Category: Journals

Volunteers with the International Solidarity Movement are encouraged to write personal reflections about the work they engage in with Palestinian communities, the events they experience, and the people they meet. These journals offer the human context often missing in traditional reports or journalism. These articles represent the author’s thoughts and feelings and not necessarily those of the International Solidarity Movement.

Saturday January 17 – Starting again

Sharon Lock | Tales To Tell

Let me start with the good news. I found it surprisingly destabilising having to evacuate the hospital. Since the strikes began, I have spent

Washing floor
Washing floor

more nights here than anywhere else, and it began to feel like coming ‘home’ each time I arrived, especially with the welcome I unfailingly received. There is a sense of order in a hospital, of safety and care and compassion. When a handful of us came back to mind the hospital at about 3 am after evacuation, with the remains of the fire still resisting the fire-fighters, it felt very bleak. Beds were scattered in the road; inside, things were overturned and broken after the hurried leaving, the place was covered with mud. In most rooms there were waterfalls. Two out of three of our buildings were blackened and smoldering.

I wandered about in the operations room, clearing things up so it wouldn’t look so sad. If I felt displaced, when I had a perfectly good flat to go to, what about all the medical folks here whose homes have been destroyed in the last weeks, for whom this was their only warm, comfortable, safe place?

But yesterday the Red Crescent met and decided they wanted to work from Al-Quds again, and even better, the hospital will be open on Monday. I forgot to allow for the fact that they have no choice. Today I arrived to a completely revived atmosphere on the ground floor – lights working again, most things back in place, mud washed away, and disaster team boys sliding around their room on a cloth to dry their floor. I haven’t been to visit the bits of the hospital that were burning two days ago. Right now I think I’ll just enjoy what I see. Some of the medics are making us a potato chip dinner. The triplets are now at Nasser childrens hospital, by the way.

So you remember I wrote this about Wed morning Jan 14:

While there, heard shouting, went up stairs to see medic S covered in blood, he had just carried a little girl in from the street who snipers had shot in face and abdomen. We saw her father fall on the hospital stairs, having been shot in the leg. Mother was panicking, shouting there was another girl left behind. S, I and other medics went out to get her, found her not far away, S took her on his shoulders into the hospital. The other medics and I realised they were just the beginning of a stream of desperate people fleeing their buildings, many of which were on fire.

This was the Badran family. Faddel al Badran, 54, was shot in the leg. Yasmine, 12, was the girl we went to bring in. Haneen, 9, was the one shot in the face and abdomen: I knew she had been taken straight into surgery at Al-Quds. today I found out that she was transferred to Al-Shifa and died shortly afterwards.

Last night they bombed another UNRWA school in which homeless people had taken refuge in Beit Lahia. There are 36 wounded, including 14 children. Two boys aged 3 and 8 are dead. John Ging of UNRWA was on the TV being coldly furious. But as I type (I’ll be reading this out over the phone to the UK for uploading) a truce has apparently begun. It is strangely quiet. Everyone desperately wants to hope it’ll have some meaning.

7 Minutes

Palestinian exploring a bomb crater in Gaza
Palestinian exploring a bomb crater in Gaza
Eva Bartlett | In Gaza

15th January 2009

When I’d met the extended Abed Rabbo family, before the ground invasion began, they had just had their house bombed by an F-16. Their area has been occupied by Israeli tanks and soldiers since the ground invasion began. Medical workers cannot reach the injured there, and those who have managed to escape testify to imprisonment in their houses, abuse, point-blank shooting (to death), and a number of dead not yet known. It’s an area Israel views as strategic, lying just hundreds of metres from the eastern border to Israel, a key entry point for invading troops. Past invasions have meant entire families and neighbours being locked into a room of a house for a day, days. Supposition among journalists and those with 2 cents here is that Israel’s intense bombardment of, and destruction of houses in, the area is to both decimate any resistance and to create an alternate ‘road’ for tanks and troops to roll in on, meaning houses in their path are leveled to the ground.

That day, Abu Mahmoud Abed Rabbo had related the events of his house demolition. “A person called me saying he was a spokesperson for the Israeli army and that we had 7 minutes to leave the house before it was bombed. I begged for 10, told him 7 wasn’t enough to collect possessions and get our children out safely. He said 7,” Abed Rabbo explained. His family made it out in time, avoiding the death sentence that has been given so many here, without warning. He said he’d just stood away from the house and watched as it was bombed, watched 20 years of his life be erased, with everything inside it. “I’m just a working man, not Fatah, not Hamas. Just a man. Why did they bomb my house?” he’d asked. “There were 4 families in here, at least 25 children,” he’d added.

Gazan women forced to cook over a fire
Gazan women forced to cook over a fire
We stepped over and around rubble and the bits of house interiors that get melded together in blasts like these, going across the street to a relatives who was then sheltering the family. An elderly woman sat by a wood fire, simmering something in a pot for their meal, no gas to cook over.

We’d continued visiting sites of missile strikes around the Ezbet Abed Rabbo area. A yard with 2 massive craters in it, one from that morning and one from the night before. Looking from a room at the back of a 2 story house, I noticed the damage the F-16 bombs had done not only to the land but also to the houses around. Glass shatered, window frames blown in, safety to the wind…

And on to the next house demolished, in our paths at least, that of Ziad Abud Foul, whose new home was demolished at 2 am January 2nd. The blast, of course, damaged the surrounding buildings, cutting chunks out of walls and sending rubble and shrapnel flying dangerously.

This family is very likely now among the dead.

Injured, denied access

By Eva Bartlett

View Eva’s blog In Gaza

Friday night, Red Crescent ambulances in Jabaliya collected numerous victims of smoke inhalation: a strange chemical smoke which seizes the lungs and air passage, and suffocates the victims. Many elderly were collected in turns, and a 3 month old baby was brought in held by a sobbing mother.

At least, at least we were able to reach them.  A Palestinian Red Crescent dispatcher has received what he says is hundreds of calls from the northern Gaza area alone, which have been left unanswered as the areas are under Israeli military occupation.

A glimpse of some of the cases one ambulance took during a brief 6 hours:

Working with Red Cross evacuation team in Gaza

By Sharon in Gaza

To view Sharon’s blog please click here

So, Thursday.. the Red Cross co-ordinated evacuation into Zaytoun. Doctor Said would look good on a Red Cross poster – black sweater, shaved head, muscles enough to keep that Red Cross flag held above his head for the two hours we were behind army lines. You’d definitely invite him in for coffee to ask for his opinion on the state of the world.

His colleague has more of an accountant look about him, but his job is to keep us alive – he is armed with a walkie-talkie and is negotiating our path constantly with the army as we move. With May, a small, quick woman who is the Engineer for the Red Crescent, supervising all the vehicles etc, I carry a stretcher and water. About 8 intrepid Red Crescent paramedics join us, wearing weighty bullet proof vests or not, dependent on their preference for possible death or certain backache.

What startles me first of all is how close the IOF have come. I have heard that they are 2km from the hospital but I guess I didn’t quite absorb that; when we all jump in the ambulances to drive there, we jump out again almost immediately. The Israeli Occupation Force is pretty much just round the corner. I haven’t seen them in person since 2005. They ain’t changed much.

Just as I occasionally forget that the planes in the sky are killing machines and assume for a moment they’re just jetting folks off on climate damaging holidays, my brain firstly registers the sound of tanks as some sort of roadworks nearby. Which they are in a way, they are unmaking the road. As-Saladiin is the main north-south road and they’re doing their best to turn it impassible, with earth mounds and barriers and blockades made of bombed cars. Soldiers point guns at us from behind the earth mounds. Snipers cover us from occupied houses. We all hope Mr Walkie Talkie is saying the right things.

He’s very polite, and isn’t in fact saying any of the things I would be saying if I was on the phone to the IOF right now. I guess that’s why he has his job and I don’t.

Walking past all these weapons is the point where anyone would reasonably get scared; for some reason (I discovered this on my first West Bank trip years ago) this doesn’t happen to me. There’s clearly a bit of wiring in my head connected wrong, and I think people who are scared and do stuff anyway are much braver than I am. And as you already know from my blog I do get scared sometimes, now (stupidly one might say) just isn’t one of those times.

Maybe it’s when I’ve got work to do that it’s ok. What I feel in walking this road with these good people is calm, and focused, and glad to be here. As my friends know to their sorrow, what I don’t cope with is supermarkets and four-by-fours and plastic. Even more, I don’t cope with the dissonance of trying to live in a Western society that pretends this reality, the reality of this road I am walking at this moment, does not exist. In the UK, in front of me is McDonalds, in my head are the tanks. It almost sends me crazy sometimes.

So here, the dissonance is finally gone, and the relief is great. So yes, I acknowledge I have a personal agenda. We all do.

When I was a kid, I was very aware of war zones, but I always understood they happened in places different from my home. I would like to tell you about what I am seeing right now as I walk. I am seeing flowering vines. Bright curtains in windows. Chickens running about. This is your home, you know. This is the garden where your children play. This is your house with obscene holes blown in it, with Israeli snipers lurking in the shadows of its roof, with a dead resistance fighter sitting with his back to your wall.

“Red Cross! It’s safe to come out! We can evacuate you!” everyone shouts up at the silent windows of the next house, the one after, the one after that. And eventually a lone elderly man appears from a house holding a white flag. And the a whole collection of faces behind a gate, hands reaching for our bottles of water. A dead teenage boy has been placed outside the gate. “My son,” says a man simply to us, in English. We ask them to wait there and continue. After an hour and a half, we have collected about 80 people, at least half children and many elderly. For each turn off the path we make to shout at damaged houses, permission must be asked and granted. And yes, I did the RC poster thing myself and carried a small child. Well, he only had little legs and we were in a hurry.

And strangely, the evacuation has its lighter moments; one of the paramedics has a tendency to attempt to catch any animal that passes him, failing however to get a hold on a chicken, a duck, a cow, or a goat. Actually the goats want to accompany us of their own accord anyway, viewing the whole thing as some sort of pleasure jaunt. Red Cross and Red Crescent alike are smoking heavily as they go, lighting each other’s cigarettes.

In a straggly convoy we leave the silent houses and walk back towards army lines. 4pm is drawing near. In the Gaza city, Israeli planes continue shelling during the supposed 3 hour ceasefire, but here soldiers have watched us in eerie silence, apart from tank engines.

When the children see the tanks, their faces twist, and they reach for their mothers hands, some having to be forced to continue moving past them. Guns are trained on us. Now we can see the earth mounds we have to climb over that have our vehicles on the other side. But! It’s 4pm. Woe betide holding off the day’s ceasefire end for another 5 minutes. Whoosh of a rocket, everyone tenses, it explodes just behind the building the ambulances are parked beside. Children stumble on rubble and begin to wail. Nearby gunfire begins.

And strangely, the point after we climb over the line and open our vehicles doors is when some of the adults begin to cry anxiously. Perhaps they think there won’t be enough space for all – and we do have to shove people in, including into the ambulance carrying the three dead we stretchered out. “Where is Jusef?” “Where is Samir?” Parents lose sight of children and panic. But in the end we get them all in, and drive that oh-so-short distance back to Al Quds hospital, where people tumble out of the vans. And then there is a bright moment, which I watch from a window above; families arriving and claiming their missing people.

I sit down to eat cold rice with the medics on duty, but before I can take a mouthful, get physically hauled up 6 flights of stairs by one of the medics who was on the evacuation, to find that being on today’s team apparently merits very tasty scrambled eggs instead. We hear that on another Red Cross evacuation, the army shot at and injured one of the Red Cross workers.

Some moments of Friday 9th Jan:

…standing ten floors up in the Ramattan press building (which got struck the other day) watching phosphorous shells falling on the eastern area of Gaza city, again and again, bright white smoke rising. This stuff can burn through to the bone; the doctors say they haven’t seen anything like it. Now the thought of being underneath that does frighten me.

…discovering our final remaining internet/food cafe has been threatened with bombing and so has closed. We are *hoping* it’s temporary. It is incredibly difficult to find ways to get information out now, since movement and electricity are so limited.

…while on ambulance shift, visiting Dr Halid of the lovely smile, who is tired and missing his family. Everyone in the hospital seems to have their family on the other side of the army blockade. The 14 year old boy in the ICU bed is gone. In his place is a little one, almost a baby, his chest rising and falling with the ventilator’s jerk – Abed, enlarged pupils indicating the usual explosion-caused brain injury. Dr H realises his oxygen levels are low and swiftly begins to try to clear a blockage, asking me to hand him things. “He will die,” says Dr H, “but he will not die of suffocation.” In the middle of this EB appears to hurry me to the ambulance, I tell him I can’t come. Later I hear from him that the call turns out to be to 3 injured people from the same family after an attack on their house, their injuries involve missing limbs and holes in chests he has to try to seal. His face is sad and subdued- no access to his wife and 3 kids, his house demolished, and a damn hard job. I feel extremely bad I wasn’t there to help, even just to share the weight of witnessing these terrible things.

…one of the medics telling me about a call the Red Crescent received yesterday, from a woman sobbing that she had no flour to make bread and could not feed her children. “What could I do? All I had to offer anyone was an ambulance.” he said.

…coming home this morning to discover the fire station on the other side of the road is no more. Glad I wasn’t home for that.

Saturday 3pm:

Just posting this now from Ramattan, their Wifi is working today thank goodness and they don’t mind us hitching a ride on it. Mo stands at the window watching Israeli tanks shell buildings in the distance. As usual smoke is rising in several locations. There is a press conference going on behind me about the fact that the government body that manages the water here is now unable to guarantee waste water treatment or drinking water. I am hearing of more and more houses with no water at all. I suppose maybe next time I go to fill my water container there maybe nothing to fill it with. What happens then?

The FreeGaza boat is trying to reach us again tomorrow!!!! Bless their brave hearts.

Sharon in Gaza: January 7th, 8th and 9th 2009

By Sharon in Gaza

To view Sharon’s blog please click here

Nour, evacuated from Zaytoun on Wednesday
Nour, evacuated from Zaytoun on Wednesday
I covered another ambulance shift Wednesday night, working with two guys who might turn out to be my favourites. S is a sweet EMT driver with good English, very helpful for me, with the ambition to have a baby born in his ambulance since so far he only knows the theory of the process. EB is a dad of three, with a wife who he insists doesn’t mind the idea of him having a second wife at some point. S is scathing about the concept of multiple wives.

EB is happy for me to work as his assistant so that’s pretty cool. I can actually be useful especially when a medic is outnumbered; last night at one point we took on four injured people after a rocket blast near Palestine square, all from the same family home. A little boy with a head wound, two adult men, one with a head wound and the other with a leg wound. A young woman who hadn’t any visible bleeding waited uncomplainingly til last, at which point we found that under her shirt, glass or shrapnel had entered deep beside her spine, so she got sent off for an x-ray on arrival to Al Shifa.

I’d heard word that Hassan was here in Al Quds, but by the time I got here he’d been sent home, which was encouraging in terms of his wound, and certainly good for his family who hadn’t seen him since the strikes began I think. I’ve since glimpsed the footage A took of his shooting, presented on AlJazeerah, so at least it’s got that far, and I had reports of it being on New York TV.

Dr Halid’s house in Khan Younis was destroyed yesterday. So was EB’s. So was Dr Basher’s, and his next door neighbour’s. He showed me the usual photos of rubble, his personal rubble. Three more homeless families taken in by relatives, whose houses also may be under threat. Is anyone’s home going to be left standing?

Young boy evacuated from Zaytoun - Eye and arm injuries
Young boy evacuated from Zaytoun - Eye and arm injuries
Wednesday was the first day when there was a truce from 1pm til 4pm. In that time, the Red Cross successfully negotiated for themselves and Red Crescent medics to enter Zaytoun, one of the places where calls for help have not been allowed to be responded to. My medic friends described walking for about 4 km, using donkey carts to bring out the few dead and injured they could; they only had time to reach four houses. At times they were shot at by the army despite the advance arrangements.

The house of the Samoudi family was one of the houses they reached. A medic told me that two days before, there had been a call from this house to the Red Crescent, saying that 25 women and children were there, with about 5 shaheed after shelling attacks. But on Wednesday when the house was reached, almost all were dead, survivors included one 11 year old boy with a leg injury. What shocked the medic I spoke to was that the majority appeared to have been killed by close range shooting – it seemed an execution had taken place. I have not been able to find out further clear details on this, and in fact there are various confusing versions of this story, speaking of seven families and 100 people in fact being in multiple houses together that were shelled. Ramattan journalists are going to interview a survivor in the hospital this afternoon so it may become clearer.

At other locations children without food or water were found besides dead parents. Some of the injured people brought out are above us here in the Al Quds hospital. I met baby Nour, tucked in a bed with her mother, and another woman with them whose child had been killed.

Following this I obtained permission to go on Thursday’s Red Cross/Red Crescent evacuation back to Zaytoun again during the hours of ceasefire. My impression was they were glad of a second woman and another international. The team was made up of three Red Cross folks and about ten Red Crescent medics. A similar RC evacuation team in another location during ceasefire was fired upon, with one Red Cross worker injured. I am going again today, Friday with the team from Al Quds. I will try to write a description of this process shortly.

We understand also that UN food deliveries were fired upon and one or two UN people were killed. My access to the net is so little that you will be able to find out more accurate reports on these sort of events (ie involving international agencies) with your own searching.

Last night for the first time I went back to my flat with the aim of getting a night’s sleep, having not had more than 2 hours in a row in any 24 since this whole thing started. I wish I hadn’t! Being away from Palestinian or international friends was hard, but being woken 2 hours into my longed for sleep by the sound of shooting outside the house had me in complete confusion, since it wasn’t coming from a hovering Apache.

Since on the evacuation today I finally saw Israeli tanks and soldiers and realised how close their lines are, my sleepy mind immediately decided they’d somehow reached the port area. The drone planes were also going crazy, normally they mainly sound sinister but monotonous, now they sounded like a bunch of very mad hornets, swooping about manically.

I started to think about what to grab for an escape back to my friends, but a little while later I got onto V and he explained that the drone planes have started shooting, something at least us foreigners had no idea they could do. Rockets, yes, shooting, no. Last night apparently for the first time they began shooting at anyone on the street. I shelved my escape plans, but then the hornets started swooping nearing to me and the rockets were rocking the building. So I jumped up, packed a bag for if the building fell apart, got dressed, moved my mattress the furthest I could from outside walls, and then miraculously managed to go back to sleep.

When I visited the Kabariti family yesterday, M told me that the girls are asking him how much it hurts to get injured, and what happens if they die. They are seeing so many pictures of children like themselves wrapped in body bags. He has explained that God sends you into unconciousness if you are hurt, so you don’t feel the pain

11am: I have just heard that the evacuation for today has been called off, I am unclear whether Israel won’t agree to co-ordination or if the RC, like UNWRA, have frozen their operations after being under attack yesterday. So this means more time to wait, for the people trapped in no-man’s-land.