UNRWA: Innovative Housing Project Puts Roofs Over The Heads of Some of Gaza’s Displaced

posted on: Feb 8, 2015

Eight-year-old Aseel Al Ashqar fiddles quietly with a worn, pink blanket she has laid on the floor of the empty new bedroom in downtown Beit Hanoun, Gaza Strip; the room she now shares with her four siblings. The holes in the blanket, she explains, are a consequence of a bomb that also wiped out her family home during the 50-day summer conflict last year. She found the blanket buried in the rubble.

According to UNRWA assessments, at least 100,000 Palestine refugee family homes were damaged or destroyed during last summer’s conflict. Finding adequate shelter amidst a crippling housing shortage in the Gaza Strip has put enormous stress on refugee families such as Aseel’s.

During the war, Aseel and her family took refuge at the UNRWA Abu Husein school in Jabalia, in the north of Gaza. They stayed there for several days before renting a cramped flat far away from their home, in the unfamiliar al-Saftawi area of Gaza City.

Source: www.unrwa.org