Mohammed Abed starts his Tuesdays in the dark, piling containers of hummus, baba ganoush, falafel, shawarma and kebab onto a motorized tricycle before driving to a street market in Condesa. In this leafy, international neighborhood, he now sells the food of home, Reuters reported. The 36-year-old systems engineer from Gaza has built a routine in Mexico City, but the city’s noise still finds its way past it. “In Gaza, during the war, hearing a plane meant that something terrible could happen at any moment,” Abed told Reuters. “The sound makes me remember everything we went through, and my body reacts before I can even think.” A passing jet or a summer storm can return him to 2025, when an Israeli airstrike killed his 4-year-old daughter.

According to official figures, about 160 Palestinians now live in Mexico, roughly twice as many as in 2022. That is a very small share of the nearly 1.9 million people who have lost their homes since the war in Gaza began after the Hamas-led attacks of Oct. 7, 2023. That war is one that a United Nations commission of inquiry concluded last year amounts to genocide, a finding Israel rejects. Most displaced people never left Gaza, and many who did found refuge next door in Egypt and Jordan. The handful who made it to Mexico have discovered something few expected so far from home: a city full of strangers who seem to recognize them.

A father’s promise brought the Abed family from Gaza to Mexico City

Abed described his life in Gaza before October 2023 to Borgen Magazine as comfortable, even “luxurious” compared with what came after, with a home, a car, his own company and his family around him in Jabalia. The war, he said, turned his life “from white to black.” Much of Jabalia was reduced to rubble, hospitals and schools among it, while electricity and running water grew scarcer by the day. His nephew was badly hurt three different times, and he lost his daughter. “It feels as though a part of my body has been taken away,” Abed told Borgen, adding that he misses most the simplest part of his day: coming home from work to sit beside her and stroke her hair.

His way out had been mapped years earlier by his father, Kamal Abed, who left Gaza for Mexico in 2009 after his factory was bombed, according to Borgen, and later became a Mexican citizen, according to Reuters. Kamal loved the country and kept telling his son that once he met Mexicans, “he would love them.” When the war began, Kamal went to Egypt in 2024 to get his family out, but he died of a heart attack with the evacuation still unfinished. Borgen reported that his body was taken back to Gaza for burial, as he had asked. Abed’s brother Shadi picked up where their father left off and, working with Mexican civil society groups and asylum attorneys, won permission for 18 relatives to travel, children among them. Their route took them through Jordan and Turkey before they landed in Mexico City in May 2025, and Reuters reported that every one of them now holds permanent residency.

“I don’t like politics,” Abed told Reuters. “I want to live, like everyone else, in peace.”

Palestinian refugees in Mexico City found a community in strangers

Abed told Borgen that one of his first joys in Mexico was something most of us never think about: washing his face under a running tap instead of from a bowl. Much of what followed depended on people who had never met him. A small group of volunteers from DAR and BEITNA, about 15 people supporting around 30 refugees, steers newcomers through medical visits, apartment hunting, government offices, job searches, and fundraising, according to Adham Bakry, an Egyptian artist who works with the community. Bakry interprets between Arabic and Spanish, and one refugee told him he serves as a “cultural anchor.” When Abed’s son was born, DAR raised money toward the hospital bill.

The kindness Abed describes often comes from people with no connection to Palestine at all. Once, when his Metro card came up empty at the turnstile, a commuter behind him paid his fare without a word. Locals have walked up to offer directions when he looked lost, and two professors he knows sell handmade crafts in their free time and send the money to Gaza. “People here are empathetic,” Abed told Borgen. “A woman I met told me she was worried for the people of Gaza and that she hoped they were warm and had enough clothing. She asked what she could do.” He said what he loves most about Mexico is “the people’s friendliness, the smiling, the openness.”

Palestinian food found its flavors at Mexico’s Central de Abasto

For Abed, Palestine survives most vividly on the plate, and rebuilding it took some detective work. At first, he couldn’t find za’atar, the right spices, or the olive oil he knew from home. Then he discovered the Central de Abasto, Mexico City’s vast wholesale market, where he gathered spices one at a time and worked out the blends himself, Borgen reported. Vendors he met among the produce stalls invited him and his brother to start selling at local markets and tianguis. These days, he also works a second market on Sundays and, on his days off, cooks alongside his wife for the Palestinian banquets she caters, Reuters said. His younger brother, Fadi, runs his own food business, and 48,000 people follow it on Instagram at @hijo.de.palestina, where he narrates in Spanish thick with his Gaza accent.

Mexico keeps surprising Abed with pieces of home, whether in indigenous textiles or the pride Mexicans take in their family names and hometowns.

Mexico keeps its door open to Palestinian families as others close theirs

Abed’s family is not the only one to find a way in. In late April, two families from Gaza arrived in Mexico City through HEAL Palestine’s Global Healing Program, and the organization said Nadya Rasheed, the Palestinian ambassador to Mexico, was waiting at the airport to greet them. They included Mira, 6, who came for neurosurgery on a serious head injury, and Muath, 14, who lost a leg in a bombing and came for a prosthesis and rehabilitation. According to HEAL Palestine, it was the program’s first evacuation since the United States suspended visas for Palestinian patients.

For its part, Mexico’s government has drawn its own line. In February, President Claudia Sheinbaum turned down President Donald Trump’s invitation to join his “Board of Peace,” the body originally meant to oversee the ceasefire, because it left out any Palestinian representative, Novara Media reported. “Given that we recognize Palestine as a state, it’s important that both states – Israel and Palestine – participate,” Sheinbaum said, adding that Mexico would send its U.N. ambassador to observe the board’s meeting instead.

The Palestinian Mexican story is older than this war

For some families, the bond between Palestine and Mexico runs back generations, and the filmmaker Colette Ghunim set out to trace hers in the documentary “Traces of Home,” which follows her journey with her parents to her father’s Palestine and her mother’s Mexico.

Her father’s family was driven out of Safed in 1948 during the Nakba, when 750,000 Palestinians lost their homes, the Los Angeles Times reported. Melissa Barrera, who joined the film as an executive producer, told the Times the project “feels so close to my heart, not only because of my love for Palestine, but because I’m Mexican, and because this is the story about a Mexican Palestinian American family.”

While filming, Ghunim learned that the company behind a barrier separating Palestinians and Israelis had also bid to build the wall on the U.S.-Mexico border. “We may think as Latinos that Palestine is so far away,” she told the Times, “we’re going through the same thing that they’re going through again and again across the world.”

Abed’s own ties to Gaza now run through a phone that rings at strange hours when the internet allows it, because two of his sisters, along with aunts and uncles, are still there. “My heart and mind are still in Gaza,” he told Borgen. He is working to bring his sisters to Mexico, Reuters reported. In May, his youngest son, Yusuf, was born in Mexico City and became a Mexican citizen at birth.

“He was born in Mexico but carries the roots of Gaza in his heart,” Abed told Reuters.

Tags: Mexico, Palestine