More
On The Destruction Of Rafah
By Gideon Levy
08 June, 2004
Haaretz
One
of the 120 homes demolished by the IDF in the Brazil refugee camp belonged
to architect Manal Awad. This was the third time since 1948 that her
family has been left homeless - and the second time that Ariel Sharon
was responsible.
Now all 19 people are crowded into a tiny two-and-a-half-room apartment
belonging to one sister, on the edge of the destroyed area of their
refugee camp. The curtain blowing in the breeze allows intermittent
glimpses of the view from the window: mounds of rubble all the way to
the end of the street. This is the Awad family: Mother, elderly aunt,
son, daughters and their families. On Thursday, May 20, two bulldozers
approached their home, threatening to raze it with the occupants still
inside: Operation Rainbow. The 85-year-old aunt barely managed to climb
out. She says that in 1948, when she fled from her first home, and in
1972, when the IDF razed her home again, it was easier for her - she
was still young then. One of the daughters, architect Manal Awad, says
that it's not just stone walls that have been destroyed, but also memories
- in the photographs and books that are lost forever. Her sisters tried
to save the coffee table that she had designed, but couldn't. The table
was crushed along with the other contents of the house. Among the wreckage,
the only thing she could find was the new narghile she had bought for
her brother in Tunisia.
The IDF did its work very thoroughly here: The houses and their contents
were completely crushed. Here and there, some recognizable items can
be seen - part of a dress, a smashed water boiler, the torn pages of
a book. Entire houses have been wiped off the face of the earth, and
now they are just mounds of dirt. The chief of staff, Moshe Ya'alon,
said without batting an eye: "We know of 12 houses that were demolished
since the start of the operation." Platoon commander Brigadier
General Shmuel Zakkai corrected him the next day, saying the actual
number was 56 houses.
But neither figure
is correct. In the Brazil camp alone, according to Mustafa Ibrahim,
an experienced investigator for the Palestinian civil rights commission,
120 houses were destroyed. Visiting the place, it's hard to count, but
one sees that many dozens of houses were demolished, judging by the
many mounds of rubble. All the talk about smuggling tunnels also appears
less than credible. The Awad family's home, for example, is approximately
800 meters away from the Philadelphi corridor; there are no tunnels
that long. This was demolition just for the sake of it, a punitive campaign
of vengeance against innocents rendered homeless for the second and
third times.
In Operation Defensive
Shield, we destroyed the center of the Jenin refugee camp - 350 houses
- but the destruction was dense and concentrated. There were battles
there as well. In Operation Rainbow, we demolished houses in a scattered
fashion, without a battle, so that the Brazil camp now looks like Sarajevo
in 1993. It's hard to find the logic in the demolition campaign: A group
of houses here and another one there, this house yes and that one no,
seeming more the result of whim than any real planning. To the 120 houses
in the Brazil camp that were thoroughly destroyed must be added a similar
number of houses that were partially destroyed - not to mention the
crushed cars, the roads and utility poles that were uprooted, or the
Taha Hussein school, part of which has been reduced to rubble. The residents
describe how the bulldozers approached from all sides; they were trapped
inside their homes, and terrified. (One resident telephoned me then
and told about his neighbor and the man's 12 children who were trapped
in a house that was about to be demolished, begging for something to
be done to save them.)
This past Sunday,
long after the end of the operation, as a bonus, we demolished another
23 houses in the adjacent Block J, in another nameless, forgotten operation
which doubtless is of tremendous security importance.
Manal Awad sits
in her modest office in the Rimal neighborhood of Gaza City, tearlessly
mourning her demolished home. She is the director of the Women's Mental
Health Center in Gaza. She is 30 years old, dressed in an elegant sport
jacket and speaks fluent English. She was in her office when the bulldozers
arrived at the family's home, where her mother and aunt and sisters
were. They had sent her brother out of the house before the bulldozers
came, thinking that if it was only women left there, they'd be safe.
"I'll never
forget that day. My sister called and told me there was a tank next
to the house. I told her not to dare peek out the window. We're experienced
- in Tel al-Sultan, they shot at anyone who peeked out of the window.
On the radio I heard that they were starting to raze houses with people
still inside. We were afraid that this time it would be especially bad,
but in our worst dreams we never imagined that our home would be destroyed.
"I tried to
reassure my sister, but when I called back she told me that the bulldozers
were right in front of the house. I told her: You have to get out of
the house immediately. She said the guest room was already collapsing.
They were afraid to go out because there was a bulldozer in front and
another one in back, as well as tanks. My mother took a hammer and tried
to break through the wall to get to the neighbors. My sister brought
a ladder for them to climb out. My 85-year-old aunt, who walks with
difficulty, managed to climb the first couple of rungs, but then she
stopped and said she couldn't go on. She said that in 1948, she could
run away, but not now. My mother and sisters pushed her up, the neighbor
pulled from the other side and she finally got over, I don't know how.
"It was the
first time in my life that I ever heard my mother cry like that. She's
a strong and sensitive woman, but she never cried that way. Not even
when my father died 23 years ago and she was left alone with six daughters
and a son and an elderly aunt. She fought for us all her life and now
I felt that she needed my support and I wasn't by her side. I was helpless.
It wasn't easy to hear her crying on the telephone. She said to me:
`I won't leave the house.' Those were the last words I heard from her.
My sister said: `Now it's the end. We're running away.' I didn't know
what happened to them, whether or not they were alive. I only got the
good news an hour later - they had reached the neighbors. They thought
that the bulldozers would stop and not demolish the neighbors' house,
too, but that also turned out to be wrong. My mother was so angry and
shouted against Sharon and against Bush while the bulldozers were pursuing
them to the neighbors' house. It was also demolished. My sister came
out of the neighbors' house waving a white flag. I tried to picture
the layout of the street, to think where they could have run to, with
the tanks there. I was afraid for their lives. All of those images keep
coming back to my mind.
"In 1948, the
family fled from our village near Ramle to a cave. In 1972, Sharon demolished
our house in the Shabura camp, when I was a baby. Now this is the third
house. My mother is a strong woman, but now she's broken. It's the end
for her. She always dreamed about the first house that they fled from,
but she was attached to the house in the camp. Now it's all meaningless.
Her life was for nothing. She hoped that our fate would be different.
Peace. Maybe not peace, but at least a better life.
"I wasn't with
them, but I felt what they felt. I lost all my memories there. A house
isn't just walls. I can buy new furniture, a new refrigerator. But that's
not it. The photographs with the family history - every one holds a
memory for me. Photographs of our loved ones and our joys and our sorrows
- all destroyed. We also had a book collection. It wasn't so big, but
it meant a lot to us. Each one had his favorite books. Nothing is left.
The house is destroyed. Life is destroyed. Thirty years of life was
wiped out.
"When I was
finally able to go to Rafah on the weekend, a friend offered to accompany
me. I told her there was no need, that I was strong, but she warned
me that I'd be in shock when I got there. She was right. Nothing was
left of the whole street. We live in the old part of Brazil, and we
always said that if they did demolitions, we'd just hear the noise,
but that they'd never come close to us, because we're far from the border.
But for some reason they started with our house. I'm sorry that I'm
just talking about myself ... I hoped so much that I'd be able to save
something.
"A week has
passed and I have the feeling that it's just going to get harder and
harder. I thought I'd recover. It was a simple refugees' house, but
on the inside it was beautiful to me. I've been all over the world and
seen some amazing houses, but I always missed that one."
Here is where the
family home stood. A pile of rocks. Manal's mother, Shukrin, emerges
from the ruins - a small woman in black - and here is Manal's brother,
too. And here is the Mansour family's house, and the house of the Hassan
family and the Hamad family. Nothing is left. The elderly aunt, Aliya,
sits on the floor of the apartment that is their temporary refuge, staring
at the carpet, her expression masked. Manal took her to see a doctor
in Gaza; he said that her spine had not been injured during the escape
with the ladder.
Aliya vividly remembers
the first escape, from Abu Shusha, and the second escape from the Shabura
camp, when Sharon came "to widen the corridor." It's the same
now. Aliya tells about their first days in a cave after fleeing Abu
Shusha, and how they trekked from there first to Yavneh and then to
Gaza. Her niece Shukrin adds some details. They speak softly, the signs
of the most recent trauma still very apparent. It happened twice in
the month of May - May 1948 and May 2004. Only in 1972 did it happen
in December.
Yusuf, the husband
of one of the sisters in whose home they've taken shelter, chuckles:
He hasn't yet counted how many people are now living in his tiny house.
"Like sardines, but at least everyone's together." This morning,
when a Palestinian bulldozer came to clear away the rubble opposite
his house, his daughter burst into tears. She thought the Israelis had
come back to demolish some more.
We go outside to
wander along the long pile of rubble. There is destruction on both sides
of the sandy road. By one pile that used to be a house, children are
still scavenging for pieces of metal to load onto a donkey cart. The
apartment of Yusuf Bahlul (who once worked for Sonol in Gaza), on the
top floor of an apartment building overlooking this refugee camp, took
a direct hit from a shell and is also ruined and covered in soot. Everyone
here speaks Hebrew, from the years when they used to work in Israel.
A small television
table stands alone in a living room whose walls have all collapsed.
In the Brazil camp, an old woman tries to push a crushed water heater.
Her strength is gone. A post-disaster calm prevails. The Philadelphi
corridor is visible at the bottom of the street, and every so often
a menacing Israeli tank passes by. The stench of burst sewage pipes
pervades the air as children display their latest finds from the rubble.