When the Assi brothers returned to their village, most of it was missing. Their house was flattened, and their olive groves crushed. The only thing left standing was a single almond tree.
Of all the areas hit in Israel’s military campaign, Juhr el Dik, a farming village on Gaza’s eastern border, had more than its share of loss. In its center is now a giant swath of destruction where about 40 houses once stood.
“It’s an earthquake,” said Salim Abu Ayadah, the mayor of the town, whose house was among those destroyed. “When I saw it, I couldn’t believe my eyes. I couldn’t walk.”
The destruction was a hard fact, but how it happened was not, with Israelis and Gazans each offering their own divergent versions of events, alternate realities that have come to typify this war.
Villagers here say the Israelis bulldozed the area during their ground operation, which began on Jan. 3. Tread marks from tanks or bulldozers crisscross the area.
An Israeli government minister said that Israel had not planned to enter the village, but that it was left with no choice when six Hamas fighters shot at its troops from a water cistern there. Soon after, a group of houses detonated at once, wired to explode as Israeli troops passed, said the minister, Isaac Herzog, who is in charge of humanitarian relief for Gaza and who cited information from a brigade commander.
Residents strongly dispute that account. Three of them, including the mayor, said all the houses were intact when they fled several days after the ground invasion began.
“It’s simply not true,” Mr. Abu Ayadah said. Hamas fighters would occasionally drive up in a car, fire a rocket and leave, he said, but they did not have close relations with the villagers, farmers who were far from urban politics.
Giving the Israeli version the benefit of the doubt, he said, “So suppose there’s a bomb in one house, but in many houses — no.”
What is left is an unnatural landscape. Mounds of concrete rubble mix with broken olive trees. Flies buzz over dead goats. Spoons, slippers and hair brushes are strewn in the dirt.
When Khaled al-Assi returned, he first noticed the broken bodies of his olive trees. The trees, which would take 20 years to grow back, were dearer to him than his house, which could be rebuilt. His father had planted them when Mr. Assi was little, and, until recent weeks, they had supported his family, as well as an impoverished widow, Um Salama, a villager who was no relation.
“We can’t build our house without outside help, so we’re focusing on the trees now,” Mr. Assi said, his brother Ziad scooping sandy soil out of a four-foot hole he was digging.
The task was urgent, because the trees, whose unearthed roots had not had water in days, were close to dying. Of his several dozen trees, a handful appeared to be salvageable.
But there was another reason for urgency. When the brothers first saw the house in a crumpled heap, they said, they were so stunned it was hard to breathe. Ziad started crying. They plunged into tree planting to escape.
“Everybody now is trying to forget,” Khaled said, standing among his broken trees in a blue button-down shirt, and jeans smudged with dirt. “The only way to put your mind on something else is to replant.”
The village on Tuesday was a scene of frenetic activity. Men scurried over broken piles of concrete blocks, yanking out pieces of metal to use for makeshift roofs. A team of men dragged branches onto a donkey cart to make fires for cooking.
Mr. Abu Ayadah said about 130 homes in Juhr el Dik had been destroyed and 40 others seriously damaged. In all, there are 600 to 700 homes, he said.
The destruction was so complete in the Assis’ area that it looked surreal. Even the animals were confused. A brood of chickens rustled noisily underneath a fallen guava tree that had flattened their coop. A cat mewed plaintively, unseen. A dog wandered.
“They can’t find their house,” Mahmud el-Bahabsa said of the chickens. “Even the dog is lost.”
There were few clues about how the destruction actually happened. A giant artillery shell, knee-high standing upright and marked M825E1, gave few answers. A map drawn in black marker on the back of a kitchen cabinet door, and a calendar with days crossed off sketched on a wall, did not help much either. Rounds fired from an Apache helicopter also turned up in the rubble.
Up the hill, another resident was thinking about her trees. Noha Shawal, an affluent woman whose family owns a summer house here, looked ruefully at her unearthed grove.
She was particularly angry because she had just replanted after May, when the Israeli military bulldozed older trees she had nurtured. She was home when the soldiers came that time. They closed her in a room and began to bulldoze, she said.
“I wish this could happen to their land,” she said, sitting on a plastic lawn chair, surveying her damage. “I wish I could see the look on their faces.”
Ms. Shawal’s son owns a children’s clothing store in Gaza City. His business partners, Israeli Jews, are reliable and trustworthy, he said. But since an embargo that Israel imposed after Hamas pushed out its political rival in 2007, business has plummeted.
“We are like chickens — they decide what to feed us,” Ms. Shawal said. “They would not accept this life for themselves.”
The residents seemed determined to make the best of a bad situation.
The Assis’ 80-year-old neighbor, Abu Tawfiq, joked that he would use the artillery shell as a teapot. Pea plants that were still alive would provide dinner. Cured olives in a blue plastic jug, unspoiled, turned up in the rubble.
By late afternoon, four trees had been replanted, their smooth trunks twisting unnaturally out of the sandy soil. It was unclear, Khaled al-Assi said, if they would survive. He would keep thinking about them, he said, even in his sleep.
“I’m going to sleep and to look at the sand,” he said. “I will imagine that there is still an olive grove there.”
Ethan Bronner and Nadim Audi contributed reporting.
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