Palestine Gets the First Tweet Street

‘@arjanelfassed tweetstreet’, in the Palestinian refugee camp of Askar, has become the world’s first street named after a Twitter account. This is what Arjan El Fassed, a Netherlands-based Dutch-Palestinian writer-activist, had to do to get it: donate $146 to a Dutch website which passed it on to the Palestinian Child Care Society to fund ‘cultural and expressive after-school activities’ for 1,000 children in the camp at its youth centre. Another 199 street names are up for grabs.

‘@arjanelfassed tweetstreet’, in the Palestinian refugee camp of Askar, has become the world’s first street named after a Twitter account. This is what Arjan El Fassed, a Netherlands-based Dutch-Palestinian writer-activist, had to do to get it: donate $146 to a Dutch website which passed it on to the Palestinian Child Care Society to fund ‘cultural and expressive after-school activities’ for 1,000 children in the camp at its youth centre. Another 199 street names are up for grabs. They may be temporary, the street names, but have brought El Fassed instant Twitter fame. Why did he choose his Twitter account name? To bring online attention to the plight of Palestinian refugee children. The Aksar camp is in Nablus, the largest Palestinian city in the West Bank. Incursions from the Israeli Defence Forces are common in the 60-year-old refugee camp. ‘In a place where streets have no names, one street is named after a Twitter-account,’ El Fassed tweeted.

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Shivam Vij