Testimonies

A Nakba at the beginning of my life … and another Nakba at the end of it. What can we even say?

The Jews ordered all our family to line up against the wall and they started shooting us. I was hit in the side, but most of us children were saved because we hid behind our parents. The bullets hit my sister Kadri [four] in the head, my sister Sameh [eight] in the cheek, my brother Mohammed [seven] in the chest. But all the others with us against the wall were killed: my father, my mother, my grandfather and grandmother, my uncles and aunts and some of their children.

The militias forced the remaining inhabitants onto trucks and took them to the Egyptian Sinai Peninsula. I barely made it out alive, and walked down the coast with my family over 36 miles, insisting my wife need not take her favorite clay pot because it would be only a matter of days before we returned.

They took my home by brute force and made me a refugee and I want my home back, and I want to live in it in freedom and dignity. [...] Nakba to me is an earthquake, not by the forces of nature, but by the powers of evil. It is not instantaneous but lasting for decades.

We owned a few dunums, where we planted wheat and barley. We lived off the land, and there was plenty to eat and drink. Everything was lovely.

My memory of those moments is like a treasure to me. I remember the masses of people at the Haifa port. I remember the suffering of the people.

My family lived up the hill on the eastern end of the village, and we fled towards Yalu, but upon reaching that village we realized the Israeli army was already there and we could not enter. We ended up walking for sixteen hours to reach Ramallah, thirty-two kilometers away.

My village was brutally attacked and burned down by the Zionist army and we were forced to flee the burning village to the adjacent village of Hatta. [...] A man pushed me out and took my position when the warplanes attacked again. In a split second, he died in front of my eyes. I survived.

They bombed us from the air just as we were breaking the fast for Ramadan – they knew we would all be in our homes.

We left before the killing reached us. People from other villages were fleeing and told stories of what they were running from, so people from the farther villages packed up and fled.

The situation was as if we were experiencing the Day of Judgment (...) Crowds of people escaping from the death on foot and others riding donkeys and camels, while children ran in front of their families as the sound of bullets fired by the Zionist gangs towards us [...] Living in tents is the height of tragedy, without protection and privacy for you and your family (...) We felt naked in front of each other and felt ashamed all the time, even when we had to relieve ourselves inside tents.

We never set eyes on Fatima or our dog or the city we had known ever again. Like a body prematurely buried, unmourned, without coffin or ceremony, our hasty, untidy exit from Jerusalem was no way to have said goodbye to our home, our country and all that we knew and loved.

Of course we passed it. In May 1948, we left Jaffa. Jaffa fell, and I became a refugee in Nablus.

At that moment, a jeep pulled up with three people. One of them, a Zionist officer, got out. He pulled a gun and put it to my head and ordered me to put the water down.

On 14 May 1948, Simsim village faced a fierce attack by Israeli troops. As a result, my father removed the family to the Seifa area, north of Beit Lahiya in northern Gaza. About three months later, we and many villagers came back to the village to protect our lands and properties.

We fled on foot. We had only the clothes on our back.

You are still living in the same place, but you ask yourself, 'Is this still my home? Is the air mine? Is the sky mine?'

My family and I were expelled from the village of Julis 76 years ago, after which we endured a difficult displacement journey. We migrated to several Palestinian cities, fleeing from shelling until we reached the Bureij camp in the middle of the Gaza Strip, where we settled for several years. We then lived in the Nuseirat camp for more than 60 years.

At 9 in the morning, the shooting stopped and the attackers rounded everyone up on the beach. They sorted them out, the women and children on one side, the men on the other. They searched the men and ordered them to keep their hands above their heads.

We left behind the most fertile fields in the area. Just months before the Nakba I was tending the land daydreaming about my future. My father worked that land. My father's father did before him and so many generations before.

In 1948 our village in the Beer El-Sabe district was subjected to a brutal Israeli attack, during which children, women and elderly people were killed, creating a state of terror and fear among the remaining villagers. This led to a further mass exodus of occupants of neighboring villages.

The Jews were stationed here and there with loudspeakers and guns, loaded and ready. One loudspeaker repeated that we better leave in order to avoid what happened in the mosque.

This is always the case with us Palestinians, we're always getting pushed from one place to the next. I wish they'd give us a traffic light for once.

We had wheat, flour and goats. We never saw another happy day after we left.

We left the house in panic. We didn't know what was going on…. Eventually, we ended up here. More than seventy years went by… I'm afraid of dying before returning to beautiful Jaffa.

We were only wearing the clothing we had on because we are coming back tomorrow. We are coming back. Now we just want to be far from the shooting.

...one early morning around thirty trucks entered the village, the soldiers was dressed Arabian style, so we thought they are Arabs coming to defend us, but they began shooting every one they saw. Most of the residences escaped to the north, because the Zionists made a save side in the north to kick out everyone, we escaped to Lebanon, through Albassa and Tarshiha. After we left the village the Zionists destroyed all the village except the mosque and old Romanian building.