Beach Camp ( Gaza City ) Tawfiq Nassar, 58, sits every day with his wife and children at the door-step of his house in the Beach refugee camp. He watches kids playing soccer.

"It's great looking at those kids," he said. "This is a good thing about the camp -  kids can always play together."

Though Tawfiq Nassar loves the camp, he dreams about leaving it one day and returning to his village Barbara, which is only 18 kilometers north of his house. He has even planted this idea in his grandsons' minds.

However, he does not believe that his return to Barbara means that the Israeli people must be thrown out.

"We can live together, Arabs and Jews, in one state, in one land. But every single refugee must return to his home," he said. "Personally, I don't accept a Palestinian state in Gaza and the West Bank ". According to Nasser this would be a grave injustice.

Nassar believes that the best solution is one reached peacefully. "The world sympathized with us during the first intifada because we faced armed soldier with a stone. But when we militarized the resistance our struggle was distorted only the world sympathy with us will bring peace," he said.

Nassar left his village with his parents when he was 5 years old. He still remembers the first tent camp set up for refugees in Gaza City , where thousands of refugees lived for several years. Then, they were moved to various camps in the Strip.

When he was eight, his family moved to the Nussierat camp in the middle of the Gaza Strip. When he married, in 1970, he rented a house in  Beach Camp, he is still living in that same house, sharing it with his two married brothers.

"I am fed up with being a refugee for more than fifty years, I own thousands of square meters of land in Barbara. I must get back to my land," he said.

In 1994, Nassar was able to visit his village with an American TV crew. They did a documentary movie about him. "We stayed there for a week and that was the greatest time in my life…" Nasser remembered. But, when the crew ventured to film Nassar in his father's farm they were stopped by the Israeli police. They destroyed the Camera and held Nassar in custody for three days.         

Nassar has been working as a truck driver for most of his life; he did not drive his own truck till 1984 when he bought one. He used to travel to the Israeli-Jordanian border carrying vegetables exported to Jordan from the Gaza Strip. For more than 30 months he has not been able to make this trip due to the siege impose on the Gaza Strip.

His most painful experience was when he literary had to move his own people, including his neighbors to a new exile: In the early 1970s, the Israeli military flattened hundreds of refugee houses in Beach Camp to widen its  alleys;  It wanted to ease its troops' movement inside the crowded camp to better control it.

"The Israeli army detained more than sixty truck drivers from the Camp. They kept our identity cards and ordered us to carry the homeless families in our trucks," Nassar said sadly reminded of the horrible memory.

Families, which became homeless for the second time, were moved either to the Sinai Desert or to the West Ban. Some lucky families escaped the Israelis and hid in their relatives' houses.

Nassar is a father of six boys and a girl. In spite of the hardship he is facing living under occupation and earning a living for his children, he refuses to talk about it: "Complaining to anyone, but God, is humiliating," he said.  

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