Past bombed suburbs and scrubland stands the house on the frontier of hell. Once, Abdullah Wahdem's home was a pleasant villa set in the citrus groves of northern Gaza. Now its cream stucco frontage is pitted by the bullets and artillery salvos that slammed into the last outpost of a stricken land. Three miles away, across the wasteland, is Sderot, the Israeli town regularly hit by Hamas rockets fired from Gaza. While those attacks have provoked international outrage, few outsiders ever see the return violence visited on innocent inhabitants of a territory under blockade. The occupants of Abdullah's house are as gravely scarred as its facade.
Behind the shutters stands his sister-in-law, a pretty young woman with a closed slit where her left eye was shot away. Her small daughter and the family's other children still wake screaming after artillery rounds fell on their bedroom. Abdullah's 10-year-old son, Mohammed, extends a hand with fingers missing.
"We are still suffering so much," Abdullah says. "Everything has been demolished by the Israelis." The fruit farm that was once his livelihood has been flattened by "sweepers" that have destroyed trees and bushes to allow maximum visibility in a buffer zone where, according to a local lawyer, a shoot-to-kill policy still operates. Farmers have been struck down as they tend their land, and a teenager collecting scrap metal from the rubble was shot the day before we drove in. Full story...
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Behind the shutters stands his sister-in-law, a pretty young woman with a closed slit where her left eye was shot away. Her small daughter and the family's other children still wake screaming after artillery rounds fell on their bedroom. Abdullah's 10-year-old son, Mohammed, extends a hand with fingers missing.
"We are still suffering so much," Abdullah says. "Everything has been demolished by the Israelis." The fruit farm that was once his livelihood has been flattened by "sweepers" that have destroyed trees and bushes to allow maximum visibility in a buffer zone where, according to a local lawyer, a shoot-to-kill policy still operates. Farmers have been struck down as they tend their land, and a teenager collecting scrap metal from the rubble was shot the day before we drove in. Full story...
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