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.
A 91-year-old survivor from Julis, in the Gaza district, recalls his family's expulsion in 1948 and a lifetime in the refugee camps of Bureij and Nuseirat.
Mohammed Abdul Jabbar Abu Seif was fifteen years old in 1948, when his family was driven from Julis, a village in the Gaza district northeast of Gaza City. They fled on foot from place to place under shelling, sleeping first in the open, then in tents and mud houses, before settling in the Bureij refugee camp and later in Nuseirat, where he lived for more than sixty years.
His testimony, published by the American Friends Service Committee’s Gaza Unlocked project during the 2023–2024 war, is that of one of the last living Nakba survivors of his generation. Displaced again within Gaza in 2024 at the age of 91, he writes that his testament to his children and grandchildren is never to leave, and that his dream remains to return to Julis before he dies.
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Quoted exactly as published by Gaza Unlocked (American Friends Service Committee). Visit the archive for the full testimony.
Gaza Unlocked (American Friends Service Committee)