“Qatar announces $500 million in support for the reconstruction of Gaza,” Qatari Foreign Minister Mohammed bin Abdulrahman Al Thani said in a tweet May 26. A few days earlier, Al Thani had met in the Qatari capital Doha with the political chief of the Palestinian Islamist movement Hamas, Ismail Haniyeh. At the same time, thousands gathered in front of the emirate’s national mosque in solidarity with the Palestinian cause amid Israeli airstrikes on the Gaza Strip.

But in the background of this decadeslong political proximity between Qatar and Palestine lies an intimate history, a family history that reserved Qatari society rarely tells.

“It fills me with pride to know that the country of which I am a citizen [Qatar] is a country that is on the right side of history,” said Shahad Younis. The young Qatari woman’s maternal and paternal grandparents were expelled from their homes in Palestine in the late 1940s and initially sought refuge in Lebanon before relocating to Qatar.

“I just watched this video of children jumping on a trampoline to the sound of bombs. This is their normal life, and it could have been mine,” Younis told Al-Monitor.