The Rocky Mountain Collegian

Issue date: 1/20/09 Section: News

Media Credit: Adel Hana - Associated Press Palestinian girl Lina Dardonah, 12, carries her teddy bear as she collects her belongings from the rubble of a building destroyed during the Israeli army operation in Gaza, east of Jebaliya refugee camp, northern Gaza Strip, Monday.

JERUSALEM - Gaza's streets brimmed with energy Monday as people picked up the pieces of their lives, while Israeli officials said they planned to pull all troops from the territory by Barack Obama's inauguration as president of the United States on Tuesday.

U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon planned to travel to Gaza on Tuesday to inspect the damage and visit United Nations facilities hit in the fighting.

The visit will make him the highest-ranking international official to visit the territory since Hamas militants took it over in June 2007.

Ban will not meet officials from Hamas, whose government is not internationally recognized.

During Israel's three-week onslaught, Israeli tanks had been stationed on the rim of Gaza City, and destruction there was heavy.

Tank shells turned some buildings into heaps of concrete while the tanks themselves rammed into the sides of others, peeling off pieces. Orange and olive groves were flattened.

Further inside the city, the parliament building and other targets of Israeli warplanes and helicopter gunships were reduced to piles of debris.

Destruction in some areas left streets that resembled a moonscape.

Elsewhere, damage appeared pinpointed, with isolated homes flattened or demolished.

With Israeli tanks now gone from the immediate area, donkey carts hauled produce and firewood through streets littered with rubble and broken glass.

Among the dead during the three-week war was the Hamas interior minister - head of the territory's internal security - but a spokesman for the ministry said Hamas remains in firm control, with armed police back on the street and Hamas civil servants surveying the damage.

"We are working despite damage done to communication, to our vehicles and the destruction of our compounds. We are on the ground and our people can feel that," said the spokesman Ihab Ghussein.

Continued...

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