Deir al-Balah

The name is a memory in plain Arabic: Deir al-Balah, the Monastery of Dates. Tradition holds that the deir was a convent founded here in the fourth century, in the time of Saint Helena, and the balah the date palms that still mark the place; the town stands on the ancient coast road of Palestine, the way armies and pilgrims took between Egypt and the north. Beneath its soil lies older evidence of that road’s importance — a Late Bronze Age cemetery of the Egyptian New Kingdom period, its anthropoid clay coffins excavated in the twentieth century, when the Gaza coast was an imperial highway.

In the First World War the coast road brought the armies back. Deir al-Balah became a base of the Egyptian Expeditionary Force in the long fight for Gaza, and the war cemetery consecrated here in 1925 — photographed that April day by the Matson studio — still holds the dead of 1917. Under the Mandate it was a village of the Gaza district, growing dates and citrus between the dunes and the gardens.

The war of 1948 remade it. Refugees from the towns and villages of the southern coastal plain and the Naqab were gathered into a camp beside the town, established in 1949; Deir al-Balah camp is among the smallest of Gaza’s camps in area and among the most crowded, town and camp growing into a single community in the narrow middle of the Strip, where the coast road — now Salah al-Din Street — still runs.

In the war that began in October 2023 the middle of the Strip was bombed, raided and overwhelmed: Deir al-Balah’s markets, mosques and schools filled with the displaced of Gaza City and the north, its hospital — al-Aqsa Martyrs — became one of the last functioning in the territory, and its streets were struck again and again even as the town served as a staging ground for the polio vaccination campaign of 2024. The monastery is long gone; the dates remain, and so does the town that took its name from both.

Sources

• Dayr al-Balah — Palestine Remembered
• Deir el-Balah Camp — UNRWA