BY: MOHAMMED (KABOBfest.com)
23 days after Israel launched one of the most barbaric wars in recent history on the besieged refugees of the Gaza Strip, the futility, fruitlessness and utter savagery of this war is plain to see.
One thousand three hundred human beings -albeit of the Palestinian type- were murdered over the past 23 days in Gaza. They were murdered in their homes, in their mosques, in their schools, in their hospitals, in their cars, in their ambulances, in their streets, in their police stations and in their refugee camps. They were murdered by over one 1,000,000 kilograms of explosives dropped from the air, and tens of thousands more kilograms fired from the land and the sea. They were murdered by white phosphorus fired over, into and around their homes and neighborhoods, a chemical that burns the flesh to the bone. They were murdered and maimed by prototypical DIME (Dense Inert Metal Explosive) munitions, that release microscopic bits of shrapnel into the vicinity, tearing apart their victims insides, amputating thousands of limbs. They were murdered by indiscriminate sniper fire, by F-16 warplanes, torn apart by helicopter gunships, executed by Israeli special forces, bombed as they huddled in their homes and left for days to bleed to death. They weren’t even allowed to rest in death, bombed in their freshly dug graves.
This is a war waged by one of the most advanced armies in the world against one of the weakest populations on the planet. This is a massacre.
This is a war that was waged on the civilian population, a war intended to terrify the people until they gave in to Israel’s
inhumane diktats. This is terrorism.
This is a war where nothing, absolutely nothing, is considered sacrosanct by Israel, where everything is a legitimate target, where nothing is off-limits, where international treaties governing the protection of civilians are trampled on and international law desecrated. This is a disturbing assortment of the most heinous war crimes.
No words can ever adequately describe the utter destruction visited upon Gaza over the past three weeks. This is a territory that has been subject to a deliberate policy of de-evolution by Israel for the better part of forty years. Yet it will take many years to rebuild Gaza back to the pathetic standard it held three weeks ago. Everybody in Gaza-where 80% of the population are
refugees and 50% are children-knows somebody killed in this rampage.
It is difficult to move away from the human cost in life and limbs that was paid by Gaza’s long-abused population, but a simple examination of the political realities and results of this war reveals just how unnecessary these murders and mutilations were. Israel has achieved absolutely none of its goals: it has not weakened Hamas, it has not pacified Gaza, it has not reinstated the collaborator, Mahmoud Abbas, back in power, it has not ended rocket fire, it has not convinced the Palestinian people to turn against the resistance, it has not strengthened its allies in the Arab world, it has not endeared itself to the world in general. It has done nothing but give it’s generally ignorant and militaristic public a short-term feeling of military superiority against a generally defenseless population, and it has contributed to an exponential increase in threats against its own security.
Israel has let its short-sighted strategy of using its military dominance to bomb and destroy and terrify civilians in the hope that they will be cowed take lead it to yet another horrific slaughter. It is a state founded on terrorism and violence and a state that needs terrorism and violence to keep those it oppresses in check. It is a state that ferments hatred and violence, then cries victim while simultaneously destroying and slaughtering those it oppresses and imprisons. It is a state that should never be allowed to claim a moral high ground.
This is a war that Israel could never win. Despite their horrific cost in human lives, wars are not by who can kill the most, but by who achieves their goals. The day Israel announced that it was aiming to destroy Hamas, remove it from power and end the firing of home-made rockets was the day Israel lost this war. No matter where your feelings lie when it comes to Hamas and its tactics, it, like all other Palestinian groups fighting Israel’s oppression, is a resistance movement borne out of the fabric of Palestinian society. To destroy Hamas, you need to destroy the Palestinian people. Stopping the firing of home-made rockets is also impossible to achieve through military means. Israelis quickly forget that the rockets were developed while Gaza was under complete Israeli control.
Like Lebanon in 2006, Israel has attempted to cover up its political failure by reducing Gaza to rubble. I am not sure if it is appropriate to claim a victory for Gaza as it buries so many of its sons and daughters, but from a political standpoint this was a war that Israel could never win, and Gaza could never lose.
Israel announced a unilateral ceasefire in Gaza last night, to take effect at 2AM. At 2:45AM, Israeli Apache helicopters attacked the Martyrs Cemetery behind Naser Hospital in Khan Younis, riddling the graves with machine gun fire. Before the end of the first day of this unilateral ceasefire, a farmer in Khan Younis and a girl in Jabalya had been murdered by Israeli forces.
Palestinian fighters continued to fire their home-made rockets, a day after Ehud Olmert announced that his military had succeeded in severely limiting the capability of Palestinians to do so. Throughout the morning, medics, rescue workers and ordinary civilians rushed to areas in northern and eastern Gaza that had been closed off by the Israeli military for weeks. 95 bodies were recovered in the most horrific conditions.
We saw the images on TV: blackened bodies buried under the rubble of their own homes. Children, women, and men. Corpses lying in the streets. Medical sources confirmed that a majority of the bodies had been dead for a long time and were decomposing. They were buried immediately in mass graves. Muawiyah Hassanein, the head of Gaza’s emergency medical services, seemed stunned as he recounted what his teams had seen that morning. Some of the dead had died after being left to bleed to death from non-life threatening wounds. Many had to be dug out from under their own homes-bombed inside their own homes, targeted inside their own homes, killed inside their own homes.
Some of recovered bodies had been executed and eaten by wild dogs. Many were mutilated. Some bodies had been run over by tanks. All were victims of unspeakable barbarity.
Hassanein said that there were still tens of bodies in areas they could not reach yet, particularly in Jabal al-Rayyes and Izbet Abed Rabbo in Jabalya.
I’m sure I’ve used the word destruction many times already, but I can’t think of anything more apt to describe what we see on TV and hear from those in Gaza. Entire neighborhoods have been obliterated. Worse still, entire families have been annihilated. Forget the dead. Forget the wounded and crippled and disfigured. I can’t even begin to fathom how those that physically survived this insanity are going to be able to start rebuilding.
Israel targeted everything and anything. 4,500 homes have been destroyed. More than twenty mosques have been flattened. 60 schools, including four run by UNRWA, have been extensively damaged. The American School has been completely flattened. Three hospitals-Al-Wafa, Al-Quds and the Red Crescent Hospital-were hit by missiles and shells. 25 ambulances have been destroyed, as have all the police stations. UNRWA’s headquarters was bombed and its food and medicine supplies burned.
Of the so 1,300 dead so far, 473 were children. 110 were women. 16 paramedics, the unsung heroes of Palestine, were murdered as they attempted to recover the dead or save the wounded. 120 police officers were killed serving their communities in their police stations, including a new class of cadets who were bombed during their graduation ceremony. 4 journalists were killed as they attempted to report the details of Israel’s atrocity.
This is a massacre.
In the afternoon, the deputy head of Hamas’ political bureau, Mousa Abu Marzouk, announced that the resistance would commit to a ceasefire in Gaza for a week. Unless Israel removed its army from inside Gaza by then, the ceasefire will not be extended. He reiterated the conditions on which a long term ceasefire would be based: the removal of all Israeli soldiers from Gaza, an end to Israeli violence, and the complete reopening of all the border crossings, particularly Rafah.
In the Egyptian resort of Sharm al-Sheikh, leaders from across Europe and the Arab world gathered to discuss ways of ‘maintaining the ceasefire’. After that, the leaders of several European states, including France, Spain, Italy, Germany, the Czech Republic and others flew to Israel to offer their support in the fight to end weapons smuggling into Gaza. It makes me sick that some of the world’s most powerful states are expressing their solidarity with a fascist, oppressive occupier as it carries out one of the most heinous massacres of recent times. It’s as if the impoverished, besieged and pulverized Gaza Strip were a superpower threatening the entire world.
I called my colleague at work, the one whose sisters live in the Bureij refugee camp in Gaza. The last time we had spoken he had told me that the tanks were on the edge of the camp but they would be okay because they lived on the other side of Bureij. Today he told me that the woman who had been killed in her home by a tank shell in Bureij two days ago along with her five children was his sisters’ next door neighbor.
They had been convinced that they would be next and spent the entire night praying, repeating their final prayers over and over again, never expecting to live another day. I told him my uncle’s wife had been doing the same thing for days on end. The experience was undoubtedly shared by tens of thousands of women across Gaza over the past three weeks.
I asked him why he wasn’t at work today. He told me he had gone down to Ofer, the Israeli military prison just outside Ramallah. His brother had been arrested last week and was due to be sentenced this week by a sham military tribunal. Like all Palestinian prisoners in Israeli jails, he would not be allowed access to any evidence held against him. The hearing was postponed, but he is likely to be sentenced to administrative detention-imprisonment without charge. Against the backdrop of violence in Gaza, the oppression in the West Bank has never been more suffocating.
I called my uncle Mohammad somewhere in Gaza City, at the apartment he was sharing with some friends. I asked him how the day had been without the constant bombing. He told me the helicopters and drones have not left the skies, that nobody trusted the Israelis to be honest about their ceasefire (indeed, as I’ve mentioned above, they’ve already broken it multiple times).
I asked him if he had taken the chance to go out in the relative calm. He told me he had been out since the early morning, back at the apartment in Tal al-Hawa, the modest residence he had worked his whole life to buy for his children and take them out of the refugee camp. It was almost completely ruined. I asked him if it would ever be livable. He said he was trying to figure it out. He’s no structural engineer, so he can’t be sure, but for now he’s doing what he can to salvage his home. He bought plastic covering at more than double the price to cover the bombed out windows, and had spent the whole day sweeping the glass, mortar, wood and dust out of the rooms. My first goal, he said, is to try and get some running water. He wants to get a plumber to visit the wreckage tomorrow and see if it is possible to fix the water lines.
I asked him if their building had suffered extensive structural damage. He told me they had been lucky; theirs had been one of the few in Tal al-Hawa to remain safe enough to enter, but it looked like many of the apartment buildings would have to be torn down.
He told me the extent of the destruction throughout Gaza can’t be appreciated except by those on the ground. Even the TV can’t show you how bad it is, he said. I asked him how people were planning on rebuilding when basic building materials-cement, wood, glass, pipes, etc.- were banned from entering Gaza. That, he said, is the big question. Nobody knows. The world seems more interested in stopping weapons smuggling.
I called his wife Areej next. She’s still staying with my aunt Najat and their kids in the tiny home in the Shati’ refugee camp. I must have woken her up because she sounded sleepy, but happy as ever to get a call. She told me the kids were doing better, they were playing with their cousins but she wasn’t letting them out of the house. Nobody can feel safe yet, she said.
I asked her if she was at least feeling better. She told me it was definitely better than Tal al-Hawa. They’re not bombing here constantly, she said. She was beginning to calm down. I told her to get her sleep. She hadn’t had much for weeks.
I tried calling my cousin Mosab next. I knew he would have taken the first chance to go back to his neighborhood and see what had become of his house, but he didn’t pick up. In a sense, I was glad. More than the house, Mosab had lost many friends in that neighborhood. It would have been tough listening to him talk about them.
I called my uncle Jasim in Khan Younis. His wife Amal picked up. She told me Khan Younis was okay. They hadn’t been bombed all day. That was something. I asked her about her youngest daughter, Lama. She told me Lama was fine thankfully, she was asleep with all the other kids. She asked if I had talked to my aunt Najeyye (Mosab’s mother). I told her I’d tried calling but he hadn’t picked up. She said she had talked to them earlier. Like thousands of other displaced families, they’d gone back to inspect what remained of their home. It had been hit by several tank shells and had been set alight. The interior had been gutted by fire and the walls had gaping holes in them. They didn’t know when they would be able to go back to live in it, if ever. Like everyone else, they wanted to start fixing and repairing straight away, but there are no building materials in Gaza. So people will remain displaced, with no idea what the immediate future holds.
My last call was to my uncle Mahmoud. We hadn’t talked in a few days-it was usually late by the time I got round to calling him. He was awake today though. He repeated what Areej said, that nobody believed the Israelis would hold their fire. He told me of the helicopter attack on the graves behind Naser Hospital. I asked him if he had gone out today, but he told me there was nothing to do or see except rubble and destruction, so he had stayed home. I asked him about his youngest kids, Hanan and Hosam. He told me Hosam had finally gotten the haircut he had been waiting three weeks for today, and seemed pretty happy with himself. Hanan, though, was worrying her father. Over the past few days she had begun to experience severe pain in her leg every time a bomb landed nearby and she was scared. It has gotten to the point where she can hardly walk now. He wasn’t sure what to do for her, but he said he had heard of a lot of kids suffering from the same affliction. He hoped she would get better by herself the relative calm persisted, but if not he was going to take her to get it massaged.
I asked him if his in-laws had visited their homes on the eastern border. He told me they hadn’t, they were still at his apartment. The Israelis had not pulled back behind the border in their area, he said, and the heavy presence of helicopters and drones in the sky did not help matters. He told of me two boys who had died in the eastern area a few days ago, during one of Israel’s ‘three hour humanitarian ceasefires’. The boys, whose family owned several goats, had gone out during the supposedly safe period and begun packing feed for the animals into sacks. They were killed by a missile fired from a drone. It was a direct hit. The two brothers had been torn apart, so their bodies were collected in one bag and they were buried like that, a tangle of unidentified limbs. The people of Gaza have every right to suspect Israel’s intentions.
He told me that the drones and helicopters had been using another weapon, a small missile that was dropped vertically. Upon impact, the munitions did not immediately explode, but bounced back into the air. About two feet off the ground it would explode, sending razor sharp shrapnel into the vicinity. This weapon has a clear aim: to cut off the legs of anybody nearby.
I told him I could not understand the savage desire to not just kill, but to cause unimaginable suffering. He told me they would never forget what Israel had just put them through. They had been suffering and oppressed their entire lives, but nothing had ever come close to matching the sheer barbarity of the past 23 days.
I told him the tanks had pulled out of Netzarim in the evening, meaning that the road to Gaza City might be usable. He said he was wondering when the university up there would reopen again so he could complete his Master’s degree. He told me today he had taken out all his papers and tried to review, but had spent the best part of the day just trying to figure out what each paper meant. They were filed and organized, but his mind had been so completely detached from his studies for the past three weeks that he was having trouble regaining his focus.
You may have noticed that while this war seems to be over, I keep describing it in present terms. That’s because this massacre is but one chapter of an ongoing campaign of violence and oppression waged by Israel on Gaza, and on the Palestinians, for six decades. Even if the bombing stops for any extended period of time, we know Israel will soon be itching to go back and finish its job because it will soon discover that in reality, it did little to change the nature of Gaza and its people. This can be avoided if Israel is ever willing to accept the right of Palestinians to liberty and freedom in their homeland, outside the refugee camp walls. Unfortunately, Israel is still obsessed with the idea of a Jewish supremacist state, a state that necessarily demands that the Palestinians remain oppressed and disenfranchised. This massacre is not over-even if the large-scale killing ceases for now, the psychological, emotional and physical wounds opened over the past 23 days will take many, many years to heal. The scars, however, are likely to remain forever.
Gaza isn’t rebuilding. It wants to, but the borders remain sealed. The spirit to fight on, however, can never be locked away. Israel’s far superior military capabilities, and its willingness to use the most barbaric of weapons on a civilian population, belies its intrinsic weakness: It cannot understand the basic human spirit driving the Palestinians to resist oppression and to persevere in the face of dispossesion, no matter the cost.
Remember Gaza.