A group of Mehr News Agency reporters visited an art exhibition collected by Iranian photographer Wahab Ramzi, whose photographs from the Palestinian refugee camp, were held at the Museum of Contemporary Palestinian Arts in Tehran.
In 2023, Iranian photographer Wahab Ramzi went to Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon. During this visit, he learned about the life stories of the Palestinians, their dreams and their laughter, and viewed their family albums. This museum is the result of its depiction of the Palestinian people living in 4 Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon.
The exhibition, titled “Keys Older Than Israel,” displays photographs taken by Ramzi from refugee camps in Lebanon. The pictures depict the life story of Palestinian refugees who kept the keys to their homes in the hope of returning to their motherland, Palestine.
Each photo in the exhibition tells the tragic story of Palestinian families who were displaced by the Israeli regime in 1948.
What’s even more painful and surprising is that the keys in these photos are older than Israel’s fake regime.
Aisha; Palestinian women in Lebanon
Among all the images in the exhibition, the story of one of the images caught everyone’s attention. Aisha Khaled is an 84-year-old woman who lives in a Palestinian refugee camp in the Burj al-Shamali area, south of Beirut. Aisha lives alone, having lost her family members, children, and husband in recent years.
Aisha’s house is filled with Palestinian items and symbols, including pictures of her martyred sons. Almost everything in Aisha’s house is white except for the Palestinian flag and the embroidered pillows.
Pictures of her children, keys, and a handful of Palestinian soil are Aisha’s most precious possessions, with which she spends her life these days.
At the age of 84, Aisha still hopes to return to her homeland. It is a perfect symbol of resistance, hope, strength and patriotism. For her, there is no place more suitable and better than her country, Palestine.
Even living in Bint Jbeil (Bint Jbeil, the second largest municipality in Nabatieh Governorate in southern Lebanon), the Rashidiya camp (the largest Palestinian refugee camp in the Tire region in southern Lebanon) did not satisfy her during the past 76 years.
She keeps the soil she got from the yard of her childhood home in Palestine in a small bottle. Although she is far from her country, this bottle gives her the feeling that she can hold her country, Palestine, in her hand. When she misses her motherland, she may smell the soil deeply with all her heart.
Aisha has never returned to her homeland since 1948
Aisha Khaled was born in the village of Al-Khalisa and lived there with her family until 1948, when the Israeli regime invaded Palestinian villages for the first time and forced their residents to leave their homes and head to refugee camps in Lebanon.
Al-Khalisa is a Palestinian Arab village located on a low hill on the northwestern edge of the Hula Valley with a population of over 1,800 and located 28 kilometers (17 mi) north of Safed. The village was depopulated in 1948. Before the Israeli occupation, Aisha’s father had a large farm full of cows, sheep, and horses. They lived a normal life and celebrated with neighbors and relatives on every occasion and holiday.
It was late in the month of Elul (August-September according to the Gregorian calendar) when Israelite forces invaded the Khalsa. Because of her fear of the sounds of gunfire and gunfire, 13-year-old Aisha and her family forcibly left their home.
The most tragic part of the story is that Aisha’s mother did not even turn off the stove for lunch, as she thought she would be home again in a few hours. But little did they know that they would never return to their homeland even after decades.
Today, all the family members have been martyred or died, and Aisha, the youngest member of the family, lives alone with all those beautiful memories in Khalsa.
This story is not just Aisha’s story, it is the shared grief and grief of the Palestinian nation over the past 76 years; The oppressed nation whose ultimate wish is to see its motherland even once before death.
Palestinian refugees
Most Palestinian refugees are ethnically cleansed Palestinians from the 78% of Palestine on which the Israeli regime was founded in 1948, and their descendants. The mass expulsion of approximately 750,000 Palestinians (about a third of all Palestinians) in 1948 was a deliberate and systematic act of ethnic cleansing, known to Palestinians as the “Nakba” (“the catastrophe”).
Other categories of Palestinian refugees include 1) Palestinians who fled their homes but remained internally displaced in the occupied territories that became Israel, 2) Palestinians who were first displaced when the Israeli army occupied the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and the Gaza Strip in the 1967 war., 3) Palestinians who They left the occupied territories since 1967 and were prevented by Israel from returning due to cancellation of residency rights, denial of family reunification, or deportation, 4) Palestinians Internally displaced people in the West Bank, East Jerusalem and Gaza Strip since 1967, and 5) Palestinians expelled from their homes during Israel’s genocide in Gaza in 2023-2024.
There are an estimated 9.17 million displaced Palestinians worldwide (as of 2021), according to the Badil Center for Palestinian Residency and Refugee Rights.
Among them are about 8.36 million refugees and 812,000 internally displaced people.
Of these 8.36 million refugees, 2.3 million are in Jordan, more than 1.5 million in occupied Gaza, 887,000 in the occupied West Bank, 576,000 in Syria, and 485,000 in Lebanon.
Narrated by Marziyeh Rahmani
