CrossFireArabia
As the winter months approach many people in Gaza will likely continue to sleep in the wilderness and under the freezing air. Most of the Gazans at 2 million were displaced countless of times in this Israeli genocide with nowhere to go as their homes have been bombed multiple times.
Every family, individual, man, woman and child, have been affected. Everyone has become disparate to find a place, or just sleep anywhere
One such family, without a husband have found a street pavement as its abode among the noise of the traffic. Others, sleep in makeshift sheets and plastic, hastily hoisted to to at least try and cover their skin and bones.
…On the roadside
“Don’t worry it won’t fall down, shut up and sleep”, a mother tells her little one who found a ramshackle place on the roadside. “And the same goes for you,” she tells her other child.
But how can that be! “We are living on the pavement next to the road, among speeding cars, where people are constantly going up and down during the day and at nighttime,” she tells the Al Jazeera cameraman. Its pitch dark here. Only the passing cars provide a flicker of light.
“Our home has become the pavement. In the night we literally sleep between passing people, there is nothing to protect us. I try not to close my eyes because of the fear around us as men constantly roam up and down with the the stray dogs and other wild beast making an attempt on our shelter. I have to be alert to shoo them away.”
The skidding of cars never shops, she tells the cameraman. “I stay awake also because my child may suddenly get up and run to the road, and if a car hits him, it really wouldn’t be the fault of the driver. I do all I can to protect them,” she concludes.
The war made Gaza a downtrodden, chaotic world with wrecked homes and debris, estimated at 200 million that would take years to clear out.
Living in Plastic
Next, the scene changes with many tents huddled one against each other, trying to do with the latest modern living the war has brought on. The Gaza Strip has become an amalgamation of tent cities, and with those labels, there are the underdogs – those who can’t offered the proper $1000-tent but have to sleep on the margins of rag-tag communities in derelict and tiny ‘holes” made of plastic sheets and/or light material that collapse at the sight of any gust of wind.
“It’s like living outside, you can’t call this a place of living,” another mother one says, referring to her small, plastic tent. Here there is no toilet, we have to ask other people’s living in proper tents to ‘do our business” and at times, forcing ourselves upon them but what can we do”, her voice can filter through the camera.
“At night we remain in fear because of the stray dogs who remain amongst us, howling between our tents. This is not to say anything about the snakes. At night I beg my neighbors to let my two grown up daughters sleep in their tent while I remain with my other small children here, but it’s a struggle.”
At night my children freeze because there are no blankets, we barely have thin sheets to use as cover, there are no clothes here, we simply don’t have anything, they have to go bare foot, there are no shoes, not even sandals or flip-flops for them to wear.
There is neither food, nor drinks, we stay hungry all day except for the one-day meal the kids bring from the food charities they queue for. After that one meal, we wait for the following day hoping to be fed.”
Dry bread Sprinkled With Salt
“How can I describe the place, it’s bad,” says a haggard old man with a beard that keeps getting longer. “We have no tent to sleep in, winter is setting in and the rain is likely to lead to our death, first it was the scorching sun, God only knows how we survived then, now the winter is upon us, we just wait for the worse, the drenching rains, life is a constant challenge,” he says amidst the dirt-soil.
Even the water is hard to come, and this is for everyone, the rugs you see here were given to us by people whose situation is really no better than us. In terms of food, as God is my witness, the bread I have here from my feed, I collected, it’s dry and hard that has been sprinkled with salt. When I am hungry, I wet it with the available water and eat. This is how we try to survive in Gaza today.”
These are a few of the voices from Gaza. For them, life has long become miserable. Here, they speak out of their dreary lives that have become a constant struggle for survival.
