Ahmad al-Nahal was scrolling social media recently when he came across a posted plea that caught his attention. As the director of the Gaza Children Village organization, which houses, educates and feeds about 2,100 orphaned children in the Strip, al-Nahal was no stranger to calls for help.
But this request was different: an appeal to save the remaining wild animals from the Rafah Zoo, a troubled and partially evacuated attraction that had once housed lions, tropical birds, primates and other exotic fauna in the southern Gaza city.
“The former director of the Rafah Zoo was in trouble; he couldn’t feed the animals,” al-Nahal told The Times of Israel.
Moved, al-Nahal contacted the zoo’s founder and head, Fathi Jumaa. About a year and a half earlier, Jumaa had fled Rafah with some of his animals, first to Khan Younis and later to Deir al-Balah. Now, as ever, he was struggling to find the money to feed their voracious diets and unable to properly care for the critters.
Al-Nahal reached out to the founder of his own organization, Dr. David Hassan, a Palestinian-American physician based in North Carolina who opened The Gaza Children Village about six months ago.
The organization is set to expand across the Strip, but currently operates mainly in Khan Younis and Deir al-Balah — not far from where the animals are now being kept.
Hassan recalled being contacted by his Gaza-based team, who relayed the animals’ and Jumaa’s plight, calling it an emergency.
“‘There’s no food. The owner cannot feed them. Can you help?’” Hassan recalled being told. “So I said, Okay.”
Since that phone call, Hassan’s organization, which is raising money to expand operations to help 20,000 Gazan kids, has also taken on the financial burden of feeding the animals and providing them with medical care — but the animals and their caretakers are not out of the woods yet.
Together with the family that ran the controversial zoo for years, the Gaza Children Village is now trying to nurse the surviving animals back to health, offer them better care, and most importantly, find them a larger and safer home in Gaza, until they can hopefully be spirited out of the Strip. Until then, it is hoping the animals can help provide the Strip’s traumatized kids some small measure of comfort.
But experience shows that saving the animals will be anything but straightforward, with a web of competing narratives and numerous obstacles that must be overcome if the creatures and their caretakers hope to escape for greener pastures.
It’s a jungle in there
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For private zoos anywhere in the world, the line between wildlife education or conservation and accusations of trafficking or animal cruelty can be dangerously thin. The Rafah Zoo, laden with allegations of extortion and abuse even before the war, for continuing to operate and seek help despite a previous international rescue operation, has been no exception.
Fathi Jumaa’s daughter Dalia Jumaa has been caring for animals since childhood, just like the rest of her immediate family. She told The Times of Israel by phone from Gaza about the immense challenges of keeping the animals alive during the war, though even before the war, the family struggled to care for the beasts.
The Rafah Zoo is one of several that have existed in Gaza over the years, operating in extremely inhospitable conditions. A zoo in Gaza City’s Zeitoun neighborhood, which famously painted donkeys with zebra stripes when it could not acquire the real thing, lost most of its animals to war in 2009 and closed in 2016. Another in Khan Younis was criticized for displaying animal corpses.
Jumaa called the Rafah Zoo the oldest in the strip and the most significant. It appears to have been the only one that made it through the war with some of its animals still alive.
“It was founded almost 30 years ago,” she said. “I grew up in the zoo — more than I grew up in my own house.”
Before October 2023, the zoo housed several hundred animals — including lions, monkeys, gazelles, crocodiles, and various birds.
But its very existence stirred controversy. An AFP reporter who visited the site some six years ago described seeing emaciated animals in tiny cages and other forms of abuse.
“It was known as the worst zoo in the world because of the conditions there,” Uri Linial, head of the Captive Wildlife Division at the Israel Nature and Parks Authority, told The Times of Israel.
In 2019, the international animal rights charity Four Paws, which had rescued animals from other Gaza zoos, agreed to pay some $55,000 for the animals’ care, moving them to sanctuaries outside of Gaza. It said it also extracted a pledge from Fathi Jumaa to keep the zoo closed.
Instead, the zoo reopened a few months later, with conditions described as bad as ever. The Jumaas were accused of using the operation to extort more money from international donors like Four Paws to feed and care for the animals, including lions apparently smuggled in from Egypt.
“The same owner… acquired more animals once he realized the trick — that he would be paid for them,” Linial said.
International organizations were also said to have been wary of cooperating with the zoo over trafficking concerns.
Ashraf Jumaa, who managed the reopened zoo, denied to AFP in 2019 that the zoo was trying to blackmail Four Paws or traffic wildlife.
“The first goal is entertainment, not trade. The main reason we reopened the zoo was people in the area that supported us,” he said at the time.
Dalia Jumaa told The Times of Israel her father closed the zoo from the first day of the war, October 7, 2023, due to concerns for the animals’ and people’s safety.
When Israel ordered civilians from the north of the Strip to evacuate to the south over the first few months of the war, the zoo swelled with displaced relatives, she recalled.
“All of our extended family came to the zoo,” she said. “It turned into a refugee camp – around 230 people lived there.”
Dr. Amir Khalil, the Austria-based vet who runs Four Paws, told NPR that he was contacted by Fathi Jumaa for help to evacuate the animals and himself from Gaza at the start of the war. The group offered to do what it could to help the animals leave if Jumaa could bring them to the border, Khalil said, but the zookeeper said he would remain in Rafah.
In the spring of 2024, Israel’s military closed in on Rafah and warned the hundreds of thousands of civilians there to move to other parts of the enclave. Realizing they would have to leave the zoo behind, Jumaa said the family contacted international organizations for help evacuating the animals out of the enclave, but received no reply.
She noted that her family did not communicate directly with Israeli authorities, such as the Israel Defense Forces or COGAT, the Defense Ministry body that coordinates with Palestinians on civilian affairs.
Al-Nahal told The Times of Israel that Fathi Jumaa had conditioned the animals’ removal from Gaza on his entire family — 12 people — also being allowed to leave the Strip.
Dalia Jumaa said leaving with the animals had been the family’s preference, but did not confirm that the entire family’s evacuation had been a condition.
Broken chain
According to Linial, the Jumaas may have backed out of more offers to take the animals out of Gaza. He told The Times of Israel that during the war, the Israel Nature and Parks Authority was approached by an international animal welfare organization called Breaking the Chains, which claimed to have purchased animals from a zoo in Gaza — apparently in Rafah — in order to evacuate them.
Efforts to get permission from the Israeli military went all the way up the chain of command to the deputy chief of staff. “It was very complicated, and we had already reached the stage of readiness for entry,” Linial said.
“But then, one day — the organization stopped answering calls, and the evacuation was canceled,” he recalled. “I have absolutely no explanation for why they disappeared; I was left stammering in front of zoos around the world that had already agreed to receive the animals.”
On social media, Breaking the Chains said it fed and cared for the animals daily from summer 2024 until January 2025, after the zoo had relocated out of Rafah.
“Before we stepped in, the animals were going days – sometimes up to a week – without food,” the group wrote in late September.
According to its website, Breaking the Chains stopped operating in Gaza sometime in early 2025, and now appears to work exclusively in Ukraine.
Jumaa said Breaking the Chains’s assistance had been minimal, and there had never been any deal with the group to move the animals out of Gaza. The organization had spoken with her father about the possibility of buying the animals to take them out of the Strip, but it never went anywhere.
“There was no agreement or anything,” she said.
Breaking the Chains said in response to The Times of Israel that ultimately, the process of evacuating the animals from Gaza did not proceed, but not due to a lack of willingness on its part or on the part of the Israeli authorities.
The organization clarified that “it is not correct that Breaking the Chains purchased the animals, but we did cover the care of the zoo animals for over seven months – including food, medication, the construction and purchase of transport crates, and the rent for the temporary location where the animals were housed while preparations for their potential evacuation were underway.”
Hassan said he understood from Israeli officials that they had been unable to reach the zoo’s owner during the Rafah operation to arrange the animals’ evacuation.
COGAT did not respond to questions from The Times of Israel.
When the family left Gaza in May 2024, it managed to bring some 70 animals with them, though foxes, turtles, some monkeys and three adult lions were left behind.
When the family went back to check on the zoo during the January ceasefire, they found the site destroyed and all the animals left behind dead, except for three adult lions, who were nowhere to be found.
The family believes that Israeli authorities evacuated the lions from the Strip after the military took over the city, based on accounts from Gazans working near the border who reported seeing the lions being taken out of the enclave.
Linial told The Times of Israel that no wild animals were formally evacuated from the Gaza Strip with the involvement of the Israel Nature and Parks Authority during the war. There was no response from COGAT.
Jumaa said she and her brother and parents were among the last to leave Rafah, fleeing the city under bombardment. With them were three lion cubs, 19 monkeys of various species, two gazelles, 14 squirrels, five dogs and several birds, including an eagle, parrots, peacocks and others.
The family first relocated to Khan Younis and, after a few months, moved again to Deir al-Balah in central Gaza, where they have been since. There, the animals are housed in a warren of small cages in sheds or under tarps on an empty plot that had previously been used for agriculture.
The family has been living next to the site in a tent for more than a year.
Feeding the animals, already a major challenge, became even harder in March 2025, when fighting resumed and Israel stopped allowing aid into the Strip, touching off severe food shortages for humans, to say nothing of animals.
“During the seven months of famine in the Gaza Strip, it was the hardest time for my father to provide food and water for the animals. We gave them our own food,” Jumaa said. “When I baked bread – I baked for us and for the animals. There was no meat for the lions. My father paid a high price for vegetables. Sadly, many animals died from disease and hunger.”
Even with food once again available and the war seemingly ended, the family has continued to struggle to keep up with the cost of feeding and caring for the animals.
Since the partnership with Gaza Children Village began, the organization has been covering $400 a day for food for the animals, and pays Fathi Jumaa a zookeeper’s salary of $50 a day. The organization’s staff also takes part in feeding and caring for the animals.
It also provides for medical care. When one of the lions, no longer a cub, fell ill recently, the group found a vet and paid $600 for treatment to get her back to health, according to al-Nahal.
Beyond the financial support, the organization sees the zoo, which it has renamed after famed primatologist Jane Goodall, as a therapeutic asset for the children under its care. “We use the place as a way for the children to relieve stress,” al-Nahal said. “They love the animals, and we take them on visits there.”
A better future for animals, and kids
With efforts to get the animals out of Gaza stalled, the Gaza Children Village is focused now on moving the animals to a better home, with appropriately-sized enclosures rather than cramped cages.
Al-Nahal said the organization has big plans for the future.
“We want all the children of Gaza to come — not just those from the academy — and we don’t want to charge any entry fee,” he said. “It should be free, a form of stress relief and recreation for the little ones.”
Because Rafah is in the part of the Strip that remains in Israeli military hands, returning there to rebuild the zoo is not a realistic option. But alternatives are hard to come by in the cramped and rubble-strewn Strip, not to mention the steep cost of preparing a site.
Al-Nahal said the organization had found a candidate site in a village near Deir al-Balah, which it was renting out.
“But the cost of construction is high,” he said. “We’re talking about $200,000 if we build it according to proper zoo standards.”
Hassan said efforts to move the animals outside Gaza had run into various obstacles — both in finding a zoo or organization willing to take them, and because of logistical and regulatory hurdles in Israel. Officials maintain that zoos there are already struggling with overcrowding, he relayed.
According to Linial, getting all the relevant parties — such as the IDF and others — to mobilize for the animals’ rescue would be much more difficult now due to the previous aborted attempt.
The fact that the animals are in a part of the Strip where Hamas is once again the de facto authority complicates matters even further, he said.
Attempts to coordinate the entry of additional veterinary equipment and medicines or other urgent needs with Israeli authorities have failed thus far, Hassan said. He noted that an anonymous Israeli donor had already pledged NIS 40,000 ($12,500) to pay for the supplies.
COGAT did not respond to The Times of Israel.
The family had told Hassan that it had had difficulty raising money for the animals during the war from international organizations, which said they preferred to focus on helping humans, he said.
But he sees the two as connected.
“It’s really saving the animals for the sake of saving the animals,” he said. “But there’s also, if you will, a psychotherapeutic aspect — helping these kids, because they get so happy and excited to play with the animals.”
