Jaafar Atallah was a stranger in Rafah. A potter from northern Gaza, when he arrived as a refugee he did not know where the clay was. He did not know it would be gathered from cavities left by bombs, and he did not know it would be yellow. Where he was from, the clay was red. He collected it near the border with Israel, although when that was too dangerous, he looked in the pits made for the foundations of buildings.
Knowing how to find clay was something that Jaafar, like most of Gaza’s potters, learnt from his grandfather, part of a tradition inherited over centuries. When Palestine was under the British mandate, there were some 50 pottery workshops in Gaza and a neighbourhood named Potters Street. At night, thick columns of smoke would rise above the low roofs.
Over time, modernity and plastic imports took over. There were just a few workshops left on the street when Jaafar and his cousin Nasr came of age.
Still, Jaafar and Nasr perfected the forms they had begun to learn as children: water pitchers (ibriq), serving bowls (zibdiya) and cooking jars (qidra), the designs almost unchanged from 500 years ago.
For special occasions, people in Gaza cook with a red clay qidra. It is narrow at the bottom, balloons outward then closes in, leaving just enough space for the onions, meat, garlic and rice of the eponymous meal. Sometimes, the jar cracks in the oven and has to be replaced after one use.
Nasr worked in a factory while Jaafar worked with his uncles making flowerpots and supplying dishware to summer camps. Then in the autumn of 2023, Israeli bombs flattened Jaafar’s workshop. The bombardments, triggered by Palestinian military group Hamas’s deadly October 7 attack, turned large swaths of Gaza into a wasteland. Jaafar and his family fled northern Gaza for the south.
When they reached Rafah, Jaafar asked people where the clay was. They told him to look in the expanses of land near the city where bombs had churned the earth and ripped the clay to the surface. To his surprise, the clay there was yellow.
From his tent, Jaafar made pottery for people who had left their homes behind. There were no stores and no imports and kitchens had been crushed. With electricity scarce and summer heat rising, jugs like the ibriq kept water cool. The unglazed ceramic is porous, and tiny beads of water leak through to the other side, coating it in sweat.
When I first told Jaafar that I was interested in writing about his pottery, he told me that his capacities were vast but his resources limited. “I can make you anything that enters your mind,” he said. “But right now I’m working according to the limits of our possibilities and the equipment we have.”
Nasr remained in north Gaza. The factory he worked in was damaged but still standing. A new kind of demand for pottery began: not symbolic or celebratory but necessary. “They returned to the way of their ancestors,” Nasr said of the people who ordered ibriq, supersized to hold more water as wartime required.
In May, Israeli forces invaded Rafah. Jaafar and his family were displaced once again, fleeing this time to Zuwayda in central Gaza. Again, he searched for clay where bombs had fallen. This time it was black. “In each area, the clay has its own colour, God be praised,” he said. “And they are all good . . . whether it’s red, black, yellow, all of this clay makes excellent pottery.”
Once again, he set up his pottery wheel under the blue plastic sheet of his tent and made zibdiya, the simplest thing he knew. His neighbours distributed them to displaced people.
After Israel and Hamas agreed a ceasefire in January, Jaafar returned to northern Gaza. The destruction is so complete that he plans to visit the municipality when it reopens to see if they can point him to the borders of where his workshop once was, because right now, he cannot tell.
Instead, there is a field of weeds and yellow flowers. In some places the plants are up to his knees. He would doubt whether he was in the right place except for the fact that sometimes he finds the rubble of a kiln, or a pile of shattered pitchers.
malaika.tapper@ft.com