Twilight Zone / End of the Rainbow

[Violet_Crumble]

By Gideon Levy

One of the 120 homes demolished by the IDF in the Brazil refugee camp belonged to architect Manal Awad. This was the third time since 1948 that her family has been left homeless - and the second time that Ariel Sharon was responsible.

Now all 19 people are crowded into a tiny two-and-a-half-room apartment belonging to one sister, on the edge of the destroyed area of their refugee camp. The curtain blowing in the breeze allows intermittent glimpses of the view from the window: mounds of rubble all the way to the end of the street. This is the Awad family: Mother, elderly aunt, son, daughters and their families. On Thursday, May 20, two bulldozers approached their home, threatening to raze it with the occupants still inside: Operation Rainbow. The 85-year-old aunt barely managed to climb out. She says that in 1948, when she fled from her first home, and in 1972, when the IDF razed her home again, it was easier for her - she was still young then. One of the daughters, architect Manal Awad, says that it's not just stone walls that have been destroyed, but also memories - in the photographs and books that are lost forever. Her sisters tried to save the coffee table that she had designed, but couldn't. The table was crushed along with the other contents of the house. Among the wreckage, the only thing she could find was the new narghile she had bought for her brother in Tunisia.

The IDF did its work very thoroughly here: The houses and their contents were completely crushed. Here and there, some recognizable items can be seen - part of a dress, a smashed water boiler, the torn pages of a book. Entire houses have been wiped off the face of the earth, and now they are just mounds of dirt. The chief of staff, Moshe Ya'alon, said without batting an eye: "We know of 12 houses that were demolished since the start of the operation." Platoon commander Brigadier General Shmuel Zakkai corrected him the next day, saying the actual number was 56 houses.

But neither figure is correct. In the Brazil camp alone, according to Mustafa Ibrahim, an experienced investigator for the Palestinian civil rights commission, 120 houses were destroyed. Visiting the place, it's hard to count, but one sees that many dozens of houses were demolished, judging by the many mounds of rubble. All the talk about smuggling tunnels also appears less than credible. The Awad family's home, for example, is approximately 800 meters away from the Philadelphi corridor; there are no tunnels that long. This was demolition just for the sake of it, a punitive campaign of vengeance against innocents rendered homeless for the second and third times.

http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/434662.html