Bombed for nothing: Everyday life on Israeli-Gaza border

[Scurrilous]

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"Despite all calls for peaceful negotiations, rockets and violence are part of life on the Israeli-Gaza border. As civilians bear the brunt of the conflict, Faisal Malaka from Gaza told RT’s Nadezhda Kevorkova how it feels to live there.

"Why do you always come after the war and destruction? Why don’t you want to stop them, before they start?" says local farmer Faisal Malaka, aged 22. He is reluctant to talk because he doesn’t think “they” do much good.

By ‘them’ he means the Israeli army officers, who are just a few hundred meters away. The border is demarcated with an electric fence and towers. Faisal says the fence is lethal. His house is closest to the border.

"Europeans have been writing about us in their newspapers since 1948. But nothing is changing. You are the fourth or the seventh to have come here since the war of 2008. Journalists can’t stop them,” Faisal tells the children to go inside the house and not to look out of the windows. He allows me, though, to take some pictures of the dents on the house walls and the steel shutters on the windows that are meant to protect his family. We had seen the dents and shutters from a distance.

But children will be children: they sit in a corner for a while, then come and hang around the adults again.

Faisal is a manager. A graduate of Gaza’s Islamic University, he has a Master’s degree with honors.

"The Israelis say, you are illiterate and ignorant peasants and you don’t know how to read or write."

"We are the most educated people in the Middle East. The more they take from us, the more we learn. Before, I could work in the garden. The only thing I can do now is to learn. There’s nothing funny about it,” Faisal says in response to my forced smile.

His family used to have orchards, but not anymore.

"Since 2000, Israeli bulldozers have destroyed all the trees here. They’ve cut down all the orange, lemon, almond and olive trees. They’ve destroyed our hen-house. They buried our house in sand twice – in 2000 and 2009. On the 22nd of January, they came and buried our house in snow up to the roof?” Faisal tells me twice about the bulldozer as my mind refuses to take it all in."

http://rt.com/news/israel-gaza-conflict-violence-469/