Staten Island Advance · Staten Island, New York · 27 June 1991

CP-1991-007

Palestinian refugees head home

Camp Canada, Egypt has been home to thousands

William C. Mann, Associated Press, Camp Canada, Egypt

Transcribed from the clipping

“CAMP CANADA, Egypt — Sitting in the ruin of what was his home for 15 years, Mustafa Kamel el-Hawi spoke of jumbled emotions as he prepared to leave for a new world. It’s a world three miles away, across a frontier of barbed wire, in Israeli-occupied Gaza… ‘I feel confused, like I still need something from Egypt, but I must make a statement for Palestine,’ said el-Hawi, a 33-year-old civil engineer educated in Houston. ‘Everybody in the camp feels the same way.’ The forgotten families are going home from scruffy Camp Canada, named for Canadian peacekeepers who, in the 1950s, used it to watch over the area where the Sinai Peninsula meets the Gaza Strip. The 560 families, about 6,000 people in all, were stranded in Egypt in 1982 when Israel ended 15 years of occupation in Sinai but kept control of Gaza… It was a 70-mile trip, along a border fence of steel mesh and barbed wire, across a no man’s land 135 feet wide into Israel, then back along the fence to Tel Sultan and a two-bedroom house of concrete blocks el-Hawi built. He stripped his Camp Canada house for construction materials, so the family left a shell of roofless rooms behind. ‘We call it our new life,’ he said. ‘It’s going to be difficult to begin the new life on the outside… We’ll have to make new friends. We’ll be meeting Jews in the street.’… The afternoon before a move to Tel Sultan, singing young men on flatbed trucks moved through the dusty streets to the three houseshells where belongings are stacked or heaped on dirt floors. They work like wreckers, sweating and laughing as they manhandle mattresses and tables and carpets into the trucks. El-Hawi said the young men serve as moving crews ‘just for friendship. They’re just happy to work, instead of sitting here with nothing to do.’… Tamraz, 42, sat on the floor of his concrete-block house with his youngest daughter, 4-year-old Heba. ‘Heba,’ he asked, ‘do you like Egypt better, or Palestine?’ She grinned and said, ‘Palestine.’ As Tuesdays are for moving, Mondays are for reflection. The el-Hawis chatted under a lemon tree in what used to be their interior courtyard. Neighbors dropped by to wish them well. Sitting on the sand outside her kitchen, el-Hawi’s mother began sobbing, wiping tears from wrinkled cheeks with her orange scarf. She wept because of the intefadeh, the anti-Israel uprising now in its fourth year, during which Israeli soldiers have killed at least 830 Palestinians. She worries about Mustafa and about his four sons, aged 6 to 16 months. ‘She told me that if she’s with us on the outside, then she’ll know we’re all right,’ el-Hawi said.”

Context added by this archive

A moving day, reported as a moving day. Six Palestinians are named, including a four-year-old who is asked a question and answers it, and an eighteen-year-old sitting her final exams. The casualty figure appears once, near the end, as the reason an old woman is crying in her own courtyard. The paper’s spelling, intefadeh, is kept.

Cite this item

"Palestinian refugees head home," Staten Island Advance, 27 June 1991. Covering Palestine archive, CP-1991-007. https://coveringpalestine.org/archive/cp-1991-007

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• Gazans pass through first Palestinian-run borderStaten Island Advance · 27 November 2005 · the same newspaper
• ‘Administrative detention’: Israelis skip due processThe Baltimore Sun · 6 February 1991 · the same year
• Books About the Arab WorldSyracuse Herald Journal · 24 February 1991 · the same year
• Temple Mount inquiry continuesThe News & Observer · 2 April 1991 · the same year