Palestinian Architect Can’t Find Israeli Schools’ Rocket Storage Areas

“If there’s anything my career as an architect in Gaza has taught me, it’s that hospitals and schools by nature double as weapons storage facilities.”

Kfar Blum, June 29 – A member of a group of construction professionals from Gaza visiting Israel to help them improve engineering and design of public facilities at home wondered today why the public schools they inspected seemed not to have anywhere to keep missiles.

Jamal Masri, an architect from Gaza City, wondered aloud to his colleagues in the delegation where Israelis store their weapons, as despite careful exploration of the school buildings, he was unable to identify a suitable space for stockpiling rockets and other war materiel. In Gaza, noted Masri, such facilities are practically mandated by law.

“Did you guys see anywhere to keep rockets?” he inquired of his construction industry peers after visiting half a dozen educational facilities in Tel Aviv, Ramat Gan, Haifa, Kiryat Ata, and Kfar Blum. “I didn’t see any good spaces for that.”

Masri, 41, joined a team of designers and engineers for a tour of Israeli public buildings, a trip sponsored by various coexistence NGOs and the European Union aimed at strengthening professional and personal ties between Palestinian and Israeli professionals and helping the Gaza Strip’s construction industry adapt to its circumstances using ideas and ingenuity from elsewhere. The group spent six days visiting schools, hospitals, municipal buildings, and community centers, observing the engineering and architecture that went into each structure, and interacting with Israeli counterparts. Participants said the contacts were friendly, if cautious, and Masri added that he wished for more openness so he could assuage his curiosity about where in those public facilities Israel keeps its armaments.

“I’m not just professionally curious,” admitted the father of four. “I’m personally intrigued by the obvious ingenuity of a design that makes rocket storage essentially invisible. It has to be there, after all. If there’s anything my career as an architect in Gaza has taught me, it’s that hospitals and schools by nature double as weapons storage facilities, and occasionally as outright combat positions.”

“I suppose it’s possible they have different regulations that call for such arsenals to be kept primarily in houses of worship,” mused he continued. “Next time, I’d love to see how different synagogues – or churches, I guess – are designed to incorporate rocket storage.” Masri added that during the Tel Aviv portion of the trip the group passed by the Ministry of Defense, but he failed to spot any ambulances, which he considered puzzling, since by Gaza standards, the ministry should be located in or under a major hospital.