Inside a Staten Island home with a manicured front lawn and a basketball hoop in the driveway, Najla Khass brings out several trays of strong Turkish coffee and fresh pastries. Above her, is a gold-plated map of Palestine, her homeland which she fled when she was just 8 years old. Her home is all at once a shrine to Palestine as well as a refuge from the ongoing destruction of Gaza.
Since the war on Gaza began a year ago, Khass has opened the doors of her home to Palestinians who are fleeing the ongoing Israeli bombing of their homeland. Earlier this year, the UN Special Rapporteur on Human Rights in Occupied Palestinian Territory concluded there were “reasonable grounds” that the threshold “of the crime of genocide…has been met.”
Khass, 44, left Gaza in 1988 during the height of the First Intifada. It was not the first time her family was forced to flee. Originally, her family lived in the Palestinian village of Bayt Tima before 1948. Home to a population of 1,060, the village was virtually destroyed by Israeli forces during the Nakba, the displacement of Palestinians as part of the 1948 Arab-Israeli war. Residents of the village, along with Khass’ family, were forced to take refuge in Gaza and were never permitted to return.
Now a married mother of five children with two cats, Khass has devoted her life to assisting refugees from around the world get on their feet in New York. As a refugee resettlement project manager for Islamic Circle of North America, or ICNA Relief, she has helped Syrians, Venezuelans, Ecuadorians, and Haitians find homes and jobs.
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But when the war on Gaza broke out last October, she made it her mission to do all she could to help not just her own family in Gaza but any Palestinian trying to flee, including opening the doors of her own home.
“I know how it is because I came here as a young child and packed everything away and never talked about it until this war,” she said. “I do this because I was them.”
Khass first attempted to get her cousin’s family out of Gaza at the start of the war. She wired them the $5,000 per adult and $2,500 per child fees that Egypt required Palestinian refugees pay at the Rafah border crossing.
“My family sold their tents, their gas tanks, their clothes,” she said. “I told them, ‘Don’t bring anything, just sell everything. Once you get to Egypt, buy everything new.’ ”
However, once the border crossing was closed by Israel in May, Khass’ family was unable to leave Gaza, and she lost contact with them, leaving her unsure of their fate.
Although modest of her good deeds, she has extended her hospitality to her entire community, taking in various refugees who managed to escape from Gaza. She recently helped reunite a Gazan family of eight and secured them an apartment in Jersey City.
“My house is open to everybody and everyone,” she said. “This house is not just mine and my kids. I’m the khalto [aunt] of the community, I guess.”
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Ida Hamdan, an American-born Palestinian whose family is from the West Bank, has been volunteering alongside Khass since the two began helping refugees from the Syrian Civil War in 2011. Sitting in Khass’ living room, Hamdan chokes up as she speaks about her friend’s work helping families.
“This is not Najla’s first rodeo, she under-talks herself,” she said. “What Najla does is a blessing.”
Next to Hamdan is the soft-spoken but confident Hala, 25, who has been living in an apartment on Staten Island for about a month thanks to Khass’ help. Hala, who declined to give her last name, escaped Gaza on Nov. 6. Before the war, she had already secured a green card for the United States.
With Khass’ help, Hala has gradually started her life anew, but she misses her home and is sad that she felt forced to leave her hometown of Deir el-Balah, which has suffered heavy Israeli bombing for months.
“I really love Gaza, especially Deir el-Balah, because I have all my memories there,” she said. “There are no chances, no future so I was planning to go away to have opportunities.”
She especially yearns for the home cooking of her grandmother. Particularly maftoul, a hearty dish made of boiled wheat flour, similar to couscous, served with meat and chickpeas, which was her grandmother’s specialty.
“It’s a really difficult meal to make. Not many women could make it — only the most senior women could make it,” she said. “My grandmother would take two days to make it on a wood fire outside.”
Although Hala grew up living through five wars, she said that nothing could compare to the level of destruction this most recent war has brought, with most of the previous wars lasting only a few weeks.
“So it was very bad,” she said. “There was no electricity at all. There was no clean water to shower, to clean, to drink.”
When she finally was able to leave in November, she lost contact with much of her family. What little news she did receive was not positive.
“It was terrible,” she said. “A lot of my family has passed away. They became shahid [martyrs].”
Now when she turns on the TV, Hala can barely bring herself to watch the news.
“The first month was nothing compared to now,” she said. “Now it’s much worse. At least, alhamdulillah [thank god] I didn’t live in a tent.”
In Gaza, Hala received her nursing degree from Al-Azhar University, which has since been destroyed by Israel, but she hopes she can continue to pursue a nursing career in New York.
Working with refugees like Hala has given Khass an ever-expanding family to extend her generosity towards. Unable to return, she feels the least she could do was open up her home to those seeking refuge.
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Khass, who makes no apologies for her Palestinian pride, proudly wears a hat that reads “unstoppable” and drapes herself in the keffiyeh. She continues to be a visible presence in her community despite being physically assaulted in June. While she was sitting in her car on Staten Island waiting for her son, a man confronted her for having a Palestinian flag on her dashboard.
“He said why do I have a flag for a country that didn’t exist,” she said. “I told him you just have to get educated and he jumped into the car and kept punching my arm.”
Khass’ experience is far from unique. The Council on American-Islamic Relations has documented 4,951 incoming anti-Muslim and anti-Palestinian hate crime complaints, a 69% increase over the same period in 2023.
Despite that incident of violence, Khass has felt overall inspired by the wave of pro-Palestinian protests that have engulfed the city over the past year, signaling a seismic shift in the public perception of Israel.
“When did you think in our lifetime that people would have second doubts and open their eyes about Israel,” she said.
Hamdan agrees.
“It’s bittersweet, but it really is like a miracle,” she said. “I knew people I have gotten into a debate about Palestine in the past who are now turning to me and saying they now understand what I have been talking about.”
The wave of support for Palestine has renewed Khass’ hope that maybe one day soon, her family might be able to return to their ancestral home of Bayt Tima.
“We won’t give up the fight,” she said. “If not my generation, it’s my children’s generation.”
For years she has yearned to return to Gaza, a land she last visited in 2003.
“I have this urge, I don’t know why, I just want to breathe in Gaza,” she said. “Breathe in the air.”
