BROKEN GLASS crunched under my shoes as I stepped out of the taxi. The shattered pieces glimmered in the dark, and a line from a second World War song about the Blitz in London, went through my head: "The streets of town were paved with stars . . .", writes LARA MARLOWEin Gaza City
But there is nothing romantic about Gaza 2009. The hotel lobby was dank and cold.
Perhaps to prepare me for the plastic sheeting that has replaced my bedroom window, the receptionist complained that the price of glass multiplied tenfold, from 50 Israeli shekels per square metre before the three-week war to 500 Israeli shekels since hostilities stopped last Sunday.
But is it really over?
I woke before dawn to a loud, hammering noise. From the street outside, I could see an Israeli gunboat lobbing artillery shells along the coastline.
The practice may prevent Hamas receiving weapons, but Gazans see it as a wicked way to stop them fishing – and eating. Several people were hospitalised as a result of yesterday’s shelling, and Hamas officials told me five fishermen were killed.
In central Gaza, the bomb sites were purposefully, if disputedly, chosen, like Baghdad in 2003.
Like the Americans in Baghdad, the Israelis took a swipe at the press building, wounding two journalists.
Cheerful, uniformed policemen lined the pavement opposite the bombed-out central police station. “We’re back at work. This is our office now,” they told me.
The Palestine Legislative Council, once the finest building in Gaza, was flattened – so much for promoting Arab democracy.
Flattened too was the government palace overlooking the sea, where Yasser Arafat received world dignitaries.
The former home of Nizar Rayan, a Hamas leader who was killed by a one-tonne bomb with two of his four wives and 12 of his children on January 1st, has become a shrine. The targeting of Rayan’s building was not precise. Most of a city block was chopped into debris, with brocade curtains and living room furniture dangling from uprooted girders.
Men, women and children strolled past Rayan’s house, pointing and staring at the home of the “martyr”. A Hamas youth group arrived on motorcycles.
The further one advances towards Gaza’s northern border, the more extreme the destruction.
Beyond the crest of a hill in the Abed Rabbo residential district lies a vista of devastation that again reminds one of the second World War, or, more recently, the villages of southern Lebanon.
At twilight, donkey carts rattled down the hillside towards Jabalya. Orange campfires burned brightly in the rubble, where refugees brewed pots of tea.
The Israelis destroyed some 4,300 Gazan houses in three weeks, a good proportion of them on the high ground to the north of the enclave. These fields of ruined homes and ruined lives have become a calling card that says: Israel passed here.