[R-G] (Gaza) Suddenly, Home Was Gone

[Anthony Fenton]

MIDEAST:  Suddenly, Home Was Gone
By Eva Bartlett

http://www.ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=46002

BEIT HANOUN, Gaza, Mar 6 (IPS) - Dates in the calendar to mark the  
rights of women mean little to Manwa Tarrabin (56) and her two  
daughters. They have lost home, and any rights to it.

Until Jan. 17, they were living in a small bungalow in the Al-Amal  
quarter of Beit Hanoun, within 200 metres of Gaza's eastern border, in  
a region declared by the Israeli authorities a 'closed military zone'.

Prior to the three weeks of Israeli air, sea and land attacks on Gaza  
it had been a tidy home at the top of a slight rise, surrounded by  
open fields and a smattering of olive and fruit trees. Following the  
withdrawal of Israeli troops, the house is a pancake of angles and  
debris, one of 80 homes demolished in the Beit Hanoun border area.

A dirt path leading to the Tarrabin house crosses agricultural land  
torn up by tank and bulldozer tracks, and passes numerous former  
homes, likewise demolished on the day before Israel unilaterally  
declared a ceasefire.

A farming and herding family, the Tarrabins lived off what their sheep  
and goats produced, and what they could sow in the fertile  
agricultural land around them. After the attacks began Dec. 27, they  
continued to stay in the house. On the afternoon of their forced  
eviction, Manwa and her daughter Sharifa (22) were in the house.

"I was so scared when I saw the tanks. My heart dropped to my feet,"  
Tarrabin said, recounting how the Israeli army demolished her house.

"It was around 2.30 pm on Jan. 17, and we were inside our house when I  
heard the tanks. There were four of them and two bulldozers, one of  
them very, very large. The Israeli soldiers shouted at us over a  
megaphone to leave the house.

"They told me our house was now in a closed military zone," Manwa  
said. "They said it was a 'decision from the top' and that we had to  
leave immediately and walk towards Gaza. I refused, and tried to  
negotiate with them for time to gather our belongings. They refused."

Tarrabin said she and her daughter were forced from the house with  
only the clothes they were wearing, without even time to take their  
identity cards or personal items.

"We walked down the track from our house and when we were far enough  
away, I stopped to watch the soldiers." At approximately 5 pm, less  
than 12 hours before Israel declared a ceasefire, Israeli soldiers  
bulldozed the Tarrabins' house.

This demolition came in an area that had been under Israeli military  
control since early January after Israeli tanks rolled over the border.

Since 2000, areas all along the Green Line border have been off limits  
to Palestinians. The area was unilaterally declared a "buffer zone" by  
Israeli authorities. This zone was expanded from 150 metres to 300  
metres, with Israeli soldiers shooting at farmers and residents in the  
region as far as 600 metres away.

In tandem, Israeli bulldozers and tanks have deliberately destroyed  
thousands of dunams (one dunam equals 1,000 square metres) of  
Palestinian farmland within and well beyond the buffer zone, as well  
as the poultry and other farms in the region, some even 2.5 kilometres  
from the border with Israel.

On Jan. 17 Israeli authorities again unilaterally extended the buffer  
zone, increasing the off-limits area to a kilometre from the Green  
Line. The 80 houses levelled in the Beit Hanoun 'buffer zone' rendered  
an approximate 400 residents homeless and landless.

The Tarrabin family had already lost much of their grazing and  
agricultural land to the buffer zone, yet like the majority of those  
living within its limits, they have no option but to risk injury and  
possible death in returning to live and work on the land.

On Jan. 29, for the first time since the demolition, Manwa and Sharifa  
returned to their destroyed house in the now very high-risk region,  
accompanied by international human rights observers and a film crew.

To either side of the ruddy dirt path to the Tarrabin home, recently  
demolished and uninhabitable houses littered the landscape. "That  
house belonged to the Khadera family," said Manwa, pointing to the  
remains. "The mother was killed in the shelling.

"There were goats and sheep at the bottom level of this house.  
Soldiers bulldozed the house with the animals inside," said Manwa,  
pointing to a house where its elderly owner was tending a small fire  
for tea next to the broken structure.

Down the track a little further, the Wahadan family house was now  
rubble. "They destroyed the house, the water well and its pump too,"  
said Saber Al- Zaneen, a local aid worker.

Not far from the Tarrabin house, the Abu Jeremi family house stands  
intact. Revisiting their home for the first time since they were  
evicted by Israeli soldiers Dec. 27, Freije Abu Jeremi said their  
rabbits, chicken and sheep were slaughtered when Israeli soldiers  
demolished the animal shed.

According to Al-Zaneen, Beit Hanoun region is one of the most fertile  
areas in Gaza. "These flat fields around us once held around 750  
dunams of olive, lemon and palm trees," he said, gesturing towards the  
land rendered desolate since the encroachment of the 'buffer zone'.  
"People from all over Gaza had work here."

At her ruined home, Manwa Tarrabin quickly realised that her hopes of  
retrieving a change of clothing, identification papers, and her cash  
were futile: they all lay buried beneath an unmovable slab of  
concrete. To reach them will require a bulldozer, impossible because  
no non-Israeli bulldozer can enter the region under Israeli military  
control.

Among the crimes of war Israel is being accused of are the intentional  
destruction of civilian property, illegal under international human  
rights law and humanitarian law, including the Fourth Geneva  
Convention. Such destruction has been common also in areas outside  
Beit Hanoun, such as the Abed Rabbo region east of Jabaliya and the  
Attatra region in the north-west of Gaza, besides Gaza City itself.

The organisation Save the Children estimates that 100,000 people (56  
percent of them children) are homeless following the attacks.

Sharifa and Manwa Tarrabin left swiftly after they arrived at what was  
home after Israeli soldiers fired four shots in the direction of the  
group digging through the rubble of her house. "They were close," said  
Al-Zaneen. "I heard the bullets whiz past."

The family has since relocated to a relative's home in Khan Younis,  
far from their broken home. (END/2009)