A people’s history of Gaza

The Documentary Podcast

BBC

Society & Culture, Documentary, Personal Journals

4.3 • 2.6K Ratings

🗓️ 19 October 2025

⏱️ 62 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

The back-story of Gaza, from the 1940s to the 2010s, told through the personal experiences of a wide variety of ordinary people - a teacher, a smuggler, a bird-watcher, musicians, doctors and others. Tim Whewell finds out how the tiny territory was created, how it first filled with refugees, how people lived, worked and died, how they survived invasions, wars and blockade, how hopes for peace rose and fell - under the rule of Egypt, Israel, the Palestinian Authority, and Hamas. How did refugees arrive in Gaza in 1948? Why is the Strip so important to Palestinian identity - and the wider Palestinian-Israeli conflict? How did living conditions gradually improve? How did the 1967 Six Day War change people's lives? Why did the two intifadas of 1987 and 2000 break out? When were the best times for Gazans in recent history? What changed for them after Hamas took control in 2007? Tim asks these and many other questions in this journey through the recent history of a sliver of land that has often dominated world news.

Transcript

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0:00.0	BBC Sounds, Music, Radio, podcasts.
0:05.7	Thanks for downloading this documentary podcast from the BBC World Service.
0:10.9	After two years of devastating war, Gaza's at another crossroads in its history.
0:16.5	Now, perhaps with a better future ahead.
0:19.5	I'm Tim Hewle. I've from the Strip as a BBC correspondent,
0:23.4	and what's always struck me as the energy, the sheer vitality of the place, despite all its
0:28.4	problems. I've got to know some of its people, but I didn't know much about Gaza's history,
0:34.3	back to when the Strip came into being as a separate territory full of refugees in 1948.
0:40.3	So, in the middle of the war, with some difficulty, I tried to find out, talking usually remotely
0:46.6	to ordinary people. Here's the result, a people's history of Gaza. It's sometimes sad,
0:53.6	sometimes surprising, occasionally even hopeful.
1:01.6	From the beginning, there was a long strip of sand where Asia meets Africa, the desert reaches the
1:09.0	sea, a geographic corridor.
1:12.8	Look up in any spring till recently, and it wasn't drones or fighter planes you saw.
1:22.8	In March, there are so many migratory birds.
1:27.4	When we were younger, storks decorated the sky.
1:32.4	Rara Sirda is a garson bird watcher.
1:38.1	Thousands and thousands of them flying in beautiful waves.
1:42.3	We wouldn't even see the blue of the sky. It was just covered in birds.
1:50.7	Lack-lac. Stalks are named in Arabic after the cluttering of their long red bills. This is a people's
2:00.0	history of Gaza with me, Tim Huell, here on the BBC World Service.
2:04.6	It's mainly recent oral history within living memory.
	...

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