A refugee who established the first lifesaving club in Gaza says Palestinians still “dream” of returning home after US President Donald Trump vowed to take over the region.

Mohammad Saleh escaped from Gaza in May last year, but not before he helped establish the first surf lifesaving club in the Middle East, operating out of the Gaza Strip.

Saleh trained with the North Steyne Surf Lifesaving Club on Sydney’s Northern Beaches in 2020 before returning to his home in Palestine and establishing his own Nippers club.

“The quality of life in Gaza isn’t like here in Australia but there’s a lot of people like me trying to make life better for the community,” Saleh said.

“We started to establish a surf lifesaving club, a club in Gaza.

“We succeeded in that, it was successful.

“[For] around 11 weeks every Saturday, a lot of children participated in it.” 

He says things in the region quickly turned following the October 7 attacks carried out by Hamas and Israel’s response.

“Sadly everyone knows what happened on the 7th of October,” Saleh said.

“There were a lot of airstrikes against innocent peoples, against civilians, buildings, even hospitals.

”Unfortunately, we lost a lot of people … especially people who were participating in the Nippers program in Gaza.

“We lost about 10 per cent of our team and participating children, we lost four children – their ages between six years old and 12 years old.

“One of them, he wanted to be a robot engineer, he was nine years old … and his sister, unfortunately, both of them were killed with their entire family.”

Before he was granted a protection visa to Australia, Saleh and his family moved from region to region within Gaza, searching for somewhere safe.

“The home is everything for us, we were forced to leave our home and everything inside it, our memories, our stuff, our clothes,” Saleh said.

“The IDF mentioned many times there are safe places in Gaza, ‘Go to these places’.

“I witnessed there was no safe place in Gaza in the period of time before I escaped.

“For seven months, there was no safe place.”

Now back in Australia, Saleh spoke out about Trump’s alarming announcement that the US would take over the Gaza Strip.

This week, Trump said the US would take over the region and “level it” with the goal of relocating more than 2 million people to other countries.

Saleh said Palestinians deserved the right to return to their home and land, and despite the destruction, they dream of returning home.

“The Palestinian issue, it’s not real estate … the Palestinian people are not projects,” he said.

“We’re supposed to return to our homes, our lands, our historical lands.

“Palestine can hold every person to live there – Jewish, Christian, Muslim, atheist, any person can live in Palestine.

“For hundreds of thousands of years, we lived together.”

“I assure you … every Palestinian who had to take refuge, it’s their dream to come back to their homes.”