Opinion Editorials, October 2003, www.aljazeerah.info
Human Price of the Israeli Occupation of Palestine
Israeli daily aggression on the Palestinian people
Mission and meaning of Al-Jazeerah
Cities, localities, and tourist attractions
Football pitch and hope all that’s left for Rafah’s homeless refugee
26/10/2003
By Jean-Marc Mojon Agence France Presse
His hands in his pockets, Mohammad Radwan gazes nostalgically at the pitch. The football stadium which was packed with his best memories as a player and coach is now packed with Palestinian refugees whose homes were razed by Israeli bulldozers.
This small ground in the southern Gaza Strip city of Rafah was where the 39-year-old played his first game in the local junior team and where he returned as a coach after playing professionally in Jordan and notching up a few caps with the national squad.
Now his wife and six children sleep in the changing rooms and the men have lined up mattresses on the concrete terracing.
"This place was always a second home for me, now it's my only home," says Radwan with a wry smile.
Ten days ago, the army demolished his home and dozens of other houses cosying up a little too close to the border with Egypt and suspected by Israel of sheltering the entrances to weapons smuggling tunnels.
"They started bulldozing the houses. I waited until the last minute before leaving the house where I was born, but then we just had to run," Radwan says.
According to the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA), 189 houses were destroyed and 1,780 people made homeless.
Emergency financial aid was distributed to the homeless people, who can also apply for housing, but the extent of the crisis is unprecedented in the three-year-old uprising.
"There is very little accommodation left. Some 6,000 people had already suffered the same fate since the start of the intifada and all the rental houses have been used up," says UNWRA spokesman Paul McCann.
As a result, the average rent for a house has risen from 100 to 150 dollars a month in a city where people live on less than two dollars a day.
"It will cost 25 million dollars to rebuild enough houses and it is difficult to build quickly because Israel still imposes a blockade on things like pipes and gravel," he adds.
Entire extended families were made homeless overnight, ruling out the usual solution of moving in with relatives and many of them had to live in UN tents for several days or in municipal buildings.
Khadra Khaled Abu Nama, 65, built a rickety little shack with a few bits and pieces she retrieved from the rubble right on top of the ruins of the two-storey building where she lived with no less than 30 relatives.
"We are looking for a house but everything is too expensive. I haven't showered in two weeks and the kids don't even have water to drink," she says, squatting in her fly-infested shelter, patched up with carpets and jute bags.
Aisha al-Zum found refuge in a furniture workshop, which the owner agreed to rent for 100 dollars a month.
Nursing her two-month-old baby, the 35-year-old woman looks at the squalid windowless backroom where her family has been sleeping for the past week. "I guess this is our new home now," she says.
Her neighbourhood of Ybna is nothing but a ghost town, a sinister sprawl of crumbling tenements.
A child's T-shirt still hangs from a washing line. An Israeli mirador towers menacingly over the empty refugee camp, where silence is only broken by the clatter of helicopters and the crackling of gunfire.
Mohammad Radwan steps cautiously in the rubble through his flattened neighbourhood, making sure to keep out of the snipers' line of fire.
He scans the desolate scene and struggles to locate his former home. Suddenly, he spots what used to be his front door, sticking out from a pile of rubble. "This is my house," he says.
"The bulldozers are huge, as tall as my house. They destroyed my building by ripping off the roof of my uncle's house and dropping it on mine. Everything collapsed from above," Radwan recounts.
"All my belongings have been buried under tons of concrete, even my boots. But this is still my home. One day I will tear down this wall and rebuild my house on the exact same spot.
"I want my nine-year-old son Yusef to grow up playing football in the streets of Ybna."
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| Earth, a planet hungry for peace |
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| The Israeli apartheid (security) wall around Palestinian population centers (Ran Cohen, pmc, 5/24/03). |
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| The Israeli apartheid (security) wall around Palestinian population centers in the West Bank (Ran Cohen, pmc, 5/24/03). |
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