Abu Saman lives in a sprawling tent camp in a beach area on the outskirts of Rafah
Having three dogs in a tent on a Gaza beach complicates an already difficult situation, but the smile on teenager Hassan Abu Saman’s face as he strokes the animals shows that it’s all about him worth it.
He has been a dog lover since childhood and had 16 dogs before the Israel-Hamas war devastated the Gaza Strip, but when he fled the Nuserat refugee camp, he took only three of them with him: Mofaz, Lucy and Dahab camps in central Gaza.
“After the matter was resolved, I found a car to pick up the remaining people, but when I came back, I didn’t find them, they were lost. I went back to look for them a second time and found them.” The house was bombed ,” said 17-year-old Abu Saman.
He is one of an estimated 1.5 million Palestinians who have flocked to Rafah in southern Gaza, near the Egyptian border, to escape an Israeli military offensive, although Israel says it plans a ground offensive there as well.
Abu Saman lives in a sprawling tent camp in a beach area on the outskirts of Rafah with his family and three dogs, who follow him wherever he goes. They were popular with the kids at camp, who took turns petting them.
Abu Saman calls the dogs “my other kind of friends” and talks about them like people.
“He had been very depressed because of the war,” he said of Mofaz, the eldest of the three.
Finding enough food is a problem for both dogs and humans, and Abu Saman said Lucy and Dahab lost weight because they usually eat a special dog food that is no longer available.
The future is uncertain for the teenager, his family and his beloved pets.
“If we come back, the house will be razed to the ground. He doesn’t have a house or anything,” he said, referring to Mofaz, whom he caressed as he spoke.
According to Israel, the war was triggered by an attack by Hamas militants on southern Israel on October 7 that left 1,200 people dead and 253 taken hostage.
Israel, vowing to destroy Hamas, launched air and ground attacks on Gaza that killed more than 29,000 people, according to local health officials. It also displaced much of its 2.3 million people, caused widespread hunger and reduced much of the territory to rubble.
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)
