’They have no humanity. They didn’t even give us two minutes to get out’

Last month, Israeli troops swept into the Rafah refugee
camp in Gaza, bulldozing hundreds of homes and leaving
around 60 dead. Israel says it was looking for
terrorists, but by the time the army withdrew, 1,600
people were homeless. What happens to the people whose
houses are destroyed? CHRIS MCGREAL asked six families
to show him what they salvaged from the rubble

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."

http://www.guardian.co.uk/israel/Story/0,2763,1231162,00.html