Tag: Al Shifa Hospital - Page 3 - International Solidarity Movement

Majda’s story: “Are my children terrorists?”

31 January 2009

Nadeem family: Mohanned, Majda, Firas, Basher, Tala, Dima

The night of Wednesday, January 14, was the worst night for the people in the Tela Howa area. You’ve already heard Reem’s story, and heard from me that this was the night they began to drop rockets on the Al Quds hospital, with our worst rocket fire occuring Thursday night.

Today I met Majda Nadeem and her children. They live on the third floor of a building beside the crossroads of the main road that leads from Al Quds hospital. I was led to their story via the story of the Al Haddad family, which happened a few hours later and had a much more tragic end.

Majda, who is a poet with her own website, but also the pretty and youthful looking mum of Tala (7), Dima (12), Firas (13), Basher (14), and Mohanned (16), told me the area their building was in was targetted from about 1am that night. They hid in their middle room, away from any outside walls. Early on they thought maybe it was specifically their building being targeted with rockets and about to be destroyed, so they ran down into the street, but then decided it was the next door building and that the street was even more dangerous because the Israeli planes were shooting anything that moved.

So they spent the night awake and frightened, praying, thinking they would never see daylight. At 6am 3 phosphorous shells hit their building, setting their cousin’s ground floor flat on fire, and they realised some of the buildings near them were on fire too. The phosophorus fumes made it almost impossible to breath, and then at 7.30am an F16 plane dropped a missile on the main road beside them (I saw the enormous crater) and the exploding rubble smashed all their windows and doors. Terrified, they fled the building again.

Majda’s husband Nasser and Basher and Firas went to try to get their car, but it wouldn’t start. Majda and Mohanned tried to get the girls away across the street. They got as far as the wall beside the street, and a tank – that could clearly see they were a family group carrying small bags – opened fire on them as they cowered against the wall. Mohanned made it across the street, but Majda dropped the bags and tried to shield the girls. “Mohanned was calling something to me but the attack was so loud I couldn’t hear. I tried to run to him with the girls, but fell on the street. I was injured and bleeding but I crawled over to him.”

By this time Majda couldn’t see where her husband or other sons were, and the mobile wouldn’t work. When she finally got through for a moment, her husband told her he and Basher had been shot, were unable to move, and were lying flat on the street in the hope of surviving the combined land and air attack, in sight of the tanks that had already shot them. Getting her other three children to shelter, Majda tried to call the ambulance, the Red Cross, even a radio station, but the phone wouldn’t work. So she set out to run to Al Shifa hospital for help.

When she said this, I stopped to check I’d understood. Al Quds hospital was 5 minutes away and Al Shifa was at least a kilometre, it takes me about half an hour to walk there from Al Quds. Majda explained that she knew from the radio that Al Quds was under the same attack as they were and there was no way she could make it there alive, nor could anyone there reach them alive, which was in fact true.

In the meantime, 13 year old Firas was also going for help for his brother and father, but almost immediately he was shot in the knee by an Israeli sniper. This didn’t stop him however – he covered at least 60 yards, half of them in sight of the tanks, to reach his cousin’s house. His cousin then managed to contact a neighbour who was a doctor with a UN car, and they went into the line of fire and picked up Nasser and Basher and got them to Al Shifa. By the time Majda reached Al Shifa (I still can’t get my head around how she must have felt during that run) her husband was in surgery and her son was also being treated.

Now, she has her two boys safe in her own double bed, each with a bandaged leg. Basher has steel bolts in his – he lost a large chunk of the lower leg to what have been described to me as a large bullet. He was due to enter a kung fu championship, so that’s had to be put on hold, but he was apparently bravely joking with his nurse, during a painful dressing change, that he could still kick with the other leg.

Firas is going to have an operation on Tuesday because his knee needs putting back together to what extent it can be. Mohammed and Hazem, volunteer nurses-in-training attached to Al Shifa, come in daily to care for them. Both boys have lovely smiles, and their mother says they mostly behave well to each other while sharing the bed. Their father Nasser, an engineer with no work for more than two years since the siege allows few building materials in, is still in Egypt being treated. As I understand it, his hip, kidney, and prostrate are all damaged.

Dima and Tala come in from school while I am there, being treated to the usual coffee and arabic sweets. Such small girls. “Are they terrorists?” asks their mother. “My family cares about all people. We don’t mind if they are from a different country or a different religion. We think all people are the same. That’s what we believe.”

Where would you go?

By Eva Bartlett in Gaza
ingaza.wordpress.com

If your unbelievably small and overcrowded land was being terrorized, pulverized by bombs from the world’s 4th largest military, and your borders were closed; if your house was not safe, mosque (church) not safe, school not safe, street not safe, UN refugee camp not safe…Where would you go, run, hide?

Over 15,000 have been made homeless, internal refugees from Israel’s house-bombings, shelling, and shooting. Some have been housed in UN schools around Gaza. In Jabaliya today, Israeli warplanes bombed one such school. Shifa’s director conservatively estimates 40 dead, 10s injured. It must be higher. I will go to the recieving hospital and look at the mutilated survivors, maybe see the corpses come in. Then I will tell and show you, if I’m not bombed.

The Shifa director also told me that emergency medics still cannot reach the Zaytoun house that yesterday morning was bombed with inhabitants locked inside. There are two main accounts of the story, both criminal. One: Israeli soldiers rounded up the inhabitants of the multi-story house, separated the men –15, I was told–and shot them point blank in front of the women and children of the family, 20, I was told. Then, laid explosives around the house and bombed the rest of the extended family.

Two: Israeli soldiers rounded up the inhabitants of the multi-story house, locked them in one room for a day, and bombed it the following morning.

Either way, Israeli soldiers intentionally imprisoned and bombed the inhabitants of the house. And are actively preventing medics from reaching any potential survivors. The medics have tried to coordinate with the ICRC (International Committee of the Red Cross) without success: no one can reach the house.

Is this logical, humane, moral? What’s going on with the ICRC? Would this happen in any other place, with any other invading force?

A house in Beach camp, off the coast and in Gaza city, was shelled yesterday around 8:30 am, seven killed, including five children.

And of course, the bombing of residential houses in the north goes on. I’m cut off from what happens in the central and southern areas, until I’m able to sit with journalists and get the news. But I know they are not excluded from this carnage.

Jan 5 night shift / UNRWA refugee schools attacked

By Sharon in Gaza
talestotell.wordpress.com

Evacuated after multiple rocket hits destroyed their home

8pm: I am due at Al Quds hospital for a Red Crescent shift at 8pm, but as I am finishing up writing with the seaside apartment’s generated electricity, the strangest noise arrives from the sea. It is a whooshing sound like a rocket coming very close; V and I look at each other, look at the seaside window – he pulls his cap lower and leans away from the window, I put my jacket over my head so I can’t see what happens. But instead of finishing with an explosion, the sound decreases again into the distance.

It is then repeated several times, and I realise what we are hearing is not rockets, but planes – very loud and incredibly fast, making me think of the term supersonic, if that even means anything outside of comics. I set off to walk the half hour dark route to Al Quds hospital, but am only half way up the hill when more planes speed over, and explosions start between me and the hospital. I completely lose my nerve, stopping still under a tree and texting Eva that I can’t do this walk by myself. The planes have freaked her out as well. I walk quickly back to the apartment, and try to work out what to do. V suggests I walk the other direction, to Al Shifa hospital, and catch an ambulance shuttling to Al Quds.

What is with these planes? This little bit of land doesn’t even have a proper army! The term “overkill” has never had more meaning. It takes me some time to get up the courage to set off again, luckily the wierd planes have gone.

10.45 I am still at Al Shifa, having been waylaid by a Press TV reporter wanting to do an interview, but I’ve got into an ambulance ready to head off. Just as it is about to leave, rockets fall either side of the hospital and we retreat hurriedly back under the entrance shelter.

By the time we get to Al Quds the atmosphere is hectic. They have just received three men who were in a car outside a bombed house, I am not clear if one is dying or already dead. We rush another of them to Al Shifa for neurosurgery. Then we are sent off at high speed to emergency calls, through a darkened city full of smoke. Double strikes by Israel happen so often now that the ambulance workers’ stress levels are very high; the medics are doing everything at top speed and shouting at the tops of their voices as they do it. Rubble covers the streets from strikes minutes ago. The familiar smell of rocket fire fills the air, the same smell the grey dead men give off whom we have collected in the last days.

We peer into the darkness for someone watching for us; we spot a young boy who runs back around the corner. He returns with his family, 25 of them, mostly terrified young children. One boy is hopping. The medics run to grab them, shouting what must be the equivalent of “Move, we’ve got to get out of here!” Everyone is shoved into ambulances; a girl of about six is posted through the half open window into my arms. We tear back to the hospital, offloading them into comparative shelter, racing back to collect a father with his daughter of about 8 in his arms, a head trauma case.

Later, I go to see the family of 25, gathered in a room where they have been given blankets and food. There don’t appear to be any serious injuries, though when I hear more that seems a miracle. I ask two articulate and beautiful teenage English speakers from the family, R and S, what their story is. They explain half the family is their aunt and her children, who came to their house because their own was destroyed. R says – “in the last 3 nights, we were hit 13 times the first night, 3 times the next, and tonight 10 times. The 3rd floor was gone, then the second floor, we were just left in the first floor, now there is almost nothing.” They translate the aunt’s words to me – “What is the solution for us? What?” The girls add, “We had no solution from Fatah. No solution from Hamas. We just want peace! Just peace!”

“Where will you go?” I ask them.

“We don’t know.” they say. “We have some other family but they left their house too because Israel threatened to bomb it. We don’t know.”

I hear from E that she was borrowing internet in the Sharuch building tonight, which houses Russia TV, Fox, possibly Reuters, and other press offices, when it was struck 7 times one after the other. She got safely to the ground from the tenth floor, with everyone else, but she says she did think the whole place was going to collapse.

There is confused news through the night of more attacks on mosques and homes throughout Gaza. After the hectic earlier hours, the middle part of the shift is filled by collecting 5 women going into labour; by the 5th call S thinks his dispatcher is joking. I am pleased to be able to smile at our patients. Then S tells me about a 17 year old woman who went into labour yesterday. Her sister-in-law’s 1 year old was killed in the last days in her arms, the bullet continuing on to wound the mother. And her father-in-law is dead, but his body has not been able to be collected.

4am: Behind the two reception desks opposite each other are two families sitting on plastic chairs put in a circle. They are silent. A medic explains that the residential building behind us here at Al Quds has had a bomb threat. These families have evacuated to us here. Others remain in the building.

6am: I speak to EJ in Jabalia on the office phone. I forgot to tell you that the Red Crescent Ambulances again relocated their base, since there was a concern that Karmel Adwan hospital as a government hospital might be a target. So EJ, Mo, and A have done the night shift from the new base of Al Awda hospital. EJ says that at about 5am, 4 ambulances went to collect wounded from a house attack. They returned to get further wounded, again in a convoy of 4, and the Israeli army shelled the house for a second time as soon as they arrived. The medics outside the vans were injured by flying rubble. EJ was inside.

S tells me there was an attack on the Shatr UNWRA School, by Apache he thinks, which killed three UNWRA volunteers helping with the refugees. He is asked to take the ambulance to collect the body parts, as they are near the bathrooms which is distressing for people. But the RC boss says his is the only ambulance on standby so he must wait til others return first.

5pm: We just heard in the last hour that the Al Fakhoura UNWRA School was shelled, we think by tanks, and it is confirmed that 43 members of the same extended family were killed. The UNWRA Schools are sheltering refugees whose homes Israel has already bombed or threatened to bomb. We have also heard a third UNWRA school was attacked earlier but we have no further details yet. I cannot express the anger I am feeling right now.

Our group is holding together but we are feeling the increasing strain of not enough internet access, food, sleep, or hope for an end to this insanity. The numbers of dead have exceeded 570 and the injured have exceeded 2,600.

It’s really hard to post from here

By Eva Bartlett
ingaza.wordpress.com

Every time I manage to make it back to Gaza to write for a period, a new calamity.

“They’re shelling Awda hospital,” in Jabaliya, the news reports. Our internationals there at the moment report it was two shells at a police post next to the hospital, one hospital worker getting shrapnel to the head, but surviving.

The numbers slaughtered and injured are so high now – 521 and 3,000 as of this morning, Gaza time – that sitting next to a dead or dying person is becoming normal. The stain of blood on the ambulance stretcher pools next to my coat, the medic warning me my coat may be dirtied. What does it matter? The stain doesn’t revolt me as it would have, did, one week ago. Death fills the air, the streets in Gaza, and I cannot stress that this is no exaggeration.

Back in Gaza city briefly, after a day and night again with the medics, I’ll try to summarize, though there is too much to tell, too much incoming news, and it’s too hard to reach people, even those just a kilometer away. Before dropping me off, the medics had gone to different gas stations, searching for gas for the ambulances. Two stations, no luck. Some at a final source fills their tanks. The absence of gas is critical. So is the absence of bread, which goes on, the lines longer than ever yet.

A text tells me (at this point I have to rely on news from phone and text messages, when reception is available) that the UN says 13,000 have been displaced since these attacks, that 20% of the dead are women and children, 70% are without drinking water. There are many more facts to sober one drunk on apathy, but I can’t source or share them now.

The Israeli army occupied areas in the north, shelled houses, demolishing them, many injuries, dead, many off-limits to the ambulances.

Beit Hanoun is occupied by the Israeli army, which is now controlling the entry points to the northern region, cutting it off. One small, sub-par hospital without an ICU is staggering under the influx of injured from house demolitions, shellings, shootings… Two ambulances serve this region, I don’t have any information on their condition, the amount of petrol they have, or what areas of the Beit Hanoun region are accessible or not.

Entering via an ambulance to take an emergency case to Gaza’s Shifa hospital, I see the Beit Hanoun hospital crammed, with a frenzied air, families desperate to get their injured care…those who have been able to get to the hospital. Mohammed Sultan, 19, stands dazed with a gunshot graze to the back of his head. From Salateen, northwestern Gaza, he had to walk 1 km before a car could reach him and take him here.

The man we transfer to Shifa has been shot in the face. He is about 35, is a civilian, was in or near his house. His face has exploded, and we move as fast as possible over torn up roads, ambulance jarring as we move and as the medics try to administer delicate care. It’s on everyone’s mind that the army is present here, that our safety is not.

Beit Lahia and beyond, in the northwest, are mostly off-limits to ambulances, leaving the wounded and dead where they are. The calls from there for help, for evacuation, have been non-stop and now go ignored.

In Zaytoun, reports have one extended family being separated men from women, locked inside two houses, and the houses shelled a day later (this morning, around 11 am). Bodies are still being pulled and carted to Shifa hospital. Many estimate that as many as 20 were killed, 10s more injured. I will go to Shifa after this to try to confirm numbers, though again the disclaimer that confirmation in these conditions takes time (and working phone lines). Zaytoun area is occupied in parts, making ambulance access again nearly-impossible, if not fully, I don’t know at this point.

I’m told that areas further south have been invaded, shelled, occupied. Like Zahara, and Juhadik in central Gaza. Press TV reporter Yusuf al Helo told me this morning that the reason he hadn’t answered my phone calls last night (he is one of the better sources for up-to-date news) was because his uncle, in the extended Zaytoun area, just off the main Salah el Din street, was killed when Israeli forces shelled their house. “My cousins were in the house too,” he told me, as were many more injured. Over 15 hours after the assault, Yusuf updates me: “until now they still haven’t been able to take the injured and dead out of my uncle’s house.”

Last night, in a Jabaliya hospital, I talk with one nurse who tells us that his brother Adham, an 8 year old, was shot in the neck and in the chest at 4:30 pm that day (January 4th) when on his rooftop in the same northwestern area that ambulances now cannot reach.

Mohammed tells me his village, Khosar, east of Khan Younis was shelled in an agricultural area, one of the many open areas continuing to be pummelled. One of the many areas period: open, residential, market…

Painfully, I learn that after a hasty funeral, Arafa’s mourning tent was shelled yesterday, mourners inside. At least five injuries and much insult.

At 4:37, Haidar updates me that “the house of the El Eiwa family, from Shejaiyee, was attacked. Lots of casualties, including children.”

He updates me on a BBC report: “the one o’clock news on the local BBC channel interviewed a Norwegian doctor in Gaza wo said some of the victims bear traces of depleted uranium in their bodies.”