Standing in front of the stove, Reem Redwan skillfully flipped qatayef, small stuffed pancakes typical of Ramadan nights in the Levant. In the adjacent living room, the television, with the volume turned down low, played an episode of one of the series that Arab countries produce by the dozen to occupy families after breaking the fast. It was dusk on March 29, around 6 pm.

Her home resembles a show apartment: impeccably tidy, with impersonal furniture and bare walls. Only a few photos on the refrigerator mark a presence. The mother and her 16-year-old daughter, Sewar, settled here three weeks ago, in the very center of Ramallah, in the occupied West Bank.

Their new apartment is a temporary stop, more comfortable than the drafty two-room place they lived in for a year and a half, on the roof of a building on the outskirts of town, far from everything. Outside Gaza, where she spent most of her life, Reem shares the same fate as her relatives and friends who stayed in the coastal territory: enduring displacement and uprooting, seemingly without end.

"I have no address. I have lost my past, I have been stripped of my future, I am dragging myself through the present. In this kind of situation, you try to console yourself with what remains, but my hands are empty. When I try to remember the past, I find only pain," she said while drizzling the qatayef with a mixture of water and sweet lemon.

Her biting humor has amplified

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