Word: rafah
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...Khan Younis, where U.N. records and eyewitnesses say that Israeli soldiers herded around 275 Palestinian men out of their homes, lined them up against the wall of a 14th century castle and executed them. This was in retaliation for attacks on nearby Israeli kibbutzim. Then, several days later, in Rafah, another 100 or so Palestinians were shot and clubbed down as thousands were marched to a barbed-wire pen in a schoolyard for interrogation by Israelis hunting for renegade Egyptian soldiers and Fedayeen guerrillas. The Israelis deny that either event was a massacre, disputing the casualty figures and suggesting their...
...theme running through Sacco's chronicle is what he calls, "the frailty of memory". Sacco does his best to sort out the contradictory testimony, made hazy by the passage of time and successive repeats of similar traumas over the decades. The survivors of the Rafah killings, for example, all remember the appearance of a flock of doves soon before they were freed, but they can't recall if the birds settled on the shoulders of the officer who appeared to demand the Palestinians' release, or if the doves hovered above the officer's head, or if their uniformed savior...
...comes crashing in. Sacco and his fixers are shot at by an invisible Israeli sniper in a watchtower. They meet a man who pleads with militants not to use his home as a firing position because the result will be the destruction of his house; and they witness a Rafah home demolished by an Israeli bulldozer that "scooped out the earth as if it were ice cream." Back in 1956, the Palestinians saw the faces of the Israeli soldiers bursting into their homes, but today, in Sacco's cartoons - as well as in reality - Gazans seldom if ever see their...
...Hamas. Israel has also presented most construction materials from entering the territory, which has prevented the reconstruction of thousands of homes and other structures damaged by last year's Israeli offensive aimed at stopping Hamas rocket fire. Egypt, which controls the only Gaza border crossing outside Israeli territory at Rafah, has cooperated in enforcing the blockade. It has also begun to move more forcefully against the tunnel economy. (See pictures of heartbreak in the Middle East...
...same. Especially in the Gaza Strip, a land haunted by decades of bloodshed and oppression. Sacco, whose previous works include Palestine and Safe Area Gorazde, investigates a pair of events, from November 1956, in which Israeli soldiers massacred hundreds of residents of the towns of Rafah and Khan Younis during the Suez Canal crisis. His reporting on those deaths leads to a meditation on the situation in Gaza in the early 21st century. Sacco's journalism sheds new light on these tragedies that "barely rate footnote status" in the region's official history, but it's the art that resonates...