He tightens his suitcase, loads only with hope. It is the same that accompanied him for decades, from the day when, a five -year -old boy, he was forced to abandon his home in the Negev. Ahmed last year left his land once again, Gaza, as he already did in 1948, during the “Al-Nakba”-“The catastrophe”-when over 700,000 Palestinians were expelled from the villages and cities of the historic Palestine, forced to leave houses, livestock and memories to walk towards the unknown. So, like today, Ahmed’s life is reduced to a few objects crammed into a suitcase. But inside there is not what really matters: a son, a daughter -in -law and four grandchildren who were trapped in Gaza, under the bombs and the Israeli siege.
A life suspended between two exodus
Ahmed Abuasid, who is 82 years old, is not an ordinary man. He was the first pneumologist and allergist doctor of the Gaza Strip, a reference figure for patient generations. His personal history is intertwined with the birth of the state of Israel: in 1948 his family was deported by Bir Sheva (today Be’er Sheva) to Gaza. “I remember the fear and violence that fell on the people,” he says. “As a child you do not understand the horror of the war with the mind, you perceive it with the heart. It was that my first encounter with the pain that violence leaves behind him, but also the first desire to become someone capable of healing him: a doctor”. That dream led him to study medicine in the former Yugoslavia and then to specialize in London, always with the idea of returning to Gaza, where his people and the woman of his life, Sanaa, then became his wife, Sanaa Abusaid, awaited him. During his life in Gaza, Dr. Ahmed took care of thousands of children and adults, despite the continuous sieges and deprivations of the strip.
The last suitcase
In 2024, the new “Nakba” forced him to leave again. Ahmed and his wife Sanaa managed to reach Italy, where today they live as refugees in Siena. The Israeli authorities have allowed him to bring only a few objects with them, confiscating almost everything else. “Now this is my last exodus,” he says in a calm voice. “I accept that Italy will welcome my remains when I leave this world, because I fear that there will no longer be a land to return to after two years of devastation. In Gaza we had a large house, which for years has been a place for meeting and dialogue with doctors and people from the West. Today that house no longer exists. I have seen erase twice, in a single life, what makes a place of a community: houses, schools. refugee to remove my breath.
A desperate appeal
What Ahmed and Sanaa ask is what any parent could want more and without which life becomes without any sense: “Save our son Fadi, our daughter -in -law Shorook and our four grandchildren. Do not let our history close to them without them”. Today Ahmad lives in the province of Siena as a recognized refugee. Its history, which began with the birth of the state of Israel, risks ending with the death of Palestine. His voice is that of a tired man, but still capable of dreaming of the impossible: that at least his family can be saved before it is too late.
