There are still nine bodies in the rubble of a house in Zeitoon – a
neighbourhood in the east of Gaza city. 7 children and 2 pregnant
women, still lie crushed beneath the weight of a four storey building,
their bodies unretrieved. The oldest child is 6 years old.
At 6am on 6th January, just after morning prayer, an Israeli Apache
helicopter fired a few missiles at the At Daya house, before an F-16
dropped a bomb – disintegrating the house, killing 32 civilians.
“There was no warning – nothing”, advised Mohammad al Ray, the 26
year-old neighbour. 1 family member, Amer, was pulled out alive; and
3 others survived because they had spent the night in a relative’s
house. The rest died. My guess is that around 20 of them would have
been children. There was also a third pregnant woman, whose body was
recovered.
neighbour Mohammad
The remains of the house remind me of nothing so much as an art
installation – as ridiculous as it seems. Mostly, because the jumble
of rubble, rebar, household items, and personal effects bears no
resemblance to anything remotely utilitarian. So far-removed is the
wreckage from it’s original form, that it is no longer even
identifiable as a building. Indeed, it is difficult to even
comprehend how it could once have been a home.
The rotting smell of death emanates from where the front of the house
used to be. I am becoming used to this smell as there are carcasses
of animals trapped in rubble in most devastated villages. But to know
it is the decay of human flesh I am smelling…
front of the house
As I walk across the mound of rubble and detritus, I am extremely
conscious of the fact that on the other side of the piece of concrete
on which I stand may be the body of a small child, or woman. Still,
clambering up the mound a little, I am struck by the sight of what
appears to be a crater in the middle of the house. Only later do I
find out that Mohammad, the neighbour, recalled that the sound that
they heard when the bombs struck, could not explain the damage that
occurred. A doctor who is accompanying us explains that the Israeli
army seem to be using some bombs that don’t make much noise when they
hit, but then seem to suck the building down, as if by some kind of
negative force. The crater begins to make sense.
the crater
None of the family were fighters; Hamas supporters; or even
politically affiliated. “They were just ordinary civilians”, explains
Mohammad.
The surrounding houses were also gutted by the blast. Like devastated
doll-houses, their facades have been ripped off to reveal the inner
life. There isn’t so much that’s identifiable, though, in any of the
rooms – just the all-too familiar sight of concrete building-blocks,
reduced to rubble and dust, covering all the floors. “We were all in
this room when the bombs were dropped”, Mohammad recalls. “All the
doors were closed and none of us could get out. It took us hours to
dig our way out”.
Further towards the outskirts of Zeitoon, where the al Samouni
massacre took place, we are taken again into a house we had been in
last week – the house of Shaima and Hanin and five other children.
This time it is their parents who take us into the house, which is
much the same one week later, but with less mess. Slowly, it seems,
they have been clearing up the devastation the Israeli soldiers left
behind. The house is no less tragic for it, though. Rather, it
resonates with the trauma of the adults who have seen and experienced
far too much. Punctuated by the coughs of his children – common in
areas that suffered white phosphorus attacks – Abu Abd tells the story
of the night when Israeli soldiers forced them from their home before
bombing it; forcing more than 100 people from the neighbourhood into
one house, which they then also bombed with white phosphorus. He
tells us how the soldiers shot and killed a man who was carrying his
young son. And how one small child, Ahmad al Samouni, 4 years old,
tugged on the trousers of one soldier, asking him not to hurt his
daddy. And then of how the soldier looked down, pointed his gun at
Ahmad, still clutching his trousers, and shot him. “We carried him in
here” his 20 year old son, Abdullah, explains, coughing. “He died
here on this couch”. He and 46 others.
The land of the extended al Samouni clan in Zeitoon is a mess of
carved-up earth and hap-hazardly piled rubble. One woman, Samahar,
who sits everyday in a small, makeshift shelter where her house once
stood, explains that there were more than 20 houses there, before the
attacks. It’s a small wonder to me how she knows exactly where her
house was, now that everything is such a mess – all but a few
landmarks erased. But it was her house, I tell myself. She would
know. There is nowhere for her to sleep, but she comes everyday to
her land, just to be there. Other families who don’t have the luxury
of staying with relatives in the centre of Zeitoon, however, are
sleeping in makeshift shelters like hers. One 15 year-old boy showed
us the small slip of nylon that fails to suffice as his blanket.
Samahar explains to me that there’s no water at the site – just a few
tanks for drinking. Nothing for bathing or washing clothes. She
points to Shaima’s dirty tracksuit, explaining that there’s no way to
wash it. The neighbourhood well was destroyed in the attacks. Also
there are no toilets. All of the houses that are still standing had
their toilets destroyed in the bombing. She says she could go on the
ground somewhere, but someone would see.
She goes on to tell of how she was forced to run from her home with
just the clothes she was wearing and no shoes. She points to the old
shoes she is wearing, says they are someone else’s hand-me-downs. How
her family lost absolutely everything. Even her children are going to
school without school bags, she says, showing us the plastic shopping
bags they are using.
Finally, she talks of how the land used to be, before it was
transformed into this post-apocalyptic-style wasteland. Of the fruit
trees; and the vegetables; and the small fish ponds they had. What
was especially wonderful, she recalls, was the smell – the smell of
flowering fruit-trees, grass and crops. Of women baking bread. Now,
even though the dead livestock have mostly been removed and burnt, the
only smells lingering in the air are those of dirt, rubble, and death.
Overnight, the lives of the al Samounis and their neighbours, were
transformed from those of simple farmers – mostly poor, but largely
self-sufficient – into bearers of tragedy. More than 100 farmers with
no farms spend their days in a communal tent – no other employment;
nothing to do. Homeless, jobless and without money, the residents of
Zeitoon are largely unable to do much to improve their situations.
And, unlike other areas where tent communities have been established
by charities, the people of Zeitoon have received just a few water
tanks that are refilled by a water truck daily. In a political
climate where there are so many obstacles to reconstruction – lack of
materials, money and willingness of international agencies to work the
Hamas government – the people of Zeitoon will continue to sit and
wait.
