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Bulldozers Don't Have Heart
By Chris McGreal
The Guardian, June 4, 2004
The Al-Akhras family
There is nothing left of the Akhras' family's home. Even the cloths blowing in the breeze above their heads, providing a pathetic, makeshift tent to the once nomadic Bedouin family, are borrowed from luckier neighbours. A large round metal bowl is all that they recovered from the rubble of their house after it was bulldozed by the Israeli army.
"There were 10 rooms here," says the 50-year-old patriarch, Ghazi. "Thirty-three people lived in the house. There was me, my wife, my seven brothers and their wives, and all our sons and daughters."
It was 10pm when the bulldozers came. "All the people were fleeing their houses, but one of my brothers is handicapped and was trapped in the house. We had to carry him out as the bulldozer was hitting the building."
All that remains of the house is a mound of concrete and dirt. The destruction by the bulldozer was so complete that some of the walls have been ground to a rubble reminiscent of the rocky desert beyond the fence.
Like many other families in Rafah, the Akhras family has been made homeless before. Ghazi came from Yibna after the Israeli army, under the command of Ariel Sharon, then military governor of Gaza, bulldozed his home in 1971. "We bought the house here from the Israelis. We had the documents to show it. We saved nothing, not even the documents," he says. "This is more than the catastrophe of 1948 for us. In 1948 there were no Apaches shooting at us."
Akhras, who worked as a builder in Israel before the intifada, cannot afford to rebuild. "I have no money to do it. Now we are all homeless, living in houses of relations. During the day we come and sit on the rubble, under the tent, because the relations do not want us in their house all day. At night we go there just to sleep."
The Abu Ghali family Aziza Abu Ghali is exhausted by her fury and can barely stand. "My husband is 90 years old and has nowhere to sleep. The Jews are just demolishing our houses. I was shouting at the bulldozer driver: 'Don't you have children?' They kill our sons and put us in the morgue. We are praying to Allah to show them the suffering that they show us."
Aziza is one of the few in her street who remember how they all ended up in Rafah in 1948, just as the Israeli state was being created. She was born in the now extinct village of Yubna, which was erased and replaced with the Israeli town of Yavne. Four of her children - three sons and a daughter - were born there also. "The Jews used their guns to make us go away. They tell lies about this now, saying we ran away on our own. Who would leave their home unless they had to? We only left to save the lives of our children. I was a young woman then. I never imagined that the Jews would still be doing this to me."
When the bulldozers came this time, Aziza was asleep. Her husband, Yousef, was in a bed in a neighbouring room. Their son and his family lived across a small yard in two other rooms.
All that was recovered from the wreckage was Yousef's wheelchair. The corner of his bed sticks out from the rubble. Their fridge is tossed on top, wrecked. A metal ceiling fan, its blades buckled like a withering flower, hangs from a surviving wall.
Yousef's son, Sobhi, a nurse in a UN clinic, says his father was lucky to escape. "All day there was shooting. There was a tank near our house and I was afraid to even put my head out of the door. There were Israeli snipers on the top of the buildings. It was dangerous just to show your face.
"I was awake the whole night. I could hear sounds of houses being demolished. At first light I could hear my father knocking at my mother's room saying he wanted to go to dawn prayers. He is almost totally deaf. I wanted to call to him and tell him to stay indoors because they might shoot, but he came out and I had to rush to rescue him."
The family sheltered for a few more hours until the bulldozer's attention turned to their own house, home to 13 people. "I saw the house was about to be demolished. I just picked up my son and my father and dragged them away. We ran out into where the shooting was. The bulldozer driver was indifferent to us. They saw us and knew we were inside. We had just a few minutes to get away. We were crying and shouting at them. I was carrying my father on my shoulders. I don't think he even understood what was happening."
The Al-Wawi family
Mousa Joma al-Wawi has a long history with Ariel Sharon. "We call him 'the bulldozer'. This is not the first time he's done this to us. The first time was in 1971," says the 54-year-old grandfather, standing amid the rubble of his home in the al-Brazil neighbourhood in Rafah.
Like many in Rafah, the latest round of mass demolitions was not the first time that Wawi had been bulldozed out of his home. He counts off the times he has had to flee his house.
"I was a refugee before I was even born. My mother was pregnant when she fled our village, Zarnuga, when the Jews came in 1948. The house is still standing. There's a Jew living in it. My mother moved to a tent in Khan Younis (a little north of Rafah) and then to Rafah, where I was born."
Wawi's introduction to the bulldozers came in the 70s, when General Sharon, as he then was, bulldozed about 20,000 people from their homes in the Gaza Strip to widen roads as part of his strategy against the Palestine Liberation Organisation.
"Sharon destroyed our house. The UN and Israelis built us new ones in Yibna [a Rafah neighbourhood]. They sold the house to us. I have all my documents. The house had a tiled roof and two rooms. It was 1.5m high and 3m long by 2.5m wide. When we became a bigger family, we expanded it."
But the bulldozers were back in 1997, as the Israeli army destroyed the very homes it had built for Palestinian refugees about 25 years earlier. The Wawi family fled to the al-Brazil neighbourhood of Rafah and, over the years, built up a new home.
There were about 20 men, women and children crammed into the back room of Wawi's home on the corner of an al-Brazil street when the demolition squads arrived. They had not dared to venture out because of the bullets flying round the street, but now they had to escape.
"My brother lives next door," says Wawi. "We were all in this room and my brother came with a hammer and smashed a hole in the wall. The bulldozer was hitting the house. We carried nothing at all. We were just trying to escape by ourselves ... Some of the pigeons survived."
Among the rubble lies the water tank, pierced by bullets, a broken bedside table and the remnants of a wardrobe. A hanging basket of red flowers magically survived unscathed, and the family pulled some blankets, pillows and a child's toy plastic bike from the rubble.
Where will they go now? "This is still my home," says Wawi. "We will clean it and we will bring tents in. If they want to shoot me in my home - shoot me, my sons, my grandchildren - we cannot stop them. We are staying, no matter what."
The Mikkawi family
Rula Abu Abid grips her doll as if it is all she has left in the world. It is called Larla and its head is buried in the rubble of her home. Rula asked her grandfather, Hassan Mikkawi, if they would ever find it. The 61-year-old motor mechanic - "the most famous mechanic in Rafah" - reassured the five-year-old that one day they would have the strength to sift through the rubble to look.
One building in the family compound, which provided homes for two of his sons and their families, has been completely demolished. The armoured bulldozer ripped the front out of his own home, crushing furniture, destroying much of the living room and wrecking the bedroom. The surviving furniture is battered and splintered. Not much else was saved: a toolbox, a crate of onions, a large metal bowl, a bedside table, some blankets. Mikkawi's car was flattened by the massive bulldozer.
"I lived in America illegally for more than a year. It was 1996," he says, pulling out an Alabama driving licence to prove it. "I had good work as a motor mechanic, but I came back here. I often wonder why, but I could not take my family to America. When I came back, we thought things would be peaceful. We thought there would be no more demolitions."
Hassan Mikkawi was six years old when he fled his own village, Zarnuga, as it was seized by the fledgling Israeli army in 1948. There were about 2,500 Arabs living there, many of whom ended up in Rafah.
"I remember the garden and the mosque. At that time there were no tanks, but I remember the shooting. I remember my mother and my father and my brother weeping. And I remember us running away and my father carrying some food and some clothes. It was the same then as it is now.
"We arrived in Gaza in 1948 and came to Rafah a year later. In 1967 the Israelis crushed our home and they wanted to send us to Sinai or the West Bank but we refused. My father built a house here. Two rooms with a bathroom. You can see we made it much bigger, much grander."
There were 16 people living in the house when the bulldozers arrived for the most recent demolition. The family ran, waving white headscarves. When they returned, the parts of the house that were not destroyed teetered precariously. A forest of scaffolding is all that keeps it standing.
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