Tag: Gaza

The Guardian: Land, sea, sky – all will kill you

By Karma Nabulsi

To view original article, published in The Guardian on the 3rd January, click here

Mohammed is burying his family. So is Jamal. Haider doesn’t feel safe in his flat so is sheltering in his car. In a series of phone calls to friends besieged in Gaza, one writer reveals the reality of life under daily attack

Last Saturday, the first day of massive air strikes on Gaza, I finally get through to my old friend Mohammed. We speak for a few moments, he reassures me he is OK, he asks about my now-delayed trip to Gaza, and suddenly I ask: “What is that noise?” It is a sort of distant keening, like the roar of approaching traffic, or a series of waves hitting a rocky shore. “I am at the cemetery, Karma”, he says, “I am burying my family.” He now sounds exhausted. He repeats, over and over again in his steady, tired voice as if it were a prayer: “This is our life. This is our life. This is our life.”

I had just come off the phone with Jamal, who at that moment was in another cemetery in Jabaliya camp, burying three members of his own family. They included two of his nieces, one married to a police cadet. All were at the graduating ceremony in the crowded police station when F16s targeted them that Saturday morning, massacring more than 45 citizens in an instant, mortally wounding dozens more. Police stations across Gaza were similarly struck. Under the laws of war (or international humanitarian law as it is more commonly known), policemen, traffic cops, security guards: all are non-combatants, and classified as civilians under the Geneva conventions. But more to the point, Palestinian non-combatants are not mere civilians, but possess something more real, more alive, more sovereign than a distancing legal classification: the people in Gaza are citizens. Some work in the various civic institutions across the Strip, but most simply use them on a daily basis: their schools, police stations, hospitals, their ministries.

Later on that first day I finally reach Khalil, who runs a prisoners’ human rights association in Gaza. He was trying to organise a press conference. It was chaotic: he was shouting, he couldn’t finish his sentences or form words. When I told him what I had just heard, he told me that he too had just come from the cemetery. His cousin, Sharif Abu Shammala, 26 years old, had recently got a job as a guard at the university. He had been asked to go in that morning to sign his worksheet at the local police station; he had felt lucky to find the work.

For the one and a half million Palestinian citizens living in Gaza, ways to absorb and describe their daily predicament – these collective and individual experiences of extreme violence – had already been used up by the two years of siege that preceded this week’s carnage. Hanging out with Mohammed at his office in Gaza City six months ago, mostly just watching him smoke one cigarette after another, he abruptly leant over his desk and said to me: “Everyone is dead. There is no life in Gaza. Capital has left. Ask someone passing by: where are you going? They will answer: I don’t know. What are you doing? I don’t know. Gaza today is a place of aimless roaming.”

On this New Year’s Day at his home in Sheikh Radwan, his walls tremble from the F16 aerial bombardment under way in his neighbourhood. The intensity of it courses down the line into my ear, his voice a cloud of smoke. His house is just next to the mosque. Earlier this week, his wife’s cousin in Jabaliya refugee camp lost five of her children: they lived next to a mosque the Israeli air force had bombed. “So where can I sleep, my children sleep?” he asks down the phone. “I don’t know how to tell you what this is like, as I have stopped sleeping, myself. We cannot go out, we cannot stay in: nowhere is safe. But I think I would rather die at home.”

I first met international law professor Richard Falk when he was a member of the Seán MacBride commission of inquiry into the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982. The UN rapporteur of human rights to the Palestinian territories, he has studied massive bombardment of this type many times before. Yet he too struggled to put words on to the singular horror unfolding: “It is macabre … I don’t know of anything that exactly fits this situation. People have been referring to the Warsaw ghetto as the nearest analog in modern times.” He says he cannot think of another occupation that endured for decades and involved this kind of oppressive circumstances: “The magnitude, the deliberateness, the violations of international humanitarian law … warrant the characterisation of a crime against humanity.”

A friend of mine, a brilliant and experienced journalist from Gaza, has been covering these indescribable things in her job for an American newspaper. She tells me: “I don’t know what to do. I feel overwhelmed by what I am seeing, and what they are doing: I simply can’t understand the enormity of what I witness in the hospitals, where they keep bringing in children, or out in the streets – they are killing all of us. I don’t know how to write about it.” She feels utterly weighed down by the fact that the Israeli government have refused to allow international journalists into Gaza to see what she is seeing. Despite her bewilderment she, like all the other citizens of Gaza I speak with this week, seem to know exactly what to do: although filled with fear, they run to volunteer, help pull neighbours from under the rubble, offer to assist at the hospital (where more than half of the staff is now voluntary), write it all down, as best they can, for a newspaper.

Only a gifted few have found for us the words we keep seeking, and indeed Palestinian poetry of siege has a tradition going back generations. Mahmoud Darwish wrote some for an earlier Israeli siege, 26 years ago in Beirut:

The Earth is closing on us
pushing us through the last passage
and we tear off our limbs to pass through
The Earth is squeezing us
I wish we were its wheat
so we could die and live again
I wish the Earth was our mother
so she’d be kind to us

During that siege, in the daily bombardment from F16 fighter planes, entire buildings would come down around you – six, seven stories high, hundreds of neighbours, colleagues, and friends disappearing forever under a tonne of rubble and plumes of smoke. We stopped racing down to the cellar: better to sleep up on the roof. This week the citizens of Gaza find themselves seized with the same dread choices. On Wednesday night one colleague, Fawwaz, a professor of economics, was trapped under the rubble of his house near the ministry of foreign affairs. He managed to text a friend to send emergency workers to rescue him. Haider, another university colleague, tells me about it in wonder. He hasn’t known where to place himself inside his flat: all parts of it have been struck with building debris and huge flying shards of glass. He is sitting outside in his car while we speak, although I can’t see that this is the right move. Many now sleep on the roofs, he says, as if their visible presence may deter the Apache helicopters, earsplitting drones, and fighter planes that are demolishing everything in their path – more than 400 buildings in six days.

The recently completed building of the ministry of education (paid for by European donors) is damaged; the ministry of justice, the foreign ministry utterly destroyed: all national institutions of the Palestinian Authority, none military. On New Year’s Day, Khalil tells me in a voice gone hard with a combination of anger and despair: “When we heard the news last night that the British government are giving something like €9m [£8.65m] for humanitarian assistance, all of us understood immediately that this Israeli war against our citizens will not stop but will continue, and that the donation is the invoice. We understood the Europeans will pay the price – with us”. He is roaming around his office as we are chatting, assessing the damage to it: he works just across from the Palestinian Legislative Council, where the democratically elected parliament sat; now flattened by Israeli aircraft. Every neighbourhood in Gaza is a mixture of homes, shops, police stations, mosques, ministries, local associations, hospitals, and clinics. Everyone is connected and fastened down right where they are, and no citizen is safe in today’s occupied Gaza from the Israeli military, whose reach is everywhere.

As a way to share time on the phone, while my friend Houda’s neighbourhood was under aerial assault for more than 40 minutes, she and I discussed at length comparisons between previous Israeli military sieges we had been under. The carefully planned and premeditated strategy of terrorising an entire population by intensive and heavy bombardment of both military and civic institutions – destroying the entire civic infrastructure of a people – was identical. What is unprecedented here is that in Gaza there is nowhere to evacuate people to safety: they are imprisoned on all sides, with an acute awareness of the impossibility of escape. Land, sea, sky: all will kill you.

My friend As’ad is a professor of phonetics at one of the universities in Gaza. He had been giving the students poetry to read these last months, and this summer told me about a class where they had worked on a piece by the late Palestinian poet Abu Salma. “It spoke to our situation so powerfully that all at once they began to sing it: ‘Everyone has a home, dreams, and an appearance. And I, carrying the history of my homeland, trip … wretched and dusty in every path.'” He told me yesterday on the phone, when I finally reached him after days of trying: “They bombed the chemistry lab at the university. I have a phonetics lab. Will they bomb that too?”

Before this week’s war on the citizens of Gaza, the government of Israel and its war machine had been attempting to fragment the soul and break the spirit of one and a half million Palestinians through an all-encompassing military siege of epic proportions. The theory behind besieging a population is to annihilate temporal and spatial domains, and by so doing slowly strangulate a people’s will. Siege puts extreme pressure on time, both external and internal, and on space: everything halts. Nothing comes in, nothing comes out. No batteries, no writing paper, no gauze for the hospitals, no medicines, no surgical gloves even – for these things, say the Israeli military, cannot be classified as humanitarian. Under siege no one can find space to think lucidly, for the aim is to take away the very horizon where thoughts form their reasoning, a plan, a direction to move in. Things become misshapen, ill-formed, turn in on themselves. Freedom, as we know, is the space inside the person that the siege wishes to obliterate, so that it becomes hard to breathe, to organise, above all to hope. Not achieving its aim, and even now with no international action to put a stop to it, the siege this week reached its natural zenith. Western governments, having overtly supported the blockade for two years, now fasten their shocked gaze upon the tormented and devastated Gaza they have created, as if they were mere spectators.

I wish we were pictures on the rocks
for our dreams to carry as mirrors.
We saw the faces of those who will throw
our children out of the window of this last space.
Our star will hang up mirrors.
Where should we go after the last frontiers?
Where should the birds fly after the last sky?
Where should the plants sleep after the last breath of air?
We will write our names with scarlet steam.
We will cut off the hand of the song to be finished by our flesh.
We will die here, here in the last passage.
Here and here our blood will plant its olive tree.
(Mahmoud Darwish)

This week Palestinians have created an astonishing history with their stamina, their resilience, their unwillingness to surrender, their luminous humanity. Gaza was always a place representing cosmopolitan hybridity at its best. And the weight of its dense and beautiful history over thousands of years has, by its nature, revealed to those watching the uncivilised and cruel character of this high-tech bombardment against them. I tell each of my friends, in the hours of conversation, how the quality of their capacity as citizens inspires a response that honours this common humanity. From the start of the attack, Palestinians living in the cities and refugee camps across the West Bank and the Arab world took to the streets in their tens of thousands in a fierce demand for national unity. More than 100,000 people erupted on to the streets of Cairo; the same in Amman. Earlier this week I regaled my friend Ziad, who lives in Rafah refugee camp, with an account of how, at the demonstration in London on Sunday, a young man threw his shoe over the gates of the Israeli embassy. Rushed by police (who perhaps thought it was a bomb), the mass of British protesters poured off the pavement to envelop him. Ziad laughed for ages and then said quietly, “God only knows, he must be from Gaza.”

Journal: Why we are staying

By Eva Bartlett

To view Eva’s blog please click here

January 2, 2009, 1:13 pm

Israeli authorities benevolently announced that today, January 2nd, the 7th day of Israel’s air attacks throughout Gaza, internationals would be permitted to leave through the Erez crossing.

As I write, the radio reports the latest attack: a drone rocket targets an area near Al Quds Open university in Khan Younis, killing 3 young girls from the same family, al Astal, between the ages 10-13, I’m told.

1:30 pm
I write from the Al Shifa hospital ICU staff room, where I’ve just seen another recently-dead patient, 13 years old. “He died as a result of his different injuries: internal bleeding,and the most important injury, brain trauma, brain matter out,” Dr. Rami tells me. “He arrested, we administered CPR for 30 minutes and no response.”

The next bed contains a woman in her thirties, unconscious, injured in the 1st day of attacks as she went to her work.

Another bed holds a youth, Mohammed,15, injured yesterday afternoon in the bombing of al Farooq mosque and the house of a nearby politician, Abu Narr. “The boy was returning to his house. The injury was to his head: head trauma, massive injury, shrapnel in the foot, in the back. The most dangerous injury is in the head. The patient is unconscious now, under sedation, connected to the ventilator. His case is too critical, too critical.”

2:40 pm

“Now another child died, in the operation room,” a nurse tells me. Mohammed Abu Aju, 13 years old, explosive wounds, in Shejaiee. “He was in the street, ” I’m told. “He was hit around 1 pm. He had head trauma, amputation of the lower limbs, shrapnel wounds all over –more than 100,” he tells me.

We discuss the unfathomable situation here, how incredible it is that it’s gone this far, that it began at all.

“My brother is a policeman, not hamas, not fatah, just a policeman. He worked as a policeman before Hamas came to power, and he continued. Thankfully, he wasn’t near any of the many targeted police stations on Saturday, he is alive,” one of the ICU nurses tells me.

Approximately 435 internationals are said to have left, from what journalists have told me, but I have no intention of doing so, we have no intention of doing so.

Here are some reasons why we stay:

Israel not only controls who is unable to leave Gaza, but who is unable to enter Gaza. Since November 4, Israel has banned foreign journalists from entering Gaza, making a minor exception for a few days in early December. At present, with the over 420 dead, over 2,100 injured and the many civilian homes and buildings destroyed, there is an urgent need for foreign journalists.

I’ve seen the demolished houses, mosques, universities, water lines. I’ve seen the newly-homeless, asking where they will live now that their home is rubble, now that the winter cold combines with rain, now that there are continually drones, helicopters and F-16s overhead.

I’ve heard the accounts of recently-killed: the 5 girls living next to a targeted Jabaliya mosque; the 2 boys collecting wood; the 55 year old mother of my friends; the 9 and 12 year old girls who stopped in a grocery store after school and were killed by the missile which targeted the police station across the street [“One girl had shrapnel injuries all over her, it took a long time for her to die from her internal injuries,” the ICU doctor tells me. The other, he says, “lost half of her head and a shoulder” in the blast (at just after 11 am, the time when many civilians are on the streets)], and the 50 year old father of a patient in the nearby hospital, also killed; the family attempting to work collecting scrap metal, even despite the siege, despite the air invasion, blown to piece and burned.

I’ve felt the terrifying impact of missiles landing 30 metres from a thin-walled ground-floor room hearing the screams of terrorized families trapped in their homes, 50 metres from a thin-walled apartment room, 100 metres from hospital buildings windows already shattered. I’ve been rocked awake night after night, if I’ve fallen asleep, by missiles outside of whatever building in whatever region I stay: Gaza City, Jabaliya, beside the port… I avoid the coastal road where Israeli naval boats continue to fire upon Gaza, but I walk under buzzing drones every day and night, under the warplanes, leaving one truly feeling like a target, no matter where we are.

I’ve heard time and time and time again, “They call us the terrorists, yet it’s our kids, our wives, our mothers, our brothers dying. What can we do? This is our life,” from Palestinians, even before the attacks, when it was Israel’s siege on Gaza that was the most urgent factor. Now that urgency is amplified beyond imagination by the on-going attacks.

1.5 million Palestinians throughout the Gaza Strip are unable to run from, escape from, these illegal attacks. My life, internationals lives, are no more important than Palestinians’ lives. We will stay on during their suffering, in solidarity and to document the illegal acts Israel is doing, the war crimes Israel clearly does not want the world to see, to understand, and is preventing journalists from reporting. To see, to understand, means to stop Israel’s bombardment of Gaza, its contravention of international humanitarian law and international law.

[facts below according to the latest stats journalists are publishing. Again, bearing in mind that the attacks CONTINUE and the dead and injured are still being brought in from new attacks, absolute numbers are presently impossible. Certainly the numbers may be higher]

*428 dead from Israel’s indiscriminate missile attacks throughout the Gaza Strip
*2100 injured, many of these critically-so, standing death, lasting brain damage, lasting internal problems, amputations

Of the dead and injured, significant numbers of civilians: children, women, elderly, and innocent men who have been targeted.

*2 emergency medical personel targeted, killed; 15 further injured
* at least 8 mosques targeted, destroyed
*a park in Rafah targeted, killing two civilians (22 and 33 years old) and injuring 10s
* 3 different universities targeted, including Islamic University, repeatedly targeted.
* schools targeted, including a secondary school
* UN schools suffering damage from targeting near the schools
*a kindergarten targeted
*charitable societies, providing life-skills training, targeted

Fida Qishta: About my daily life in Gaza Strip, Rafah

Fida Qishta lives in the city of Rafah in the Gaza Strip, Palestine. She is a freelance journalist, filmmaker and blogger, and the International Solidarity Movement (ISM) coordinator for the Gaza Strip.

31st December 2008

For the last year and a half the Israeli government has intensified the economic blockade of Gaza by closing all the border crossings that allow aid and essential supplies to reach Palestinians in Gaza. This forced Palestinians to dig tunnels to Egypt to survive. Israel continued talking about a military operation in the Gaza Strip, until the madness of war became inevitable for the both sides. And since it began, hundreds of Gazans have been killed,

I don’t know how other people around the globe think. Did you think to be honest with yourself once to understand the truth? A handmade Palestinian rocket jeopardizes Israeli security, but the Israeli’s scary F16 rockets, missiles, and the tanks don’t jeopardize Palestinians security!

Israel’s military operation makes Palestinian blood fall like rain

There is no solution in sight .The Israeli government and their army commit inhuman acts against civilians. For the last five days the Israeli missiles killed 394 Palestinians and injured more than 1800. Do you know my dear reader how many Israelis were killed by Palestinians resistance rockets? Four were killed and 12 injured. I wrote these numbers to say this is not equal, and it’s unfair for the world to keep silent.

On December 28th, we woke up at 7am after an Israeli F16 attack. Our house was shaking. We all tried to imagine what had happened, but we wanted to at least know where the attack was. It was really scary. We tried to open the main door to our flat, but it was stuck shut after the attack.

Two friends and I climbed out the window to leave the house. It was a shock when I found our neighbor’s pharmacy was the target. It was just 60 meters from our house. They targeted a pharmacy. I still don’t believe it and can’t imagine it. I filmed and asked some people who were really close to the pharmacy about what happened and their thoughts,

64 year-old Saed said, “At almost 6:30 am three missiles were fired by Israeli fighter jets. They hit the pharmacy in our neighborhood and the surrounding shops. They’re just civilian buildings. And as you can see, the street is damaged. All of the buildings are damaged. The Palestinian people elected Hamas in a democratic election, and all the world witnessed the election. And we are punished because of Palestinian democracy. If it were Israeli democracy the world would welcome it. I’m 64 years old and I never saw a sweet day in all my life. Since I was born in 1945 we’ve been in a conflict with the Israelis.”

Om Mohammed said: “They say that they don’t attack civilians, but they attack children. Why do they do that? They care so much about Palestinian rockets hitting them. Don’t they realize how much their air strikes hurt us?”

“We fold our arms and they attack us. Then they say to the world that Arabs attack them. Do you see? Did we hit them? Israel is a liar. Israel is a liar. They do anything and they don’t listen to the international community. This is medicine for the children. There’s no medicine. No drinks, no water, no gas. We are suffering from hunger. They attack us. What does Israel want? Can it be worse than this? I don’t think so. Would they accept this for themselves?”

“Look at the children. What are they guilty of? They were sleeping at 7:00 am. All the night they didn’t sleep. This child was traumatized during the attack. Do they have rockets to attack with?”

“They [Israeli forces] attack everywhere. They became crazy. The Gaza Strip is just going to die…it’s going to die. We were sleeping. We were just asleep. Suddenly we heard a bomb. We woke up and we didn’t know where to go. We couldn’t see through the dust. The dust filled the house. We didn’t know where to go. We called to each other. We thought our house had been hit, not the street. What can I say? You saw it with your own eyes. What is our guilt? What are we going to say? Are we terrorists? I don’t carry a gun, neither does my girl.”

Also on December 28th an Israeli F16 attacked a mosque in Jabalya. That increased the number of mosques attacked to five, and today they attacked one more in Gaza City. When they attacked the mosque in Jabalya, one of the houses nearby was totally destroyed. But the house is not the problem. The problem is the family who lives there, five sisters were killed and their mother seriously injured. The first question the surviving daughter asked was, are my dad and mum okay? She was between the two dead bodies of her sisters. How will she forget that? No treatment in the world can erase that image from her mind. It’s not the education that Palestinians give their children, it’s the experience that the children live.

December 27 Update

We just received a phone call on our land line. It was the Israeli Defense Ministry, and they said that any house that has guns or weapons will be targeted next, without warning and without any announcement. Just to let you know, we don’t have any weapons in our house. If we die please defend my family.

December 27

This morning I went with some friends to visit the Block O neighborhood in the city of Rafah in the South of the Gaza Strip. While we were in one of the houses that we planned to visit, my phone rang. It was a friend from Gaza City. He was asking about something. Suddenly I heard the sound of an explosion at his side. At the same time I heard an explosion in Rafah too. He said, Fida they are attacking nearby, and I said they attacking here too. It seems that they attacked all of the Gaza Strip at the same time, all the cities at once. We hung up.

My friends and I in Rafah ran into the street, and in the street everybody was running, children and other people who wanted to see their relatives and friends. It was the time for schoolchildren to go to school, and for the second school shift to start. To explain more, because of the number of students here, which is increasing daily, schools in Rafah work in two shifts. The first shift starts at 7 am and finishes at 11:30 am, and the second shift for a different group of students starts at 12 pm and finishes at 4:30 pm. The attack happened at 11:30am, the time when schools change shifts, just as the first shift was coming back from school, and the second shift was to go to school.

So anyway, when we went to the area it was full of children and people looking at the wreckage. It was scary for many people to come and look because the Israeli attack wasn’t over, and from where we were we saw an Israeli airplane attack another police station. Some people could say they are police and that gives the Israelis the right to attack them. What about all the civilians who were walking or driving nearby? What about the children who were in this street? It’s impossible that the world sees just part of the truth and denies the important part. Even if it’s a police station, this government was elected and democratically chosen.

Most the people who were killed were people walking nearby or children going or coming back from school. I can’t believe what this world thinks.

Below are some interviews I conducted this morning.

Interview 1:

We heard the explosions and went to the scene. People were shouting. Some of the schoolchildren were afraid. There was damage throughout the whole neighborhood. Until this time we don’t know the exact number of martyrs. But people have been killed and many have been injured. There are martyrs under the wreckage…as you see.

Interview 2: Naama, 13 years old

I was sitting with my friends when the attack happened. We were scared and we ran out of our school. Our headmaster asked us to go home. We saw fire. We were told to leave the area by another street.

Interview 3: Policeman, 39 years old

We were at the police station. The Israeli planes came and suddenly the building collapsed on us.

I saw four dead bodies near me. They were in pieces. Outside I saw the same thing.

Everyone was shouting. I lost consciousness and then found myself in hospital.

Interview 4:

We were in a meeting in Rafah. I was with Abu Odeh, the manager of the traffic police, and with Rafah’s manager. We were preparing to release impounded motorbikes before the Israeli attack. We received an order to evacuate the police station, and as we were leaving the attack happened. We managed to reach the door of the police station. The explosion was strong and I fell down. I looked around and saw my colleagues and they were in pieces. The situation was desperate, so I said the Shahada prayer until I was rescued and taken to the hospital.

Interview 5:

We heard the attack. It was far away in Tel Al Sultan [northern Rafah] and we were in the city centre. We ran away from the police station. I was injured by shrapnel as I was leaving the main gate of the police station. We didn’t have a chance to get an overview of the scene because debris was flying everywhere.

December 26, 2008

Our experiences here reveal much more than what is in the news. Here in Palestine, the death penalty was ordered after a summary trial before a military court for people caught with Palestinian passports. Why?

While the world celebrates Christmas and people wish each other a happy New Year, it shocks me how many people in the world live below the poverty line, and how many children die every year because of bad food or water. And where I live in the Gaza Strip, sickness and poverty are increasing. Gaza is the only prison in the world which has no limit on the number of prisoners or on prisoners’ age.

The prison here has no image that you can imagine, and no description that writing can describe. And the prisoners here range from a day old to over a hundred years old.

In Gaza you might be confused to see many shops full of things to buy. With so many things that to buy, you might ask, are these people really under siege? Yes the shops are full of things that Gazans need to survive, but can’t buy. How they can buy something they don’t have they money for. You can find chocolate in the markets but you can’t find bread. You can go to the hospital but you can’t find the necessary treatment.

From the thousands of stories about life in Gaza and the suffering of the people here, I was amazed by one story of Gaza’s fishermen that I heard when I was out on a fishing boat. To write a story like this you need to wake up at 5:30 am and prepare yourself to leave Rafah at 6am to be on time for the fishing trip.

The trip from Rafah to Gaza City is an hour by taxi. Normally, we share the taxi with six other people. We don’t know one another, but the strange thing is that we talk to each other as friends who see each other every day. And in that way you can hear six stories about life, about a father or a son, a mother or a daughter, a lover or a friend, about their days, or about the questions in their minds that need answers. We share the taxi to share the costs, but at the same time to share the happiness and the sadness. This is one of the things we have that people in Europe don’t.

At 7 am on my first day fishing, I wanted to be on one of the trawlers. I didn’t think it would be easy or that I would be safe, but it was worth trying, in order to see something different and a window on the world that is almost closed.

I arrived at Gaza port with one of my friends, got on the boat and started the trip, after the fishermen had prepared themselves. On the boat I realized how open the fishermen were, how much they wanted to talk about their experiences. They just needed somebody to listen, somebody to make them feel better.

While we were all chatting about different things, Ahmed, who is 20 years old, started to talk. He said, “my brother was shot in the head while he was working on this boat. I remember that day very well. All of us on the boat were working, and things were going alright until an Israeli gunboat showed up and started to shoot at us. You are going to ask me, for no reason? Yes, for no reason, unless they aim to make us suffer on land and in the sea. The gunboat started to shoot directly at our boat. Ibrahim was shot in the head. Some of us were scared, and some tried to deal with Ibrahim’s wound. They were really strong to be able to deal with his injury and see all of the blood. For a while I thought he had died. But when we arrived to the port, and took him to the hospital, he was in very bad condition according to the doctors. He stayed in the emergency room for ten days, and after that it was God’s will that he survived. Since then he has not come back to fish because the accident affected him.”

I asked myself since hearing this story, what is the mistake that we have made to face this fate? The Israelis always say that they fight us because we are armed. Are the nets that we use for fishing a prohibited thing, are they a weapon? If so, international law should inform us of this.

For your information, according to the Oslo Agreements, Gaza’s fishermen have the right to fish 20 miles from the shore, and according to international law we can fish 12 miles out, with or without an occupation. Then why does the Israeli Navy force these fishermen to fish no more than six miles from shore? Is this part of their siege, or another of their security reasons which have no end?

I asked another fisherman named Hassan who is 35 years old, is it really dangerous to fish? He answered, the Israelis have left me with no alternative but to die.

In the stories that I write I never try to remember the date or the time, but for some people it makes a difference to know when something happened. But for Gazans it doesn’t make any difference. It amazes me how people here survive. Maybe as we say in Arabic, a person who sees others’ miseries finds that his misery looks smaller than he imagined.

Journal: A personal post

By Sharon in Gaza

To see Sharon’s blog please click here

People have asked me if I am frightened. What I am frightened by is the enormity of these events, at how few international eyes there are here to witness them, and that it is hard to imagine how it will end. In the last handful of days, I have given about 30 interviews by phone, and a couple on camera, to a world outside which my friends are telling me is slowly waking up to this disaster. Yet about 400 foreigners took Israel up on its offer of an exit route through Erez border today, and we wonder what they have planned next that they don’t want outsiders here to witness.

I am so glad to be here, to be a small sign to Gaza folks that people do care about them. And my fabulous friends are sending supportive messages, not only to me but to Palestinians, who cluster round to look at them, and translate them to each other, sometimes in tones of astonishment; and to smile at the footage of demonstrations and vigils. I told a local friend today that Israelis will be demonstrating against their government’s actions on Saturday, and she could hardly comprehend it. (See a Jerusalem demo that’s happened already here.) I look forward to sharing the pictures of this and all the other rallies about to happen, with her and everyone.

Underneath the rockets is a strange place to be, that’s for sure. So far, most of my little ISM group seems to have the same calm response to this crazy scenario, and that is helpful. During the day we will catch taxis (largely to save time as well as for safety) if they are going where we need to go. If we are going to dangerous areas, or at night when the taxis vanish, we tend to walk. We prefer to avoid paying someone to take us somewhere dangerous anyway.

Walking through this ghostly city at night is easier with a colleague for company and consultation. Everyone, including the taxi drivers, take circuitous routes designed to avoid as much as possible both places that have been bombed (as repeat strikes are not the less common for being pointless) or places that might be bombed.

Palestinian Legislative Council

Palestinian Legislative Council
This process is becoming increasingly intricate. Last night, E and I began the route to the hospital as we had the night before, choosing what had been the safeish route then. We didn’t realise (til we found it looming above us) that this route, yesterday watched over by the elegant and massively solid Palestinian Legislative Council, now included its enormous remains. I am awed by how much power it must have taken to destroy it. We stumbled swiftly over the rubble away from it, rockets occasionally lighting the sky above us, in time for us to cover our ears.

About 14 mosques have been bombed since Saturday. Early on, after covering the destruction of the mosque that had also killed the Balisha girls, V and I had to pass a beautiful one in Jabalia. An old man explained we had come the wrong way, and said we had to go back pass what he called the “mosquito”. We did, uncomfortably. I heard yesterday it no longer exists.

Old Governor’s Mansion

Old Governor’s Mansion
There used to be a lovely house overlooking the sea on Charles de Gaulle street, surrounded by one of the few gardens with lush green grass. In August when I was first here, I would peer in through the railings as I passed. I discovered yesterday it is rubble, the white staircase climbing into nowhere now. I am told it was the governor’s mansion from the time of Egypt’s rule here in the 50s, used mostly since the 60s to host dignitaries, historic building. Not someone’s home though. The Al Quds doctors were telling us that most of last nights targets in Rafah were homes.

I was thinking about rubble, and how it all looks the same, though the buildings it once constituted all looked different. And how tiring and sad it must be to clear it by hand, when you maybe haven’t eaten enough or slept enough. Especially if it is your personal rubble.

My uncle phoned today, he was surprised to find that, of all the important things he could have interrupted me doing, I was in fact washing my hair. I haven’t slept a night at home once since the strikes began, but I do managed to the occasional visit for a wash. And to eat jam with a spoon since it is the sole foodstuff at my place.

At least one more emergency medical worker was injured today. Ahmed Eid, 25, was attempting to rescue people in the just-bombed house of the Babish family, in the Sheikh Radwan area east of Gaza city at about 4pm, when Israeli planes took the opportunity for a second strike. 6-7 civilians were injured and Ahmed required stitches to his head. There are unconfirmed reports of injuries to another medical worker. 3 children were killed by rocket attack in Khan Younis. At 1.30 this afternoon, Dr Hasan Khalef from Al Shifa tells us that in the last 24 hours, 20 children have been killed and 112 wounded, and 8 women killed and 135 wounded. Ismail, the third child of the Hamadan family, died yesterday of his injuries.

Gaza people too have grieved for the Ni’lin boys killed by Israeli soldiers for being out on a West Bank demo against the Gaza strikes – 22 year old Arafat, who died that day, and 18 year old Mohammed, who was shot in the head by Israeli soldiers and died of his injuries yesterday.

To be absolutely honest, if this goes on for weeks, I don’t think all of my ISM group will make it out alive. But are our lives worth any more than those of the people of Gaza?

Photos from Rafah following Israeli air-strike – 30th December

These photos were taken on Tuesday 30th December in a residential neighbourhood of Rafah called Hi Alijnina, following an Israeli air strike at approximately 5.00am local time. One house was totally destroyed and adjacent homes were severely damaged. A teenager was injured when his bedroom wall collapsed on him as he lay sleeping. Other civilians were also injured.