Palestinian Pottery
الفخار الفلسطيني
Red clay thrown on a hand wheel in Gaza and Hebron — cooking pots, water jars, and plant vessels made by families whose surname is simply 'the potter'.
Gaza has the clay. Its terrain holds substantial deposits of terra rossa, the red, porous, iron-rich soil that takes and holds a shape, and the coastal strip has been producing pottery for a very long time: clay objects excavated at Tell el-Ajjul, just south of Gaza City, date to around 1500 BCE. The trade has left its name on the map — al-Fawakhir, the potters’ quarter of Gaza City, is still where Gazan clayware is sold, for cooking, for storage, for plants, and for the table.
The method has changed little. Raw clay is cleaned by passing water through it to carry off impurities, thrown on a manual wheel, left to dry for at least two days, then fired in kilns that reach around 800 degrees Celsius, and rested again before use. What comes out are working objects: vases, plant pots, jugs, plates, and the large jars used to keep water cool. In Gaza the Atallah family runs seven workshops; before 2000 they exported to the West Bank, Jordan, and the Gulf, and since then the export trade has slowed to a trickle under closure.
In Hebron the craft carries a family name outright. Fakhoury means potter, and the al-Fakhoury family of the old city has worked in ceramics across five generations, running the largest pottery business in the area still using traditional techniques from a shop open since 1964 — alongside the city’s better-known glassblowing. Between the two cities the same fact holds: these are not heritage revivals but continuous working trades, and what threatens them is not fashion but blockade, closure, and the loss of the markets they used to reach.