Gaza Unsilenced Read online

  As a photojournalist, there was distance between my subject and me. Now, as a mother, when I turn on the TV and see a mother in another war zone crying her heart out, or an anxious mother in Israel, I can only wonder: Whose war is this? When things get darkest, I wonder: Will I be next? Will I be the next mother crying over the dead body of her baby? My trust in humanity fades away, and I sink into tears of rage and weakness.

  I don’t fear for my life in the same way as I do for my daughters’ lives. They didn’t choose this. They deserve decades of happiness, life and joy. I was pregnant with Lateen when I covered the 2012 Gaza war, hoping it would be the last one.

  My daughters have no shelters to run to. Israelis hide in shelters in Jerusalem, Tel Aviv, Jaffa, and Haifa. But Gazans have none; Israel has banned cement from entering, with minor exceptions, since the siege was imposed on the Strip seven years ago. Gazans succeeded in smuggling some through underground tunnels from Egypt. But it was barely enough to rebuild their destroyed houses.

  Meanwhile, Talia’s bad birds keep flying. I’m torn between spending time with my children and documenting mothers grieving their losses, waiting like thousands of other peaceful civilians for a glimpse of hope from underneath the rubble.

  The Jewish Daily Forward, July 15, 2014, http://bit.ly/1Dg7TGw

  Gaza: A Human Tragedy

  Sarah Ali

  What is it like to live in Gaza under Israeli offensive?

  Boom! It’s 3:05 a.m. We wake up for suhour, the pre-dawn meal in Ramadan, after a long and horrifying night made worse by the thick presence of Israeli surveillance drones in Gaza’s sky. Friends on my Facebook newsfeed complain of sleep deprivation and continuing Israeli air strikes around them. The radio has a bad signal, so I turn it off. My two-anda-half-year-old niece flinches as a deafening explosion strikes a nearby area. Her forefinger pointed upwards, she exclaims, “wawa!” (a colloquial Arabic word babies use to say they are in pain).

  On July 7, Palestinians found themselves in the throes of yet another Israeli aggression. Thirteen days into the Israeli onslaught on Gaza, over 400 Palestinians have been killed, most of them civilians. At least 77 children are among the dead. Thousands of people have been injured and over 50,000 displaced. Some 15,000 houses have been destroyed or severely damaged, and dozens of fishing boats have been burned, destroyed or partially damaged.

  The main water line for al-Shati refugee camp in Gaza was bombed and damaged, while 50 percent of sewage pumping and treatment centers are no longer operating. A home for the disabled run by a charitable center was destroyed, killing two women and injuring others. A kindergarten was hit and damaged. A rehabilitation hospital was targeted. The house of police chief Tayseer Al-Batsh was hit by two Israeli bombs, critically injuring him and killing 17 people of Al-Batsh family. Four children playing on the beach were slain as an Israeli gunboat targeted them in broad daylight. Another three children were killed while playing on the rooftop of their house. The list goes on and on.

  In response to Israel’s occupation and illegal blockade of the Gaza Strip (with Egypt’s complicity), its wreaking havoc across the West Bank, its constant human rights violations and arrests, shooting at Palestinian fishermen and farmers, and frequent bombing of Gaza—Palestinian armed groups have fired a barrage of rockets into Israeli territory. Sirens go off in Jerusalem, Sderot, Tel Aviv, Isdoud, Beer Saba‘, and other areas, forcing Israeli citizens into shelters. So far there have been two civilian deaths in Israel and five Israeli soldiers have been killed in clashes with Palestinian fighters.

  In late afternoon on July 16, the house of my deceased grandparents—home to four families and 12 people in East Gaza—was bombed. My uncles and cousins received no phone call, no messages, nothing (not that a phone call telling you “we’ll bomb your house” makes it any better). The distance between their house and that of their neighbors is less than a meter. No rocket could have possibly been fired from their house into Israel. And, yet, an Israeli “targeted” strike hit them. When the first missile fell, they ran out of the house. My uncle and 70-year-old aunt sustained injuries, but they all miraculously survived.

  Homeless, in every sense of the word, they are now split into relatives’ homes. Their house has been completely destroyed. Most of their belongings remain in the street; they visit every morning, trying to find and pull out of the rubble anything still fit for use. My uncle’s wife, an agriculture engineer and a lifelong embroidery enthusiast, laments, “How did I not take my embroideries? Why did I leave without them?”

  We are still in the holy month of Ramadan, a time of spirituality, reflection, and religious devotion, when people socialize outside and at home with family and friends. Mornings and evenings of Ramadan are no longer the same, though. Most workplaces are closed. People do not go to school or work. They are careful not to go out a lot, although many Palestinians still venture out to get food and perform Taraweeh—evening prayers. At night, most people, except for medical staff and journalists, remain indoors.

  War is horror. War is our vulnerability and helplessness. It is our inability to protect family and friends. It is deciding not which area in Gaza is safer, but which one is less dangerous. It is packing official papers, a bottle of water, life savings, a mobile with a dead battery, and, above all, memories into one small “emergency bag” and forgetting the bag altogether once your house is shelled. War is having no time to say goodbye to your window, or the stickers on your wall, or a piece of embroidery, or that crack in the door you always hated. War is leaving your house barefoot. War is your grief aired live on TV. War is humiliation. War is remorse for things you have not done. War is traumatized children and traumatized adults. War is broken hearts and scars that do not heal.

  War is the painful abruptness of loss. All it takes is a minute, or perhaps less than a minute. A sky lantern lights up the whole area around the “target,” guiding the Israeli apache or F16 through the dark strip. A terrifying whoosh accompanies the missile as it falls upon the house. Screams and silent tears. A last declaration of faith in Allah and His messenger. A last breath. The sky lights up again. A massive explosion is heard outside. Smoke clouds the area and the air around smells of death. Flames erupt. The explosion echoes in your ear. In seconds, someone’s memories are buried under the rubble of their home. Someone’s loved ones are gone forever.

  It is 3:30 a.m. I hear the third boom in a span of only a few minutes as a reminder of the war. War is waking up for suhour not by an alarm clock, but by a blast. Faces are pale and food is tasteless. Time is meaningless. Power is now off and there is no way I can make sure my friends are alive. My niece, still crying and terrified by the sounds of bombing yawns, her tears lulling her to sleep. I turn on the radio again only to hear about Western leaders staunchly asserting, from the comfort of their countries, the right of our oppressor to “defend” itself, while simultaneously denying a defenseless and besieged population that right. I smile at the irony of it all as another explosion roars in the background.

  Al-Jazeera, July 20, 2014, http://bit.ly/1n1YKZR

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  Destitute by Design: Making Gaza Unlivable

  Israel’s war on Palestinian industry, economy, and civil society has been long-standing and unrelenting, and nowhere is this policy more visible than in the Gaza Strip, where an elaborate and draconian siege and blockade designed to strangle the productive sectors—the bedrock of self-sufficiency and prosperity—ensures that Gaza remains destitute. A partial list of damages includes 18,000 housing units totally destroyed or severely damaged (leaving about 108,000 Palestinians homeless); the destruction of Gaza’s only power plant (which also put the sewage and water treatment plants out of commission); 22 schools destroyed and 118 schools damaged; and at least 24 medical facilities damaged, with some hospitals taking repeated direct hits. Enormous swaths of agricultural land (17,000 hectares, about 42,00 acres) as well as much of its agricultural infrastructure, including greenhouses, irrigation systems, animal farms, fodder stoc
ks, and fishing boats, were severely damaged. Fishing, once an important and vital sector of the coastal enclave, has been restricted to so narrow an area that only the youngest of fish are available to catch, threatening future populations and the livelihoods of the fishermen themselves. Exports are all but prohibited. Imports are determined by the whims of the Israelis controlling access points in and out of the Strip and change on a regular basis, and have included bans on items such as construction material, water filters, and books. The Palestinian Authority estimates that repairing the damages will cost close to $5 billion.1 This devastation comes on the heels of two previous attacks from which Gaza, gripped by siege, had not yet recovered. These periodic bombing episodes (euphemistically referred to as “wars”) ensure that Gaza remain a laboratory in which 1.8 million residents struggle to survive.

  The objective was clearly expressed by former Israeli minister of interior Eli Yishai: to “send Gaza back to the Middle Ages.”2 By destroying and damaging Gaza’s infrastructure, Israel’s strategy seems to have been to extinguish all hopes of self-sufficiency—in other words, to make Gaza unlivable.

  “The Tank Shells Fell Like Rain”: Survivors of the Attack on UNRWA School Report Scenes of Carnage and Destruction

  Sharif Abdel Kouddous

  Hussein Shinbari is the only member of his family that survived the attack on a United Nations school in Beit Hanoun on Thursday. He is covered in blood. His undershirt, his pants and his hands are all stained a deep red.

  After Israel launched its ground invasion into Gaza last week, the Shinbari family left their home in the northeastern town close to the Israeli border and sought shelter at the nearby school. “They told us it was safe,” Hussein says, sitting on the ground by the morgue of the Kamal Adwan Hospital in Beit Lahiya.

  More than 1,500 displaced Palestinians were staying at the school. The conflict has caused unprecedented massive displacement in Gaza, forcing over 140,000 people to seek shelter in more than eighty UN shelters.

  On Thursday afternoon, the people in the Beit Hanoun school were told they were being transferred to another area, away from the shelling and clashes on the streets outside. According to multiple survivors, they were instructed to gather their scant belongings and assemble in the schoolyard to await buses that would take them to another shelter.

  At around 2:30 p.m. a barrage of artillery shells crashed into the school, according to witnesses. At least sixteen people were killed and more than 200 wounded, many of them women and children. Hussein lost his mother; his stepmother; his 16-year-old brother, Abed Rabo; his 12-year-old sister, Maria; and his 9-year-old brother, Ali.

  “I was the only one who walked out,” Hussein says. He helped carry his dying family members to the ambulances that eventually arrived. “I’m not asking Hamas or Fatah for anything,” he says. “I only have God left.”

  The Israeli military says Hamas was firing rockets from Beit Hanoun and that it had told the Palestinian refugee agency, UNRWA, and the Red Cross to evacuate the school. Yet UNRWA spokesman Chris Gunness says the UN had asked the Israeli military for a lull in the fighting to allow for an evacuation but did not hear back. Gunness says precise coordinates of the shelter had been formally given to the Israeli army. The attack marked the fourth time a UN facility has been hit by Israel since the conflict began on July 8.

  “These people had no place to go. They are very poor, so they sought the protection of the United Nations,” says Dr. Bassam al-Masry, the head of the orthopedic department at the Kamal Adwan Hospital, whose house is adjacent to the school in Beit Hanoun. “Today they were shelled. Why?”

  The hospital is filled with heart-wrenching scenes. Men and women being carried in on stretchers. People rushing through the halls with wounded children in their arms. It is unbearably hot and humid. In one corner, six women gather in a knot of grief, sobbing and holding each other. One of them collapses in shock.

  Inside the morgue a baby is brought onto the wooden examination table. She is about one year old. She looks unharmed, except when her head is turned to reveal that a small chunk of her neck is missing. The other bodies lie in the refrigerated morgue drawers cocooned in bloodied white shrouds. Only their faces are uncovered.

  “We thought the school was safer than our house,” says 32-year-old Monther Hamdan. He is lying on a cot with a wounded leg and grasps his father’s hand as he speaks. All thirteen members of his family were injured in the attack. They arrived at the school three days ago. “The tank shells fell like rain.”

  The attack on the UN school came on one of the bloodiest days of the conflict. Approximately 120 Palestinians were killed yesterday, bringing the death toll in Gaza to nearly 800, the vast majority of them civilians, including at least 190 children, according to the Health Ministry. Over a two-day period, a child was killed every hour in Gaza. More than 5,100 have been wounded.

  The level of violence has escalated significantly since Israel’s ground invasion last week. Calls for a cease-fire seem to have had the opposite effect. A three-kilometer buffer zone has been declared by Israeli military, equivalent to 44 percent of the Gaza Strip. Israeli forces have pushed in from the border backed by tanks and a continued assault from the air. Thirty-two Israeli soldiers and three civilians have been killed.

  In southern Gaza, the Israeli military dropped leaflets warning residents to evacuate areas east of Khan Yunis. “The Israeli Defense Forces are not targeting any of you,” it says. “If you follow directions, the IDF will not hurt any of you, the civilian population.”

  Testimonies by the residents of the town of Khuza‘a, one of the Palestinian residential areas closest to Israel, belie that claim. They describe a nightmarish ordeal trying to escape the Israeli invasion. Multiple witnesses say they were prevented from getting out by Israeli tanks and troops, that Israeli forces fired on ambulances and that the dead and wounded were left behind in the streets.

  An UNRWA school in Rimal offers shelter to families from Bayt Lahiya (who are originally from Majdal and became refugees in 1948). Euro-Mid Observer for Human Rights reports that 141 government schools, 76 UNRWA schools, and 6 universities were damaged during the assault.3

  Photo by Ezz Al Zanoon.

  “There was no mercy,” says Wael Abu Irgala, a 24-year-old resident of Khuza‘a. “We saw things you couldn’t imagine.”

  Wael says the Israeli military began indiscriminately shelling Khuza‘a on Tuesday at around sunset. By 1 a.m., Israeli troops began knocking on doors and shouting out taunts to the residents inside, calling for the men of the houses to come and face them, says Wael’s aunt Asmaa. The next morning Wael and Asmaa and hundreds of the town’s residents tried to evacuate, but it would be another twenty-four hellish hours before they made it out.

  Town residents gathered on Wednesday morning and held up white flags as they walked. Two handicapped girls were being pushed in wheelchairs. Without warning, an Israeli tank stationed on the main road opened fire, shooting bullets into the crowd. The residents fled in panic. The man pushing one of the wheelchairs was shot, leaving the handicapped girl alone on the street.

  “There were wounded on the ground and we couldn’t save them,” Wael says. “They would shoot anything that moved.”

  Many people were injured in the attack and a number sought refuge at the house of a local doctor, Kamal Gedeih. He tended to the injured with very basic first aid supplies, including Wael’s other aunt, who was shot in the stomach.

  Multiple calls were made to local hospitals, human rights organizations and the Red Cross, pleading for help in escaping the conflict, but no one came.

  In the afternoon, an airstrike hit the yard of Gedieh’s house where the doctor’s brother was filling up water bottles for the people inside. It took him ten minutes to die. Another fifteen minutes later, a shell smashed into the side of the building. Gedieh himself was injured along with several others.

  Wael and Asmaa decided to leave the doctor’s house and took their wounded relative, who was sho
t in the stomach, and other family members with them. They ended up finding a basement where dozens of other residents were seeking shelter. They spent the night there. There was no water, food or electricity. Several people collapsed from exhaustion.

  The shelling and bombardment continued throughout the night. On Thursday morning, they decided to try and make their way out again. They walked in a group with their hands in the air. Some carried white flags.

  “We didn’t expect to get out alive,” says Asmaa. “We walked for five kilometers waiting for death.” She says Israeli troops on tanks and deployed in the streets were blocking all the main roads. They gestured which direction for them to go. The relative with the stomach wound had to be half-carried the entire way.

  In the assault, the town had been demolished. “We found a burning land, we didn’t know the streets or the houses of our own neighborhood,” Asmaa says. “It looked like a different world, empty of people.”

  They finally made it out to Nasser hospital in Khan Yunis late Thursday morning.

  The scene at the hospital is one of chaos and overcrowding. People fill the corridors. The wounded are ferried back and forth. One man follows two corpses being carried into the morgue. He is holding a bright blue plastic bag. In it is all that remains of one of his relatives.

  “This was the worst night in this hospital,” says Dr. Jamal al-Hams, the director general of the hospital. He says at least twenty-one people are dead and 150 injured. “The fridges are full and there’s nowhere to put the bodies.”

  Multiple medical workers and witnesses say the Israeli military did not allow ambulances to enter Khuza‘a during the brutal assault.

  “There are many wounded still inside. They are calling us and we can’t get to them,” says Dr. Wissam Nabhan at the European Hospital in eastern Khan Yunis. Nabhan says he took four ambulance trips on Thursday morning to try to evacuate people, and every time he came under fire from the Israeli military.