Meet Umm Saber — A Voice From The Ruins of Beit Hanoun
Posted on 29 Dec 2025
Saadiya Abdelhadi, known in her community as Hajjah Saadiya, or Umm Saber, is 75 years old and born in Beit Hanoun, North Gaza. It is where her life was rooted, where she raised her five children, and where her home once stood. Today, everything she owned exists only as memories and a small bag of torn photographs carried with her through nine displacements.
She now lives in Ansar 5 Camp in Gaza City, run by the Danish Refugee Council, after exhausting every other place she could flee to. She shares a worn tent with three girls aged 12 to 16 and four orphaned grandchildren, her son Mahmoud’s children. Mahmoud and his wife were killed in what was declared a “humanitarian zone” in Khan Younis. When they died, she fled alone with all seven children.
DRC Site management in Gaza
Around 600,000 people live in displacement sites across Gaza and more than a million live outside formal sites, with thousands of tents already flooded or collapsed after the first serious rains.
Thanks to a hybrid partnership model, DRC and its partners reach the hardest-to access communities across more than 42 sites, providing area based integrated, life-saving assistance and maintaining continuity of basic services:
Site mapping, service coordination, and area based outreach and coordination to ensure coverage in underserved sites.
Implement rapid site improvements to support both Disaster Risk Reduction (DRR) and winterisation preparedness
Conduct participatory planning for site upgrades and returns pathways.
Saadiya has been displaced nine times. Each time she thought she had reached the last place she would need to flee, bombardment forced her to escape again; from Beit Hanoun, Jabalia, Gaza City, Nuseirat, Khan Younis, Deir al-Balah, Al-Zawaida, and finally here in Ansar 5. With each flight, a piece of her life was left behind.
Her memories of home remain vivid. She speaks of orange trees, clementines, and bread baking on a clay oven. She remembers her son Mahmoud calling his sisters to dinner after evening prayer saying, “Mama, your bread beats them all.”
She speaks softly of a neighbour named Abu Abdullah, exchanging food during Eid and lighting lanterns during Ramadan. Today, none of them remain — some are under rubble, others in mass graves, and many simply displaced with no sense of where night will fall.
DRC's displacemnt tracking has counted 621,000 internally displaced people across 353 displacement sites, plus 1.4 million displaced people outside formal sites (host families, damaged buildings, informal locations).
In Mawasi Rafah, DRC has recently mapped pockets of displacement with roughly 1,200–1,300 households (about 6,200–6,500 people) across a handful of informal sites, previously hard-to-reach and severely underserved.
Life in the camp is harsh. Water arrives intwo small buckets a day, rationed carefully. Food consists mostly of aid parcels,flour, canned items, sometimes only tea and dry bread. The tent leaks when it rains and cracks when the ground dries. There isno privacy for women, toilets are few, and the elderly body she carries aches daily.
There’s not much life left in me, what’s gone is more than what remains.
/ Saadiya
Since November heavy rains caused severe flooding across displacement camps; thousands of tents were inundated or collapsed, destroying bedding and clothing just as winter started.
In November 2025, through ongoing coordination efforts, DRC also secured 160 new tents distributed on 17 November as part of the winterization response. These tents will support households severely affected by the recent winter storm, with priority given to the most vulnerable families currently exposed to harsh weather conditions. Additionally, DRC’s partner PARC plans to distribute additional 602 tents across five sites located along the seashore and in remote areas, targeting highly vulnerable households displaced from the north as well as families already living in coastal sites. In parallel, DRC partners have completed Winterization Response works in six sites in southern Mawasi, using sandbags to reduce flood risks and reinforcing slopes and low-lying areas to prevent water buildup.
Conditions in the sites remain dire - Severe overcrowding, lack of privacy, limited access to safe water, and inadequate shelter conditions in displacement sites are sharply increasing both health and protection risks, particularly for women and female-headed households.
She suffers from high blood pressure and joint pain, with no access to medicine. Her grandchildren have no school or toys. They ask her “Grandma, when will we go home?” She answers “Soon, Inshallah,” though she cannot promise it.
The household has no income. After Mahmoud’s death, they rely solely on humanitarian assistance, neighbour support, and prayer. Some nights they sleep without eating.
What she needs most is clear: a dignified shelter, food, and medicine, especially with winter approaching. Last winter, rain soaked their mattresses, the tent collapsed, and they burned cardboard and plastic to stay warm. The children developed chest infections. The fear of repeating that winter sits heavy in her voice.
If assistance arrives, she says it would be plastic sheets and wooden planks to reinforce the tent before rain comes again.
Yet she still clings to hope — found in the sound of children laughing while playing with stones. As long as they laugh, life continues.
Saadiya wants the world to hear her story, not for pity but recognition.
“We are human too. We dream of a warm home, clean water, and a roof that doesn’t fall on our heads.”
DRC’s Protection programme continues to deliver case management and psychological first aid, alongside an expanded its protection team and also cash-for-protection response for vulnerable families.
