Amid the Destruction, a Return to Life in Gaza http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/25/world/middleeast/25mideast.html?_r=... GAZA — The boys clapped and sang to pulsating music. They played games and shouted. It could have been a group activity at any school in any place, but this was the middle school in the Jabaliya refugee camp in Gaza, near where the United Nations says some 40 people were killed by Israeli mortar fire earlier this month. Saturday was the first day of school since before the war, and 1,000 homeless people had been removed from the building so that classes could begin.
Even then, normal schoolwork had to wait. A team trained in trauma and group activities was running the assembly, and after the singing and clapping, there was a play devoted to how to handle dangerous materials, like shell parts, still in or near homes. Later, each pupil described what had happened to him and to his friends and family in Israel’s 23-day war aimed at stopping Hamas’s rockets. “They are not ready to learn yet,” said Asem Bajah, an English teacher, as he watched the singing. “And I am not ready to teach.” One week after the war between Israel and Hamas stopped, Gaza remains in a kind of stupor. There are numbers, of course, to describe its misery — 4,000 homes destroyed, 21,000 badly damaged, 100,000 people homeless, according to several aid agencies — but they do not tell the full story. Most of Gaza, especially the capital, Gaza City, remains largely intact. This is not Grozny after the Chechen war or Dresden after World War II. The hospitals are coping; shops are reopening; traffic is becoming a problem once again. Israel has tripled the amount of goods flowing in here since before the war. But the areas where Israeli tanks and artillery poured in at the start of the ground war are devastated: Juhr el Dik to the east, Beit Lahiya, El Atatra and sections of Jabaliya to the north, as well as the outer Gaza City neighborhoods of Zeitoun and Toufah. Homes have been blown up or bulldozed, their squashed furniture visible beneath layers of collapsed concrete. Factories — for paint, dairy products, soft drinks — have been smashed. Schools have 10-foot holes in their walls. Wedding halls are blackened hulks. The American International School, a private institution in northern Gaza, has been destroyed. Mosques are gone. Moreover, in addition to the buildings that housed Hamas’s main security networks, institutions like the parliament, the main ministries, the central prison and nearly all the police stations are crushed beyond repair. In some homes, families have been cleaning for five days straight, removing bullet casings, sweeping broken glass, sorting through charred clothing. Since electricity has been lost in most of those areas, the evenings see families gathered around makeshift fires outside, cooking and warming themselves. In the neighborhood of Zeitoun, where 30 members of an extended family, the Samounis, were killed and homes were bulldozed, survivors can be seen each day using hoes and other crude tools on the piles of rubble and dirt hoping to salvage a few useful or valuable items. A couple of days ago, Ghalia Samouni, 44, was sitting atop one such pile and picking away at it with her bare hands, explaining that she had left 1,000 Israeli shekels, or about $250, in a bag somewhere around there before the war started. Her daughter Amani, 19, was trying to find her gold and identity card as she dug a few feet away. In El Atatra, where a mosque and many homes around it were destroyed, Israeli troops said they had uncovered a hand-drawn map showing homes that had been booby-trapped with explosives. It was hard to match the map with the area, and residents said they were farmers, not fighters, and that there had been no explosives or booby traps in their houses. But several acknowledged that under the area’s main street was a long tunnel used by Hamas’s fighters, now collapsed by Israeli explosives. Still, the impression left from the worst-hit areas was that Israeli troops entered expecting a horrific battle. Little came their way, apparently because Hamas fighters decided that it was not worth dying, and Israel’s casualty count was low. But the damage is overwhelming. Hamas officials have slowly emerged from hiding over the past few days, although the top leaders have remained underground, apparently worried that their lives could be in danger. Their police force is back on the streets. On Saturday, in Remal, a neighborhood in central Gaza, policemen in blue uniforms gathered in front of what used to be their headquarters as a bulldozer heaved a mangled car out of the way behind them. They had been doing their work from the sidewalk, they said. One had even caught a burglar in town. “Our building is gone, but we still come to work in the morning,” said one policeman, as another reached up to a lamppost to hang a portrait, pulled from the rubble, of Sheik Ahmed Yassin, the spiritual leader of Hamas who was killed by Israel in 2004. Gaza has no functioning glass or cement factories and has not been able to bring in raw materials for them for months because Israel and Egypt closed commercial crossings. Now efforts are under way to change that. John Holmes, a United Nations humanitarian relief official who came here on Thursday, said by telephone that he had been talking with Israel about how to get such materials and other vital components to rebuild. “We need to fix the water and sanitation networks as quickly as we can,” he said. “That means importation of construction materials on a big scale. It has not happened for the last 18 months. The Israelis don’t say no, but they say we need to have assurances it will not be misused by Hamas. We are trying to work out the mechanisms.” Hamas officials left Gaza on Saturday for Cairo, where they were to discuss longer term cease-fire details. In Israel, officials said that on Sunday, the cabinet is expected to discuss a proposal that the government defend the military if there are any international attempts to accuse it of improper activity or war crimes. The proposal is expected to assert that soldiers and officers operated in accordance with international law, the military’s values and moral principles. --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ Thanks for being part of "PoliticalForum" at Google Groups. For options & help see http://groups.google.com/group/PoliticalForum * Visit our other community at http://www.PoliticalForum.com/ * It's active and moderated. Register and vote in our polls. * Read the latest breaking news, and more. -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
