JABALYA REFUGEE CAMP, Gaza Strip, 17 October 2004 — Palestinians picked through the rubble of dozens of homes in a sprawling refugee camp yesterday after Israel ended its most powerful assault in the Gaza Strip in four years of bloodshed. A spokesman for Prime Minister Ariel Sharon said the army would return to northern Gaza if there was more Palestinian rocket fire into Israel, which killed two toddlers on Sept. 29 and triggered the 17-day Israeli offensive.
Residents in Jabaliya, a refugee camp of 100,000 and the scene of fierce fighting between troops and gunmen, said Israeli tanks and bulldozers churning through its alleyways had destroyed dozens of homes and torn up roads and water pipes. “The whole house is rubble and there is no way we can find anything,” said Ezzeya Daher, 50, as hundreds of people picked through mounds of debris to search for belongings. “Now we are refugees for a second time.”
Palestinians yesterday surveyed the widespread devastation inflicted by Israeli troops during an 18-day military operation, after the troops redeployed overnight - comparing the scene to the aftermath of an earthquake. At least 129 Palestinians were killed in the operation, the deadliest in Gaza since the beginning of the intifada or uprising four years ago, which the Israelis said was aimed at preventing militant rocket attacks on Israeli territory.
More than 100 houses were leveled in the refugee camp of Jabaliya and neighboring Beit Lahya, scenes of the heaviest violence, said Palestinian Authority security sources and an AFP correspondent at the scene. Fifty workshops and shops along the Gaza Strip’s main road were destroyed by tanks and army bulldozers. Lampposts and electricity cables lay uprooted along roads mangled by Israeli tanks around Jabaliya and Beit Lahya. Puddles of stagnant drain water permeated refugee camp streets with a fetid smell. Whole districts were still without water and electricity yesterday.
“This is worse than an earthquake. The Israelis threw out the Palestinians in 1948 and in 1967 and they’re trying to do the same thing now,” said Jamila Yehya, 54, a Jabaliya refugee whose home was destroyed on Friday.
“Sharon is worse than the Nazis,” she continued, pointing to the ruin of her three-story house in the Al-Sikka district, the most damaged in the camp. Nearby, dozens of women sift through the ruins of their homes in the hope of recovering some valuables or personal effects.
Surrounded by four of her children and holding a fifth in her arms, 32-year-old Manal Abu Nadi weeps over a pile of rubble. Her house and nine others belonging to members of her family in Al-Sikka were demolished on Friday shortly before Israeli forces redeployed away from Palestinian residential areas. “They destroyed our house without warning. We left without our shoes,” she cries. “Sharon is a butcher.”
Dozens of homeless families milled around schools run by the United Nations refugee agency in the hope of passing the night in a tent or finding another temporary home. Israeli armored columns also damaged a 4th-century Byzantine archaeological site in eastern Jabaliya, an official from the Palestinian Tourism Ministry, Muin Sadeq, told journalists.
For Aisha Abu Al-Jedian, 70, history had come full circle. Sitting on the wreckage of her home, she said she was a refugee from a village near what is now the southern Israeli town of Sderot, where the two children were killed. “Let them (militants) continue to rocket Sderot until the (Israelis) leave us alone,” she said.
One four-story building in Jabaliya had about 200 bullet holes. Its owner, 70-year-old Abed Abu Warda, said he and 30 members of his extended family had squeezed into one room to try to avoid the gunfire.
