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.
A survivor from al-Sawafir al-Sharqiyya in the Gaza district, fifteen in 1948, describes the burning of his village and a warplane attack during the family's flight.
Ahmad al-Haj was fifteen in the spring of 1948, a farm boy from al-Sawafir al-Sharqiyya, one of some thirty villages of the Gaza district that were forcibly evacuated between mid-May and mid-June of that year. Returning from market one day in April, he was shot at by machine gunners as he passed through Julis, which Zionist forces had just taken; weeks later his village itself was attacked and burned, and his father was captured and held in prison for months.
Interviewed by Wafaa H. Aburahma in Nuseirat refugee camp in 2014, al-Haj recounted the flight from village to village — to Hatta, then Falluja, then Gaza — the years in tents before UNRWA built shelters, and his refusal, sixty-six years on, to buy land for a house because he never accepted that Gaza would be his final home.
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