It’s been four weeks since the end (or temporary pause) of the war on Gaza. Israel’s merciless pounding of the tiny, sealed strip of land, chronically overcrowded with three generations of refugees, resulted (predictably) in a massive loss of life and catastrophic levels of destruction.

My father returned from Gaza today having spent the better part of a week there. He went to be with my grandfather who has fallen seriously ill. My dad is exceptionally lucky. Through his work, he is one of the few allowed into Gaza and the only member of our extended family who sees and is seen by our relatives there.

He didn’t get much time to tour Gaza, the place he grew up, because he spent most of his time with my grandfather in hospital and in the family home in Khan Younis after the old man was discharged. There’s a large poster hanging in the house now of Hamada, my uncle Mahmoud’s 22-year old brother in law, a police officer who was killed by an Israeli airstrike on the first day of the war. Hamada’s dad, whose own brother was shot dead by the same forces that murdered his son, met my dad at the hospital when he went to visit my grandfather. He spent almost an hour talking about his son.

Hamada had died in the first minutes of the war when tens of Israeli warplanes attacked Palestinian police stations all over Gaza, killing around 120 policemen in one raid. He had been on the job for less than a month.

On the day he died, December 27th, 2008, Hamada was not even supposed to be at the police station. It was his day off, but he had told his mother that he wanted to volunteer his time and help the other officers. His father recalled how excited his son had been about receiving his first paycheck, promising to gift it all to his parents and promising to buy everyone at work shawarma sandwiches.

The family received his paycheck after his death. His dad kept his son’s promise, and bought all the surviving police officers shawarma sandwiches, then donated the rest of his son’s first and only salary to charity.

My dad did manage to visit some of the areas most affected by the destruction, including Tal al-Hawa, where he stayed with his brother for a night, and Jabal al-Rayyis, Jabal al-Kashef and Izzbet Abd Rabbo, all east of Jabalya. He shot videos of the last three areas, which were almost completely flattened. Virtually no building are left standing there; homes, factories, mosques, businesses, shops-all reduced to compact mounds of rubble. He told me that a whole month after the war, the soil of Jabal al-Rayyes is still drenched with the stench of gunpowder. He described the smell as being as potent as tear gas, causing him to cough and tear up just by walking around the area.

He also visited the Islamic University which had been hit during several air strikes. The missiles destroyed a girls dormitory and the main science lab, destroying millions of dollars of equipment and countless projects and studies-years of research wiped out in a split-second of barbarity. During his visit, bulldozers were removing some of the rubble (picture at right). Simply clearing the rubble from the tens of thousands of destroyed homes will cost hundreds of millions of dollars and may take years.

What stood out the most to my dad though is the spirit and resoluteness displayed by those who lived through and survived those 22 days of hell. He admitted that at times during the war, as the warplanes bombed and the hundreds of dead piled up, he began to doubt that those appearing on TV to proclaim their steadfastness were being truthful to themselves or to the viewers. But in Gaza he saw it everywhere; in the togetherness between neighbors, in the way families pitched their tents next to their
destroyed homes, in the Palestinian flags rising high above the mounds of rubble everywhere.

This is Gaza: A surreal collective of pain, bravery, strength and conviction. Even after the carnage of the war was assessed and billions were lined up for rebuilding the shattered infrastructure, the borders remain sealed, with few allowed in, almost none allowed out, and an average of only 100 trucks a day are permitted to supply 1.5 million people with humanitarian aid. Building materials are still banned. Nobody knows how long the crushed structures will remain in view. It is relatively easy for Israel to destroy bricks and mortar, but it has found it impossible to destroy the people’s spirit.

Remember Gaza.

Related posts:

1. Gaza: Recovering, but not rebuilding
2. Gaza: Getting back on its crippled feet
3. Gaza: Israel could not win
4. Gaza: What is there to say?
5. Gaza burning