Israeli Vandalism: The Story of Hamad City
‘No stone is unturned’: The Israelis are determined to make the lives of the Palestinians of Gaza into a living hell
When the Israeli army left Hamad City, they totally destroyed it. A plush city, north of Khan Younis and built with hundreds of millions of dollars from Qatar starting 2015, it was raised to the ground.
Through Israeli bombardment its blocks of residential towers, shops, parks and recreational grounds were turned into rubble by vicious missiles.
It was a map of well-thought out and planned Israeli destruction as the videoclips amply demonstrate. The once-smart city was turned into a mass wreckage not fit for anybody.
When citizens came back after the Israeli army pulled out, they were shocked to find there was nothing left of their apartments. They have all been bombed and destroyed.
“Will anybody find me a tent?” one returning resident cried out. In reality, and even if a tent was found, there was no place to hoist it, because of the vast extent of the debris, wreckage and ruin.
According to UNRWA, the amount of concrete pulverized into rubble in Gaza today stands at 23,000 because of the extent of Israel bombing.
A lot of planning went into developing what was to become a smart city and probably the only one of its kind in Gaza.
One wrote: A smart sustainable city is one that uses the technology to transform its core systems and optimize the exploitation of limited resources based on a knowledge-based system that provides real-time insights to stakeholders.
It was built this way because of the challenges facing the cities of the Gaza including factors of population growth, lack of resources and limited space, he added.
Hamad City was developed in phases. Its first phase become operational in 2016 when over 1000 families were housed in a new state-of-the art 3000-apartment complex. These are of course now, destroyed.
The Israeli war machine destroyed these and the 40-plus towers that were subsequently built, proudly called the Hamad towers.
Bissan Oweda, a blogger in Gaza, wrote these were supposed to be the safest in the entirety of the 365-kilometer Strip but no more.
“As we enter Hamad City we find, great, great destruction around us,” said Mohammad Salameh, a blogger. In the videoclip we see people entering the city on foot with total destruction around underpinned by gouged debris.
“The enemy is still on the outskirts of the city, but as we look around us, there is nothing that can be said is inhabitable, its total destruction, we can now see the sound of gunfire in an intense manner suggesting there might still be Israeli bulldozers,” he added.
The mounts of debris, rubble and wreckage of buildings gets not only worse but is also horrific.
In one video an ambulance is shown trying to drive through the roads of the city trying to pick up the martyrs shot by the Israelis, few here, few there. Where do you start and where do you end?
In one case, the Palestinian ambulancemen picked up 15 bodies scattered throughout the city after they were shot by Israeli snipers. They were seen being put in the ambulance to be transported to the Al Aqsa Martyrs Hospital in Dier Al Balah in central Gaza.
This is the second time the city had been targeted. This time, the Israeli army really destroyed everything around.
The first time was in early December 2023 when Israeli planes began to destroy the city and take down its towers one-by-one. “Bombs slammed into the pale apartment blocks one by one, reducing them largely to rubble and sending a huge pall of black smoke into the sky, as people fled and cries of ‘help!’ and ‘ambulance!’ rang out,” AFP reported.
The once beautiful housing project was turned into a bloody nightmare.
Marwan Asmar is a writer based in Amman, focusing on Middle East affairs
https://countercurrents.org/2024/03/israeli-vandalism-the-story-of-hamad-city/
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