Gaza Trip Report

by Bill Corcoran, ANERA President

Walking through "No Man's Land" - the area just after the Erez Crossing into Gaza.

Campus of the American School in Gaza. Everything was destroyed.

Meeting with staff members was somber and productive.

Water and sewage systems throughout Gaza suffered a great deal of damage.

A preschool in Beit Hanoun suffered extensive damage to its classrooms during the 22 days of fighting.

A Beit Hanoun preschooler shows the destruction in one of her school's classrooms.

Handing out bookbags at a preschool in Beit Lahia.

Handing out bookbags at a preschool in Beit Lahia.

ANERA's food parcels are purchased and prepacked in the West Bank.

ANERA's food parcels are full of essentials like cooking oil, rice, milk, baby food, lentils, etc. They are purchased and packaged in the West Bank.

There is a lot of damage in Jabalia and ANERA will work to connect families with water.

Wreckage of a home in Jabalia.

Monday, February 9

Crossing into Gaza, I must admit I was nervous about being admitted despite having a permit. You can never predict how the system will work.

Fortunately it was very smooth. Only foreigners are allowed into Gaza. Even our deputy head of office in Jerusalem, a Palestinian, who entered regularly before the war, is not allowed in now. The reason stated most often is “security”.

Immediately after the crossing, the smell hit me. The sewage is ranker than ever and it was a cool day in the high 50s. Salah, our director of the ANERA Gaza office, met me at the entry point for a tour of Beit Lahia and its famous sewage lagoon. This outdated and low tech treatment center has burst in past years, resulting in the death by drowning of 5 villagers. It took slight damage during the war and fortunately only flooded into agricultural fields. ANERA monitors it regularly and reports to USAID. Its earthen levees conjure up images of New Orleans and its disaster.

The damage to buildings in this northern area which abuts the border close to Ashkelon - on the Israeli side - was particularly savage. Municipal water tanks, commercial radio stations, and residences were destroyed in major numbers. The worst was Salatin, which immediately reminded me of Banda Aceh and its tsunami devastation. Once beautiful middle-class homes lay on the ground as flattened ruins. These modern cement structures were leveled without exception. Some families camped next to them in tents. Most people had abandoned the area to live with relatives in overcrowded homes or in tent villages that are cropping up. Nothing remains to be salvaged except some rebar. Now, you can see for miles with no homes obstructing your view.

Close to this beachfront community is the famous American International School. Renowned for its first-class standards, English training and beautiful campus, it produced graduates who then matriculated at Western universities. It too was not exempt from the same fate. No portion of this sturdily constructed institution stands. All its buses were burned and the athletic fields were dug up. Some of the destruction in the area was methodically conducted by tanks or bulldozers that plowed or rolled over objects. The school has rented space to conduct classes but they have no books or supplies.

The first meeting with ANERA staff was emotional for all parties. Over pizza and Coke (the Coke came in through the tunnels) they confessed their stories of family loss and fear. While working and proud to be doing so, you could sense their limited ability to focus as thoroughly as they had before the war. At the end of my stay, some admitted they feel “foggy” and the visit helped them energize. After conversations with a local psychologist, we will devise and conduct a psychosocial program for our staff, and do so jointly with Save the Children. Hopefully through this brief intervention, we can restore their spontaneity and smiles. Repeatedly, staff spoke of isolation and being helpless victims.

We spent the evening driving around Gaza to survey damage. Later, we enjoyed a dinner of Denise fish with Dr. Majid Abu Ramadan, former mayor of Gaza City, about water and sanitation issues. He assesses the war damage at $8 million to simply repair piping and sewage stations to pre-war conditions. That would hardly be adequate considering the long-term deterioration of infrastructure before the war.

ANERA continues to update USAID with daily reports on water and sanitation. They are considering whether or not to authorize projects in Gaza. Still, the problem of importing pipes and cement through the Israelis remains a tremendous obstacle. No repair materials have been permitted to enter for two years.

Tuesday, February 10

Beit Hanoun in the north repeats the previous scenes of destruction. A poignant moment was with the children of the preschool which abuts a police station. An attack on the station destroyed it and the “collateral damage” collapsed half of the classrooms. Without that space, they were operating in double sessions of three hours each. In addition, they had no water or electricity.

The next preschool in Beit Lahia tugged the heart strings even more. Our staff had pooled their money to buy book bags for the children. An extraordinary shopping spree uncovered enough of the bags in stores, all of which have depleted inventories. The purpose was to distribute them to children who had lost either a parent or a home in the war. Sadly, in this school of 85, 35 of the children needed bags. Even more tragically, they cried at the strangers and showed little excitement about the colorful gifts given them.

Salah showed me his family well, orchards, cemetery and mosque that had been demolished. In the middle of agricultural fields, they would have required several distinct and separate actions to destroy them.

The same could be said of the many minarets that had been shot off of mosques around Gaza.

We inspected food parcels that had just arrived at multiple locations of partner nonprofits. Some of them are stored in small neighborhood centers. ANERA chose to avoid the dangers of large-scale distribution from its warehouse. Stampedes or fights from cutting in line could be dangerous for all. The cardboard boxes include rice, lentils, tuna, canned meat, jam, tea, milk and baby food. They have been well received and are of excellent quality.

Malnutrition is a real problem. Vegetables and fruit now must be imported from Israel, which has boosted the prices. That expense has reduced children’s access to vitamins in a serious way since October.

We later visited Dr. Fadel Abu Hein, who has been a dependable partner of ANERA for over a year. He managed the psychosocial Child Well-Being project funded by the Canadian government. Now that it has ended, ANERA has contracted him again for a second stage which will address 6,500 traumatized children and their parents. We will concentrate on three districts of Gaza City and Beit Hanoun because of their devastation and our access to them. In a related situation, the clinics and hospitals with which we deal, have asked us to amend our product mix of in-kind medicines by adding a drug that reduces children’s bed-wetting. Apparently, that anxiety was compounded on Tuesday night (the Israeli election) when a huge rain storm hit Gaza. Its thunder and lightening confused the children who assumed the F16s were returning. Many of them were a wreck, as were their parents who missed another night of sleep trying to console frightened children.

At the main ANERA warehouse, we are stacked to the ceiling. We are renting three extra warehouse facilities to hold our stocks of food, milk and health care supplies. That has required temporary staff too.

Wednesday, February 11

Money for water projects, raised at ANERA’s Annual Dinner, has been sitting untouched because of the border closures and then the war. We used the morning to review some sites that will be directed to water needs in Jabalia camp and Deir al Balah. The project design has been modified to use large PVC pipe, rather than the preferred steel. It is not a perfect solution, but it is acceptable because the materials are currently available in Gaza and so the work can proceed right away. This will supply water to families in hundreds of homes that never had access before. The secondary beneficiaries are young girls who are sent to fetch the water in buckets.

Getting back through Erez Crossing took over two hours at the Israeli checkpoint. It gave me time to reflect on the fact that everything I witnessed in Gaza was through the eyes of a visitor and everyone I visited is not allowed to leave.