We left behind the most fertile fields in the area. Just months before the Nakba I was tending the land daydreaming about my future. My father worked that land. My father's father did before him and so many generations before.
A nine-year-old when Burayr was besieged and depopulated in 1948, he recalls the farmland his family had worked for generations and the return they never stopped expecting.
Omar Abedelal was nine years old when he, his family and their neighbors were displaced from Burayr, a village northeast of Gaza known for its fertile fields, as Zionist militias closed in during 1948. The family had been preparing to harvest the wheat that year; instead they joined the exodus south, and Abedelal has lived ever since as a refugee in Gaza City.
He gave this account, at the age of 82, to the late Gaza academic and writer Refaat Alareer, who recorded the memories of Nakba survivors for a 2021 feature first published by Politics Today and republished by the Palestinian Information Center. Alareer, editor of Gaza Writes Back, was killed in an Israeli airstrike in December 2023.
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Quoted exactly as published by Palestinian Information Center. Visit the archive for the full testimony.
Palestinian Information Center