She had arranged to meet us in a café she'd found on the internet, several kilometers from her new adopted town, somewhere in the southeast of France, on a wide boulevard lined with blocks of flats. Nacera (her first name has been changed) arrived early but didn't go inside the rundown establishment. In this working-class neighborhood with a large immigrant population, there were only men at the café, both inside and outside, smoking and chatting in Arabic. The young woman waited outside the only bakery open on the icy December morning. "I really like working in cafés. I had no idea that this existed in France, cafés frequented only by men," she said, astonished to have come across this bar that she thought was "reserved" for them.

Exfiltrated from Gaza at the beginning of November with her parents – who do not have dual nationality – this young French-Palestinian woman left behind part of her family, one of whom was injured in a bombing. A few days after they left, her parents' building in the ministries district was shelled by Israeli aircraft. "Don't tell your mother," her father begged when he told her the news. "She finally found out, and cried a lot. All their savings had gone into buying this apartment," Nacera said. "My mother had just had everything redone. Here, she complains about not having a handbag to go out with." She smiles sadly, as if these were trivial details, given the violence of the war that has been raging between Israel and Hamas since the latter's attack on October 7.

Yet it's easy to understand the need to hold on to these tiny, everyday things, after living through a forced exodus, fearful of bombs. They provide a link to reality when the relief of being alive is no longer enough. "Every night, I have one nightmare after another and I remember them," confided the young woman. "Every morning, I ask myself: is this my life or my afterlife?"

After completing her doctorate in France, Nacera obtained a permanent employment contract, which enabled her to successfully apply for French nationality. She would like the rest of her family to be able to join her.

"Before the war, it was hard enough to imagine the future in Gaza. But now?" Her French is excellent, her English perfect, and she is undertaking studies in a major French city, which she visits regularly. France-Horizon, an organization set up by the French state in 1940 to manage the population displacement linked to the Second World War, and which works under the ministry of foreign affairs, has found a two-room apartment for Nacera and her parents, in a suburb of 10,000 inhabitants in the shadow of a metropolis. "It's hard to work in such a small apartment," she said.

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