Gaza bookshop owner’s dreams buried under the rubble

GBNEWS24 DESK//

or decades, it was the place to go for books in the blockaded Gaza Strip, from school texts to the Koran to Arabic translations of European literary classics.

But last Tuesday, owner Samir al-Mansour watched in disbelief as the bookshop and publishing house he had poured his life into went up in smoke.

“Forty years of my life were obliterated in less than a second,” said the man in his 50s, a cigarette between his fingers, staring at a mound of concrete, paper and squashed plastic chairs.

“There are 100,000 books under this rubble,” he said.

At around 5:00 am on Tuesday, Mansour was at home watching television when the channel reported the Israeli air force was about to hit the building housing his bookshop.

A person is seen holding a sign amongst a crowd of other demonstrators during a pro-Palestine protest on the steps of City Hall in Louisville, Kentucky, US. Israeli police said an assailant stabbed two young Israeli men before being shot dead by police at a tram station in Jerusalem yesterday. There was no immediate confirmation of the assailant’s identity. PHOTO: AFP

Mansour rushed over, but came to a dead stop some 200 metres (220 yards) away from the building, just in time to see a missile obliterate his life’s work.

The latest deadly clashes lasted 11 days and saw Israel launch air strikes in response to a rocket barrage by Hamas, which rules Gaza, and other Islamist groups. “I have nothing to do with an armed group, a political faction,” Mansour told AFP. “It’s an attack on culture.”

Mansour started working in his father’s bookshop in the 1980s, when he was just 14 years old, then took over in 2000 and soon branched out into publishing.

Israeli strikes on Gaza since May 10 have killed 248 Palestinians, including 66 children, and have wounded over 1,900 people, the Gaza health ministry said. Rockets and other fire from Gaza have claimed 12 lives in Israel, including one child and an Arab-Israeli teenager, an Israeli soldier, one Indian, and two Thai nationals, medics said.