Umm Omar was eight when her family was driven out of Jusayr, a farming village near al-Faluja, and ended up in Jabaliya camp in the northern Gaza Strip. “When they stole our country, I was only eight,” she said. “It was May and the weather was rainy.” What she remembers of the village is the harvest: her parents’ wheat fields, the flour, the goats, going out into the crops as a small girl. “Life was good there. We used to grow wheat.”

The family took shelter for four days in a neighbouring village before moving on through al-Faluja and al-Majdal and finally to Jabaliya, established by UNRWA in 1948 for an estimated 35,000 people who fled or were evicted from the southern Naqab (Negev) region, and now the largest camp in the Strip. Her father meant to wait a month for the fighting to stop. He walked back to Jusayr with other men from the village to look at the house — “They saw that everything was OK. It was just like we left it” — and on the way home he stepped on a mine and was killed.

She was seventy-six when she gave this account. She had been back once: her eldest son Omar, who worked selling vegetables and fruit inside present-day Israel, took her to Jusayr thirty-one years after they were displaced. “The village wasn’t like it used to be. I couldn’t believe that I was seeing it again, but it wasn’t like I remembered,” she said. “I took Omar around and showed him where our house used to be. It was gone. I showed him where the streets of Jusayr were.” Omar’s own home in Gaza was destroyed by Israeli air strikes in 2014. Years ago the couple buried their house deeds and keys in a place only their children know.

“I still hope that I’ll die in my home town,” she said. “I may be using a walker to move around today. But if they told me I can go back to Jeseer, I’d run all the way.”

Sources

• Nakba survivors share their stories of loss and hope — Al Jazeera, 19 May 2016