Media coverage
Corriere della Sera · 2021-05-22
The article describes Hamas militants near Khan Younis waiting for the bodies of comrades believed buried in tunnels bombed by Israel, as both sides seek to shape a narrative of victory after the ceasefire. It also focuses on the battle over Gaza reconstruction funds, with Omar Shaban warning of a lack of transparency in money channeled through the Palestinian Authority or through Qatari cash aid, while hundreds of families are still waiting for compensation from earlier wars. The piece highlights the hardship of residents such as Abdelhadi Musallam, who has yet to be reimbursed for past rebuilding costs and whose home was damaged again in the latest fighting.
The article describes Hamas militants near Khan Younis waiting for the bodies of comrades believed buried in tunnels bombed by Israel, as both sides seek to shape a narrative of victory after the ceasefire. It also focuses on the battle over Gaza reconstruction funds, with Omar Shaban warning of a…
FROM OUR CORRESPONDENT IN GAZA - The dirt road cuts through the fields toward the East and toward the guard tower on the other side of the barrier. The prickly pears serve as a thorny guardrail; the plant is a symbol for both Palestinians and Israelis (sabra in Hebrew is the nickname of the first pioneers), and both admire its scratching determination. It is forbidden to go beyond the paramilitaries in light camouflage; around them, other groups of men sit in the shade, men who left the camouflage at home. They spend the whole day here; they were already here on Friday from the first hours of the truce until sunset, watching the excavators not far away, waiting to see whether a body will emerge from the sand; their comrades are down there.
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“I won’t answer.” None of the militants will speak, but in Khan Younis everyone knows that on day 4 of the war some of them went down into the tunnel system to supply it with food and water, while the commanders of the Ezzedin Al Qassam Brigades believed the Israelis were about to invade the Strip. It was a stratagem and, buried in the tunnels bombed by the air force, that vanguard remained there. How many there are — for now around twenty bodies have been recovered — could make a difference for the Israeli government, which until the very end pursued an image of victory.
Perhaps it is too late. Mohammed Deif — Hamas’s military chief, born in Khan Younis itself — is already the most celebrated among the fundamentalist leaders; the darkness of the underground life in which he has lived for 30 years has helped illuminate his legend even among the Palestinians of East Jerusalem and the West Bank. All to the detriment of the respect accorded to President Abu Mazen, who has been in power for 16 years: yesterday — the ra’is had announced them and then canceled them — the first parliamentary elections since 2006 should have been held; Hamas had won those, and a year later it seized control of the Strip from the Ramallah Authority in a coup.
Thus the battle for hearts and minds — as the American general Stanley McChrystal called it in Afghanistan — passes through the donors’ purse and over who should have access to it. Joe Biden from the White House repeats that any funding for the reconstruction of Gaza will be paid to Abu Mazen’s government. “The problem is that there is no transparency,” explains Omar Shaban, founder of the independent organization PalThink, “and countries hesitate to transfer to the Palestinian Authority the sums pledged because they fear they will be dissipated. It already happened with the donors’ conference after the war in the summer of 2014.”
Qatar has decided to open its representative office — a cube of white marble on the Strip’s seafront — and the hundreds of millions of dollars carried in suitcases by the ambassador were distributed to Hamas. With the blessing of Benjamin Netanyahu’s government. “In this way the Israelis have in fact allowed the Islamists to strengthen themselves,” Shaban continues. “I propose creating a special fund, with a board of trustees, that sets priorities and supervises the use of aid.” The small Gulf emirate, in search of diplomatic stature, makes cash deliveries and it becomes impossible to verify how they are used. Six hundred families are still waiting to receive the contributions to rebuild the houses destroyed in the nearly two months of conflict between July and August seven years ago.
Abdelhadi Musallam still has to repay the money he asked for then from friends and relatives. To make the family apartment building in the Bureij refugee camp habitable again he needed $8,000; in the Strip more than half of the two million inhabitants live below the extreme poverty line, set by the bureaucrats of despair at $1.90 a day. Local United Nations officials told him to advance the sum; he would be reimbursed as soon as his name moved up the list. “I’m still waiting. In the meantime this happened,” he says while mixing cement and repairing the gashes in the roof. The house next door was targeted last week; it belongs to a Hamas commander. The concrete and metal blocks flew to the other side of the alley and also devastated Abdelhadi’s rooms. The UN estimates that in these 11 days of conflict — the Palestinians killed by the bombardments are almost 250, while 13 Israelis were killed by rockets launched by the fundamentalists — 2,000 homes were destroyed and 17,000 damaged.
Text © Corriere della Sera — archived here with attribution to the source. — Machine translation for archival reference. — Original source