KARAMA
Gaza, Dignity Under Siege
by Adriana Zega
Adel and Randa
Khoza’a, Khan Younis
Empty fields surround their piece of land. No houses, no cultivations, no one left.
Only three automatic military towers stand aligned, a few hundreds meter away in the middle of the buffer zone. The barrel pointed in our direction. Beyond is the border fence with Israel.
During Cast Lead war the Israeli army destroyed their house and chicken farm. Since the war, their family live, all separated, in different places.
Everyday they go back to their land to reunite. The foundation of a new house emerges from the ground. Despite the danger, it’s right here, where they had been living since 1998, that they will rebuild their home and their life again.
Interview:
“I'm still suffering from the war. I don't know what I can do.
I cannot go back to my previous situation. Our situation was very good and now I have to start from zero. Since the war it's very difficult. My family has been divided for the last three years. I live with my brothers. My wife sleeps at her brothers’ house. Our four sons live in a third place”.
“You can see, here we are surrounded by three military towers. I have lived here since 1998. We had a nice house with 5 rooms. We were farming and breeding chicken, we had a big farm of 360 m2 with more than 2, 800 chicken’s. At the beginning of the war the Israeli forces destroyed everything, my house and the animal farm”.
“We escaped from the house on the first day of war. Many tanks started invading the area and shooting.
The Israeli forces were also firing rockets with white phosphorous. A bulldozer came and destroyed our house. The cage for chicken breeding was hit by a rocket from an F16 warplane”.
“We had another piece of land closer to the border. Since 2007 we cannot reach it. There, we lost 3 dunums of land. I was cultivating wheat and I had 33 olive trees and 16 palm trees”.
“I came back to my land three month’s after the end of the war.
Since then my family and I come here everyday. We are rebuilding our house”.