Gazan man aims to help those displaced in camps
▶ Filmmaker tells William Parry how her documentary about generational grief became a source of strength
Three weeks after the war on Gaza broke out, Yahya Al Qassas, 28, wanted to make a change.
Determined to help solve some of the compounding issues facing Gazans, he began distributing blankets to people as temperatures started to drop.
Shortly afterwards, donations arrived and Mr Al Qassas and other volunteers embarked on a mission to help.
He has since launched the One Body Initiative for Gaza which has a GoFundMe account with about $11,000.
“We started building tents, 18 in total, inside displacement camps, by just finding families that were living on the streets.”
As well as offering blankets and tents, Mr Al Qassas and his team provide medicine, blankets, sleeping bags, nappies, food and building tents.
They also started to source materials to build toilets and shelters for people in displacement camps.
Ahmed Al Faraa, 46, who was displaced from Khan Younis, is one of hundreds of Palestinians who Mr Al Qassas has helped.
He now lives in the Tell Al Sultan refugee camp in Rafah, on the border with Egypt, with 20 other families all living in tents.
The toilets, built through the initiative, have been much-needed, Mr Al Faraa said, especially for the women in his family.
Although basic, they are more accessible than other options they had.
“The nearest toilet was at least 1km away,” Mr Al Faraa told The National.
“And once we got there, we had to wait in line, with about 100 to 120 people ahead of us.” The UN has said Gazans in overcrowded spaces are forgoing what little food and water they can find to avoid having to use unsanitary toilets.
Amid a lack of basic hygiene, displacement camps and UN schools have become hotbeds for diseases like Hepatitis A, with at least 8,000 cases recorded due to people’s proximity to sewage and waste.
The Health Ministry said more than half a million Gazans, or about a quarter of the population in the enclave, fell ill with dangerous diseases between the end of October and January.
It added that there are more than 700,000 cases of infections among displaced Gazans.
Despite the work carried out by Mr Al Qassas and his team, he said it has been difficult to source materials amid pricesare increases.
Securing items such as wooden planks and nylon panels is also becoming more difficult as daily raids in Gaza continue.
The shortage of essential building tools and materials leaves Mr Al Qassas and others little to work with.
Mr Al Qassas said his team are resorting to using whatever they can find.
“We use car tyres to create the shape of the well, which a pipe flowing out of the toilet travels into,” he said.
The temporary fix requires constant maintenance in areas that have seen a sudden population increase, such as Al Mawasi, which Israel has designated as a “safe zone” for Gazans.
The next project, Mr Al Qassas said, involves building shelters for those in need using donations from around the world.
The documentary Bye Bye Tiberias is Lina Soualem’s second. It is a beautiful, delicate and intimate tale of four generations of women from the Palestinian side of her family, including her great-grandmother Um Ali, her grandmother Nemat, her mother and actress Hiam Abbass (Succession) and Soualem herself.
After winning London Film Festival’s Best Documentary last year, it screened in Dubai this week as part of Reel Palestine at Cinema Akil.
The catastrophic events of the Nakba in 1948, the seismic ruptures of displacement and the trauma it caused Palestinian society and her family are present throughout. Soualem pieces together the stories, weaving them with her childhood memories of visits to the family home in Deir Hanna in a kind of filmic tatreez.
“My mother first took me to Palestine when I was 18 months old,” she tells The National. “She would take me almost every year, if not several times a year, to see my family – all of my cousins, my aunts and uncles – for the summer vacation.
“I always felt very close to them, to the village, and [my grandmother’s] house was really our centre.”
Born in Paris to an Algerian father and a Palestinian mother, Soualem explores her diverse cultural roots in her documentaries, unpicking
how her identity was undermined by peers and the education system in France.
“I never felt like I could live my different identities when I was younger, at school,” she says. “I was always judged for not being French enough, not being Algerian enough – or told I couldn’t be Palestinian because Palestine doesn’t exist. No one was interested in my Arabic language.
“This is very common for many people of Arab descent in France. We were never valued for our double culture; instead we were usually stigmatised for it. When September 11 happened, a girl came to me in class and said: ‘Look at what your people did, the Arabs!’ I was 12 years old and it was very violent for me, there was a lot of aggressiveness.”
Through her mother and their frequent family trips
to Palestine, Lina learnt to speak Palestinian Arabic. The film reveals how Lina’s birth helped repair a family rift, which began when her mother opted to leave Palestine against her parents’ wishes, in search of an acting career in France. Lina was like “an angel that reconciled us”, Abbass says in the film.
The mother-daughter bond is beautiful and very clear in the film, especially in the childhood VHS footage shot by her father, but their journey in the film also involves the adult Lina asking her mother delicate questions about her past and her family’s past.
Early in the film, Abbass advises her daughter: “Don’t open the gate to past sorrows.” Of course, Soualem does so anyway and such moments are poignant.
The relationship between mother and daughter evolved during filming, Soualem says. “I think it’s brought us not closer, but more to an ‘equal’ place. You usually relate to your parents as a child and during the film, we kind of had to find our balance and exchange ‘woman to woman’. This was something new and that’s helping us also deal emotionally with everything that’s going on in Gaza. We understand each other in a more natural way.”
In Bye Bye Tiberias, Soualem juggles many dichotomies – strength and fragility, closeness and separation, laughter and grief, celebration and mourning, dignity and dehumanisation.
She says in the film: “These images of childhood conceal the reality of a place that may disappear any day now. These images are my memory’s treasure. I don’t want them to fade. I know that they too might sink into oblivion.”
The words today seem uncannily prophetic.
The archive footage Soualem uses of Palestinian families fleeing their homes with what they could carry, of Zionist militias destroying homes and of survivors searching the rubble for belongings, or perhaps loved ones, is eerily reminiscent of the horrors people have been facing in Gaza – with the world watching – since October 7.
Bye Bye Tiberias was released before October 7, and Soualem and Abbass could not have imagined what subsequent screenings would feel like – for them or for audiences. Its UK premiere was at the London Film Festival in October, where it picked up the aforementioned prize.
“It was all very, very intense because everything was happening while we were trying to understand what was going on,” Soualem says. “I was facing audiences with the film and I was very frightened by the potential backlash.
“It was difficult to go through it because the dehumanisation of Palestinians over those first days and weeks was so violent, but at the same time I was showing the film and receiving a lot of warmth. It was weird to live these two things at the same time. That gave me a lot of strength to go through this period because it wasn’t easy. I was really afraid everywhere I arrived and was always positively surprised by the audiences.”
Soualem says that what is unfolding in Gaza is devastating but not surprising, and that the “cycle” is regrettably part of the fabric of the narrative that runs in her film.
“It’s not shocking in the sense that we always knew that this story has been repeated over the years,” she says. “It’s a cycle. We inherited from our ancestors this fear of loss that is continuous so it’s as if the fear is now proven.
“Nothing is new, just the shock of the amount of people killed and injured, and the fact that it’s live and there is little reaction. For my mother and for older generations that actually lived through it in the past, it has triggered that trauma again.
“When I started writing the film six years ago, I wanted to give these remarkable women back their humanity and their complexity through the film, because they are often portrayed in a dehumanised way. People always talk about Gaza as a separate thing from the rest of Palestine, as if the people of Gaza are Hamas, but a great percentage of the people in Gaza are already refugees from other parts of Palestine.
“So, when you see the stories of my family, it’s by chance that some Palestinians remained, internally displaced, while others became refugees. Almost every person in Gaza is the child or the grandchild of a Palestinian refugee.”
In the film, Soualem says: “I wonder if we can manage to find ourselves truly in a world we invented.”
For now, she is doing that, with great love and reverence for her family and culture, through her art.
I was showing the film and receiving a lot of warmth ... but I was very frightened by the potential backlash
LINA SOUALEM Filmmaker