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Gaza – Ahmed Al-Suwerki does not hide his fear for the health of his horse, who is exhausted by the burden of the new task he has assigned to him, which is transporting passengers instead of goods.
But the temptation of the “opportunity” provided by the Israeli war on… Gaza strip For carriage owners, it keeps them going.
The sight of hundreds of citizens congregating on both sides of the road after they were stranded prompted the owners of primitive vehicles, which the Gazans call “carros,” to fill the void created by the absence of cars and buses as their fuel ran out.
Speaking to Al Jazeera Net, Al-Suwerki mentioned that about two weeks ago, like other car owners, he began transporting passengers in exchange for a fee.
Despite the good financial returns that this new profession generates, it is exhausting for the animals that pull the carts and they are not accustomed to working all day without stopping. Al-Suwerki says, “If the horse gets tired, or if I feel that this work will affect him, I will stop immediately. He is my hand and my foot, and I cannot do without him.”
Previously, the Swerki horse worked several hours a day, interspersed with good periods of rest, but transporting passengers required continuous work.
This new reality has increased the prices of horses and donkeys to almost double, as Al-Suwerki says that many people do not stop asking him while moving about whether he wants to sell the horse, which he receives complete refusal.
Carriage owners say they received offers amounting to 8,000 shekels (one dollar = 3.7 shekels) for a horse, and less than that for a donkey.
Attitudes and prices
Al-Suwerki begins his work around six in the morning by mixing about 3 kilograms of barley with an amount of hay to serve breakfast to his skinny red horse, accompanied by a bucket of drinking water. After he prepares the cart to be mounted on the horse’s back, he sets off to begin his work of transporting passengers.
Before the war, Al-Suwerki lived in Gaza City, north of the Strip, and worked for its municipality in the field of transportation. As the brutal Israeli raids continued, he fled with his horse to Deir al-Balah, where he temporarily resided with some of his relatives.
Despite the novelty of this phenomenon, it soon required laws to regulate its affairs, and there became “parking lots” for vehicles and roads that pass through it, and the residents know them well. Vehicle owners also agree to special “prices” according to the transportation distance.
Citizens complain about the high cost of transportation by vehicle, as they are forced, for example, to pay 5 shekels ($1.3) to move from Nuseirat camp to Deir al-Balah, which is almost double what they used to pay in taxis.
On the other hand, cart owners believe that the prices are fair, especially with the doubling of the cost of animal food and the exhaustion they experience when moving between neighborhoods and cities. In this regard, Al-Suwerki says that the price of barley and hay has doubled three or four times due to the war.
He added, “We used to buy a pound (3 kilograms) of barley for 5 shekels, and now its price has become 20 shekels, and has reached 25 shekels, and the horse needs two pounds of it daily, in addition to hay.”
The problem is that barley, which is the only food that gives the horse “energy” to work, is about to run out of the Gaza Strip’s markets due to it being an imported commodity, which could lead to the carts stopping working, according to him.
The vehicle driver points out that many of the passengers do not have money, and says that he is forced to transport them for free out of compassion for them. He called on passengers “complaining” about the high prices “not to forget that the vehicles alleviate much of their suffering in light of the lack of any alternative transportation.”
The rickshaw riders consist of a heterogeneous mixture that includes the poor, the rich, workers, academics, and other groups. Al-Swirki says, “Rich people ride with me, and they have jeeps and modern cars, but there is no gasoline or diesel. They put their cars on the street and ride with me. They are not ashamed now.”
A club for politics and storytelling
Al-Suwerki works on one round-trip route, starting from Deir al-Balah camp, west of the city, all the way to Salah al-Din Street, east. During the road, the cart driver listens to the residents’ horrific and tragic stories about the war, and the conversation is certainly not devoid of long discussions about politics and developments in the situation.
Al-Suwerki notes that the majority of passengers are displaced people who talk a lot about their original areas from which they were forced to leave. “They say they are from Gaza, the north, or (the area of) Al-Shifa Hospital, (the) Al-Nasr neighborhood, and the Indonesian (hospital)… Our homes are destroyed, and corpses are in the streets.”
A forty-year-old woman, wearing a black abaya, tells the story of a young man in one of the areas invaded by the occupation army in Gaza, who was pushing his paralyzed mother in a wheelchair. She added that an Israeli soldier asked him via a loudspeaker from inside a tank to leave her and go, but he refused and told him, “She is my mother.” The soldier shot the mother and killed her, and the soldier told him, “Now you can leave her.”
Another passenger interrupted her, “Is it possible?” She immediately replied, “I swear to God, this happened.”
The same woman goes on to talk about the outrageous high prices due to the scarcity of goods. She takes out from her large black bag a small bag containing a small amount of coffee, and says, “These are 50 grams of coffee for five shekels, an ounce costs 30 shekels. I bought it because coffee is more important to me than bread.”
Without stopping for a moment, she continued listing the goods whose prices had doubled, “Can you believe that a kilogram of salt now costs 20 shekels after it used to cost one shekel, a box of yeast costs 65 shekels, a bag of flour costs 200 shekels (..).”
Then the conversation suddenly turns to politics, and the passengers argue a lot about the outcome of the war, the Israeli and American goals, and whether or not Israel will allow them to return to their homes in the northern Gaza Strip.
