Gaza: Living in 'a special kind of a hell'

ISRAELI INCURSION

Gaza: Living in 'a special kind of a hell'

BY JAMES RUPERT
STAFF CORRESPONDENT

May 24, 2004

RAFAH, Gaza Strip -- Cornered between the high, hard fences of Egypt's border and Israel's settlements, this gritty desert town long has lived in physical isolation at an edge of Palestinian lands. In recent years, Rafah's obscurity has helped mask its rise as the most violent, deadly front in the Israeli-Palestinian war.

During 44 months of the current intifada, both the Palestinian public and the world's press have focused on West Bank locales, especially Jenin and Nablus, as epicenters of the conflict. But in Rafah, people have been dying at nearly twice the rate of the most violent West Bank cities.

"All Palestinians live under war ... . Rafah has become a special kind of a hell," said Nasser Hassanain, who runs an Internet cafe in town.

Rafah's violence has become famous this month at a heavy cost to its people, including Hassanain. About 60 have been killed in the week-old Israeli offensive here, and as many as about 9,000 have had their homes destroyed, according to the mayor's office.

Hassanain is 34 and returned last year from five years of working in Cleveland. "I started out washing dishes; I saved and worked as much as I could," he said. By last year he owned a franchise convenience store there. "I sold it for a lot of money and came home very proud of myself," Hassanain said.

From Ohio, "I sent money home" -- $150,000 over the years "to help our family build a house," he said. "My brothers," eight of them, "contributed what each one could, but most of the money came from me because I'd been successful in America," Hassanain said.

The house, in Rafah's Brazil neighborhood, was a big, three-story, yellow building with an apartment for each brother's family and another for their parents. "It was like a nest to let us live our family life close together," he said. "The American dream is about having a house by yourself and sending your kids to college. Our Palestinian dream life is to live close by our brothers and sisters and parents, to be together with them."

Installed in the new house, "our wives all took turns preparing the meals for the whole family," Hassanain said. "Usually, for dinner, we had about 30 people eating ... We wore each other's clothes and paid for each other for whatever we needed."

The house was about 250 yards from the fortified wall, guarded by Israeli troops, along the border with Egypt. But in recent years, Israel has been demolishing homes near the wall to deny cover to guerrillas who have stepped up attacks on Israeli posts. Israeli troops also demolish homes if they conclude they have hidden tunnels dug under the border to smuggle in weapons.

Wednesday, after some of Rafah's heaviest fighting in memory, Hassanain and his brothers sent their wives and children to stay with relatives in Tel Sultan, a neighborhood farther from the border wall. Thursday night, as Hassanain walked home from his Internet center, he found that Israeli tanks, troops and bulldozers had moved into his neighborhood. He retreated to sleep on the floor of his office.

On Friday, when the troops pulled back from Brazil, its residents streamed back in, and Nasser was stunned to see that bulldozers had shorn part of the first floor off the new yellow house. Rooms now gaped to the outside. In place of the street where he used to walk his children -- Ahmed, 6, and Tasneem, 4 -- to get candy, the machines had left dirt ruts. Shops were smashed.

Hassanain wandered back to his Internet center and held his head in his hands. "It's not just the house," he said. "A house can be rebuilt." But suddenly, the nine brothers and their families were scattered to at least a half-dozen different locations, camping on floors here or in schoolyards there. "Who will bring our family back to live, ever, in one place again? How will we find our neighbors again?"

Parents uprooted in '48 war

Hassanain's parents were among 750,000 Arabs uprooted in the war that accompanied Israel's founding, in 1948, an event Palestinians call an-Nakba (The Catastrophe). Now, with a hollow look in his eyes, Hassanain said he saw it happening again.

"We are -- tramps, I think. Or hobos? What is the word now in English? I saw Charlie Chaplin's film once, "The Tramp." We are like him now. Like a homeless man sleeping on the street in Cleveland."

At the Khansa Elementary School in Rafah, where about 50 families are staying, Hannan Abu Tyur, 32, is equally bewildered and scared. On Saturday, she sat with three other women and about 15 children under the shade of a canopy in the school courtyard. She cradled her son, Mohammed, 45 days old. With water supplies off in much of Rafah (and electricity sporadic), "I have no way to wash myself, or him," she said. "I am trying to do everything for him and the other children." But her breast milk was suddenly drying up -- whether because of stress or the change in diet to United Nations-supplied food rations -- and she worried about feeding her baby.

The humanitarian disaster that is Rafah has been building for years, before exploding this month, local officials say. "Over 31/2 years [of the current intifada], the Israelis have destroyed 2,300 residential buildings and partly destroyed 950 more," said Saeed Fathi Zarb, the mayor. "And 16,000 dunams [4,000 acres] of greenhouses and agricultural lands."

"We had 16,000 homeless people in the city last week, and now we have about 25,000," about one person in six, he said Saturday.

The Israeli military has been demolishing homes in part to shove the city away from the border fence and clear a free-fire zone in front of its positions. Last year, guerrillas of Hamas, Islamic Jihad and other factions launched roughly five attacks a day with bombs, rifles and rockets against Israeli troops at the border. The total of attacks, nearly 2,000, was twice the number recorded in the entire West Bank , according to Israeli commanders quoted by The Washington Post.

Rafah's norm is war. Yesterday, volleys of automatic rifle fire prompted occasional explosive bursts from Israeli heavy machine guns. Helicopter gunships droned high overhead, spewing hot flares meant to divert any possible heat-seeking missile. Through it, the city returned to what passes for normal, with more shops reopening and some schools (those not crammed with refugees) holding classes.

Rafah is so explosive because "people here are poorer and more hopeless than anywhere else" in the Palestinian territories, said Abdelaziz Shahin, a representative from Rafah in the Palestinian Legislative Council. In the 1990s, the economy in Rafah, even more than other parts of the Gaza Strip, "depended on the people here going out to work at laboring jobs in Israel," he said. When the Oslo peace process collapsed in 2000 and terror attacks against Israelis escalated, Israel's shutdown of the Gaza border threw the city of Rafah out of work.

"Plus, of course, we're on the border, and Israel is very sensitive" to the danger of arms being smuggled in through tunnels dug to Egypt. "There have been tunnels," Shahin conceded, "but Israel uses the issue as an excuse to commit all kinds of attacks unrelated" to preventing them.

Internet cafe and shelter

Since the Israelis began tearing apart his neighborhood, Nasser Hassanain has been running an impromptu homeless shelter at his Internet cafe for himself and his friends. They brew endless pots of tea and coffee on a gas burner, surf the Web for news and discuss the battle and its implications.

"Maybe in Brazil and Tel Sultan [another Rafah neighborhood occupied by Israel in recent days] there were five or 10 people ready to be suicide attackers in order to kill some Jews," Hassanain said. "After this attack, there will 10 times more of them."

His loss has left Hassanain feeling deeply divided about the United States. He had been preparing in recent years to become a U.S. citizen. "But now, I want to throw that all in the trash," he said Friday.

The next day, Hassanain got calls from worried friends in the United States, and that made a difference. A former employee called, plus "some of the other dads" from his son's preschool in suburban Cleveland, "to check on how I am and my family."

When someone else in the perpetual discussion group called Americans racist and anti-Muslim, Hassanain objected. "American people are very easy to make friends with. They will accept you no matter where you come from," he said. "Only the government policies are terrible."

By yesterday morning, Hassanain was feeling ragged. It was his fifth day without a bath or a shave. Amid the stress, he had been smoking three packs of cigarettes a day instead of his usual half-pack. "And my blood-pressure medicine is almost finished," he said. "A lot of the pharmacies are closed, and the ones open don't have it."

About 10 a.m., Hassanain's brother Elias, 22, walked into the Internet center campsite. He had just gone to see the house but had stopped short when he saw Israeli tanks back in the street. He had then called a neighbor with a view of the family house to learn what was going on. "He says the bulldozers have knocked down the rest of our house. It's all finished."

Nassir's face remained somber but showed little reaction. "Well, I have to go," he said. "I have to look for my medicine."