AFTER 22 days of devastating Israeli air strikes and shelling, shocked Palestinians emerged on to the rubble-strewn streets of the Gaza Strip yesterday to collect their dead and inspect their shattered homes.
Women sat weeping amid the ruins of their houses, many too distressed to speak. Others sifted through the debris to gather cherished belongings. One held a necklace. “This is all that’s left,” she said. Children tried to salvage schoolbags and books. Shereen Abed-Rabbo (12) returned to find her home reduced to bricks. Among her destroyed belongings was a torn Koran. “God will punish them very harshly when he sees his book was torn into pieces.”
Families who fled advancing Israeli troops began returning to barely recognisable neighbourhoods to discover who had survived and who had died. “Thank God you are alive! The house can be rebuilt, God willing,” Abu Daoud Amer consoled a friend.
Hamas, eager to show it still controls Gaza, sent policemen back on to the streets – even the traffic police were out on mangled, cratered roads. Municipal bulldozers pushed aside crushed cars and fallen chunks of concrete from the streets, but nothing could conceal the scale of destruction wrought by Israel’s military machine.
“Some people can’t even recognise the place where their house used to be,” one policeman radioed to his commander from the northern town of Beit Lahiya.
Ambulances negotiated roads torn up by bombs and tank tracks to recover bodies that had lain for days in rubble in Beit Lahiya and open areas to the north. Hamas police said about 95 bodies, mostly of militants, had been found so far.
Fearing renewed Israeli strikes, the police chief in the northern Gaza Strip ordered his men to move only in very small groups and to guard police headquarters and public buildings, not going inside unless absolutely necessary.
“Be careful,” one officer told policemen. “This is not a real calm.” Israeli strikes killed scores of policemen on the first day of the war. Israel classes Gaza’s police as combatants, although some lawyers say they should be regarded as civilians.
Sereya, an old woman in a black robe, wandered among the ruins of the compound where she had lived. “What should I say? Should I speak of my house that was destroyed or of my land that was bulldozed?” she cried. “I got out with only what I’m wearing.” – (Reuters)