Gaza ghost town

By Rafael D. Frankel

NISANIT, The Gaza Strip—The mini market here is closed, its shelves stacked on the sidewalk next to one of its freezers. Garbage lines the streets, as well as the yards of the Mediterranean-style villas. And most of the villas themselves are baron of life—some even stripped of the shingles off their roofs, the tiles off their floors, and the marble off their kitchen counters.

The only thing that differentiates Nisanit, a small Jewish settlement in the northern edge of the Gaza Strip, from a ghost town is its few remaining residents—men mostly—who are packing up their homes. They have sent their wives and children out already, not wanting them to see the sorry state their town has deteriorated to ahead of its pending evacuation and demolition.

Moti Tenaim, 46, sits in a plastic chair in the nearly empty living room of his best friend's house he is helping to pack up. His hands behind his head, he stares out at the block they lived on together for nearly 20 years.

Tenaim's wife and four children—three of which were born here—have already moved to Nitzan, a community of prefabricated homes 17 miles north where some of the Nisanit families will go in the short-term.
"My family left when our house was still whole. I wanted them to remember it like that," he says.

In the late afternoon, children would usually be playing in the streets, he said. Instead the only sounds come from a moving truck hauling away a load of furniture.

A few blocks over, Arik Pilus picks through the remains of his house.
After he took his family and most of his belongings last night to Ashkelon, an Israeli city up the coast where he will now live, looters picked through what was left in his home. They stole ceiling lights, cabinets, and even the kitchen sink. Such acts were unthinkable here just days ago, when the community of 370 families was intact, he said.

Now he loads his car with a few last things, taking out a Qassam rocket—a popular weapon of Palestinian militant groups in Gaza—which landed next to his house during the last intifada. "It's my memory from here," he said.

Walking past a bus stop where one of the fiberglass walls is laying shattered on the sidewalk, Veldad David, 23, who lived here since he was 12, said the community "is socially falling apart."

"We're waiting for a miracle," David said, as a public bus—still making all the stops—let off one teenage girl who had tied an orange ribbon (a symbol of the anti-disengagement movement) on her purse.

Back at his friend's house, Tenaim stands on the front porch. Hovering over the uprooted remains of a garden, he takes a deep breath and looks to the sea just a few miles to the West.

The low sun, gentle breeze of sea air, and the sand dunes would make Nisanit feel like a state park off Highway One in northern California if it weren't for the barbed wire fence and army posts surrounding the town.

"What did we fight the wars for?" Tenaim asks, gesturing at what is left of his town.

But the empty houses cannot answer him, and even they will soon be gone.

©2005 Rafael D. Frankel and The New York Daily News