Chana Joffe-Walt

She has a cough, and there is no medicine. Her friends have scattered. Some of them are dead. Her relatives are all over. Some of them are dead. She's eating canned beans instead of burgers. She's finding glass in her brother's head. This is her life. This is the story she has to narrate.

Okay, Banyas, I'm going to go.

Go to sleep. Okay. Sleep well. I'll talk to you soon. Where are you? Are you still here? I'm here. Hello? Hello? I'm here. Are you still here? Yes, I am. We have a couple minutes left in this episode, and I have a small update. Recently, Banias' family moved, not far, an apartment a couple miles from Derbala, where they've been staying. The new place is less crowded.

There's more privacy for her family. It has trees outside and a refrigerator. That doesn't work, but still. The apartment is quiet, temporary, and it's not home. Banias knows she can't go home, to the north of Gaza, where she's from. She knows her home was destroyed. She's seen pictures of her neighborhood exploded on fire.

And she's seen video of the empty space where her house was, the small mountains of rubble. The gray couch with yellow cushions that she sat on after school, the chandelier her mother chose, the mirror by the door, the teacups and trays filled with treats, her new reimagined big girl bedroom with an Elsa bedspread, her desk, the pink moon they hung on the ceiling.

All of that is somewhere in that pile of rubble. All of that is there in the north of Gaza, their life. But the north of Gaza has been transformed. There were about a million people living in northern Gaza when the war started. Over 270,000 homes. Everyone was told to leave, to go south. Most people did.

And now, those people are separated from the north of Gaza by a wide, militarized zone that they cannot cross. Israel has been building and fortifying this military zone for the last few months. It cuts right across Gaza, splits Gaza in two, completely separating the north of Gaza, where Banias is from, from the south of Gaza, where she's been displaced to.

This military zone is called the Netzerim Corridor. It has a constant military presence, and it's big, around 20 square miles. It takes up more than 12% of the entire territory of Gaza. In order to build it, Israel cleared out a wide stretch of land, demolished hundreds of buildings from the Israeli border all the way to the ocean.

And in that space, Israel installed checkpoints and paved roads and flags and water lines and cell phone towers. It looks like something you'd put in place if you're planning to stay a while. A former chief of staff of the Israeli military has called the emptying out of the north of Gaza an ethnic cleansing. He said, quote, the land is being cleared of Arabs.

Human Rights Watch, Oxfam, Amnesty International have all called what is happening in Gaza an ethnic cleansing or a genocide. Israel denies this, and the Israeli military sent me a statement calling the charge of ethnic cleansing entirely baseless. It says it's working to dismantle Hamas's military infrastructure and is adhering to its obligations under international law.

The people who remained in the north and never left are under siege with increasingly limited food and medical care. The U.N. says children are, quote, as ever, the first and most to suffer. So this latest move for Banias' parents, it feels like a new phase. It's a move from I can't believe it's gone on this long to this is going to keep going on. For Banias, it's more of the same.

More temporary, more displacement. Displacement that looks pretty likely to last most, if not all, of her childhood. I asked Banias if there was a song she thought we should use at the end of the show. This is what she suggested. She says she danced to the song at her uncle's wedding two days before the war started and has not stopped listening to it since.

Today's episode was produced by Valerie Kipnis and edited by Laura Starczewski. The people who put together today's show are Jendayi Banz, Sean Cole, Michael Comete, Henry Larson, Catherine Raimondo, Stowe Nelson, Nadia Raymond, Anthony Roman, Ryan Rummery, Francis Swanson, Christopher Switala, Matt Tierney, Nancy Updike, Julie Whitaker, and Diane Wu. Our managing editor is Sara Abdurrahman.

Our senior editor, David Kestenbaum. Executive editor, Emmanuel Berry. Welcome to the world, Elias Berryman Chase. Special thanks this week to... Claire Garmirian and Becky Smith with Save the Children. Shaina Lowe and Camilla Lodi with the Norwegian Refugee Council. Tanya Hari with Gisha. Amy Walters and the wonderful Al Jazeera podcast, The Take.

Corey Short with the City University of New York, Jamin Vandenhoek with Oregon State University and the UN Satellite Center. Dr. Iman Farajala's book that focuses on the experiences of children in Gaza in particular is called My Life is a War. This American Life is delivered to public radio stations by PRX, the public radio exchange.

To become a This American Life partner, which gets you bonus content, ad-free listening, and hundreds of our favorite episodes of the show right in your podcast feed, go to thisamericanlife.org slash lifepartners. That link is also in the show notes. I'm Chana Jaffe-Walt. Ira will be back next week with more stories of This American Life.

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