Joanna El-Nakhal, 42, came to the Gaza Strip 18 years ago. She met her husband, Majid, now a pharmacist, whilst studying in Wroclaw , Western Poland . Now a Muslim and a mother of two living in Gaza City , she is originally from Gostynia near Plock . She was the president of the Palestinian-Polish Association in Gaza for the past four years.



She and her husband and daughter Marta, 16, are now living in Central Gaza after their home in Eastern Gaza was destroyed by Israeli occupation forces during this winter’s onslaught. Joanna’s home joins the estimated 100,000 people made homeless by Israel ’s attacks on properties, according to the United Nations. Rent prices have skyrocketed in the strip, from an average of $100 to $400 per month. Entire families are rotating their presence amongst relatives, sleeping 20 to one room in some cases.



10 temporary camps have been set up throughout with the Gaza strip, with five in the North alone. They bear names such as ‘The Dignity’ and ‘The Steadfast’ in Ezbit Abid Rubbu and Hay Al Salam, ‘The Loyal’ in Atatura, and ‘Rayan’ in Jabaliya, after Hamas leader Nizar Rayan who was extra judicially killed along with his 2 wives and 12 children when Israeli F16s bombed his home.



A new life



Joanna’s first impressions of Gaza when travelling to Palestine to begin a new life with her one year old son, were that it was a place of beauty and plenty. Her husband was living on his grandfather’s land on the outskirts of the Gaza Strip in Jabbal El-Nahal – Nahal Mountain - on the Eastern border with Israel . Theirs was the last house to be built in a long line of family properties belonging to Majid’s brother Rafiq and his six children, Zaafer, with his five, Amer, the eldest son, killed in the first Intifada, and a father of 10, Howla, his sister with her family, and Munir with his twins. Now all have either been reduced to rubble or partially destroyed. Any still standing stand empty. They are flanked by a sea of churned muddy land mangled with twisted tree roots and broken branches. Neighbours homes, a local police station, and cement, ice-cream and biscuit factories lie in ruins close by. The area looks like a disaster zone.

'It's a blessing Majid's mother died before this happened', says Joanna. ' She bore 15 children and saw all of them educated to PHD standard. If she had seen all this it would have finished her off.’



The El-Nakhal homes had been opulent and elegant, standing tall with high ceilings, pillars and porches, flanked by rows of mature date palms, ‘They bore succulent, long, tasty dates’ Joanna told me, proudly. Now each house is half destroyed. Rafiq’s home the worst hit, nothing but a pile of rubble and concrete slabs, the date palms scorched and crippled.



We thought we would be able to return



Joanna recalls the first time Israeli soldiers occupied her home.

‘In 2006 we had the occupation forces right next to our house, we saw them all. They spent three days inside our house. We heard bombing and bulldozing – they had bulldozers one story high. They wanted to eat and drink our food. They shot our water butts and electricity transformer. Our house caught fire. Tanks were positioned behind our house and were shooting, it was unbelievable, for three days we were on the ground, all of us, cowering in the kitchen. Our land phones were ringing, our friends were calling to see how we were, the Polish consul was calling. I remember sliding across the floor on my belly, trying to reach the phone, and it was as if the soldiers knew I wanted to get to the phone and they would intensify their shooting. They kept bombing, apaches were flying above us, we thought they would destroy our house. For three days we lay on the floor. I had to see a doctor afterwards because Id sprained my side and neck by lying so tensely on my side on the floor. When this December’s attack started, and they began by bombing with F16s, we left straight away. All our windows were smashed out that first day, but still, when we left, we thought somehow that we could come back during the day. We soon realised there was no chance’.



The El-Nakhal family's land was fertile and fruitful, stretching three hectares to the edge of the Jabbal, a plateau from which one can see the whole of Gaza city to the west, and behind it the sparkling Mediterranean sea . To the east lies Khalil ( Hebron ) visible on a clear day behind the Israeli settlement of Nakhel Oz.



Standing on the edge of El-Nakhel, the panorama of occupied Gaza city is a concrete labyrinth of clambering uneven grey blocks and towers. In their structural uniformity and collective stunting, with space and concrete in such scarce supply, and no way outwards, only a capped upwards, and the imprisonment of those living under siege within them, looking out in the bright sun at this grey cubic panorama, Gaza City resembles an uneven cluster of tunnels in reverse.



‘We had orange, lemon, grapefruit, olive, grape, and clementine orchards, as far as you can see’ points Joanna. She is referring to a sea of choppy brown soil churned with twisted roots and broken tree trunks. In the middle of it all, is an uprooted Jumeza Tree. 'It's a prolific tree, it bears fruit seven times a year' says Joanna, proudly. ‘The Israelis bulldozed all of it, including a 150 metre deep water well, first in 2006. Even when we re-planted our olive trees, they grew a few feet only to be bulldozed again this time. But we had a harvest last summer. She smiles, 'They bore fruit and we ate it'.



Behind us is a damaged mosque and broken cement factory, further back the Israeli border, and to our right, in bright sunlight, a lone tent with a Palestinian flag standing high above it in a bulldozed field with goats hobbling along around it. Joanna's home is riddled with wide blast holes and the upper floors burnt out completely. Where her marble front steps used to be is a waterfall of hardened debris and mud.



Joanna had brought saplings from Poland to plant in Palestine . Greengage and asparagus seedlings and a star of Bethlehem to nurture. Now most were dead. ‘But they left me my herb garden’, she says, ruefully, showing me her sage, oregano, lavender, aloe vera and rosemary. ‘Look here’ she points to the trashed ground beside her house, ‘Look the rosemary is flourishing again’ and sure enough it was beginning to re-grow.



The house had a thick, 6 feet high wall of cacti flanking it, now decapitated and sliced up by shrapnel. ‘We had this as our wall of protection and for succulent cactus fruits. They’re delicious and really expensive in Poland , maybe 5 zlotys (£1) for one, and here they grow wild and free'.



Joanna had decked out her home in a traditional Polish folk style. ‘My husband didn’t want me to work’ she explains, ‘Fifteen years ago, most women didn’t even drive cars let alone work, so, for this sacrifice, I made my home my nest and as Polish as I could’. And indeed it had a classical wooden turret, a hearth fire, and a library packed with Polish children’s books and international literature ‘Kraszowski, Shekspir, Homer, Jezyk Polski. and stacks of Polish magazines, ‘Przekroj’, ‘Twoj Styl’, ‘Chwila Dla Ciebie’. Now, they are all now charred and some shot, including a Polish Q’ran pierced by a bullet,



Joanna’s house was bombarded with what the family thinks were apache fired missiles and tank fired flachette shells – these are exploding shells that shed tiny flesh tearing metal darts for up to 200 metres around. Some could still be found in what was her bedroom along with jagged chunks of shrapnel.



Soldiers occupied it – its’ height and panoramic views an advantage to the army seeking visual dominance over the area. The top floor was worst hit, with gaping 10 feet wide holes in the walls where windows once were, and a mess of gutted charred rooms with crippled walls, and black soot everywhere. Blast holes of varying sizes pock-marked the few remaining walls. In the case of 16-year-old Marta's bedroom, there are no longer any windows or walls, just gaping spaces and black rubble.



‘All her presents from my mother, the parcels that she sent from Poland every year – Barbies, books, girls things, Polish pamiatki (souvenirs), every birthday all these treasures, and the souvenirs from the travels of her friends and family, these are our memories, you cannot replace them. These things are part of her education – I educated my children to a European standard with interaction and input from other cultures, and now these things, these memories are gone’.



'We left with the clothes on our backs', recounts Joanna, 'All our clothes and basic items are now gone. I left with a blanket and my Jasiek – my little pillow of goosefeathers – and Marta the same - a pillow and two blankets. We never thought it would end up like this. There's nothing like this. You can rebuild a house but there's nothing comparable to the loss of a life’s belongings. I don’t have the strength to cry anymore’.



Bullet casings and remnants of Israeli food packets litter the ground outside. Her front room and kitchen are filled with broken glass, debris and walls blasted with gunshot and missile holes. Whole sections of wall were blasted clean away. A plastic green Christmas tree with its gold tinsel scattered around lies trashed on the floor. Joanna picks it up, ‘Even though I am a Muslim, I still hold on to these Christian traditions’ she says sadly.



Built painstakingly by Majid on his grandfather's land, the house is now inhabitable. The family are renting an apartment in the Rimal area of Gaza City . ‘It was such a mighty house, built with 30cm thick Jerusalem Stone’, says Joanna staring at her punctured, wrecked home. ‘They can demolish a house, uproot the trees, but they cannot take the land’, she says eyes glowing defiantly, and then hesitates, with alarm in her voice ‘Or can they? Maybe they can. After this attack, anything is possible’



A home should be a place of peace



‘Now we feel like our lives are constantly at risk. The home should be a place of peace and protection, like a child in the hands of her mother – that’s how we should feel in our home’. Looking out of the glassless windows of Joanna’s devastated home we stare past the line of smashed up homes, damaged factories and the random donkey cart clopping along, to Israel, where buses, lorries, SUVs - are moving silently along an open road, past patches of dense evergreen forest, screened by the endless stare of a series of Israeli watch towers; odd white 1960s looking baubles on stalks. ‘See, there they go, freely, on their way, for outings, for holidays, to work’, says Joanna wistfully. Her family hasn’t been allowed out to Poland for over 10 years.

I ask Joanna whether she feels fear living here, so close to the borders. ‘Since I moved here’ she says, ‘I can honestly say, I haven’t slept one night in peace’. Suddenly we hear a rocket soar over us, a sky-tearing sound, followed by a thud inside Israel . ‘Ah, ah, there they go again, see?’, sighs Joanna. 'And wait, you'll see them respond'. Less than five minutes later, a tank and two jeeps make off from the base opposite us and begin to traverse down the road.



Majid is a pharmacist, Joanna never completed her medical studies in Wroclaw 'My husband didn’t want me to' she explains. 'Being here with different realities changes your ambitions, you adapt. But I am lucky, it’s a luxury for me to not to need to work and to be able to look after my children, whereas many European women and so many couples, are both working just to get by.'



Joanna's parents were not initially welcoming of her choice of husband, but gradually came to accept him and their daughter's new family. I ask her what its really like here for her, how did she come to fit in. She said she doesn’t identify as a Palestinian, and that there has been more than one time were she was ready to sling a bag over her back and walk out. Her daughter, Marta, who has lived in Gaza since she was a year old, stresses 'I am Palestinian'.



No comparison in Poland



Joanna tells me, 'In all the years I have lived here, I haven’t had any trouble, everyone is kind and helpful and I haven’t met any disrespect and, without sounding too proud, I would like to think that I am well liked and accepted here in my community. When I first came to Gaza , it was the first Intifada and Israeli soldiers could enter at any moment, on foot. Nothing has changed, just their weapons. They can come in and hit us and destroy us at any moment. Just as there was a soldier with a gun against a boy with a stone then, there is now a one ton bomb against people with stones, like me. As I am a civilian, all I have at may hands are stones. I have nothing to do with any groups, I am not a member of any.'



We look across at the clear blue skies above Gaza city. 'When I used to hear a plane flying, I used to associate it with holidays. Now I get a racing heart and speeding pulse as I think of bombing'.



'I know people have lost their homes in Poland before because of floodings, and these comparisons have been made but there is no comparison. Under the pretext of Fatah or Hamas, it doesn’t matter who, Israel is occupying and destroying, anything mended they destroy again. And the world allows this to happen, after all it was the United Nations that allowed Israel to exist. And this battle is unequal. Israel is a military state, everyone is mobilised, and the worst thing is that amongst those soldiers are Polish citizens, and the people here know this. Children here used to say to me, you’re a foreigner Jew'.



Standing in her desolated kitchen Joanna states, 'Everyone has the right to have a home, to have safety and shelter. So an attack on people in their homes is unforgivable. If Israel wants to target Hamas, target Hamas, not people in their homes. This is a holy land, and it belongs to all peoples of all religions, but as long as these religions are politicised there will never be peace here.'



'Every citizen has the right to live in their land, their country, and no one has the right to take this freedom from anyone. Look at our Poland , under hundreds of years of occupation, under the dismemberment, under communism. Palestinians have no rights, and who gave the Israelis the right to take their rights away? I don't even want to talk politics because it’s a waste of words but I will tell you this. I believe in peace. I kept a chronicle of the visitors to our society here, and Miriam Akavia, a Polish writer from Krakow , a Jew, who survived the camps, and a democrat, she visited us. She is the honorary President of the Polish-Israeli Society of Friends. She wants peace and she said to us, 'I survived to be able to speak out for peace and to work for peace. This is why I survived'. So when I think of her words, I think, we need to survive to come together to make peace a reality. It takes two sides and both sides must want it – it takes two to tango after all. I always say, ‘Hope dies last.’