We left the house in panic. We didn't know what was going on…. Eventually, we ended up here. More than seventy years went by… I'm afraid of dying before returning to beautiful Jaffa.
An 80-year-old refugee from Jaffa, living in the Jabaliya camp's 'Jaffa neighborhood' in Gaza, recalls the panic of the May 1948 flight from her city.
Wajiha al-Harsh was a small child in May 1948, when Jaffa — the largest and most important city of pre-1948 Palestine — came under heavy bombardment and its people were driven out, many of them toward Gaza. Like thousands of Jaffa’s refugees, her family ended up in the Jabaliya refugee camp north of Gaza City, in a district that came to be known as the Jaffa Neighborhood, with its Jaffa Supermarket and Jaffa Mosque.
She described the 1948 deportation in an interview with journalist Hanan al-Rifi of the Nawa news agency, given at her “temporary home” in the camp more than seventy years later. The quote is reproduced by Zochrot on the page of its virtual study tour “From Jaffa 1948 to Gaza 2024,” which traces the ties between the emptied city and the Gaza camp that took in its people.