Family’s lives torn apart in night of war
Reageer (0)By Erin Cunningham
Wafa Awaja and her family are now living in donated tents. She is preparing to mark the death of her son tomorrow. Alexei Kidel for The National
2-1-2010
GAZA CITY -- Thirty-three-year-old Wafa Awaja swats away the merciless flies as she talks in matter-of-fact sentences about the single night of war that took her eight-year-old son, crushed her home, and wounded both herself and her husband just one year ago.
It was night-time on January 4 when a full-blown Israeli invasion of Gaza put her home, less than a kilometre from the border with Israel in the north, into the line of fire.
Wafa, her husband Kamal, and her son Ibrahim were all shot as they fled the razing of their house by an Israeli tank, according to both Wafa and an account by Defence for Children International. With wounds to both his head and his abdomen, Ibrahim bled to death within minutes – it was his eighth birthday.
A now-pregnant Wafa, Kamal and their remaining five children live in a makeshift fortress of donated tents on an empty plot in Gaza’s north, caught in an unlucky web of border politics and economics that is preventing any reconstruction of their home – and of the territory.
“There’s no other place, where should we go?” asks Kamal. “The house we built on our own is gone. Now we are living with the dogs and the flies.”
Israel launched a deadly, 22-day military offensive on the Gaza Strip one year ago, killing about 1,400 Palestinians and wounding 5,000 in an effort it says was aimed at quelling Hamas rocket fire into the Jewish state. The assault brought widespread destruction to an already embattled enclave, leaving tens of thousands homeless, according to the United Nations.
Because they still owe money on a loan used to buy the house destroyed in the war, the Awajas cannot afford to rent another one. Kamal’s monthly salary, disbursed from the Fatah-run Palestinian Authority (PA) in Ramallah, is just US$900 (Dh3,300). He gives $650 of that each month to the bank.
A comprehensive Israeli ban on the import of construction materials is also preventing the family – and many others – from rebuilding. Israel has kept Gaza under a tight economic blockade since the Islamist movement Hamas seized control of the coastal strip in June 2007.
Over the past year, with borders sealed and billions in reconstruction funds yet to reach the territory, a string of three canvas tents have turned into home for the Awajas.
“At first, we were not used to displaying our lives so publicly,” said Wafa. “As a woman, I should have my own privacy.
“When I would see men passing by, I would leave whatever I was doing and run and hide. But now, I don’t really care. The whole world knows I live in a tent.”
Forced to cut down on their consumption of meat, the Awajas currently divert local water pipes to irrigate a small vegetable garden next to their tents.
But in a nod to the middle-class lifestyle they maintained before the war, the Awajas equipped their kitchen with a smattering of dusty appliances, including a microwave, a refrigerator and a gas-burning stove hustled through Gaza’s network of underground smuggling tunnels.
Kamal even managed to connect their mini-encampment to an electricity grid, propped up a rusty satellite dish with sandbags, and pilfered an internet connection from neighbouring Israel with a borrowed wireless router.
However, the temporary amenities are no substitute for a real home and the security it provides, they say. Times are still hard. When Kamal left Gaza last month to make the annual pilgrimage to Mecca in Saudi Arabia, Wafa and the children said feral dogs attacked the kitchen tent for food almost nightly.
Their oldest children, Umsiyat, 12, and Subhi, 10, embarrassed by their living conditions and struggling to study in their makeshift home, are now failing courses at school.
But it is often the memories of the war that make things the most difficult. The family plan to mark what would have been Ibrahim’s ninth birthday tomorrow by receiving guests.
Posters of the young boy adorn the walls of all three tents. Wafa says she waits for the other children to leave for school before weeping every day for her dead son. Four-year-old Diaa cries hysterically at the sight of journalists or aid workers: they remind him of the war.
While having received several thousand dollars in compensation for their losses, the Awajas say they could be evicted from the government-owned land on which they live any day.
The Hamas-run government in Gaza has already threatened to remove the portable toilets donated to the camp by international aid agencies, they claim.
But the family continues with its preparations for another winter outdoors in the canvas outpost, aware at least this year of what to expect while cold and homeless.
“Last winter the tent flooded and everything we had saved from our home was ruined,” Wafa said. “I couldn’t stop crying, it was a disaster. But this year, I know what to do. And if I don’t laugh about our situation now, I will die.”
foreign.desk@thenational.ae
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