from The Earth Times
Jabalya, Gaza Strip - A lone figure sat atop an enormous pile of rubble Friday morning on the outskirts of Jabalya, in the northern Gaza Strip, smoking a cigarette, drinking tea and staring into the distance as the Muslim call to prayer sounded from afar. "This was my home, where I am supposed to go?" asked Kanaan, rhetorically, taking another sip of from his small glass.
Another round of calls from the nearby mosque signalled the first Friday prayers since a ceasefire went into effect six days earlier, after more than three weeks of violence.
"All I have left is my blanket, this foam pillow and my teapot," the 45-year-old Palestinian man said, pointing to the belongings at his feet.
Kanaan, a father of eight, lived in the building with his extended family, 14 people in total. He said all of his clothes and possessions were lost when Israeli tank shells and bulldozers destroyed the home in the second week of the offensive.
"It's a tsunami what happened, total destruction, everything is destroyed," cried Muhammed Najjar, an 18-year-old resident of the small rural area, about 2 kilometres from the border with Israel.
Of the dozens of houses closest to the border, all were turned to rubble or destroyed, their skeletons appearing to defy the laws of physics, hanging at precarious angles.
According to official statistics, over 5,000 houses were destroyed and 20,000 damaged across the Gaza Strip during the fighting. In many areas the devastation appeared systematic.
Some of Kanaan`s neighbours pulled blankets and plastic bags out of the rubble and built makeshift shelters, bemoaning the cold and the darkening skies, signalling impending rain. Others, lacking alternatives, crawled into the dangerous structures, laying out blankets and arranging a small fireplace around which they kept warm and cooked their food.
"Potatoes, potatoes, potatoes," Fahed, 48, lamented. "We sometimes have a little bread, no milk and some dirty water."
The potatoes, being boiled in a small, dirty pot in the polluted water, cooked on the flames from wood taken off the destroyed building, were brought by an Islamic charity society.
His wife, Fahed said, was killed in the second week of the offensive, leaving him to take care of his four daughters alone. His small plot of farmland was also damaged.
Much of the land around the area was destroyed, farmers said, as they carted away eggplants and some other vegetables that had been "harvested" by the Israeli tanks.
"This is all I have left from my land," said Omar, a Bedouin from Jabalya, waving his hand at the wagon on the back of his tractor, containing one load of vegetables.
Fahed's donkey was also killed, apparently by a shell, leaving him unable to work as a porter any longer.
"I lost all my work, I have no money. My youngest daughter, she is only two months old, and now she has no mother," he said and collapsed into the rubble.
"God is great," he announced, dismissing his friends` words of sympathy.
His donkey was not the only animal killed. Cows and goats lay in the ruins and on the roads leading to the neighbourhood, some buried under rubble, others under downed power lines, flies fluttering around them. Cement and ceramic factories in the nearby industrial zone were completely destroyed.
"It`s death and destruction, everywhere, it stinks of it," said Omar the farmer, moving on with his crops and circumventing one of many craters in the road - as large as four metres deep and 15 metres wide, made by F16 air strikes.
At a United Nations school in Jabalya refugee camp, Yousef Abudeidah was taking refuge with 12 members of his family, having nowhere to live after his house, next to the factories, was destroyed after an extended siege that lasted over five hours.
"My entire home, was destroyed, turned into a pancake," he said. After working in the United Arab Emirates for 28 years, he returned to Gaza in 2006, with a modest fortune that he invested into his residence and its surrounding farmland.
"All my years of work in the Gulf were destroyed," Abudeidah said.
The Palestinian residents of what is known colloquially as the Abed Rabbo neighbourhood, named after the larger clan most of the people belong to, do not deny that militants fired from the area into Israel, but insisted no locals were part of the "resistance."
Some people mildly supported the rocket fire, while others opposed it, calling them "silly, cheap Arab rockets," which served no purpose.
The supporters said that the rockets were intended to strike some fear into the Israelis and "make them see that we won't live under siege," in the words of 20-year-old Salah.
He was referring to the blockade on Gaza, which became near total after the Islamic Hamas movement took over the enclave in 2007.
"For some of these little rockets they destroyed everything and killed 20 people from Abed Rabbo (family) alone," he said while kicking at the remains of a tank shell.
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