Next to Israel’s targets in Gaza are residents now left without shelter

Palestinians rest near a pavement damaged in an Israeli strike, central Gaza Strip, 14 May 2023

Sheren Falah Saab and Jack Khoury report in Haaretz on 15 May 2023:

“The Israel Defense Forces bombed a position of Islamic Jihad,” report the Israeli media outlets – and for the most part this dry, concise description, lacking names and faces, will suffice. But behind and alongside it, there are often civilians whose homes are damaged during these attacks, even if they did nothing except live near someone who joined in firing at Israel or near houses that were used for that purpose.

Those people usually receive brief phone calls, an advance warning of a few minutes, and are told to leave their homes if they want to avoid being hit in the upcoming shelling, and are informed about the beginning of a war of survival.

“A captain from the Mukhabarat (Arabic for “intelligence,” which is Gazans’ name for the Shin Bet) contacted us,” Najah Nabhan, a resident of Bir al-Naja in the northern Gaza Strip, told the Saudi Arabian channel Al-Hadath, describing what happened to her and her family last Saturday. “He told us to evacuate the house. I was with my children, most of them with disabilities.”

Her relative Mohammed told Haaretz that his cousin Hussam “tried to conduct negotiations to prevent the shelling. He explained more than once that bombing the apartment, which belongs to a Jihad activist, would lead to harming innocent bystanders as well. This is a good family, and now they’re homeless, without medicine and without property.

“If they want to shell Hashem’s house, let them,” adds Mohammed, “but why are the families to blame?” And here lies the difficulty in the lives of residents of the Strip, even more so during combat initiated by Islamic Jihad. The Gazans know and understand that they must support any form of the resistance, the fight against Israel; that’s the framework in which they live, without being able to avoid it, even they would like to.

Although Islamic Jihad isn’t popular in the Strip compared to Hamas, the Palestinians in Gaza support any form of resistance. Even if the apartment in their building serves as a headquarters of the organization, they don’t oppose it. They are aware of their complicated predicament and the contradictions that could result from it and lead, in the end, to the loss of their home and even their lives.

The IDF says that all the buildings that were shelled were used by Islamic Jihad for combat, and that in many of the buildings, one floor was used by the organization as a war room while civilians lived in the other apartments. Najah said in the interview to the Saudi channel that she doesn’t know why her home was shelled, and wondered whether “they think that the phone call in which they asked us to evacuate means that we agree to let them destroy the building.”

Mohammed noted that the father of the Khaled family collapsed several hours later and the children are with relatives; Wafa, the Palestine news agency, reported that the neighbors volunteered to search among the ruins for the medications, using the light from their cell phones during the nighttime electricity blackout.

This case is one of many examples of families in the Gaza Strip who lost their homes last week, and in the Strip they count at least several dozen like them in what has become almost routine. Those families are now the focus of Gazan attention, along with the 33 dead in the Strip since the assassination of senior Jihad officials on Tuesday morning. Six of the 33 are children, according to the count in Gaza, four are women and 17 are identified as armed men.

According to an interim report by the Al-Mezan Center for Human Rights in Gaza, 93 houses were totally destroyed, and dozens of others were damaged – including five- and six-story buildings – leaving about 400 families without homes, at least for the immediate future. Samir Zakut of Al Mezan says that many of the buildings in the Strip are so decrepit that any slight damage to them can cause their collapse, as well as damage to adjacent buildings. Salameh Marouf, one of the leading spokesmen of the Hamas government in Gaza, said that the direct monetary damage is estimated at a minimum of about $5 million, and doesn’t include the economic consequences for the families who were hit.

Intasar al-Masri, 65, from Beit Lahia in the northern Strip, told Al-Jazeera, “In one moment we became homeless, without any property, split up and living with relatives.” The home of Al-Masri, who is called Umm Rani, was attacked on Wednesday at about 10 P.M. Their relative Maha, also a resident of Beit Lahia, told Haaretz, “They received a phone call from an unidentified number, and a man who described himself as an officer from Israel asked them to evacuate the house. They woke up the children, some of whom went out barefoot.”

During the fighting in Operation Guardian of the Walls, in May 2021, the family home was also damaged; now it had been destroyed. Maha said that 6-year-old Zain went to the ruins of the house the next morning to look for his Spiderman piggy bank. “They’re an impoverished family, and he saved money to buy a bed for his room,” she says. “His father works as a barber, and Zain wanted to help him. He’s in a bad emotional state, cries most of the time.”

Zain was documented recalling in tears what happened to his family, digging through the ruins and looking for items from what used to be his room. He finally found a blue blanket, covered with dust.  The anger at Israel, and at the way it shells their homes, is at the forefront of the words of Gazan residents. Even when nobody is killed, the lives of entire families are ruined, leaving behind them psychological and property damage, and sending the families into an almost impossible situation. But in private, one also hears criticism of Islamic Jihad, which fought Israel for the second time in a year without the open involvement of Hamas, even while the residents remain loyal to the value of the fight against Israel.

“It’s dragging the Gazans into a useless war, and there’s nobody to compensate the families,” sums up Maha. “I’m not pessimistic at all, but in every such round of fighting I feel like someone waiting for my turn to die. Every such shelling kills our soul, but we’ll continue to fight.”

Bar Peleg contributed to this report.

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