On the United Nations’ World Refugee Day on Saturday Palestinian Marwan Kuwaik will try make some money by selling snack food on Gaza street.
The June 20 event this year comes as a reminder to the world that everyone, including refugees, can contribute to society, the UN said on its website.
In Gaza, Kuwaik earns about 30 shekels ($8.50) a day selling lupin beans from his bicycle.
Asked about World Refugee Day, he said: “We remain without a solution ... the situation is miserable but we still have hopes.”
The 70-year-old is among 1.4 million Palestinians UN-registered refugees in the poor and crowded enclave, whose economy has suffered from years of blockades.
“I support my family, 15 people. I have never stopped my work for 40 years, even during wars, curfews and closures, except when I am sick,” Kuwaik said.
His parents were among the hundreds of thousands of Palestinians who fled or were forced to leave their homes in what is now Israel during the fighting that surrounded its founding in 1948, Reuters reported.
He was born two years later in Gaza and lives in the outskirts of its Beach refugee camp. The UN registers as refugees the descendants of those Palestinians displaced more than 70 years ago.
Kuwaik said his family once owned farmland in Lod, a city in Israel. He visited Lod twice in early 1980s and found a new house of concrete had been built next to his father’s old shelter.
The new Israeli owners continued to grow olive trees on the farmland as his family long had, he said.
“We will return,” Kuwaik vowed in his house as he filled small plastic bags with lupin beans.
“If we die our sons will rise, and if they die then our grandchildren will do it.”
