The so-called Yellow Line. Photo: Hussain Al-Jerjawi

I thought I was going home. It was a few days after the ceasefire in October 2025, and I had convinced myself that the road to Shuja’iyya, east of Gaza City, was open again. No one told me it wasn’t. There were no signs, no warnings, nothing that could explain why my steps began to slow as I walked east of Salah Al-Din Street.

At first I blamed the destruction. Buildings I knew by memory had collapsed into shapes I could not recognize. Streets that once carried noise now held a silence that felt deliberate. But it wasn’t just that.

At that time, I moved constantly between neighborhoods as part of my work in humanitarian response. I visited families and sat with them, trying to understand what they needed and what was still missing. I had grown used to entering other people’s spaces and hearing stories of their losses.

But that morning, as I walked toward my own home, something felt different. I kept walking, telling myself there was nothing stopping me, which was technically true. There was nothing visible I could point to and say, this is where I must stop. And yet I stopped.

The northeastern part of the Gaza Strip where Sadeq walked. Photo: Sadeq Nawaf Abdul Hafez

I remember that moment clearly, not because anything happened, but because nothing did. No soldier appeared, no voice called out, no barrier rose in front of me. Only a quiet, undeniable feeling that I was about to cross into a place that no longer belonged to the living. I didn’t know then that people had started calling it the Yellow Line.

On October 10, 2025, the ceasefire agreement entered into force, introducing this Yellow Line, ostensibly to separate forces during the first phase and reduce friction. What unfolded on the ground, however, quickly exceeded this technical definition. Instead of a full withdrawal pending the second phase of the ceasefire, the Israeli army began expanding its control east of the line, particularly in Gaza City’s eastern neighborhoods, such as Al-Shuja’iyya, Al-Zeitoun, and Al-Tuffa.

In some locations, the distance between the Yellow Line and Salah Al-Din Street, which separates Gaza’s eastern neighborhoods from those in the center and the west, was no more than 150 meters. As the transition to the second phase of the ceasefire agreement stalled, the line shifted from a temporary measure to a fixed instrument of control, entrenched through military positions, systematic leveling of the remains of buildings beyond, and the yellow-painted concrete blocks that gave the line its name.

At the moment I was walking home, there were no yellow concrete blocks in sight. I only knew that I could not take another step.

Yellow concrete blocks now mark the area where Sadeq had walked earlier. Photo: Sadeq Nawaf Abdul Hafez

I stood there longer than I care to admit, staring ahead as if the answer might reveal itself if I waited long enough. That’s when I noticed the man beside me. I hadn’t seen him arrive. He was just there, standing a few steps away, looking in the same direction. For a while neither of us spoke.

Then, without turning to me, he said, “The ceasefire stopped the war over there.” He tilted his head slightly westward. “But not here.”

I didn’t ask him what he meant. I think I already understood. Still, I asked him, “Did you go back?”

He nodded. “Three nights,” he said. “I stayed three nights.”

He continued, “On the third night, I stopped trying to sleep.”

I waited for him to explain. His eyes remained fixed ahead.

“The sound doesn’t leave,” he said finally. “It stays with you.”

In my work, I have learned to ask questions, to follow details, to gently push people to explain what they might rather leave unsaid. But standing there beside him, I did not ask anything more. Some silences are not meant to be interrupted.

“In the morning,” he told me, “I packed my things again. I didn’t say goodbye to anyone.”

After a moment, he added, “It didn’t feel like I was leaving. It felt like I had never really returned.”

After a while, he turned and walked back the way we had both come, as if there had never been another direction to take.

Another of the concrete yellow blocks. Photo: Sadeq Nawaf Abdul Hafez

I stayed standing there, not because I was waiting for something, but because I didn’t yet know how to leave a place I had not entered. Behind me was the city I knew, crowded now with too many lives pressed into too little space. Faces I had come to recognize from my visits. Homes that were no longer homes, but still held people trying to remain. Ahead of me was something else, not empty exactly, just unreachable.

That day I did not go home.

I told myself that this was temporary, that whatever held me back would eventually lift. But as I walked away, I realized something had already changed. The road was still there. My home was still somewhere ahead.

And yet the distance between us had become something I could no longer measure in steps.