Gaza Unsilenced Read online

  When they got to al-Shifa hospital, Ahmed was reunited with the rest of his family. He saw his dead brother for only a short time as bodies were being piled on top of each other as new ambulances arrived.

  Hamada al-Ghafeer described his and his family’s survival as “a miracle.” As bombs fell down, he and his family hid under the stairs, broken glass showering over them. “I prayed that I’d die before my kids and not live to see them torn and burnt in front of my eyes,” 39-year-old Hamada said.

  “They were bent on obliterating all of Shuja‘iya. I can’t believe we outlived this massacre. It’s a miracle, a rebirth.”

  Al-Akhbar English, July 22, 2014, http://bit.ly/1nBHnAh

  An Eyewitness to Genocide: A Night in Khuza‘a

  Sarah Algherbawi

  Khuza‘a is a 4,000-acre town that lies east of Khan Yunis city in the southern area of Gaza, with a population of almost 11,000 people. On Monday night, July 21, Israeli forces started to bomb Khuza‘a heavily, with the aim of destroying it. Before the operation started, the Israeli army ordered the residents of Khuza‘a to evacuate their homes; almost 70 percent of the residents left their homes to UN shelters or relatives’ houses in relatively safe areas, while around 3,000 people decided not to leave.

  Mahmoud Ismail, one of the eyewitnesses of the massacre, explained the reasons behind 3,000 people not leaving their homes in response to the IDF orders, saying: “Neglecting Israel’s orders of evacuating our homes was a decision that each of us has made individually, and not at all heroic! It is just that many of us did not have the emotional capacity to sleep away from home, others thought the operation would be over very fast and it wasn’t worth the effort of evacuation, while the majority like me didn’t expect, even in the worst case scenario, that we will witness the worst nightmare of our lives in the coming few hours.”

  At first, a bomb cut the main road that linked Khuza‘a with Khan Yunis, another one then destroyed the power transformers, another damaged the mobile networks, and a fourth destroyed the landlines! Leaving Khuza‘a with no electricity, Internet, mobiles, or telephones, completely disconnected.

  People spent the whole night in complete darkness; they heard nothing but the noise of shelling, warplanes buzzing, and the falling glass of windows. Fragments of bombs hailing down reached everywhere. Danger surrounded every corner of the house and everybody.

  Mahmoud’s mind was besieged with ideas and scenarios that would happen, just as black as the darkness around. He was counting the number of shells, foretelling where they’d fall, whose house that was bombed, is it coming to ours? Which mosque? What kind of bombs are they using? Is it tanks or F16s...? Countless questions with no answers, just the sound of bombs.

  The next morning, the ICRC (International Committee of the Red Cross; after hundreds of appeals by residents to save the lives of people, evacuate the injured, and pull out the dead) told them to leave their homes to the entrance of the town to secure their exit. The trapped 3,000 people left their homes in a legion similar to their predecessors, 66 years ago. They reached the entry point with extreme difficulty, but were surprised with Israeli tanks instead of ICRC ambulances, that started to shell and shoot every moving body! People rushed back in the opposite direction; in the meantime, many were killed and injured.

  Mahmoud, his family, and other people who he didn’t even know, were able to reach a house that contained 50 people, they distributed themselves into three rooms; believing that this way they might lessen the death toll.

  The second night was more horrific, children were crying and screaming, they were terrified and thirsty; as the IDF bombed the town’s water tanks, leaving residents with no water to drink. Mahmoud and many others were waiting for the morning light, hoping that the light would shed some hope.

  The light came up, along with a sound of a bomb that hit the shelter. What was even worse than the sound of a bomb was the silence that followed. Everything was hit, and grey is all you see. Moments after, the grey turned into RED! Mother, brother, still alive? He wondered. He checked if he still had his feet, his only way to survive.

  Run, he told himself; minutes passed and he reached his house. Once he arrived, the house was hit with yet another bomb. He ran again with hundreds of people in different directions, as they came to realize the direction of shelling. On the streets they were stepping on dead bodies and injured people left to bleed. Many faces were familiar to Mahmoud, but they had no choice but to jump over bodies to save their own lives, until they were finally away from Khuza‘a.

  Why and how Mahmoud, his family, and a number of other families survived, he doesn’t know, it’s luck and nothing more than luck. They left people behind, and until this moment the actual number of martyrs in Khuza‘a is unknown; the only thing Mahmoud knows for sure is that a lot of bodies are still under the rubble.

  International Solidarity Movement, July 31, 2014, http://bit.ly/1m4lnbX

  Israeli Army Uses Gaza Children as Human Shields

  Rania Khalek

  Since the assault on Gaza began, Israeli leaders and their supporters have repeatedly accused Hamas of using Palestinian civilians as human shields in an attempt to absolve Israel of responsibility for deliberately killing more than 1,600 Palestinian civilians in the besieged Gaza Strip.

  Despite there being no evidence to prove this libelous claim, it has been unquestioningly echoed in major media outlets and invoked by U.S. officials to blame Palestinians for their own slaughter. It has even been used to justify genocide against Palestinians in a newspaper ad created by anti-Palestinian extremists Shmuley Boteach and Elie Wiesel.

  But the available evidence demonstrates that it is the Israeli army, not Hamas, that has been using Palestinians as human shields in Gaza.

  In video testimony released by the Euro-Mid Observer for Human Rights, Ramadan Muhammad Qdeih recounts how Israeli forces stormed his home in Khuza‘a, where some sixty members of his extended family were sheltering in the basement on July 25, and forced them to act as human shields.

  First, the Israeli soldiers shot dead his 65-year-old father Muhammad Odeih near the entrance of the home as he tried to alert the soldiers to the presence of women and children while carrying a white flag.

  Next, says Qdeih, the soldiers forcibly positioned members of his family, including the children, at the windows of his home and proceeded to fire from behind them.

  “They ordered us to take off our clothes and tied our hands up,” says Qdeih. “They took us to one of the rooms and used us as shields, making us stand at the windows as if we were looking outside. I was at one window and three children from my family at another. The soldiers then began firing around us.”

  For eight hours, Qdeih’s relatives were denied food and water as they were shuffled from one room to another with their hands restrained behind their backs and forced to stand in front of open windows as Israeli soldiers fired from behind their bodies.

  Hiding Behind Children

  Qdeih’s family members weren’t the only Palestinian civilians Israeli soldiers hid behind in Gaza. According to Euro-Mid, for five days Israeli forces used a Palestinian teen as their own personal human shield:

  In another incident, on July 23, 17-year-old Ahmad Jamal Abu Reeda says he was restrained by Israeli troops who threatened to kill him. After harshly interrogating and beating him, the troops ordered Abu Reeda to walk ahead of them at gunpoint, accompanied by police dogs, as they searched houses and other buildings. Several times, they demanded that he dig in places they suspected tunnels to exist. Abu Reeda was forced to remain with the Israeli forces for five days.

  This procedure is not new. During Operation Cast Lead, Israel’s three-week bombardment of the Gaza Strip in the winter of 2008-2009, Israeli soldiers used an eleven-year-old Palestinian boy as a human shield, forcing him to walk in front of them at gunpoint and enter potentially booby-trapped buildings to check for explosives.

  And these are not isolated cases. Israel has a well-documented hist
ory of systematically using Palestinian civilians as human shields, particularly children.

  Ethnic Cleansing

  From summary executions to deliberately murdering fleeing civilians carrying white flags and using civilians as human shields, there is no shortage of atrocities committed by the Israeli army in Khuza‘a, which was completely flattened by non-stop Israeli shelling in what has been described as a massacre.

  After visiting Khuza‘a and speaking with survivors, Jaber Wishah, the deputy director of the Palestinian Centre for Human Rights in Gaza, told Gaza-based journalist Mohammed Omer that he believes Israel’s intention was to ethnically cleanse Khuza‘a in an effort to split the Gaza Strip in two, north and south, to make it easier to control.

  As more information about Israeli criminality in Gaza comes to light, it has become increasingly clear that Israel is spreading lies about Palestinians.

  Israel is the one using Palestinian children as human shields. Israelis are the ones celebrating death in Gaza. Israeli officials are the ones declaring a “holy war.” And Israeli leaders are the ones calling for genocide.

  The Electronic Intifada, August 11, 2014, http://bit.ly/1uhXplG

  Psychological Damage of Gazan Children Will Have Long-term Consequences

  Lynda Franken

  Hassan al-Zeyada, 50, works as a psychologist at the Gaza Community Mental Health Program’s center in Gaza City. He treats several residents who suffer from psychological trauma due to Israeli military operations in the coastal enclave. When his own home was shelled on July 20, killing six of his family members, he found himself with the difficult job of having to treat himself.

  No Safety

  Tackling the psychological problems in Gaza stemming from the aftermath of Israel’s Operation Protective Edge, during which nearly 2,000 people in Gaza were killed, will be a huge challenge. UN statistics presented today show that approximately 335,000 people are displaced and live in shelters, schools, or with family. These numbers only include persons that registered through local or international NGOs. The real number of displaced people is therefore likely to be higher and is also “expected to rise again if hostilities resume.”

  With the Israeli military attacking UN shelters, schools and mosques alike, safety is nowhere to be found in the Gaza Strip—a worry al-Zeyada feels quite acutely. “They may hit at any time. There is no safe place. Psychologically, that is the problem,” he told the New York Times.

  Even with the 72-hour truce entering its third day, many residents of the Gaza Strip do not feel secure enough to permanently move back to their hometowns. Keeping in mind the failure of extending the previous 72-hour truce, former Beit Lahiya resident Hikmat Atta said he is not taking any chances. “We’re just going back for the day, at night we’ll come back (to the UN shelter),” he told Al-Jazeera yesterday.

  Children Are the Main Victims

  With half of the Gazan population under the age of 14, children have been the main victims of the latest Israeli military operation. The UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) estimates that 373,000 children in Gaza are in need of direct and specialized psychological support.

  Child injured when his neighbor’s home was hit by an F-16 missile (August 17).

  Photo by Mohammed Asad.

  High levels of stress felt by worried Gazan parents have a negative influence on their children, argues Dr. Jennifer Leaning, director of FXB Center for Health at Harvard University. “I would say that in all studies of disaster and in war crisis, the fundamental feature that protects children from serious psychological stress is their certainty...that their parents or grandparents will be able to protect and hold them.”

  She adds however that: “The parents and grandparents...are in no psychological position to be able to convey that umbrella of hope and safety for their children.”

  The Aftermath of Operation Cast Lead

  In 2010, a report presented by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) showed that both teachers and students in Gazan schools faced psychological problems in the aftermath of 2008–2009 Operation Cast Lead.

  Seventy-seven percent of the teachers saw a decline in their students’ performance levels. Teachers themselves were struggling to maintain order and 57 percent of all teachers did not feel safe in their own school.

  “If you don’t feel safe, you can’t help students feel safe,” one teacher remarked in the UNESCO-report.

  One of the main problems after Operation Cast Lead was the increasing dropout rate of students. A UNESCO survey among 6,000 students showed that many of them had to work to provide for their families after the death of family members who used to provide for them, or to fill in for family members that became unemployed due to the military operation. Some students managed to work during the night while attending school during the day, but they underachieve because they lack the time to properly study and rest.

  “I began working...one year ago during the war because there was no other source of income for my family. I work 6 p.m. to 6 a.m., sleep, then go back to school at 11 a.m. There is no time to study,” a preparatory student remarks in the UNESCO report.

  Problems Ahead

  The Israeli NGO B’Tselem puts the Palestinian death toll after Israel’s three-week 2008 Operation Cast Lead campaign at 1,385. Operation Protective Edge, which has lasted for 36 days thus far, has a running death toll of 1,962. The main difference between the two operations is the amount of civilian casualties. During Cast Lead, half of the casualties were civilians, whereas UN statistics show that 71 percent during Protective Edge have been civilians.

  The high number of civilian casualties in the 2014 operation is expected to correlate with an increasing number of children affected by psychological problems. Bassema Ghamen, a counselor worker for the UN agency for Palestinian refugees (UNRWA), stated that counselors have already noticed “serious behavioral changes in children, such as aggression, anger, nervousness and restlessness. Children cannot sleep or fall asleep only to wake up screaming in the middle of the night, clinging to their parents.”

  The psychological damage faced by Gazan children will also affect future peace negotiations, argues Dr. Jesse Ghannam, a clinical psychiatrist working for UNRWA.

  “When we are talking about creating a solution for the Palestinian-Israeli conflict...they aren’t growing up interested in peace and wanting to make things better. They just grow up deeply traumatized and very distraught and angry.”

  Palestine Monitor, August 13, 2014, http://bit.ly/1EW1P2r

  A Gaza Mother amid the Airstrikes

  Eman Mohammed

  As a photojournalist, stepping into war isn’t a dilemma for me. It is my instinct to grab my cameras and run out to document the man-made misery, the horrors of war, each and every time hoping humanity will get the lesson.

  But nothing prepared me to understand how to raise children in a war zone—not even having been a child in one myself.

  I grew up in Gaza. When I was in school, I spent my days walking to and from class, avoiding the streets that were normally targeted by airstrikes. On my summer holiday, I stayed indoors for fear of meeting the same fate as the families who dared to visit the beach and were killed by missiles while they enjoyed their barbecue.

  Despite my best efforts to give my daughters a different life, I have found myself in the exact same situation my mother was in 16 years ago when airstrikes hit Gaza. I was 10 years old, and the strikes haven’t really stopped since.

  After covering two wars in Gaza, I shifted my whole life. I moved with my American husband to the United States, to try to give my two daughters—Talia, who is three, and Lateen, who is one — the universal dream of peace. But as I drifted into a suburban life, I also longed for my sweet mother and my home. I longed to smell the roses while walking on the beach. So I took my daughters back to Gaza to visit their grandmother, and now I find myself again at ground zero, trapped between airstrikes and the unknown.
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  Now, seeing my two daughters staring at me in shock, calling my name in fear, asking to come with me when I leave on assignment to photograph the airstrikes or their aftermath, my heart refuses to believe I could have possibly risked the lives of my two angels by bringing them here. They don’t understand why their little adventure to see grandma escalated into war so quickly and so dramatically, or why they can’t get a hug from daddy, but only get to see his face through the cold laptop screen.

  The ones who write the rules of war are the ones who never experience it. If you haven’t tasted the pain of losing a loved one, the urge to run away when there is no way out, or the need to jump out of bed to hold your kid and cover her ears because a war plane just offloaded its rockets around your house—then you have no idea what life in Gaza is like.

  Talia is convinced that an angry, bad bird is making the noises. Each time she hears an explosion, she yells back, telling the bird to go home. My younger daughter doesn’t understand what’s happening. Sometimes she cries. Sometimes she is quiet and looks around. My mother is a pharmacist and these days she is on the emergency schedule, working every day. When I am out covering the funerals and the bombings, I leave the girls with her. I try to leave very early in the morning so I can come back early and spend time with them. Or I leave late so I can spend time with my daughters before I go out.

  In the field, I capture a mother mourning her three-year-old girl. It fills me with pain—the daughter is the same age as my baby—but the mother lost her child and I am able to go back home and hold mine.