Students Brave Shelling and Return to Damascus Schoolshttps://english.aawsat.com/home/article/1180071/students-brave-shelling-and-return-damascus-schools
Students Brave Shelling and Return to Damascus Schools
Syrian students head to school on February 18, 2018, following days of calm in Damascus' Old City that has been bombarded by rebels entrenched on the capital's outskirts. LOUAI BESHARA / AFP
Students Brave Shelling and Return to Damascus Schools
Syrian students head to school on February 18, 2018, following days of calm in Damascus' Old City that has been bombarded by rebels entrenched on the capital's outskirts. LOUAI BESHARA / AFP
Hanan anxiously waved goodbye as her 11-year-old daughter headed into class in Syria's capital after more than a week at home under escalating rebel shellfire.
"I can't describe my anxiety from the moment Lina leaves for school, until she returns. It's like she's coming back from some adventure or battle, not from class," the 44-year-old mother told AFP.
Hanan lives with her husband and three daughters in Al-Amin, a neighborhood at the heart of Damascus's Old City which has been bombarded by rebels entrenched outside the capital.
Fighting between regime troops and rebels escalated during the second week of February, forcing nearly a dozen schools in the Old City to shut for several days and prompting terrified parents to keep children at home.
Hanan kept her daughters out of school for eight days. On Sunday, she woke up and checked a Facebook page called "Daily Mortar Strikes -- Damascus" to see where shelling had hit overnight.
Nervously, she sent her daughters off to class, personally accompanying Lina on the 10-minute walk to Josephine's Girls School.
"Today was better. We woke up to our alarms instead of explosions," she said.
The walk to school has become so dangerous that Hanan said she would rather keep Lina at home.
"It's better that my daughter loses a year of school than lose her life, or that I lose her," she told AFP.
Although it has been relatively insulated from the mass destruction wreaked on other Syrian cities, Damascus is regularly bombarded by armed opposition factions based in nearby Eastern Ghouta.
Syrian troops have recaptured most rebel positions around the capital in recent years, and are determined to clear the final pocket in Eastern Ghouta.
Regime forces intensely bombarded the enclave for five days earlier this month, killing dozens, as rebel rockets and mortars on Damascus killed at least 20 people including three children, according to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights.
The rain of shells has traumatized Damascenes including Fadia, who teaches English to eighth graders at a private school in the Bab Sharqi district.
"We'd hear the sound of shells, we were so scared. Then one of our students, 15-year-old Rita al-Eid, was killed by a mortar," Fadia told AFP.
"The next day, most of the classrooms were empty."
She breathed a sigh of relief last week when her school sent out text messages saying classes were canceled for three days.
"The sound of ambulances didn't stop at all. Sometimes we had to close the windows just so we could hear the students," said the 36-year-old.
"Then we'd open them again, scared the glass would shatter if a shell hit nearby."
Now that shelling has subsided, Fadia's school will reopen on Monday.
"I think residents will feel safe when they see that schools have opened again," she told AFP, but admitted she's still nervous.
"Shells aren't a game. It's a matter of life or death -- and life in the Old City is directly tied to the situation in Eastern Ghouta."
A few blocks away in Bab Touma, a handful of public buses stood waiting for passengers to head to the outskirts of the capital.
Driver Abu Mohammad cleaned the glass of his white bus, pausing briefly to point out a crater punched in the pavement by a deadly mortar strike last week.
"We all went home then, but we came back the next day -- we have to live, and we have no other choice," he told AFP.
The unpredictability of the rocket and mortar fire has made Damascus residents afraid to leave their homes, making business slow for bus drivers, said Abu Mohammad, in his fifties.
"Usually on days like this, there are tons of people from early in the morning until late at night. But there are so few people today," he said.
"No one's leaving their homes except when absolutely necessary. Death can ride buses, too."
Gaza Is in Ruins after Israel’s Yearlong Offensive. Rebuilding May Take Decadeshttps://english.aawsat.com/features/5068562-gaza-ruins-after-israel%E2%80%99s-yearlong-offensive-rebuilding-may-take-decades
This overview shows a destroyed mosque and other buildings in Khan Younis in the southern Gaza Strip on October 7, 2024 on the first anniversary of the ongoing war in the Palestinian territory between Israel and Hamas. (AFP)
TT
TT
Gaza Is in Ruins after Israel’s Yearlong Offensive. Rebuilding May Take Decades
This overview shows a destroyed mosque and other buildings in Khan Younis in the southern Gaza Strip on October 7, 2024 on the first anniversary of the ongoing war in the Palestinian territory between Israel and Hamas. (AFP)
The Gaza Strip is in ruins.
There are hills of rubble where apartment blocks stood, and pools of sewage-tainted water spreading disease. City streets have been churned into dirt canyons and, in many places, the air is filled with the stench of unrecovered corpses.
Israel’s yearlong offensive against Hamas, one of the deadliest and most destructive in recent history, has killed more than 41,000 people, a little over half of them women and children, according to local health officials. With no end in sight to the war and no plan for the day after, it is impossible to say when – or even if – anything will be rebuilt.
Even after the fighting stops, hundreds of thousands of people could be stuck living in squalid tent camps for years. Experts say reconstruction could take decades.
“This war is destruction and misery. It would make the stones cry out,” said Shifaa Hejjo, a 60-year-old housewife living in a tent pitched on land where her home once stood. “Whoever sees Gaza ... It will make them cry.”
Israel blames the destruction on Hamas. Its Oct. 7 attack on Israel — in which some 1,200 people were killed and around 250 taken hostage — ignited the war. Israel says Hamas embedded much of its military infrastructure, including hundreds of kilometers (miles) of tunnels, in densely populated areas where some of the heaviest battles were fought.
The fighting left roughly a quarter of all structures in Gaza destroyed or severely damaged, according to a UN assessment in September based on satellite footage. It said around 66% of structures, including more than 227,000 housing units, had sustained at least some damage.
If there's a ceasefire, around half of all families “have nowhere to go back to,” said Alison Ely, a Gaza-based coordinator with the Shelter Cluster, an international coalition of aid providers led by the Norwegian Refugee Council.
The devastation in Gaza rivals front-line towns in Ukraine
Almost as many buildings have been destroyed or damaged in Gaza as in all of Ukraine after its first two years of war with Russia, according to Corey Scher and Jamon Van Den Hoek, US-based researchers who use satellite radar to document the wars' devastation.
To put that into perspective: Gaza is less than half the size of Ukraine's capital, Kyiv.
The amount of destruction in central and southern Gaza alone, Scher said, is roughly equivalent to what was lost in the front-line town of Bakhmut, the scene of one of the deadliest battles in the Ukraine war and where Russian forces destroyed nearly every building in their path to force Ukrainian troops to withdraw. The destruction in northern Gaza is even worse, he said.
Gaza’s water and sanitation system has collapsed. More than 80% of its health facilities — and even more of its roads — are damaged or destroyed.
“I can’t think of any parallel, in terms of the severity of damage, for an enclave or a country or a people,” Scher said.
This overview shows destroyed buildings in Khan Younis in the southern Gaza Strip on October 7, 2024 on the first anniversary of the ongoing war in the Palestinian territory between Israel and Hamas. (AFP)
At the end of January, the World Bank estimated $18.5 billion of damage — nearly the combined economic output of the West Bank and Gaza in 2022. That was before some intensely destructive Israeli ground operations, including in the southern border city of Rafah.
’I couldn’t tell where people’s homes were’ When Israeli ground forces pushed into the southern city of Khan Younis in January, Shifaa Hejjo and her family fled their four-story home with only the clothes they were wearing.
They spent months in various tent camps before she decided to return – and the sight brought her to tears.
Her entire neighborhood had been destroyed, her former home and the roads leading to it lost in a sea of rubble.
“I didn’t recognize it,” she said. “I couldn’t tell where people’s homes were.”
Around 90% of Gaza’s 2.3 million people have been displaced by the war, often multiple times, according to UN estimates. Hundreds of thousands have crowded into sprawling tent camps near the coast with no electricity, running water or toilets. Hunger is widespread.
Hejjo lived in a tent in the courtyard of a hospital. Before that, she was in Muwasi, the main tent camp in southern Gaza.
“It smelled bad,” she said. “There were diseases spreading.”
She said her husband, who was suffering from liver disease, was broken-hearted when he heard their home had been destroyed and he died shortly thereafter.
She was among the first to return after Israeli forces withdrew in April. Her neighbors stayed away, fearful they would find bodies or unexploded bombs.
But for her it was still home.
“It is better to live in my home, where I lived for 37 years, even though it is destroyed,” she said.
Hejjo and her children dug through the rubble with shovels and their bare hands, going brick by brick and saving whatever could be reused. Torn clothes were used to feed cooking fires.
Rats had crept in, and swarms of mosquitoes hovered over the ruins. There was broken glass everywhere. They set up a tent fortified by corrugated metal sheeting and some bricks salvaged from her destroyed home. A light drizzle wet their clothes as they slept.
UN agencies say unemployment has soared to around 80% — up from nearly 50% before the war — and that almost the entire population is living in poverty. Even those with means would find it nearly impossible to import construction materials because of Israeli restrictions, ongoing fighting and the breakdown of law and order.
A man standing atop a heavily damaged building views other destroyed buildings in Khan Younis in the southern Gaza Strip on October 7, 2024 on the first anniversary of the ongoing war in the Palestinian territory between Israel and Hamas. (AFP)
There are mountains of rubble, little water and no electricity
The first obstacle to any significant rebuilding is the rubble – mountains of it.
Where houses, shops and office buildings once stood, there are now giant drifts of rubble laced with human remains, hazardous substances and unexploded munitions.
The UN estimates the war has left some 40 million tons of debris and rubble in Gaza, enough to fill New York’s Central Park to a depth of eight meters (about 25 feet). It could take up to 15 years and nearly $650 million to clear it all away, it said.
There’s also the question of where to dispose of it: The UN estimates about five square kilometers (about two square miles) of land would be needed, which will be hard to come by in the small and densely populated territory.
It isn’t just homes that were destroyed, but also critical infrastructure.
The UN estimates nearly 70% of Gaza’s water and sanitation plants have been destroyed or damaged. That includes all five of the territory’s wastewater treatment facilities, plus desalination plants, sewage pumping stations, wells and reservoirs.
The employees who once managed municipal water and waste systems have been displaced, and some killed. And fuel shortages have made it difficult to keep operating facilities that are still intact.
The international charity Oxfam said it applied in December for a permit to bring in desalination units, and pipes to repair water infrastructure. It took three months for Israel to approve the shipment, but it still has not entered Gaza, Oxfam said.
The destruction of sewage networks has left streets flooded with putrid water, hastening the spread of disease.
There has been no central power in Gaza since the opening days of the war, when its sole power plant was forced to shut down for lack of fuel, and more than half of the territory's electrical grid has been destroyed, according to the World Bank.
This overview shows destroyed buildings in Khan Younis in the southern Gaza Strip on October 7, 2024 on the first anniversary of the ongoing war in the Palestinian territory between Israel and Hamas. (AFP)
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has said he won’t allow Hamas or even the Western-backed Palestinian Authority to govern Gaza. He has said Israel will maintain open-ended security control and delegate civilian affairs to local Palestinians. But none are known to have volunteered, and Hamas has threatened to kill anyone who aids the occupation.
Rebuilding Gaza would also require the import of massive amounts of construction supplies and heavy equipment, which Israel is unlikely to allow as long as there’s a potential for Hamas to rebuild its militant infrastructure. In any case, Gaza has only a small number of crossings with limited capacity.
The Israeli military body that coordinates civilian affairs in Gaza says it does not restrict the entry of civilian supplies and allows so-called dual-use items that could also be used for military purposes. Israel allowed some construction materials in before the war under what was known as the Gaza Reconstruction Mechanism, but it was subject to heavy restrictions and delays.
The Shelter Cluster estimates that it would take 40 years to rebuild all of Gaza’s destroyed homes under that setup.
For now, aid providers are struggling just to bring in enough basic tents because of the limited number of trucks going into Gaza and the challenges of delivering aid. Efforts to bring in more robust temporary housing are still in the early stages, and no one has even tried to bring in construction materials, according to Ely.
In September, the Shelter Cluster estimated 900,000 people were still in need of tents, bedding and other items to prepare for the region's typically cold and rainy winters.
