GAZA – On the United Nations’ World Refugee Day on Saturday, 70-year-old Palestinian Marwan Kuwaik in Gaza, will be focusing on trying to eke out a living, selling snack food on the street.
The June 20 event comes with the message that everyone, including refugees, can contribute to society, the UN said on its website.
Kuwaik earns about 30 shekels ($8.50) a day selling lupin beans from his bicycle. He is among 1.4 million Palestinians UN-registered refugees in the impoverished enclave, whose economy has been battered because of years of Israeli and Egyptian blockades.
“I support my family, 15 people. I have never stopped my work for 40 years, even during wars, curfews and closures, except when I am sick,” Kuwaik said.
His parents were among the hundreds of thousands of Palestinians who were displaced when the state of Israel was formed in 1948.
He was born two years later in Gaza and lives in the outskirts of its Beach refugee camp. The UN gives refugee status to the descendants of Palestinians displaced more than 70 years ago.
Kuwaik said his family once owned farmland in Lod in Israel. He visited the place twice in the early 1980s and found a new concrete house built next to his father’s old shelter.
The new Israeli owners continued to grow olive trees on the farmland as his family long had, he said.
“We will return,” Kuwaik said in his house as he filled small plastic bags with lupin beans. “If we die our sons will rise, and if they die then our grandchildren will do it.”
Asked about World Refugee Day, he said: “We remain without a solution … the situation is miserable but we still have hopes.”
(Photos syndicated via Reuters)
This story has been edited by BH staff and is published from a syndicated field
