Nabil’s immediate family was obliterated too, but unlike his niece Mayar, the 36-year-old is acutely aware of the loss. He lost his wife Shirin and four little children: Gheidaa’, Mustafa, Abdel Rahman, and Dalal. Nabil and his now 7-year-old son Baderaddin are the only survivors. Both were seriously injured, and Nabil’s left arm was torn off in the explosion.

It is the third day of Eid al-Adha, and Makhrous – Nabil’s father and Mayar’s grandfather – wishes us a happy Eid with tears in his eyes. For the Siyams this is a difficult day to be joyous. The holiday tradition is to visit your family or receive visitors such as your siblings and their families, your children and their grandchildren. A little bit more than a year earlier, in summer 2014, the house of Dalal and Makhrous was hit with shrapnel from a shell. Most of their grown-up sons and daughters were present in the house with their own kids, visiting on the occasion of Ramadan: 30 people all together. When the artillery fire neared their house, they all fled into the street. “As we ran for our lives, two missiles hit us, right in front of the gate to our house,” says Dalal.

On the third day of Eid, the Siyams’ house is rather empty. We talk to the grandparents, while Mayar and her playmate, Moataz, run around. The little boy’s father Ayman, who also lost his wife in 2014, will stop by to give us buckets of flowers. “For Eid,” he explains and sits quietly in the corner, while Makhrous and Dalal recount all the times the family had to flee in the past half-century.

Makhrous and Dalal

“I am a Palestinian refugee from al-Abbasiyye,” says Makhrous Siyam, mukhtar of the Siyam family. “By the time I finished high-school, I had already lived through three wars.”

Makhrous now lives in Rafah, in the Gaza Strip, where today there is an entire generation of kids that had experienced three wars by the time they finished kindergarten. He is as old as the occupation: a Nakba baby, one might say. His wife Dalal is the same age. They lived through the 1948 ethnic cleansing, though the memories they have of that are only those passed on by their parents, and through the 1956 invasion followed by the first short-lived Israeli occupation of the Gaza Strip, and then through the war of 1967, which they can recall with gruesome details.

“When did we get married?” They first laugh at the question. But later, when the couple starts to search in their memories for dates, Makhrous says it was a year after the Six-Day War. “Yes, we got married in 1968. Dalal was my neighbour.” The Israeli offensives punctuate their memory and become a reference point: “The year I was born was the beginning of the Nakba. The year the Six-Day war broke out, I finished high-school. The year after the war, we got married.”

“It’s hard to remember. Martyrs, martyrs, martyrs, too many in my life; so many, they made me forget how many years have passed,” adds Dalal.

The British Mandate

“How did my parents meet? My father was already married, and had grown-up sons. One of them wanted to get married. So, my father went to this one family to ask them if his son could marry their daughter. But when he saw that woman, he immediately liked her and asked for her to become his second wife. That was my mother. And my half-brother ended up marrying her sister.” – Makhrous explains.

“One day they sold a bit of land they had in Rafah and went towards the coastal plains. They moved to al-Abbasiyye village: life there was supposed to be easier. My father and all his brothers did the same: sold the land here, and moved to Palestine. You know, this was just as it is today: people immigrate to Canada or Australia, but before they sell all their properties and then become citizens of that new place. When? Hmm, was it 1943? I am not sure which year precisely. Early 40s.”

Why did the parents of Makhrous felt they should leave Rafah?

“I am a refugee from Palestine. That my parents are from Rafah? No, it doesn’t change anything. Many people came to Palestine – from Syria, Egypt, Turkey, and everyone who was born in Palestine and forced to leave that land will tell you they are Palestinian. So I am a refugee from Palestine too. Yes, of course, you are right, Gaza is a part of Palestine. But the Palestine I am talking about now is the one that is gone.”

“No, they didn’t own any land in al-Abbasiyye. During the mandate my four uncles and my father used to work cutting the trees for the British army. Back then it was hard work, there were no electric saws. They also built the electricity and phone lines. The British needed a lot of wood.”

Why did the forests of Palestine nearly disappear?

“Their house wasn’t made out of stone. They built a shack from aluminium. Because of the British planning regulations, it was difficult to obtain materials or a building permit.”

Nakba: The Catastrophe

“My father was still young when the war broke out in 1947.”

On 13 December 1947, Irgun, a Jewish militia, attacked al-Abbasiyye, alongside other villages in the area. 24 men disguised in British army uniforms infiltrated the village, setting bombs in houses and throwing grenades at others, while part of the group opened fire on villagers who were sitting at a cafe. They left behind them a car which exploded in the village. At least 14 people were reported killed in this attack.

What happened in al-Abbasiyye and with its inhabitants in the following months?

When Makhrous’ parents and their family were waiting in Rafah to return back to al-Abbasiyye, around 4,000 Jewish immigrants settled in their former village. Dozens of ethnically cleansed villages were to be homes for the newly arrived Jews from Europe and the Middle East; their presence was a guarantee against any of the original inhabitants ever returning and an argument to support Israel’s territorial claims in future negotiations.

“In Rafah we lived in a refugee camp, in Block A. Five years, eight people, in a tent, and all of us dependant on aid packages from the UN. Only in the early ‘50s did the UN start to build houses. Very close to each other; people were cramped there. Bathrooms were shared by many families. Conditions were horrible. With time, they built schools and hospitals.”

While the Jewish immigrants who moved into Palestinian houses often tried to settle down as fast as possible, with much encouragement from the state, Palestinians didn’t want to take root in the refugee camps. For years, there was no attempt at providing more permanent infrastructure, because many had expected their return would be a matter of weeks.

1967: the Six Day War and the Israeli occupation of the Gaza Strip

Makhrous: “Would you like some coffee?”
Dalal: “No, no, I can’t because of my blood pressure.”
Makhrous: “Mayar, habibti, go to your father…. eee… uncle, yallah. There’s too much noise. So let’s continue with the story… We had just taken our last high school exam when the Six Day war broke out. We were asked to volunteer and stationed close to the farm lands. Suddenly, almost above our heads, a fleet of airplanes flew; they came from the north and were headed towards Egypt. Soon after, the tanks came. People were confused: the Israeli tanks arrived with Iraqi flags. Our neighbour went to greet them. He was shot dead. We didn’t know how to evacuate the dead and injured. We put one man on a donkey and hoped to find a doctor.

Why did the Israeli tanks have Iraqi flags?

Dalal: “I was 20 years old at that time, I wasn’t married yet. A friend of my father came to our house; he had a donkey. He told us he was too tired and too old to run. He asked us to take the donkey and escape. ‘I don’t care if they kill me or not, I can’t run anymore’. So he stayed with his donkey and we fled. My mother led us out of the house, and we went to hide by the sea. We spent two days walking, searching for safety, hiding under guava trees, with planes flying over our heads. Our neighbours escaped a bit later and caught up with us. They told us our house was gone: the Jews blew it up. My mother’s only reaction was to say ‘God help us’. For 15 days we were hiding by the sea. One day, we heard the occupying army call out through megaphones that it was safe to go back, so we returned to our house. It was destroyed. The old man was dead. Someone told us that when the army came to blow up the house, the donkey started to bray, but the old man was asleep and it didn’t wake him up. West of our house grew two old orange trees. There was nowhere else to go. We sat under those trees and waited. After four days, the sons of the old man came to bury him.”

The Six Day War ended with Israel taking over huge swaths of territory. It imposed military occupation on the Sinai Peninsula, the Gaza Strip and the West Bank, East Jerusalem and the Golan Heights, later annexing the latter two.

Makhrous: “From that time on, people relied on work in Israel, until 1992, when they started to close Gaza off. As I said, we got married a year after the war. I too worked in Israel. I had a family to take care of. Until the Intifada. The soldiers started to block the roads and make it gradually more and more difficult for us to reach our workplace.”

In the early ‘90s, Israel started to implement the first elements of the closure policy, long before Hamas came to power in 2007. “The years of the Second Intifada were difficult. No family went through those times without damage. My deaf nephew was killed and so was our neighbour. Many were sent to prison. But whatever we were spared back then or during the later Israeli offensives, caught up with us in 2014.”

The 2014 Israeli assault

On 8 July 2014, Israel begins its offensive against the Gaza Strip. Two weeks later, in the early morning hours, the Siyam family escapes their house as the shells are falling nearer and nearer. Just as they exit the house and start running for their lives, they are targeted from the air.

The House

Two children, three-year-old Mayar and even smaller Moataz, make a lot of noise; they play with the glass door separating the living room from the roofed patio of the Siyam family house. The adults are unusually patient with them. The kids do not get scolded and when they call out for someone’s attention, they get it immediately. Mayar’s playmate, noisily crying, is Moataz, her year-and-a-half-old cousin. He was just five months old when his mother was killed in the attack. Mayar abruptly runs into the room and calls her grandmother, Dalal, ‘mama’. “What is it, my dear?” Dalal responds attentively. “Mayar doesn’t understand what happened”, explains Dalal.

But it seems that Mayar understands at least some of it. She used to cry a lot; cry and scream. She used to call out for ‘mama and baba’ (mom and dad), but her parents could not come to console her. Sometimes, running around the house, Mayar notices their pictures, hanging high on the wall, along with other members of the family who were killed. She stops in front of them, stares and starts making noises, mumbling to herself, her voice growing, until someone comes and picks her up, lifts her to the pictures, so she can give a kiss to her parents.

EID

24 SEPTEMBER 2015

“And this is the life story of the mukhtar Makhrous Siyam. Today is the third day of Eid, so happy Eid.”

“A young man, recently married, came to me and said: ‘It’s the third day of Eid and I still haven’t tasted meat; meat has not entered my house.’ Of course we try to help; this is my job as a mukhtar. But this has to be the most difficult Eid I can think of. Yesterday I was mediating between two families who fought in the streets between each other. You know why? Because of ten shekels [2,3 euro]. If you think of how desperate people are, especially on the day of Eid… They are poor, poorer than before, and everything you need to celebrate Eid got so expensive: the meat and clothes… an overwhelming majority of the families in our area cannot afford to make the sacrifice of a goat or a sheep. But it’s our duty to share with them: as a mukhtar, I have worked with number of institutions, we gathered 200 portions of meat.”

A loud bleating interrupts the conversation…

It’s late, the muezzin is calling for prayer, and Makhrous wants to go to the mosque. He feeds the goats and calls a cab for us. We wait, talking about the growing prices of meat, fuel, clothes, and all the family problems he has to mediate as a mukhtar. It’s dark outside and electricity for Rafah area has been cut. This is how it is in Gaza: electricity is on for six to eight hours and off for the following six to eight hours. We hear honking outside – the taxi driver is letting us know he has just arrived. We say goodbye to Makhrous and Dalal. As we get into the car, I recognize the driver and his voice from Anne Paq’s photos and videos. She met his family almost a year earlier. It’s Nabil. I visited the Siyams’ house three times and never met him there. “It’s too difficult to sit at home,” he tells us, smoking a cigarette and driving, all with his one remaining hand, on the way to Gaza city.