From 1948 to now, Palestinian woman in Gaza recounts life of displacement
Khan Younis: As a 4-year-old, Ghalia Abu Moteir was driven to live in a tent in Khan Younis after her family fled their home in what’s now Israel, escaping advancing Israeli forces.
Seventy-seven years later, she is now back in a tent under the bombardment of Israel’s campaign in Gaza.
On Thursday, Palestinians across the Middle East commemorated the anniversary of the “Nakba”, Arabic for “the Catastrophe”, when some 700,000 Palestinians were expelled by Israeli forces or fled their homes in what is now Israel before and during the 1948 war that surrounded its creation.
Abu Moteir’s life traces the arc of Palestinians’ exile and displacement from that war to the current one. Israel’s 19-month-old campaign has flattened much of Gaza, killed more than 53,000 people, driven almost the entire population of 2.3 million from their homes and threatens to push them into famine.
“Today we’re in a bigger Nakba than the Nakba that we saw before,” the 81-year-old Abu Moteir said, speaking outside the tent where she lives with her surviving sons and daughters and 45 grandchildren.
“Our whole life is terror, terror. Day and night, there’s missiles and warplanes overhead. We’re not living. If we were dead, it would be more merciful,” she said.
Palestinians fear that Israel’s ultimate goal is to drive them from the Gaza Strip completely. Israel says its campaign aims to destroy Hamas after its Oct 7, 2023, attack in which militants killed some 1,200 people in southern Israel and abducted around 250 others.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has said that after Israel defeats Hamas, it will continue to control Gaza and will encourage Palestinians to leave “voluntarily.”
From tent city to tent city
The Gaza Strip was born out of the Nakba. Some 200,000 of the 1948 refugees were driven into the small coastal area, and more than 70 per cent of Gaza’s current population are their descendants. Gaza’s borders were set in an armistice between Israel and Egypt, which along with other Arab countries had attacked after Israel declared its independence.
Abu Moteir doesn’t remember much from her home village, Wad Hunayn, a small hamlet thick with citrus groves just southeast of Tel Aviv.
Her parents fled with her and her three brothers as the nascent forces of Israel moved into the area, fighting local Palestinian militias and expelling some communities.
“We left only with the clothes we had on us, no ID, no nothing,” Abu Moteir said. She remembers walking along the Mediterranean coast amid gunfire. Her father, she said, put the children behind him, trying to protect them.
They walked 75 kilometers to Khan Younis, where they settled in a tent city that sprang up to house thousands of refugees. There, UNRWA, a new UN agency created to care for them – temporarily, it was thought at the time – provided food and supplies, while the Gaza Strip came under Egyptian rule. After two years in a tent, her family moved further south to Rafah and built a home. Abu Moteir’s father died of illness in the early 1950s. When Israeli forces stormed through Gaza to invade Egypt’s Sinai in 1956, the family fled again, to central Gaza, before returning to Rafah.
In the years after the 1967 Mideast War, when Israel occupied Gaza and the West Bank, Abu Moteir’s mother and brothers left for Jordan.
