For a few minutes on a recent afternoon, the sun-bathed silence that fills Nadav Tzabari’s neighbourhood could almost be mistaken for peace. Then shelling.
KIBBUTZ NAHAL OZ, Israel (AP) — For a few minutes on a recent afternoon, the sun-bathed silence that fills Nadav Tzabari s neighborhood could almost be mistaken for peace.
For a few minutes on a recent afternoon, the sun-bathed silence that fills Nadav Tzabari’s neighborhood could almost be mistaken for peace. Then shelling from Israeli tanks dug in across the fence line in Gaza erupts again, sending shudders through the vacated homes and overgrown gardens of this long-resilient farming community, emptied for months of nearly all its people. “This is my house,” says Tzabari, a 35-year-old teacher, arriving at a small stucco building with a red tile roof near the center of Nahal Oz.
Months after Hamas attackers killed 1,200 people, a string of Israeli farming communities they targeted just across the border fence with Gaza remain all but empty.