Abdul Rahman Ghraben’s mother carried in a yellow plastic bag. “This is his pant leg, and tiny pieces of him,” she said, holding the knotted bag at the handles. Her husband had been explaining how fourteen year old Abed was killed on January 11.
“The Israeli forces had been bombing hard so we’d evacuated the house, gone to Fakoura (UN school which had been bombed with white phosphorous). The first 3 days at the school we had only the clothes we were wearing, no blankets, no food. At night in Fakoura it was so cold and windy, so when we heard on the radio that there would be a cease-fire between 8 am and 11 am, Abed asked if he could return home to grab a jacket. We all went with him,” Abu Abed explained, now holding the yellow bag.
Abed’s pants
Abdul (Abed) Rahman Ghraben
remains of Abed
Abu Abed mourns his dead son
shrapnel
flower in a bullet hole
“When we were in the house, the Israeli army starting bombing in the area,” said Umm Abed. “We were very frightened, we had thought the cease-fire meant we could return home safely. We quickly took whatever clothes and food we could and left the house. I thought Abed was ahead of us. At the school friends told us Abed hadn’t come back. They also said that a drone had fired a missile at our area. People were saying the missile had hit a child and shattered him to pieces. We didn’t know it was Abed.”
Umm Abed stopped her recollection to take out the contents of the yellow supermarket bag. “We searched for Abed for 2 days. People were telling us ‘your son was killed’ but we couldn’t find his body, we couldn’t believe it had been Abed.”
“Finally,” Abu Abed continued, pulling the tattered pant leg out of the bag, “we found this and knew Abed had been killed. It’s all that was left of him. Since then, since we’ve returned home we find more pieces of him.” The father pulled out a tuft of hair, a dried piece of some internal part of Abed, an inch long piece of sharp shrapnel from the drone’s missile. “Daily we find small bits of him, all over the area. He was blown to bits,” his father says. Although the strike happened 3 weeks ago, the family’s pain is no less fresh.
“Why are they doing this to our children? What did my son do? Did he launch rockets? Where is their humanity when they kill a child like this? He was a child, he had the right to live like any other child,” asked Abu Abed, voicing the questions that parents of over 400 children in Gaza are asking of the Israeli army and Israeli authorities making the decisions to bombard Gaza.
In a bullet hole in the wall beside Umm Abed, a decorative flower had been stuck, the hole too large for the plastic stem. Efforts fall short to cover the ugly rampage of the soldiers inside a house which has been torn apart much as their lives have been torn apart. The Ghraben’s house is in the Hayid Amal neighbourhood of Attatra, in the Beit Lahia region. Like the surrounding houses, it is puckered with scars of Israeli army firing, and bears evidence of the Israeli army’s invasion and rampage through it. A bedroom door is torn off its hinges, clothes shredded by automatic gunfire, damage throughout the house. Abu Yusef, an uncle and neighbour, had the day before shown his house: more extensive trashing had been done, but the family was back living in it, drafts and all.
Abu Abed made a parting plea to those outside Gaza: “We are asking the international community to cut their relationship with Israel, because Israel is killing children. During just 10 minutes in my neighbourhood alone Israeli soldiers killed 10 children,” he said as an example to the wider massacre of children, and adult civilians, which happened during the 3 weeks of war on Gaza. “We are still not safe. We still expect an Israeli bulldozer or tank could enter and bulldoze our homes at any time, because they have before. There are still F-16s which fly over our house, and we never know when the next bomb will be dropped.”
For over 24 hours earlier this month, a village in southern Gaza was devastated by an Israeli army attack. Jack Shenker revisits a day of destruction.
Khoza’a village has a small white-brick mosque, a smattering of donkey carts and a rusting water tower. It has neat rows of olive and citrus trees, and low-cut picket fences shading the main street. But the first thing that greets you as you enter the southern Gaza village from the west are its demolished houses: slabs of destroyed domestic comfort stacked and folded in on each other in impossible-looking ways.
They have shed their loads onto the alleys below, where they sit amongst rubble-shard mountains and steel reinforcement rods standing starkly in the wind.
Everyone in Khoza’a has a story about what happened when Israeli forces launched a 24-hour assault on their farming community of 12,000 earlier this month. It began when Apache helicopters appeared overhead late in the evening of January 12th, day 17 of Operation Cast Lead, Israel’s three week onslaught of the Gaza Strip. Mohammed al-Najar’s wife was giving birth that night in a hospital in nearby Khan Younnis; the missiles stopped him from witnessing the arrival of his new son. Instead, he spent the early hours of the 13th quieting the cries of the village’s infant population.” They were screaming that night,” he told me. “They screamed through the bombs and they screamed through the jokes and soothing prayers we whispered to calm them down.
Khoza’a isn’t screaming anymore, but it is garrulous, every corner stumbling over itself in an effort to tell its story. Kids swarm around in excited packs; I can’t move without wrinkled black munitions balls being pressed into my hand, or serial numbers from rockets being thrust before my camera.
The first independent investigators entered Khoza’a on January 14th. Over the next eight days, local researchers and I conducted interviews with as many of its residents as possible, including local paramedics and doctors who dealt with the wounded. Many of their witness statements are corroborated by testimony collected by the Israeli human rights group B’Tselem and Palestinian researchers.
The attack on Khoza’a began at 9:30pm on January 12. For over five hours, the village was blanketed by F16s, helicopter gunships and unmanned drones. At 3am on January 13, the second phase of the attack began when Israeli bulldozers trundled up to a cluster of houses on Khozaa’s eastern fringe, a mere 500m from the “green line” separating Gaza from Israel. Scared and confused, the residents of these buildings poured onto their roofs, waving white flags under the cold night sky. “There were over 200 people from 36 families up there calling down to the Israelis,” remembers 29-year-old Iman al Najar.
As their houses were demolished one by one, a stream of people headed 100 metres uphill to the west to a small, grass-strewn courtyard off a paved alleyway, dodging fire on the way. There they were flanked by walls on three sides and sheltered from the surrounding buildings, where IDF special forces had taken up positions. As night ticked away and the small 7m x 10m square filled up with villagers, it became clear that the Israeli soldiers were intent on levelling every house on the eastern street. Rawhiya al Najar, a 50-year-old mother of three, ran back to her street to urge those still in their homes to evacuate. By 7am, when she had reached the last house, all 200 of the former roof-wavers – over half of them children – were now gathered in the courtyard. Trapped between bullets and bulldozers, the villagers had nothing to do but wait.
One kilometre to the west, on the opposite side of town, members of Rawhiya’s extended family had formed an assembly of their own. Over 20 al Najars were taking refuge in the house of Khalil, their elderly patriarch, having been forced from Riyad al Najar’s home across the street by rocket fire. As explosives pounded the area from land and air, the children were now wedged quietly under the stairs. “The adults thought this would be the safest place to be if the building collapsed,” recalls Joma’aa, 18. They were wrong. A rocket sliced through the roof and the first floor and landed under the stairs, where 16-year-old Ala’a and her 15-year-old brother Ayman had taken cover. Most of Ala’a’s waist and pelvis was blown away, as was a third of her face; she eventually died after 10 hours of surgery in Khan Younis hospital.
Ayman survived, but the burns he received were so severe that his bones were visible through the wounds. Five more missiles quickly followed, taking the lives of a 22-year-old neighbour and 75-year-old Khalil himself, who had chosen to sit out in the garden to watch his village light up with gunfire. A rocket split him in half, and his family had to lay him to rest twice; they only discovered his legs a day after burying his torso.
Stunned by the volley of explosives, the rest of the family escaped across the alley to another home, where they huddled together on the ground floor. The drones spun around and followed accordingly. First a series of missiles blew holes in all the buildings, then white phosphorus flares looped down and into the holes. This time a young boy was hit in the eyes and legs; his skin, coated in chemical toxins, could not be touched. “Trying to pick him up was like trying to carry sand or liquid in your hands – he was just falling apart,” said one relative.
Since the dead and dying were covered in phosphorus, they had to be left behind as the group sought safety once again, clambering over a low back fence and back into Riyad’s house. Having run out of homes to protect them, the al Najars – filthy, exhausted, and fewer in number than ever before – were back where they started.
It was now 8am. Back in the grass-strewn courtyard, Rawhiya and her tightly-packed companions were in a similarly tight situation. Having finished with the houses, Khoza’a’s concrete-razing visitors were moving on – to the very space where the newly homeless were now trapped. Eight bulldozers surrounded the courtyard’s northern wall and began crunching into it, sending rubble flying forward. Each time the crumbling outer wall showered the villagers with metal and concrete, the courtyard became smaller and more claustrophobic.
Realising that they would all soon be crushed, Rawhiya grabbed a white flag, got a small group together, and tentatively stepped out in the alleyway to see if it was safe. Several villagers claim that Israeli soldiers shouted across at them to turn right and head up the path; they complied. “Rawhiya and I were at the front, followed by the rest of the women, then children, then men,” recalls 23-year-old Yasmin al Najar, her neighbour. “As we rounded the corner, I saw a special forces soldier in a window at the end of the street. He smiled at me and we thought that meant ‘go ahead’, because they were telling us our evacuation had been co-ordinated. So we went ahead and they shot Rawhiya in the head.”
The bullet was fired by a sniper in a house the Israelis had commandeered at the start of the incursion. They had two hostages in the basement: a 14-year-old boy and a woman in her 40s. The boy was Iman al Najar’s brother, Mohammed.
The opening through which Rawhiya al Najar, a 50-year-old mother of three, was, according to numerous witnesses, shot dead by Israeli soldiers whilst holding a white flag
Outside, there was chaos. Fragments of Rawhiya’s bullet had sprayed Yasmin too; clutching at her wounds, the young woman spun around and followed the others back into the courtyard. When their supposed saviours returned blood-spattered and shrieking, the villagers who had waited behind moved closer to outright panic. Mobile phone calls were put in to emergency services in the hope that the Palestinian Red Crescent would be allowed to come in and save Rawhiya. The answer came through shortly afterwards: the Red Crescent had contacted the IDF and been told that Khoza’a was now a closed military zone. Medical staff were not allowed to enter. Witnesses claim that one ambulance that attempted to reach Rawhiya anyway was shot at from the ground and air, forcing the paramedic, Marwan Abu Raeda, to seek cover in a nearby house. He was not able to remove Rawhiya’s corpse until 8pm: she had taken almost 12 hours to die.
Meanwhile, the villagers had a desperate choice to make. “We had to decide – death by rubble or by guns,” explained Iman. “I didn’t want to be buried alive, nor did anyone else. So I said to everyone, we have to stay together; we either live together or die together.” The villagers agreed and sunk to the floor, slowly crawling as one out onto into the alleyway.
At noon, bits of shrapnel were still flying through the air from rocket attacks on nearby houses. Iman led the villagers (including Yasmin, who had tied some loose fabric to her leg to stem the bleeding) out on their hands and knees across the pathway where Rawhiya lay, alive but dying under the midday sun. The group made it to a UN school 300 metres away just before helicopters swooped back in for a new round of devastation. Inside, they called the Red Crescent again. But with Israeli special forces still manning positions along the street, only one ambulance could make it to the gates. “We insisted on the children getting out first, but there were so many of them and just one ambulance. They were climbing all over each other in terror to try and get inside,” recalled Iman. Those children who couldn’t fit in the ambulance stood banging their heads against the school walls.
Marooned in their separate corners of the village, Khoza’a’s residents waited for the missile fire to ebb away. By the evening it had stopped, and the hunted started edging out of their hiding-holes. Evacuations got underway. One particularly courageous organiser was Mahmoud al Najar, a 55-year-old father of three, who shepherded residents from the bullet-torn backstreets into cars and trucks driven over by concerned relatives. Mahmoud had been unaware of the dramas faced by his family members across the village; several members of the al Najar family report that when he heard that Rawhiya had been shot, he strode back towards the courtyard pathway to look for her. As he was heading to search for his relative in the gloom, a single shot from a special forces sniper hit Mahmoud in the head. He died instantly.
(The IDF, contacted for comment said, issued this statement: “The IDF does not target civilians. For 22 days the IDF fought an enemy in Gaza who does not hesitate to hide behind civilians and fire from humanitarian aid facilities. IDF forces have clear firing orders, but in the complex situation in which fighting takes place inside towns and cities, placing our forces at great risk, civilian casualties are regrettably possible. In response to the claims of NGOs and claims in the foreign press relating to the use of phosphorus weapons, and in order to remove any ambiguity, an investigative team has been established in the Southern Command to look into this issue. It must be noted that international law does not prohibit the use of weaponry containing phosphorus to create smoke screens and for marking purposes. The IDF only uses weapons permitted by law. The IDF is obligated to international law, and in light of the [claims made in this article] some of the issues will be investigated.”)
By the time night fell on January 13th, 14 residents of Khoza’a had been killed, 50 lay wounded, and 213 had been taken to hospital for gas inhalation. Given the scale of destruction wrought by the invading army Khoza’a’s death toll was remarkably low. Indeed, the village’s story is significant largely because it is so ordinary.
Geography has etched violence into Khoza’a’s landscape for years. Farmers tending their fields regularly come under fire from Israeli troops across the border. Only two days prior to the invasion, a string of air strikes had devastated a group of houses near the “green line”. Seven months earlier – just two days before the old ceasefire came into effect – Aiya al Najar, an eight-year-old girl, was shot by an apache rocket as she stood on the roof of her home. It tore her body apart so extensively that they carried it away in buckets, “like pieces of meat in a plastic bag”, according to one cousin. Two years before that Aiya’s brother, 18-year-old Zaki, was shot dead in a ground operation.
Residents are adamant that the closely-knit village has never been a base for Hamas fighters. They are convinced that the attacks are part of the Israeli state’s plans to expand its border buffer zone westward. “They wanted to send a message to our village: ‘Leave, leave your land behind,’” says Samer al Najar, Yasmin’s father, while monitoring his daughter’s recovery at home. “But this was the land of our fathers and will be the land of our children, so we stay. We sleep in tents in the rubble rather than finding shelter elsewhere. And although there is no armed resistance here, amid this violence the act of staying becomes a resistance, and that is why they are afraid of us.”
Nor has the incursion really ended, at least in the minds of those who bore it. The day before I visited Khoza’a, a local who was inspecting the municipal water lines near the border – in co-ordination with the Israeli authorities – was shot at by troops, three days into a supposed ceasefire. The day after the cessation of hostilities was announced, Maher Abu Rajila ventured down to his farmlands to inspect the damage caused by the bombardment. He was killed by gunfire from within Israel. The children who sought shelter in the UN school are unwilling to return. “They’re too scared,” Imam tells me flatly.
In the aftermath of Khoza’a’s incursion, it’s the inanimate objects that stand out. Ala’a’s school notebooks flutter in the wind, blown open to the elements by the bombs that also twisted her bedroom upside down. Dusty teacups stand neatly to attention on kitchen windowsills bereft of their kitchens, the rest of the home curled up in pieces in a nearby street. These are the details that residents of the village keep pointing out to me, along with the animals and foliage: sheep, pigeons and trees mowed down from the sky.
Trails of phosphorus from the incursion remain buried under sandy ditches on the side of the road. Expose them to air and they burst into flames again; douse them with water and they splutter back into life within seconds. The kids kick them around sometimes for fun, half-heartedly pulling their jumpers up over their noses to smother the fumes. Last week, a nine-year-old boy named Adam al Najar took hits to his legs and chest when he triggered an unexploded landmine.
“They keep us awake at night with their bombs so we can’t sleep like other people sleep,” says Iman. “They fire missiles at our streets so our children can’t play like other people’s children. They bulldoze our land so our trees can’t grow like other people’s trees. But no matter how many they cut down, we will plant more and keep on standing.”
5pm, 30th January 2009, Ramallah: On Friday, January 30th, two people were shot by Israeli forces with live ammunition in the West Bank village of Ni’lin.
Ulrika Andersson, 31, was shot in the leg with live ammunition during the weekly demonstration against the construction of the annexation wall in the village of Ni’lin, occupied West Bank.
Ms Andersson, from the Swedish town of Gothemburg, was taking part in the non-violent demonstration when an Israeli soldier shot her from approximately 50 metres with a new 0.22 bullet. The bullet entered and exited through her lower right leg.
Witnesses have reported that the demonstration was in fact finished when the two people were shot, with Israeli forces opening fire as demonstrators were returning home.
A nineteen year old male demonstrator was also shot by a 0.22 bullet in the foot. Fragments of the bullet are still lodged within his foot. He is currently being operated on.
Both demonstrators shot has been taken to Sheikh Zaid hospital in Ramallah for emergency treatment.
Ulrika Andersson said when in Sheikh Zaid hospital;
“I am lucky, I was hit in the calf. Many residents in Ni’lin have not been so lucky resulting in many injuries from the Israeli aggression against the demonstrations in Ni’lin, including four deaths. The soldiers were aware of an international presence within the demonstration and clearly saw me.”
Since the start of the massacre on Gaza (27 December 2009), the Israeli army has been testing new types of weapons in several villages around West Bank. One of these new weapons is the 0.22 caliber bullet.
The small bullet, known by its caliber size as “0.22″, does not make a sound when fired. The low caliber allows the bullet to easily enter the body and causes internal bleeding.
Since the introduction of this new weapon, eight people have now been shot with the “0.22″ in the villages of Bi’lin, Ni’lin, and Budrus. Several people from Bi’lin and Ni’lin have this bullet lodged in their knees, one bullet went through a demonstrator’s leg and another demonstrator was shot in the stomach (causing internal bleeding).
International activists have joined the demonstrations against the construction of the annexation wall in Ni’lin since the village started it’s regular protests in May of 2008. According to the Israeli daily Maariv, in March 2008 the Israeli authorities issued a new directive enabling Israeli forces to open fire directly on Palestinians who try to demonstrate near the wall, unless internationals or Israelis are amongst demonstrators.
The construction of the annexation wall and Israeli only roads around Ni’lin will separate the village from 40% of it’s land and see a total loss of 85% of the village’s land since 1948.
Imagine being grateful for the chance to return to your demolished home and sift through the rubble, to try to retrieve personal belongings, ID cards and papers, still-useable clothes and pots…
Imagine your house had been bulldozed, you’d been given 5 minutes to leave it, not been allowed to collect any of those cherished possessions, you’d not had the foresight to gather all the most important documents and memorabilia and keep them by the door anticipating such an event, you’d been commanded to run away run to the nearest city or you’d be killed, you’d watched from a distance as the military dozer ate your house, and you’d been too terrified (with reason) of being shot at if you tried to later return and collect belongings …so terrified you didn’t.
That was Manwa and Sharifa, mother and daughter, living in a house just a hundred metres from Gaza’s eastern border.
Stately Manwa, short and broad and strong and smiling. A month and a half ago when we met she’d grinned, grinned, in welcome and in her customary nature. She’d already lost much of her land to Israel’s “buffer zone” the 300m (in other areas more than half a kilometer) band of land along Gaza’s borders with Israel. This ‘buffer zone’ is one of Israel’s many contrived [‘for security’] land-grabs, as is the Separation Wall [‘security barrier’] eating the West Bank, the closed military zones throughout the West Bank, the Jewish-only roads dissecting the West Bank, and Israel’s latest: the extended ‘buffer zone’ now declared a ‘closed military zone’ from the eastern border out 1 km. Manwa’s is but one of many households who’ve been forced off their land –in Gaza!! in Gaza!!! NOT in Israel. This is Palestinian land, it must be highlighted. Palestinian land, it must be screamed –after Israel’s military assault on Gaza (the one that has killed over 1400 now…).
At 2:30 pm January 17, 4 massive Israeli tanks and 1 towering military bulldozer accompanied a smaller military bulldozer and invading, occupying Israeli soldiers as they blazed towards Manwa’s, yelling through a megaphone, ordering them to get out of the house. Sharifa, 22, left first. Soldiers asked her if there were any men inside the house, to which she replied ‘no’. Manwa came next, also with hands in the air. The question was repeated, soldiers not believing the women could stay by themselves, telling the women as much.
It was 3 weeks after Israel’s Gaza-wide air-strikes began, and the fact that Manwa and Sharifa had stuck it out alone in that isolated area is incredible.
“They told me our house was now in a closed military zone,” Manwas said. “They said it was a ‘decision from the top’ and that we had to leave immediately and walk towards Gaza,” she said. “I refused, and tried to negotiate with them for time to gather our belongings. They refused.”
Manwa was a safe distance away, watching, when the Israeli soldiers bulldozed her house at 5 pm that day.
This was one day before Israel declared a ceasefire (which Israeli soldiers promptly broke, in instances throughout Gaza) and the area was in the northeastern corner of the Strip. There would have been absolutely no possibility of resistance fighters being present, thus no ‘reason’ to demolish the houses (as Israeli war mongers attempt to justify their collective punishment –demolishing, bombing, setting fire to with chemical weapons, Palestinians’ houses and buildings if it is suspected that there may have been resistance in or near the buildings, or if one’s family has a member in the resistance, or if it is suspected that there may be a member of resistance in the family, or if one has the same name as a member of the resistance…).
Yet, strangely, illegally, Israeli war authorities were able to declare Palestinian land in Gaza a closed military zone and, thus, render the land vacate, and an estimated 400 people homeless (modest estimate based on 80 families with an average of 5 people per family) in the Beit Hanoun ‘buffer zone’ areas alone.
At 1:40 pm, a delegation of about 15 international and Palestinian solidarity activists joined Manwa, Sharifa, and Manwa’s son Said, for the walk along the track 1.5 km out where the closed military zone began. Manwa had asked us to come. She wanted to go home, even briefly, to try to find her papers and anything precious.
We walk past a plot of rubble which a week ago had been 3 houses. Mohammed lived in one of them, with 5 other family members, and like Manwa was given just minutes to vacate.
The flat fields around us once held olive, lemon and palm trees, Saber tells us. About 750 dunums (1 dunum=1000 square metres). “People from all over Gaza had jobs here. It is one of the best regions for agriculture in Gaza,” Saber goes on. He doesn’t need to spell out that all of the trees had been bulldozed, like the houses, over the years since 2003. We know, are aware of Israel’s policy of razing Palestinian land.
We pass a house shell, with a yellow Fatah flag still flying, and are told that a mother from the Khadera family was killed in the shelling. Luckily her daughters survived.
Another house in ruins on the left side of the track. “There were goats and sheep in one area of the bottom level of this house,” we are told. “The Israeli soldiers bulldozed it with the goats and sheep inside.” An old man sits next to his former home, concentrating on the fire that is boiling his tea water.
Down the track a little further we are directed to where the Wahadan family house was. “They destroyed the house, the water well and its pump too,” Saber tells us.
Proud Manwa narrates as we walk. “I was so scared when I saw the tanks. My heart dropped to my feet,” she tells us. She goes over the day of demolitions again, in detail, reliving it and making sure we understand that (and how) she’s lost her home.
We pass an F-16 crater, the kind you see all over, and then take a slight detour off the path, to go visit a shanty town of tin houses. This is part of Manwa’s extended family, and they want to show us how even though the houses are over 50 metres from the missile crater, the impact of the missile sent shards of shrapnel slicing through the corrugated metal walls of their shack-home. “The children are having serious psychological problems now,” Saber relates, telling us that the kids, around 2 or 3 years old, are traumatized by the explosion, the deadly fragments of missile which pierced their home.
When we are nearly at Manwa’s house we briefly discuss the importance of such accompaniments. Gives people hope that they can return to their homes, if only briefly for now. Challenges the illegality of Israel arbitrarily imposing and extending no-go zones at whim on Palestinian land.
We reach the house and I recall my first visit, when I’d been charmed not only by Manwa, Sharifa and Said, but also by the neat, tidy, homey house, had thought that it was the perfect hill-rise location with the possibility to grow the grains and vegetables one needed, graze one’s sheep. It is a pancake of angles and debris now. It is too tangled and the slabs too large to move without a bulldozer. We can only surface-sift, and are unable to reach the closet which Said points out lies under an unmovable slab of concrete. Manwa nonetheless smiles her gratitude at us for being here.
About 100 metres beyond, the electrified fence, and beyond the patrol road which carries the jeeps that buzz back and forth. Some jeeps buzz by and we eye them, wary. Yesterday, in Faraheen, east of Khan Younis, an impoverished agricultural worker was shot dead as he worked the land near the ‘buffer zone’ down south. He was apparently the only bread-winner in the family and had held off doing any farm work in that area for some time now, worried about being shot. Poverty breeds necessity, and in Gaza that means risking death at the guns of Israeli soldiers when farming or fishing (or at home or at school or at mosques or in cars or…).
I kick aside a rusted stove pipe, pluck out some notebooks with writing which could be valuable in some way to the family, shake the concrete dust off of some dresses and clothing items, find a tin box with necklaces and mementos. It all goes into a plastic bag I’ve found in the ruins. I step over the room with the animal feed, some of the sacks still partially filled with grains, and head to the corner where the closet is said to be. This is the most eastern corner, closest to the border. We all watch the border area as we sift, hoping to find ID cards and anything useful.
But eventually we are defeated, cannot reach beneath the heavy top layer. We must leave, and leave behind Manwa’s identity.
She smiles still.
As we walk away, 2 crisp cracks of gunfire, and a whizz. ‘Warning shots,’ though close enough to hear that whizz. A minute later, 2 more.
We’re luckier than the Khan Younis youth of Tuesday.
Two of her boys worked to pull pieces of clothing, books, and anything reachable from under the toppled cupboard. Every item is sacred. She led me through her house, pointing out the many violations against their existence, every graffitied wall, each shattered window and glass and plate, slit flour bags –when the wheat is so precious –and the same revolting array of soldiers’ left-overs:spoiled packaged food, feces everywhere but the toilet, clothes used as toilet paper. The same stench.
“They broke everything, broke our lives. That was the boys room,” we continue through the wreckage. “Look, look here. See that?! Look at this!” This is to be the refrain as we step over destroyed belongings into destroyed rooms.
It isn’t only the destruction, defiling, vandalizing, waste… it’s also the interruption of life, a life already interrupted by the siege. She held out school books, torn, ruined, and asked how her children were supposed to study: when they have no books, no power, had to flee their home, are living in constant fear of another bombardment of missiles (from the world’s 4th most powerful and most abundantly-equipped military).
Some of the graffiti reads:
“We don’t hate Arabs, but will kill every Hamas.”
and
“IDF was here! We know you are here. We won’t kill you, you will live in fear and run all your lives!”
For people in families like hers, the surviving members, this psychological terror is real. For those who have been killed already, the “we won’t kill you,” is a lie. Ask the surviving fathers, mothers, siblings, children.
From the rooftop, we see neighbouring houses inflicted with the wrath of the Israeli military machine. And great swathes of land which once held homes and trees, now naked, stubbled with pillar fragments at painful angles, rubble, stumps, and tank tracks.
“Here, here, come look over here, over here.”
“That was all our land: clementines, lemons, olives…”
“That’s my brother’s house over there, its all broken…”
The drones were still overhead, the words too urgent, too many, too fast, too dizzying.
Down to ground zero and on to more newly wrecked houses and lives. Past a water pump which served at least 10 houses in the area, hit by missiles, ruined.
Passing more shells of houses, I meet Yasser abu Ali, co-owner of a paint and tools supply shop bombed to the ground by 2 F-16 missiles. Seventeen people were immediately dependent on the revenue from the business, not accounting for indirect dependents (suppliers, buyers). As abu Ali tells of he and his brothers’ $200,000 loss, it comes out that he is a cousin of Dr. Ezz-El-Din Abu El-Eish, the doctor whose 3 daughters and neice were killed by Israeli shelling on his house in Jabaliya. Everyone has their own story, and stories overlap, tragedies overlap and compound.
At Samir Abed Rabbo’s, the tour begins as with the others: everything is broken and upside down, there are Israeli soldiers’ leavings (food, playing cards, feces…) and graffiti: “Join the Israeli army today!” and other slogans from the patriotic invading and occupying forces.
The house is more holes than walls, from multiple tank shells to automatic gunfire shots from the tanks. Seeing so many intentionally & deviously-ruined houses dulls the concept of damage. But strangely some things stand out as odd or notable amidst the whole-scale destruction. Entrails of ceilings and support beams hang in threads. A chair sits gutted.
And there are the sniper holes. I look out the hole facing Salah el Din street, the Dawwar Zimmo crossroads, and I realize that it was from one of these very holes that Hassan would have been shot, thankfully not killed (unlike the 13 other emergency medical workers), thankfully we also weren’t shot dead. These sniper holes litter house walls in homes all over Jabaliya, Attatra, Zaitoun…Gaza.
The baby’s bedroom, not saved from the attacks. A wall of cheerful cartoons and cute baby posters contrasts the ugliness of the gaping shelling wounds, reminding that nothing is sacred to an army that will shoot children point-blank [i will tell of this in a later post].
The rotting donkey out back explains the stink, a stench different than that of the army’s usual odor.
Leaving Samir Abed Rabbo’s ruins, I see a newly-homeless family making tea over a fire, behind the rubble of their former home.
Saed Azzat Abed Rabbo stands under a missile hole in his bedroom ceiling, explaining that on the first day of the land invasion, he and family had been in the house when a missile struck it. They frantically evacuated to a school in Jabaliya, Feluja, and only learned of their house’s post-occupation demise upon returning after the Israeli soldiers left.
It is like the others: ravaged, left with soldiers’ waste and wine bottles–Hebrew writing on the label (wine isn’t available here anyway, so there’s no question who drank the wine) –rooftop water tank blown apart, and rooftop views affording more sights of neighbourhood destruction and of the lemon trees that once stood near Saed Abed Rabbo’s home.
I left Abed Rabbo that day, weaving amongst taxis, motorbikes, trucks, and carts packed with belongings, people who had no home to stay in, who’d only come to retrieve what they could from their former lives. I’d seen more than I felt I could internalize or reproduce for others, but knew I’d go back for more stories because I knew there are more. More than I can possibly hear or pass on.
