Gaza’s last tiger heads to South African reserve
Laziz, who survived wars between Israel and Hamas, lived in ‘world’s worst zoo’
KHAN YOUNIS, GAZA STRIP— The last tiger in Gaza departed the coastal enclave at dawn on Wednesday, travelling in a wooden crate, cooled by chunks of ice placed on top of his temporary transport.
The tiger was high, perhaps thankfully. He was given a sedative by his new keepers to help him deal with the strangeness of his trip.
The Bengal tiger was rescued from a painfully small cage in the nowshuttered amusement park dubbed by animal rights advocates “the worst zoo in the world.”
But the Khan Younis facility was unique. Its owner displayed the mummified corpses of animals that had died at the zoo due to stress, disease and starvation.
The last tiger in Gaza, renamed La- ziz, meaning “delicious” in Arabic, passed from the besieged Gaza Strip into Israel at the Erez crossing early Wednesday. He was scheduled to visit Hebrew University’s Koret veteri- nary hospital and then continue on to Ben Gurion Airport to make El Al’s evening Flight 71 to Johannesburg.
Laziz was travelling with 14 fellow survivors of the Khan Younis zoo. These were the lucky ones — out of 220 inhabitants at the zoo during its peak. Before departing Wednesday morning, the animals and their new caregivers, from the international animal charity and rescue group called Four Paws, spent the night in the parking lot of the Marna House Hotel in Gaza City.
The tiger has lived an impossible life. The zoo’s owner and patriarch, Ziad Awaida, said he purchased two tiger cubs from black-market traders providing animals for an Egyptian zoo. The tigers grew up in their cage in Khan Younis and were the zoo’s most popular attraction.
The pair survived wars in 2008 and 2012 between Israel and Hamas, the Islamist militant organization that controls the Gaza Strip. In the aftermath of the third and most costly war in 2014, the female tiger died — along with more than 2,100 Palestinians and 72 Israelis.
The zookeeper’s morbid display was both a financial and political decision. He had bought the animals, and people would pay to see them, dead or alive; he also wanted to show Palestinians what the Gaza wars and Israeli siege had wrought.
The tiger is headed to Lionsrock, a big cat preserve in South Africa, where he will be free to roam a large natural enclosure. He is eight or nine years old. Tigers in the wild live about 17 years, but those in captivity can survive longer, so maybe the story ends well for him.