Gaza- “A room in my house is better than a million tents.” This is how Hadeel Al-Arawi responded to her husband, “Abu Yazan,” when he offered her to return to their destroyed home in the city of Khan Yunis in the southern Gaza Strip, following the withdrawal of the Israeli occupation forces from it after 4 months of ground invasion and the destruction of all aspects of life. In which.
Hadeel and her family were among the first to return to the city last month. According to her description, “Khan Yunis was not the one we knew. We were shocked by the massive destruction, and life there was frightening, until its residents began to encourage each other to return to it.”
For about two months, Hadeel, her husband, and their four children lived in a small tent in the Al-Mawasi area, west of Khan Yunis, after repeated displacement following the Israeli invasion in December of last year. She describes the experience of life in a tent as “cruel and miserable.”
Massive destruction
When Hadeel returned to her apartment in her husband’s family’s residential building on Al-Bahr Street leading to the Nasser Medical Complex, she found it destroyed.
She told Tel Aviv Tribune Net that the scene of the building was shocking: great destruction, broken doors and windows, walls that no longer had a trace, and the street itself looked as if it had been subjected to an earthquake, and she felt as if she was entering a “dark and lonely cave.”
Hadeel lives in an apartment on the last floor of this three-story building, and she was surprised as she was climbing up by the extent of the devastation caused by the occupation soldiers, who took it as a “military barracks” and wreaked havoc and destruction there, in addition to the destruction caused by artillery shells.
But the mathematics teacher quickly composed herself and said, “I thought she was right. I did not hesitate to decide to return to my apartment, and despite the devastation in it, the room there is better than the tent, as there is no privacy, the heat is intense, and diseases spread.”
With pride, it looks at its early return to the neighborhood before the majority of its residents, who are doubling day after day, and are returning to their destroyed homes, renovating one or more rooms, despite the massive scale of destruction in Khan Yunis, which affected all aspects of life and basic facilities.
Spirit revived in the city with the return of groups of its displaced residents, who had left the neighboring city of Rafah, in the wake of the escalating Israeli ground military operation since May 7.
Back to life
Abu Yazan describes Khan Yunis as afflicted, and tells Tel Aviv Tribune Net that it was like a ghost town when they returned to it, but life began to come to it 3 weeks ago with the return of many of its residents, and they have no alternative to that.
International and local estimates indicate that approximately 900,000 Palestinians were displaced from the city of Rafah as a result of the ground operation. The majority of them took refuge in tents in the coastal area of Al-Mawasi, extending from Rafah to Deir Al-Balah in the middle of the Strip, until there was no longer any foothold there, as the tents were close together and spread throughout and there was crowding. Intense.
During the first weeks of returning to Khan Yunis, Abu Yazan struggled to provide his family’s daily necessities of food and drink. He was forced to travel long distances in order to buy the available vegetables, and bring a quantity of fresh water for drinking, and salt water for hygiene and other household uses.
Abu Yazan has been relieved to some extent of this suffering with the spread of “stands” selling vegetables, and the availability of a nearby mobile station for selling fresh and salt water. However, he complains of the high prices, which are deepened by the crisis of lack of liquidity.
Due to the massive destruction of infrastructure, the city of Khan Yunis does not have water or sewage networks, and residents suffer from deteriorating communications and Internet services, forcing them to resort to alternatives with high financial costs to manage their daily affairs.
Emergency measures
To overcome the high costs of life, Muhammad Hammad opened a primitive bakery in front of his destroyed house in Khan Yunis, in which he prepared bread for the neighbors for a small fee.
He told Tel Aviv Tribune Net that he helps him provide the basic needs of his family of 4 members, and his brother-in-law, Omar Al-Masry, who lives with him, shares the work with his family (10 members) after they found their house destroyed in the “Jourat Al-Aqqad” area of the city.
It did not take long for Muhammad and Omar to introduce their small project, and customers flocked to them daily from the neighborhood and neighboring areas, in light of a stifling fuel and cooking gas crisis, the severity of which increased with the storming and occupation of the Rafah land crossing.
Muhammad and Omar collected large quantities of wood left over from the occupation forces’ destruction of the doors and furniture of the house, to use them as fuel for the oven fires.
The fuel crisis affected taxis, most of which stopped operating, and were replaced by animal-drawn carts. They became a common means of transportation, and transportation on them became commonplace in the devastated streets of Khan Yunis.
Omar told Tel Aviv Tribune Net that the residents of Khan Yunis return to it and see the extent of the destruction appearing before them, but the disaster is much greater than that. He added that in some areas, sewage water floated in the streets, because the occupation destroyed the ground as well as above it, and there was no longer any infrastructure, “and as the population increases, the disaster will unfold.”
The Ministry of Health and international medical organizations succeeded in partially restarting sections of the Nasser Medical Complex, which the occupation forces stormed during their ground invasion of Khan Yunis, but it is still unable to meet the needs of the population, and to resume its work to keep pace with the repercussions of the war, amid fear and warnings that it will go out of work. Entirely due to the fuel crisis.
