A Tribute To My Grandparent's Demolished Home

I first learned of my grandparents' home being demolished a few months after it actually happened in October 2003. Rafah was under siege by the Israeli Army at that time and phone calls to Gaza were nearly impossible. Al-Barazil housing project was hit especially hard because it was alongside the Gazan-Egyptian border. I remember I was driving to school in Pennsylvania when my mother called to tell me. She was very calm, and reported it to me like she reported every other piece of news that came out of Gaza. I could not comprehend what she was saying. The shock did not allow for me to make sense of anything she was telling me. It didn't make sense that the house my grandfather built was no longer a house, but just rubble. And when I asked her how she felt, she replied like she did with everything else, "We're no different than the other Palestinians." My grandfather died in that same house a year before it was destroyed. Since that time my uncle and his 10 family members had been living there.

Now, almost two months of being in Rafah, I worked up the courage to go visit the Al-Barazil Housing Project to pay respects to my grandparents' demolished home. It was time to come to terms with the reality of the situation. I think it was also important for me to see where the house I spent so many summers used to stand. Perhaps to understand why it was demolished in the first place, or to make sense of yet another one of Israel's unjust and inhumane acts.

I took my cousin with me because I didn't think I would be able to find it on my own. The entire area around by the border and around the house area was demolished in October 2003. I read in the news, and my uncle confirmed that Israel destroyed all the homes because they apparently were looking for tunnels between Rafah to Egypt that they said were used for smuggling weapons. So basically Israel was doing its job in reportedly, "dismantling the terrorist infrastructure."

After walking around in what felt like circles around the flat land looking for the remnants of the house, we found it! There right in front of me sat but a small piece of land with a few strings of grass growing on it. The house my mother grew up in no longer stood there. And there I stood staring at the land wondering how or what could have wiped away an entire house from the ground up. And neither did the garden my grandmother grew, or the fig trees, or the olive trees. What about the small shop my grandfather had inside the house he built to keep himself busy? Or the gate that I hated for the many times it shut on my fingers. Or the backyard where my mother had her wedding? Where was the room that I saw my grandmother for the last time before she died … Gone too?

I felt lost; I couldn't make out exactly where I used to sleep during the summers, or where the steps that I played on used to be. It was all gone, and all that was left of it was flat land with a few strings of green grass. "Are you sure this is it? Are you sure, maybe there were still some parts left to it," I asked my cousin. "Yes, of course," he replied. There wasn't any way to come to terms with what I was looking at. It was hard for the land to mean anything to me. I had no relation to it. It was nothing to me if it did not have my grandparents house, just land alongside the border of Rafah. Without the walls, or the rooms, or the gardens, it meant nothing to me. All my rationale was suddenly gone, and I felt like a child again wondering and in denial if I would ever see my grandparents' house again.

We continued to walk alongside the Wall, over empty lands and I imagined the houses that stood under my feet as I walked over it. I wondered whose homes I was stepping on, whose memories I was walking over, and whose lives were shattered with the demolition of their homes. I imagined as my cousin described where the tanks stood just two years ago and shot 10 children dead, and where the Israeli snipers hid in a hole they dug in the rubble. It was still there. I imagined the shelling of the houses, and where people must have run to with their children. But I didn't recognize any part of El-Barazil, for it wasn't houses I was looking at, only empty flat land. The school my parents met and feel in love was gone, and I stood face to face with the Wall, in the same spot I used to stand over 10 years ago, but it was barbed wire then. The same barbed wire that my grandfather stood in front of and spoke to his son who was on the other side in Egypt, with wires between them. All of Gaza used to be surrounded by barbwire, but it was now a Wall. And Palestinians in Egypt who are not allowed in Palestine cannot meet us at the Wall, and if my grandfather were alive, he wouldn't be able to see or speak to his son through this 25-foot Wall like he used to.

I cried at what was left. I had nothing left to imagine, nothing but memories of my grandparents home. The house ceased to exist and there was no way to get it back. I am left along with many other Palestinians trying to come to terms with the reality of our situation. And we are supposed to accept unquestioningly that this is what the world has willed for us as life goes on regardless.

This is where the house used to be

Could It Get Any Worse?

Every morning, I usually wake up to the sound of construction in front of my home in Southern Rafah. The UN is building homes here for over
25,000 Palestinians whose homes were demolished by Israel during the past six years. But in the last two days, I have had to wake up on my own. There are no trucks loading sand, or construction men screaming at each other because the UN has halted the project along with some $93 million in other projects when the cement and other building materials ran out. And Israel will not include the necessary building materials in any emergency package to Gaza. I don't think anyone outside of here realizes how negatively this will affect Palestinians
in Gaza.

For example, my uncle and his family of eleven are just one of the many waiting to get a home from UNRWA. His home was demolished almost 3 years ago, one of the 3,000 destroyed since the beginning of the Second Uprising (Intifada). Although he was lucky enough to find an
apartment, it has only one bedroom, one bathroom and a small kitchen for his family of eleven; and he was still one of the lucky ones. Most people had to crunch themselves in with relatives whose houses are already crowded. With 1.4 million people crunched in 139 sq mi, almost twice the size of DC which is …… people per square mile, Gaza is one of the most densely populated places in the world. So, when the news of the halting of the construction reached my uncle, all he could say was, "Could it get any worse?"

Like many Palestinians, my uncle, earns his income by going to Egypt and buying merchandise -- mostly cigarettes since that's what sells in Gaza -- and comes back to Rafah to sell it. When the Egyptian-Gazan border was functional, he made a trip to Egypt every two weeks. Many times he would buy, for instance, $200 worth of merchandise but the Egyptians at the border checkpoints between Gazan and Egypt would often dump the products they didn't like, such as cigarettes, or keep some of what they did like, or just mistreat them while rifling through my uncle's bags so that most of electronics wound up not working properly. So, even then he didn't always profit from his trips; and this was his only source of income. The border however has not opened since June 6th, and my uncle has already sold all of his merchandise. So, he now sits and waits, and finds ways to keep himself busy until the border opens, without which he has no source of income. And neither does his son who works as a police officer and has not been paid for 18 months, since Hamas's election. The economic embargo has not allowed any
funds to reach Hamas's government because the US classified Hamas as a terrorist organization, but it is people like my cousin and 19,000 other government employees that suffer as a result, and therefore must work without salaries.

Similar to others here in Gaza, life for my uncle is becoming desperate. He has 10 people that he has to feed and clothe, but he doesn't even have a shekel to cover the cost of his children's
transportation to school. And to make matters worse, he has a heart condition and the pharmacies have run out of medicine he needs. Last year, he was able to get through to Egypt to have a heart operation, but now if something were to happen to him, we don't even know where we would take him or how we would even get him there. The border is closed and there are 6,000 people waiting to get out, 28 of which have already died in just two weeks. No one besides his family would care if he were to die. To the rest of the world, he would just be another number; another one of the 60% of Gazans who are unemployed; another one of the 81% of Gazans living below the poverty line; just another poor Palestinian waiting for his demolished home to be rebuilt by UNRWA. My uncle is still my uncle, and not a number, but he is just one of the hundreds of thousands of Palestinians whose life has been challenged in every aspect; his very right to live has been violated by Israel's collective punishment of all who reside in Gaza.

After we heard of the news, I stood with my uncle at our window and as we stared at the dozens of concrete skeletons of homes and schools bathed in the fading light of the sunset, when he said quietly, "I guess we won't be moving in September."

"God willing, soon," I replied. "Don't worry." But inside I knew -- we both knew -- that life here in Rafah will only get worse before it gets any better.