Home |  Elder Rights |  Health |  Pension Watch |  Rural Aging |  Armed Conflict |  Aging Watch at the UN  

  SEARCH SUBSCRIBE  
 

Mission  |  Contact Us  |  Internships  |    

 

 

Gaza Operation By Israel 

Leaves Many Homeless
Effort to Find Tunnels in Refugee Camp Is Called Most Destructive Incursion

 

 

By Molly Moore 

Washington Post, October 15

 

RAFAH REFUGEE CAMP, Gaza Strip, Oct. 14 -- Salahuddin Street was a canyon of rubble Tuesday, the guts and souls of a dozen houses bulldozed into hills of splintered furniture, crushed concrete blocks and tattered clothing.

The ravaged street near the Gaza Strip's southern border with Egypt was just a snapshot of a broader swath of devastation: more than 230 homes razed, bulldozed or heavily damaged, according to international aid organizations that describe this as the Israeli military's most destructive incursion into Gaza  since the outbreak of the Palestinian uprising three years ago.

Eight Palestinians, including two children, have been killed in the operation, which Israeli military officials say is aimed at destroying tunnels used to smuggle weapons into Gaza from Egypt. Three tunnels have been discovered in the five-day operation, according to Israel's military commander in southern Gaza.

Col. Pinky Zoaredez, Israel's commander in southern Gaza, said Palestinians and international aid organizations had "exaggerated the numbers" and that soldiers had destroyed "no more than a dozen houses."

"Our mission is to stop terrorists from smuggling ammunition and weapons from Egypt," Zoaredez said. "We behave very gently with innocent people."

But a Washington Post reporter counted a dozen houses demolished or heavily damaged on three blocks of Salahuddin Street in the Rafah refugee camp's Yibneh neighborhood -- just one of at least a half-dozen communities within the camp that have been attacked by the Israeli forces.

The International Committee of the Red Cross said the Israeli military's actions have left more than 1,200 people homeless, many of whom fled with only the clothing they wore. On Tuesday, more people abandoned houses they feared would collapse because of cracks developing in their walls and foundations.

"We awoke to the sound of bulldozers in front of our house," said Jihad Moghir, 30, who was sleeping Tuesday under a green plastic sheet pitched over wreckage that was once his home. "The kids were terrified. We escaped through a window. What the Israeli forces did here was inhuman."

International human rights and aid organizations condemned Israel for the operation. "The repeated practice by the Israeli army of deliberate and wanton destruction of homes and civilian property . . . constitutes a war crime," Amnesty International said in a statement Tuesday.

[Meanwhile, Israel's military on Tuesday ordered 15 Palestinian detainees expelled from the West Bank to the Gaza Strip, an action human rights groups denounced as a violation of international law, according to the Associated Press.

[The military said most are members of Islamic Jihad and the Islamic Resistance Movement, or Hamas. None participated directly in attacks on Israelis or had "blood on their hands," but all were accomplices to violence, an army statement said.]

The Rafah refugee camp, a sprawl of apartment buildings and concrete homes that house an estimated 90,000 people, has been the most dangerous and volatile flash point in the Gaza Strip during most of the Palestinian uprising.

Though the impoverished enclave makes up less than one-tenth of Gaza's population, more than half of all the houses destroyed by Israeli military forces in the Gaza Strip in the past three years have been located in the Rafah camp, and 186 of the 928 Palestinians killed by the Israeli military in Gaza were inside the camp or in the adjacent town of Rafah.

Three of the 47 Israeli soldiers killed in Gaza over the last three years died in the Rafah area, and Israeli military officials said their patrols in the area are subject to daily attacks by small-arms fire and homemade explosives.

Israeli tanks, armored bulldozers and armored personnel carriers clanked into the Yibneh neighborhood from three directions Friday morning just after midnight, according to residents.

A bulldozer demolished a house near the end of the street to clear a spot for a tank, said Ziad Ahmed, who wears his black beard and curly hair cropped short. Snipers then took over a four-story gray concrete apartment building and knocked holes in the walls to position their guns, he said, pointing out the damage.

As Ahmed conducted a neighborhood tour Tuesday, heavy machine-gun fire rattled from an Israeli lookout position near the metal wall on the Egyptian border and echoed off the concrete buildings of the refugee camp. "This is our life," he said with a shrug.

Almost every house on the street was pockmarked by large-caliber bullets or gored with fat holes ripped by tank shells. In one home, a tank shell had lopped off the head of a peacock painted on a tile mosaic inside a bathroom.

Ali Yousef, his wife and six children were watching television in the early hours Friday after a late supper when they heard the tank at the end of the street firing at their house.

The family clambered out a back window as "the bulldozer came to destroy everything over our heads," Yousef said. "They destroyed everything without any reason."

On Tuesday afternoon, his wife and two daughters hunched on a carpet salvaged from the heaps of concrete. "I lost everything," Yousef said with a sad sweep of his arms.

Hussein Mustafa Awoun, 72, a retired vegetable vendor with a face as wrinkled as an autumn leaf, said he fled his house before dawn Friday. He returned two days later to find his home gutted by fire and sprayed by tank shells and machine-gun bullets. A bulldozer had smashed the front rooms and left a huge palm tree loaded with ripening dates tilting dangerously over the rubble. Inside the house, women's underwear had melted to a clothesline burned in the fire.

For Awoun, who shared the house with his wife, son, daughter-in-law and eight grandchildren, it was the second time Israeli forces had damaged his house. Six months ago, an Israeli demolition team brought down his front room when it blew up a house across the street.

"Even if we build here, they will come again and tear it down," he said. "We're too close to the border."

The military says that in three years, it has uncovered 70 tunnels under the border fence that Palestinians have used for smuggling weapons and other goods from Egypt. Israeli forces have been steadily pushing back neighborhoods of the Rafah camp from the fence. In some areas, two full blocks of homes have been destroyed to create an open area in front of the metal barrier, which is dotted with Israeli guard posts.

"When you're fighting, sometimes you do need to destroy houses and need to open the way to a tunnel," said Zoaredez, the Israeli military commander.

Since Friday, Israeli forces have destroyed 114 houses and seriously damaged another 117 in the neighborhoods of Yibneh and J and O blocks, according to the U.N. Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees, which administers the camp. Troops are currently razing houses in the nearby Salam and Brazilia neighborhoods, international aid agencies said.

On Tuesday afternoon, Wasfi Abu Heshem, 57, surveyed a dirt pit in the place she once called "my small paradise." The military had bulldozed her house, her son's home next door and nearly 50 olive, orange and other fruit trees in their gardens.

"They thought there was a tunnel here," she said. "I told the soldiers, 'Isn't it a shame to do what you're doing here? What did you find here?' "

" 'We didn't find anything,' one told me," Heshem said. "They were sorry themselves."

Correspondent John Ward Anderson in Jerusalem contributed to this report.

 

 

 

 

 

Copyright © 2002 Global Action on Aging
Terms of Use  |  Privacy Policy  |  Contact Us