🇵🇸🇮🇱🇺🇸 Gaza’s homes are rubble, their deeds are buried with them, and now Gazans have to prove they ever lived there at all.
Most of Gaza's physical archives are gone, lawyers' offices and the bar association were destroyed, and people sheltering near the bombed land registry ended up burning Ottoman-era records just to cook and keep warm.
So lawyers are piecing cases together from electricity bills, old videos and the word of former neighbors, many of whom have been killed in the war.
There's a reason they're racing the clock.
Israel holds more than half of Gaza, and a U.S. military map seen by the FT marked a "US Planned Community Area" over private Palestinian land, next to a planned UAE housing complex, all inside a "Rafah Clearance Zone."
When planners were told they’d have to check who owned the land before building on it, they reportedly reacted with dismay, as if the 2 million people who lived there were a paperwork problem.
Source: FT / Writer: Julie
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