After four wars that have left more than 4,000 dead and more than $5 billion in damage to its buildings, Gaza struggles with the toll. AP visits one neighborhood.
Left behind in Gaza are neighborhoods in shambles and families in mourning.But their fears linger, knowing that sooner or later, war could erupt again.A family sits inside a makeshift tent built among the rubble of their home, destroyed by an airstrike in Beit Lahiya.BEIT HANOUN, Gaza Strip - The electricity is out again tonight in what’s left of Zaki and Jawaher Nassir’s neighborhood.
Each afternoon, demolition workers arrive to hack away at this real-life stage set so that the Nassirs and their neighbors can start rebuilding – again. All told, the wars have done more than $5 billion in damage to Gaza’s buildings, roads, electrical and water systems, roughly double the Strip’s annual economic output. Nearly 250,000 homes have been damaged or destroyed.
Gaza’s crisis is rooted in events that came long before Hamas seized control in 2007. More than half of those packed into the Strip are from Palestinian families who fled or were driven from what is now Israel during the 1948 war over its formation. But the recurrent fighting and the blockade of recent years have made life in Gaza far worse.
Five decades ago, Nassir’s father moved his family to a plot of farmland in what was then a village. Today, three- and four-story homes along Al-Baali Street – at the heart of that tract and named after Zaki’s father – are filled with Nassirs. As the Nassir siblings married, they built homes on much of the family’s land, still a few minutes by donkey cart from fields of grain and fruit trees.
Then, in the last days of 2008, Israel launched a major military offensive after heavy rocket and mortar fire by militants across the border. Soon the first war came to Al-Baali Street.
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