One year after the war, Gaza struggling to survive

A stone’s throw away from the Israeli border in Shajaiya, a group of young men are rummaging among the steel and concrete that remains of the Sarayo Biscuits Factory.

Hasan Ahmed Al Awadi, who worked here as a watchman, now sits looking at the rubble. He is using part of the former offices to raise some poultry.

“I can’t give you biscuits but I have some chickens,” he tells me smiling.

A year ago, Israeli tanks and fighter planes reduced the factory to rubble, leaving 50 workers jobless and Hasan’s colleague dead.

Further down the road, Al Wafa Hospital has just managed to get a consignment of cement and glass smuggled from the tunnels to be able to repair the extensive damage to the new state of the art four-storey building for rehabilitation and the elderly.

“We had a totally new building that was meant to be inaugurated in January 2009,” says the head of rehabilitation, Dr Kamees Al Issi. “The Israelis inaugurated it for us. Not one window pane was left intact.”

Facing the hospital is the Gaza juice factory. The cold store was totally burnt down and most of the equipment destroyed. The factory now employs half of the 100 workers it had before the war, and they are manually capping and labelling bottles through new equipment they managed to get through the tunnels.

In Zeitoun, Sameh Sawafiri had a poultry farm of 30,000 chickens providing most of Gaza’s supply of eggs. Israeli soldiers flattened them all in their cages. Now he has managed to reopen with one-third of the chickens had a year ago, and a lot of debts.

The owners of El Bader Flour Mill in Beit Lahiya were not so lucky. Israeli planes targeted the central nerve of the mill, leaving it totally out of action.

“Since the war we had to stop completely,” says Hamdan Hamada who still pays 25 of the 85 workers in the hope they will be able to resume work soon. “We need iron, cement and equipment, but Israel is not allowing us to get anything. We are waiting for a political decision from Israel to get the material to reconstruct our flourmill. So far we only got promises.”

A year since the war on Gaza, most of the coastal strip is still at a standstill, waiting for a political decision from Israel, and for pressure from the rest of the world, for the blockade to be lifted. Billions of dollars pledged for reconstruction remain out of reach, making reconstruction and recovery impossible.

Driving through the streets of Gaza, the rubble is still everywhere, with many of the bombed buildings still standing like skeletons, memorials of destruction. In some parts, the rubble has started being cleared in the last weeks, but Israel’s and Egypt’s ban on construction material makes it impossible to rebuild the 3,535 homes that were totally destroyed last January.

Mohammed Zaid Hader’s family from Izbet Abed Rabbo is one of around 1,000 still living in tents. It is their second winter facing the cold and the rain. Left totally impoverished since his four-storey house was destroyed, he has become one of the 80% of Gazans dependent on humanitarian aid.

Beyond reconstruction, thousands of lives have been destroyed with the death and suffering of relatives, friends and neighbours.

Nawer Thabet from Juhor Ad Dik lost her mother and only sister when their house was shelled. One year on, she is still in trauma, recounting, in tears, how she is unable to go back to the house where her mother always welcomed her.

“I remember this tragedy everyday, I can’t get it out of my mind. I still can’t go back to our house in Johr Al Deek, I can’t face it,” she says.

Everyone says they were used to attacks from the Israeli army, but this was something else altogether. The attacks were coming from everywhere, leaving nowhere to escape as people were forbidden to leave the Gaza Strip to seek refuge far from the conflict zone. “Nowhere is safe” could not ring truer than during what the Israelis called ‘Operation Cast Lead’.

Children are perhaps paying the highest price. The war taught them that not even their homes were safe, and not even their parents could protect them.

Ahmed Hdeir, father of six from Beit Lahiya, told his children the war was just a computer game.

“But when they hit our house I couldn’t keep up that story,” he says. They still suffer from nightmares and he takes them to psychologists for counselling every week.

In the last Eid at the end of November, thousands of children were playing in the streets with toy guns. Gazan psychiatrists are concerned about the widespread trauma and further radicalisation they are inevitably faced with. When everything is lost, the only glorious way seems that of the martyr.

While the bombs were falling all over Gaza, Abdul Salam from Beit Lahiya spent his time sleeping, even when his neighbourhood was fiercely bombarded.

“Everyone was exposed, so there’s no place to hide, nowhere to go,” he says “You can do nothing. You wait for a bomb to fall from the sky, to destroy your house. You just have to empty your mind, relax, and whatever happens, let it happen. I would sleep all day long. Even my wife was surprised. She used to ask me ‘Don’t you hear the bombs and the shooting?’ But what can I do?”

Gazans are known for their resilience and creative ways of getting by against all odds, but they are paying a very high price. Even before the war, the blockade was collectively punishing an entire population, leaving scars that will take decades to heal.

Young people are dying to get out, to travel and see the world, but they know they cannot plan a trip abroad. In fact, they can plan nothing at all. In Gaza, everything is inshallah (God-willing).

A whole generation of children has never been out of Gaza. Unlike their parents, most of whom used to work in Israel and have Jewish friends, the only Israelis they have seen were armed soldiers keen on destroying their houses and killing their relatives.

Now, the Egyptian government is reportedly erecting yet another wall in Rafah – an iron barrier meant to stop tunnel smuggling. Tunnels are the only lifeline left for Gazans, and in their creative resourcefulness they might also find way around this latest obstacle. The question is, for how long will they be forced to live like this?

A lonely Christmas in Gaza

In Bethlehem, a Christian carpenter sells little nativity cribs with Mary and Joseph carved behind the Israeli wall and the three wise men caught on the other side of the wall, unable to cross over to visit Jesus.

Whoever visits Bethlehem knows perfectly how the Israeli separation wall surrounds Jesus’s birthplace today, cutting it off from nearby communities and restricting Palestinians’ movements.

Twenty-two year old Berlanty Azzam, a Palestinian Christian, will this year be added to the thousands of Palestinians denied entry into Bethlehem, after she was expelled from the West Bank last October.

Azzam, from Gaza, had been studying for a business degree at Bethlehem University for the last four years. Just two months away from her graduation, she went on a short trip to Ramallah for a job interview. On her way back, she was arrested, handcuffed and blindfolded at an Israeli checkpoint, and deported to Gaza.

Her crime, according to an Israeli court that upheld her deportation, was to have lived in the West Bank illegally. Even though she is Palestinian, Gazans are not allowed to live there.

The ban on travel for all Gazans becomes even harder for the 3,000 Christians during Christmas. Separated from Bethlehem by a few kilometres, Jesus’s birthplace has never seemed so distant for them.

For the last three years, since Hamas took over Gaza, all men from Gaza aged under 35 were completely banned from travelling for Christmas. Last year, only 150 were allowed to travel. This year, there has been no news of any permits for Gazans yet.

It’s a hard Christmas this year – Christmas day is just two days before the first anniversary of the 22-day attack by Israeli forces on Gaza. Some of those who were in Bethlehem last year ended up caught out during the war.

“They went to Bethlehem for a few days and ended up caught there for a month; some of them run out of money,” Kamel Ayyad, a public relations officer at the Archbishop’s office by the 1,600 year-old Church of St Porphyry in Gaza City, said. “Some of them came back to find their houses damaged.”

The Christians of Gaza may be the least heard of all Palestinians. Numbering just 3,000, with the overwhelming majority of them belonging to the Orthodox rite (who celebrate Christmas on 7 January), their numbers keep dwindling as they tend to be typically middle class families in search of better opportunities. In 2006, 71 fled to the West Bank after a Christian was killed. Ayyad believes up to 40% of Christians would leave if the border had to open.

Mousa Al Bayouk, 17, from the Christian quarter in Gaza City, is studying to enter university. At his age, it will take him another two decades before he will get a permit to visit Bethlehem. He is not afraid of another war.

“We’re used to the war, what do you want me to be afraid of?”

But he would like to leave Gaza for a future abroad.

“I would like to study abroad, in Greece, to become a mechanical engineer. I wouldn’t want to return,” he says. He then adds, almost apologetically: “If the situation was good I wouldn’t want to leave.”
Shadi Suheil Abu Daoud, a teacher of history at the Christian Latin Patriarch school in Gaza, does not believe Christians will leave Gaza and the West Bank.

“We have always been here, we are Arabs, Palestinians, part of this nation,” he says. “Christians have been part of the Palestinian national movement,” he says, referring among others to the famous leftist founder of the PFLP, George Habash.

“I don’t like it when Palestinians leave our land. This is our country, we have to build our future,” he adds.
At the Christian school where he teaches, only 30 out of 382 children are Christian. Yet the school is also testament to the overall mutual respect that exists between Christians and Muslims in Gaza.

“Here you can find our church just next to a mosque,” Ayyad, who says his best friends are Muslims, says. “We welcome each other in our homes, we eat together. That’s how it has always been. We are all Palestinians, we are all suffering.”

The occasional incidents between the two communities are largely isolated attacks by extremist Islamist groups, or Salafists, which are at odds even with Hamas.

“Some Salafists try to create problems, because they know neither Christianity nor Islam,” Ayyad said.
Reflecting other Christians’ views, Shadi says Hamas brought order and security to the Gaza Strip.
“We feel protected,” he said. “The only problems we had were with some terrorists coming through the tunnels from Egypt who wanted to turn everyone into a Muslim. Their inspiration is Bin Laden and they are a problem even for Hamas here.”

Meanwhile, as pilgrims from around the world flock to Bethlehem and the rest of the Holy Land for Christmas and all year round, Christians in Gaza feel they are forgotten by their brethren.

“People go to visit Bethlehem, Jerusalem, Nazareth, but they hardly think of us,” Ayyad said. “All we want from them is to pray for us. We are in Jesus’s land and we are suffering, today.”

“We ask the foreign tourists and pilgrims to demand an end to the occupation, and to pray for us,” Shadi said.

‘We built Israel and all we got was destruction’

Almost a year since his three-storey house in northern Gaza was destroyed, Mohammed Zaid Hader is still living in a tent in the shadow of what remains of his former house, and his outlook is only bound to get grimmer.

It will be the second cold winter that he will have to face with his wife and eight daughters, because like the rest of the owners of more than 3,500 homes that were totally destroyed in Israel’s last offensive, he cannot get the material to rebuild it. For Mohammed and his family, the two-year blockade on Gaza has made daily life miserable, leaving them vulnerable and desperate for the most basic necessities.

As I approach his tent in we pass through makeshift canals dug desperately in the sand on the night when Gaza got its first torrential rain of this winter.

“We were totally flooded, we couldn’t keep up with the water. I kept digging to divert as much water as I could, but it was impossible, he says as he braces himself for worse yet to come.

The sense of hopelessness here, where an entire neighbourhood made up of hundreds of houses was razed to the ground last January, is as overwhelming as the scale of destruction.

For Mohammed, the irony could not be more poignant. As a former builder who used to work in Israel, he worked with Israeli employers on construction sites to build their own properties.

“We built Israel with our Jewish friends, and look at what they did to our houses,” he said. “Why did they have to bomb our houses like this?”

Israel’s two-year blockade since Hamas took over control of Gaza means that none of the essential reconstruction material can come into the strip – from cement and tiles to plastic pipes and glass. Demand in Gaza for window glass alone would cover 30 football fields with glass.

Mohammed is now unemployed. Like thousands of others, he was stopped from working in Israel in response to the 2000 Intifada. This year, he worked for a few months in a smuggling tunnel until it collapsed, leaving him injured and fearing for his life

He told me it took him four years to build his house. The little financial help he received after it was destroyed disappeared quickly to pay old debts. Now he is penniless even if there was material available to rebuild it. Across Gaza more than a hundred other families face the same situation, living in tents that were too hot in summer and are now unfit for the cold winter weather.

As we speak, bulldozers are removing most of the rubble, although Mohammed is still using the remains of his house to shelter a water tank and some poultry. He does not know where he will put them once the area is cleared.

Amid the rubble, Mohammed has collected dozens of tiles that he salvaged and that once used to pave the floors of his house. They may be priceless in Gaza given the total blockade, but he has no house to put them in and no idea when he will have.