BEIT HANOUN, Gaza Strip — Young engineer Abdullah al-Baltaji had only one choice: leave Syria and find shelter in the Gaza Strip after rockets hit his home and private office in the Mezze neighborhood in the Syrian capital, Damascus. He settled with his family in the Shajaiya neighborhood in the eastern Gaza Strip less than a year ago, accompanied by his wife, twin daughters and son. They lived in an apartment built by the Gaza government.
Baltaji fled Syria to protect his family from the bloody war that has been raging there for more than three years. However, this was just a prelude to a more dangerous phase that awaited him in the Gaza Strip.
“My apartment was destroyed a few months after its construction, just like the other houses in the neighborhood, at the onset of the Israeli war that started over a month ago. I was seriously injured by the splinters of a tank shell that hit me while I was in my apartment. I had a lacerated tendon in my foot, and I couldn’t move. I was left permanently crippled,” he said.
Baltaji cannot forget the day when his family’s apartment was reduced to flames, just like the other houses in the Shajaiya neighborhood that were directly shelled. The family and dozens of others escaping their houses and seeking refuge hid in one room that was barely nine meters (29.5 feet) wide and only three meters (10 feet) away from where the rockets fell.
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