For 15 months, I was displaced from my home in northern Gaza. For 15 long months that felt like 15 years, I felt like a stranger in my own homeland. Not knowing when the exile would end, I lived with an unbearable sense of loss, with memories of a home frozen in time that I could see in my mind but could not go back to.

When the ceasefire was announced, I did not believe at first that it was actually happening. We had to wait a week before the Israeli army allowed us to go back north. On January 27, finally, hundreds of thousands of Palestinians embarked on a journey back to their homes. Sadly, I was not among them.

I had broken my leg during an incident last year and it is still not healed. I could not make the 10km trek through the sand and dust of al-Rashid Street, whose asphalt the Israeli army had dug out. My family also could not afford the exorbitant amount private cars were charging to drive us via Salah al-Din Street. So my family and I decided to wait.

I spent the day looking at footage and images of Palestinians walking back on al-Rashid Street. Children, women and men were walking with smiles on their faces, chanting “Allahu Akbar!” and “we are back!”. Family members – having not seen each other for months, sometimes a year – were reuniting, hugging each other and crying. The scene was more beautiful than I had imagined it would be.

Seeing those images, I could not help but think about my grandfather and the hundreds of thousands of other Palestinians who in 1948 arrived in Gaza and waited – just like us – to be allowed to go back home.

My grandfather Yahia was born in Yaffa to a family of farmers. He was just a child when Zionist forces expelled them from their home city. They had no time to pack up and go; they just took the house keys and fled.

“They erased our streets, our homes, even our names. But they could never erase our right to return,” my grandfather used to say with tears in his eyes.

He transferred his longing for his home to my mother. “My father used to describe the sea of Yaffa,” she would say, “the way the waves kissed the shore, the scent of orange blossoms in the air. I have lived my whole life in exile, dreaming of a place I have never seen. But maybe one day, I will. Maybe one day, I will walk in the streets my father walked as a child.”

My grandfather died in 2005 without ever seeing his home again. He never found out what had happened to it – whether it was demolished or taken over by settlers.

The images of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians walking on foot back to their homes made me wonder: what if my grandfather had also been allowed to walk back home? What if the world had stood up for justice and upheld the Palestinians’ right to return? Would we now have black-and-white photos of smiling Palestinians walking on dusty, crowded roads on the way back to their villages and towns?

Back then – like today – the Zionist forces had made sure that Palestinians would not have anything to go back to. More than 500 Palestinian villages were completely destroyed. Desperate Palestinians kept trying to go back. The Israelis would call them “infiltrators” and shoot them. Palestinians who tried to go back to the north before the ceasefire were also shot.

On February 2, my family and I finally travelled north by car.

There was joy, of course: the joy of reuniting with our relatives, of seeing the faces of cousins who survived even after losing some of their loved ones, of breathing familiar air, of stepping onto the land where we grew up.

But the joy was laced with agony. Although our home is still standing, it has suffered damage from nearby bombings. We no longer recognise the streets of our neighbourhood. It is now a disfigured wasteland.

Everything that once made this place liveable is gone. There is no water, no food. The smell of death is still lingering in the air. It looks more like a graveyard than our home. We still decided to stay.

The world calls the movement of Palestinians back to the north a “return”, but to us, it feels more like an extension of our exile.

The word “return” should carry with it a sense of triumph, of long-awaited justice, but we do not feel triumphant. We did not return to what we once knew.

I imagine that this is what would have been the fate of many Palestinians returning to their destroyed and burned villages after the Nakba of 1948. They, too, would have probably felt the shock and despair we feel now at the sight of mountains of rubble.

I also imagine that they would have worked hard to rebuild their homes, having experienced the hardship of displacement. History would have been rewritten with stories of resilience rather than unending exile.

My grandfather would have run back to his home, keys in his hands. My mother would have seen the sea of Yaffa she had so much longed for. And I would not have grown up with the generational trauma of exile.

Most of all, a return back then would have probably meant that the never-ending cycles of Palestinian dispossession, lands stolen and homes bulldozed or exploded would never have happened. The Nakba would have ended.

But it didn’t. Our ancestors were not allowed back and now we live the consequences of justice being denied. We have been allowed to return, but only to see wholesale destruction, to start over from nothing, with no guarantees that we will not be displaced again and that what we build will not be destroyed again. Our return is not the end of exile.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.