The Gaza Strip is nothing more than a macabre theater of ruins. In one year, the Israeli army killed nearly 42,000 Palestinians in the enclave and injured nearly 100,000, mostly women and children. It also destroyed most of a territory that has now become uninhabitable and is losing all memory.
“Urbicide”, “domicide”, “ecocide”, “genocide”, the terms are multiplying to evoke the situation in the Gaza Strip after a year of war. If the war in Gaza ended today, the United Nations said last May, it would take until 2040 to rebuild all the homes that were destroyed by Israel’s bombings and ground offensives in the territory. The cost would exceed $40 billion. “ For no reason, the Israeli army attacked our house: first they bombarded the staircase, located in the center, then their bulldozers gutted the ground floor and the first floor (…) A house is not just stones », testifies to theFrench Jewish Union for Peace Iyad Alasttal, Palestinian director born Khan Younès. Gaza is one of the most densely populated places on Earth. Before the war, 2.3 million people lived on this 365 square kilometer strip of land.
In the northern Gaza Strip, the level of destruction exceeded that of the German city of Dresden, bombed in 1945 by Allied forces in one of the most controversial acts of World War II. Housing, administrative buildings and archives, schools, hospitals, places of worship, sewage pumping stations, roads and walls, historical sites, agricultural fields and beaches, 70% of the Gaza Strip is nothing but dust. Even the cemeteries were ravaged.
“Destroying everything is a genocidal objective of the Israeli army. They want to break, damage the will of the Palestinian people, analyzes the eminent Palestinian doctor Samah Jabr, psychiatrist and psychotherapist. They want to break the Palestinian people’s belief system, hope, ability to act. The desire to change the situation. This is an attack on the spirit of the Palestinian people. »
More rubble in Gaza than in Ukraine
For the past year, Unosat, the United Nations satellite mapping service, has published monthly maps of the Gaza Strip. One of the cards September illustrates a comprehensive damage assessment. According to satellite imagery analysis, Unosat identified approximately 1,190 km of destroyed roads, 415 km of severely affected roads and 1,440 km of moderately affected roads. In total, according to the World Bank, more than 90% of main roads have been destroyed or damaged.
According to World Bank data on the first four months of war, housing alone represents 72% of the total cost of damage, ahead of public service infrastructure such as water, health and education (19%). and damage to commercial and industrial buildings (9%). Some 84% of health facilities have been destroyed or damaged, and those that are still functioning lack water and electricity. As for the rubble, the volume was estimated eight months ago at 26 million tonnes.
At the end of April, the head of the United Nations demining program in the Palestinian territories, Mungo Birch, declared that there was more rubble to clear in Gaza than in Ukraine in two years. “ By reducing the Gaza Strip to a pile of ruins, Netanyahu probably hopes to reduce its population tenfold: all Palestinians who can will want to leave this pile of hopeless ruins, even if they have to swim across the Mediterranean. », analysis on his blog military expert Guillaume Ancel, writer and former French army officer.
Destroy the past, the present….
“ Among the things that were attacked by the Israelis in the first months was the laboratory where Palestinians freeze sperm and eggs. Why do they need to destroy this laboratory? Because it’s the future. It is the generation to come, it is the fertility of the Palestinian people. And then they attacked Palestinian intelligence with artificial intelligence: university professors, poets, intellectuals, then heads of families. Then they attacked everything, everything, in Gaza », says Doctor Samah Jabr.
According to Unicef, 87% of the enclave’s schools were destroyed or damaged and the 12 universities were bombed. And with the schools destroyed, it’s a 2nd school year lost for the children of the enclave. “ Schools in Palestine are not just a place to learn to read and write. It is a place of social connection, of emotional development. Everything that happens disrupts development and damages children’s brains and cognitive and emotional capacities. I think it will change their vision of the future. How can children in Gaza now imagine a future, a peaceful future? », asks the psychiatrist.
“ With all this destruction, including property that told a story, we find ourselves with war traumas that are passed down from generation to generation, analyzes Caroline Brandao, lawyer, teacher-researcher and head of international humanitarian law at the French Red Cross. In international humanitarian law, the destruction of civilian objectives, civilian infrastructure, but also cultural property, is also an attack on the heritage of humanity, on transmission, on the culture of the country. So there is also a desire behind this to destroy a memory, to destroy a culture, to also destroy roots. » UNESCO estimates damage caused to more than 50 cultural, religious and archaeological sites and raises fears of the risk of irreversible cultural erasure.
Generally speaking, schools and cemeteries are places protected by law. They can also become military targets if they are diverted for other purposes, an argument often put forward by Israel which claims that Hamas places weapons and soldiers there. But according to certain rules, starting with the elementary one, the principle of proportionality. Rules laid down in the Geneva conventions, conventional law, but also in customary international humanitarian law. “ But here, in this case, continues the lawyer, there was no proof that these places were used for military purposes, they were rather places where people went to take refuge, or places where we wanted to dispose of the dead when we could. » Today, even mourning and the ceremonies surrounding it have become impossible.
…. and the future
“ The trauma, in the case of the Palestinians, is not accidental, analyzes Samah Jabr. It’s not an earthquake or a car accident. It is deliberate, strategic and vicious. It’s the colonial trauma in any case. And the trauma is the disaster of helplessness. So Israel is trying to inject this feeling into every Palestinian. It’s psychological torture. Israel uses much greater power than necessary to mark the minds and the psyche, the psychology of the Palestinian people. To make us feel completely helpless in the face of their power, their brutality and their cruelty. »
On the environmental level, humanitarian law stipulates, among other things, that agricultural land must be spared from bombing so that, once the conflict is over, farmers can return to work there without fear of finding themselves faced with war explosives or weapons. remains of white phosphorus contamination. Unosat shows that compared to the average of the previous seven years, approximately 68% of permanent crop fields in the Gaza Strip experienced a significant decline in health and density, as well as a notable increase in destruction of crops. orchards and other trees, field crops and vegetables in Deir al-Balah governorate. Today in the Gaza Strip, the situation is such that last July, the first cases of poliomyelitis were detected in wastewater, due to the disastrous hygienic conditions in which the population has been living for almost a year. .
A disaster whose scale remains unknown
The enclave has become uninhabitable, even the air has become unbreathable. Greenhouse gas emissions generated during the first two months of the Gaza war were greater than the annual carbon footprint of more than twenty of the world’s most climate-vulnerable nations, according to an Anglo-American study. “ The war in Gaza has disrupted millions of Palestinian lives and caused catastrophic damage to the natural environment on which they depend for water, clean air, food and livelihoods », Deplored UNRWA in June.
We will have to wait until the conflict ends to really know the extent of the catastrophe in the Gaza Strip. According to a study of the Watson Institute on the wars led by the United States in the 21st century, the number of “indirect” deaths linked to the destruction of infrastructure, environmental contamination, food insecurity, the flattening of the health system etc, is four times higher than the number of direct deaths.
“ But the misfortune does not end when people go out to Gaza, when they have lived a year in an incessant traumatic atmosphere, explains Dr. Jabr. Without international will, they will pass their trauma from one generation to the next. With all this stress, cortisol (hormone essential for regulating metabolism, the stress response and the immune system, Editor’s note) and biological composition will change. » And the psychiatrist and psychotherapist mentions epigenetics: when the effects of trauma are transmitted genetically from one generation to the next. “ The epigenetics of Palestinians will change. Ongoing trauma can change people’s genetic expression. And of course, there will be traumatized generations, and I think that is in the calculations of the Israelis. Not only to damage the current Palestinian people living in Gaza, but also to damage future generations of Palestinians. Destroy men, destroy the territory and also destroy souls and generations. »
Of the roots of the Gaza Strip, only those of the prickly pears risk remaining.
