AJE News Video, 13 Jan. 2015 ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Gaza City - Hesham el-Moghraby stands in the centre of his living room, looking down at two large tombs. He takes his baseball cap off, runs one hand over his head, and puts the cap back on. There is no other place that I know, Moghraby tells Al Jazeera from inside his familys dark shack, which brims with piles of salvaged tyres, firewood, plastic tubing, old shoes and scraps of metal. This is Moghrabys life inside Gaza Citys el-Sheikh Shaban cemetery. The 43-year-old cannot say exactly how he ended up living in a makeshift home between gravestones; all he knows is that his family has lived here ever since the Nakba, the 1948 expulsion of Palestinians from their lands. Its horrifying for the kids, he says, noting they are taunted at school because of their peculiar living circumstances. It is also difficult to provide for the family, Moghraby says, when he makes just a few dollars a day taxiing residents around town in his horse-drawn cart. Most of the time, the kids go to sleep hungry, he says. They [contend with] insects and rats. Dozens of people have made their homes inside the el-Sheikh Shaban cemetery. None want to live here, but they say they have nowhere else to go. Some areas of the graveyard, which was hit by bombs in the 2014 war, look more like a dump than a cemetery. It has become part graveyard, part scrapyard, and part shantytown. In one corner, a bedraggled cat feasts on a dead bird, while the overgrown graves are blighted by residents trash: discarded food packaging, splintered wood, bits of wire and cloth. Children play with marbles upon the flat stone surface of a large tomb. Its very depressing. Its hard for the kids, resident Abdul Raouf el-Harrem tells Al Jazeera. They dont have any place to play, so they play between the graves . . .
Posted on: Wed, 14 Jan 2015 08:14:34 +0000
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