What it means for a Palestinian to lose his home to Israeli terrorism

The damage to Gaza's housing units as a result of Israeli barbarism is 12 percent worse than that cause by the firebombing of Dresden. And it's only getting worse from here.

Israel is trying to create a buffer zone inside the Gaza territory, stealing a further 16 percent of the occupied land for itself. In its attempt to build this buffer zone, the Israelis have destroyed nearly all of the buildings that fall in the area earmarked for it, according to a report by a UN body.

The United Nations Satellite Centre, or UNOSAT, in an April 9 report, revealed a sobering picture of Israel’s unabashed terrorism on the periphery of the tiny strip: “Satellite-derived analysis undertaken on 29 February 2024 on 4,042 buildings within the zone, shows 3,033 destroyed, 593 damaged (severely or moderately damaged) and 416 with no visible damage.”

That’s 90 percent of the buildings destroyed and rendered unfit for human habitation. That’s nine out of every ten buildings. Buildings, not homes. It is important to make that distinction because, due to a paucity of space in the besieged enclave, Gazans are forced to build their residences vertically instead of horizontally. Several families live in various apartments of the same building. Which is why we have seen regular reports of dozens of members of the same family being wiped off the face of the earth due to Israeli bombardments.

When multiple generations of a family reside on several floors of the same building — because they aren’t allowed by the Israelis to move out of an already densely-packed Gaza — which is then indiscriminately bombed, headlines like this one: “Israeli strikes kill UN staff, more than 70 of his extended family in Gaza” are inevitable.

Several surnames will no longer find a mention in the Gaza census because everyone carrying them has been massacred by the genocidal Israelis.

Back in early January,

Tarik Cyril Amar

wrote about the unprecedented destruction of Gaza being “A Slaughter of Superlatives.” In his article, Amar wrote:

The Israeli genocide of the Palestinians that the world is currently witnessing has several such special, concretely unique (at least for now) features. Some of them even qualify as a particular type of superlative, achieving inverted peaks of depravity. [my emphasis]

Four more months of destruction has followed since Amar’s assessment and the “inverted peaks of depravity” have only sharpened in the meantime. For comparison, the firebombing of Dresden during the Second World War had destroyed only 50 percent of the city’s residential buildings. Israeli terrorism is well beyond the “inverted peaks of depravity” at this point. We need even newer superlatives.

What does it mean to lose a home? Most of us are privileged enough to have never experienced such a loss. And never will. But even if such a tragedy were to befall us, insurance will take care of it. It might inconvenience us a bit for some time, but ultimately we will get our homes re-built and within a few weeks our new abodes will start to feel like home again where we can live in relative peace and security.

But that’s not the Palestinian experience.

On day 31 of the ongoing Gaza genocide, a Gazan named Ahmed Alsammak appeared on an Electronic Intifada live broadcast and put things in perspective for a Palestinian with a bombed house. Here’s what he said:

I have lost my house twice. The first was during the Israeli war in Gaza in 2008-09 and the second time in 2012.

During the first war in Gaza [2008-09], we were sleeping. We [had] just built our house. It took us like three or four years to build our house. It was so expensive. It was the first years of the besiegement, the blockade on Gaza and the building materials were so expensive; and my mother — she was the only breadwinner — took tens of thousands of debts to build our house. And we moved to our house in October 2008, just two months before the war.

On the first day of the war, it was maybe 1 am, they called our neighbour and warned him to evacuate his house before bombing him and he was shouting at night and it was the first time for me [experiencing such a thing]. I just was 13-year-old. I was a child. And he was shouting, like, in an insane way to wake up all neighbours and we just fled, just a 100 metre maybe away from our house when we heard the Israeli warplane, which is Al Sattash, the F16 is called Al Sattash in Gaza, when it bombed the house with three rockets.

We lied down next to a wall, just a 100 metres away from our house and the rubble and the smoke suffocated us. It was unspeakable. Then we ran like maybe a kilometre to reach our relatives’ family to stay there; when we return back again at 6 or 7 am to see what had happened, we didn’t find anything. We just found rubble.

I still remember how my mother fainted when she saw her life’s savings [bombed to rubble]. When my father passed away, he left his inheritance to us and my mother put everything — a lot of, all our inheritance and all debts, and all her life’s savings in that house and it was flattened.

And then it took us two years to rebuild it. We took the compensation from the UN or I guess the government, I don’t remember exactly because I was a child.

In 2012, on the last day of the war, they also bombed the same house and they flattened again our house. At that time, when our house was bombed, we were still in debts from the first house. And it took us again years of displacement, bitter displacement, and when we received the compensation to rebuild our house again, it wasn’t enough. By the way, we still want $5,000 from the UN, but still they haven’t paid us because they say there is no funds [owed] to you.

And we rebuilt the house again. And this is just a small story about how, I, from the third generation [since the Nakba], suffered and has been suffering from that, and that experience has left an indelible mark on me.

Just like that, at the whims of some Zionist terrorist sitting somewhere in a cozy office complex in Tel Aviv or another occupied Palestinian city, the life savings, hopes, and aspirations of dozens are bombed into rubble. And — if those dozens survive — they are made to run and plead for compensation to rebuild their homes again. If it all comes through, they can never be sure of when they will lose their rebuilt home again; just because the occupying terrorists hold all the leverage and face precisely zero censure from anyone for their terrorist acts.

Alsammak’s story multiplied hundreds of thousands time over is the current Gazan reality.

While the buffer zone in Gaza has seen unprecedented damage, things aren’t any better in the other parts of Gaza either. According to a UN-World Bank report:

The continuing conflict has damaged or destroyed approximately 62 percent of all homes in Gaza, equivalent to 290,820 housing units, and more than a million people are without homes. Housing accounts for 72 percent of the total damage costs, at an estimated value of $13.3bn. [my emphasis]

62 percent of all homes in Gaza destroyed.

That’s 12 percent worse than the damage caused during the firebombing of Dresden.

While normal folks like Alsammak and his fellow Gazans struggle to re-build their homes and lives after suffering from Zionist terrorism, a billionaire Zionist terror apologist, owning a plethora of plush homes in some of the world’s poshest localities, is already busy making plans for what he — and his fellow Zionist terrorists and their apologists — will do once the Alsammaks of Gaza are forced out of their painstakingly built homes that carry generations worth of memories and house dozens of dreams and hopes for the future.

“Gaza’s waterfront property — it could be very valuable,” gleefully declared the terror apologist who goes by the name Jared Kushner.

He didn’t say it in the privacy of his home or whispered his perverse desire in the ears of his father-in-law who will likely be the US President again within a years’ time. No. He said it in public. At the vaunted Harvard University. Because such hateful and literal terror advocacy is kosher in the hallowed halls of prestigious American institutions.

Alsammak can go drown in the sea with the rest of his countrymen, or just go anywhere in the world (except to his rightful home in occupied Palestine), as long as he doesn’t obstruct the view of a serene Mediterranean Sea while Kushner enjoys brunch from his sea-facing Gaza beachfront balcony.

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The worth of a Palestinian life