Tag: Cast Lead

Il Manifesto: The angel factories

By Vittorio Arrigoni

Translated from Il Manifesto

To view original article, published by Il Manifesto on the 30th December 2008, click here

Jabilia, Bet Hanun, Rafah, Gaza City are the legs of the journey in my personal map of hell. Whatever the press releases from the summit of the Israeli military may say, recited parrot-style all over Europe and the US via the disinformation experts, in the last few days I’ve been an eye witness to the bombing of mosques, schools, universities, hospitals, markets and many, many civilian buildings.

The medical director at Al Shifa hospital has confirmed he received calls from members of the IDF, the Israeli Army, ordering him to evacuate the hospital, or else face being showered by missiles. But they didn’t let the Army intimidate them.

I should be sleeping at the port (though we haven’t shut our eyes once in Gaza for at least 4 days), but it’s being constantly bombed at night. You no longer hear the sirens of ambulances in a mad chase, simply because there isn’t a living soul left at the port or its environs. Everyone is dead, and it feels like treading a cemetery in the aftermath of an earthquake.

The situation is really that of an unnatural catastrophe, a hate-fuelled and cynical upheaval catapulted onto the people of Gaza like molten lead, tearing human bodies apart. Contrarily to their predictions, it unites all Palestinians, brought together and turned into a sole entity. These are people who may not even have greeted one another until recently, on account of belonging to opposing factions.

When the bombs shower like rain down from the sky, from a height of ten thousand metres you can be sure they make no distinction between a hamas or fatah banner hanging from your window sill. They’re no less explosive even when you’re Italian. There’s no such thing as a surgically precise military operation. When the Air Force and the Navy start bombing, the only surgical operations are those tackled by the doctors, unhesitatingly amputating limbs reduced to a pulp, even though those same arms and legs may have been saved. There’s no time, you have to run, and the time used to treat a seriously injured limb may spell death for the next wounded patient in line awaiting a transfusion. At Al Shifa hospital 600 inpatients are in serious conditions, with only 29 breathing machines.

They’re short of everything, especially experienced staff. For this exact reason, tired as we were (not so much by the sleepless nights as by the apathy and compliance of Western governments, at all effects accomplices of Israel’s crimes), we decided that one of our Free Gaza Movement boats would leave the port of Larnaca, Cyprus last night, carrying three tons of medicine and medical staff. I waited for them in vain – they ought to have docked the boat at 8 AM this morning. Instead, they were intercepted by 11 Israeli war ships at 90 nautical miles from Gaza. They tried to sink them in full international waters. They rammed into them three times, producing an engine failure and a leak in the hull. By pure chance the crew and passengers are still alive, and have managed to dock the boat at a Lebanese port.

Feeling increasingly frustrated by the “civilised” world’s deafening silence, my friends will make a second attempt soon. They’ve in fact unloaded the medicine from our damaged boat, the Dignity, and filled another boat ready for departure, heading straight to Gaza.

We’re certain that the criminal will of Israel, in trampling all over human rights and international law, will never be as strong as our determination in the defense of human rights.

Many journalists interviewing me ask me about the humanitarian situation of Palestinians in Gaza, as if the problem amounted just to food, water, electricity and fuel shortages, rather than the matter being about who’s the actual cause of all this, by obstructing the borders, bombing the water plant or electric power stations.

There are endless queues at the few bakeries with their shutters still semi-open; they have 40 or 50 people scuffling to grab the last chunk of bread. One of the bakers, Ahmed, is a friend of mine, and he’s told me about his greatest fears of the last few days. He dreads the bakeries being mobbed more than the bombs. Brawls have already exploded in front of his shop. The police were around to keep public order until recently, especially in front of bakeries, but you won’t see a single uniformed policeman in all of Gaza now. Some are in hiding at the moment. The others are all buried under two metres of earth, including some of my friends.

Another massacre of children in Jabilia: two little brothers, were struck by an Israeli bomb while driving a donkey-drawn cart in the as-Sekka street in Jabalia.

Mohammad Rujailah, a partner in the ISM, took a photo which is more than just a still image: it’s a history, the revelation of the tragedy we’re intensely consumed by every minute, counting every hour while losing friends, brothers, relatives. Tanks, fighter planes, drones, Apache helicopters, the world’s largest and fiercest army attacking a people who use donkeys as their main means of transportation, just like in Jesus Christ’s time:

—here the picture—-

According to Al Mizan, a human rights monitoring centre, while I write 55 children are involved in bombings, 20 are being killed and 40 are being seriously injured.

Israel has turned the Palestinian hospitals and morgues into angel factories, not realising just how much hatred they are generating in Palestine and the rest of the world.

The angel factories are churning angels out at the rate of a non-stop production line tonight as well, I can tell from the rumbles of explosions I hear outside my window.

Those tiny dismembered and amputated bodies, those lives snuffed out before they could even blossom, will be a recurrent nightmare for the rest of my life. If I can still find the strength to talk about their end it’s only because I want to bring justice to those who no longer have a voice, those who’ve never had a hint of a voice, perhaps for the benefit of those who’ve never had any ears.

Stay human

Vittorio Arrigoni

Vittorio Arrigoni writes from Gaza

By Vittorio Arrigoni in Gaza

Translated from Il Manifesto

To view original article, published by Il Manifesto on the 29th December, click here

6:05 PM, Marna house, Gaza city

An acrid smell of sulphur fills the air while the sky is shaken by earth-shattering rumbles. My ears are now deaf to the explosions while my eyes are all out of tears from all the corpses. I stand in front of Al Shifa hospital, Gaza’s main hospital, and we’ve just received Israel’s terrible threat that they intend to bomb its under construction wing. This would be nothing new, as Wea’m hospital was bombed just yesterday, along with a medicine warehouse in Rafah, the Islamic university, which was also destroyed, along with various mosques scattered along the Strip. Not to mention many CIVILIAN structures.

Apparently, they can no longer find “sensible” targets, the air force and the navy is killing time targeting places of worship, schools and hospitals. It’s another 9/11 every single hour, every minute around here, and tomorrow is always a new day of mourning, always identical to the previous one. You notice the helicopters and airplanes constantly overhead, you see a flash, but you’re already a goner and it’s too late to take flight. There are no bunkers against the bombs in the Strip and no place is really safe. I can’t contact my friends in Rafah, not even those who live North of Gaza City, hopefully because the phone lines are overloaded. Hopefully. I haven’t slept in 60 hours, and same goes for every Gazan.

Yesterday three other ISM members and I spent the entire night at the al Awda hospital in the Jabalia refugee camp. We were there because we were fearing the much dreaded ground raid that never happened. But the Israeli tanks are posted all along the Strip’s border, and their corpse-hungry creaks will apparently form a funeral march tonight. Around 11:30 PM a bomb fell about 800 metres from the hospital, the shock wave blow several windows apart, injuring the injured. An ambulance arrived, then they blew up a mosque, thankfully empty at that time. Unfortunately, though it actually has nothing to do with bad luck but with the criminal and terroristic will to massacre civilians, the Israeli bomb has also struck the building adjacent to the mosque, which was also destroyed. We watched as the tiny bodies of six little sisters were pulled out of the rubble – five are dead, one is in life-threatening conditions. They laid the little girls out on the blackened asphalt, and they looked like broken dolls, disposed of as they were no longer usable.

This wasn’t a mistake, but a voluntary, and cynical horror. We’re at a toll of 320 dead, more than a thousand wounded and, according to a doctor at Shifa, 60% of these are destined to die in the next few hours or days, after a prolonged agony.There are many missing, and for the last two days despairing wives have been searching for their husbands or children in hospitals, often to no avail.

The morgue is a macabre spectacle. A nurse told me that after hours of searching, a Palestinian woman recognised her husband from his amputated hand. All that’s left of her husband, and the wedding band on her finger from the eternal love they had sworn one another. Out of a house inhabited by two families, very little has remained of their bodies. They showed their relatives half of one bust and three legs.

Right now, one of our Free Gaza Movement boats is leaving the port in Larnaca, Cyprus. I spoke to my friends on board. They’ve heroically amassed medicine and steeped it everywhere in the boat. It should reach the port of Gaza tomorrow around 8:00 AM. Here’s to hoping that the port will still exist after another night of endless bombing. I’ll be in touch with them for the entire night. Please, someone stop this nightmare.

Choosing to remain silent means somehow lending support to the genocide unfolding right now. Shout out your indignation, in every capital of the “civilised” world, in every city, in every square, covering our own screams of pain and terror. A slice of humanity is dying in pitiful in a useless listening.

Israeli helicopters and navy continue to fire on Gaza’s port

The shelling of Gaza’s port continued on the evening of December 30th, as Israeli Apache helicopters began firing rockets on the area and Naval vessels continued their ongoing shelling.

Eva Bartlett, a Canadian human rights worker, heard and witnessed the attack from a building 150 meters away. She reports that the first explosion began at 9:18 pm. For the next half hour, the Naval ships and Apache helicopters continued firing intermittently. At 9:57, the intensity of the attack increased and more than 15 shells and rockets were fired in quick succession, with the Apaches specifically targeting the landing dock and the breakwater. Eyewitnesses in the area report that a Port Authority office and a boat anchored in the port were destroyed. The rockets and shelling continued into the night, while Israeli drones could also be heard circling overhead.

Gaza city port, the only port for the whole of the Gaza strip, houses a large number of Palestinian fishing boats on its piers. Many of these boats have also undoubtedly been damaged in the heavy shelling, further destabilizing the already fragile fishing industry upon which Gazans have been heavily reliant since Israel imposed its blockade on the strip in June 2007. The extent of the damage, however, is at this time indeterminable, as the continued presence of the warships in the harbor makes any assessment impossible.

This is the second time that Gaza’s port has been destroyed by Israeli bombing since construction began in 1999. Israeli Navy warships previously bombed the port in 2002, under the pretext that it could be utilized for arms smuggling. Repairs on the port were agreed upon in negotiations between Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon and Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas in 2005, after illegal Israeli settlements were withdrawn from Gaza, with the hope that an open sea port would not only provide a much-needed boost to Gaza’s economy, but would also function as an important symbol of Palestinian independence.

The Palestinian dream for the port – an independent harbour that would enable Gazan’s to freely import and export, creating jobs and freedom from Israel’s control of all Gazan borders – was, however, never realized. Whilst the port was repaired, Israel’s illegal control of Gazan waters continued unabated; illegally preventing Gazan boats, including fishermen, from venturing farther than 6 miles from shore, maintaining the imprisonment of Gaza. This oft-denied Israeli policy was exemplified most recently on Monday 29th December, when the Israeli Navy attacked the Free Gaza boat, “The Dignity”, in international waters as it attempted to carry 3 tonnes of desperately-needed medical aid into Gaza’s now-ruined port.

The destruction of the port has rendered humanitarian missions such as these even more difficult. Should further boats manage break the Israeli blockade, there is now nowhere left to unload