Until three weeks ago Mahmoud ran one of Gaza’s biggest chicken farms with his father. They consider themselves to be modern farmers – their use of technology putting them commercially ahead of others in the region.
“We employed 30 people” Mahmoud told IR, “other farms use more manpower, but have less processing equipment than us. Of course, these people have lost their jobs. We have lost our livelihood.”
The family’s one hundred thousand chickens were producing 4,000 cartons of eggs (30 eggs in a carton) each day. These were widely distributed throughout Gaza, (along with chickens for consumption), mostly to supermarkets, but also to smaller shops and hospitals. Monthly turnover was 30,000 sheikles per month.
The family live on the site of the farm, in a large, four storey house. From their windows they used to look out over the chicken runs, to the farmland (olives, lemons) beyond.
The smell of death
We caught up with them today – as they sat on the steps of their badly damaged home, surveying the changed landscape. It is not unrecognisable. The long metal chicken runs are still there, the chickens, even, are still inside. But their white bodies are lifeless. There are hundreds of them, - either they were crushed by falling debris from the buildings around them or if they survived the shelling – one imagines shock or thirst killed them. Four men in white boiler suits are making an attempt to clear the carcasses – tearing open the metal cages, unceremoniously picking them up by a leg or a wing and throwing them from one to another, finally landing on a ever growing heap in a huge chicken-grave that they’ve dug in the ground. The stench of dead birds is pungent and, as people who lived nearby are beginning to come back to pick over the rubble of their destroyed homes, must pose a public health hazard.
Beyond repair
Mahmoud offers to show us around the family home. As we enter, his mother approaches, carrying a bundle of clothes in her arms.
“Even the clothes, torn, destroyed”, she says. We ask if she will try to mend them but, turning trousers and jumpers over in her hands and assessing the holes, laments that they are beyond repair.
As we walk around the house, Mahmoud, his mother whose name is Ina’am and older brother Mohammad point to the damage. At first it seems remarkable the building is still standing – all others around have been razed – leaving an area the size of about six football pitches covered with rubble of concrete and twisted metal. The brothers show us the broken sofa, television, computer, radio – all their possessions in fact. At first we imagined the damage was secondary – caused by bombs and flying debris. But as they lead us from room to room, a different story unfolds.
“All this damage, the interior damage, was done by Israeli soldiers”, they tell us.
Fear
Ina’am describes how – on the night of Jan 2nd – soldiers barged into the house, shouting at the family to group together.
“They were about 50 soldiers – men and women soldiers with their faces covered in black. They moved us into one room and they ransacked our house, breaking, damaging everything in their path. We moved away to stay with our family in a different region. The soldiers took over our house for 14 days”.
Is this why the big house was left standing? To use as a headquarters, a base for the soldiers to live in while the war went on? Some of what the family shows us points to this being the case.
In a bedroom the family has piled its mattresses against a wall.
“They smell bad. They slept on them, sure, but they urinated on them too”, says Mahmoud. Embarrassed to continue speaking, he takes us nonetheless to the top floor of the house, an open area that Ina’am used for hanging out the washing. A plastic chair has had the seat punched out of it, and underneath and all around is human excrement. A hundred or so small plastic bags, some clean and empty, others full, are scattered around. I pick an empty one up. On the side is written “biological human waste only”. Army issue.
One floor down, the breezeblock walls each have two or three holes – rough edged, a little larger than a football – knocked through them. Mahmoud tells me the soldiers brought sledgehammers to make the holes. Then they dragged mattresses to the side of them and used them as sniper points.
“Three floors up there is a good view. They pointed their guns through the holes, shooting at the people – our neighbours – on the ground”. Twenty nine people were killed in the Zaytoon area.
The concrete floor is littered with empty shells. On a lower floor, where the windows have all been knocked out Mahmoud shows me a comfortable chair which has been crudely attached to the top of a sideboard. He says the soldiers built this to place to one side of the window, shooting from the good vantage point.
Looking out of the window to the front of the house, there is household rubbish all over the ground.
“The first night, before we left, they put all of our men in one room and corralled all the women into another room”, remembers Mohommad. They went into our kitchen and ate all the food they wanted, then they threw all the cans and waste food out of the window”.
Driven from their homes
The next day the family went to live elsewhere. When the soldiers had gone, two weeks later, they were able to examine the damage closely. Not only are windows smashed out, mirrors broken, the ceramic toilet and basin smashed and the doors covered in marks made by a chisel or a knife, but there is offensive Hebrew graffiti on many of the walls.
Mahmoud finishes our interview outside while Ina’am boils up coffee in her makeshift kitchen.
“This is their behaviour. But we will not be beaten. We will rebuild. We will rebuild our home and our business, God willing.“