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.
A 96-year-old survivor from Barqa, depopulated in May 1948, recalls walking down the coast into Gaza with his family, expecting to be home again within days.
Mutlaq Mahmoud Abu Elkhair is a retired merchant from Barqa, a village northeast of Gaza known for its citrus, bananas and sesame, which was attacked and depopulated between 10 and 13 May 1948 and later destroyed. Since the 1950s he has lived in the Tel al-Sultan refugee camp in Rafah, at the southern edge of the Gaza Strip.
He wrote this first-person account in April 2024, at the age of 96, as a full-scale Israeli offensive on Rafah loomed. Seventy-six years after fleeing Barqa on foot — assuring his wife she could leave her favorite clay pot behind because they would be back within days — he describes watching another mass displacement unfold around him, with more than seventy relatives sheltering in his house.
Sources
Source
Quoted exactly as published by Institute for Middle East Understanding (IMEU). Visit the archive for the full testimony.
Institute for Middle East Understanding (IMEU)Connected in the archive
2 connected records2 records 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
- Barqa, Gazaبرقة، غزةmapped, not yet written up
Evidence — From a recorded field in this archive: village: "Barqa" → Barqa, Gaza (Gaza)
named in this record — 1 record
One record names the other. A pointer for reading, not a claim that they belong to each other.
- Rafahرفح
Evidence — Inferred from the text — read the evidence: Since the 1950s he has lived in the Tel al-Sultan refugee camp in Rafah, at the southern edge of the Gaza Strip.
Cite this page
Every claim above carries its sources — citation is the point.
- Chicago
“Mutlaq Mahmoud Abu Elkhair — Testimony.” Testimonies, FALASTEEN.AI. Accessed 22 August 2026. https://falasteen.ai/testimonies/mutlaq-abu-elkhair-barqa.- MLA
“Mutlaq Mahmoud Abu Elkhair — Testimony.” Testimonies, FALASTEEN.AI, 2026, https://falasteen.ai/testimonies/mutlaq-abu-elkhair-barqa. Accessed 22 August 2026.- BibTeX
@misc{falasteen-mutlaq-abu-elkhair-barqa, title = {Mutlaq Mahmoud Abu Elkhair — Testimony}, howpublished = {\url{https://falasteen.ai/testimonies/mutlaq-abu-elkhair-barqa}}, organization = {FALASTEEN.AI — A Living Archive for Palestine}, year = {2026}, note = {Accessed 2026-08-22} }