War photographer Patrick Chauvel took this picture of a Palestinian man standing in the rubble of his home in Jenin, the West Bank, in 2002, during the second intifada, or Palestinian uprising. After Chauvel put the camera down, the man’s wife offered him a coffee. It was, he said, “an incredible gesture of hospitality, given the obliteration of their home”.

This story captured my attention, and I bought the photograph in 2010. It sits in my GP consulting room in east London, and patients, some of whom are refugees and asylum seekers, occasionally ask me about it. Initially, they are puzzled and intrigued. Why is he standing amid the wreckage of his home? It is not the sort of picture they expect to see on a GP’s wall. But when I talk about the coffee and the hospitality, they are touched.

With all the recent Syrian news coverage of images showing the destruction of peoples’ homes and lives, I found myself studying the photo again. Why was this man’s house destroyed? He’s an old man. Was he even still alive? I needed to know what happened to him. In November last year, I set out to find him.

With photo in hand, and with some trepidation as I speak no Hebrew or Arabic, I set out for Jenin. I flew to Tel Aviv and travelled to Ramallah via Jerusalem, then took the bus from the West Bank city of Nablus through a beautiful landscape of hills, small villages and farmland. The bus station in Jenin was hot and bustling.

I needed to find someone who might recognise the minaret in the photo. With the help of a Palestinian soldier, who spoke English, and some locals, I was soon in a taxi heading for Al-Ansar mosque in Jenin refugee camp.

The streets surrounding the mosque were deserted in the heat of the day. The taxi driver showed the photo to a local man and we were directed to a small grocery shop in a nearby street. It was one of many operating from homes in the camp, cluttered with coffee, balloons, shampoo and plastic containers with child-sized portions of luminous pink candyfloss.

The shop owner smiled in recognition as I showed her the photo. “That man is my father-in-law, Ibrahim Mahmoud Saleh. He’s an old man now, and not very well, but still lives in the camp.” She was a widow and had been married to one of his seven sons. I hadn’t expected it to be so easy, but these are strong communities, and people know each other.

Ibrahim Mahmoud Saleh, on the balcony of his new apartment. Photograph: Kate Adams

Ibrahim was living in an upstairs flat in a street overlooking the cemetery in Al-Hadaf district of the camp. As we stood on the road, the taxi driver shouted his name to locate him. A woman in a brown patterned veil appeared at a window and invited us in. Bright pink bedsheets were hanging out on a balcony, and the block was covered with a mass of wires.

As we reached the first-floor landing, Ibrahim’s wife, Rasmie, opened the door. He was standing behind her, instantly recognisable wearing his keffiyeh, as in the photo. Their youngest son, Mahmoud, laughed with excitement when he spotted his dad in the picture.

But Ibrahim, frail and needing a stick to help him walk, wasn’t engaging. “He has memory problems,” explained Waleed, the taxi driver turned translator.

Ibrahim Mahmoud Saleh at home. Photograph: Kate Adams

Rasmie unlocked a door and ushered us into a room they reserved for guests – bare except for a sofa, table and chair.We shared stories and soon I, too, was enjoying the family’s hospitality over a coffee scented with cardamom seeds.

Rasmie said Ibrahim was born in Al-Kafrayn, a small village near the coastal town of Haifa, one of 15 children. In 1948, after the Arab-Israeli war, the residents of his village were all displaced to Jenin. The camp was established in 1953. It is not a refugee camp as you might imagine it, with tents providing temporary shelter. These displaced Palestinians now live in a crowded concrete town with 17,000 inhabitants. Some, like Ibrahim, have been here for over 60 years. There is a depressing permanence about it.

Ibrahim Mahmoud Saleh, looking at Patrick Chauvel’s 2002 shot of the ruins of his house in Jenin. Photograph: Kate Adams

Rasmie said they married a year after Ibrahim’s first wife’s death, 24 years ago. She counted on her fingers her 33 grandchildren and 21 great-grandchildren. Ibrahim worked as a local street vegetable seller and retired in his late 70s. He is now 96 years old.

Rasmie recounted the build-up to the battle of Jenin in 2002, when the photo was taken. Fighters were hiding in the camp following an ambush of Israeli soldiers. Then one day, she saw hundreds of tanks approaching. Ibrahim wanted to stay, but she was frightened that they would be killed, and persuaded him to let the family move temporarily to her local village. All they took was a spare set of children’s clothes.

I had always thought their home had been bombed, but the family told me that Israeli forces used armoured bulldozers to smash a path towards the fighters hiding in the camp.

When Rasmie heard that her home had been destroyed, she was devastated. “I totally collapsed inside,” she said. As soon as the curfew was relaxed, her family returned to the camp. This was the day that the photo was taken.

With the support of a UN agency, the family was given the opportunity to have their original house rebuilt, or have a bigger home in another part of the camp to relieve overcrowding. Ibrahim’s sons persuaded him to go for the added space. They live on £150 a month, £120 of which comes from one of Ibrahim’s sons. Rasmie says it is a struggle to make ends meet. She likes the flat but misses her old neighbours.

Ibrahim Mahmoud Saleh and Kate Adams. Photograph: Kate Adams

Like his father, Mahmoud works in the local vegetable market. Most of the young people in the camp used to work in construction or restaurants in Haifa and Afula in Israel. Since the building of the wall between Israel and the West Bank, with further restrictions on movement, unemployment has risen. Haifa is only 28 miles away, yet there are teenagers who have never seen the sea.

Tensions rise in the camp from time to time. Near the site where the original photo was taken, there is a wall covered with images of boys and young men who have died in recent years. They are portrayed as martyrs, posing with guns in front of the Al-Aqsa mosque in Jerusalem. As I crossed the border back into Jerusalem, the golden dome of Al-Aqsa was glistening in the sunset. How many of the young people in the camp had seen the mosque?

On my return, I contacted Chauvel. He was amazed that I had gone to find the man, something he said he should have done years ago but “wars keep putting me on the road” (he had just returned from Mosul in Iraq). He recalled the man’s great dignity, and told me he, too, has the photo on the wall of his office. The image might be 15 years old, but the loss it depicts is still real.