Through handmade gifts, Palestinian brother and sister bridge distance between friends in Palestine

By Salam AbuSharar

NABLUS, West Bank (AA) - As the world marks July 30, International Friendship Day, Palestinian friends are celebrating their friendships in their own creative way.

The day is for celebrating friendship all over the world to help people use the spirit of humanity to overcome big challenges to the planet such as poverty, crisis, war, and human rights abuses.

For Palestinian friends, this warm day is a day to remember how the Israeli occupation disrupted bonds of family and friendship and also a day to forge connections to nurture these bonds, no matter how hard it may be.

From their handmade gift store in Nablus in the West Bank, the Thaher siblings started a new creative stage in their work which challenged the geographical separation between the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

Sarah and Mohammad Thaher, originally from the city of Nablus, grew up in the United Arab Emirates until they finished high school and then returned to Palestine to study at university.

During their life in the UAE, they had many friends from the Gaza Strip who were living there too.

For social and economic reasons, many Palestinian students return to home soil to do their university studies.

Speaking to Anadolu Agency, Mohammad Thaher described how it was very hard for them to grasp that they would no longer be able to meet their friends from the Gaza Strip despite being in the same country, Palestine.

The Israeli blockade on the Gaza Strip, imposed since the Second Intifada in 2000, doesn’t allow Palestinians to move between the West Bank and Gaza Strip. This blockade isolated the Gaza Strip from the West Bank geographically and socially.

If not for the blockade, “in less than three hours we could travel from Nablus to Gaza, to meet childhood friends, but as you know this is an impossible dream,” Thaher told Anadolu Agency.

- Ties of friendship despite frustration

He still remembers their frustration and concerns during Israeli offensives against Gaza, and how it was very hard to find out anything about the fate of their friends.

Inspired by this plight, Sarah and Mohammad Thaher started thinking about a way to create a bond with the Gaza Strip that can carry warm emotions between friends, particularly on special days.

In 2016, on the store’s social media platforms, the two siblings started getting orders from people in the Gaza Strip for their loved ones in the West Bank.

At the same time, they were looking for a way to send gifts from the West Bank to the Gaza Strip, until they found a sister and brother in Gaza Strip who make handmade gifts. Now, they work together to bridge the distance between the two Palestinian regions.

“We’re working together to create happiness for our people, either friends or families. This is a meaningful effort for us, when we prepare gifts on behalf of our customers to make them feel there’s no distance, no hard (barriers of) geography,” Thaher told Anadolu Agency.

According to Thaher, due to Israeli restrictions, many Palestinian friends between Gaza Strip and the West Bank had never had a chance to meet, with their relationships formed through social media, so when they get a gift that can cross borders, it overwhelms them with emotion.

“When I do the packaging, I write a card with my own handwriting, which is more attractive than (machine) printing,” he said. “It shows the names of the cities the gift was sent from and where it will be received,” he said.

“After many attempts, we succeeded in getting many boxes of handmade gifts from Gaza, through the Erez military checkpoint, but it’s still impossible to send boxes into Gaza,” he explained.