Palestinian Taterez embroidery master Hanan Zarura with the jackets she makes in her studio in the Shatila Palestinian refugee camp in Beirut, Lebanon. NPR's Dalia Hamisi hide title
Editor's note: The story contains graphic images of violence and death.
SHATILAH REFUGEE CAMP, BEIRUT — Women sit hunched over sewing machines, one eye on the colorful threads woven into the black linen, the other on their cellphones playing 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, located near a stadium in a southern Beirut neighborhood.
Hanan Zarura designed the Tatriz pattern in his studio in the Shatila refugee camp in Beirut, Lebanon. Each Palestinian region has its own unique embroidery designs, and Zalula, who has never been anywhere in the Palestinian territories, knows them all. NPR's Dalia Hamisi hide title
They are among 5.9 million people registered by the United Nations as refugees and their descendants who were displaced or expelled when the state of Israel was founded in 1948. Nearly half a million of them live in Lebanon, where they are still considered outsiders - unable to buy property, access public health care or work in most industries. Israel will not allow them to return.
For these women, their occupation is traditional Palestinian embroidery known as Tatlitz — Providing livelihoods and connections to homeland.
The workshop was supported by an NGO called Beit Atfal Assumoud, which was founded after Lebanese Christian militias massacred Palestinians in another refugee camp north of Beirut in 1976. The original mission of the workshop was to provide trading opportunities for widows and other impoverished Palestinian women. (Men were not prohibited from sewing tateriz, but it was usually women who worked in the trade, and this workshop employed only women.)
Hanan Zalullah (right) gives instructions to an employee in an embroidery workshop in the Palestinian refugee camp in Beirut, Lebanon, on December 2, 2024. NPR's Dalia Hamisi hide title
The studio has grown in recent years as Tatraz has become known as a symbol of Palestinian resistance and identity across Palestine. In 2021, UNESCO added Tatlizi to a global list of crafts, rituals and art forms it considers "intangible" of the "cultural heritage of humanity."
“Tourists come from Germany, Sweden, England! The (Palestinian) diaspora comes here to buy gifts for family and friends,” said Hanan Zarura, the studio’s lead designer. “We recently sewed a wedding dress for a young woman in the United States.”
The workshop also sells its merchandise, including bookmarks, wallets, wall hangings and scarves, online.
Zarura, 70, has lived a life filled with displacement and loss.
In 1948, her parents left the land near Nazareth, in what is now northern Israel, where their ancestors had farmed for centuries. Her father worked in the port of Haifa on the Mediterranean coast. From there, they fled north with their children and infants - Zarula's older siblings.
Birth certificate of a relative of Hanan Zarura, issued during the British Mandate of Palestine. NPR's Dalia Hamisi hide title
They walked along the coast into Lebanon, stopping first in the coastal city of Tyre. They were then herded into the Shatila refugee camp, established in 1949, Zarullah said.
Zarula was born there and grew up with her parents’ trauma—and then experienced her own trauma.
In 1982, during the Lebanese civil war and Israeli invasion, local militias allied with Israel killed as many as 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 name of the refugee camp has become synonymous with it.
This archival photo of the interior of the Shatila refugee camp in 1982 shows the bodies of Palestinian refugees killed by Lebanese Christian militia fighters allied to Israel. Hanan Zalula survived the massacre, but her father-in-law was killed. Michel Philippot/Sygma via Getty Images hide title
By then, Zalula already had a toddler and an infant. She remembers militiamen going from house to house, rounding up local men and shooting them. They killed her father-in-law and then came for her husband, a car mechanic.
"I thought they might pity him if he had a baby, so I put our two-year-old in my husband's arms," she recalled.
She believes it works. The militiamen told her husband to return the boy to Zarula, and they captured her husband but did not kill him - he managed to escape three days later. They survived.
But years later, in 1988, her husband was killed in another round of fighting at the camp. Zalullah finds herself widowed By then there were four children.
At the lowest point in her life, she turned to the taterez embroidery she learned as a child—both for a living and for therapy.
“The NGO took care of my children in exchange for my time,” Zalula recalled, referring to the Beit Atfal Assumoud nonprofit. “That’s how I started — as a volunteer, a few days a week — teaching Taterez to other women at camp.”
Canvas designs embroidered by Tatriz in a studio in the Shatila Palestinian refugee camp in Beirut. NPR's Dalia Hamisi hide title
Each Palestinian region has its own unique embroidery designs, and Zalula, who has never been to any part of the Palestinian territories, knows them all. Since then, she has become a master craftsman in this art.
In 2000, Zarullah was finally able to see her homeland first-hand, traveling to the Israeli-Lebanese border thanks to the NGO where Shatila worked.
Zarula met for the first time two aunts who still lived on the other side, Palestinian citizens of Israel. Until then, they had only spoken on the phone.
Hanan Zarura shows off a Palestinian embroidered abaya, a traditional garment worn in the Arab world. NPR's Dalia Hamisi hide title
"There was a 2-meter (6-foot) fence between us, so we couldn't hug or kiss," she recalled. “Israelis are in the middle.”
However, her aunts asked an Israeli border guard to pass a piece of jewelry through the border fence, which he did. This is the gold ring that Zarula now wears every day. It looked like a spoon from their old house, to which Zarula still had the key. Her aunts told her that a Jewish Israeli family now lives there.
From an early age, Zarura was often aware of her parents' trauma and displacement as a result of the 1948 war.
"My children grew up with more trauma. There's no escaping that," she regrets. "It's not that we're passing it on from generation to generation. It's history repeating itself."
But Zarula said she also grew up on the inspiring stories of her late parents, who described the coexistence of Jews and Arabs before 1948 in what was then called Palestine.
Hanan Zarura sits in an office near his embroidery studio in the Palestinian refugee camp of Shatila in the Lebanese capital. NPR's Dalia Hamisi hide title
“My parents would tell us stories about their happy life in Palestine – how they had Jewish and Christian neighbors and how there was so much love and familiarity between them. They would all send each other good wishes on the holy day ," she recalled. “In those days, Palestinian olives were shared by everyone.”
Now, as a refugee in Lebanon, she is prohibited from buying property.
Her four children are grown. One lives in Ireland, the other in Belgium, and two sons live in nearby Beirut. They have nine children. Zarula is happy to see her grandson often.
But she said she would still move to the Palestinian territories "in a heartbeat".
"Of course! Even in the war, this is my country," she said. "No one wants to be a refugee."
NPR producers Moustapha Itani contributed to this report in Beirut and Fatima Al-Kassab in London.