'The Last to Leave': One Man's Nakba Testimony from the Village of Fara
Date: May 15 2026
Author: Aya Youssef

From Journal of Palestine Studies.

https://www.palestine-studies.org/en/node/1659032

Editor’s Note: This story is about Aya's grandfather, based on an interview conducted in July 2023. It was submitted in response to a call issued for the virtual “How to Write Your Nakba Story?” workshop hosted by the Palestine Square Editorial Committee in April 2026. More Nakba stories will be published in the coming weeks.

Even at 93, Abdul Qader Abdullah Youssef talks about his trip to Tabaria as if it happened yesterday.

He sits beneath a tree in south Lebanon, its branches stretching wide enough to cast a soft shade over him. Beyond him, the landscape opens into hills and houses — close enough to Palestine to feel like an extension of it, yet far enough to remind him that it is unreachable.

He holds his cane close to his chest, both hands resting over it, as if anchoring himself between what was and what is. The first memory is not the war, but a school trip.

“We went to Tabaria,” he says. “The lake, the pine trees… There was nothing more beautiful.”

He recalls the day through simple details: a group of students eating lunch by the water, in a place that, at that time, felt permanent.

Then everything falls apart.

“The hardest thing,” he says. “Was leaving. We were the last people who got out of Palestine.”

Abdul Qader grew up in Fara, a village in the Safad subdistrict of the Upper Galilee, where he spent his childhood before the family's displacement during the Nakba in 1948. His family left in October 1948. They didn't leave immediately in May because they believed what they had been told by the Palestinian groups defending the land.

“They said one week,” he recalls. “Just one week, and they would liberate Palestine.”

He pauses.

“That week still hasn't ended,” he says, with a faint smile, before continuing. “I finished the fifth grade there. I was still studying before we left. We left our homes full… I swear, full. Full of grains, full of food, olive oil… everything.”

He repeats the word “full” as if it might restore something, as if the detail itself serves as proof. This was not a displacement born out of poverty or scarcity. It was forced — an abrupt exit from a life that was still functioning.

It happened in stages.

“They would make so-called truces,” he says. “Every five or six months, they would break them and take more land. Zionists terrorized people. Every place they took, there was a massacre.”

Fara fell to Zionist Occupation in the final stage of "Operation Hiram," a full scale offensive against the "last pocket of Arab resistance in Galilee." In his book, Nakba and Survival: The Story of the Palestinians who Remained in Haifa and the Galilee, Adel Manna writes that Zionist army officers committed "fifteen massacres during a single week after occupying the Galilee," noting that a formal policy of ethnic cleansing was in place.

He recalls what happened in a nearby village in the Upper Galilee.

“They asked the villagers for 100 rifles,” he says. “They didn't have them. Some people had already left, others were still there. They gathered what they could. Around 25 rifles.”

Back then, Zionist militias demanded that villagers hand over their weapons as they expanded their control over the land, he adds.

According to him, villagers asked for time. “They said, give us 24 hours,” he recalls. The request was denied.

“They lined them up and shot them,” he says. “Eighty people...”

He identifies the attack as the Saliha massacre, which happened in October 1948. Historical estimates account for more than 80 Palestinians who were killed that day, with some accounts placing the death toll at 94. He adds that one man from his own village was among those killed.

His family crossed into southern Lebanon, moving between villages including Yaroun and Bint Jbeil — both of which have been targeted by Israel's current long war on Lebanon. They stayed for months, sometimes years at a time, before moving again.

When the family finally left Palestine, they had taken only what they could carry.

“We left with cows, goats, sheep,” he says. His father sold the animals gradually to sustain the family.

“He sold them little by little,” Abdul Qader says. “In the end, nothing was left.” Even the rifle was sold.

“Back when we were still in Yaroun, [my family] used to send me to a cafe to hear the radio, to know if there was any news from Palestine.”

Abdul Qader says he would hear about battles in different villages and then return to report to his family.

Eventually, in 1952, they arrived at Al-Rashidiyya, where Palestinian refugee camps were being established. Rashidiyya Camp is the largest Palestinian refugee camp in the Tyre region of South Lebanon, and the closest to Palestine geographically, lying about 13 kilometers from the Lebanon–Palestine border.

“We suffered a lot,” he says. “We were humiliated a lot in the camps.”

He describes living under tarps, exposed to the summer heat and the winter cold. The camp is surrounded by trees, gardens, and the Mediterranean, largely isolated from its surroundings.

“There is a saying,” he adds. “The one who leaves his home, his worth diminishes.”

He pauses briefly.

“We lived it.”

Despite decades of displacement, his description of Palestine remains vivid and detailed.

“Palestine was the best of lands,” he says. “Fertile, blessed, and it had everything.”

He lists what he remembers: lemons, olives, grains, livestock, trade...

“Haifa was the bride of the Middle East,” he says.

At some point during our conversation, he takes out a stack of documents. — yellowed pages, lightly frayed at the edges, carrying the faint scent of age.

“This is 10 dunams of land,” he says, pointing at one. “In an area called Ras al-Ahmar. My father bought it in 1946, two years before we left.”

The document records a purchase made before displacement, evidence of a life that was still being built.

Around him, the setting remains calm. The tree above shields the July sun. The landscape stretches toward a border that remains close.

He returns to the same point several times:

“We were the last to leave,” he says.

“They told us one week,” he repeats.

At 93, Abdul Qader does not describe his experience as something finished. His story does not end with displacement. It remains open.

“God willing,” he says. “We still have hope.”

About The Author:
Aya Youssef is a Palestinian Romanian journalist and visual storyteller born in South Lebanon. Her work focuses on documenting human stories connected to the Palestinian cause, memory and displacement across generations.