Caravillas such as these in Nitzan were built as temporary homes for evacuees of Gush Katif. Photo: Moshe Milner/Israel Government Press Office. Debbie Rosen still lives in a caravilla today. Courtesy of Debbie Rosen
A resident of Gush Katif for more than twenty years, Debbie Rosen moved to the area with her husband in 1985. A photographer, Debbie worked as the spokesperson for the Gush Katif municipality, handling both the foreign and the Israeli media. She has six children.
After the evacuation from our home in Neve Dekalim, we were sent to the Shalom Hotel in Jerusalem where we were for five months. It was very difficult. It’s nice to be in a hotel for a week or two, for a vacation, but not when you have no home to return to.
Then we were sent to Nitzan, near Ashkelon, to live in caravillas (small, cheaply built temporary structures that sit on concrete blocks) with the idea that in a year or two we would build permanent homes nearby. That was almost twenty years ago.
I still live in a caravilla today. I cannot afford to build a house, though I have tried hard to make our caravilla a home.
During the evacuation, my husband and I were in the process of getting divorced. We finalized it after we had already moved to Nitzan. I trained to be a tour guide, and I loved the work. For a while, things were good—I led large groups of tourists who came off the cruise ships docking at Ashdod, and others who arrived for the Maccabiah Games. But we all lost our jobs during the Covid-19 pandemic, and then again during the recent war. Everything stopped.
I always loved photography, and studied it professionally in college, where I also met people from the kibbutzim near Gaza. Since the massacre on October 7, I’ve recognized some of the names in news reports—former classmates of mine from Kibbutz Nir Am and Kfar Aza, both of which were attacked. I thought about the trauma they must have endured.
In the time leading up to the uprooting, Alex Levac, a world-class photographer, and Daniel Ben Simon, a reporter—both of them working for Haaretz, a left-wing paper not usually sympathetic to Gush Katif—came to photograph and write about the looming expulsion.
We had a very good relationship with all of them, even though they were from “the other side.” Alex loved my photographs. He later curated an exhibit of my photographs of Gush Katif, which was shown in Ra’anana after the uprooting.
Recently, I took a retraining course from the Ministry of Education to become a teacher. Today I teach English, Tanach and literature, and I also serve as the head of informal education in a school for teens at risk. The work is very meaningful. I feel it is real shlichut, a mission.
I have three boys and three girls. My children were young when we were removed from our home in Neve Dekalim. Since the current war started, my sons found themselves back in Gaza—as soldiers—serving in the very places where, as children, they had stood in protest against leaving Gush Katif. Two of them are in Sayeret Golani, an elite combat unit. The third works in a non-combat role in the Israeli Air Force.
One of my daughters lives in Tekuma, a religious moshav in southern Israel that was evacuated during this war. Tekuma is also the site of the “car graveyard”—a memorial of more than 1,500 burnt and destroyed vehicles belonging to victims of the October 7 massacre. My daughter’s mother-in-law, who had lived in Tekuma too, recently passed away. When the war began, my daughter’s in-laws had to leave their home for two months. They hoped to return, but instead offered their house to fifteen soldiers stationed in the area, so the men could have something better than tents to sleep in.
I continue to photograph; I love taking pictures of nature and people. It gives me the shivers now to remember that, in the summer of 2022, I participated in an exhibit for a soldiers’ memorial center. One of the photographs was of a wall built to defend the southern border of Eretz Yisrael.
The wall is in Kibbutz Be’eri.
Emunah gives me strength. We can’t control everything in our lives, and we cannot take anything for granted. I am grateful in spite of everything we’ve gone through, baruch Hashem, that my three sons came home alive from the war. We have to be grateful for everything.
Toby Klein Greenwald is an award-winning journalist and theater director. She is recipient of the ATARA Life Achievement Award.
More in this section:
Twenty Years Later—Remembering the Uprooting of Gush Katif by Carol Ungar
Debbie’s Story by Debbie Rosen, as told to Toby Klein Greenwald
From Gush Katif to the Rebuilt Ganei Tal by Moti and Hana Sender, as told to Toby Klein Greenwald