Winds of war still blowing through Gaza's rubble

Nicholas Kristof, New York Times News Service, Gaza City

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“GAZA CITY, Gaza Strip — It is winter in Gaza, in every wretched sense of the word. Six months after the latest war, the world has moved on, but tens of thousands remain homeless — sometimes crammed into the rubble of bombed-out buildings. Children are dying of the cold, according to the United Nations.

Rabah, an 8-year-old boy who dreams of being a doctor, walked barefoot in near-freezing temperatures with his friends through the rubble of one neighborhood. The U.N. handed out shoes, but he saves them for school… The suffering here has multiple causes. Israel sustains a siege that amounts to economic warfare on an entire population.

Hamas provokes Israel, squanders resources and is brutal and oppressive in its own right. Egypt has closed smuggling tunnels that used to relieve the stranglehold, and it mostly keeps its border with Gaza closed… Yet I have to acknowledge that Israel’s strategy of collective punishment may be succeeding with a sector of the population.

Gazans aren’t monolithic in their views any more than Americans, but many said that they were sick of war and of Hamas and don’t want rockets fired at Israel for fear of terrible retribution. ‘I don’t want resistance,’ said Khadra Abed, a 50-year-old woman living with her family in the remains of her home.

‘We’ve had enough suffering.’ Halima Jundiya, a 65-year-old matriarch who says the children in her family are still traumatized by war, was blunt: ‘We don’t want Hamas to fire rockets. We don’t want another war.’

One bearded young man said he worked for Hamas but had turned against it, because government salaries were no longer being paid. ‘I hate Hamas,’ he said, which seemed an odd thing for a Hamas officer to say. Yet Israel should understand clearly that its bombings also put some on the path to becoming fighters.

A 14-year-old boy, Ahmed Jundiya, is part of the same clan as Halima, but he draws the opposite conclusion… ‘War made us feel we will die anyway, so why not die with dignity,’ Ahmed told me. ‘I want to be a fighter’… ‘I will give my soul to kill all Israelis,’ he said.

Some of that is teen bravado, and some may reflect the unfortunate reality that, if you’re a teenage boy, one of the few career paths available is as a fighter… Israel and Egypt both have legitimate security concerns in Gaza… but the Israeli human rights organization Gisha notes that it’s ridiculous for Israel to insist that the ongoing economic stranglehold is essential for security.

Gisha introduced me to Aya Abit, 24, who is married to a Palestinian man in the West Bank. They have a 5-month-old baby whom the father has never seen because Israel won’t allow Abit to leave Gaza.

‘I cry every day,’ she says… I found that Israel had bombed Telbani’s factory repeatedly during the war… ‘They burned $22 million for no reason,’ he replied indignantly. ‘What I created in 45 years, they destroyed in less than two hours. What should I tell them? Thank you?’

‘This is the worst time ever,’ he added. ‘People have nothing to lose. So I expect another war.’”

Context added by this archive

A column that argues against several things this archive documents and several it does not. It calls Hamas brutal and oppressive in its own right, quotes a Hamas officer saying he hates Hamas, grants Israel and Egypt legitimate security concerns, and quotes a fourteen-year-old saying he would give his soul to kill all Israelis.

The record held only the sympathetic half of it until 22 September 2026.

Cite this clipping

"Winds of war still blowing through Gaza's rubble," Tri-City Herald, 10 March 2015, p. 1. Covering Palestine archive, CP-2015-001. https://coveringpalestine.org/archive/cp-2015-001