With today marking the Jewish new year, most former residents of Gaza’s Gush Katif slate of Jewish communities are observing the Rosh Hashanah holiday in hotels, school dormitories and outdoor tents, still waiting for government compensation and temporary housing solutions almost two months after being evacuated from their homes.
“I am celebrating Rosh Hashanah with my immediate family in a one room hotel,” said Mayan Yadai, a former resident of Katif’s Nezer Hazani farming community. “We can’t even invite other family or friends because there’s no room for them to stay.”
Yadai, like most of the 78 families of Hazani, is staying at a hotel in Hispin, a Golan Heights town, after being thrown out of another hotel in which the government originally housed the former residents. Hazani refugees also previously lived in school dormitories and a tent city near the Tel Aviv highway.
“We have been going from one place to another,” said Anita Tucker, one of the pioneer Hazani farmers. “It’s been a month and a half and nothing is ready for us, not the compensation and not the housing. For now, we have received nothing from the government and have had to rely on private help.”
Tucker said Israel’s Disengagement Authority, which heads the Gaza resettlement effort, told former Hazani residents and most of the other 7,500 Gaza refugees forced from their homes in August that they would set up mobile-home communities in the Negev by in mid-November.
“Originally, the Authority told us the communities would be ready by September, then October, now we’re talking at least another two months. It’s really making me dizzy just trying to survive,” said Tucker.
A spokesman for the Disengagement Authority confirmed the mobile-home communities would not be fully constructed until November, but said former Gaza residents have received a 50,000 shekel advanced payment while their compensation packages are being processed.
Former Katif Housing Director Dror Venunu told WND some Gaza refugees have indeed received the advanced payment, but only if they resided in Katif for more than three years and only if they owned their homes.
Said Venunu: “A lot of the former residents are having trouble proving they used to live in Gush Katif because when they were evacuated from their houses they didn’t get to bring anything. They don’t even have phone bills or documents to show where they used to live. And those who rented their homes won’t even get anything.”
The Disengagement Authority said the average settler compensation will be about $200,000, but former Katif residents say that is before their hotel bills and mortgages are deducted.
Once the government constructs Negev mobile-home cities, Katif refugees will be allowed to reside there for up to two years, the Authority said. After that, they are on their own.
The vast majority – 1,450 of Katif’s 1,800 families – did not apply for government compensation ahead of Israel’s evacuation deadline last month, most saying they feared if the withdrawal were allowed to be implemented in Gaza, it would lead to other evacuations in Judea, Samaria and eastern Jerusalem.
The Israeli government, though, re-offered the compensation packages after the Gaza evacuation and said all families would be fully compensated.
About 350 former Katif residents who applied early for compensation and moved from Gaza before the evacuation deadline are currently living in temporary communities in the Negev town of Nitzan.
The former Gaza residents reside in small prefabricated “trailer villas.” Several residents said electricity and running water are sparse and that construction of a school for their children and a synagogue has been delayed.
“I used to live in a mansion in Gush Katif,” said one Niztan resident. “Now I have to take my guests out to a coffee shop because there is so little room in my caravilla I can’t have more than three or four people over for coffee.”
The families of Shirat Hayam, a former Katif town that used to be located along the Mediterranean Sea, are living and spending Rosh Hashanah in a college dormitory in Israel’s southwestern Gush Etzion region. Many who previously inhabited large modern homes are currently packing their families into one-room dorm units.
Yossi Chazut, a former Shirat Hayam resident, said, “This is going to be a difficult holiday for us. Most have not received anything at all from the government. I don’t know what I am going to do because I lived in Gush Katif less than three years. I’m not even getting compensation to pay the storage fees to get my belongings out from my evacuated house.”
Chazut said the Eztion Yeshiva (college) is absorbing the costs of Gaza refugees’ living until new communities are provided, and said community members have been donating food and clothing.
“It’s so hard to have to now be a charity case,” said Chazut. “We used to be entirely self-sufficient and prosperous.”
The former residents of Gaza’s Ganei Tal farming neighborhood are celebrating Rosh Hashanah at a guest house near Ashdod, where they will live until their Negev community is built.
“We’re trying to make the best of it,” former Ganei Tal resident Orli Eldar told WND. “It’s very frustrating when your own government has no problem throwing you out of your house, but when it comes to finding you other housing, they can’t get their act together.”
The 50 families of Eli Sinai, a former Katif town that was situated along the Gaza-Egypt border, have been living in tents outside a popular rest stop at the entrance to the Israeli Negev.
“We have been waiting for the Disengagement Authority to get us the compensation and the relocation we were promised,” said Anat Hakman, a former Eli Sinai resident. “Things are so slow. I can’t believe it’s been almost a month and we have no where to live.”
Hakman showed WND her current home – two beds and an improvised closet area under a dark blue tarp. Her tent, along with those of the other former Eli residents, has a fan connected to a generator that works about eight hours a day.
“The generators are our biggest expense,” said Hakman. “It costs us several hundred dollars a day and is coming from our pockets.”
The Eli refugees take showers and wash their clothes in local homes. The area municipality provided them with water tanks and port-a-potties.
Hakman said once their Negev community is finished, the families are planning to move as a unit.
“Community is the most important thing to all of us. We have been very clear with the Israeli government that we will only move to new homes if it’s all of us together.”
Israeli Knesset Member Benny Elon told WND: “The situation is quite sickening. We’re talking about kids who don’t know which school they are going to attend and the school year already started. Families that went through such pain are living in bad conditions, some in small hotel rooms at the height of tourist season. Without some assistance from good people in Israel and America, I don’t know what’s going to be for them.”
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