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Often after the demo against the Buffer Zone near Beit Hanoun (Erez) crossing we walk back and sit near the little breeze block construction waiting for the transport.Samir, a volunteer with the demo organizers Local Initiative Beit Hanoun always sits on these stairs. A very normal thing to do – one sits on the stairs, as one does. But the chunk of a ‘stair concrete’, sits awkwardly, dipping down on the side of the street and there is a house missing. It must have been thorn from the body of the house by an amazingly destructive force.
Yesterday on 10 May, after a Naqba commemoration , after dabkha dance, coffee and bread made the way Palestinians working in the field always used to make them, I asked Sabr the local activist and the boss of the’ Initiative’ about the house the staircase used to belong to.
It was a smallish house and 25 people from 3 Ahmed families lived there. It was destroyed together with other nearby houses, 2 belonging to Ahmed families and 4 belonging to the Swelim families on 5 January ’09.
Before the Israeli attack in ‘08/’09 the soldiers came at night and took away Nahed, one of the Ahmad’s who lived in the ‘staircase’ house. They than destroyed his house not long after. Nahed has not seen any of this because he is still languishing in an Israeli prison.
There is a massive pile of rubble with another stairway and bits of different bathroom tiles mixed in wit the rubble nearby. Somebody’s’ homes and beautiful bathrooms ‘deconstructed’.
There is so much ‘deconstruction’ near Beit Hanoun and the neighboring Beit Lahiya. The landscape is surreal. The green fertile fields and orchards which with remains of the houses of those who worked them, with gates leading nowhere, stairways sitting in the road, floors neatly stuck up on the top of each other.
Where the destroyed Ahmed and Swelim homes were, the people have started building new houses. People here rebuild and Israelis destroy.
Tags: buffer zone, destruction of property, farming, Gaza, Israel, siege
January 24, 2011 at 10:14 pm |
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