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Day one of visits was meant to illustrate the indescribable destruction wrought by the Israeli military during the 22-day assault on Gaza. Our first stop was at the American International School, which had been completely flattened on January 3, 2009 during the assault.
Among the rubble, students’ papers were strewn by the wind. We picked up one exam by a young girl in which she had scored 95%. Making the experience even more dramatic were the former students of the school who accompanied us as we walked around this massive pile of concrete and protruding rebar that used to be a sanctuary of learning.
The young students talked about the fact that many of their foreign teachers had been sent away a couple of years ago because of the situation in Gaza. Having “American” in the name of the school had made it a target of extremists. And now their school had been demolished. “Why was our school targeted? What did we do to deserve this?” The school itself is located in an open area with no other buildings around, so “target” was indeed the correct word to use. Fortunately, the school was closed at the time for the Christmas holidays, but the night watchmen was killled.
This was a private school so most of the students were admittedly privileged, but there were also students from poor areas attending on study grants, which were funded in part by the U.S.
Norm Finkelstein spoke with a young girl about her studies. As we were leaving, he told her, “You’re so smart. When I’m an old man, you’re going to be a leader of Palestine.”
We knew we would be touring the demolished areas of the north, but nothing could have prepared us for what we saw at Izbat Abd Rabbuh. The entire area, just a short distance from the border, had been razed, and all in just the last 4 days of the assault. By the shape of the rubble, with walls and ceilings collapsed in on themselves, it was evident that the Israelis had mined the homes. We met the son of an ambulance driver. His father had been stopped by the Israelis, forced to get out of his ambulance, and strip down. Then the building next to him was bombed and his ambulance, along with his clothes, were still there under the rubble. He thankfully made it out alive.
We were told that when Sen. John Kerry visited the area, he never got out of his car.
There was certainly a concentration of destroyed buildings in the area, though signs of the Israeli attack abound throughout Gaza: piles of rubble of bombed out buildings, the twisted iron and aluminum of destroyed factories, once green fields reduced to sand and dirt by Israeli tanks, apartments with 2 meter holes in the walls, toppled minarets of mosques turned to ruins.
The “precision” of the Israeli military was evident.
Aside from a few rare cases in which cinder blocks have been used to fill gaping holes in the sides of buildings, nearly 4 months after the ceasefire, no reconstruction whatsoever has begun. The blockade keeps the necessary building materials out of Gaza.
Category: in gaza
