Karl Schembri RAFAH, Gaza Strip – Opening the door to her house, Sanaa El Nahhal warns me there is still a lot of work to be done before it can be called a home. The dust on the unfinished floor, the glassless windows and the bare cement make it immediately clear that the house is still under construction. But in reality, it isn’t.
“It would take a few more months’ work to finish, but we can’t find the material to continue,” Sanaa tells me as we walk through rooms which have been left incomplete for years.
Like thousands of other unfinished houses in the Gaza Strip, Sanaa’s was caught in the period when Hamas took over control of the territory in 2007. The ensuing blockade by Israel and Egypt meant that all construction material, including cement, tiles and even glass panes, were banned from entering the strip.
Israel cites “security” reasons to justify the siege, which has been in place since the Islamist movement took control of the Gaza Strip.
Yet the siege has made the lives of 1.5 million Palestinians living here miserable, 85 per cent of whom survive on humanitarian aid, and with the number of abject poor tripling since Israel’s war on Gaza last January. Indeed, after the war, the number of houses in need of reconstruction increased by thousands, but none of the works could start as the crippling blockade remains in place.
Sanaa, who has been living in Malta for the last 20 years, was planning to build her own family house in Rafah a few years ago, where the rest of the El Nahhal extended family lives.
Even her brother, Samir, who was in Malta after the war, has an unfinished house nearby, waiting for the moment when tiles, cement and paint are back on the market.
“Right now it’s very hard to find anything, or else it’s very expensive,” he said. He was lucky enough to have finished the ground floor, where he lives with his wife, son and two daughters, but the stairs lead to empty, unfinished rooms.
Their father’s fields on the border with Egypt lie abandoned, an olive grove surviving on its own.
“We used to grow fruit and vegetables and sell them in Israel, and they would even be exported as products of Israel at a high price,” Samir says. “But now we can’t get them out of the strip.”
The price their produce would fetch today in Gaza has gone down to one-tenth of what it was a few years ago, forcing them to abandon agriculture completely.
“My father still comes here to look at the trees and to water them, but there is no work to be done,” Samir said. “I told him if it were up to me, I would have already sold the land, but he insists this is family land and that we have to hold on to it.”
In a nearby field, Sanaa’s cousin Khaled El Nahhal is still growing some tomatoes and marrows, although most of his fields are empty. He also laments the fall in work and shows me damaged greenhouses that can’t be repaired.
Sanaa is now waiting for the Rafah border to open to be able to return to Malta after visiting her family.
“We have been planning to come back here and resettle in Gaza,” she says about her husband and two children living in Malta as we walk away from the area. “But not now.”
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