A stone’s throw away from the Israeli border in Shajaiya, a group of young men are rummaging among the steel and concrete that remains of the Sarayo Biscuits Factory.
Hasan Ahmed Al Awadi, who worked here as a watchman, now sits looking at the rubble. He is using part of the former offices to raise some poultry.
“I can’t give you biscuits but I have some chickens,” he tells me smiling.
A year ago, Israeli tanks and fighter planes reduced the factory to rubble, leaving 50 workers jobless and Hasan’s colleague dead.
Further down the road, Al Wafa Hospital has just managed to get a consignment of cement and glass smuggled from the tunnels to be able to repair the extensive damage to the new state of the art four-storey building for rehabilitation and the elderly.
“We had a totally new building that was meant to be inaugurated in January 2009,” says the head of rehabilitation, Dr Kamees Al Issi. “The Israelis inaugurated it for us. Not one window pane was left intact.”
Facing the hospital is the Gaza juice factory. The cold store was totally burnt down and most of the equipment destroyed. The factory now employs half of the 100 workers it had before the war, and they are manually capping and labelling bottles through new equipment they managed to get through the tunnels.
In Zeitoun, Sameh Sawafiri had a poultry farm of 30,000 chickens, providing most of Gaza’s supply of eggs. Israeli soldiers flattened them all in their cages. Now he has managed to reopen with one-third of the chickens had a year ago, and a lot of debts.
The owners of El Bader Flour Mill in Beit Lahiya were not so lucky. Israeli planes targeted the central nerve of the mill, leaving it totally out of action.
“Since the war we had to stop completely,” says Hamdan Hamada who still pays 25 of the 85 workers in the hope they will be able to resume work soon. “We need iron, cement and equipment, but Israel is not allowing us to get anything. We are waiting for a political decision from Israel to get the material to reconstruct our flourmill. So far we only got promises.”
A year since the war on Gaza, most of the coastal strip is still at a standstill, waiting for a political decision from Israel, and for pressure from the rest of the world, for the blockade to be lifted. Billions of dollars pledged for reconstruction remain out of reach, making reconstruction and recovery impossible.
Driving through the streets of Gaza, the rubble is still everywhere, with many of the bombed buildings still standing like skeletons, memorials of destruction. In some parts, the rubble has started to be cleared in the last weeks, but Israel’s and Egypt’s ban on construction material makes it impossible to rebuild the 3,535 homes that were totally destroyed last January.
Mohammed Zaid Hader’s family from Izbet Abed Rabbo is one of around 1,000 still living in tents. It is their second winter facing the cold and the rain. Left totally impoverished since his four-storey house was destroyed, he has become one of the 80% of Gazans dependent on humanitarian aid.
Beyond reconstruction, thousands of lives have been destroyed with the death and suffering of relatives, friends and neighbours.
Nawer Thabet from Juhor Ad Dik lost her mother and only sister when their house was shelled. One year on, she is still in trauma, recounting, in tears, how she is unable to go back to the house where her mother always welcomed her.
“I remember this tragedy everyday, I can’t get it out of my mind. I still can’t go back to our house in Johr Al Deek, I can’t face it,” she says.
Everyone says they were used to attacks from the Israeli army, but this was something else altogether. The attacks were coming from everywhere, leaving nowhere to escape as people were forbidden to leave the Gaza Strip to seek refuge far from the conflict zone. “Nowhere is safe” could not ring truer than during what the Israelis called ‘Operation Cast Lead’.
Children are perhaps paying the highest price. The war taught them that not even their homes were safe, and not even their parents could protect them.
Ahmed Hdeir, father of six from Beit Lahiya, told his children the war was just a computer game.
“But when they hit our house I couldn’t keep up that story,” he says. They still suffer from nightmares and he takes them to psychologists for counselling every week.
In the last Eid at the end of November, thousands of children were playing in the streets with toy guns. Gazan psychiatrists are concerned about the widespread trauma and further radicalisation they are inevitably faced with. When everything is lost, the only glorious way seems that of the martyr.
While the bombs were falling all over Gaza, Abdul Salam from Beit Lahiya spent his time sleeping, even when his neighbourhood was fiercely bombarded.
“Everyone was exposed, so there’s no place to hide, nowhere to go,” he says “You can do nothing. You wait for a bomb to fall from the sky, to destroy your house. You just have to empty your mind, relax, and whatever happens, let it happen. I would sleep all day long. Even my wife was surprised. She used to ask me ‘Don’t you hear the bombs and the shooting?’ But what can I do?”
Gazans are known for their resilience and creative ways of getting by against all odds, but they are paying a very high price. Even before the war, the blockade was collectively punishing an entire population, leaving scars that will take decades to heal.
Young people are dying to get out, to travel and see the world, but they know they cannot plan a trip abroad. In fact, they can plan nothing at all. In Gaza, everything is ‘inshallah’ (God-willing).
A whole generation of children has never been out of Gaza. Unlike their parents, most of whom used to work in Israel and have Jewish friends, the only Israelis they have seen were armed soldiers keen on destroying their houses and killing their relatives.
Now, the Egyptian government is reportedly erecting yet another wall in Rafah – an iron barrier meant to stop tunnel smuggling. Tunnels are the only lifeline left for Gazans, and in their creative resourcefulness they might also find way around this latest obstacle. The question is, for how long will they be forced to live like this?
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