In the small living room of her old house in Jerusalem, Nuha Attieh picks up the things on the coffee table, sits her four grandchildren on the couch, and goes out to change, apologizing. Thursday is the day for family psychology sessions with social workers from the NGO Médecins du monde Suisse.
The voices of Selma, 8, and her brother Jamal, 7, rise in high tones. “There were four”said one. “No, five!” They came in here and there.”corrects the other. About ten days after the Hamas attack, on October 7, 2023, Israeli law enforcement He appeared in the family living room. Nuha didn’t even have time to put on her veil. When he asked the Israelis what they were looking for, they ordered him to remain silent. “One of them was armed, he wanted to shoot”Selma specifies, without it being clear whether it is this incident or a previous raid. His childish expression contrasts with the violence of the situations he describes.
“Everyone sees me as strong, but I’m not.”
Nuha Attieh lives at the end of a small street in Sheikh Jarrah in East Jerusalem, the Palestinian part of the city. Since 2009, the date of the first expulsion of a family from the neighborhood, at the initiative of Israeli settlers, the retired nurse, widowed at 36, has lived in constant fear of losing her home. She makes sure there is always someone inside the walls. During the Jewish holidays, “I sleep dressed, with a veil, on the sofa”in case there is an intrusion, he said.
In May 2021, the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood was at the center of a protest movement against the advance of settlers, which attracted international media attention. The brutal repression by the Israeli police was one of the triggers for the eleven-day war that followed in Gaza. Nuha’s son was arrested two months later by the police; He was only able to find out his place of imprisonment after two months. He was released in May 2022. “We are alive, but we have no life, he summarizes, with red eyes. Sometimes I isolate myself to cry. Everyone sees me as strong, but I’m not. »
In recent months, the sight of rows of tents for displaced people in Rafah, in the southern Gaza Strip, has sparked another terror in Nuha. In 1948, during the creation of Israel, his family was expelled from a village west of Jerusalem, where the Israeli city of Bet Shemesh is today. A forced exodus, experienced by another 700,000 Palestinians, which is designated, in national memory, as the “catastrophe” (the Nakba, in Arabic). “At the age of 60, I am a refugee in my own country, Nuha observes. This is happening again today with Gaza. » He dries his cheek: “My heart is broken. »
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