Hanan Zarura, a master craftswoman of Palestinian tatreez embroidery, with a jacket she's been making at her workshop in the Palestinian refugee camp of Shatila, in Beirut, Lebanon.
Dalia Khamissy for NPR
Editor’s note: This story contains a graphic image of violence and death.
Women hunch over sewing machines with one eye on multicolored thread they’re weaving through black linen, and another on their cellphones, streaming scenes of Israeli airstrikes in Gaza.
The seamstresses in this workshop are second and third-generation Palestinian refugees. Most of them were born in the surrounding refugee camp, called Shatila, near a sports stadium in a southern neighborhood of Beirut.
Hanan Zarura designs a tatreez pattern in her workshop in the Shatila refugee camp in Beirut, Lebanon. Every Palestinian region has its own unique embroidery design, and Zarura — who has never been anywhere in the Palestinian Territories — nevertheless knows them all.
Dalia Khamissy for NPR
They’re among 5.9 million people the United Nations has registered as refugees displaced or expelled at Israel’s 1948 creation and their descendants. Nearly half a million of them live in Lebanon, where they’re still treated as outsiders — unable to buy property and restricted from accessing public health care, and from working in most industries. Israel does not allow them to return.
For these women, their trade — traditional Palestinian embroidery, called tatreez — provides both a livelihood and a connection to their homeland.
Global recognition for traditional Palestinian embroidery
The workshop is supported by a nongovernmental organization called Beit Atfal Assumoud, founded in the aftermath of a 1976 massacre of Palestinians by Lebanese Christian militias in another refugee camp in northern Beirut. The workshop’s initial mission was to provide a trade for widows and other impoverished Palestinian women. (There’s no ban on men sewing tatreez, but it’s typically been women who’ve taken up the trade, and this workshop employs only women.)
Hanan Zarura (right) gives instructions to an employee at her embroidery workshop in a Palestinian refugee camp in Beirut, Lebanon, on Dec. 2, 2024.
Dalia Khamissy for NPR
The workshop has expanded its business in recent years, as tatreez gains renown as a symbol of resistance and identity for Palestinian everywhere. In 2021, UNESCO named tatreez to a global list of handicrafts, rituals and art forms it considers “intangible” to the “cultural heritage of humanity.”
“Tourists visit from Germany, Sweden, Britain! The [Palestinian] diaspora come to buy gifts for family and friends,” says Hanan Zarura, the workshop’s chief designer. “We recently sewed a wedding dress for a young woman in America.”
The workshop also sells its wares online, including bookmarks, wallets, wall hangings and scarves.
A life story that mirrors modern Palestinian history
Zarura, 70, has had a life filled with displacement and loss.
In 1948, her parents were displaced from the land near Nazareth, in what is now northern Israel, which their ancestors had farmed for centuries. Her father had a job at the port of Haifa, on the Mediterranean coast. From there, they fled north with their toddler and baby — Zarura’s older siblings.
The birth certificate of a relative of Hanan Zarura, issued during the British Mandate of Palestine.
Dalia Khamissy for NPR
They walked up the coast, crossed into Lebanon, and first stayed in the coastal city of Tyre. Then, Zarura says, they were herded into the Shatila refugee camp, which was established in 1949.
That’s where Zarura was born and grew up with her parents' trauma — and then experienced her own.
Shatila’s bloody history
In 1982, amid Lebanon’s civil war and an Israeli invasion, local militias allied with Israel killed up to 3,500 Palestinian refugees in Shatila and another Palestinian refugee camp called Sabra. It was one of the bloodiest chapters in Palestinian history, and the camps' names have become synonymous with it.
This 1982 archive image from inside the Shatila refugee camp shows the bodies of Palestinian refugees killed by Christian Lebanese militia fighters allied with Israel. Hanan Zarura survived the massacre, but her father-in-law was killed.
Michel Philippot / Sygma via Getty Images
By then, Zarura had a toddler and baby herself. She remembers militiamen going door to door, rounding up local men, and shooting them. They killed her father in law, then came for her husband, who worked as a car mechanic.
“I thought they might have mercy on him if he had a baby, so I put our two-year-old in my husband’s arms,” she recalls.
It worked, she believes. The militiamen told her husband to give the boy back to Zarura, and then they captured her husband, but did not kill him — and he managed to escape three days later. They survived.
But years later, in 1988, her husband was killed in another round of fighting in the camp. And Zarura found herself a widow with four children by then.
Tatreez as work and therapy
At the lowest point in her life, she turned to the tatreez embroidery she’d learned as a child — both for a livelihood, and as therapy.
“The NGO took care of my children in exchange for my time,” Zarura recalls, referring to the Beit Atfal Assumoud nonprofit group. “So that’s how I began — just as a volunteer, a few days a week — teaching tatreez to other women in the camp.”
Canvas designs for tatreez embroidery, at a workshop in Beirut's Palestinian refugee camp of Shatila.
Dalia Khamissy for NPR
Every Palestinian region has its own unique embroidery design, and Zarura — who has never been anywhere in the Palestinian Territories — nevertheless knows them all. She’s since become a master craftswoman of this art.
In 2000, Zarura was finally able to lay eyes on her homeland, with a trip to the Israel-Lebanon border, organized by NGOs working in Shatila.
For the first time, Zarura was able to meet two of her aunts who still live on the other side, as Palestinian citizens of Israel. Until then, they’d only talked on the phone.
Hanan Zarura shows off a Palestinian embroidered thobe, a traditional garment worn in the Arab world.
Dalia Khamissy for NPR
“There was a fence 2 meters [6 feet] high between us, so we couldn’t hug or kiss,” she recalls. “The Israelis were in the middle.”
Her aunts asked an Israeli border guard to pass a piece of jewelry across the border fence though, and he did. It’s a gold ring Zarura now wears every day. It looks like a spoon from their old house, to which Zarura still has keys. Her aunts told her a Jewish Israeli family is living there now.
Generational trauma, and memories of coexistence
Zarura grew up constantly aware of her parents' trauma from the 1948 war and their displacement.
“My kids have in turn grown up with more trauma. There’s no escaping it,” she rues. “It’s not that we’re passing it down the generations. It’s that history keeps repeating itself.”
But Zarura says she also grew up with inspiring stories from her late parents, of what they described as coexistence between Jews and Arabs in what was then called Palestine, before 1948.
Hanan Zarura sits in an office adjacent to her embroidery workshop in the Palestinian refugee camp of Shatila, in Lebanon's capital.
Dalia Khamissy for NPR
“My parents would tell us stories about the blissful life they had in Palestine — how they had Jewish and Christian neighbors, and how there was love and familiarity between them. They would all send good wishes to each other on their holy days,” she recalls. “Back then, the olives of Palestine were shared among everyone.”
Now, as a refugee in Lebanon, she’s forbidden from buying property.
Her four children are all grown up. One lives in Ireland, another in Belgium, and two sons live nearby, in Beirut, with nine children between them. Zarura sees her grandchildren often, and she’s happy.
But she says she’d still move to the Palestinian Territories “in a heartbeat.”
“Of course! Even in war, it’s my country,” she says. “Nobody wants to be a refugee.”
NPR producers Moustapha Itani contributed to this report from Beirut and Fatima Al-Kassab contributed from London.