Since Oct. 7, around half of the buildings in northern Gaza have been destroyed or damaged.* In the before and after photos, the sky looks the same, but that’s about it.

Remember this city is at the heart of history, and has already been under a fierce occupation for decades, so Gaza has had many structures in it, and already had many new structures replacing old ones, already had bombed-out buildings and rubble. But now, much of that which was rebuilt, times over, has been obliterated.

Gaza, located at the crossroads of Africa and Asia, has been at the heart of many battles. It has spoken a variety languages, practiced a variety of religions, has been destroyed, abandoned and reinvigorated many times. During the early Bronze Age, before Egypt’s upper and lower kingdoms were unified, the pharaohs constructed the first fortified Egyptian citadel outside of Egypt in Gaza, which was home to people called the Canaanites at the time. Later, Gaza was a bustling port of trade under the Greeks. Greek historian Herodotus described Gaza, which he referred to by the name of Cadytis, as a large metropole with development extending inland beyond the city walls. Some who found themselves in control of Gaza let old structures stand, others adapted them, yet others destroyed them. Before the majority of its inhabitants converted to Islam in the seventh century, the city saw peaceful coexistence by Pagans, Christians and Jews under certain rulers, but the groups also battled for control. In 66 AD, when Jewish people were massacred in nearby Caesarea by the Romans, the Jews of Gaza responded by rioting and destroying much of the city and its surrounding villages in retaliation.

In the sixth century, Procopius of Gaza and many other famous scholars taught at Gaza’s academy of rhetoric and a school dedicated to mosaic art was founded in Gaza. Around 635 AD, the Muslim armies took the city from the Romans. Gaza played an important role in trade during the Middle Ages, particularly under the Mamluks. Even during its long period of Muslim rule, it was besieged multiple times by the Crusaders, who were once and for all driven out by Saladin in 1178. It witnessed a golden age under the Ottoman-appointed Ridwan dynasty in the 1500s, and Palestinian economy in general underwent significant development from the mid-1700s through the late 1800s under the Ottomans.

Gaza experienced destructive earthquakes in 1903 and 1914. And in 1917, during World War I, British forces captured the city from the crumbling Ottoman empire. Since then, its fate has been controlled by Western interests.

Recent photography shows entire blocks in northern Gaza with every building on them collapsed. Some of those located most lucratively have already been fully razed. What will they do with all the rubble?

Inside of each destroyed building, many rooms, and inside of each room, the fostering of Palestinian life. The war on Gaza is making so many martyrs and also killing culture — decimating the structures that gave Gazans a sense of identity, a sense of time.

One of the remaining Gazan journalists, Bisan Owda, posted an Instagram story on Nov. 29 during the week-long pause in Israel’s genocide. “I lost the hope of a ceasefire; I lost the hope of returning to the north,” she said. “But if that happened, what are we gonna do? Clean? Clean what? Rebuild? Rebuild what? There is no city. … Every place we loved, every place we memorized, the full image about our city and our life is now totally changed forever… forever, even the mentality of people, even how are they thinking, their way of living, their memories. They are reshaping our history, our society, by destroying everything. … What is gonna happen? What’s next? … What am I going to do with my life?”

I feel a calm sense of longing when I think about what Gaza used to be. When my grandmother was 14, she went with her mother on a school trip from Alexandria to Gaza. They visited her father’s cousin. He had a house on the ocean. “I knew he was rich, because he had what we didn’t,” she told me.

My grandmother and great-grandmother shopped at the American stores (which didn’t exist in Egypt at the time) and bought lace tablecloths made by the local women. What a delicate thing to get from Gaza. That was just 12 years after the Nakba, in 1960, so they also went to see a refugee camp.

“There were a lot of people, white tents,” said Teta. Many of those tents would eventually be replaced with structures, and those camps would become neighborhoods.

Around that time, Teta had a different Palestinian cousin who came to Alexandria to study (because Palestinians in the Gaza strip could study in Egyptian public schools for free until Gaza and Sinai were annexed from Egypt by Israel in the 1967 war). “My cousin was telling me, they would get up on top of buildings, and they could see their old houses, and they regretted leaving them.”

Old structures empower and glue communities. Structures themselves retain life, energy, memory. They morph. A place has a feeling. In an old place, you can feel all the centuries or millennia of life that’s been through it, and it’s instructive, because you then can place yourself in that history.

I’m thinking of Gaza and all the childrens’ rooms that were destroyed, the women’s closets. The embroidery that exploded. The tiles of the mosques.

In some cases, structures have already been bulldozed, cleared to make way for new real estate. In other cases, occupation soldiers have seized them. They’ve begun to use dead and exiled Gazans’ items as their own, to rewrite history.

Currently Israeli flags whip through Gazan winds, standing on posts that triumphantly rape the earth they’ve been thrust into.

“I think they want Gaza, because Gaza is beautiful, oh my God, the beaches are so beautiful, helwa awi,” says my Teta on the phone a couple weeks into the bombing. “And I think Israel knew about the attack before it happened,” she adds; her friend Nagwa told her and she agrees.

I think about the blue sky and the buildings in Gaza and the roads that arch right into the ocean and sky and the fences and the bombs that are leaving so many limbs on the ground. I think about Gaza and I think about the blue skies and the bombs pouring out of them.

Saint Porphyrius, built in about 1150, is the oldest church still in use in Gaza. Located in a historic neighborhood in Gaza City, in the north, the church offered sanctuary to people of various faiths over generations. An Israeli strike hit the church on Oct. 20, killing at least 18 people who were sheltering there. The explosion damaged the church’s facade and caused a nearby building to collapse.

The Omari Mosque, or the Great Mosque, is the oldest standing mosque in Gaza. After it was built in the seventh century, the Crusaders converted it to a cathedral. According to Gazan historian Rania Filfil, “Over the following centuries it switched between mosque and church, inscribing thus the history of its city in architecture.”

“The basilica of the cathedral remains today in the Great Omari Mosque in Gaza’s old city, despite the massive damage that the mosque sustained during World War I,” Filfil wrote in 2009. Then, in 2014 Israel bombed the structure, and did so again on Dec. 8, leaving it a skeleton of itself.

I think about Gaza and I think about blue skies and sand and kites. I think about Gaza on Dec. 8, 1987, when people poured out of its barriers and began the First Intifada, a popular uprising.

I picture Gaza and I picture families sitting on top of rubble — shreds of fabric and parcels of kitchenware, the ashes of recipe books and family heirlooms fluttering about — their rubble, inside of their homes. Rubble has become a character of life in Gaza. I picture families in Gaza sitting in the frames of their homes on top of the rubble that once was their lives. And they will begin, as groups of helpers amass, to remove the rubble, old sinks and walls and memories, and to reconstruct their homes. I saw a picture the other day of a woman sitting on a mattress on a pile of rubble in the bombed-out frame of her home with her baby on her lap and a clothesline hung behind them. The significance of the clothesline gave the immense sense that she had reclaimed her home. The caption read, “despite the destruction of our home, my baby, we will return and rebuild it again!”

In another recent photo by Palestinian journalist Motaz Azaiza, a man’s hand sticks out of the rubble. Right out of his reach, a fresh tea bag hangs, crushed between two pieces of concrete. The caption reads, “Israel must be proud about their speed to kill, they can do it before a cup of tea is ready.”

Israel has destroyed Gaza’s main courthouse, legislative building and dozens of other centers of administration. The municipality headquarters, located in the center of the old city, stored historical archives more than 150 years old, which, according to The New Arab, “held key documentation of the city’s urban development, including mapping engineering studies of the water and sewage networks.” Gaza’s central library has also been bombed. The Islamic University of Gaza, an independent Palestinian university established in 1978 in Gaza City, was the first institution of higher education to be established in Gaza. On Oct. 11, Israel bombed four of its buildings, completely destroying some.

Imagine a bomb hitting a library. Books, some older than the occupation itself, will burst into a million pieces, broken sentences and punctuation marks floating to the ground. Or a music classroom or recording studio. The metal of the doumbeks will melt; the strings of the ouds will scream and pop.

Imagine a room full of old women gathering to mourn and the bomb hits, and because they died so abruptly those elders’ oral histories that their relatives hadn’t yet recorded are gone. Open mouths shattered into the air, whispers amongst the rubble.

I picture Gaza and I picture birds flying in the sky, light falling through leaves in a courtyard before a cloud floats by. I picture the roots of the olive trees talking to each other. I picture my grandmother laying on the beach.

I picture a blue sky over Gaza before the occupation began and Gazans bustling around their alleys and mosques and churches and synagogues and I hear the oud and I can smell the falafel and the conversations drifting out of coffee cups and banging around on the architecture of the buildings that had been around for centuries already and now are rubble.

*Update: As of Jan. 1, 2024, more than 70% of homes in Gaza have been destroyed.