Between the rubble and the tent... Abdul Karim removes the rubble from his house with his hands to find a place to shelter

Gaza - Special Ofoq News - With a small hammer, Abdul Karim Hassan stands among the rubble of his destroyed house in the Al-Zaytoun neighborhood, southeast of Gaza City, hitting scattered pieces of cement in search of the iron buried underneath.

Abdul Karim no longer removes rubble to rebuild his house; The house, which consisted of three floors, was completely destroyed by the Israeli occupation army. What he is doing now is trying to recover what can be used from it, to set up a tent over the ruins of the place that was once his family’s home.

Abdul Karim said in an interview with Lamaa: “There is no other place to live, and I am forced to isolate the rubble of the house with my hands. There is no equipment, and the area is disaster-stricken, and I have no alternative but to remove the rubble so that I can set up a tent.”

Abdul Karim spent six months trying to remove the rubble of his destroyed house, amid the absence of heavy equipment and the difficulty of reaching the rubble.

A piece of iron may seem small to those who see it, but to Abdul Karim, it is part of a shelter that he is trying to make from the remains of his house, so he continues to search among the rubble, using a hammer and simple tools, even though the task may take many hours.

He says that the iron extracted from the rubble has become important to him, as its prices are high in the market, while he needs it to stabilize the tent and make a more stable shelter than the curtains alone.

In the devastated area, the rubble is no longer just the remains of homes that lost their owners. Rather, it has turned into a source of materials that residents are trying to reuse for survival. Iron is extracted from columns and roofs, then repurposed to make tent frames, while others are trying to benefit from wood and other usable materials.

But even extracting iron is not an easy task.

Abdul Karim says:Breaking the concrete surrounding a single skewer may require hours of work, and an entire day may pass without being able to remove a single piece.

He added, "I spent a whole day trying to get one iron skewer out of the house."

With every blow of the hammer, new parts of his old home are revealed before him, but what he is looking for is not memories of the house as much as he is looking for a way to create a new place to house him.

From a three-story house to a tent on top of the rubble, the meaning of place changed for Abdul Karim. He was no longer looking for anything except a small space in which he could live.

Thus, he continues to remove the rubble of his house with his own hands, extracting from among the stones and iron what could turn into a temporary roof, in an attempt to find shelter in the same place where he lost his home.