Almost a year since his three-storey house in northern Gaza was destroyed, Mohammed Zaid Hader is still living in a tent in the shadow of what remains of his former house, and his outlook is only bound to get more grim.
It will be the second cold winter that he will have to face with his wife and eight daughters, because, like the rest of the owners of more than 3,500 homes that were totally destroyed in Israel’s last offensive, he cannot get the material to rebuild it. For Mohammed and his family, the two-year blockade on Gaza has made daily life miserable, leaving them vulnerable and desperate for the most basic necessities.
As I approach his tent, we pass through makeshift canals dug desperately in the sand on the night when Gaza got its first torrential rain of this winter.
“We were totally flooded, we couldn’t keep up with the water. I kept digging to divert as much water as I could, but it was impossible, he says as he braces himself for worse yet to come.
The sense of hopelessness here, where an entire neighbourhood made up of hundreds of houses was razed to the ground last January, is as overwhelming as the scale of destruction.
For Mohammed, the irony could not be more poignant. As a former builder who used to work in Israel, he worked with Israeli employers on construction sites to build their own properties.
“We built Israel with our Jewish friends, and look at what they did to our houses,” he said. “Why did they have to bomb our houses like this?”
Israel’s two-year blockade since Hamas took over control of Gaza means that none of the essential reconstruction material can come into the strip – from cement and tiles to plastic pipes and glass. Demand in Gaza for window glass alone would cover 30 football fields with glass.
Mohammed is now unemployed. Like thousands of others, he was stopped from working in Israel in response to the 2000 Intifada. This year, he worked for a few months in a smuggling tunnel until it collapsed, leaving him injured and fearing for his life.
He told me it took him four years to build his house. The little financial help he received after it was destroyed disappeared quickly to pay old debts. Now he is penniless even if there was material available to rebuild it. Across Gaza, more than a hundred other families face the same situation, living in tents that were too hot in summer and are now unfit for the cold winter weather.
As we speak, bulldozers are removing most of the rubble, although Mohammed is still using the remains of his house to shelter a water tank and some poultry. He does not know where he will put them once the area is cleared.
Amid the rubble, Mohammed has collected dozens of tiles that he salvaged and that once used to pave the floors of his house. They may be priceless in Gaza given the total blockade, but he has no house to put them in and no idea when he will have.
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