Death And Destruction
In Rafah
By Chris McGreal
in Rafah, Gaza
10 March, 2004
The Guardian
Just
a few months ago Zakia Abu Alouf's flat, built with her life's savings
from teaching in Saudi Arabia, stood in the middle of her street. The
end of the row was marked by the towering metal wall the Israeli army
built where the Rafah refugee camp in Gaza runs up against the Egyptian
border. Between the Israeli gunposts and Mrs Abu Alouf's finely decorated
home stood about a dozen houses and low-rise apartment blocks with tobacco
stores and workshops.
But that was until
the Israeli army turned its attention to the area of Rafah known as
Block J.
"There was
a three-storey building right there," said Mrs Abu Alouf, pointing
at a mound of pulverised brick and cement a few metres from her home.
"There's nothing left but that little pile. Next to it, that other
pile - that was a two-storey building. That twisted metal over there
was a Coca-Cola store. The bulldozers pushed it all the way up the road.
There were shops and a carpentry workshop. It's all gone bit by bit."
The first homes
were crushed by the monster armoured bulldozers in a wave of destruction
in October when the military wrecked about 200 homes in Rafah in what
was ostensibly an "anti-terrorist" operation in search of
tunnels used for smuggling weapons across the border.
Nearly 2,000 people
were driven from their homes, according to the UN. Many were forced
into tents just as their parents and grandparents had been when they
first fled to Rafah during the brutal upheaval of Israel's birth 56
years ago.
There was a murmur
of criticism from the west at the scale of the destruction, but it evaporated
amid Israeli insistence that it was part of the "war on terrorism"
and because Rafah, isolated on the southern tip of the Gaza strip, was
far beyond the world's gaze.
Nothing has been
heard since, even though the bulldozers have ground on and the Israeli
army continues to kill Palestinians at a higher rate in Rafah than anywhere
else in the occupied territories.
Over the past four
months, as many homes have been wrecked as during the October raid.
A further 210 have been bulldozed, forcing another 2,000 people from
their homes on the edge of the ever-widening Philadelphi Road, a five-mile
strip along the border under Israeli military control. The scale of
the devastation is now far beyond that which the town of Jenin saw two
years ago.
Destruction
With the destruction have come dozens of deaths. Three weeks ago, in
Rafah, an Israeli soldier shot dead a 10-year-old boy and wounded three
of his friends for being "suspicious figures". Rarely a night
passes without persistent Israeli gunfire into Rafah that often appears
to be random and frequently pumps bullets into ordinary homes.
Mrs Abu Alouf has
still got her flat but most of her side of the street has vanished,
with the exception of a couple of battered, abandoned buildings and
a six-storey block of flats pancaked by an Israeli demolition squad.
The bulldozers returned to grind to dust many of the wrecked homes.
Now, Mrs Abu Alouf's flat is the frontline, facing the Israeli watchtowers
200 metres away.
"That's what
makes me afraid. Mine is the last home in the street now and it's everything
we have. I have begged them not to destroy it. They know there are no
tunnels here, but I don't think it is about that at all. Do they really
believe that every house in my street had a tunnel under the border?"
she said.
Mrs Abu Alouf's
four children no longer sleep in their bedrooms because Israeli bullets
periodically crash through the windows. The entire family is confined
to a single inner room at night and has built an inner wall right next
to the toilet after one child was nearly shot while sitting on it. Her
12-year-old daughter has taken to sucking her thumb again.
For Palestinians,
the continuing destruction flies in the face of Ariel Sharon's pledge
to pull all the Jews out of Gaza. The Israelis say that a proposed withdrawal
at some ill-defined date is no reason for them to let up their efforts
to "combat terrorism". The Palestinians suspect that the Israeli
prime minister's promise has only made more urgent the army's desire
to assert its grip over a wide swath of the border with Egypt. "It's
not a matter of tunnels or terrorists," said Yusuf Ashair, another
man made homeless in Block J. "They want us out of here, they want
us to flee. They don't care if it's a school or a house they destroy.
They know that if they destroy it all people will leave."
The destruction
is not just in Block J. In December, the army bulldozed 33 homes in
the al-Brazil area of Rafah. In the Yibna district 96 homes were destroyed.
Mazeb Agha, 14,
lives in the wreckage of his house with his family because they have
got nowhere to go. "I know that staying here could cost me my life,"
he said. "Most of the neighbours left when their houses were destroyed.
But we have no money for rent to move somewhere else. This is our only
home. So we stay on the other side of the house and we never go upstairs.
It's too dangerous."
Mrs Abu Alouf teaches
at a neighbourhood school where the "School Vision" statement
at the main entrance includes the right to a "secure environment".
Much of the front wall and gate were ripped out by a tank last month
but the school got off relatively lightly compared with a nearby school
that had its classrooms wrecked.
The headteacher,
Subhiya Silawi, said: "We were lucky because none of our pupils
was hurt in their homes this time. We had a 10 year-old student, Hani
Radaiya, killed by an Israeli bullet in front of his house in November
and another child shot in the foot a few weeks ago. This is the hardest
thing to accept