Abdullah Nashwan was born in al-Dawayima, high in the hills of al-Khalil, a village of olive terraces and gardens cut into the mountainside. On 28 October 1948 Zionist forces approached the village and opened fire with automatic weapons and mortars. Some of its 4,304 inhabitants fled; others took shelter in the mosque and in a cave nearby. When the village’s mukhtar, Hassan Mahmood Ihdeib, returned, he found the bodies of about sixty men, women and children in the mosque and eighty-five more in the cave, and recorded 455 people missing. The Nashwan family was among those who ran. “We didn’t even take our clothes,” Abdullah says. He was eleven years old, and walked fifty kilometres to the refugee camp at Jericho, where he lived for more than twenty years, married, and had six children.

The 1967 war displaced them again, this time to Jordan, where the family arrived in the newly established Baqa’a camp — his son Saadi was four months old. Abdullah worked as a cook for UNRWA; the tents became concrete; four more children were born. He was eighty-six when Al Jazeera visited in November 2023, watching the destruction of Gaza on the television in his front room while his daughter-in-law brought out his late wife Fatima’s embroidered thob, its pattern the pattern of al-Dawayima. “We are watching Palestine fall apart,” his son said.

Sources

• ‘We will never forget’: Reliving the pain of the Nakba amid Israel’s war — Al Jazeera, 2 December 2023