The night was warm and lovely as the Abu Samra family gathered outside their home in northern Gaza in September 2023, the smell of mint from the garden filling the air.

As always, the family patriarch recounted how, as a 10-year-old in 1948, he was forced from his village in what is now Israel, one of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians displaced in what they call the Nakba — “the catastrophe.”

The patriarch, Abdallah Abu Samra, had told the story often, each time focusing on different details to ensure his family would remember them. One day, he hoped, they would all return.

Within weeks, that prospect seemed more distant than ever.

Hamas waged its surprise attack on Israel, storming across the border on Oct. 7, killing about 1,200 people — most of them civilians, according to the Israeli government — and seizing about 250 others as hostages. Israel then launched its war in Gaza, killing tens of thousands and leaving generations of Palestinians to experience displacement and hunger, and the fear that they would never see their homes again.

The Abu Samra family and many other Gazans say they have always lived in the shadow of the Nakba. And from the first moments of the war, as Israeli warplanes started dropping bombs and fliers ordering mass evacuations, their worries of another Nakba rose.