Summary
Palestinian writer from Al-Nuseirat refugee camp in Gaza, author of “Travel Restrictions as a Manifestation of Nakba: Gaza, the Path Backward Is the Path Forward” in Light in Gaza (2022), arguing that Israeli travel restrictions are the ongoing Nakba in the form of family fragmentation, and that lifting them is possible (Light in Gaza: Writings Born of Fire, PDF p.227-240).
Details
- His grandparents fled Aqer in 1948 to Gaza; his great-grandfather Ahmad Aljamal was killed when Zionist militias invaded the village, and his grandmother Zainab Aburahma carried her baby Ghalia the whole walk to Gaza (PDF p.228).
- His father, stopped by Israeli soldiers at the entrance to Al-Nuseirat in 1987 and ordered to dance for their entertainment, asked them to clap, then ran and hid in an orange grove, signalling his family by making the Maghreb call to prayer from a nearby mosque (PDF p.227-228).
- His sister Zainab, twenty-six, died in Cairo in 2007 after an Israeli permit to reach a Jerusalem hospital seventy-nine kilometers away was denied and her Rafah exit came too late; her body was held at the closed crossing for two days before entry on the third (PDF p.231-232).
- His mother, confined to Gaza for thirty-two years, was granted a four-day permit to visit her West Bank family in 2012 after Gisha filed her case in an Israeli court, and “overstayed” by thirty-two days, “a day for each year she had spent in Gaza, prohibited from leaving” (PDF p.232).
- He was stranded in Kuala Lumpur in 2013 trying to return to Gaza through Cairo, and meets his scattered family in third places — Jordan in 2014, Germany in 2017, Sweden in 2018 — because permits to visit the West Bank are nearly impossible for a man of his age (PDF p.229-230, p.233-236).
- His demands include ending the buffer zones, which deprive Gaza of more than one-third of its fertile land, and rescinding the three-to-six-nautical-mile sea buffer imposed since 2000 (PDF p.239).
Related pages
Light in Gaza: Writings Born of Fire, Nakba, Gaza, Rafah Crossing, Right of Return