Gaza Unsilenced Page 5

  “I asked him, my son, why did you go to the beach while the situation is dangerous? He answered, we were playing as we wanted to play, why should we be afraid?” Sahar said.

  Ismail Muhammad Baker, nine years old, was killed along with his cousins Ahed Atif Baker and Zakaria Ahed Baker, both ten years old, and eleven-year-old Muhammad Ramiz Baker when Israeli fire targeted them on a beach near Gaza City’s seaport on July 16.

  The massacre, witnessed by international journalists at the nearby Al-Deira hotel, caused outrage around the world and drew attention to the horrifying death toll among Gaza’s children.

  As of Saturday, more than sixty children were among the 339 people who have been killed since Israel began its round-the-clock bombardment of Gaza on July 7. The death toll rose sharply since Friday, when Israeli forces began a ground invasion in parts of Gaza.

  Deeply distraught and surrounded by mourners and relatives, and joined by Ismail’s father, Muhammad, Sahar Baker said she hoped God would punish Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his government for “stealing my dear son. We raise our children and all of a sudden they steal them from us.”

  A Cheerful Boy

  A mother of six other sons and three daughters, Sahar recalled that Ismail was always helpful to her and acted more mature than his age.

  Ismail had recently started selling tea at the seaport to earn a few shekels to help the family out, his father said. “This newly-built house will not see Ismail grow up,” Muhammad added.

  Ismail’s father was also deeply distraught and emotional when he spoke to the Electronic Intifada. He is unemployed like so many others in Gaza’s dire economic situation, but the family home was recently rebuilt thanks to a grant from the Qatari government.

  Grieving parents of Ismail, Ahed, Zakaria, and Mahammad Baker, who were killed on July 16 by shelling from an Israeli gunboat as they played soccer on a Gaza beach.

  Photo by Alaa Shamaly.

  “Hours before I heard news of his death, Ismail asked me to prepare him some food, which I did,” Sahar recalled. “As we heard loud explosions, I felt so worried for him. Then later I saw his body dismembered, his abdomen, his back, his limbs....”

  Samara, Ismail’s twelve-year-old sister, stood in the corner crying. “Ismail was such a kind brother. Everyone loved him,” she said. She remembered how he would take younger children to the store to buy them treats.

  “I used to have seven brothers, but now I only have six,” she said, embracing her father for support.

  “What Did He Do?”

  “Ismail was so tender and kind,” his maternal grandmother, Um Said, told the Electronic Intifada. “Why did they kill him? What did he do?”

  “Was my son one of the targets in Israel’s target bank?” his father Muhammad asked.

  Preparing to bury the four Baker boys, who were killed on July 16, 2014, by shelling from an Israeli gunboat as they played football on a Gaza beach.

  Photo by Alaa Shamaly.

  “I call on [Prime Minister Recep Tayyip] Erdogan of Turkey to help bring justice to the Turkish victims of Israel’s attack on the flotilla,” Muhammad said, noting that there is a memorial at Gaza port to the ten victims of Israel’s May 2010 attack on the Mavi Marmara.

  “And I call on Erdoĝan to help bring justice for my slain son,” Muhammad added.

  The Electronic Intifada, July 19, 2014, http://bit.ly/1p580Mi

  Gaza: Israel Puts Paramedics in Its Crosshairs

  Mohammed Suliman

  Twenty-eight-year-old Ayed al-Buraey was a Palestinian paramedic from northern Gaza. After he finished his shift, Ayed would normally call his wife to assure her that he was safe. This time however, he did not call.

  Ayed was killed on July 25 when Israeli forces shelled the ambulance he was in while he and his crew were on their way to evacuate the injured in Beit Hanoun. The shells struck the ambulance and set it on fire.

  Hatem Shahin, a volunteer paramedic, was with the crew when the ambulance vehicle was shelled. He was injured in the attack but managed to get out of the ambulance and, with the help of few young men, walked to Beit Hanoun Hospital, where he was then taken to al-Awda Hospital in Jabaliya.

  “We were heading to al-Masreyyeen Street to evacuate a few injured people stuck there. Once we entered the street, a shell hit our ambulance. I started shouting but couldn’t hear anything. The vehicle was ablaze. I crawled out of it and walked away,” 38-year-old Shahin told Al-Akhbar.

  “When I arrived at the hospital, I was told that Jawad Bdeir [the ambulance driver] was also injured and that Ayed was killed. I was shocked,” Hatem said.

  Since the start of its most recent onslaught on Gaza on July 8, Israeli forces have on several occasions attacked medical personnel, rescue teams and ambulances. According to the Palestinian Center for Human Rights in Gaza, Israeli forces have killed seven medical personnel and injured 16 others so far. Nearly 20 ambulance vehicles have been completely destroyed during the same period.

  Israeli forces have also attack hospitals and medical staff such as Balsam hospital, Beit Hanoun hospital in Beit Hanoun, the Algerian hospital in Khan Younis and al-Wafa hospital, which finally collapsed after Israeli warplanes bombarded it several times.

  “I Came Home to Tell You I’m Safe”

  As the Palestinian death toll increased day by day, Ayed would rarely come back home to see his wife and two little children. On the few occasions he did manage to come back, he would take his four-month-old baby in his arms and fall asleep.

  “I was always worried to death about him,” Reham said tearfully. “It was like I knew something wrong would happen to him. We rarely saw him, he came home only three times since the start of this war.”

  “When I asked him about his work, he couldn’t even reply because of how tired he was. He only hugged the children and slept. He used to tell me, ‘I came back to tell you I’m safe, so don’t worry about me.’”

  The ambulance vehicle in which Ayed was killed belonged to the Palestinian Red Crescent Society. It was then removed from the street by an Israeli armored bulldozer, which put it on the side of the street. Shortly afterwards, another ambulance arrived at the scene in order to evacuate Ayed’s body. This time, the International Committee of the Red Cross coordinated its access to the area, but as soon as it came into the street, it was fired upon by the Israeli army and another medic was moderately injured.

  In another incident, Israeli forces opened fire on medical personnel as they were evacuating a handicapped person from al-Qarara area in Khan Younis. They killed one paramedic. Al-Mezan Center for Human Rights in Gaza reports: “As a result of the attack, a medic, Mohammed Hassan al-Abadla, 32, was injured when he was outside the vehicle. Under the fire, the ambulance driver drove away. Communication with the injured medic was cut and he stayed in the area for half an hour, during which he bled to death. The ICRC had to coordinate again for his fellow medics to reach him. They found him dead.”

  Jihad Saleem, 43, is an ambulance officer from Gaza. He says although this has been his job for years, every time he receives a call informing him of a body to be picked up or an injured person to be rescued or a group of people to be evacuated, he feels his heart beat as if it was his first time all over again.

  “When I see bodies torn to pieces, sometimes disemboweled, I think of them as my own family,” he told Al-Akhbar.

  “We’re always stressed because of what we see and what we have to deal with. We always imagine this is our own family we’re going to save,” he explained, adding that it actually happened to one of his colleagues. “He went to save a group of people only to find out it was his brother’s house and four of the dead were his own nephews.”

  Another paramedic, Ahmed Musallam, was injured while he was evacuating residents from a building that was going to be bombed. Even though Ahmed was hit by shrapnel in his leg, he refuses to let his injury stop him from doing his job.

  “I just couldn’t sit at home despite the pain in my
leg. It pains me much more to see these little children dying under the rubble and hear their mothers mourn over them. I had to come back here,” the 30-year-old told Al-Akhbar. “This is where I belong, and my people need me here.”

  Israeli attacks on medical personnel, particularly paramedics, as well as the obstruction of medical access to the injured have been condemned by various human rights organizations in Gaza and described as “a serious violation of the international humanitarian law that may amount to war crimes.”

  In Shija‘ia, ambulances were not off limits (July 26). By the end of the assault, at least 36 had been damaged by Israeli firepower.1

  Photo by Mohammed Asad.

  Today Reham is completely distraught over Ayed’s loss. She described him as stubborn, saying he always refused sit at home. “He used to tell me, ‘If we all sat at home and didn’t go to work, who will save all these people?’”

  “But now he’s [the one who] died and no one came to save him. My children and I will never see him again,” she said.

  Al-Akhbar English, July 28, 2014, http://bit.ly/1BNIhMx

  Losing a Good Friend

  Mu’taz Hilal Muhammad al-‘Azayzeh

  Mu’taz Hilal Muhammad al-‘Azayzeh, 15, is a grade 11 student. He lives in Deir al-Balah. His testimony was taken by Khaled al-‘Azayzeh on October 26, 2014.

  I’m a grade 11 student in ‘Abd al-Karim al-‘Akluk School in Deir al-Balah and live there with my family.

  I used to go to Rudolph Walter School, on Salah al-Din St. on the eastern side of Deir al-Balah. There, I was close friends with ‘Alaa Abu Dahruj. We studied together from Grade 6 through Grade 10 and spent all our time together, in class, during recess and after school. ‘Alaa was a very good soccer player and played for the Deir al-Balah club and other clubs. He wore sports clothes all the time. I played with him and we spent most of our free time practicing soccer. ‘Alaa told me a few times that he couldn’t go a whole day without playing.

  At the beginning of last summer, we got together all the time, sometimes at the soccer club and sometimes at the mosque. ‘Alaa lived a 10-minute walk from my house. During the war, we saw each other three times, once in town, once at the mosque and the third time, he came to visit me at home. We sat on the sidewalk across from my house with another friend, Muamen Abu Sha‘ar. We heard the explosions and talked about the war. ‘Alaa said he wasn’t afraid to die and told us he was still playing soccer outside, by his house.

  On July 21, 2014, we fled from our home, which is located in an area that was shelled all the time. We went to my grandfather’s house in downtown Deir al-Balah. This was during the month of Ramadan. On that day, at 3:30 p.m., a friend of mine from school phoned and told me it had been reported on television that a person named ‘Alaa Abu Dahruj had been killed, but he wasn’t sure whether this was our friend ‘Alaa, because the report did not give the father’s name.

  I phone a mutual friend of mine and ‘Alaa’s and asked him. He told me ‘Alaa had been killed in the bombing on Shuhadaa al-Aqsa Hospital. ‘Alaa and his family had left their home when the bombardment began and fled to the hospital to take cover, but shells hit the hospital and ‘Alaa was hit by shrapnel in the abdomen and killed.

  I started crying and walked out of my grandfather’s house despite the bombing and war. I headed towards the hospital to see him. I wasn’t afraid and I didn’t care about the shelling because I wasn’t aware of anything happening around me. I was thinking only of ‘Alaa and what had happened to him. I recalled our walks together, and the time we’d spent together. My father met me along the way and kept me from going to the hospital because it was dangerous there. The next day, ‘Alaa was buried in the Deir al-Balah cemetery and I didn’t go to the funeral because my father wouldn’t let me leave the house. That afternoon, I went to the cemetery and sat by his grave. I read the el-Fatiha prayer and prayed for him, and I took photos of the grave. The cemetery was empty because there were was still some occasional shelling and air strikes.

  Since the school year began, I’ve gone into the cemetery most days on my way to class. I visit ‘Alaa’s grave for a few minutes, remembering stuff we used to talk about. I pray for him and continue on my way to school. My school friends and I get together almost every day and remember ‘Alaa and all kinds of things we did and saw together.

  ‘Alaa really liked me. Once, he stood up to the teacher and defended me when another student wrongly complained about me. ‘Alaa said the other student was lying. Sometimes, we quarreled for a day or two but then we’d make up because we missed each other.

  B’Tselem, Testimonies, http://bit.ly/1CIcPTY

  In Gaza’s al-Shuja‘iya: “I Just Survived a Massacre”

  Mohammed Suliman

  “A massacre, a massacre!” were the words my brother, who works as a doctor at Gaza’s al-Shifa Hospital, said as he yelled over the phone urging me to come to Gaza’s main hospital immediately. “Come witness the massacre,” he said.

  At first light, as I readied myself to go to the hospital, I heard knocks on my door. Three young men in tattered, seemingly burned clothes stood there. They asked me if I knew of any flats in the area they could rent. They were survivors of the yet unfinished massacre. “We’ve just fled from Shuja‘iya, there’s a massacre there,” they told me before they walked away.

  On my way to al-Shifa, I saw scores of people roaming the streets, some barefoot, others weeping. They had fled the “Death Zone.” Drones were still buzzing overhead, warships shelled sporadically, and Israeli jet fighters roared intimidatingly before the roaring soon faded into the distance. But it all somehow felt so quiet.

  I soon arrived at al-Shifa. Flabbergasted, I made my way through the crowds of people who had already gathered there seeking shelter with their families and children. Some lay on the ground, and others wailed the death of their children and relatives. Some stood by the morgue looking for their lost family members. These were some of the survivors of the Shuja‘iya massacre.

  “We were sitting at home after iftar when suddenly shells started raining down on us,” 42-year-old Fatima al-Dib told Al-Akhbar. Fatima and her family hid under the stairs and were stranded for nearly 10 hours unable to escape while Israeli mortar shells fell on and around their house.

  “There was a blazing fire outside,” Fatima, a mother of two boys and three girls, recalled the past night. “My daughter was injured, so we carried her and hid under the stairs. We stayed there all night long from 8:30 in the evening until 6:00 in the morning as we heard the Israeli artillery fire shells in our direction nonstop,” she told us tearfully, her daughter in her arms.

  Surviving a Massacre

  On their way out, Fatima saw houses left in ruins, glass shattered, corpses strewn on the sidewalks, some disfigured and others ripped apart. “They must have been trying to flee when they were killed.... When I got to al-Shifa, I realized I have just survived a massacre,” Fatima commented.

  On July 19, Israeli forces perpetrated a vicious massacre against residents of Shuja‘iya area, east of Gaza City. When night came, Israeli artillery intensified its bombardment of Shuja‘iya throughout the night. Ambulances and civil defense forces were prevented from entering the targeted areas to evacuate the dead and injured. Houses were destroyed with their residents trapped inside, and other houses burned all night long. Corpses were buried under the rubble, and the injured bled to death. Children screamed for their lives. More than 70 have been killed, and more than 250 others were injured, the vast majority of them civilians. Over half of them are women and children.

  Abu Mohammed al-Helo and his family were some of the survivors. Abu Mohammed came to al-Shifa and was frenetically looking for his brother Jihad and his family. Neighbors told him that Jihad’s house was shelled but that he was still alive. “My brother and his family are trapped under the rubble,” he told us. “Neighbors say they heard them shouting for help as they escaped the area but couldn’t rescue them because of the strikes,. With tears welling up in h
is eyes, he walked away, looking for help.

  As I stood by the morgue to meet some of the families of the victims, very few people came to see the corpses and identify their relatives. It was simply unclear who was dead and who was still alive. Some were also completely disfigured that it was impossible to identify them. Most of the families were either still stranded in Shuja‘iya or just unaware that their family members have been killed. They were instead waiting for them to join them at UNRWA schools where families sought shelter.

  The International Committee of the Red Cross has come under fire for failing to intervene and rescue the injured and evacuate residents of Shuja‘iya whose calls went unanswered.

  Ahmed Jindiyya lost his brother Mohammed after a missile landed on his house. He called the Red Cross, which told him they would come to their rescue but never really turned up. “We were at home when our neighbor’s house was bombed. We tried to escape but the shells soon hit our house,” Ahmed told Al-Akhbar.

  “As the shells hit around us, I hugged my children and tried to calm them down. But the shelling got closer and closer, so we covered our heads with pillows and a mattress. Then a missile hit our house. Mohammed [Ahmed’s brother] got killed, and some others were injured”

  An ambulance finally arrived, and the injured were picked up. Ahmed, whose family is comprised of five sons and three daughters, escaped with his family in the middle of the night. According to Ahmed, a family including women and children was running away ahead of them when a shell hit and killed them.

  “We decided to hide by walking on the sidewalk close to the wall,” Ahmed narrated how he and his family barely escaped death as mortars fell near them. “My children were crying and we walked as fast as we could till we got to Shuja‘iya Square where ambulances picked us up.”