Nawal and Ahmed
Qarara, Khan Younis
Their life close to the border had been hard. They suffered many military incursions and daily shooting. Still they were trying to live a normal life. They could make a living from their land and they had a house. Until the day the war started and they had to escape and leave everything.
Nawal and her husband welcome us in the backyard. In the house there is no space to receive guests. It’s made of two small rooms constructed with some bricks, asbestos and plastic. The tree became their kitchen, its branches the shelves. Pots and dishes crop up among the leaves. Nawal takes some cups from the tree and excuses herself for a long while to prepare a bedouin tea on the fire for the guests.
KARAMA
Gaza, Dignity Under Siege
by Adriana Zega
Interview:
“Our house was destroyed in the last war. I built it in 1984. Before the war we used to live in a very hard situation. We were living less than 300 m from the military tower in the border area. They were shooting at every movement. We tried to live in a normal way, even if there was shooting every night. Shooting was not direct at the people but sometimes they shot at the house walls. Even if we were afraid we didn’t have another place we could go to find refuge”.
“In 1995 the Israelis felled all the 95 olive trees in our land. We replanted them again. And again in 2003 they felled them. We have 3 dunums of land close to the house and 4 dunums next to the border. We had quite a good gain from our land. We had olive and grape trees. We produced olive oil and sometimes we sold the olives".
"In 2006 we suffered a third incursion: again they leveled our land and this time they destroyed our water well too. In the same year my brother Abdallah and his son were killed inside their house by tank shooting. My father and sister were injured. And then in 2008, in the last war, they destroyed our house. Since then we cannot go back anymore to our land.”
“The war started Saturday, 27 December 2008, at 12:15 am exactly. We left after four days, the 1st of January, when the land incursion started. We saw everyone leaving from the neighborhood, tanks advancing and we heard that some of the neighbors were killed. We feared the same would happen to our house and so we fled. We decided to take the animals with us. We didn’t bring anything else from our house, only the donkey with the cart and the three sheep. Here we don’t have space to keep them so we had to sell them”.
“We went immediately to our house when we heard the war was finished and the Israelis were not shooting anymore. Journalists, UNRWA, police and many people came with us. We found nothing was left”.
“Living here is difficult. Everything is difficult. It’s even harder during winter, it becomes too cold , no matter how much nylon we put on the walls. We freeze. And in summer it becomes too hot. We are living here since four years, and we don’t know how long it will take for our situation to improve. UNRWA has started calling people to know if they have land to rebuild a house. But we don’t have money to buy any land”.
“In the present situation it’s impossible to go back to our home and rebuild our house. If someone could guarantee that the situation will become safer, I would be ready to rebuild it. This is our situation. I’m tired. We don’t like to be here but we are here because of the occupation. They took our land, they destroyed our house, our trees by bulldozer…all this things happened because of the occupation. Who would like to live in a situation like this? This is not a human situation to live in. This is the occupation”.