Rolling bulldozers
The apartheid wall is turning the life of Palestinians in Rafah into an even greater nightmare. Annika Hampson reports from Gaza
The view from Abu Jamil's balcony is dominated by Israel's giant, metal apartheid wall and the devastation left in its wake. In both directions houses have been flattened and trees uprooted, while the buildings left standing are pockmarked with tank- shell holes and peppered with machine-gun fire. Abu Jamil and his family live on Rafah's Salaheddin Street, one of the most lethal front lines of the Intifada.
"This is a residential neighbourhood," says Abu Jamil, waving his hand at nearby houses, "people here are not asking for anything. We just want a normal life, a house, food on the table, a job to go to and schools to send our children to." Life in this neighbourhood however is far from normal. Instead, normalcy is something that local residents watch on blaring television sets to distract crying children and drown out the sound of tanks thundering along the border with Egypt and the bullets ricocheting off walls.
Salaheddin Street is dubbed locally "Death Alley". Since the beginning of the Al-Aqsa Intifada, 35 people have been killed on this street alone, and scores more critically injured. It is along this street that Abu Jamil takes his donkey cart each dawn to collect his vegetables to sell in the local market. He returns home after dark having spent the afternoon working in his fields. He works seven days a week, 12 hours each day in order to earn enough money to feed his family.
His wife Noura stays at home alone with their son Jamil, 3, and daughters Nancy, 18 months, and Basant, four months. Their home lies within the 200-metre swathe of land that Israeli military bulldozers are clearing for the ongoing construction of an apartheid wall. The Israeli army has been destroying all buildings within those 200 metres to allow maximum security for the wall, and Abu Jamil's family knows that their home is on the Israeli list for demolition. Making sure the house is never left empty is their sole, but unreliable, insurance policy.
Pointing to a series of bullet holes in the kitchen wall, Noura admits that anyone in her family could be shot at any time -- like the boy in a nearby house who was shot in the neck when he wandered into his kitchen to have a glass of water one morning last week. There had been shooting on the street for three hours that morning. Once it was quiet again, Noura hung the washing out on the balcony. She seems quietly resigned as if the fear is so close, so old and familiar that it has lost its potency. Struggling to maintain some sense of normalcy has become a form of resistance.
The wall, which is ploughing through the southern neighbourhoods of Rafah adjacent to the border with Egypt, is the reason behind this hellish chaos. Running nearly 4kms from the Gush Katif settlement block in the southwestern part of the Gaza Strip to Israel's border to the east, the wall has swallowed both houses and land. Many civilians, including children, have been shot dead. "What kind of life is this?" Abu Jamil asks, "This is a wall of fear and suffering, of loss and blood and tears. Why do they need such a wall?"
Rafah's residents have been given no official explanation as to why the Israelis are building such a wall through their neighbourhoods. But speculation abounds. The most reasonable explanation is that Israel is building a new bypass road from the settlements straight to Israel to allow the settlers and their agricultural produce direct and easy access. Since the settler road currently runs through the Gaza Strip, the wall would protect the settlers.
Another explanation is that the wall would prevent arms-smuggling from Egyptian to Palestinian Rafah, via underground tunnels starting in a house on one side and ending in another house on the other side. Although the 200-metre distance would make the tunnels more difficult, it wouldn't necessarily eliminate them.
Statistics complied by the Rafah Governorate indicate that nearly a thousand houses have been demolished in Rafah since the Intifada began in late September 2000. Many of these houses were demolished as a direct result of the apartheid wall. Since 18 June 2003, 917 houses have been completely demolished, rendering 1,154 families (6,610 people) homeless. Another 380 houses were partially demolished. In addition, 154 family-owned stores have been completely demolished in the Salaheddin area alone, while 2,576 homes alongside the Gaza- Egypt border suffer daily from indiscriminate shooting and shelling from Israeli tanks and gun towers positioned along the length of the wall.
Ibrahim Abu Shatiat, one of Abu Jamil's neighbours, used to live on "Death Alley". On 27 September 2001, the Israeli army both dynamited and bulldozed his home. "That night will forever be etched in my memory," he began. "We expected the bulldozers but had no warning. They just came one night and it was my turn."
Residents are not given demolition orders and there are no courts to appeal to. Once a family is made homeless, little can be done on their behalf. Shatiat sums up the problem, "people have no money to rent property, and in any case there are no properties left to rent." He recalled how the bulldozers simply turned up late in the evening after his children had gone to bed. When they came closer and closer to his house and he suspected that the house might be targeted, he woke the children and fled to a neighbouring house. "It was dangerous to leave the house because snipers were watching for any movement. But if we had stayed in the house, it would have been brought down on our heads." When the family returned to the house at sunrise, it was gone.
"I am a father and my children look to me for answers. That night I had no answers, no explanations, nothing." The family lost everything. Sitting on his balcony and staring into the distance at the apartheid wall growing in both directions, Abu Jamil knows he too would soon be added to the statistics just like Shatiat and others before him. "It is just a matter of time," he said.
