Picking up the pieces in Gaza

BY MATTHEW McALLESTER | Newsday World Correspondent

July 9, 2006

BEIT LAHIYA, GAZA - Every day of his life, Mahmoud Ankar wears a T-shirt or sweatshirt with his name and the telephone number of his parents printed on the front. "Anyone who finds him please call," reads the rest of the message.

Usually, the mentally handicapped 18-year-old lives in a room separate from his family in a walled garden that protects him from getting lost in the confusing, harsh world of the Gaza Strip outside. He can't hear and can't talk and can't survive on his own in the streets without the kindness of strangers. And his special shirts.

On Thursday, an Israeli tank shell smashed into a store 20 yards from the Ankar house, on the front line of houses attacked by the Israeli military last week. In the chaos and panic, in the blinding smoke caused by the explosion, Mahmoud Ankar simply disappeared, his parents said yesterday. Their beloved son was out there somewhere, wandering streets filled with Israeli bullets and Palestinian militants with their machine guns and homemade rockets.

Cowering inside their home, the Ankars could not go and search for him.

Yesterday, the Israelis had pulled out of the neighborhood where they had battled for two days, and it was possible for the first time to survey the damage and the human cost. The Israeli army pushed into eastern parts of the Gaza Strip, toward Gaza City, and there was more fighting with Palestinian militants. More than 40 Palestinians and one Israeli soldier have died in the fighting so far. Israel yesterday rejected a proposal from the Hamas-led government for a cease-fire, demanding the release of Cpl. Gilad Shalit, an Israeli soldier who was kidnapped two weeks ago in a Palestinian raid, before any agreement can be reached.

As the fighting shifted from their neighborhood, the people of Beit Lahiya emerged from their bullet-raked homes and began to tell their stories and vent their fury at the Israelis. One family, the al-Ajouris, walked around what they said had been a beautiful home. Corners of the building were missing, tank shells having torn them away. The stone facade was peppered by thousands of bullets.

When the attack began, seven women and girls were in the house. All the men of the family were at work. For two days, the women cowered in the basement without food or water, they said yesterday.

Nine-year-old Naama stood among the broken glass of a bedroom yesterday and said she had been very afraid.

"She kept crying all the time," said her sister, Rasha, a 21-year-old student. "She called her dad on the cell phone and said, 'Call the Red Crescent, Dad. Take me out of here. I can't stand it anymore.'"

Rasha lifted her robe, pulled off a sock and showed a wound in her ankle caused by flying glass from the shattered windows of the basement.

"We tried to go upstairs to bring water from the bathroom," said their mother, Tidal, 49. "But they shot at us and shot the refrigerator. We were so thirsty and hungry. I have low blood sugar, and I need food."

On Friday, the women decided they would rather die in the street than in the basement. So they raced upstairs and outside, jumped over a wall and found an ambulance that took them to safety.

When the crisis over the captured soldier, Shalit, began, the women said they sympathized with his mother and family. But after what they had been through, they no longer want him freed. "I don't want the soldier to be released," said another sister, Fatma, 18. "They destroyed our house for the sake of releasing him. If they've already destroyed the house, why give him over now? This will not lead to the release of the soldier. It will lead to more kidnapping."

Fatma also said that Israel's other stated goal in the attack - to prevent militants from firing rockets into Israel from the neighborhood - had not succeeded because even during the Israelis' occupation of the neighborhood, the rockets continued.

"They are stupid," the teenager said.

At the Ankar home, the kitchen wall was all but missing, a tank shell having torn it open. Unlike the al-Ajouris, the Ankars stayed throughout the battle, worrying about their handicapped son, Mahmoud.

Yesterday, Abdel Karim Ankar's cell phone rang. It was a man calling from the southern Khan Younis refugee camp, many miles from Beit Lahiya, which is in the north. The man said he had found Mahmoud and called the number on his shirt.

Soon after, the man drove Mahmoud home. It was impossible to tell how he had ended up so far away in such a short time.

When he got back to the house, Mahmoud no longer had his own safe world to wander in. The Israelis had razed his room and the walls of the garden, his family said. In front of the house, where the family said the room and the garden had been, there was nothing but sand and rubble.

So they had to lock Mahmoud, silent and wondering in his gaze, in a room in the house.

"Now all I want is another wall so I can let him walk around again," said his mother, Tamam, 43. "Or he'll never go out again."