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JENIN REFUGEE CAMP, April 19: What do you say to a Palestinian refugee drenched with sweat from the effort of digging out his destroyed home with a garden hoe, filling bucket after bucket with rubble?
“Trust in God,” were the only words a neighbour found to tell Yahya Salih as the 42-year-old stood ankle-deep in a hole he had made atop a mountain of dirt and concrete wreckage in the centre of the Jenin refugee camp, in the West Bank.
“My house is under here,” said Salih, straightening up from his toils under the hot sun. “This was our bedroom,” he said, plucking at an edge of foam rubber — the corner of a mattress still buried deep in the ruins.
“That is our pillow,” he continued, pointing to the dusty stuffing where his little girl sat watching him from the edge of the shallow pit he had dug.
“I am trying to find our identity cards at least, and to get to my wife’s jewellery. My children need their clothes.”
For now, all Salih, who had worked as a car painter, had were the tools he was using to save his home, wife and children. He sat in the dirt to rest next to his five-year-old son Ahmed, who cuddled close to kiss his father’s dusty beard.
Amid the wreckage in the Jenin camp, 13-year-old Mohammad Badi scavenged a green harness with pockets which he thought had been used by Israeli soldiers. He put it on and walked around carrying a slingshot.
“I want to carry out a suicide attack on the Jews,” he said.
HOMELESS AND SCAVENGING: Palestinians in the camp have either been killed themselves or incapacitated by an offensive that has left many residents homeless and scavenging.
The central square of the camp, a 49-year-old warren of closely packed concrete houses, is no more after being blown up or bulldozed by the Israeli army.
Houses in neighbourhoods surrounding the square suffered severe damage from the battles, including shells from tanks and helicopter gunships, and dozens look uninhabitable.
The upper section of the camp, straggling along a hillside, is essentially intact, apparently spared from serious fighting.
On the slope running up from the square stands the Ansar mosque. Its walls and those of a nursery school next door are perforated with bullet holes.
Half a dozen mineral water bottles brimming with urine were left behind on a mosque stairway leading to the roof.
Palestinians who lived nearby said Israeli soldiers took over the mosque during the offensive. They pointed to boxes, scrawled in Hebrew, which appeared to be for ammunition. Also left behind were wrappers for a type of military flare.
UN envoy Terje Roed-Larsen said on Thursday the widespread destruction was “a disgraceful chapter” in the history of Israel.
He said the army had used “morally repugnant means” in its assault and a grave humanitarian crisis was the result.—Reuters
