Sharon Lock | Tales to Tell
Many people in Gaza are now homeless due to Israeli attacks on their communities. Temporary shelters are springing up across Gaza.
Temporary shelters in Jabalia
Tag: Gaza
Ground Zero
Tuesday 20th January, 2009
Earlier this week, following the withdrawal of Israeli troops from the Gaza Strip, residents returned to some of the areas which had 
become no-go zones during the attacks, such as Jabalia just outside Gaza City. On Tuesday 20th January, ISM Gaza Strip volunteers joined a university professor as he visited his house in the east of Jabalia. We were shown from room to room around the bombed-out shell of what had once been a beautiful home. When asked if he and his family would continue to live there, he replied calmly that it was their right to and that they would never leave their land.
As we made our way up the hill through the orange grove beyond the professor’s house, we encountered evidence of where tanks had been positioned – churned up ground, tank tracks, uprooted olive trees. At the top of the hill, from where the Green Line was clearly visible, we began to see homes which had been totally destroyed, several stories concertinaed. Families sat together on the rubble of their homes. Children collected firewood from the dismembered limbs of fruit trees.
At first it seemed as though it was ‘just’ a cluster of ten or fifteen destroyed houses, which would have been bad enough in its own right. However, as we continued walking it became apparent that the devastation extended into the next street and the next, more and more destroyed and damaged homes following one another. This entire neighbourhood on this easternmost edge of Jabalia had been virtually wiped off the face of the earth. It resembled the site of some massive natural disaster. However this ground zero was entirely man-made.
The gouged-out windows of some of the homes still standing were filled with dark green sand bags. This was a sign these houses had been used by the Israelis as sniper positions. One could barely imagine how the situation must have been in this neighbourhood when it was under attack.
We met a blind woman who had been held prisoner for 11 days in one room of her home, along with a paralysed man, whilst Israeli soldiers used it as a base. Terrified and expecting to be killed at any time, they were given water twice during their ordeal. When the Red Crescent evacuated them, the woman said she could finally breathe for the first time since the soldiers arrived. The walls had been daubed with Hebrew graffiti, empty plastic food trays were strewn around and the stairway stank of urine.
In the wake of a Gazan holocaust, thousands of people are finding themselves in truly desperate situations. A traumatized but resilient population is somehow beginning to pick up the pieces. Merely continuing to exist is a form of resistance.
Electronic Intifada: Sharpeville 1960, Gaza 2009
Dr. Haidar Eid | Electronic Intifada
22 January 2009, Gaza
“Where can I bring him a father from? Where can I bring him a mother from? You tell me!”
These are the desperate words of Subhi Samouni to Al Jazeera’s Gaza correspondent. Subhi lost 17 members of his immediate family, including the parents of his 7-year old grandson. Shockingly, even as I write this article, corpses of the Samouni family are still being retrieved from under the rubble – 15 days after the Israeli Occupation Forces shelled the two houses. The Israeli Occupation Forces locked 120 members of the family in one house for 12 hours before they shelled it..
Subhi’s words echo the harsh reality of all Palestinians in Gaza: alone, abandoned, hunted down, brutalized, and, like Subhi’s grandson, orphaned. 22 days of savage butchery took the lives of 1312 Palestinians, over 85 per cent of them civilians, including 434 children, 104 women, 16 medics, 4 journalists, 5 foreigners, and 105 old people..
What can one say to comfort a man who has the harrowing task of having to bury his entire family, including his wife, his sons, his daughters and his grandchildren? Tell us and we will relay your words to Uncle Subhi because his loss has made our words of condolences meaningless to our ears.
Think also of words you want to say to 70-year old Rasheed Mohammed, whose 44-year old son Samir was executed with a single bullet to the heart in front of his wife and children. The IOF refused to let an ambulance pick up his corpse for 11 days so his family had to wait for the assault to stop before they could bury him. 70-year old Rasheed had the excruciatingly painful experience of looking at, touching, kissing, and then burying the decomposed body of his son. Tell this family how to make sense of their harsh reality – say something to make the children sleep, to ease the anguish in the father’s heart, to help the wife understand why her husband had to be taken from her.
You might prefer to talk to 14-year old Amira Qirm, whose house in Gaza City was shelled with artillery and phosphorous bombs – bombs which burnt to death 3 members of her immediate family: her father, her 12-year-old brother, Ala’a, and her 11-year old sister, Ismat. Alone, injured and terrified, Amira crawled 500m on her knees to a house close by – it was empty because the family had fled when the Israeli attack began. She stayed there for 4 days, surviving only on water, and listening to the sounds of the Israeli killing machine all around her, too afraid to cry out in pain in case the soldiers heard her. When the owner of the house returned to get clothes for his family, he found Amira, weak and close to death. She is now being treated for her injuries in the overcrowded and under- resourced Al-Shifa hospital.
You can try to comfort 10 year-old Mohammed Samouni who was found lying next to the bodies of his mother and siblings, 5 days after they were killed. He would tell you what he has been telling everyone – that his brother woke suddenly after being asleep for a long time. His brother told him that he was hungry, asked for a tomato to eat and then died. Are there any other 10-year olds in the world who are asked to carry this experience around with them for the rest of their lives? Of course not – this ‘privilege’ is reserved just for Palestinian children because they were born on the land that Israel wants for itself. But it is these traumatized children who will deny Israel what it wants because their very survival is a challenge to that apartheid state. It is these same children who will surely inherit Palestine: it is their birthright and no assault can change that fact – not today, not ever..
And through it all we were subjected to Tzipi Livni, Israel’s Minister of Foreign Affairs, adamant in her defence of the world’s most ‘moral’ army. “We don’t target civilians” she lied. “We don’t want the Palestinians to leave Gaza. We just want them to move within Gaza itself!” Israel’s PM Ehud Olmert too had something to say to Palestinians in Gaza: “We are not your enemy. Hamas is your enemy.”
Amira, Mohammed, Rasheed, Subhi and the more than 40,000 families whose houses have been demolished know differently. Those people who rushed to the cemetery after it was bombed and found the body parts of their dead relatives exposed to the elements know differently. They know that they were deliberately targeted because they are Palestinian. All the rest is propaganda to appease the conscience of those with Palestinian blood on their hands – those who are both inside and outside Israel.
For 22 long days and dark nights, Gazans were left alone to face the 4th strongest army in the world – an army that has 250 nuclear heads, thousands of trigger-happy soldiers armed with Merkava tanks, F16s, Apache helicopters, naval gunships and phosphorous bombs. 22 sleepless nights, 1528 hours of constant shelling and shooting, every single minute expecting to be the next victim.
During these 22 days, while morgues overflowed and hospitals struggled to treat the injured, Arab regimes issued tons of statements, condemned and denounced and held one meaningless press conference after another. They even held two summits, the first one convened 19 full days after the assault on Gaza began and the second one the day after Israel had declared a unilateral ceasefire!
The official Arab position vis-à-vis the Palestinians since 1948, with the exception of the progressive Nationalist era (1954-1970) has been a lethal cocktail of cowardice and hypocrisy. Their latest collective failure to break the 2-year old Israeli siege of the Gaza Strip and their lack of action to support Palestinians under brutal military assault must be questioned.
Arabs must demand answers from the spineless Arab League because there was no brotherly solidarity shown to Gazans during the Israeli assault. There was no Pan Arabism evident in their platitudes. Some, shockingly, even found it an appropriate time to blame Palestinians for the situation they found themselves in, instead of demanding that Israel stop its merciless assault.
In Gaza today, we wonder how the expressions of support for us in the streets of Arab capitals can be translated into action in the absence of democracy. We wonder whether Arab citizens of despotic regimes can non-violently change the system. We torment ourselves with trying to discern the means that are currently available for democratic political change. With the ongoing massacre in Gaza, and the construction of an Apartheid system in Palestine (1948, 1967), we know that to survive, we must have the support and solidarity of our Arab brothers and sisters. We saw the Arab people rise to that challenge and stand by us for 22 days but we did not see their leaders behind them.
Archbishop Desmund Tutu of South Africa said, “If you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor.” The UN, EU, Arab League and the international community by and large have remained silent in the face of atrocities committed by Apartheid Israel. They are therefore on the side of Israel. Hundreds of dead corpses of children and women have failed to convince them to act. This is what every Palestinian knows today – whether on the streets of the Gaza Strip, the West Bank or refugee camps in the Diaspora
We are, therefore, left with one option; an option that does not wait for the UNSC, Arab Summits, or Organization of Islamic Conference to convene: the option of people’s power. This remains the only power capable of counteracting the massive power imbalance in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
The horror of the racist Apartheid regime in South Africa was challenged with a sustained campaign of Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) initiated in 1958 and given new urgency in 1960 after the Sharpeville Massacre. This campaign led ultimately to the collapse of white rule in 1994 and the establishment of a multi-racial, democratic state.
Similarly, the Palestinian call for BDS has been gathering momentum since 2005. Gaza 2009, like Sharpeville 1960, cannot be ignored: it demands a response from all who believe in a common humanity. Now is the time to boycott the apartheid Israeli state, to divest and to impose sanctions against it. This is the only way to ensure the creation of a secular, democratic state for all in historic Palestine.
This is the only answer to Uncle Subhi’s puzzling questions: it is the only way to give his grandson a future, a life of dignity and equality, a life with both peace and justice, because like all children, he deserves nothing less.
Words & Images
Sharon Lock | Tales to Tell
In their own words:
It’s going to be a terrible war. So, if we want to remain alive, we will have to kill and kill and kill. All day, every day…If we don’t kill, we will cease to exist…Unilateral separation doesn’t guarantee “peace” – it guarantees a Zionist-Jewish state with an overwhelming majority of Jews…
– Professor Arnon Soffer, Head of the IDF’s National Defense College, in an interview with the Jerusalem Post (24 May 2004)
I believe that it should have been even stronger! Dresden! Dresden! The extermination of a city! After all, we’re told that the face of war has changed. No longer is it the advancing of tanks or an organized military. […] It is a whole nation, from the old lady to the child, this is the military. It is a nation fighting a war. I am calling them a nation, even though I don’t see them as one. It is a nation fighting a nation. Civilians fighting civilians. I’m telling you that we […] must know […] that stones will not be thrown at us! I am not talking about rockets – not even a stone will be thrown at us. Because we’re Jews.[…] I want the Arabs of Gaza to flee to Egypt. This is what I want. I want to destroy the city, not necessarily the people living within it.
– Reserve Colonel Yoav Gal, an Israeli Air Force pilot, on Army Radio during “Operation Cast Lead” (11 January 2009)
Amer’s story: They killed me three times
Sharon Lock | Tales to Tell
22 January 2009
Ramatan TV, nine floors up and open 24 hours, was the last bastion of internet during the strikes. We knew the place because we got asked in for interviews, and then called a few press conferences there, for example announcing that internationals would be riding with ambulances. We began to hang around in the corners at other times, hoping no-one would mind us hitching a ride on the wifi.
Instead of complaining about random internationals cluttering up the place, Ramatan journalists wholeheartedly adopted us, brought us tea, gave us blankets if we needed to stay the night. Now most nights at about 9pm, you’ll find some of us there being fed a small feast in the kitchen.
I forgot that I didn’t like journalists much, because these guys are firstly Palestinian, and their reporting is compassionate. Now journalists are flooding in through Rafah (though I do like some of them) I was reminded. Two days ago a recently arrived Channel 4 guy came into Yousef’s office on a deadline, wanting to know how many children died in the UNSRA schools. Youself said “Two children at one school. Forty five people at another…”
“But how many of them were children?” he insisted.
“Forty five people altogether,” Yousef said, thinking he’d misunderstood.
“No,” Mr Channel 4 said irritatedly, “I want to say the number of children.”
“Oh £*$&%*&@$ @*%@&*£.” I said, and stomped off, remembering my former journalist feelings.
Yousef Al Helou has the end office in Ramatan. His TV speaks English sometimes, and he’s always willing to pool information and help us figure out what is going on. Today he took me and E to Zaytoun to hear the story of his cousin’s family. When we arrived, I realised we were only two houses from the first house we’d evacuated people from on the Red Cross evacuation I went on. I would have walked past Amer and Shireen Al Helou’s house that day. But by then it was empty and broken, because the day Amer told us about was January 4th.
Sleeping under stairs
Amer is 29. 14 people from his family were in the house that night, and they were all trying to sleep under their stairs as some sort of shelter. Even though the stairs were partly open to the back yard, the F16 attacks on the house made downstairs seem the safest place. The house now has holes from shell blasts and thousands of pock-marks from the three inch nails that the shells were filled with.
“We hadn’t known how bad it would get,” said Amer. “Or we would have left our house and gone somewhere else. But we thought our area was a quiet area. And then that night we thought they would go past us at the front. But they came from the back.” Amer didn’t know it yet, but his brother Mohammed had already been killed elsewhere that day, struck by drone rockets.
army shooting in house just before 6am Jan 4
The Israeli soldiers came to their house at about 5.30am, after the house had been shelled for 15 hours, and immediately opened fire on the family, killing Amer’s father with three shots. Then they told the family to leave. Amer had called an ambulance (which had to turn back after being shot at) and was refusing to leave his father’s body but the soldiers said they would shoot him if he stayed, so they fled 300 yards up the dirt track behind their house, at which point they were shot at again by another group of soldiers. This time Amer’s brother Abdullah was shot, Amer and Shireen’s 6 year old daughter Saja was shot in the arm, and their 1 year old daughter Farah was shot in the stomach. They spent the next 14 hours sheltering behind a small hill of dirt, while the wounded bled, and were not allowed to access help though the soldiers were aware of the injuries. Having no other way to comfort her small daughter, whose intestines were falling out, Shireen breastfed Farah as the little girl slowly bled to death.
After 14 hours, at about 8 in the evening, the soldiers sent dogs to chase them out of their shelter and dropped phosphorous bombs near them, but due to the wounded family members and having bare feet in an area of broken glass and rubble, escape was difficult. The army took the three wounded and put them behind the tanks, and captured Amer, but the rest of the family managed to get away and call the Red Crescent. The ambulance that eventually reached the injured people 7 hours later (driven by my medic friend S) took an hour to find them, and by this time Farah was dead. (When I heard Amer’s story I realised S had already told me about collecting “a small shaheed” from this area.)
Amer was held for 5 days in army custody (the first 3 without access to food, water, or a bathroom), beaten and tortured, and questioned about resistance activity which he knew nothing about. When he was finally released on the border, the army sent two known collaborators to escort him, so it would look to the resistance fighters like he himself was a collaborator. But the fighters knew who he was and that he was not a collaborator. He tells us:
“I had my four children young, and they gave me the most happiness in my life. I took such good care of them. I didn’t let them just play on the street, we had a big living room in our house with toys for them, we would invite all the neighbours’ children to come play there with ours, so that we could be sure they were all safe. I always drove them to and from school, I didn’t even let them walk. Whenever I was depressed, I would gather all my kids, pile them in the car, take them somewhere nice like the park or the beach, and then to see them happy and having fun would make me happy again.
Now my remaining children will not go to sleep without their shoes on, because they think we will have to run for our lives again.
We love life as the Israelis do. Are they the only people allowed life? They killed me three times that day, first when they killed my brother, then when they killed my father, then when they killed my daughter. We looked for my father’s body later; they had buried him under rubble, eventually we found his foot sticking out. Sometimes now I think we have to leave Gaza, to join my brother in South Africa. Sometimes I think, no – Gaza is worth fighting for, this is our home.”
Amongst their crumpled belongings, next to the spot Amer’s father died, the family gives us tea. Shireen solicitously dusts the sand off my back. We ask them how it is they have not gone crazy from the pain of these events. “It’s not us, it’s God who gives us peace and strength. Without this I would be dead too. What happened to my family was like a horror film.” says Amer. He shows us photos of Farah (whose name means “joy”) and Saja on his phone. “I don’t think I can have any more children. I am too broken inside.”
Abdullah
The family is not living in the house right now, they are split between different homes, and Abdullah is in hospital in Egypt. Amer is wearing Abdullah’s jacket, complete with bullet holes. “It is hard to be here again in this house after what happened. But your presence has lifted my spirits.” he tells us.
Back at Ramatan, I hear one of the journalists talking. “I couldn’t protect my children – this is my responsibility, and I couldn’t.” He says. “My daughter asked, what is it like to die? I told her, it’s just like closing your eyes.”