No one and nothing was spared during Israel’s attacks on Gaza and it will take billions to rebuild the area, writes David Kenner
THE second floor of the al-Awda factory is covered in a sticky red liquid, as if a massacre occurred here. The truth, happily, is less gruesome: An Israeli tank shell ripped open plastic cartons containing strawberry juice, which was to be sold during the Islamic holy month of Ramadaan – before the war intervened.
Until a month ago, the factory employed 600 people in the production of about 125 different snacks – everything from chocolate wafers to biscuits and ice cream. Now, it is gutted: the room that contained the milk, butter and sugar is a sickly sweet ruin of charred parcels; a hole had been punched in a wall to create a makeshift slide that evacuated biscuits from an encroaching fire; the potato-chip machines imported from Europe have been ripped to pieces.
Mohammad al-Talbani, the factory owner, estimates that his production facility was worth $30 million (R321m). It had been the work of his lifetime: He launched his business after finishing secondary school in the late 1960s, making sesame and coconut sweets by hand from his home in Gaza’s Maghazi refugee camp.
Al-Talbani believes his factory was not merely collateral damage in the war, but that the Israeli attack was part of a broader campaign of economic warfare on the residents of the Gaza Strip.
There had been no Hamas fighters anywhere near the factory when it was shelled, he insisted. “If someone had come here to launch a rocket, I’d shoot them myself,” he said.
The Palestinian Authority government has estimated that it could cost $6 billion to rebuild the territory: 50 000 homes have been totally or partially destroyed, roughly 250 factories have reportedly been rendered inoperable and Gaza’s sewage treatment facility and power plant have been damaged, shrinking the available supply of drinkable water