What stuck with me most, however, was the demand of the Awajah children regarding the reconstruction of their new home in 2012: they insisted that the house have two doors.<\/p>\n
What The Awajahs Saw<\/strong><\/p>\n In separate interviews in 2009, Wafaa and Kamal Awajah told me the same story, each breaking down in tears as they offered me their memories of the traumatic events that had taken place eight months earlier — a night when they lost far more than a home.\u00a0 The next day, a still grief-stricken Wafaa walked me through her recollections of that night, pointing out the spot where each incident had taken place.<\/p>\n On January 4th, as Operation Cast Lead\u2019s ground campaign began, the Awajah family was at home.\u00a0 Wafaa\u2019s eldest daughter, 12-year-old Omsiyat, woke her up at around 2 am.\u00a0 \u201cMom,\u201d said Omsiyat, \u201csoldiers are at the door.\u201d\u00a0 Wafaa jumped out of bed to look. \u201cThere are no soldiers at the door, honey,\u201d she reassured her daughter. When Omsiyat insisted, Wafaa looked again, and this time she spotted the soldiers and tanks. She lit candles in the window so that the Israeli troops would know that a family was inside.<\/p>\n Suddenly, the ceiling began to crumble.\u00a0 Wafaa, Kamal, and their six children fled, as an Israeli military bulldozer razed their home. No sooner had they made it outside than the roof collapsed. \u00a0As tank after tank rolled by, the family huddled under an olive tree next to the house. When dawn finally broke, they could examine the ruins of their house.<\/p>\n Just as the Awajahs were trying to absorb their loss, Wafaa heard nine-year-old Ibrahim scream. He had been shot in the side.\u00a0 As more gunfire rang out, Kamal scooped up the injured boy and ran for cover with the rest of the family. Wafaa was hit in both hips, but she and five of the children managed to take shelter behind a mud-brick wall. From there, she saw Kamal, also wounded, lying in the middle of the road, Ibrahim still in his arms.<\/p>\n Israeli soldiers approached her husband and son on foot, while Wafaa watched, and — according to what she and Kamal both told me — without warning, one of them shot Ibrahim at close range, killing him. He may have assumed that Kamal was already dead. Despite Wafaa and Kamal\u2019s wounds, the family managed to get back to their wrecked home, where they hid under the collapsed roof for four days with no food or clean water, until a passing family with a donkey cart took them and Ibrahim\u2019s body to a hospital in Gaza city.<\/p>\n As far as I know, the Israeli military never investigated the incident.\u00a0 In fact, only a handful of possible war crimes during Operation Cast Lead were ever investigated<\/a> by Israel.\u00a0 Instead of an official inquiry, the Awajahs were left with a dead son, grievous physical wounds that eventually healed, psychological ones that never will, and a home reduced to pile of rubble.<\/p>\n CLICK\u00a0HERE<\/a> – One Family in Gaza<\/em>, Jen Marlowe’s award-winning short documentary film featuring the Awajah family<\/strong><\/p>\n Life Goes On<\/strong><\/p>\n When I met them eight months later, the Awajahs were struggling to rebuild their lives. \u00a0\u201cWhat\u2019s hardest is how to offer safety and security for my children,\u201d Kamal told me. \u201cTheir behaviors are not the same as before.\u201d<\/p>\n Wafaa pointed to three-year-old Diyaa. \u201cThis boy is traumatized since the war,\u201d she said. \u201cHe sleeps with a loaf of bread in his arms. If you try to take it from him, he wakes up, hugs it, and says, \u2018It\u2019s mine.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cWhat you can\u2019t remove or change is the fear in the children\u2019s eyes,\u201d Kamal continued. \u00a0\u201cIf Diyaa sees a bulldozer, he thinks it\u2019s coming to destroy a house. If he sees a soldier, whether an Israeli or Arab soldier, he thinks the soldier wants to kill him. I try to keep them away from violence, but what he experienced forces him to release his fear with violence. When he kisses you, you can feel violence in his kiss. He kisses you and then pushes you away. He might punch or slap you. I am against violence and war in any form. I support peaceful ways. That\u2019s how I live and raise my children. Of course, I try to keep my children from violence, and help them forget what happened to them, but I can\u2019t erase it from their memory. The memories of fear are engraved in their blood.\u201d<\/p>\n I thought about Kamal\u2019s words as I filmed Diyaa and his five-year-old sister Hala scrambling onto the rubble of their destroyed home — their only playground — squealing with glee as they rolled bullet casings and shrapnel down the collapsed roof.<\/p>\n What moved me deeply was the determination of Kamal and Wafaa to create a future for their surviving children. \u201cYes, my home was destroyed, my life was destroyed, but this didn\u2019t destroy what\u2019s inside me,\u201d Kamal said. \u00a0\u201cIt didn\u2019t kill me as Kamal. It didn\u2019t kill us as a family. We\u2019re living. After all, we must continue living. It\u2019s not the life we wanted, or had, but I try to provide for my children what I can.\u201d<\/p>\n The Fragility of Hope<\/strong><\/p>\n In 2012, I returned to Gaza and to the tent in which the Awajah family was still living. It was evident that the trauma of their experience in 2009 — along with the daily deprivation and lack of security and freedom that characterize Gaza under siege — had taken a toll. \u201cI had thought that those were the most difficult days of my life,\u201d Kamal said, \u201cbut I discovered afterwards that the days which followed were even more difficult.\u201d<\/p>\n In 2009, Kamal told me that the war hadn\u2019t fundamentally changed him. Now, he simply said, \u201cI lost myself. The Kamal before the war does not exist today.\u201d\u00a0 He spoke of the screams of his children, waking regularly from nightmares.\u00a0 \u201cThe war is still chasing them in their dreams.\u201d<\/p>\n Most painful for Kamal was his inability to help his children heal. His despair and feelings of helplessness had grown to the point where he had become paralyzed with severe depression.\u00a0 \u201cI tried and I still try to get us out of the situation we are in — the social situation, the educational situation for the children, and the mental situation for me and my family.\u201d \u00a0But their situation, he added, kept getting worse.<\/p>\n My 2012 visit, however, came during a rare moment of hope. After nearly four years, the Awajah family was finally rebuilding their home. Trucks were delivering bags of cement; gravel-filled wheelbarrows were being pushed onto skids; wooden planks were being hammered down. In 2009, I had filmed Diyaa and Hala playing on the rubble of their destroyed house.\u00a0 In 2012, I filmed them climbing and jumping on the foundation of their new home.<\/p>\n \u201cI am building a house. It is my right in life for my children to have a house,\u201d Kamal said.\u00a0 \u201cI call it my dream house, because I dream that my children will go back to being themselves.\u00a0 It will be the first step to shelter me and my children, away from the sun and the heat and tents, our homelessness.\u00a0 The biggest hope and the biggest happiness I have is when I see my children smiling and comfortable… when they sleep without nightmares.\u201d\u00a0 Kamal added, \u201cI can\u2019t sleep because of my fear over them.\u201d<\/p>\n For Wafaa, while the new home represented hope for their future, its construction also triggered flashbacks to that night of the bulldozer. \u00a0As she told me, \u201cBulldozers and trucks bringing construction material came at night, and, at that moment, it was war again. When I saw the bulldozers and the trucks approaching with big lights, my heart fell between my feet.\u00a0 I was truly scared.\u201d<\/p>\n Planning for the new house also provided Wafaa and Kamal with a poignant reminder of the fragility of hope in Gaza. \u201cThe children say to make two doors to the house,\u201d Wafaa told me.\u00a0 \u201cOne [regular] door and the other door so when the Israelis demolish the house, we can use it to escape.\u00a0 We try to comfort them and tell them nothing like this will happen, but no, they insist on us making two doors.\u00a0 \u2018Two doors, Daddy, one here and one there, so that we can run away.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n The Gaza War of 2014<\/strong><\/p>\n After my 2012 visit, I periodically contacted the Awajah family. Construction was proceeding in fits and starts, Kamal told me, due to shortages of materials in Gaza and their lack of financial resources. Finally, however, in the middle of 2013 the home was completed and as the final step, glass for the windows was installed in February 2014.<\/p>\n Five months later, in July, the most recent Israeli assault on Gaza began. I called the Awajah family right away.<\/p>\n \u201cThe children are frightened but okay,\u201d Wafaa told me.<\/p>\n The Israeli army had warned their neighborhood to evacuate and they were now renting a small apartment in Gaza City. During a humanitarian ceasefire, Kamal was able to return to their house: it had been demolished along with the entire neighborhood.<\/p>\n When I spoke to the Awajah family at the end of September, Kamal told me that rent money had run out.\u00a0 Seeking shelter at a United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) school wasn\u2019t a viable option, he said, because there were already so many families packed into each room. The Awajahs were back in a tent next to the rubble of their twice-destroyed home.<\/p>\n 2014: Kamal and his children on the rubble of their twice-destroyed home<\/p><\/div>\n The family\u2019s situation is far bleaker than in 2009.\u00a0 Then they were able to tap into an electricity source and there was a communal outhouse for all the tent-dwelling families in the area. This time, Kamal said, the area near their house was entirely deserted: no water tank, electricity, outhouse, gas, or stove for cooking. Their only possessions were the few items of clothing they managed to take with them when they fled. They were sleeping on the ground, he said, no mattresses or blankets to ward off the cold, only the nylon of the tent beneath them. The children had been walking several kilometers to fill jugs with water until villagers who lived nearby made their wells available for a few hours a day.<\/p>\n Wafaa told me that she was cooking on an open fire, using scrap wood scavenged from the remnants of her house. For the first week, the children returned home from school every day and, surrounded by nothing but rubble, began to cry. Seventeen-year-old Omsiyat briefly took the phone. Her typically warm and open voice was completely flat, no affect whatsoever.<\/p>\n Worse yet, Kamal still owes $3,700 for the construction of their previous house.\u00a0 Though the home no longer exists, the debt does.\u00a0 \u201cWe are drowning,\u201d Wafaa said.<\/p>\n \u00a0CLICK HERE<\/a><\/em> – Video of the Awajah family today.<\/strong><\/p>\n Drowning in Gaza<\/strong><\/p>\n The Awajahs aren\u2019t the only ones in Gaza who are drowning. The true horror of their repeated trauma lies in the extent to which it is widespread and shared. Nine-year-old Ibrahim Awajah was one of 872 children in Gaza killed in the 2009, 2012, and 2014 wars combined, according to statistics gathered by the United Nations<\/a> Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs<\/a> and B\u2019tselem<\/a>, an Israeli human rights organization. (There was also one Israeli child killed by mortar fire in that period.)<\/p>\n The flat affect in Omsiyat\u2019s voice reflects the assessment of the United Nations Children\u2019s Fund that nearly half of the children in Gaza are in urgent need of psychological help. \u00a0And Kamal\u2019s desire not to move into a communal shelter is understandable, given that 53,869 displaced people<\/a> still remain crowded into 18 UNWRA schools. \u00a0According to Shelter Cluster<\/a>, an inter-agency committee that supports shelter needs for people affected by conflict and natural disaster, the Awajah family\u2019s house is one of 18,080 homes in Gaza that were completely demolished or severely damaged in the 2014 war alone. A further 5,800 houses suffered significant damage, with 38,000 more sustaining some damage.<\/p>\n Shelter Cluster estimates that it will take 20 years for Gaza to be rebuilt — assuming that it does not face yet another devastating military operation. As the last six years indicate, however, unless there is meaningful political progress (namely, the ending of the Israeli siege and ongoing occupation), further hostilities are inevitable.\u00a0 It is not enough that people in Gaza be able to rebuild their houses yet again.\u00a0 They need the opportunity to rebuild their lives with dignity.<\/p>\n Kamal Awajah said as much. \u201cI don\u2019t ask anyone to build me a home for the sake of charity. That\u2019s not the kind of help we want. We need the kind of help that raises our value as human beings. But how? That\u2019s the question.\u201d<\/p>\n There seem to be no serious efforts on the horizon to address Kamal\u2019s question, which has at its core an insistence on recognizing the equal value of Palestinian humanity. As long as that question remains unanswered\u00a0and the fundamental rights of Palestinians continue to be denied, the devastating impact of repeated war will continue for every family in Gaza and the terrifying threat of the next war will always loom.\u00a0 The Awajah children have every reason to insist that their future home be constructed with two doors.<\/p>\n ____________________________________<\/p>\n Jen Marlowe is a human rights activist, author, documentary filmmaker, and founder of <\/em>donkeysaddle projects<\/em><\/a>. Her books include <\/em>I Am Troy Davis<\/a> and The Hour of Sunlight: One Palestinian\u2019s Journey from Prisoner to Peacemaker<\/a>. Her films include <\/em>Witness Bahrain<\/a> and <\/em>One Family in Gaza<\/a>. She blogs at <\/em>View from the donkey\u2019s saddle<\/em><\/a> and tweets at <\/em>@donkeysaddleorg<\/em><\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n [Note:<\/strong> To help the Awajah family rebuild their home, Jen Marlowe set up an Indiegogo campaign on their behalf, which you can visit and share by clicking here<\/a>.]<\/em><\/p>\n![\"2014:](\"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/12\/awajahrubble_small-gaza-palestine-israel.jpg\")
<\/a>