Gaza today: 'This is only the beginning'
Ewa Jasiewicz
As I write this, Israeli jets are bombing the areas of Zeitoun
and Rimal in central Gaza City. The family I am staying with has
moved into the internal corridor of their home to shelter from
the bombing. The windows nearly blew out just five minutes ago as
a massive explosion rocked the house. Apaches are hovering above
us, whilst F16s sear overhead.
UN radio reports say one blast was a target close to the main
gate of Al Shifa hospital Gaza and Palestines largest medical
facility. Another was a plastics factory. More bombs continue to
pound the Strip.
Sirens are wailing on the streets outside. Regular power cuts
that plunge the city into blackness every night and tonight is no
exception. Only perhaps tonight it is the darkest night people
have seen here in their lifetimes.
Over 220 people have been killed and over 400 injured through
attacks that shocked the strip in the space 15 minutes. Hospitals
are overloaded and unable to cope. These attacks come on top of
existing conditions of humanitarian crisis: a lack of medicines,
bread, flour, gas, electricity, fuel and freedom of movement.
Doctors at Shifaa had to scramble together 10 make shift
operating theatres to deal with the wounded. The hospitals
maternity ward had to transform their operating room into an
emergency theatre. Shifaa only had 12 beds in their intensive
care unit, they had to make space for 27 today.
There is a shortage of medicine over 105 key items are not in
stock, and blood and spare generator parts are desperately
needed.
Shifaas main generator is the life support machine of the entire
hospital. Its the apparatus keeping the ventilators and monitors
and lights turned on that keep people inside alive. And it
doesnt have the spare parts it needs, despite the International
Committee for the Red Cross urging Israel to allow it to
transport them through Erez checkpoint.
Shifaas Head of Casualty, Dr Maowiye Abu Hassanyeh explained,
We had over 300 injured in over 30 minutes. There were people on
the floor of the operating theatre, in the reception area, in the
corridors; we were sending patients to other hospitals. Not even
the most advanced hospital in the world could cope with this
number of casualties in such a short space of time.
And as IOF Chief of Staff Lieutenant-General Gabi Ashkenaz said
this morning, This is only the beginning.
But this isnt the beginning, this is an ongoing policy of
collective punishment and killing with impunity practised by
Israel for decades. It has seen its most intensified level today.
But the weight of dread, revenge and isolation hangs thick over
Gaza today. People are all asking, If this is only the
beginning, what will the end look like?
11.30am
Myself and Alberto Acre, a Spanish journalist, had been on the
border village of Sirej near Khan Younis in the south of the
strip. We had driven there at 8am with the mobile clinic of the
Union of Palestinian Relief Committees. The clinic regularly
visits exposed, frequently raided villages far from medical
facilities. We had been interviewing residents about conditions
on the border. Stories of olive groves and orange groves, family
farmland, bulldozed to make way for a clear line of sight for
Israeli occupation force watch towers and border guards. Israeli
attacks were frequent. Indiscriminate fire and shelling spraying
homes and land on the front line of the south eastern border. One
elderly farmer showed us the grave-size ditch he had dug to climb
into when Israeli soldiers would shoot into his fields.
Alberto was interviewing a family that had survived an Israeli
missile attack on their home last month. It had been a response
to rocket fire from resistance fighters nearby. Four fighters
were killed in a field by the border. Israel had rained rockets
and M16 fire back. The family, caught in the crossfire, have
never returned to their home.
I was waiting for Alberto to return when sground shaking thuds
tilted us off our feet. This was the sound of surface to air
fired missiles and F16 bombs slamming into the police stations,
and army bases of the Hamas authority here. In Gaza City, in
Diere Balah, Rafah, Khan Younis, Beit Hanoon.
We zoomed out of the village in our ambulance, and onto the main
road to Gaza City, before jumping out to film the smouldering
remains of a police station in Diere Balah, near Khan Younis.
Its name - meaning 'place of dates' - sounds like the easy
semi-slang way of saying take care, Diere Bala, Diere Balak
take care.
Eyewitnesses said two Israeli missiles had destroyed the station.
One had soared through a childrens playground and a busy fruit
and vegetable market before impacting on its target.
Civilians Dead
There was blood on a broken plastic yellow slide, and a crippled,
dead donkey with an upturned vegetable cart beside it. Aubergines
and splattered blood covered the ground. A man began to explain
in broken English what had happened. It was full here, full,
three people dead, many many injured. An elderly man with a
white kuffiyeh around his head threw his hands down to his blood
drenched trousers. Look! Look at this! Shame on all governments,
shame on Israel, look how they kills us, they are killing us and
what does the world do? Where is the world, where are they, we
are being killed here, hell upon them! He was a market trader,
present during the attack.
He began to pick up splattered tomatoes he had lost from his
cart, picking them up jerkily, and putting them into plastic
bags, quickly. Behind a small tile and brick building, a man was
sitting against the wall, his legs were bloodied. He couldnt get
up and was sitting, visibly in pain and shock, trying to adjust
himself, to orientate himself.
The police station itself was a wreck, a mess of criss-crossed
piles of concrete broken floors upon floors. Smashed cars and a
split palm tree split the road.
We walked on, hurriedly, with everyone else, eyes skyward at four
apache helicopters their trigger mechanisms supplied by the
UKs Brighton-Based EDM Technologies. They were dropping smoky
bright flares a defence against any attempt at Palestinian
missile retaliation.
Turning down the road leading to the Diere Balah Civil Defence
Force headquarters we suddenly saw a rush of people streaming
across the road. Theyve been bombing twice, theyve been
bombing twice shouted people.
We ran too, but towards the crowds and away from what could
possibly be target number two, a ministry building our friend
shouted to us. The apaches rumbled above.
Arriving at the police station we saw the remains of a life at
work smashed short. A prayer matt clotted with dust, a
policemans hat, the ubiquitous bright flower patterned
mattresses, burst open. A crater around 20 feet in diameter was
filled with pulverised walls and floors and a motorbike, tossed
on its side, toy-like in its depths.
Policemen were frantically trying to get a fellow worker out from
under the rubble. Everyone was trying to call him on his Jawwal.
Stop it everyone, just one, one of you ring shouted a man who
looked like a captain. A fire licked the underside of an ex-room
now crushed to just 3 feet high. Hands alongside hands rapidly
grasped and threw back rocks, blocks and debris to reach the man.
We made our way to the Al Aqsa Hospital. Trucks and cars loaded
with the men of entire families uncles, nephews, brothers
piled high and speeding to the hospital to check on loved ones,
horns blaring without interruption.
Hospitals on the brink
Entering Al Aqsa was overwhelming, pure pandemonium, charged with
grief, horror, distress, and shock. Limp blood covered and burnt
bodies streamed by us on rickety stretchers. Before the morgue
was a scrum, tens of shouting relatives crammed up to its open
double doors. They could not even identify who was who, whether
it is their brother or cousin or who, because they are so burned
explained our friend. Many were transferred, in ambulances and
the back of trucks and cars to Al Shifa Hospital.
The injured couldnt speak. Causality after casualty sat propped
against the outside walls outside, being comforted by relatives,
wounds temporarily dressed. Inside was perpetual motion and the
more drastically injured. Relatives jostled with doctors to bring
in their injured in scuffed blankets. Drips, blood streaming
faces, scorched hair and shrapnel cuts to hands, chests, legs,
arms and heads dominated the reception area, wards and operating
theatres.
We saw a bearded man, on a stretcher on the floor of an intensive
care unit, shaking and shaking, involuntarily, legs rigid and
thrusting downwards. A spasm coherent with a spinal chord injury.
Would he ever walk again or talk again? In another unit, a baby
girl, no older than six months, had shrapnel wounds to her face.
A relative lifted a blanket to show us her fragile bandaged leg.
Her eyes were saucer-wide and she was making stilted, repetitive,
squeeking sounds.
A first estimate at Al Aqsa hospital was 40 dead and 120 injured.
The hospital was dealing with casualties from the bombed market,
playground, Civil Defence Force station, civil police station and
also the traffic police station. All levelled. A working day
blasted flat with terrifying force.
At least two shaheed (martyrs) were carried out on stretchers out
of the hospital. Lifted up by crowds of grief-stricken men to the
graveyard to cries of La Illaha Illa Allah, there is not god
but Allah.
Who cares?
And according to many people here, there is nothing and nobody
looking out for them apart from God. Back in Shifa Hospital
tonight, we meet the brother of a security guard who had had the
doorway he had been sitting in and the building Abu Mazens old
HQ - fall down upon his head. He said to us, We dont have
anyone but God. We feel alone. Where is the world? Where is the
action to stop these attacks?
Majid Salim, stood beside his comatosed mother, Fatima. Earlier
today she had been sitting at her desk at work at the Hadije
Arafat Charity, near Meshtal, the Headquarters of the Security
forces in Gaza City. Israels attack had left her with multiple
internal and head injuries, tube down her throat and a ventilator
keeping her alive. Majid gestured to her, We didnt attack
Israel, my mother didnt fire rockets at Israel. This is the
biggest terrorism, to have our mother bombarded at work.
The groups of men lining the corridors of the over-stretched
Shifaa hospital are by turns stunned, agitated, patient and lost.
We speak to one group. Their brother had both arms broken and has
serious facial and head injuries. We couldnt recognise his
face, it was so black from the weapons used one explains.
Another man turns to me and says. I am a teacher. I teach human
rights this is a course we have, human rights. He pauses.
How can I teach, my son, my children, about the meaning of human
rights under these conditions, under this siege?
Its true, UNRWA and local government schools have developed a
Human Rights syllabus, teaching children about international law,
the Geneva Conventions, the International Declaration on Human
Rights, The Hague Regulations. To try to develop a culture of
human rights here, to help generate more self confidence and
security and more of a sense of dignity for the children. But the
contradiction between what should be adhered to as a common code
of conducted signed up to by most states, and the realities on
the ground is stark. International law is not being applied or
enforced with respect to Israeli policies towards the Gaza Strip,
or on 48 Palestine, the West Bank, or the millions of refugees
living in camps in Lebanon, Jordan and Syria.
How can a new consciousness and practice of human rights ever
graduate from rhetoric to reality when everything points to the
contrary both here and in Israel? The United Nations have been
spurned and shut out by Israel, with Richard Falk the UNs
Special Rapporteur on Human Rights held prisoner at Ben Gurion
Airport before being unceremoniously deported this month
deliberately blinded to the abuses being carried out against Gaza
by Israel. An international community which speaks empty phrases
on Israeli attacks we urge restraint
minimise civilian
casualties.
The Gaza Strip is one of the most densely populated regions on
the planet. In Jabbaliya camp alone, Gazas largest, 125,000
people are crowded into a space 2km square. Bombardment by F16s
and Apaches at 11.30 in the morning, as children leave their
schools for home reveals a contempt for civilian safety as does
the 18 months of a siege that bans all imports and exports, and
has resulted in the deaths of over 270 people as a result of a
lack of access to essential medicines.
A light
There is a saying here in Gaza we spoke about it, jokily last
night. At the end of the tunnel
there is another tunnel. Not so
funny when you consider that Gaza is being kept alive through the
smuggling of food, fuel and medicine through an exploitative
industry of over 1000 tunnels running from Egypt to Rafah in the
South. On average 1-2 people die every week in the tunnels. Some
embark on a humiliating crawl to get their education, see their
families, to find work, on their hands and knees. Others are
reportedly big enough to drive through.
Last night I added a new ending to the saying. At the end of the
tunnel, there is another tunnel and then a power cut. Today,
theres nothing to make a joke about. As bombs continue to blast
buildings around us, jarring the children in this house from
their fitful sleep, the saying could take on another twist. After
todays killing of over 200, is it that at the end of the tunnel,
there is another tunnel, and then a grave?, or a wall of
international governmental complicity and silence?
There is a light through, beyond the sparks of resistance and
solidarity in the West Bank, 48 and the broader Middle East.
This is a light of conscience turned into activism by people all
over the world. We can turn a spotlight onto Israels crimes
against humanity and the enduring injustice here in Palestine,
through coming out onto the streets and pressurizing our
governments; demanding an end to Israeli apartheid and
occupation, broadening our call for Boycott, Divestment and
Sanctions, and for a genuine Just Peace.
Through institutional, governmental and popular means, this can
be a light at the end of the Gazan tunnel.
Ewa Jasiewicz is an experienced journalist, community and union
organizer, and solidarity worker. She is currently Gaza Project
Co-coordinator for the Free Gaza Movement.
[1]
http://www.FreeGaza.org
References
1.
http://www.FreeGaza.org/
