Winds of War in Gaza

Video by Adam B. Ellick 

March 7, 2015. 

In Gaza, Nicholas Kristof finds the place still in ruins after last year’s war with Israel.

GAZA — IT is winter in Gaza, in every wretched sense of the word. Six months after the latest war, the world has moved on, but tens of thousands remain homeless — sometimes crammed into the rubble of bombed-out buildings. Children are dying of the cold, according to the United Nations.

Rabah, an 8-year-old boy who dreams of being a doctor, walked barefoot in near-freezing temperatures with his friends through the rubble of one neighborhood. The United Nations handed out shoes, but he saves them for school. For the first time in his life, he said, he and several friends have no shoes for daily life. Nearly everyone I spoke to said conditions in Gaza are more miserable than they have ever been — exacerbated by pessimism that yet another war may be looming.

Lacking other toys, boys like Rabah sometimes play with the remains of Israeli rockets that destroyed their homes.

Gaza has been compared to an open-air prison, and, in the years I’ve been coming here, that has never felt more true, partly because so many Gazans are now literally left in the open air. But people joke wryly that at least prisons have reliable electricity.

Rubble and bombed-out buildings, like these east of Gaza City, dot Gaza six months after the latest war. CreditMohammed Saber/European Pressphoto Agency

The suffering here has multiple causes. Israel sustains a siege that amounts to economic warfare on an entire population. Hamas provokes Israel, squanders resources and is brutal and oppressive in its own right. Egypt has closed smuggling tunnels that used to relieve the stranglehold, and it mostly keeps its border with Gaza closed. The 1.8 million Gazans are on their own, and one step forward should be international pressure on Israel and Egypt to ease the blockade.

Yet I have to acknowledge that Israel’s strategy of collective punishment may be succeeding with a sector of the population. Gazans aren’t monolithic in their views any more than Americans, but many said that they were sick of war and of Hamas and don’t want rockets fired at Israel for fear of terrible retribution.

“I don’t want resistance,” said Khadra Abed, a 50-year-old woman living with her family in the remains of her home. “We’ve had enough suffering.”

Halima Jundiya, a 65-year-old matriarch who says the children in her family are still traumatized by war, was blunt: “We don’t want Hamas to fire rockets. We don’t want another war.”

One bearded young man said he worked for Hamas but had turned against it, because government salaries were no longer being paid. “I hate Hamas,” he said, which seemed an odd thing for a Hamas officer to say.

Yet Israel should understand clearly that its bombings also put some on the path to becoming fighters. A 14-year-old boy, Ahmed Jundiya, is part of the same clan as Halima, but he draws the opposite conclusion: He aspires to grow up and massacre Israelis.

“War made us feel we will die anyway, so why not die with dignity,” Ahmed told me. “I want to be a fighter.”

Ahmed keeps a poster of a family friend who was killed while firing rockets at Israel, and he says he yearns to do the same. I asked him how he could possibly favor more warfare after all the bloodshed Gaza had endured, and he shrugged.

“Maybe we can kill all of them, and then it will get better,” he said. I asked him if he really wanted to wipe out all of Israel, and he nodded. “I will give my soul to kill all Israelis,” he said.

Some of that is teen bravado, and some may reflect the unfortunate reality that, if you’re a teenage boy, one of the few career paths available is as a fighter. Ahmed’s father is an unemployed construction worker, the boy explains with a hint of distaste.

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Over all, my sense is that the suffering has left some Gazans more disenchanted with fighting, and others yearning for violent revenge. It’s difficult to be sure how those forces balance out.

Israel and Egypt both have legitimate security concerns in Gaza (an Egyptian court recently declared Hamas a terrorist organization), but the Israeli human rights organization Gisha notes that it’s ridiculous for Israel to insist that the ongoing economic stranglehold is essential for security. Gisha introduced me to Aya Abit, 24, who is married to a Palestinian man in the West Bank. They have a 5-month-old baby whom the father has never seen because Israel won’t allow Abit to leave Gaza.

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“I cry every day,” she says. “I don’t know what to do.”

Likewise, Israel prevents some Gazan students accepted at American or other foreign universities from leaving to study. That’s counterproductive: More Western-educated Gazans might be a moderating presence, but the point seems to be to make all Gazans suffer.

Senior Israeli officials understand that the economic blockade has undermined the independent business community that could counter Hamas. So Israeli officials have been saying the right things recently about easing the blockade, but not much has changed.

On a visit to Gaza in 2010, I visited a cookie factory in Gaza run by Mohammed Telbani, a prominent businessman. I returned on this visit, and I found that Israel had bombed Telbani’s factory repeatedly during the war.

Telbani has restored part of the factory, but Israel won’t allow three European technicians into Gaza to set up Danish machinery that is sitting idle. And a packaging machine has been out of operation for months because he needs a spare part that Israel won’t allow in. Israel pretty much seals off Gaza — journalists are a rare exception — and isolation and despair mark Gaza today.

This blockade isn’t as dramatic as the bombings, but, in the long run, it’s soul-destroying. Businesses can’t sell their goods; students can’t go to West Bank universities; a wife can’t join her husband. True, Hamas’s misrule is central to the problem, but we don’t have influence over Hamas; we do have influence over Israel. The U.S. and other global powers should call more forcefully on both Israel and Egypt to ease this siege of Gaza.

Telbani is a pragmatic businessman, a fluent Hebrew speaker whose aim is to sell cookies, hire workers and make money. He sounded far more bitter toward Israelis on this visit than before, and I told him so.

“They burned $22 million for no reason,” he replied indignantly. “What I created in 45 years, they destroyed in less than two hours. What should I tell them? ‘Thank you’?

“This is the worst time ever,” he added. “People have nothing to lose. So I expect another war.”

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