Abd al-Karim misplaced every thing throughout the battle together with his house and a fruit farm that offered an earnings for the household. “The decision (to leave) was difficult and as I told you, I did not make the decision in the beginning. I endured for more than five months,” he mentioned.
The present part of the truce is about to run out in early March and it’s unclear if the perimeters will lengthen it. “I have one wish for the war to end, for peace to prevail in the country and for me to return, to return to my homeland,” Abd al-Karim mentioned. Abd al-Karim’s household is considered one of a number of Palestinian households that fled the preventing for security within the Egyptian metropolis of el-Arish. His balcony in el-Arish seems out to the ocean – which has for years served as the one escape for Palestinians in Gaza because the tiny Mediterranean enclave lived by a suffocating blockade.
Before the battle, Gaza was beneath an Israeli and Egyptian blockade imposed after the Hamas militant group seized energy in 2007. Four earlier wars and divisions between Hamas and the Western-backed Palestinian Authority within the West Bank additionally took a toll on Gaza’s economic system. But the most recent battle has turned the Gaza Strip right into a panorama of destruction.
Abd al-Karim’s eldest son, Karim recalled the household’s hardship after their being displaced from northern Gaza due to the preventing. “We stayed in a small room for 200 days. After that, we left Gaza for el-Arish,” he mentioned.
The battle has displaced an estimated 90% of Gaza’s inhabitants, and since a ceasefire took impact final month, many Palestinians have returned to search out their former properties in ruins.
Palestinians have rejected the plans by Trump and Israel to depopulate the coastal enclave, regardless of huge destruction following the 15-month battle between Israel and Hamas. “I wish we could go back to our country (Gaza), that I could return to my friends, relatives and uncles. And I wish for Gaza to return to the way it was (before the war), even better,” Karim mentioned.
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