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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.
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