Neighborhoods Devastated, Reconstruction Blocked

"Amid the Destruction, a Play About Shells for Gaza Children Back in School"
A6, Sunday 1/25/09,
By Ethan Bronner

This piece is marred by Bronner's failure to explain why some of Gaza's neighborhoods were "devastated," and why Gaza "has not been able to bring in raw materials."

Bronner neglects to note the shift in Gaza schools, from plays devoted to showing Jews as enemies deserving no mercy to plays "devoted to how to handle dangerous materials, like shell parts, still in or near homes." Such a wry observation may seem unprofessional in a piece like this, yet would help illustrate why Gaza's children have to worry about shell parts in their homes.

After the play, each student "described what had happened to him and to his friends and family" during Israel's operation. One wonders whether Hamas militants using them, their homes and institutions for military cover received mention.

“Gaza remains in a kind of stupor. There are numbers, of course, to describe the misery - 4,000 homes destroyed, 21,000 badly damaged, 100,000 people homeless - but they do not tell the full story.”

In his attempt to tell the full story, Bronner writes that "wedding halls are blackened hulks, mosques are gone". He points out that most of Gaza is intact. "This is not Dresden after World War II." This disclaimer, only when considering the misleading media coverage of this operation, is not so obscene.

Yet in describing the devastation of specific neighborhoods, Bronner makes little attempt to explain what was so special about them. A map Israeli troops said showed booby-trapped homes "was hard to match" with the area, "and residents said they were farmers, not fighters, and that there had been no explosives or booby traps in their houses. But several acknowledged that under the area’s main street was a long tunnel used by Hamas fighters, now collapsed by Israeli explosives.”

Of course the residents may be farmers, but weren't they used by the fighters? How exactly was this tunnel used by Hamas? Could there have been residents not interviewed who tell a different story? Or those interviewed who are afraid to? Reading this article, one would get no sense that Hamas' war strategy was to use Gaza's civilian infrastructure, as described by Steven Erlanger.

"Little came (Israeli soldiers’) way, apparently because Hamas fighters decided that it was not worth dying.” Hundreds of Hamas militants decided that it was. Bronner seems to have concluded that most if not all Hamas were killed not engaged on the battlefield. How does he conclude this? For those Hamas that weren't killed, who for instance fled after firing rockets, mortars or bullets, they felt it was worth their fellow Gazans dying, when Israeli soldiers returned fire.

Bronner makes an incomplete point when he writes of no functioning glass or cement factories, as Gaza has been unable to import “raw materials for months because Israel and Egypt closed commercial crossings.”

A UN relief official states “the Israelis don’t say no, but they say we need to have assurances it will not be misused by Hamas. We are trying to work out the mechanisms.” This isn't enough.

Bronner should've noted that the crossings haven’t been closed to food, medical and humanitarian shipments, and that cement, in particular, is a material cited by Israeli officials as one directly used not just for infrastructure, but for military purposes like tunnels and underground bunkers.

Unfortunately, that Hamas is violently committed to Israel's destruction seems to have little bearing on explaining Gaza's closed commercial crossings.