CLAIRE SNEGAROFF, Jenin | Friday
AHMAD Hussein Faraj feels his life is over. He cannot find his wife, he has been told one son is dead, and he does not know exactly where his house once stood in what is now the rubble of the Jenin refugee camp.
Filled with heartache, the 70-year-old struggles to climb the few steps to an apartment in a part of the Jenin refugee camp in the West Bank, relatively spared by the fighting and Israeli destruction early this month.
There, in the home of the Abu Gutna family, the barefoot elderly Palestinian, wearing a headdress and leaning on a stick, tells of the tragedies that have filled the past two weeks of his life.
Once a proud father and owner of a two-storey house in the centre of camp, Faraj says he now feels “dead”.
He tells how at the beginning of the Israeli operation, he took his wife, three daughters and four sons into a bedroom of their home, believing it was the safest place to avoid the bullets and missiles.
But three days later, as the military operation intensified, Faraj ordered his family to leave.
“I said to them, ‘get out of here’. I thought only of saving them and I stayed to watch the developing situation,” he said. While he has located most of his family since, he has heard nothing from his wife and 13-year-old son who left the house taking nothing with them.
He remained in the house alone for a day before fleeing in the face of advancing Israeli bulldozers to a neighbour’s home.
The Israeli soldiers did not ask if anyone was in the house, unlike other times when they warned people to evacuate, he said. “If I had not been keeping a look out they would have killed me.”
After 13 soldiers were killed in a coordinated ambush and suicide bombing, the Israelis razed the central Hawashine area of the refugee camp, and with it the Faraj house.
Since then, as Faraj waited for news of his family, the stories have come to him. He was told a week ago that one of his sons, Abdel Rahman, was dead. His body had been seen but “I do not know anymore,” Faraj said.
His eldest son left with Palestinian fighters, but according to Faraj he did not belong to any organisation such as Hamas or Jihad Islamic which had a strong presence in the camp and had been linked to suicide attacks in Israel.
Then there is the strange story, which he cannot verify, of his second son Hihiyah “reappearing one day, coming out of the debris. That’s what people told me,” he said.
Now Faraj is waiting for the Israeli patrols to cease so he can look for his wife. “I will question people and ask when they saw her last,” he said.
But even if he can regroup the surviving members of his family, he will not rebuild the family home.
“How could I. I have nothing, I have no money, I am lost. I feel like I am dead,” he said, before indicating he had not lost everything. “I have my daughters and I am responsible for them.” Echoing Faraj’s plight, another elderly Palestinian advances gently on Hawashine place. He is also alone and his house destroyed.
“The Israeli children go to schools, they play, they swim. For us, we have our rubble, that is it,” he said, with a broad sweep of his arm to point to the pile of debris. “All conflicts find a solution. All Except ours,” he said, adding in frustration: “Where is God? He sleeps.” – AFP