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Our friend Jabr who has a house and land near the border in the village of Faraheen near Khan Younis, phoned early yesterday (Saturday the 22st) to say that Israelis entered with bulldozers and tanks and caused lots of damage.When two of my ISM colleagues and I got there a bit later, we walked through the field at the edge of the village towards Jabr and Leila’s house. We followed deep bulldozer and tank marks meandering through the vegetable plots for maximum damage, with the whole area covered with broken olive trees and the chopped off palm tree tops.
As we came to about 10 meters to Jabr’s I began to wander if the two large piles of what looked like rubbish were always there? As we walked on I started to recognise a tractor wheel, plastic containers and tangled metal objects all dusty, squashed and piled up on two heaps by the bulldozers.
Entering Jabr’s house was a strange experience. The ‘bed’ of grape wine which created a cool shade when we sat there recently, was on the ground. The funny apple tree with a knotty apple fruits we laughed about last time, while contemplating whether if was harmed by some chemical warfare agent, was uprooted.
It took some time to take in the new ‘layout’ created by the work of three Israeli bulldozers which were accompanied by three tanks as Jabr explained.
A part of the house was missing. The bit to the left where the grapevine ended and where Jabr and Leila had huts with 150 chickens, 60 rabbits and 200 pigeons.
All of them were killed except four chickens and the rooster who kept crowing. The neighbor Iyad, who was there with Leila’s sister and a few neighbors sitting in silence stunned by the devastation said, ‘He craws with joy because he escaped the heavy fork of the Israeli bulldozer’.
Several pigeons who managed to escape the demolition of their house were circling confused above where they used to live, landing on the roof and taking off again. Keeping pigeons is tradition in Palestine and the smoothness and compactness of their bodies made the contrast with the wrecked dusty surroundings even more unbearable.
When I asked grim looking Jabr who walked up and down restlessly, about the numbers of chickens, rabbits and pigeons, he managed to crack a joke which made even desperately sad looking Leila, who was sitting all shrunk next to the house door looking at the floor and repeating ‘alhamdullilah’, laugh.
I had 20 ‘man’ and 40 ‘women’ rabbits’, ‘he said, ‘as for the pigeons, they are monogamous like Europeans and I had 100 of each’.
He than said continuing to smile, cheered up by a joke ‘I will rebuild this or they will declare it a military zone and it will be lost forever.’ They have done the same in 2008 and I have rebuilt it’.
He told us that in 2008 they uprooted the ‘funny apple’ and that he managed to plant it again and it survived. ‘I will try to plant it again, maybe it will live’, he said. He than looked at his grapevine with big green grapes, which was hanging awkwardly on the knocked down mangled metal construction, ‘This is lost forever and it will not recover’, he said and picked a grape to show us that it had softened and lost its crispness. The flow of ‘life giving’ juices has been cut of irreversibly. ‘It took me seven years to grow this grapevine’, he said.
Jabr than said something which to me in the circumstances, sounded surreal ‘Let our minds be free and let hate and anger go in one ear and leave via the other’. ‘I will replant again and again. I will always continue to replant’, he said and I felt like screaming from the feeling of helplessness and injustice.
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Next to the huts Jabr had a workshop where he fixed all kinds of things including electrical goods. Nothing gets thrown in Palestine. Everything is mended and put in use. The recyclers from around the world should come here to learn.I looked at the chaos of broken things and the ‘shapes’ begun to emerge. There were two washing machines at the back of the pile nearest to the house. ‘One was our main machine’ said Jabr, ‘I got it outside the house recently to repaint it’. There was a large black plastic water tank, everybody here has one of those in Gaza and Jabr told me that it costs $250. It was full of drinking water which he also had to buy. Under the rubble there was a water pump which would cost more than $1000 to replace, a microwave, a $700 worth electrical ‘spraying pump’ for chemicals against the plant pests and disease.
Bodies of all the animals were also buried under. Further to the right in front of the house there was of one wheel of Jabr’s second tractor, which was thorn apart from the second wheel laying 30 meters away to the left. ‘I bought it two years ago and I used it when the other tractor would break down’, said Jabr. ‘To buy a much older tractor than the one they destroyed, now would cost me $10,000’.
All in all to replace just some of the things Jabr had in his yard, which he acquired and kept in good nick over the years, Jabr would need an astronomical sum of $50,000.
The second heap was Leila’s beautiful garden where last time we were there I saw neat lines of vegetables. Leila loved her garden and was showing to us all different things she was growing and telling us their names in Arabic. Last time she asked her son Subhi to pick a large bunch of garlic which I assume she hung somewhere to dry and which is now the only crop she will ever get from that garden.
The second tractor wheel was there and onions could be seen in the perturbed soil together with the broken small fruit threes which they planted among the vegetables.
Jabr pointed at the ‘nahal’, the palm tree, in front of the house. ‘In 2008 the tank fired at its top. It did not kill it! As you can see it grew back with its ‘crown bent’, but it is alive’, said Jabr making the point again about the life going on.
‘On 15 of May every year we commemorate the anniversary of Nakba, the catastrophe, when we lost our homes and out land. Israelis join in the commemorations by making another Nakba for us every May. They probably call it a ‘Land Day’, because every May they come here to ruin our land again and again’, said Jabr.
I asked him why in May and he said ‘Because we are here’. I told him that maybe in May the Israeli Army gets new recruits who want to have a go at the ‘joy riding of the bulldozers and the tanks’ and Jabr’s shrug his shoulders, he did not know why, but he dreaded the month of May.
I asked if a white donkey in the field was his and Jabr say : ‘Yes he is. Do you know that Israeli soldiers do not like donkeys? Why? Because there are terrorists’ , said Jabr and began to laugh. ‘When the donkeys sense someone approaching they raise their ears and start to make ‘donkey noise’, and soldiers do not like these ‘warning signals’. They think that it could be used by the ‘muqawama’, the resistance’. For this reason they killed Jabr’s other donkey seven months ago.
‘It was after the bombing and there was no petrol for the cars and donkeys were used as the only transport and were worth their weight in gold’.
As soon as we arrived to Jabr’s an Isreali jeep pulled in, right opposite Jabr’s house staying on the Israeli side of the fence. We than heard several shots and by their sound all in Jabr’s house knew that they were coming form the unmanned automated tower about one kilometer away.
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Three bulldozers and there tanks attacked Jabr’s home and land at eight ‘oclock on Friday night. There were many more of them lined at the other end of the border fence with large number of jeeps.Earlier, on the same day at around 1.30 two teenagers age 16 or so, in civilian clothes, armed with Kalashnikovs walked passed Jabr’s house. They walked straight towards the dangerous border fence, crossed over it and climbed the earth mound Israelis use as a raised point to park their jeeps and have a clear view of what is going on on the Palestinian side below. This is where they often fire form at villagers working in their fields.
Jabr asked them to return but they did not listen. ‘They were on their way to meet their death, and they knew it’, he said.
This part of the border, like all parts of the border between Gaza and Israel, is heavily secured by the sensors and unmanned observation towers. The Isreali jeeps arrived shortly and the teens stood and fired. When one of them run out of ammunition he raised his arms in the air, but was killed. This was around 2.30. They other one continued to fire until he was mowed down an hour later, at about 3.30. Jabr said that they were from the neighboring village.
Another hour passed after the teens were killed before a large group of about 1000 youth arrived form nearby town of Khan Younis and surrounding villages and walked calmly and fearlessly to the border wire demanding their bodies. People who have not experienced the Isreali border fence will never know the amount of guts it takes to do that.
Israeli’s did not shoot at them, surprisingly to me, but they fired a smoke bomb into Jabr’s garden, God knows why, and later when the night fell they came to destroy it.
The bodies were handed over to the three Red Crescent Ambulances accompanied by the International Committed of Red Cross. The teen who surrendered was hit in the head and the hearth and the other in the neck with a barrage of fire which all but cut off his head from his body.
As soon as the bodies were handed over the tanks and bulldozers rolled through the Faraheen fields. Before they paid their unwanted visit to Jabr’s, they went straight to his cousin’s house. At around six in the eve the same there bulldozers and three tanks plowed their way to Huda and Harb’s house, destroying an orchards with 30 olive and many more fruit and palm threes on their way to the house where Huda and her Husband Harb lived with their 14 children.
The bulldozers entered through the living room wall taking it down form the front and the side and knocking down a concrete flat roof above. Its one end was now touching the ground squashing the concrete walls underneath and messing up the once neatly lined decorative red bricks lining of the pretty arched windows.
The scene was shocking, like in the previous house demolitions I saw couple of months ago near the Juhor Al Deek border further north, the people were still inside the dangerous house structure, looking around stunned.
I asked them if they talked to the soldiers and if they were asked to leave. The father of the family Harb, said that they feared the worst when they saw the deadly convoy and fled the house. They returned this morning to find their house ruined.
Harb, whose name means ‘war’ in Arabic is 60 and was born two yers after the 1948 Nakba as a refugee in Gaza. He started saving for the house since he was 18 and it took him 15 year to get the house to the state it was in when Israeli’s demolished it. It was sill unfinished with lots more to do but they all lived in it as a family and were happy.
Harb looked stunned and quiet while Huda could not stop crying and telling me that she had no idea what they were going to do.
They are a family of farmers and they have no other source if income but the land that is now in ruins. For now most of the children were staying with Huda’s sister in the nearby village.
This was the first time their house, which was 1000 meters away from the border fence was destroyed but in 2008, in the same raid when Jabr’s land was destroyed, their orchard was demolished. They rebuilt it and they will have to do it again.
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Tags: buffer zone, destruction of property, farming, Gaza, injury, Israel, killing civilians, occupation, resistance, siege, war crimes
