Death and devastation in Gaza neatly filed and documented

We have a way of codifying the consequences of conflict. We collect the dead into lists and tidy ruins into databases. We map gravesites and calculate the cost. It is a process that produces sums and totals, graphs and tables, which in the end are far less meaningful than the reality of what occurred. It numbs and dehumanises even as the gathering is done.

In Gaza the shells of buildings have been labelled and collated, exhibits from a violent event already passing into history after only half a year. G1086-01 designates the parliament building, a collapsed grey ribcage of concrete. The site of the ruined ministries in the Tal al-Hawa district of Gaza City is recorded as G10177-01, green and grey towers gutted by the bombs dropped from Israeli F-16s.

The numbers are entered in the book of Gaza's destruction. There are houses – more than 1,300 of them – and police stations, apartment blocks and offices, schools and hospitals, each labelled with neat spray-painted letters. Tagged fetishistically in blue and green.

In a Hamas-run ministry Dr Ibrahim Radwan attempts to log on to the recently completed database of damage. "Problems, problems," he mutters at his screen. This being Gaza, he explains, the network will not work, and so his colleague, Mohammed al-Ostaz, the director of urban planning, comes bearing armfuls of questionnaires that correspond to each number.

The book of destruction belongs primarily to Ostaz, the man responsible for its compilation. It is not urban planning that he has been forced to confront in recent months, but rather the aftermath of a wholescale urban un-planning through military force. Institutions and infrastructure were targeted but Ostaz and his colleagues lack the resources to rebuild them.

The documents leave no room for interpretation. There are boxes to tick to describe the state of the building: reduced to rubble, partially destroyed, or still standing but dangerous and requiring demolition. Another series of boxes suggests options for how the damage occurred: whether it was bulldozed, directly targeted or indirectly struck. There are sections relating to how much land the building stood on; whether it was privately owned or rented; how many people were in occupation. Then there is the code itself: G for Gaza City, N for the Strip's north, K indicates Khan Younis in the south. A second set of numerals locates the district, and then finally the street.

Only on the last page is there a hint of the human consequences: a photocopy of an ID card and a phone number for the head of family. "A colleague of yours came to see me," says Dr Radwan. "He said: 'How can we rebuild Gaza without improving the position of Hamas?' So is it a question of Hamas or rebuilding Gaza? Who makes that kind of link? That seems to me to be the west's hypocrisy."

I take some of the numbers from his files and head out in search of the stories behind them. I have the name of Rajoub Yousef al-Abed al-Qaqa and a code – G1049-01. Dr Radwan says it designates a home in the Shatti refugee camp. On Al Rashid street, he explains, "next to the sea".

In Shatti – the birthplace of Hamas – people say they recognise the name and send us off on a long loop around the camp. There are ruined houses across the camp but none that match the number. I'm told by one man that Rajoub is dead, killed by the Israelis during the war. Eventually a neighbour is found who says it was Rajoub's brother Abu Yousef, a Hamas fighter wanted by Israel, who was killed, not in January's fighting but in a targeted assassination in his car a year or so before.

I follow narrow lanes, barely wider than my shoulders, until I find Rajoub's house, more by luck than judgment, a block away from that of Ismail Haniya, the Hamas prime minister.

A neighbour in a dirty black polo shirt – who declines to give his name – explains that Rajoub, a Hamas official not a "fighter" he insists, fled his home with his family before it was hit with a rocket from an Israeli helicopter. There is a pink plastic sandal in the rubble, an embroidered dress of indigo material and a towel of the same colour that lies across stairs thick with drifts of atomised breeze block. "The rocket came at 5am," says the neighbour. "It was a week before the war ended. Sixteen people lived here. Someone warned them they should leave."

As I drive back to Gaza City, movement is visible inside G10130-02, a building less badly damaged than the one once lived in by Rajoub. Where the bottom wall has been blown out around its supporting concrete pillars, a crude barrier has been built, chest high to separate it from the busy street.

Inside, Ahmad Wael Lian, aged 18, and three younger boys have set up their beds. There are piles of corn on the cob to roast and sell and a stack of melons. "This is where we lived with our family," he says. "On January 14 the building was bombed. We always sleep here. The rest of our family are renting but they need someone to watch the building." He says he has "no idea why it was attacked".

With the sun setting we head up the Strip to photograph some ruined buildings in the north, igloos of concrete standing in farmland, collapsed in upon themselves with explosives and then bulldozed. It was from this area that Gaza's rocket teams would try to reach Israel, whose lights are visible in the dusk. In retaliation every house was levelled.

There is not much left of building N30049-3. When it was detonated the house collapsed through the workshop below. But Ismail Hamouda, a wood worker whose machinery was crushed beneath the concrete beams, has brought a red car jack to lift the fallen floor. The jack registers 15 tonnes. He cranks his handle and as he does he slips in pieces of wood and wedges of broken rubble to slowly lift the pressing weight of concrete off a green metal lathe. "Khatar," murmurs an onlooker quietly as Ismail slips his legs beneath the massive beam to insert one of his wedges. Dangerous, he means.

The war may have ended months before but Ismail digs on. Shifting the ruins piece by piece. By millimetres. No number can do justice to such efforts.

Palestine | News | |