Hi. I’m Dayr al-Balah and I’m going to introduce my city.
I’m located in the central Gaza Strip and I’m the capital of the area. My country is Palestina and I’m a populated place: 49,751 of population. I’m about 13km south-west of Gaza and my language is Arabic.
I have so beautiful beaches and a lot of date palms in and around the city; I also have a very old monastery (in 372 AD), cemeteries of the Bronze Age and pottery, tombs, bronze pots and a mosaic floor. So as you can see, I’m a place with culture and I’m well-known for these things. But I have conflicts with Israel, they want our territory and it’s a pity, because a lot of people are dying because of this, and I don’t want to see more pain in this place. Some of our land was confiscated so, now you can imagine the way that these families felt. 2004 was a bad year because more bad things happened: a lot of cultivated land with olive trees,guava and oranges was destroyed.
We and all the other Palestinian territories are living under an economic blockade, so we don’t have much money or tourism… And our economy has been severely damaged. So, life is very difficult here. But even with those problems, the people here are brave and they don’t give up.
The population who lives in my city, most of them work, and they work in shops, markets and hand-made crafts. And the majority is paid employees. I don’t have a lot of green areas because there’s notenough water for all the families so it’s impossible to maintain green spaces. And as I said at the beginning, I have the Mediterranean Sea very near, so to have beaches near makes me more interesting than other places.
I hope that one day soon we will be able to expand our touristic potential and we will live in peace with our neighbours, we are not so different.
