Gaza Is a Tomb

In the rubble of the Gaza Strip, the militias are once again arming
up, training men and women, and preparing for the inevitable war
with Israel.

BY BEL TREW-APRIL 13, 2015

GAZA CITY Everyone freezes. The howl of an Israeli warplane cuts through the
conversation. The plane is coming in our direction, and is soon nearly overhead.
Brigade commander Abu Mujahid, 40, snaps his head to the right and nods at two of
his men, members of the Nasser Salahuddin Brigade, one of Gazas many fighting
groups. They silently slip out from under the reed awning we are crouched under and
jog up the pockmarked farm road to see whats going on.
Did you switch off your mobile and leave it in the car? Abu Mujahid asks urgently,
looking at the sky. He has fought in every conflict against the Israelis since the Second
Intifada, which began in 2000. Curved chunks of flesh on his arms and legs are
missing, as are his two middle fingers. His soldiers joke that he is half metal.

And then an explosion. It is loud and guttural, but far away. No one even flinches.
Its a sound blast, but it will knock your windows out, he says by way of explanation.
The fighters in Gaza are preparing for a new war every day. It could come at any time:
In the past few weeks, Israeli planes and drones have been increasingly circling the
26-square-mile coastal enclave. The Israel Defense Forces have repositioned troops
at the eastern borders, an area almost entirely flattened during last summers 51-day
war.
The war could start any minute, says Abu Mujahid. There is a lot of kinetic
movement, so all the fighting groups evacuated the bases, weve postponed training
sessions, and many of the men have moved underground.
There are people right now under your feet, his wiry second-in-command, Abu Saif,
28, adds with a toothless grin.
Gaza today is a powder keg waiting to explode. The key aspects of the cease-fire
agreement that ended the war last summer remain unfulfilled both Israel and
Hamas feel that only more violence can force their enemy to assent to their demands.
Meanwhile, the reconstruction of Gaza has stagnated due to Israeli restrictions on
letting material into the territory, as well as the rivalry between Hamas and Fatah,
sapping Gaza residents hope for a better future and leading them to believe that there
is no alternative but armed struggle.
When a truce to last years war was brokered in Egypt in August, it committed both
sides to launching indirect talks within a month to resolve the long-standing issues
between them.The Palestinians want an end to the crippling eight-year blockade on
their territory, the fishing zones extended, an airport, and a seaport. Israel, meanwhile,
wants the total disarmament of the territory and the end of Hamas, an Islamist party
that has controlled the strip since 2007.
The talks, however, never materialized. Instead, Egypt, which has long served as an
interlocutor, largely shut its borders on Gazas 1.8 million people, and in February, an
Egyptian court briefly put Hamas on its terrorist list. Meanwhile, in mid-March, Israel
re-elected hawkish Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who hasrepeatedly said that
Hamas is equivalent to the Islamic State.
***
For all the bark and bluster, the fighters begrudgingly acknowledge that the civilian
population probably cannot weather another war. Eight months after the bombing
ended, Gaza is still flattened: Only $945 million of $3.5 billion pledged for rebuilding
Gaza at an October conference in Cairo has been received, according to a
report released on April 13 by the Association of International Development Agencies
(AIDA), while not a single one of the 19,000 homes destroyed in the conflict has been
rebuilt. The report went on to state that an estimated 100,000 people are still
homeless, with almost 1,300 camping in U.N. schools.
Local bulldozers have cut haphazard paths through three-story-high piles of crumpled

concrete to allow people to move around. People paint their names and phone
numbers onto the concrete heaps, in case an aid agency bothers to turn up and start
the reconstruction efforts.
We built this house twice before in the last wars, and in the summer another missile
took most of the front off and the roof, said Abu Joseph, 70, navigating an elaborate
system of ropes to clamber onto his open roof in the neighborhood of Shejaiya. Some
engineers came here and proved the building is structurally unsound. Were waiting for
it to crumble under us for the third time.
Basic services have also collapsed, adding more hardships for residents. Electricity is
scarce: Most Gaza residents are surviving on just three to six hours of power a day.
The water in the taps is salty, because seawater from the Mediterranean has infiltrated
the sole coastal aquifer according to the AIDA report, 95 percent of the territorys
water supply is unfit for human consumption. And because the sewage plants arent
functioning properly, thousands of cubic meters of waste are openly flowing onto the
beaches.
The damage is not just physical.are suffering the cumulative effects of multiple wars
are thought to have severe shellshock, and many of them are heavily medicated."
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padding: 0px; border: 0px; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit;
font-stretch: inherit; vertical-align: baseline;">Over 400,000 children who are
suffering the cumulative effects of multiple wars are thought to have severe
shellshock, and many of them are heavily medicated. But money for such care is
scarce: UNICEFs Gaza director, Pernille Ironside, toldForeign Policy that the
organization was 70 percent unfunded, meaning it was only able to provide essential
psychosocial support to one-fifth of the affected children.
There is a $68 million funding gap for our two-year emergency response program,
she said.
One of the worst cases of post-traumatic stress in the strip is Montasser Abu Bakr, 12,
who last July saw four young boys from his family including his 10-year-old brother
blown to pieces by an Israeli naval shell on a Gaza beach. Eight months later, he is
struggling with powerful antipsychotic drugs after attempting suicide. During the
interview with him and his family, he screamed continuously, hid under his bed,
attacked his parents, and sometimes went mute.
The drugs drive me crazy, I dont know what to do, he said, breaking into sobs.
Every day, Im like a piece of wood, I cant sleep, my hands are clenched in a fist.
***
The brewing conflict between Hamas and Fatah, which is the dominant political party
in the West Bank, has also hindered reconstruction. While both parties lent their
endorsement to a newly formed Palestinian government last year, it appears to have
brought unity in name only Fatah members complain that Hamas is still preventing
the government from taking the lead on handling the funds and reconstruction efforts,

which was a prerequisite for receiving aid.

The government isnt functioning at the moment; Hamas refuses to give up control of
the police stations, security, borders, rendering it effectively useless, said Fatah
member Abu Jouda al-Nahal.
Hamas, meanwhile, accuses Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas of
deliberately undermining attempts to build a functioning government in Gaza.
Abbas is worried about his political future, said Mushir al-Masri, a spokesman and
leading member of the Islamist group. The Israeli occupation refuses the peace that
Gazas united government offers, so Abbas is scared of punishment from the Israelis
in the West Bank if a Gaza government actually succeeds.
As the civilian leaders bicker, the civilian population is increasingly turning to the
armed factions for answers. In the absence of other job opportunities, these groups
have witnessed a massive spike in recruitment: One of the Nasser Salahuddin
fighters, who went by the nom de guerre Abu Mohamed, said they have had to turn
away dozens of underage hopefuls.
The youth want revenge, when theyve lost so much, he said.
The unit leader agrees to meet in the middle of the night. A gaggle of new fighters
pose in a scrubby orchard with an assortment of rocket-propelled grenades (RPGs),
sniper rifles, and assault rifles. They do somersaults and backflips in the nearby
clearing training activities normally done through flaming hoops or under gunfire,
Abu Mohamed added.
Their units latest weapon is women. Throughout Gaza, armed groups have stepped
up their recruitment. Now, each one including Hamass Qassam Brigades and
Palestinian Islamic Jihad has a female contingent.
No one knows exactly how many female fighters there are in Gaza, but
the Nasser Salahuddin Brigade boasts 80 female combatants working in 25-women
units. Each unit has female commanding officers, who answer to a male superior.
Hundreds of other women also offer support roles.
We fit the training around our domestic chores, said Hadifa, 26, her face obscured by
a niqab, while cuddling an assault rifle during a midnight meeting at her Gaza City
home. She said the women are trained to use sniper rifles, AKs, RPGs, M16s, and
also how to drive cars through war zones, how to fight with a knife, and most recently
how to capture an Israeli soldier in battle.
Most of the women, like Hadifa, are either married to brigade members or are sisters
of the fighters, and were inspired to join the fighting groups after losing several
members of their families in the recent wars. It is not hard to see why they would be a
military asset: Women have an easier time moving around war zones, due to the
presumption that they are civilians. As a result, they can deliver weapons and food to
fighters on the front lines with less risk than their male counterparts.

We also watch the roads, protecting the men as they move, said Om Adam, 40, the
wife of a senior Nasser Salahuddin commander and one of the oldest of the female
fighters.
Om Adam, whose own son lost all but one of his limbs during the 2008-2009 war, said
that despite the horrific devastation of war for much of the population, Gaza residents
see armed resistance as one of the only ways to take control of their lives.
Gaza is a tomb; we are dead anyway, she said, helping her injured son out of his
wheelchair. Either you die pointlessly and slowly, or quickly with purpose.
MAHMUD HAMS/AFP/Getty Images
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