Sakher Abu El Oun: Ruin, despair in Gaza neighborhood after Israeli attack
AFP 31 Aug 2006
Surrounded by burned-out cars, buildings riddled with bullet holes and tank tracks, Um Hossam Abu al-Qunbuz lifts her hands to the sky and cries: “I beg the world to stop these attacks!”
The elderly mother spoke amid the rubble of her partially destroyed home in the Shajaiya neighborhood of Gaza City, from where Israeli troops pulled out early Thursday after a four-day-plus operation that killed 20 people.
The incursion, which began late Saturday, was the latest in a two-month-long Israeli offensive in the coastal strip that aims at rooting out militants but often leaves civilians dead.
Palestinian witnesses say most of the 20 people killed in Shajaiya were civilians, including a 12-year-old boy. The Israeli army says most were “armed men.”
The Israeli offensive, launched after Gaza militants seized a soldier in a cross-border raid that also killed two others, has left more than 200 Palestinians dead.
Operations like the one in Shajaiya have wreaked destruction and despair in the impoverished, densely packed territory already straining under a Western aid freeze and electricity rationing after Israel bombed its sole power plant.
The army says the incursion, like all others, was aimed at rooting out “terrorist infrastructure” and released photos of an uncovered tunnel, dug from a house in the neighborhood 150 meters (yards) east to the Karni crossing point with Israel.
The army says the tunnel was meant to be used for an attack on the terminal, used for commercial trade between Israel and Gaza.
Residents in neighborhoods like Shajaiya say the Israeli operations kill civilians indiscriminantly and amount to collective punishment for actions of the radicalized territory’s militant groups.
“May God take revenge on them, look what they’ve done,” Abu al-Qunbuz says.
“They took over and destroyed our houses,” she says, a few hours after the Israeli tanks pulled out. “They didn’t bring us food and water. They locked us in rooms and prevented us from moving around.”
In the mourning tents that line Mansur Street where Abu al-Qunbuz lives, relatives of the dead receive condolences from well-wishers. The tents are covered with flags of nearly all the dozen armed groups operating in Gaza.
Along with rubble, the ground is littered with fliers dropped from Israeli planes, which warn residents that they are being used as “human shields” by “terrorist elements.”
“Don’t let extremist groups that work for foreign interests prevent you from having a future of security and a flourishing economy,” says one.
Municipal workers work to repair damage to electricity poles and water and sewage pipes, as stone-faced residents of the area look on impassively.
“I was alone with my children” when the incursion began, says Um Mohammed Abu Qunbuz.
“My husband is abroad. We were so afraid. My youngest daughter, four years old, could not stop crying. She thought she would never again see her father. She kept repeating ‘we are going to die, we are going to die.'”
Even worse, she says, is the fact that the Israeli army razed the family’s nearby olive orchard.
“They destroyed our 100 year-old olive trees. It’s like they destroyed us,” she says.
The neighborhood’s merchants were also hit hard by the incursion.
“I’ve lost everything, my warehouse, my car, my house,” says Talal Shaaban, 60, as he stands in a shed whose floor is covered with newly bought cloth. It is now torn, dirtied, unsellable.
“The soldiers locked us in a room in our house and we had to ask them permission to go to the toilet. Is that normal? In our own house!”
Copyright © 2006 Agence France Presse. All rights reserved
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