HARD NIGHTS’ SLEEP IN GAZA
*fresh hit, a street away, seen from balcony of friend’s Jabaliya home, after 8 am January 10
Palestine Red Crescent Society Blog
http://ingaza.wordpress.com/
The enormity of the deaths hit me. After 12 days of killing and psychological warfare, I’d become…less shocked at the sight of pieces of bodies, a little numb…like a doctor might, or a person subjected to this time and again. I was and am horrified at the on-going slaughter, at the images of children’s bodies being pulled from the rubble astonished it could continue…but adapted to the fact that there would be bodies, maimed, lives ruined. Standing among sandy makeshift graves, watching men digging with their hands, others carrying corpses on any plank long enough –corrugated tin, scraps of wood, stretchers –to be hastily buried –the drones still fly overhead and tank shelling can be heard 100s of metres beyond, it all become too much again. I wept for all the dead and the wounded psyches of a people who know their blood flows freely and will continue to do so.
*lights of Israel, beyond Gaza’s electricity-absent nightscape (brightened by blasts)
2:50 am I can’t sleep.
Some mornings I wake up from a new explosion and realize I’ve somehow managed to fall into a sleep despite the blasts. Other mornings, I wake up disoriented, first wondering where I am, as I’m sleeping in some hospital waiting room or ambulance office, or the house of a driver since the Red Crescent office in eastern Jabaliya was first shelled and then made off-limits by the invading Israeli forces in the eastern Jabaliya region…and the north, the northwest, the east, the south…
Yesterday morning I awoke to an eerie near-quiet: for the time there were no bomb blasts, just those drones continuing to lord the sky. Then the blasts came. At 8:38 am I noted “resumption of loud, reverberating explosions. In the Saraya area again (the former British prison has been hit a number of times already)? 8:59 am: four very loud explosions with deep reverberations.
At 12:15 I’d noted and photographed the white stream of chemical clouds billowing over large expanses of eastern Gaza. At 1:05 pm: “Since last night until now, 23 people have been killed, all civilians,” reporter Yousef al Helo told me, adding “This afternoon, two people –including women and children –were killed in a shelling on Beit Lahia.”
Yousef read me Tzipi Livni’s response to the Security Council call for an immediate ceasefire: “Israel has acted and will continue to act according to its calculation in the interest of the security of its citizens and its right to self-defense.”
Yousef and I had discussed the violations of Israel’s unilaterally-imposed 3-hour-ceasefire [which a Lebanese journalist summed up: "How would you like it if I was shooting at you and then told you I'd give you a minute to dance around before I kill you?" ]. John Ging, director of UNRWA in the Gaza Strip, sums it up more diplomatically: “For 3 hours, the people of Gaza have some safety. That’s all it is.” During the first day of the innapropriately-named time period between 1 and 4pm, Israeli forces killed 3 sisters (ages 2, 3, 10), one woman (31), 2 elderly men (60 and 87), and targeted paramedics, shooting one in the leg, as the explosions continued all over the Gaza Strip. At 6 pm, 2 hours after the ‘cease-fire’, the official killing did indeed continue: 5 dead in northern Gaza, returning from the bread lines with a prize bag of bread, bombed in their car, including ages 10, 12, 15, cousin 20, and father 45. And later, after 9pm, another medic shot in the leg while trying to perform his duties.
With the medics last night, we’d arrived at a Sheik Radwan neighbourhood, to the smoking skeleton of a multi-story, multi-family house, evaporated. Firetrucks were there ahead of us, though we all collectively ran at one point, expecting the 2nd strike that often follows the original destruction.
Later in the night, we kept passing the ruins of buildings bombed in the last days. I’ve lost track of what was bombed when. We come to a newly-bombed building, a newly-homeless family, the adjacent building facing a like fate soon enough as it appears the structure has been so badly damaged it will soon collapse.
3:20 am: I’ve left the bed and given up on feigning sleep. Am watching the darkness explode with the political hatred that not only kills but silences truth. Hatred in every blast pounding Gaza.
“They will not finish. Until the martyrs reach 1,000,” the nurse predicts, taking a break on his night shift. “They want to make Gaza into Guantanamo,” he goes on. “All of this will not break the Palestinian people.”
In the hospital room where I tried to sleep between an ambulance shift and morning obligations, the tank shelling and firing is in the room, landing on my pillow.
It’s the shells, which crack and blast. The staccato gunfire. The drones’ whine, in menacing pitches. The fighter plane’s sudden, thundering presence.
The drone ramps up the decibels, a train wreck of disharmony.
And the inevitable whoosh before the explosion, an F-16 launch which erupts a crater where someone’s house, or a market, or a mosque once stood. The blast an hour ago was a market, another nurse tells me. “It was a beautiful market, sold everything, everything we need,” she says.
Hours later, after the sun finally rises. Women are walking onto the hospital premises, large towel-covered platters on their heads. A small electric stove is plugged in, and they take turns baking bread for their families: no gas, no electricity at home. They are lucky to have the flour to bake with, and I guess that a trickle of that aid that only trickles in has reached them. But it’s never enough.
The shelling continuing, I get to see Osama, who I’ve not seen for weeks, although he lives near the hospital where I spend much time. His family, like most, have taken all the windows out of their house (those not already blown out), and the house is frigid with cold. We talk, ask the same questions that everyone is asking every day, about when it will end, why it must be so, what value a Palestinian life has…
A new series of explosions, we go out to see, the latest just a couple of streets away, but that’s nothing. Osama’s family live in front of a house slated for attack at any time. “What can we do?” they ask, everyone asks.
8 COMMENTS
NO ROOM FOR THE DEAD, NO ROOM FOR THE LIVING
January 8, 2009, 5:19 pm
Filed under: Uncategorized
Electronic Intifada
After finishing a shift with the PRCS yesterday morning, we went to the Fakoura school, to see and to listen to the voices. Prayers were happening in the street in front of the school. I’d seen prayers in open, outdoor places in Palestine, in Egypt. But these days, when I see a mass of people praying, in front of Shifa hospital, in the streets of Jabliya, I think of the mosques that have been bombed, the loss of lives and sanctuaries. And yesterday I thought of the loss of a safe-haven.
The grief was very evident, as was the indignation: “Where are we supposed to stay,” one man demanded. “How many deaths is enough? How many?” It’s the question that has resounded in my mind since the attacks on December 27th.
Across Fakoura street from the school, about 15 metres down a drive, a gaping hole in the Deeb house revealed what had been happening when it was hit by a shell. Rounds of bread dough lay where they’d been rolled out to bake. Amal Deeb was in her thirties, a surviving family member told us. When the missile struck, it killed her and 9 others in the extended-family house, including 2 boys and 3 girls. Another 4 were injured, one having both legs amputated.
Approaching the house, the stench of blood was still strong, and became evident, in patches and pools amid the rubble of the room. Later, in Jabalilya’s Kamal Adwan hospital, 19 year old Ahlam lay conscious but unsmiling, unresponsive. The woman at her side explained her injuries: shrapnel lacerations all over her body, and deeper shrapnel injuries in her stomach. Ahlam didn’t know 9 of the family were killed.
Returning to the street in front of the UN Fakoura school, mourners had gathered, ready to march, to carry the dead and their pieces to their overcrowded resting place. Flags of all colours mixed in this funeral march: no one party dominated, it was collective grief under collective punishment.
So many people had joined the procession through the narrow streets that the funeral split, taking different streets, to reach the cemetery. At the entrance to the cemetery, decorated cement slabs mark the older graves, laid at a time when cement and space were available. The latest bodies, instead, show in sandy humps, buried just low enough to be covered but not properly so. Cement blocks mark some graves, leaves and vines on others. And some were just barely visible, by the raise in earth. But it was too packed, too hard to estimate where a grave might be, no possibility of a respectfully-spaced arrangement.
“Watch where you step,” Mahmoud, a friend, had said, pointing to a barely-noticeable grave of a child.
The enormity of the deaths hit me. After 12 days of killing and psychological warfare, I’d become…less shocked at the sight of pieces of bodies, a little numb…like a doctor might, or a person subjected to this time and again. I was and am horrified at the on-going slaughter, at the images of children’s bodies being pulled from the rubble astonished it could continue…but adapted to the fact that there would be bodies, maimed, lives ruined. Standing among sandy makeshift graves, watching men digging with their hands, others carrying corpses on any plank long enough –corrugated tin, scraps of wood, stretchers –to be hastily buried –the drones still fly overhead and tank shelling can be heard 100s of metres beyond, it all become too much again. I wept for all the dead and the wounded psyches of a people who know their blood flows freely and will continue to do so.
Hatem, the other day, told me to be strong, as Palestinians, for Palestinians. And I try, though each day brings assassinations no one could have imagined. Out of touch with all the other areas of Gaza, I read of the Samouni family and see photos of a baby girl pulled from the rubble of a house shelled by an Israeli warplane. Mohammed, a photojournalist, has photographed many of house-bombings’s dead. And today Hatem crumbled, though he is strong. It’s all too much.
dead girl pulled out of the rubble of the shelled Daya family house photo: mohammedzaanoun@yahoo.com
Nidal, a PRCS medic, told how he was at the Fakoura school when it was shelled. His aunt and uncle living nearby, he’d been visiting friends at the school. “I was there, talking with friends, only a little away from where 2 of the missiles hit. The people standing between me and the missiles were like a shield. They were shredded. About twenty of them,” he said.
Like many Palestinians I’ve met, Nidal has a prior history of loss, even before this phenomenal assault on civilians. Only twenty years old, Nidal has already had his father and brother killed, martyred it is said here, by sniper’s bullets. His right hand testifies his part in the story: “It was three years ago, the Israeli army had invaded our region (Jabaliya).One soldier threw a sound bomb at us and I picked it up to throw away. It went off in my hand before I could throw it away.” Sound bombs in prolific use in such non-violent demonstrations as Bil’in and Nalin, among others in the occupied West Bank, many youths learn at a young age how to chuck them away. But Nidal’s stubs of fingers show that he wasn’t so lucky. Luckier than his father and brother, though. And luckier than two of his cousins, his aunt’s sons, who were in the area where missiles were dropped at the UN school. They, 12 and 27 years old, were killed.
Osama gave his testimony as a medic at the scene after the multiple missile shelling.“When we arrived, I saw dead bodies everywhere. More than 30. Dead children, grandparents…Pieces of flesh all over. And blood. It was very crowded, and difficult to carry out the injured and martyred. There were also animals dead among the humans.I helped carry 15 dead. I had to change my clothes 3 times. These people thought they were safe in the UN school, but the Israeli army killed them, in cold blood,” he said.
Mohammed K., a volunteer with the PRCS, was elsewhere when the UN safe haven was shelled. “We were in Jabaliya, at the UN “G” school, to interview the displaced people sheltering there. We wanted to find out how many people were staying there, where they’d left from and why exactly, and how safe they felt in the school. While we were there, we heard the explosions, saw the smoke, and wondered where had been hit. It was Fakoura.”
*fresh hit, a street away, seen from balcony of friend’s Jabaliya home, after 8 am January 10
Palestine Red Crescent Society Blog
http://ingaza.wordpress.com/
*lights of Israel, beyond Gaza’s electricity-absent nightscape (brightened by blasts) 2:50 am I can’t sleep. Some mornings I wake up from a new explosion and realize I’ve somehow managed to fall into a sleep despite the blasts. Other mornings, I wake up disoriented, first wondering where I am, as I’m sleeping in some hospital waiting room or ambulance office, or the house of a driver since the Red Crescent office in eastern Jabaliya was first shelled and then made off-limits by the invading Israeli forces in the eastern Jabaliya region…and the north, the northwest, the east, the south… Yesterday morning I awoke to an eerie near-quiet: for the time there were no bomb blasts, just those drones continuing to lord the sky. Then the blasts came. At 8:38 am I noted “resumption of loud, reverberating explosions. In the Saraya area again (the former British prison has been hit a number of times already)? 8:59 am: four very loud explosions with deep reverberations.The enormity of the deaths hit me. After 12 days of killing and psychological warfare, I’d become…less shocked at the sight of pieces of bodies, a little numb…like a doctor might, or a person subjected to this time and again. I was and am horrified at the on-going slaughter, at the images of children’s bodies being pulled from the rubble astonished it could continue…but adapted to the fact that there would be bodies, maimed, lives ruined. Standing among sandy makeshift graves, watching men digging with their hands, others carrying corpses on any plank long enough –corrugated tin, scraps of wood, stretchers –to be hastily buried –the drones still fly overhead and tank shelling can be heard 100s of metres beyond, it all become too much again. I wept for all the dead and the wounded psyches of a people who know their blood flows freely and will continue to do so.
At 12:15 I’d noted and photographed the white stream of chemical clouds billowing over large expanses of eastern Gaza. At 1:05 pm: “Since last night until now, 23 people have been killed, all civilians,” reporter Yousef al Helo told me, adding “This afternoon, two people –including women and children –were killed in a shelling on Beit Lahia.”
Yousef read me Tzipi Livni’s response to the Security Council call for an immediate ceasefire: “Israel has acted and will continue to act according to its calculation in the interest of the security of its citizens and its right to self-defense.” Yousef and I had discussed the violations of Israel’s unilaterally-imposed 3-hour-ceasefire [which a Lebanese journalist summed up: "How would you like it if I was shooting at you and then told you I'd give you a minute to dance around before I kill you?" ]. John Ging, director of UNRWA in the Gaza Strip, sums it up more diplomatically: “For 3 hours, the people of Gaza have some safety. That’s all it is.” During the first day of the innapropriately-named time period between 1 and 4pm, Israeli forces killed 3 sisters (ages 2, 3, 10), one woman (31), 2 elderly men (60 and 87), and targeted paramedics, shooting one in the leg, as the explosions continued all over the Gaza Strip. At 6 pm, 2 hours after the ‘cease-fire’, the official killing did indeed continue: 5 dead in northern Gaza, returning from the bread lines with a prize bag of bread, bombed in their car, including ages 10, 12, 15, cousin 20, and father 45. And later, after 9pm, another medic shot in the leg while trying to perform his duties. With the medics last night, we’d arrived at a Sheik Radwan neighbourhood, to the smoking skeleton of a multi-story, multi-family house, evaporated. Firetrucks were there ahead of us, though we all collectively ran at one point, expecting the 2nd strike that often follows the original destruction. Later in the night, we kept passing the ruins of buildings bombed in the last days. I’ve lost track of what was bombed when. We come to a newly-bombed building, a newly-homeless family, the adjacent building facing a like fate soon enough as it appears the structure has been so badly damaged it will soon collapse.
3:20 am: I’ve left the bed and given up on feigning sleep. Am watching the darkness explode with the political hatred that not only kills but silences truth. Hatred in every blast pounding Gaza.
“They will not finish. Until the martyrs reach 1,000,” the nurse predicts, taking a break on his night shift. “They want to make Gaza into Guantanamo,” he goes on. “All of this will not break the Palestinian people.”
In the hospital room where I tried to sleep between an ambulance shift and morning obligations, the tank shelling and firing is in the room, landing on my pillow.
It’s the shells, which crack and blast. The staccato gunfire. The drones’ whine, in menacing pitches. The fighter plane’s sudden, thundering presence.
The drone ramps up the decibels, a train wreck of disharmony.
And the inevitable whoosh before the explosion, an F-16 launch which erupts a crater where someone’s house, or a market, or a mosque once stood. The blast an hour ago was a market, another nurse tells me. “It was a beautiful market, sold everything, everything we need,” she says.
Hours later, after the sun finally rises. Women are walking onto the hospital premises, large towel-covered platters on their heads. A small electric stove is plugged in, and they take turns baking bread for their families: no gas, no electricity at home. They are lucky to have the flour to bake with, and I guess that a trickle of that aid that only trickles in has reached them. But it’s never enough.
The shelling continuing, I get to see Osama, who I’ve not seen for weeks, although he lives near the hospital where I spend much time. His family, like most, have taken all the windows out of their house (those not already blown out), and the house is frigid with cold. We talk, ask the same questions that everyone is asking every day, about when it will end, why it must be so, what value a Palestinian life has…
A new series of explosions, we go out to see, the latest just a couple of streets away, but that’s nothing. Osama’s family live in front of a house slated for attack at any time. “What can we do?” they ask, everyone asks.
8 COMMENTS
NO ROOM FOR THE DEAD, NO ROOM FOR THE LIVING
January 8, 2009, 5:19 pm Filed under: Uncategorized
Electronic Intifada After finishing a shift with the PRCS yesterday morning, we went to the Fakoura school, to see and to listen to the voices. Prayers were happening in the street in front of the school. I’d seen prayers in open, outdoor places in Palestine, in Egypt. But these days, when I see a mass of people praying, in front of Shifa hospital, in the streets of Jabliya, I think of the mosques that have been bombed, the loss of lives and sanctuaries. And yesterday I thought of the loss of a safe-haven.
The grief was very evident, as was the indignation: “Where are we supposed to stay,” one man demanded. “How many deaths is enough? How many?” It’s the question that has resounded in my mind since the attacks on December 27th.
Across Fakoura street from the school, about 15 metres down a drive, a gaping hole in the Deeb house revealed what had been happening when it was hit by a shell. Rounds of bread dough lay where they’d been rolled out to bake. Amal Deeb was in her thirties, a surviving family member told us. When the missile struck, it killed her and 9 others in the extended-family house, including 2 boys and 3 girls. Another 4 were injured, one having both legs amputated.
Approaching the house, the stench of blood was still strong, and became evident, in patches and pools amid the rubble of the room. Later, in Jabalilya’s Kamal Adwan hospital, 19 year old Ahlam lay conscious but unsmiling, unresponsive. The woman at her side explained her injuries: shrapnel lacerations all over her body, and deeper shrapnel injuries in her stomach. Ahlam didn’t know 9 of the family were killed.
Returning to the street in front of the UN Fakoura school, mourners had gathered, ready to march, to carry the dead and their pieces to their overcrowded resting place. Flags of all colours mixed in this funeral march: no one party dominated, it was collective grief under collective punishment.
So many people had joined the procession through the narrow streets that the funeral split, taking different streets, to reach the cemetery. At the entrance to the cemetery, decorated cement slabs mark the older graves, laid at a time when cement and space were available. The latest bodies, instead, show in sandy humps, buried just low enough to be covered but not properly so. Cement blocks mark some graves, leaves and vines on others. And some were just barely visible, by the raise in earth. But it was too packed, too hard to estimate where a grave might be, no possibility of a respectfully-spaced arrangement.
“Watch where you step,” Mahmoud, a friend, had said, pointing to a barely-noticeable grave of a child.
The enormity of the deaths hit me. After 12 days of killing and psychological warfare, I’d become…less shocked at the sight of pieces of bodies, a little numb…like a doctor might, or a person subjected to this time and again. I was and am horrified at the on-going slaughter, at the images of children’s bodies being pulled from the rubble astonished it could continue…but adapted to the fact that there would be bodies, maimed, lives ruined. Standing among sandy makeshift graves, watching men digging with their hands, others carrying corpses on any plank long enough –corrugated tin, scraps of wood, stretchers –to be hastily buried –the drones still fly overhead and tank shelling can be heard 100s of metres beyond, it all become too much again. I wept for all the dead and the wounded psyches of a people who know their blood flows freely and will continue to do so.
Hatem, the other day, told me to be strong, as Palestinians, for Palestinians. And I try, though each day brings assassinations no one could have imagined. Out of touch with all the other areas of Gaza, I read of the Samouni family and see photos of a baby girl pulled from the rubble of a house shelled by an Israeli warplane. Mohammed, a photojournalist, has photographed many of house-bombings’s dead. And today Hatem crumbled, though he is strong. It’s all too much.
Nidal, a PRCS medic, told how he was at the Fakoura school when it was shelled. His aunt and uncle living nearby, he’d been visiting friends at the school. “I was there, talking with friends, only a little away from where 2 of the missiles hit. The people standing between me and the missiles were like a shield. They were shredded. About twenty of them,” he said.
Like many Palestinians I’ve met, Nidal has a prior history of loss, even before this phenomenal assault on civilians. Only twenty years old, Nidal has already had his father and brother killed, martyred it is said here, by sniper’s bullets. His right hand testifies his part in the story: “It was three years ago, the Israeli army had invaded our region (Jabaliya).One soldier threw a sound bomb at us and I picked it up to throw away. It went off in my hand before I could throw it away.” Sound bombs in prolific use in such non-violent demonstrations as Bil’in and Nalin, among others in the occupied West Bank, many youths learn at a young age how to chuck them away. But Nidal’s stubs of fingers show that he wasn’t so lucky. Luckier than his father and brother, though. And luckier than two of his cousins, his aunt’s sons, who were in the area where missiles were dropped at the UN school. They, 12 and 27 years old, were killed.
Osama gave his testimony as a medic at the scene after the multiple missile shelling.“When we arrived, I saw dead bodies everywhere. More than 30. Dead children, grandparents…Pieces of flesh all over. And blood. It was very crowded, and difficult to carry out the injured and martyred. There were also animals dead among the humans.I helped carry 15 dead. I had to change my clothes 3 times. These people thought they were safe in the UN school, but the Israeli army killed them, in cold blood,” he said.
Mohammed K., a volunteer with the PRCS, was elsewhere when the UN safe haven was shelled. “We were in Jabaliya, at the UN “G” school, to interview the displaced people sheltering there. We wanted to find out how many people were staying there, where they’d left from and why exactly, and how safe they felt in the school. While we were there, we heard the explosions, saw the smoke, and wondered where had been hit. It was Fakoura.”
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