For the third morning yesterday, Thursday the 10 June ’10, we went to Abu Ta’ima land in the Khuza’a region east of Khan Younis. We accompanied the mukhtar, the village leader, Naser Abu Ta’ima and members of his family, including 6 woman and 2 teenagers, who went to harvest the wheat.  We started just after 6 am hoping to do lots of work before 10 o’clock, when it becomes to hot.

As we were traveling on a horse drawn chart to the fields near the dangerous border, the mood was somber and tense after the exceptionally heavy shooting we experienced the day before.

I have been with my ISM friends  and Abu Ta’ima farmers to those fields many times. We have seen the wheat which is now harvested being sown and fertilized. I remember those accompaniments well because every time, without exception, Israeli soldiers would drive to the border wire, park their jeeps with their lights on and start firing.  

Life ammunition, of course. Nothing less would do for Israelis in Gaza. No ‘fancy stuff’ like the rubber coated steel bullets or tear gas for Gazans!  

This is where in my very first days in Gaza in January, I stood with my 2 ISM girlfriends Eva and Bianca, with my hearth pounding under the shower of bullets whizzing too close to our heads and raising small clouds of dust as they hit a few meters away form us. 

I will never forget the high pitched ‘metallic’ sound of a bullet passing by my ear and the shock of the realization that that was what farmers in Gaza had to endure daily just to grow their crops.

The firing on the day before, the Wednesday was even worse than the one in January.

Wheat harvesting in Gaza is done manually and mainly by women. They work on their knees pulling dry wheat from the sandy soil with their bare hands and putting the wheat blades on the piles and moving slowly on.

I was standing on Wednesday in front of the women and while we were chatting their eyes darted frequently towards the border.

They were telling me that soldiers fire at them every time and that there was a routine soldiers usually stick to. They come at 7 o’clock, fire in the air and than go away. ‘They have breakfast at 8 o’clock’, one woman said and I was not sure if she was kidding, but she did not look like she was joking. Than soldiers come again at 10 or 10.30 as the farmers are preparing to leave to fire a bit more.

On Wednesday I saw three jeeps coming form the left and the women told me not to worry ‘they would turn back without stopping’. And that is exactly what happened. It seems that jeeps patrol a particular ‘chunk’ of the border and that was where the stretch of that particular patrol ended.

What all farmers were looking at with great anxiety was the two jeeps about 200 meters inside Israel, one parked on the earth mound near the two communication towers and one close to it.

When the jeeps moved, everyone stopped in silence and waited watching intensely. If they turned left ‘mish mushkila’, no problem, because they were going away for a while and if they turned right the women would get up and start rapidly walking away, looking back all the time. Some did not walk but crawl because the land is flat and they know that they could be killed by the bullet from a very long distance.

It has happened before. A friend tells me that a boy was killed while sitting in his home in Al Maghazi area not so far away form Abu Ta’ima, by a bullet randomly fired by Israelis form 2 kilometers away.

The mukhtar Abu Ta’ima usually does not rush away. He stays. He would not be bullied by the soldiers. He said this was the only land he had and that he had to face whatever they had in stake for him.

I heard him say yesterday that his family was thrown out of Bir Sabr, nowadays known as Ber Shiba and that they came to Gaza in 1948 as refugees. ‘I am not going to be made a refugee ever again’, he says.

But the usual border routine was broken on Wednesday. After a bit of shooting at 7 at around 8.30 three jeeps drove near the border fence. One climbed the observation mound near by and one parked exactly opposite from where we were. The soldiers got out and than the whole hell broke loose.

They fired only couple of times in the air and what followed was a barrage of about 50 bullets flying at the head level, and hitting between and around us. Bianca took the loudspeaker and started asking soldiers to stop shooting as we were no threat to them and explaining that we were international peace activists accompanying Palestinian farmers on their land. The women started giggling, I did not manage to ask why.

What followed was more firing. I saw women crawling fast on their hands and knees in panic. One of them was particularly afraid and I saw her just lying on the land face down and for a moment worried that she was shot. We followed behind them and pulled about 50 meters back. After 10 minutes the jeeps left and we all returned and a large plot quite near the border was harvested.

There was lots of anxiety and tense scrutiny of the jeep movements at the other side of the border in case soldiers return at 10 am to fire their parting shots, but they failed to do that. Did they have enough thrills for that day?

Inspite of the successful end yesterday, everybody was worried going to the fields the next morning on Thursday. Abu Ta’ima’s young daughter who kept asking me on Wednesday to stand in front of her and shield her, explained that she had two children ages 1 and 2 and that was why she worried about being shot.

On the horse drawn chart she nearly cried when I asked her if she was afraid to return to the fields. ‘I could not sleep last night I kept looking at my children’, she said.

After working in tension for about two hours, all eyes fixed to the jeeps near the communication towers and fleeing in haste when they twice moved near the fence, the second time firing in the air, the farmers told the 3 of us around 8 o’clock that they were leaving.

I was puzzled because I thought that the jeeps were gone and that they could do lots of work in peace at long last, just like on Wednesday.

Abu Ta’ima’s daughter explained that the soldiers were going to return for sure and start shooting not in the air but at us.

I did not quite believe what she was saying. I thought that the fear was making her overly cautious and that she was in a hurry to be with her children.

But less than 10 minutes later, as we were just waiting there talking we saw 4 jeeps driving towards us. Women fled and made the teens follow. Abu Ta’ima stayed for a while with Bianca continuing to pull blades of wheat saying ‘half of my wheat is still in the ground. This is my land. Where is justice? Where is America and Europe to see this? Will you make sure to write about this and let everybody know.’’ 

Than Abu Ta’ima said that we should go I knew that there was no more time left to hang about.

We got back onto the charts feeling unhappy and unfulfilled. I asked Abu Ta’ima if he thought that they would leave us alone next time. No, he did not think so, but he was going to go again wheat harvesting on Saturday and wants us to join him.

This morning (Friday 28^th) Bianca and I visited two of the wounded farmers in the Al Shifa Hospital in Gaza City.

Baraqa Mihammad AL Mugrabi, age 53 and Musa Ashad Badawi, age 28 are neighbors and they went to farm yesterday at 6 o’clock in the morning. Because they have small plots of land they were quite near each other and a part of a larger group of about 30 people.

Baraga has 5 dunums of land and Musa 12, and they grow olives, apricots and other fruits as well as vegetables and some wheat.

Both of them are farmers with no other source of income and  large number of people depend on their farming income. In Musa’s case that includes over 20 members of his family including his parents and younger siblings.

Baraka supports a large family of 10 children, his parents and several older relatives.

Soon after they started farming earth-to earth missiles fired at them from 10 Israeli tanks.  ‘There were helicopters, drones, many army jeeps, 10 tanks and 10 bulldozers which later entered our land to level the mounds their artillery shells created’, said Baraka.

‘The firing was both heavy and sudden’, said Baraka, ‘about 25 artillery shells hit the area where we were and without any prior warning’.

Musa told us that they shoot at them from the guns almost daily but this was the first time they fired from the tanks.

Artillery shrapnel shattered Barak’ bone in the lower arm in several places and caused nerve damage. He also suffered spine injury in a fall following the wounding.

Musa’s thigh bone was broken, the x-ray shows a large fracture with two parts of the bone several centimeters away from each other.

When we spoke to them both Barak and Musa were in lots of pain following surgeries they had undergone yesterday and they were told that they would both have to spent at least six weeks in the hospital to ensure recovery.

Musa had no feeling in his leg and Baraka was worried that the nerve  damage would leave him permanently without use of his arm.

And of course, both of them will have to return to the place where they suffered shock and so much pain.

They have no choice, they are farmers and they have no other options. What preoccupies  both of them already is the time they will be unable to work because of their injuries and how will their families manage financially.

Musa was told that his recovery will take a whole year and Baraka’ at least six months.

Palestinian news agency Maan reported that the training centre of the Hamas’s military wing Al Qassam brigades was hit by 2 missiles and that 4 missiles were fired at already demolished Yasser Arafat Airport in Rafah, near the border with Egypt.

Maan quoted the Israeli Army (IA) spokesperson who talked about the need to destroy ‘terror tunnels’ and the attack being in response to the two rockets fired form Gaza into the border town of Askhelon.

The IA spokesperson did not mention that one of the bombed area was in a densely populated part of Beit Hanoun next to the kindergarten and summer play scheme for schoolchildren, which are both seriously damaged. 

Across the Al A’alam Street where the training compound is located, there was hardly any building intact. The nearest ones had windows blown out, and we saw a curtain hanging on the street light electrical wire 10 metres form the mangled metal window frame where it ones lived.

The shops and the flats on the ground floors were all heavily damaged. The young owner of a trendy looking hairdressers’ invited us to his saloon which was covered with glass, with a large metal chunk of the F16 rocket resting on the coffee table.

Nobody so far came to visits or write a report on the damage and the hair dresser said that he did not expect any help with fixing the damage.

We spoke with a group of people who were standing in front of the damaged houses and they told us that in each of the 15 houses facing the area directly hit,  2 or 3 people have sustained injuries, mainly from the falling debris or the broken glass and that 6 of them were children.

We went to a house of a family who had a large whole in their front wall, where their living room was. Diagonally there was a broken door though which a meter long white tube traveled landing 15 meters away in a cot of a 5 day old boy Riyad, in the room across the courtyard. When we came his mum was holding him, still in shock and distraught at what might have happened. The family said that the powerful blast smashed  roofs of the rooms in the back of the house and showed the beds with large chunks of corrugated roof covers and other debris. ‘There was somebody in every bed’, said the mother of the house, ‘we are grateful to Allah that nobody was killed’.

Couple of doors down there was a small supermarket which was badly damaged, and so was the furniture shop next to it , with its long metal doors laying bent on the pavement.

Vik who was here during the bombing raids over a year ago said that this attack was worrying because there were hardly any similar attacks on the  heavily populated areas since January ’09. 

A local resident told us that the noise and the air pressure form the blast were horrendous.  Windows on the second floor of his house were broken even though his house was 500 meters away.

‘I think that Israelis used missiles they use to destroy tunnels’, he said. ‘They create pressure which causes tunnels to collapse’.

‘Children were woken up by the noise’, said the grandmother of the 5 day old baby who had a lucky escape. ‘I don’t think that there ill be many children who will have a good night sleep in a long time to come’.

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.

Click to view slideshow. 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.

Click to view slideshow.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.

Click to view slideshow.
]]> http://gazathroughthepinktintedglasses.wordpress.com/2010/05/24/life-in-the-shaddow-of-israeli-caterpillers/feed/ 0 radamontenegro http://gazathroughthepinktintedglasses.wordpress.com/2010/05/17/israelis-burn-farakheen-crops/ http://gazathroughthepinktintedglasses.wordpress.com/2010/05/17/israelis-burn-farakheen-crops/#comments Mon, 17 May 2010 17:16:53 +0000 radamontenegro http://gazathroughthepinktintedglasses.wordpress.com/?p=429 ]]> Click to view slideshow.When we arrived in the village of Farakheen at 7 this morning about 20 wheat harvesters were already shot at.  Shots were fired again just after 8. They worked hard and fast keeping an eye at the perilous border. At 10 they went to their homes planning to return the next day to complete the harvest. This afternoon Israeli tanks and bulldozers entered the Palestinian side and soldiers used flame throwers to burn what was left.  Lives of Gazan farmers are unimaginably hard. They risk their loves every time they go to their fields, they work dawn to dusk and more often than not all of that is in vain.

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.

By 1917 Gaza was in ruins. As many times before, through its 3000 years long history, Gaza had a bad luck to become a battleground.

This time it was Britain fighting by than the ‘Sick man of Bosporus’, the Ottoman Empire, which ruled for 5 centuries in  the Middle East and Europe all the way to the walls of Vienna.

The Turks were fortified in Gaza and British were besieging them and pounding Gaza mercilessly.

Until 1917 an exceptionally incompetent Sir Archibald Murray was in charge of 44 thousand British soldier . He did not spare his man because he previously lied to the War Cabinet in London that the war in Gaza was going really well and he was desperate for success.  

Some of the 4 thousand soldiers he lost are buried in the war cemeteries in Gaza City and Deir Al Balah, a town about 15 kilometers to the south.

In 1917 Murray was replaced by Sir Edmund Allenby (of the Allenby Bridge fame (-: ) who continued with the waves of attacks on the fortified Turks.

He entered destroyed and deserted Gaza on 7 November 1917 after a 9 month long battle and 30 years of UK occupation followed.

There was nothing left of historical Gaza or otherwise and even the English Hospital, set up by the English missionaries in 1880 was in ruins.

Over 10 thousand British soldiers and soldiers from the colonies died in Gaza. I am sure there are figures of how many Gazans were killed but they are not so easy to come by. Some things never change!

Looking at the gravestones 19 April 1917 and 2 November 1917 seem to have been a particularly bloody.  Possibly 2 November because the battle was raging just before Allenby entered Gaza.

In the Gaza Cemetery there are  also some  graves from WW2. Brits, Australians, Polish, New Zealanders, Greeks, one Yugoslav and remarkably there are 4  enemy German graves!

There is a memorial to 12 ‘Musliman’ soldiers form Indian Army, 25 Indians, and there is a little separate cemetery for Canadians killed in ‘ate 50s and 60s.

 I came across the graves of two women one English, Staff Nurse Mary who died in the WW1 and a Lieutenant Jean from New Zeland who died in WW2. There are a few more medics one from a dental unit. This kind of detail brings the whole horrible war thing a bit closer and a bit more real after almost 100 years. Soldiers had toothaches on the top of all the other suffering, of course and than the dentist soldier was killed.

Walking around on the soft English grass in the late afternoon in  this beautiful and well looked after  cemetery  it  would be easy to forget where one is – there is nothing Gazan an about this place.

It is like a bit of Britain was created in this faraway place so that soldiers can be in a familiar place.

During the WW1 Brits encouraged Arabs to revolt against the Turks and were promised independence and than betrayed. After the WW1 was over the Arab lands were divided between Britain and France and the rest is history.

St Porphyrious was the first Bishop of staunchly pagan Gaza who worshipped idols and a number of deities, the main one being Marnas a patron of agriculture. 

When St. P arrived in Gaza from Jerusalem in 395, Gazans through rotten veggies at him claiming that he was a cause of a long and devastating draught. 

Kamal, who works in the Church as  a PR, tells me that St P.  performed miracles, he brought about the rain and cured the sick and Gazans started to follow him. 

Inspite of that, he did have to travel all the way to Constantinople to lobby the Roman Emperor Arcadius to destroy the pagan temples in Gaza. 

The Emperors wife Eudoxia a devout Christian helped. Kamal says that she was grateful for the miracle St. P performed by ensured that the Empress produced a long awaited heir to the throne. 

But miracle did not seem to have been enough. St P had to use a trick to push his request and when the baby was shown to the admiring subjects he placed a piece of paper in baby’s hand saying that a Church should be built in Gaza.  

That secured the funding and the church named after Eudoxia was finished in 407, built directly upon the ruins of the temple to Marnas. 

When St P died in 420 he was buried in Eudoxia Church which was renamed after him.  His remains were latter taken to Venice and there is a single bone form his arm displayed in the Church now. 

There seems to be little left from the original Church which was reconstructed by the Crusaders in 12 century and again in 1856. 

Most recent reconstruction was carried out at great expense 8 years ago when frescoes were made in Greece and than brought to Gaza to be applied to the Church walls and ceilings. 

Kamal talked about Gaza’s centuries long tradition as a regional centre of Christianity with the first Church built in Nuseirat, about 10 Kilometres south of Gaza, in 255 by the Archbishop St Ilarion. 

After the Israelis occupied Gaza in 1967 they plundered the remains of the Church together with many more valuable archaeological finds from Palestinian history. Most of them can now be find in the Museum of Jewish History in Al Quds.