Animals Rescued From the 'World’s Worst Zoo'
An animal-welfare organization reflects on its nerve-wracking rescue—and what it might mean for troubled zoos around the world.
When a rescue team arrived to evacuate a closing zoo near the Gaza Strip city of Khan Younis in late August, just 15 animals were still alive—the survivors from what had once been a collection of hundreds of animals.
They included Laziz, a nine-year-old Bengal tiger that is the last tiger in Gaza, according to Four Paws, the Vienna-based animal-welfare nonprofit that led the rescue. There were also five monkeys, an emu, a pelican, two buzzards, two porcupines, two tortoises, and a doe. The doe had lost her fawn to wounds shortly before the rescuers arrived.
Opened in 2007 on three and a half acres next to an amusement park, the Khan Younis Zoo has long been called “the world’s worst
