They came home to nothing!
They left their homes under fire, fled with what little they could carry. Now they return - or try to - to a place where everything has been erased. Where winter is approaching and the world has already looked away.
That’s the story of the people of Gaza Strip in 2025: uprooted, stripped, forgotten.
The Invisible Border
Journalist Jeremy Diamond of CNN has spoken of the mounting difficulties reporters face in fully accessing Gaza or showing what’s really taking place. According to Haaretz’s profile of Diamond: “He is one of hundreds of journalists battling Israel to enter Gaza and report independently.”
In practice, this means large swathes of territory have become off-limits, not so much by a marked line, but by the logistics of war, control, destruction, and restricted access. Some have called this an “invisible border”.
For example: there are media mentions of a military buffer zone inside Gaza, altering access and shifting the geography of what can be seen. When you cannot get in, cannot properly see, cannot tell the story - then what happens to the people on the other side?
Home Gone, Future Gone
Many of these families have already been displaced once or many times. Then they returned. But what did they find? Rubble. Half-standing skeletons of buildings. Fields destroyed. Infrastructure gone.
A news piece from February 2025 describes returning families in northern Gaza:
“I pitched my tent on the rubble of my former home,” said Hassan al-Goulah, returning to the ruins of his neighbourhood.
No job. No income. No school. No certainty. Winter is looming.
One recent report:
“It is dire. No proper tents, or proper water, or proper food, or proper money … We’re coming into winter soon … rainwater and possible floods … hundreds of tons of garbage near populated areas.”
The Conditions: Winter, Displacement, Neglect
– Shelters: Many are living in tents or damaged buildings that won’t withstand cold, wind, rain. Existing basic dwellings are already worn out.
– Food & income: With infrastructure destroyed and agricultural land ravaged, many have lost any means of livelihood. Food is scarce. Malnutrition and hunger loom.
– Medical & normal life: Hospitals struggle. Schools are closed or destroyed. Trauma, cold, exposure. The normal rhythms of life - routine, work, school, safe home - are gone.
– Return to nothing: The very act of “returning” should signal hope. But when you come back, there is no home. There is no safety. There is nothing.
Why the World Must Care
Because people being invisible doesn’t mean they are gone. Because those in power or the world at large may have shifted focus - but the crisis remains. Because it matters.
When winter comes and tens or hundreds of thousands of people have no proper shelter, when the world faces one of its most ignored humanitarian disasters, we need voices. We need awareness. We need to say: they’re still there, they still suffer, they’re still human.
This song was inspired by a report I watched from CNN correspondent Jeremy Diamond shortly after the so-called Gaza “peace plan.”
In that segment, he described and documented what he called an “invisible border” inside Gaza - a shifting, unclear, military-controlled line that civilians cannot cross, even as they try to return to the ruins of their former homes. His reporting exposed how these unseen boundaries determine who can move, who cannot, and how little the outside world is allowed to witness.
Here is the video that sparked the entire idea for Invisible Borders:
(If the Instagram reel does not load for you, you can open it directly in the app.)
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