Gravel, rotten wood and no bricks: Palestinians struggle to rebuild homes in the ruins of Gaza City
This article first appeared on our partner site, Independent Arabia
With a hammer in one hand and a stone in the other, Khalil makes a resolution: “I can’t wait around for promises of reconstruction.”
He climbs up the cracked stairs to his ruined apartment, which is now uninhabitable. Despite this, he still feels that what remains of his house is a small homeland to which he wants to return.
Khalil lives in Gaza City, where Israel carried out the devastating Operation Gideon’s Chariots II in the weeks leading up to the ceasefire. The Israeli army left behind it such terrible destruction that it was as if an earth-shattering quake had hit.
Israeli forces had used military robots rigged with explosives to blow up buildings, causing widespread damage to infrastructure and facilities.
When the Israeli army withdrew from the centres of the Gaza Strip’s cities to the yellow line agreed upon in the peace plan, Khalil immediately returned to check on his house.
He was shocked by what he found: the building’s foundations had been stripped of cement, meaning that the residential structure was at risk of collapse. Looking at the columns, he was overcome with deep sorrow, but he quickly remembered that he was living in a worn-out, impractical tent pitched on the street.
The staircase had been hit by artillery fire and was cracked and broken. He struggled to climb the stairs to reach his apartment, only to find what remained was “nothing but concrete pillars”.
Speaking to Independent Arabia, he recounted: “All the walls had collapsed as a result of the explosions. Despite this, I resolved to rebuild everything traditionally and live there again. Even in its ruined state, my home is better than living in a classroom or in a tattered tent out on the street.”
Khalil looked around and found stones scattered by the bombing. He quickly picked up the suitable ones and carried them up to his apartment, calmly stacking the stones on top of each other to build a new living room wall to replace the one that had collapsed in the explosions.
There are no new building bricks in Gaza because of the war, so Khalil had to buy reinforced nylon sheets to replace the fallen walls in his house. As for the kitchen, he salvaged wood from pallets to make simple shelves to replace the cabinets.
He explains that the makeshift reconstruction of the remains of homes in Gaza is very expensive and requires exhausting, backbreaking effort.
“We start by removing the rubble and repairing the cracked walls, but there are no stairs, doors, windows or furniture. The house is completely empty,” he says.
This is how Khalil repairs his house: a stone on top of a piece of nylon on top of rotten wood. Just being able to live in his home gives him comfort. He points to the piles of stones scattered around him, which he has laboriously turned into building materials.
