Summary
A Palestinian refugee camp on the outskirts of Bethlehem, just off the main Jerusalem-Hebron road, presented in Three Mothers, Three Daughters as built by UNRWA in 1967, home to about 2,300 people, many of them refugees of 1948 from Al-Qabu, and the home of Samira and Umm Abdullah (Three Mothers, Three Daughters: Palestinian Women’s Stories, lines 843-846).
Details
- The authors describe narrow dirt lanes, sewage flowing in open gutters and small children darting to and fro; from the main road the camp appears less impoverished than the large camps in Gaza or elsewhere in the West Bank (Three Mothers, Three Daughters: Palestinian Women’s Stories, line 843).
- Many in the camp are from Al-Qabu, ten minutes away by car, and Umm Abdullah’s family still keeps sheep there that are the offspring of sheep brought from Al-Qabu in 1948 (line 958).
- Samira’s family moved to the camp from Beit Jala — she says when she was five, her mother dates the move to 1967 — and lived in a one-room house, later two rooms, before building more (lines 858-862, 998).
- Umm Abdullah’s house was demolished by the Israeli army in 1982, ten days after Samira’s arrest, and the family lived ten months in a tent in the olive grove beside it before rebuilding on the spot (lines 944, 1052-1056).
- Samira and Asam’s wedding zaffa toured the camp with hundreds of guests from the camp and the West Bank, many of them former political prisoners (line 1076).
- At the beginning of the First Intifada the Israelis rounded up many people in the camp and held them in Atlit military prison (line 1086).
Related pages
Three Mothers, Three Daughters: Palestinian Women’s Stories, Samira, Umm Abdullah, Al-Qabu, Bethlehem, UNRWA