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.
A six-year-old expelled from Haifa in April 1948 recalls the crowds fleeing to the port; he returned with his family three years later and became a renowned visual artist.
Abed Abdi was six years old when, on 22 April 1948, he fled Haifa’s Wadi Salib neighborhood with his mother and four siblings amid intense shelling by Zionist militias. Like tens of thousands of the city’s Palestinians, the family was pushed to Haifa port and out to sea, ending up in the Mieh Mieh refugee camp in Lebanon — whose sackcloth tent dividers he later wove into his art.
The family was among the few allowed to return, coming back to Haifa three years later to find their home destroyed; like all Palestinians remaining in the city, they were confined to the Wadi Nisnas neighborhood. Abdi became one of Palestine’s best-known visual artists, and his memories of the expulsion still shape his work. He was interviewed by Zena Al Tahhan for Al Jazeera’s coverage of the 75th anniversary of the Nakba; the full feature is preserved in his official press archive.
Sources
Source
Quoted exactly as published by Al Jazeera (via the Abed Abdi Archive). Visit the archive for the full testimony.
Al Jazeera (via the Abed Abdi Archive)Connected in the archive
1 connected record1 record elsewhere in the archive are linked to this one, each by a piece of evidence you can read below.
the village this testimony is about — 1 record
- Haifaحيفا
Evidence — From a recorded field in this archive: village: "Haifa" → Haifa (Haifa Bay, northern coast)
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“Abed Abdi — Testimony.” Testimonies, FALASTEEN.AI. Accessed 22 August 2026. https://falasteen.ai/testimonies/abed-abdi-haifa.- MLA
“Abed Abdi — Testimony.” Testimonies, FALASTEEN.AI, 2026, https://falasteen.ai/testimonies/abed-abdi-haifa. Accessed 22 August 2026.- BibTeX
@misc{falasteen-abed-abdi-haifa, title = {Abed Abdi — Testimony}, howpublished = {\url{https://falasteen.ai/testimonies/abed-abdi-haifa}}, organization = {FALASTEEN.AI — A Living Archive for Palestine}, year = {2026}, note = {Accessed 2026-08-22} }