Community Razed Along With Its Homes in Gaza

Abu Anzah, whose eyes are the dark brown of bittersweet chocolate, moved to Rafah with her brother from Algeria in 1994 in the political and economic afterglow of the Oslo peace accords. In those hopeful years, the refugee camp did not imply transience, but rather a community where she could spread familial roots.

"My father said, 'We have someone ready to take your hand,' " she reminisced. "It was a time of peace. Arab girls came here from all over to get married."

At summer's end, by family arrangement, she wed Musa Abu Anzah, a lifelong resident of the camp. Both were 20 years old. Within a year, their first daughter, Jehan, was born. Azizah Abu Anzah was surrounded by in-laws and embraced by a neighborhood of extended families in the camp's Block O.

When she delivered her babies -- Jehan, now 9, Jamallah, 5, and Mohammed, 3 -- "I would find all my family members around me," Azizah Abu Anzah said.

At the birth of baby Ola this year, she said, "No one was beside me."

She and her husband, who works in the customs office at the nearby international border crossing, were the last of their family to leave Block O. After the Israeli bulldozers flattened their home, which was in the center of the neighborhood, the family moved into a once elegant, butter-colored house abandoned by its Saudi owners.

In March, after the first suicide bombing carried out in Israel by Palestinians from fenced-in Gaza, the bulldozers rolled into Block O once more. Abu Anzah and her family fled with whatever they could carry, joining the swelling exodus from Block O.

Last week, the butter-colored house was pulverized by Israeli military forces.

'We Lost All of Our Lives'

Haneyyeh Ghoul, a grandmother of 26, didn't wait for the bulldozers to arrive.

"Bullets were coming inside our house," said Ghoul, 54, a stout woman draped in a billowing black burqa that exposed only a pudgy face and sandpaper hands. "We were always running in the middle of the night, carrying our children. They were panicked, wetting the bed, throwing up. It was a horror."

Two years ago, she moved part of her family out of the two-story house in Block O that she had spent half a lifetime scrimping to build. It was the house where Ghoul raised her five children and in which she was helping bring up a third generation.

Over the following months, all of her children and their families fled Block O. One son, Ayman, 27, was killed when shrapnel from an Israeli tank shell sliced through his body while he was helping his sister move.

The family house was bulldozed last October, Ghoul said.

"All we saved, we put into our house," said Ghoul's son, Ismail, 35. He figured the comfortable two-level house cost about $5,000 to build.