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‘My hope in 1948 was to return, my hope today is to survive’
Mustafa al-Gazzar, 81, recalls his family’s months-long flight from their village in what is now central Israel to the southern city of Rafah when he was 5 years old. At one point, they were bombed from the air. At another, they dug holes under a tree to sleep in for warmth.
Al-Gazzar, now a great-grandfather, was forced to flee again over the weekend, this time to a tent in Muwasi, a barren coastal area where some 450,000 Palestinians live in a squalid camp. He says the conditions are worse than in 1948, when the UN agency for Palestinian refugees was able to regularly provide food and other essentials.
“My hope in 1948 was to return, but my hope today is to survive,” he said. “I live in such fear,” he added, breaking into tears. “I cannot provide for my children and grandchildren.”
Palestinians carrying possessions as they flee after the creation of Israel in 1948
The new Nakba: ‘Forcible displacement will be called emigration’
Even before the war on Gaza, many Palestinians spoke of an ongoing Nakba in which Israel gradually forces them out of Gaza, the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem.
Yara Asi, a Palestinian assistant professor at the University of Central Florida, and others fear if another genuine Nakba occurs, it will be in the form of a gradual departure from Gaza.
“It won’t be called forcible displacement in some cases. It will be called emigration, it will be called something else,” Asi said. “But in essence, it is people who wish to stay, who have done everything in their power to stay for generations in impossible conditions, finally reaching a point where life is just not liveable.”
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