Rafah
- Hell On Earth
By Chris Mcgreal
04 June, 2004
The Guardian
The Al-Akhras
family
There is nothing
left of the Akhras' family's home. Even the cloths blowing in the breeze
above their heads, providing a pathetic, makeshift tent to the once
nomadic Bedouin family, are borrowed from luckier neighbours. A large
round metal bowl is all that they recovered from the rubble of their
house after it was bulldozed by the Israeli army.
"There were
10 rooms here," says the 50-year-old patriarch, Ghazi. "Thirty-three
people lived in the house. There was me, my wife, my seven brothers
and their wives, and all our sons and daughters."
It was 10pm when
the bulldozers came. "All the people were fleeing their houses,
but one of my brothers is handicapped and was trapped in the house.
We had to carry him out as the bulldozer was hitting the building."
All that remains
of the house is a mound of concrete and dirt. The destruction by the
bulldozer was so complete that some of the walls have been ground to
a rubble reminiscent of the rocky desert beyond the fence.
Like many other
families in Rafah, the Akhras family has been made homeless before.
Ghazi came from Yibna after the Israeli army, under the command of Ariel
Sharon, then military governor of Gaza, bulldozed his home in 1971.
"We bought the house here from the Israelis. We had the documents
to show it. We saved nothing, not even the documents," he says.
"This is more than the catastrophe of 1948 for us. In 1948 there
were no Apaches shooting at us."
Akhras, who worked
as a builder in Israel before the intifada, cannot afford to rebuild.
"I have no money to do it. Now we are all homeless, living in houses
of relations. During the day we come and sit on the rubble, under the
tent, because the relations do not want us in their house all day. At
night we go there just to sleep."
The Abu Ghali
family
Aziza Abu Ghali is exhausted by her fury and can barely stand. "My
husband is 90 years old and has nowhere to sleep. The Jews are just
demolishing our houses. I was shouting at the bulldozer driver: 'Don't
you have children?' They kill our sons and put us in the morgue. We
are praying to Allah to show them the suffering that they show us."
Aziza is one of
the few in her street who remember how they all ended up in Rafah in
1948, just as the Israeli state was being created. She was born in the
now extinct village of Yubna, which was erased and replaced with the
Israeli town of Yavne. Four of her children - three sons and a daughter
- were born there also. "The Jews used their guns to make us go
away. They tell lies about this now, saying we ran away on our own.
Who would leave their home unless they had to? We only left to save
the lives of our children. I was a young woman then. I never imagined
that the Jews would still be doing this to me."
When the bulldozers
came this time, Aziza was asleep. Her husband, Yousef, was in a bed
in a neighbouring room. Their son and his family lived across a small
yard in two other rooms.
All that was recovered
from the wreckage was Yousef's wheelchair. The corner of his bed sticks
out from the rubble. Their fridge is tossed on top, wrecked. A metal
ceiling fan, its blades buckled like a withering flower, hangs from
a surviving wall.
Yousef's son, Sobhi,
a nurse in a UN clinic, says his father was lucky to escape. "All
day there was shooting. There was a tank near our house and I was afraid
to even put my head out of the door. There were Israeli snipers on the
top of the buildings. It was dangerous just to show your face.
"I was awake
the whole night. I could hear sounds of houses being demolished. At
first light I could hear my father knocking at my mother's room saying
he wanted to go to dawn prayers. He is almost totally deaf. I wanted
to call to him and tell him to stay indoors because they might shoot,
but he came out and I had to rush to rescue him."
The family sheltered
for a few more hours until the bulldozer's attention turned to their
own house, home to 13 people. "I saw the house was about to be
demolished. I just picked up my son and my father and dragged them away.
We ran out into where the shooting was. The bulldozer driver was indifferent
to us. They saw us and knew we were inside. We had just a few minutes
to get away. We were crying and shouting at them. I was carrying my
father on my shoulders. I don't think he even understood what was happening."
The Al-Wawi family
Mousa Joma al-Wawi has a long history with Ariel Sharon. "We call
him 'the bulldozer'. This is not the first time he's done this to us.
The first time was in 1971," says the 54-year-old grandfather,
standing amid the rubble of his home in the al-Brazil neighbourhood
in Rafah.
Like many in Rafah,
the latest round of mass demolitions was not the first time that Wawi
had been bulldozed out of his home. He counts off the times he has had
to flee his house.
"I was a refugee
before I was even born. My mother was pregnant when she fled our village,
Zarnuga, when the Jews came in 1948. The house is still standing. There's
a Jew living in it. My mother moved to a tent in Khan Younis (a little
north of Rafah) and then to Rafah, where I was born."
Wawi's introduction
to the bulldozers came in the 70s, when General Sharon, as he then was,
bulldozed about 20,000 people from their homes in the Gaza Strip to
widen roads as part of his strategy against the Palestine Liberation
Organisation.
"Sharon destroyed
our house. The UN and Israelis built us new ones in Yibna [a Rafah neighbourhood].
They sold the house to us. I have all my documents. The house had a
tiled roof and two rooms. It was 1.5m high and 3m long by 2.5m wide.
When we became a bigger family, we expanded it."
But the bulldozers
were back in 1997, as the Israeli army destroyed the very homes it had
built for Palestinian refugees about 25 years earlier. The Wawi family
fled to the al-Brazil neighbourhood of Rafah and, over the years, built
up a new home.
There were about
20 men, women and children crammed into the back room of Wawi's home
on the corner of an al-Brazil street when the demolition squads arrived.
They had not dared to venture out because of the bullets flying round
the street, but now they had to escape.
"My brother
lives next door," says Wawi. "We were all in this room and
my brother came with a hammer and smashed a hole in the wall. The bulldozer
was hitting the house. We carried nothing at all. We were just trying
to escape by ourselves ... Some of the pigeons survived."
Among the rubble
lies the water tank, pierced by bullets, a broken bedside table and
the remnants of a wardrobe. A hanging basket of red flowers magically
survived unscathed, and the family pulled some blankets, pillows and
a child's toy plastic bike from the rubble.
Where will they
go now? "This is still my home," says Wawi. "We will
clean it and we will bring tents in. If they want to shoot me in my
home - shoot me, my sons, my grandchildren - we cannot stop them. We
are staying, no matter what."
The Mikkawi family
Rula Abu Abid grips her doll as if it is all she has left in the world.
It is called Larla and its head is buried in the rubble of her home.
Rula asked her grandfather, Hassan Mikkawi, if they would ever find
it. The 61-year-old motor mechanic - "the most famous mechanic
in Rafah" - reassured the five-year-old that one day they would
have the strength to sift through the rubble to look.
One building in
the family compound, which provided homes for two of his sons and their
families, has been completely demolished. The armoured bulldozer ripped
the front out of his own home, crushing furniture, destroying much of
the living room and wrecking the bedroom. The surviving furniture is
battered and splintered. Not much else was saved: a toolbox, a crate
of onions, a large metal bowl, a bedside table, some blankets. Mikkawi's
car was flattened by the massive bulldozer.
"I lived in
America illegally for more than a year. It was 1996," he says,
pulling out an Alabama driving licence to prove it. "I had good
work as a motor mechanic, but I came back here. I often wonder why,
but I could not take my family to America. When I came back, we thought
things would be peaceful. We thought there would be no more demolitions."
Hassan Mikkawi was
six years old when he fled his own village, Zarnuga, as it was seized
by the fledgling Israeli army in 1948. There were about 2,500 Arabs
living there, many of whom ended up in Rafah.
"I remember
the garden and the mosque. At that time there were no tanks, but I remember
the shooting. I remember my mother and my father and my brother weeping.
And I remember us running away and my father carrying some food and
some clothes. It was the same then as it is now.
"We arrived
in Gaza in 1948 and came to Rafah a year later. In 1967 the Israelis
crushed our home and they wanted to send us to Sinai or the West Bank
but we refused. My father built a house here. Two rooms with a bathroom.
You can see we made it much bigger, much grander."
There were 16 people
living in the house when the bulldozers arrived for the most recent
demolition. The family ran, waving white headscarves. When they returned,
the parts of the house that were not destroyed teetered precariously.
A forest of scaffolding is all that keeps it standing.
The Abu Hasaneen
family
Raesa Khalel Abu Hasaneen has 10 children. Their small home was always
a little cramped; the boys sleeping in one room, the girls in another.
But all that is left now is the kitchen, where some of the children
bed down next to a piece of netting where once there was a wall, and
the bathroom.
"We didn't
expect this to happen here. The Israelis say they are looking for [weapons-smuggling]
tunnels but we are too far away from the border to have tunnels.
"We heard the
bulldozer and we saw the walls shaking. I put my children in one room
and I went to the bulldozer and said there were children in the house.
The children were all crying. The driver kept bulldozing. I was crying
and shouting and begging and waving a white flag.
"The men smashed
a hole in the wall to the neighbour's house. They had pieces of wood
and they were hitting and hitting. They all came to help us."
The family escaped,
but not much was recovered from the rubble. A couple of kerosene lanterns
and many of the children's schoolbooks survived, as did the kitchen
furniture and fridge. But all the beds and clothes are gone.
"The children
don't want to go to school in these clothes. They have been wearing
them for days. They are ashamed," she says.
"This was my
home for 22 years. I moved here when I married my husband. There's nothing
better than this home. I am sleeping on the stone floor now, but I'm
staying here for my dignity. I have no idea how we will rebuild it.
My husband used to be a builder in Israel but he is not allowed to work
there anymore. We have no money to rebuild.
"They only
have malice against all Palestinians because the Jews don't want to
see Palestinians as people. They just want to destroy us."
The Abu Masod
family
Mohammed Abu Masod says the graffiti on the shell of his home and factory
was nothing to do with him, but he sympathises with its sentiment. Sprayed
on to what had been one of the building's floors, now sloping precariously
after an army bulldozer ripped the supporting wall away, is a Star of
David next to a Nazi swastika. The equation deeply offends almost all
Israelis, and Palestinians know it. But Abu Masod, sitting in the rubble
of the business that fed his extended family, sees what he describes
as a common lack of humanity between the two.
"They do not
see us as human beings. They have no humanity. Look at the Jewish settlers:
they live so well and we live so badly because of it. And then what
little we have the Jews destroy. They didn't give us two minutes to
get out. They were slapping us in the face. They called us terrorists.
Who are the terrorists now?"
One in three buildings
in Masod's street were demolished by the armoured bulldozers. All that
emerged from what had been his factory, which made car carpets and seat
covers, is a couple of ruined sewing machines, a few blankets and a
battered car seat.
The Abu Masod family
came from Wadi Hanin, a village that no longer exists inside Israel.
Wadi Hanin was razed; Mohammed came to Rafah as a baby in 1948. He was
living in Yibna in 1973 when his home there was demolished by Sharon's
bulldozers in what was then, too, called an anti-terrorist operation.
He moved to al-Brazil. "We were six brothers when we built this
place. Now we are 40 people living in this building," he says.
"This little factory, all the family lived off it. We made carpets
for cars and chairs. We got nothing out of the building: the machines,
our clothes, the furniture, our gold, food - nothing. We didn't even
get the needles."
"There are
about 20 sewing machines in the rubble. I lost tens of thousands of
dollars. We bought all the machines from Italy. They were all new a
few years ago."
When the bulldozers
arrived, Abu Masod was in the house with two of his older sons, Jabr,
20, and Masod, 16. There were also five of his brothers and their 12
children, including six babies. "We were all in the house. We waved
white flags and we were talking to the bulldozer driver. We said we
had children in here. The army gathered all of the men, handcuffed us,
covered our eyes and took as to the border for interrogation. The children
were sheltering in a neighbour's house."
The destruction
was thorough. One building was entirely destroyed and another, built
above the ground-floor sewing shop, was partially collapsed and most
of the contents smashed. On top of the rubble lies a sycamore tree that
has been ripped from the ground.
"Now I am homeless
in the street. I sleep here, in the rubble. The children sleep with
the neighbours. I don't have money to buy food for the children so the
neighbours are feeding them. I can't afford to rebuild. The clothes
I'm wearing are all I have."