Beit Lahiya

Muhammad al-Hisoumi and his daughter Fayza were killed in an Israeli missile attack as they tended their land in the Gaza Strip on 12 March 2012, leaving behind a devastated family and a darkened house. Rami Almeghari profiles them.

Let me take you down, ‘cos we’re going to … Beit Lahiya in the north of the Gaza Strip, to go strawberry picking. As part of Trocaire’s work here we want to make our response to the humanitarian emergency as sustainable as possible. This way we can ensure that people who have had thousands of donums of land demolished can recover in the long term. In the northern area of Gaza strawberries are the main produce. Strawberries like you’ve never eaten before, sweet and juicy. The big ones look like something from a strawberry ad campaign but the small ones are the sweetest.

Palestinians have started to employ new tactics to prevent Israeli air attacks on their houses. Hundreds of protesters successfully forced the Israeli air force to halt air strikes on a house belonging to Muhammad Baroud in Beit Lahiya in the northern Gaza Strip on Saturday night. Israeli warplanes have already destroyed more than 60 houses belonging to activists from Palestinian factions across the Gaza Strip, using the same method of ordering the residents, through a telephone call at short notice, to evacuate their home prior to bombardment.

The paramedics and witnesses could not differentiate between the pieces of flesh of the eleven-year-old Nadi al-Attar, and those of his grandmother, 57-year-old Khairiyya, or the donkey’s, scattered on the branches of lemon and boxthorn trees on both sides of the dusty road in Beit Lahia, north Gaza. Yesterday, the old woman and her three grandsons Nadi, Shadi (14), and Ahmed (17) were riding a donkey cart, heading to their field to collect ripe figs that fetch a good price in Gaza’s markets when Israeli rocket hit their cart and blasted two of them into small pieces.