Eyewitness from Gaza

Beit Hanoon
Tuesday 30th December 2008

It happened at 9am this morning. We were speaking to Sabrine Naim at the time, standing and talking in the Naim family home which had been wrecked this morning. Chunks of debris – one a meter long and a foot wide - glass, and sharp slices of their own broken roof, had smashed onto beds, chairs, their kitchen and living room. Only two of their family of 12 had been home at the time. They were expecting an attack.

And it came at 4am – a missile strike by an F16 on the local police station and Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine offices. Smouldering rubble and rocks and dust were strewn across the heart of Beit Hanoon – the market, taxi rank and main streat littered with
debris.

Sabrine had been hit in the face with small chunks of her neighbour's home. One side of her right cheek was covered with a thick white
dressing. She looked watery eyed and exhausted. Debris had also struck her in her heavily pregnant stomach. With only a month to go until giving birth, she spent two hours in the local hospital before being discharged.

The 4am blast shook us all out of our beds. A gigantic abrupt bang – the sound of concrete walls, floors and steel rods exploding on impact in an instant. The strikes had been happening all night – most of them in Jabaliya again. Distant thuds that you strain to map in your mind.

We had spent the night in Beit Hanoon, a town home to some 40,000 people in the North of the Gaza Strip. Beit Hanoon borders Erez Crossing and Houg (now called Sderot) in Israeli territory. The town possesses some of the most fertile land in Gaza. Much of it – orange groves and olive trees – has been bulldozed by the Israeli military to clear cover for fighter fire against Israeli settlements and towns. Even so, because of its' proximity to Israeli towns, rockets have been known to be launched from here.

The family home we stayed in had been occupied by Israeli soldiers in the last invasion in 2006. The family of six was moved into the downstairs flat, whilst soldiers blasted holes in the walls of rooms on the top floor to make sniper posts. If the noise of an invasion – tanks, Apaches, F16s, heavy boots, agitated soldiers and the never-ending sneer of the surveillance drones – didn’t keep the family awake. Then the sound of single shots and the wondering what or who had been hit,
worrying that a neighbour or family member had been struck, would add to the internal invasion.

The house, located in a courtyard with olive trees and a roof with clear views of the surrounding streets made an excellent vantage point for snipers. Another home, of local doctor Mohammad Naim, a specialist in treating prematurely babies at Shifa Hospital had been occupied 12 times in the past 8 years by Israeli soldiers. He hadn't even bothered to paint over the naked grey concrete smears in the walls in his upstairs room. They had been sniper holes. And he knew they would be back again. His outside wall too, bore the spray painted orientation indicators typical of occupying soldiers moving through narrow alleys at night.

'Do you think you'll move if they invade?' I asked him. 'Where will I go?' He said, 'I haven’t got anywhere else to go?'. He showed me the lock of his front door, 'This as been smashed open at least 20 times' he remarked. Dr Mohammad had been blindfolded and taken to the agricultural school in Northern Beit Hanoon during the last invasion, along with all local men aged between 16-40.

He had been interrogated and detained from Thursday afternoon under Friday evening. 'Every invasion they occupy my house. They cut the electricity and use their own flashlights. Last time my family were all downstairs for five days. My children are the worst affected, they remember everything, the tanks, the invasion, and being jailed; none of us are allowed to go out even when there is a break in curfew'. Asked how the soldiers behaved towards the family, he said, 'Well it depends on the shift, sometimes they're decent, sometimes they can be aggressive. But with the situation as it is now, any movement could attract fire'.

'50 people were killed here'. This is my friend Sabr talking. He's pointing to the street outside his sister's home – another one always occupied by soldiers, like that of Dr Mohammad. In the last invasion, resistance had confronted advancing tanks. The result was a bloodbath.

His family home had been leveled to the ground.

Walking through the streets here, nearly every house has a martyr – martyrdom status is attributed to anyone, young or old, fighter or civilian – who has been killed by occupation forces. It is a mark of respect, and a coping mechanism for the sheer volume of death and an inconsolable, mounting level of loss that affects every family. It is also a way to honour and pay tribute to lives violently taken, and let life live after death under occupation. Everyone knows a neighbour, a friend, a cousin, somebody who was killed by Israeli occupation forces.

Communities here feel each death personally, because so many so know one another personally. The extended family lines and kinship networks that have grown up from the collective experience of dispossession and expulsion are a web of support and a common thread made solid in the form of houses built from tents, all close together and all bearing witnesses together. Because the size of families and the proximity in which people live together, there is a natural participatory experience in almost every aspect of daily life. And every killing there is a witness, to almost all that happens in peoples lives, there are witnesses, always a 'together'.

We pass a huge crater in the Al Wahd Street, just opposite the Al Qds community clinic. Its where a missile from either a Surveillance drone or F16 blasted Maysara Mohammad Adwan, a 47-year-old mother of 10, and 24-year old Ibrahim Shafiq Chebat into a pile of cement and clay-like mud. Ibrahim's father, Shafiq Chebat, a classical Arabic teacher, was the first to uncover his body, but he did not immediately recognize his son. A Bulldozer was clearing debris when an arm was discovered. 'I never expected to find him here', he explained, 'He was a civilian, he had gone to work at the 7-up factory, I thought he was at work'.

Because of an Israeli strike close to the factory in Salahadeen Street, staff were sent home early for their own protection. Shafiq's sister in law Fatima explained to me, 'The mud and the rocks, they were piled meters above his body, meters! It was two hours before they got to him. And then his father didn’t know it was him. It was his youngest son that said, 'Its Ibrahim, Its Ibrahim'. And he said no my son it's not him, but then we he wiped the mud from his face and when he saw it was him, he fell on the ground, he fainted on the ground'.

Ibrahim had been working at the 7-UP plant to save money for his wedding. He was due to marry Selwan Mohammad Ali Shebat, a woman widowed before she could wed, she now describes herself as 'broken' and 'suffocated' with grief.

The women's grieving room was full of mothers with lost sons, sitting around Ibrahim's mother on gaudy sponge mattresses. Fatima and Kamela, sisters of Sadeeya, Ibrahim's mother, had both lost a son each. 'I am a mother of a martyr and she is a mother of a martyr, we are full of martyrs here'. Fatima's son, Mohammad Kaferna, was killed by a tank shell in September 2001, whilst Kamela's son Hassan Khadr Naim was killed by a missile strike in 2007.

Sadeeya was stunned and disorientated in her grief, throwing her arms up she keened over the memory of her dead son, 'I said don’t go out, don’t go out, don’t go out, don't go out'.

Sadeeya's sister Kamela takes me by the eyes and leans forward. 'They are using weapons of war against us', she says. ' we're civilians and they are bombing these neighbourhoods with war planes'.

Blue tarpolin grieving tents silence the streets of Beit Hanoon, like the rest of Gaza. Men sit side by side in lines on plastic chairs, taking bitter coffee and dates. With their quiet collective remembrance, they are the passage ways for too many families and communities into new levels of desolation and collective resilience.

So, I think we need to go back to 9am this morning. And the 'it' of what happened.

We had been talking to Sabrine Naim, in her rubble home when we heard two soaring, succinct, thuds. A plume of black smoke stormed up into the sky. We had though it was too far, maybe the outskirts of Beit Hanoon - in the end we go to Beit Hanoon hospital – the only one in town. Its a basic facility with just 47 beds, compared to Shifa's 600, and no intensive care unit. With Beit Hanoon expected to be first in the firing line if Israeli ground forces invade, the Hospital is desperately under-equipped to cope. Two days ago it had just one ambulance. Now 5 have been scrambled from other local state and private hospitals and wait in the parking lot primed for the worst.

'They're bringing them in, they're bringing them in', we hear people say. I expect to see a wailing ambulance come veering round the corner, instead a cantering donkey pulling a rickety wooden cart vaults up to the hospital gate. Its cargo three blackened children carried by male relatives. They hoist their limp and contorted bodies into their arms and run in to the hospital. Their mother arrives soon after by car, running out in her bare feet to the doors.

Haya Talal Hamdan aged 12 was brought into the main emergency ward and lain down. She was soon covered with a white sheet, as her mother, comforted by relatives disintegrated into pieces. Ismaeel aged 9 came in breathing, his chest pushing up and down quickly as doctors hurriedly examined his shrapnel flecked body.

In the emergency operating theatre was Lamma, aged just 4. Opening the door, I saw a doctor giving her CPR, again and again, trying to bring her to life, but it was too late. She died in front of us.

Lamma's mother blamed herself, 'I asked them to take out the rubbish, to take out the rubbish, I should never have asked them to take out the rubbish'. A female relative was livid with disbelief, 'She hadn't even started school! We were, sleeping, and they call us the terrorists? How could they cut down this child with an F16?'

Doctor Hussein, a surgeon at Beit Hanoon Hospital said the cause of death was 'multiple internal injuries and internal bleeding'. Their fatal injuries were consistent with their bodies having been 'thrown up and down in the air 10 meters'.

Outside the hospital I turn around and see a young girl, maybe 10 years old, in a long skirt and slightly too big for her jacket. She's beautiful, with straggly brown air and deep brown eyes. She's on her own which is rare for any child here, they always stick together and move together. She looks eeriely alone, in the car-less empty street. I say hi and smile and she comes over and we shake hands, and I'm struck after the violence of the death of Lemma and Haya, and turmoil and out of control grief of the hospital at how vulnerable she is and how uncertain anything is about her future.

After the hospital, we made our way to the scene of the strike – Al Sikkek Street, close to the Erez Crossing. Two large craters around 6 meters in diameter and 20 meters apart scared an empty wasteland between a row of houses. One had turned into a lake; the missile downed power lines had smashed into a water pipeline, now spewing fresh water into the crater. Iman, 12 years old, a tough, long haired tom-boy wearing a woolly hat and jeans, witnessed the whole attack. She took us up the roof of her house to point out where and how and what she saw.

At the second crater, next to two green wheelie bins, we see a twisted bicycle and wooden cart, mangled together with plastic bags of rubbish that the children never got to dump. There is still blood on the ground.
Crowds of young men gather to stare into the craters, and point to the gushing water mixing with sewage. They also point out a blasted building near by – its corner missing – a casualty of a 2007 Israeli missile attack.

We walk back to the main street, now lined with solemn male, mourners, in groups talking quietly or looking listlessly at us. Iman explains to us, 'I always ask God for me to become a martyr like the other children. My mother is always asking why, but they're killing children here all the time, and if I die, then I prefer to be a martyr, like the others. Even it's better to die than live a life like this here'.

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Article printed in Daily Telegraph:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/middleeast/israel/4015727/Fath...

Father mourns loss of five children in Gaza strike

Inside the mourning tent in Jabaliya refugee camp, a group of men sat in stricken silence as they sought to comfort Anwar Balousha.

By Ewa Jasiewicz in Jabaliya refugee camp, Gaza
29 Dec 2008

Palestinians shout slogans as relatives carry the body of 4-year-old girl Dena Balosha, during her funeral in Jabalya refugee camp Photo: EPA

Hours earlier, five of his daughters had been killed by an Israeli air strike. Apache helicopter gunships fired missiles at a mosque in Jabaliya in the early hours of yesterday morning. The blast destroyed Mr Balousha's family home, found beside the mosque.

Of his nine children, four had escaped. They left behind Samar, who was only six, Dina, seven, Jawaher, eight, Akram, 14, and Tahrir, 17, who were all crushed as they slept. Another 19 civilians were injured by this attack.

"Where is respect for our lives?" asked Mr Balousha. "They are killing us and no-one is stopping it."

In all, five missiles were fired into Jabaliya before dawn. Most hit empty buildings, although one attack wounded a young boy and a middle-aged man and woman.

At Gaza's Islamic University, bombed at around midnight, the destruction was total. A five storey building, with administration, engineering and science departments, had been reduced to a pile of smouldering rubble.

Torn textbooks lay among slabs of concrete, twisted wires and shattered glass. The university's destruction came during the final exams of its students – which they might now be unable to complete.

Elsewhere, two Apache gunships fired missiles at a paint factory on Jaffa Street and a steel works in Abu Shebak Street. The buildings were set ablaze.

All night, Israeli drones circled overhead. These unmanned aircraft are generally used for reconnaissance to identify targets for attack, but some can also fire missiles. Maysara Mohammad Adwan, a mother of ten children, and Ibrahim Shafiq Chebat, a 24-year-old man, were killed by a drone two days ago in the town of Beit Hanoun.

Yesterday, a mosque opposite Al-Shifa hospital in Gaza City lay in ruins. Local journalists say a doctor and a passer-by were killed.

Hospitals, including Al-Shifa, have been overwhelmed by the flood of casualties. Their wards are filled with people suffering head, facial and spinal injuries, mostly caused by flying shrapnel.

Gaza's hospitals are short of basic medical supplies and kept alive by electricity generators, many of which lack spare parts which the Israeli blockade has not permitted to enter.

People in Gaza fear the worst is still to come. Drones continue to whine overhead and many expect a ground attack by Israeli troops.

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EYEWITNESS REPORT from Gaza: Riding on fire and a third intifada

3am As I write this the offices of the Ramatan news agency have been infiltrated with the smoke of the burning central police station in Rimal close by its destruction that just shook the whole building. Even though its close and we’re all journalists, noone wants to take the risk to go and check it out, ‘They may strike again and we may die, they may kill us’ says one producer from Jabaliya. Another strike has just hit a target, shaking the whole building again, down the street. Another 3 minutes later, again another strike, ‘Kussif’ – bombing, again and again. If we had windows here they’d be all over us by now.

Riding on fire and a third intifada

Ewa Jasieiwcz, Jabaliya and Beit Hanoun

Thursday January 8th 2008

I’ve been working with the Palestinian Red Crescent ambulance services in Jabaliya, Beit Hanoun and Beit Lahiya for the past 5 days and nights.

For the past five days the Red Cross and the Red Crescent emergency services have been blocked from evacuating the injured and the dead from key areas surrounding Jabaliya and Gaza City. Special Forces have occupied houses in the areas of Zeitoun, Atarturah, Zoumo and Salahedeen.

Paramedic Ali Khalil’s team was shot at on Monday afternoon. He told me, 'We had been told we had the go-ahead from the Israeli army through co-ordination with the Red Cross but when we arrived at the area we were shot at. We had to turn back'. Yesterday afternoon, a medical volunteer, Hassan, was shot in the leg as he and his colleague had to drop the stretcher they were carrying after coming under Israeli sniper fire. There are reports of scores of dead bodies lying in the streets un-claimed. The Palestinian Red Crescent Society estimates there are 230 injured which they haven’t been able to pick up.

There are reports of 18 corpses in one home alone and the injured dying from treatable wounds because of a lack of access to medical treatment.

Last night, at around 9pm, Marwan, an experienced paramedic, bearing the scars of years of Israeli invasions, sustained another yet another. He was shot in the leg by an Israeli sniper in Eastern Jabaliya. Gnarled by his work, picking up the pieces after Israeli attacks, he had said only the day before yesterday, ‘This is no life, its better to die, it would be better to be dead than this shit’.

The blockade on any rescuing is reminiscent of the battle of Jenin in April 2002. Israel forbade ambulances from entering the camp, blowing up one with a tank shell and killing Dr Khalil Sulleiman, the Head of the Palestinian Red Crescent. The army cut water and electricity and bulldozed an entire neighbourhood, complete with residents still in their homes, over the course of 11 days. The death count in the 11-day Jenin massacre was 58, but estimated to be much higher. Here in Jabaliya, this is the equivalent to around 4 days in the past week or almost the whole of yesterday. Between December 27th and January 5th, in Jabaliya alone, 119 people had been killed and 662 injured. An average of 15 people dying, violently, every day. On January 6th, with the Fakhoura school massacre, 50 people were killed in just one day. Hospital authorities mark the day as the single worst day they have ever seen in Jabaliya.

Sporadic battles are taking place between Palestinian resistance fighters, armed with basic machine guns, the odd grenade, and warm clothes. They’re up against the fourth most powerful army in the world, armed with state-of-the-art war planes, Merkava tanks, regional governmental co-ordination and intelligence, a green light to kill with impunity in the name of self defence, body armor, night vision, and holidays in Goa when it all gets too much…

The paramedics, drivers and volunteers at the emergency services risk their lives every time they leave their base and even working within their bases.

Medics evacuated their original base near Salahadeen street due to heavy shelling from Israeli forces early last week. They then moved to the Al Awda Hospital in Beit Lahiya because again, it was too close to the battle front, and again to a community centre in Moaskar Jabaliya to be ‘safer’.

However, against a backdrop of deafening crashes and bangs of bombs falling close by, on Monday at 12.45pm, an Israeli surveillance plane fired two missiles into the Al Awda Hospital compound. The first slammed into a police car, the second, impacted two minutes later into the ground just meters in front of the Hospital’s clinic. Two rescue workers were injured in the head and face, but we were all lucky to escape without any serious damage.

Right now we’re back at the Jabaliya base, still close to the sound of pounding tank shells, apache strikes, and light gunfire met with staggering rapid fire 50 caliber tank-gun fire, the odd grenade and the ever menacing and maddening sneer of surveillance drones.

Yesterday around 1am we were called out to a strike in the Moaskar Jabaliya area. The area was pitch black, our feeble torches lighting up broken pipes streaming water, glass, chunks of concrete and twisted metal. ‘They’re down there, down there, take care’, people said. The smell of fresh severed flesh, a smell that can only come from the shedding of pints of blood and open insides, was in the air. I got called back by a medic who screamed at me to stay by his side. It turned out Id been following the Civil Defence, the front line responders who check to see if buildings are safe and put out fires, rather than the medics.

The deep ink dark makes it almost impossible to see clearly, shadows and faces lit up by swiveling red ambulance lights and arms pointing hurriedly are our guides for finding the injured. ‘Lets get out of here, lets get out’ say the guys, and we’re leaving to go, empty handed, but straining to seeing what’s ahead when a missile hits the ground in front of us. We see a lit up fountain of what could be nail darts explode in front of us. They fall in a spray like a thousand hissing critters, we cover our heads and run back to the ambulance. One of the volunteers inside, Mohammad, is shocked, ‘Did you see? Did you see? How close it was?’

At approximately 4am, we hit the streets in response to an F16 war plane attack on the house of Abdullah Sayeed Mrad in the Block Two area of Jabaliya Camp in the Northern Gaza Strip.

Mrad is said to be a high ranking Hamas official according to local sources. The attack leveled the house. Every house strike is like walking into a smoking grave, broken doll-like bodies of children to be found beneath layers and layers of white rubble and burning shrapnel.

We took Adam Mamoun Al Kurdi, aged 3 to Al Awda. He died of multiple shrapnel injuries to his skull and lower thighs.

We sped back 5 minutes later – four teams in four Red Crescent ambulances, to fetch more casualties. Thankfully there were none.

Whilst waiting in the ambulance we suddenly heard a deafening bang and saw an orange flash before our ambulance was showered with shrapnel, glass and brick. The target of the attack was another house belonging to Sayeed Mrad. Medics say the strike was from an F16. The depth of damage caused was consistent with the force of an F16-fired bomb.

The house, reduced to rubble, was just two meters from our ambulance. Ambulance driver Majdi Shehadda, 48, sustained deep lacerations to his face and right ear and went into shock in the ambulance. He was treated with oxygen. Four rescue workers sustained minor injuries and had to be treated for smoke and dust inhalation. One, Saaber Mohammad Awad, 34, was preparing to exit his ambulance when the bomb hit. ‘The door smashed against me and the windows smashed in because of the pressure. I expected to die. If we had been outside just a second later, we would have been killed. The ambulance saved our lives’.

The four ambulances, one with all of its' windows blown in and damage to medical stocks inside, the others with cracked windows, were trapped by rubble blocking our exit route.

We had to carry Majdi on a stretcher over the debris of the bombed house in total darkness whilst Israeli drones menaced the skies above us. I tripped up over twisted steel foundation poles at one point and dropped the oxygen tank, the pipe detaching and hissing oxygen out over the rubble. We all evacuated the area after 15 minutes, along with a family, carrying their blankets, mattresses and belongings, as another property belonging to Sayeed Mrad also in the area was at risk of being bombed.

The ambulances would have been clearly visible to Israeli drones and special forces with their rooftop indentification markings, bright flashing lights and solo movement in the deserted, pitch black strees of Jabaliya.

An aerial curfew

Everyone is terrified by surveillance plane strikes here. ‘Zenane’ they call them, because of the zzzzz sound they make. They have been firing explosive missiles into people – people walking, in cars, sitting in doorways drinking tea, standing on rooftops, praying together, sitting at home and watching television together.

In Naim Street Beit Hanoun, at 9.30pm on Sunday, Samieh Kaferna , 40, was hit by flying shrapnel to his head. Neighbours called him to come to their home. Fearing his home would be struck, he and a group of relatives began to move from one home to another, to be safer.

The second missile struck them down directly. When we arrived one man, eyes gigantic, was being dragged into the pavement, half of his lower body shredded, his intestines slopping out. He was alive, his relatives were screaming, we managed to take four, whilst six others, charred and dismembered, were brought in on the back of an open cattle truck. Beit Hanoun Hospital was chaos, with screaming relatives and burning bodies. Three men died in the attack, 10 were injured, six from the same Abu Harbid family. Three had to have leg amputations, and one a double amputation.

Burning shrapnel in eyes is a common injury, shrapnel slices deep into to any soft fleshy parts of the body. We brought a boy from Beit Hanoun with a distorted heavily bandaged head wrapped in bandages, to Al Nasser hospital with its specialist eye unit and mental health clinic. When we get there, its pitch black, doctors are sitting around candles, the place is freezing and full of shadows. Both the doctors and their have been patients blinded with Israeli-controlled power cuts that intensify the confusion, fear, and psychological darkness caving in on people here.

Burning shrapnel in eyes – like those of three year old Shedar Athman Khader Abid from Beit Hanoun, ‘injured in the left eye, explosive injury, full thickness corneal wound, iris prologue and vitreous loss’ according to her medical report. Her father approaches my friend, quietly, to ask if its possible for me to help her, to get her out to have eye surgery, ’This girl, she was like a moon, haram, three years old and her beauty is robbed from her’.

Extremely hot, shrapnel lodges in chests, legs, faces, hands, stomachs, and skullls. I’ve been taught, don’t focus on stopping bleeding with shrapnel injuries, there is very little blood, the foreign bodies burn inside. Many casualties we’ve brought in that seem ok, literally, on ‘the surface’, only to die a few days later. People talk about the missiles being poison tipped, and there have been reports of white phosphorous being used.

Dead for buying bread

Last night four members of a family, were traveling back from the bakers in Beit Lahiya. Squeezed into a white skoda, their bag of bread still warm, they were struck by a surveillance plane missile at 6pm. Khaled Ismaeel Kahlood, 44, and his three sons Mohammad 15, Habib, 12, and Towfiq, 10, were cut into pieces by the attack which blew their car in two. Taxi driver Hassan Khalil, 20, was also martyred in the attack. The bodies brought into Kamal Odwan hospital were virtually unrecognizable.

A Union of Palestinian Medical Relief Committees ambulance was fired upon at approximately 8.30am on Sunday morning killing Paramedic and father of five, Arafa El Deyem, 35. He and another rescue worker had been evacuating casualties which had come under fire from an Israeli tank East of Jabaliya in the North of the Gaza Strip. Witnesses report that as the door of the ambulance was being closed a tank shell hit El Deyem. El Deyem died from a massive loss of blood following a major trauma to his chest. Paramedics I ride with cherish his memory, carrying his photo - a kind and strong looking, bearded man - on their mobile phones.

The following day, at the family's grieving tent, five of El Deyem's relatives were killed when a missile smashed into the tent in the Beit Hanoun Area. Arafat Mohammed Abdel Deinm, 10, Mohammad Jamal Abdel Dein, 25, Maher Younis Abdel Dein, 30, and Said Jamal Said, 27, all died from head and internal explosive injuries. Witnesses claim the missile was
fired by an Israeli surveillance drone.

The Ministry of Health confirmed that Doctor Anis Naeem, a nephew of the Hamas Minister of Health, Bassem Naeem, and a colleague were killed in the Zeitoun area on Sunday afternoon when a missile strike from an Israeli surveillance plane impacted on the home they had entered in order to retrieve casualties.

Rescue workers Ihab el-Madhoun 35, and Mohammad Abu Hasira, 24, were struck by Israeli missiles when trying to collect casualties in the Jabal Al Rais area of Jabbaliya last Tuesday. Witnesses said Ihab went to assist his colleague following a strike on the rescue workers. He too was then struck.

Abu Hasira was brought to the Kamal Ahdwan governmental hospital in Jabaliya and died at 7.30am according to hospital records. The cause of death was multiple trauma injuries. Ihab died from massive internal injuries following an operation on his chest and abdominal area five hours later.

Khalil Abu Shammalah, Director of Al Dhumeer Association based in Gaza City said: ‘It is a breach of the fourth Geneva Convention to target emergency medical services under conditions of war and occupation. Battlefield casualties are also protected under the Geneva Conventions and cannot be targeted once injured. Israel is in breach of international law'.

The Israeli news agency Y-Net recently reported that Yuval Duskin, Director of the
Israeli intelligence agency Shin Bet, told the Israeli cabinet that large numbers Hamas operatives are hiding in hospitals and dressing as medical workers. Palestinian medical officials have dismissed the claims as 'nonsense'. Rescue workers are terrified that hospitals will join the list of civilian targets including homes, schools, universities, mosques, and shops hit in Israel's offensive so far.

Homes crushed

People and their homes are being pulverized by Israeli tank shells, F16s and bulldozers. I traveled to the buffer zone area of Sikka Street close to the Erez checkpoint, to see the damage. 27 houses had been crushed by either bulldozers or tank shells, one had been destroyed by an F16 bomb. 10 water wells and 200 dunums of land – orange groves and strawberry fields, have been bulldozed, and approximately 250 people have been made homeless.

Six members of the Kiferna family were crushed to death when their home was fired upon by Tanks on Sunday night.

People were coming back to their homes for the first time. The Hamdan Family had three homes in a row destroyed. I asked one woman sitting amongst the ruins of her home where she would go now? She replied, ‘Beit Hanoun UNRWA school’. ’But do you think that will be safe?’ I ask her. ‘No, but I have nowhere else to go’ she replied.

The Al Naim Mosque was also completely destroyed, holy books still smouldering from the attacks. Approximately one in 10 of the some 100 mosques in the Jabaliya area have been destroyed in Israel’s assault. ‘We see them as personal centers for us, theyre not Hamas, and we paid for them out of our own money, they belong to us, not anyone else’, explained one Imam based in Jabaliya.

The demolition of Mosques means many people are praying in the streets, at the Kamal Odwan hospital, people pray in the garden area opposite, and at the funeral for the 42 people, mostly children, massacred at the Fakhoura School, hundreds prayed on the ground that was turned into an early graveyard.

Forced out

On Sunday night, all Sikka Street residents were given five minutes to leave their homes, ordered out through loudhailers, unable to take any belongings with them, rounded up by Israeli occupation forces and taken to the Al Naim Mosque. Women, children and the elderly were put inside and men aged between 16-40 were kept in a field outside in the cold and interrogated. Six were taken to Erez, three were released a day later and were told by soldiers, according to a witness, that it was safe for them to make their own way home along Salahadeen Street. It was there that special forces allegedly shot 33 year-old Shaadi Hissam Yousef Hamad 33, in the head.

Torn schoolbooks lie amidst rubble, and Iman Mayer Hammad picks through the debris of her life, a hejab, shoes, pictures, she cries out, ‘Its all gone, everything, they’ve taken everything, my children can’t finish their exams, how will they finish their exams?’

Hundreds of children won’t be finishing their exams in Gaza because they’re dead.

Whether people stay in their homes or leave, they are being bombed. Majid Hamdan Wadeeya, 40, was hit in the leg and spine with shrapnel while he and his family were preparing to leave their home in Jaffa Street, Jabaliya. We arrived at his home on Tuesday afternoon to find the family’s decrepit red car still running and the family minivan stuffed with mattresses, towels, blankets, and belongings, blasted open. They had been hit by a missile from either a drone of apache. ‘We were going from the bombing, from the bombing’, screamed his children, all terrified. We managed to take half of the family, the rest got in their red car and followed.

We were interviewing residents at the UNRWA elementary school in Jabaliya, close to the Fakhoora school, at exactly the same time of the massacre.The Sahaar family, which had walked from their home in Salahdeen Street to seek refuge in the school on the first day of invasion, were asking us, ‘But do you think we are safe here? We feel that any time a missile could come down us? Are we safe here?’ The 500 people, some 50 families living in classrooms, share just 14 toilets and rely on rations to survive. The nights are cold as the windows have been smashed out by Israeli bomb attacks. Noone can sleep at night because of the sounds of homes, mosques and people being bombed to the ground.

The fabric of life

Everyone here knows someone who has been killed in Israel’s massacres. I can’t keep up with the stories of missile struck cousins, nephews, brothers, the jailed, the humiliated, the shot, the unreachable, the homeless, the now even more vulnerable than ever, people, not pieces, piling up in morgues all over Gaza, not pieces, people. These people are struggling to live and breathe another day, to avoid the lethal use of F16s, F15s, Apache Helicopters, Cobra Gun Ships, Israeli naval gun ships, that are targeting them.

These networks and vision have held strong for 60 years, but another fabric of life is being planned by Israel. Whilst people say they are resisting the worst attack on them since the Nakba, Israel proceeds to cantonise the West Bank, under a project of roads and tunnels ‘for Palestinains’ which reinforce the existing illegal settlement system, apartheid wall, land and water theft and Palestinian bantustanisation. Under the banner of 'development', this network of new facts on the ground, ‘for the Palestinians’ is called, ‘The Fabric of Life’. Israel is blasting holes in one corner of the Palestinian fabric of life through extreme violence, and tearing up another part with the help of international companies and governments and internal authority complicity.

Back at Kamall Odwan hospital, Dr Moayan, explains, ‘Its not about just riding the streets of civilians, because, they are bombing us even when we have left, when we are inside supposedly safe compounds. I have left my house, and now have nowhere else to go, nowhere else to go.’ He continues to say what hundreds of people are saying, ‘This is the worst we have ever seen, we have never had this level of violence. It has shocked even us. In Lebanon they killed over 1700 people, will it come to this here?’

The global intifada

This killing continues, day and night, and its not just people that are being physically dismembered, their families are being dismembered, their communities are being dismembered, the landscape of Gaza is full of holes. The fabric of these communities, that neighbours no longer neighbours, that families no longer living or alive together is being stretched to breaking point. People are being made refugees again, tents as homes awaiting them again, as no buildings or building materials are available for people to even rebuild their shattered lives, their smashed homes, shops, mosques, governmental buildings, community centres, charities, offices, clinics, youth centers.

How do you break a people that won’t be broken? ‘They will have to kill each and everyone of us’ people tell me. From the first days here people were expecting ‘the shoah’ threatened upon them by Matan Villai, Israel’s deputy defence minister this February. It is happening. It is happening now. This is the Shoah.

The third Intifada being urged now has to be our intifada too. As Israel steps up its destruction of the Palestinian people, we need to step up our reconstruction of our resistance, our movements, of our communities in our own counties, where so many of us live in alienation and isolation. We need to be the third intifada – people here need more and say repeatedly that they need more than the demonstrations, because they are not stopping the killing here. Demonstrations alone, are not stopping the killing here.

The arms companies making the weapons that are targeting people here, the companies that are selling stolen goods from occupied land pillaging settlements, the companies building the apartheid wall, the prisons, the East Jerusalem Light Railway system. These companies, Carmel Agrexco, Caterpillar, Veolia, Raytheon, EDO, BAE Systems, they are complicit in the crimes against humanity being committed here. If the international community will not uphold international law, then a popular movement should and can – we can use the legal system of international law as one of many means to hold on to our collective humanity.

The European Union decision, undertaken by the Council of Ministers this December, to upgrade relations with Israel, from economic ties to cultural, security, and political relations must be reversed. The EU represents a core strategic market of legitimacy and political economic reinforcement of Israel and as such its capacity to commit crimes against humanity, with impunity.

We can cut this tie, we can halt this decision which if approved this April, will empower Israel further, bring it closer to the ‘community of nations’ of the EU, and give a green light for further terror and crimes against humanity be inflicted upon the Palestinian people. This is a decision which has not yet been ratified. We can influence that which hasn’t happened yet.

There are concrete steps that people can take, learning from the lessons of the first Intifada and the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions campaign to dismantle the South African Apartheid regime. Strategies of popular resistance, strikes, occupations, direct actions. From the streets into the offices, factories and headquarters is where we need to take this fight, to the heart of decision-makers that are supposedly making decisions on our behalf and the companies making a killing out of the occupation. The third intifada needs to be a global intifada.

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.
http://www.FreeGaza.org

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http://www.sundayherald.com/news/heraldnews/display.var.2479079.0.inside...

Inside Gaza

EYEWITNESS: By Ewa Jasiewicz

WHEN I got there, the gates of Beit Hanoun hospital were shut, with teenage men hanging off them. The mass of people striving to get inside was a sign that there had been an attack. Inside the gates, the hospital was full. Parents, wives, cousins, emotionally frayed and overwhelmed, were leaning over injured loved ones.

The Israeli Apache helicopter had attacked at 3.15pm. Witnesses said that two missiles had been fired into the street in Hay al Amel, east Beit Hanoun, close to the border with Israel. With rumours of an imminent invasion this empty scrubland is rapidly becoming a no-man's land which people cross quickly, fearing attack by Israeli jets.

But the narrow, busy streets of the Boura area rarely escape the intensifying airstrikes.

Eyewitnesses said children had been playing and waiting in the streets there for their parents to finish praying at the nearby mosque. "We could see it so clearly, it was so close, we looked up and everyone ran. Those that couldn't were soon flat on the ground," said Khalil Abu Naseer, who was lucky to have escaped the incoming missile.

"Look at this, take it," insisted men in the street, handing me pieces of the missile the size of a fist, all with jagged edges.

"All the windows were blown out, our doors were blown in, there was glass everywhere," explained a neighbour. It was these lumps of missile, rock and flying glass that smashed into the legs, arms, stomachs, heads and backs of 16 people, two of them children, who had been brought to Beit Hanoun Hospital on Thursday afternoon.

Fadi Chabat, 24, was working in his shop, a small tin shack that was a community hub selling sweets, cigarettes and chewing gum. When the missile exploded, he suffered multiple injuries. He died on Friday morning in Kamal Adwahn Hospital in Jabaliya. As women attended the grieving room at Fadi Chabat's home yesterday to pay their respects, Israeli F16 fighter jets tore through the skies overhead and blasted four more bombs into the empty areas on the border. Two elderly women in traditional embroidered red and black dresses carrying small black plastic shopping bags moved as quickly as they could; others disappeared behind the walls of their homes, into courtyards and off the streets.

At Fadi's house the grief was still fresh. Nearly all the women were crying, a collective outpouring of grief and raw pain with free-flowing tears.

"He prayed five times a day, he was a good Muslim, he wasn't part of any group, not Fatah, not Hamas, not one, none of them, he was a good student, and he was different," said one of his sisters. She took me to see Fadi's younger brother, who had been wounded in the same airstrike. Omar, eight, was sitting on his own in a darkened bedroom on a foam mattress with gauze on his back covering his wounds.

"He witnessed everything, he saw it all," the sisters explained. "He kept saying, I saw the missile, I saw it, Fadi's been hit by a missile'."

The memory sets Omar off into more tears, his sisters, mother and aunts breaking down along with him.

Nine-year-old Ismaeel, who had been on the street with his sisters Leema, four, and Haya, 12, had been taking out rubbish when they were struck by the missiles.

Ismaeel had been brought into the hospital still breathing and doctors at first though he would pull through, but in the end he died of internal injuries.

Within the past six days in Beit Hanoun alone, according to hospital records seven people have been killed, among them three children and a mother of ten other youngsters. Another 75 people have been injured, including 29 children and 17 women.

As well as the fatalities and wounded, hundreds of homes have had their windows blown out and been damaged by flying debris and shrapnel. Two homes have been totally destroyed. Nearby the premises of two organisations have been reduced to rubble. One of them, the Sons of the City Charity, associated with Hamas, was blasted with two Apache-fired missiles, gutting a neighbouring apartment in the process and breaking windows at Beit Hanoun Hospital. The Cultural Development Association and the offices of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, were levelled by bombs dropped from F16 jets.

It is hard to imagine what the Israeli pilots of these aircraft see from so far up in the sky. Do they see people walking; standing around and talking in the street; kids with sticks chasing each other in play? Or are the figures digitised, micro-people, perhaps just blips on a screen?

Whatever is seen from the air, the victims are often ordinary people. Last Thursday night saw volunteers from the Palestinian Red Crescent Society in Beit Hanoun take to the streets in an effort to save lives. Like all emergency medical staff in Gaza, they risk death working in the maelstrom of every Israeli invasion, during curfews and night fighting.

In one of the ambulances during an evening of total darkness caused by nightly power cuts, I meet Yusri, a veteran of more than 14 years of Israeli incursions into the Beit Hanoun district of Gaza. Moustachioed, energetic, and gregarious, Yusri is in his 40s and a local hero. Seen by people within the community as a man who rarely sleeps, he is a front-line paramedic who zooms through Gaza's streets to reach casualties, ambulance horn blaring as he shouts through a loudhailer for onlookers and the dazed to get out of the way.

"Where's the strike?" Yusri asks locals, as we pick our way through a gutted charred charity office and the house of the Tarahan family. Their home, on the buffer zone, has been reduced to a concrete sandwich. There are six casualties, but miraculously none of them are serious.

Beit Hanoun Hospital is a simple, 48-bed local facility with no intensive care unit, decrepit metal stretchers and rickety beds. I drink tea in a simple office with a garrulous crowd of ear, nose and throat specialists, surgeons and paediatricians. The talk is all about politics: how the plan for Gaza is to merge it with Egypt; how Israel doesn't want to liquidate Hamas as it serves their goal of a divided Palestine to have a weak Hamas alienated from the West Bank.

The chat is interrupted by lulls of intent listening as news crackles through on Sawt Al Shab ("The Voice Of The People"), Gaza's grassroots news station. Almost everyone here is tuned in. It is listened to by taxi drivers, families in their homes huddled around wood stoves or under blankets and groups of men on street corners crouched beside transistor radio sets.

It feeds live news on the latest resistance attacks, interspersed with political speeches from various leaders, and fighter music - thoaty, deep male voices united in buoyant battle songs about standing up, reclaiming al-Quds (Jerusalem) avenging fresh martyrs, and staying steadfast.

News is fed through on operations by armed wings of every political group active in Gaza; the Qasam (Hamas), the Abu Ali Mustapha Martyrs Brigade (PFLP), the Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigade (which is affiliated with Fatah) and Saraya al-Quds (Islamic Jihad). One thing is widely recognised - the attack on Gaza has brought all armed resistance groups together. However, everybody adds wryly that "once this is all over, they'll all break apart again".

One of the surgeons asks me about whether I'm scared, and whether I really think I have protection as a foreigner here. I talk in detail about Israel's responsibility to protect emergency services; to cease fire; to facilitate movement;, to respect the Geneva Conventions, including protection of civilians and injured combatants. The surgeon talking to me is an intelligent man, highly respected in the community, in his late 40s. He takes his time, explaining to me in detail that all the evidence from everything Gazans have experienced points to Israel operating above the law - that there is no protection, that these laws, these conventions, do not seem to apply to Israel, nor does it abide by them, and that I should be afraid, very afraid, because Gazans are afraid.

He recounts a story from the November 2006 invasion which saw more than 60 people killed, one entire family in one day alone. About 100 tanks invaded Beit Hanoun, with one blocking each entrance for six days. He remembers how the Red Cross brought water and food and took away the refuse. All co-ordination was cut off with the Palestinian Authority. The same will happen this time, he insists. He remembers too how one ambulance driver, Yusri, a maverick, a hero, loved by all the staff and community, faced down the tanks to evacuate the injured. Yusri, the surgeon says, just drove up to the tank and started shouting through his loudhailer, telling them to move for the love of God because we had a casualty, then just swerved round them and made off.

Yusri has carried the injured and dead in every invasion in the past 14 years. He shows me a leg injury sustained when a tank rammed into his ambulance. The event was caught on camera by journalists, and a case brought against the Israel Occupation Forces, but they ruled the army had acted appropriately in self defence.

"Look in the back of the ambulance here, how many people do you think can fit in here? I was carrying 10 corpses at a time after the invasion, there was a man cut in two here in the back, it was horrific. But you carry on. I want to serve my country," he says.

During a prolonged power cut in that six-day invasion there was no electricity to power a ventilator, and doctors took turns hand pumping oxygen to keep one casualty alive for four hours before they could be transferred. Roads were bulldozed, ambulances were banned from moving, dead people lay in their homes for days, and when permission was finally given for the corpses' collection, medics had to carry them on stretchers along the main street.

Today in Gaza everyone is terrified that such events are now repeating themselves, only worse. Gazans now feel collectively abandoned. The past week's massacres, indiscriminate attacks and overflowing hospitals, and the fact that anyone can be hit at any time in any place, has left people utterly terrorised. No-one dares think of what might become of them in these difficult and unpredictable days. As they say in Gaza, "Bein Allah" - "It's up to God".

_______________________________________

The Ceasefire

Ewa Jasiewicz in Beit Hanoun and Jabaliya

10-11th January 2009

Last night was a quiet one in Jabbaliya. ‘Only’ six homes bombed into the ground, the Market, again, maybe four lightly injured people – shrapnel to the face injuries – and no martyrs. Beit Hanoun saw a young woman, Nariman Ahmad Abu Owder, just 17, shot dead as she made tea in her family’s kitchen. It was 9pm in the Hay Amel area when witnesses reported ‘thousands’ of bullets shot by tanks onto homes in

Azrah Street
.

We got a call to go to Tel Al Zater looking for the dead and injured, around 2am. ‘This area is dangerous, very very dangerous’, warned one volunteer rescuer Mohammad al Sharif as our ambulance bumped along sandy, lumpy ground, lighting up piles of burning rubbish, stray cats, political graffiti, and the ubiquitous strung out coloured sack cloth and stripy material in large thin squares, tenting the pavements. What is it? Protection, I am told, so that the surveillance planes won’t see the fighters. Palestinian body armour.

Mohammad, and Ahmad Abu Foul, a Civil Defence medical services co-ordinator told me they had been shot at by Israeli snipers yesterday. Mohammd had recounted the story, still counting his blessings, earlier on at the ambulance station. They’d gone hurtling over graves and tombstones to fetch casualties when Israeli snipers opened fire. They’d laid down flat on the ground until the firing stopped. Ahmad, 24, another rescuer here, told me he had been shot in the chest – in his bullet proof vest – close to the Atarturah area whilst trying to evacuate corpses three days ago. His brother, he had told me, had been injured 14 times working as a paramedic. ‘14 times. Then he got hit by an Apache. Then it was serious. That took him out of work for a few months’, he explained.

Back to Tel Al Zater, we searched with micro torches, sweeping over slabs of broken homes and free running water from freshly smashed pipes. A black goat was trapped in a rubble nest. We stepped over broken blown in metal doors off their hinges. Nothing, noone, ‘snipers’, on our minds. We ended up leaving with one casualty, lightly injured, more in shock that anything else. Explosions continued through the night. Abrupt slumps into concrete echoing around the hospital, like rapid beats to a taut drum skin.

This morning was a different story. I’ve been finding that the most missile-heavy times seem to be between 7-9am. I counted 20 strikes in those two hours this morning. I’d come to Mohammad’s house. He went straight to bed, exhausted. Id caught some sleep spread across the front seats of the rickety ambulance, waking up periodically to respond to calls. At Mohammad’s I did some badly overdue washing and went towards the roof with it. ‘Ewa, do you want to martyr yourself?’ said Sousou, Mohammd’s 19 year old sister, a bright sciences student unable to finish her studies due to her university – the Islamic University – having been bombed last week. Hanging out washing on the roof here is a potential act of suicide – there are stories of people having been shot dead on rooftops. Walking down the street to buy bread, also a potential act of suicide. Visiting family, going to the market, drinking tea in your own home – a potential act of suicide? In the end I do go up, with 9 year old plucky Afnan, who hands me pegs nervously as we scan the skies periodically, while the murderous sneer of Israeli surveillance drones leers above us.

Zomou

The call comes as soon as I get to Al Awda. It’s 11.40am. A strike in

Mahkema street
, Zoumou, Eastern Jabbaliya. The streets of Moaskar Jabaliya are fuller than I’ve seen them for weeks. Fruit and vegetable sellers with wooden carts full of clay clodded potatoes, tomatoes, cucumbers, aubegines, mountains of strawberries, bags of flour, plastic bottles of vegetable oil and rice, line the streets. The reason everyone’s here, exposed like this is because with the market being bombed, the streets have become the market.

We roar through manically, siren blaring, Abu Bassem, one of the oldest and most hyper ambulance drivers, yells hoarsely at anyone nonchalant enough to not notice the screaming column of ambulances zooming towards them, past broken buildings, debris covered streets, twisted tin can warehouses and rubble homes.

Out of the city, we’re met by a crowd running towards us with a blanket hump on the back of a donkey cart. Jumping out I see bloodied legs and arms sticking it out of it, ‘Shoohadda!!’ Martyrs - yells the crowd running along with it, whilst others gesture wildly to go on, go on ahead. Jumping back in we get to the house where it all happened. A woman in her 50s, in black, has her arms around a large, lifeless woman. Pools of blood surround them. They’re cramped into a corner, the woman crying and clinging to her. We need to peel her away and lift the woman, cold, lifeless and shoeless, onto a stretcher. This is Randa Abid Rubbu, 38. Her relative or friend comes in too, unable to stand, unable to speak or move, we drag her on and she has to slump on the ambulance floor. Next we bring in Ahmad Mohammad Nuffar Salem, 21, with 16 shrapnel injuries, tearing at his own clothes in pain, they needed to be cut off.

Six members of the Abid Rubbu family were killed in the strike on their house. It happened at 11.40am. Ahmad, 21, explains ‘We were all eating together, and then we were struck’. The consensus amongst paramedics was that it was a tank shell, although the family thought it was a shell from an Israeli navel vessel.

Mohammad Abid Rubbu, 50, explains to me, that in the night his other family homes were struck three times by F16 fighter jets. ‘Thirty of us spent the whole of last night hiding under ground, in the basement. Our whole street was full of fire. They (the Israelis) spent one and a half hours attacking us. They destroyed three of our family’s homes. All the martyrs today, they were underground with us last night’.

*********************************************************************

Kamal Odwan's 'Mosque'

Kamal Odwan Hospital is the main port of call for the bulk of emergency services, once a local clinic, it has now grown, concomitantly with the population of the north, now 350,000, into a hospital. Since the bombing of an average of one in ten mosques in the Jabaliya area according to local Imams, Kamal Odwan is now also a prayer site, an open-air mosque. Rows of men kneel together daily in the car-park round the corner from the overflowing morgue; praying also takes place at the side of the lines of parked ambulances and in the little garden area in front of the reception and ER. The emergency staff, the families and friends of new martyrs, all pray together in perhaps the last place of sanctuary in Jabaliya, knowing that as soon as they set foot outside, they’re fair game for snipers, surveillance drones, Apaches, Cobras, F16 and F15 fired missiles, shrapnel, flying chunks of house, glass, and nails that are shredding people here. White phosphorous too is reportedly being used, along with a white mist of nerve gas hanging in Jabaliya a few days ago and over Beit Hanoun, in the

Zoumou street
area. Today at least three casualties, all of them elderly women, were brought into Beit Hanoun hospital suffering from inhalation of this gas, which chokes people, tightening chests and nasal passages and rendering people dizzy and disorientated; we were all affected by it, despite being maybe half a kilometre away from the site of its’ release. As I finish writing this now, in the offices of Ramatan News, the same gas, nerve fraying, chest tightening, tear-inducing and confusing is seeping into the offices.

The director of public relations at Kamal Odwan, Moayad Al Masri, whose family now lives in the Fakhoura School refugee camp gives me the stats for the past week. Every day approximately 20 people are being killed, by tank shelling, apache, F16, and surveillance plane missile strikes. December 27th 14 people killed, 52 injured, 28th, 6 killed, 22 injured, 29th 15 killed, 102 injured, 30th, 2 killed, 11 injured, 31st, 3 killed, 3 injured, New Years Day, 17 killed, 67 injured, January 2nd 6 killed, 10 injured, Jan 3rd, 13 killed, 43 injured, Jan 4th, 28 killed, 35 injured, Jan 5th, 15 killed, 98 injured, Jan 6th 50 killed, 101 injured, Jan 7th, 17 killed, 33 injured, Jan 8th, 11 killed, 53 injured, Jan 9th, 15 killed and 63 injured, January 10th 22 killed and 53 injured, and today, this morning six people had been killed so far. Four of them children. Two sisters Saher Ghabban 16 and Haowla Ghabban 14, and Fatima Mahrouf 16 and Haitham Mahrouf. Witnesses report that they were leaving their home at the UNRWA Beit Lahiya school, to go home to wash and make food. They were walking near strawberry fields in Sheyma when they were struck by a surveillance plane missile.

I go to meet a friend from Beit Hanoun at the hospital. It takes stopping five different taxi drivers before I finally get one who agrees to take me. Missiles have been falling throughout the afternoon ‘ceasefire’. Everyone has heard about cars and their passengers zapped in two by missiles from surveillance drones. We all engage in a kind of Russian roulette every time we move, knowing we might be the unlucky ones next.

In Beit Hanoun we hear about six families from the Abu Amsha House - 50 people- having to flee their four story home after the IOF called to give them five minutes to leave or before being bombed. As the families frantically gathered their belongings – mattresses, blankets, clothes, documents, photographs – and made their way down the stairs, an Israeli F16 war plane bombed them. 27 were injured, four of them seriously, including one with shrapnel in the spinal area.

A house upon them

We meet Mohammd Zoadi Abu Amsha, a United National employee running a local job creation programme and the son of Hajj Zohaadi Amsha, the owner of the destroyed house. Mohammad’s house, opposite the Abu Amsha house, had its windows blown out in the attack. I asked him why he thinks the house was targeted ‘This is the policy of Israel, the logic is to make us leave this land, make us leave our homes, to clear this land for their occupation and ownership of it. That’s what this is about. There were no fighters here by the way’ he says, ‘This is a civilian house, my father is 80 years old, he worked as a teacher for the UN’. As we’re talking, children that have gathered around us point to the sky, ‘look, look, Apache’ they say. And we look at it, flying silently across the sky, puffing out a perfect line of burning dazzle flares. A boy of about 10 spots a piece of missile, the size of a large marrow, electronic parts still intact, and lugs it up to us, ‘Take care’ we shout to him; he scrambles over debris and then lobs it onto the ground in front of us. All our hearts skip a beat.

Back at Kamal Odwan, we hear the news. Wafa Al Masri, 40 years old, and nine months pregnant was walking to Kamal Odwan Hospital, to give birth. With her was her sister, 26 year old Rghada Masri. They were passing through the Dewar Maboob crossroads in the Beit Lahiya Project area. It was 4.30pm. Witnesses said they were hit directly by a missile from a surveillance drone. Daniel, a half Ukranian paramedic here described the scene. ‘Her legs were shredded, there was just meat, and she had a serious chest injury, hypoxemia’. Wafa was transferred to Shifa for a double leg amputation, from the Fema (upper thigh area down). Paramedics were apprehensive about her or her unborn child making it. Medics managed to save the right foot of Rghada Masri, 26. I visited her at Kamal Odwan today. Visibly distressed and writhing in pain, she recounted the story: ‘We were walking down the street when we heard the sound of the plane, I can still hear ringing in my ears. We were hit by a missile. We were in the area right in the main street, in broad daylight. We would never have expected this. I saw smoke, and I saw Wafa’s legs all mangled. She was thrown metres away from me, I was thrown too. He mandeel was torn off her head, her hair was all burnt, she didn’t look like my sister, her hair was gone, everyone was saying to me, ‘she’s a martyr, she’s a martyr.’ Today I learned medics managed to save one leg and that she gave birth to a healthy boy.

Bombing civilians

At 5pm, whilst we’re gathering info on the bombing of Wafa and her sister, ambulances and taxis bring over casualties. There’s been a tank bombing of an apartment building, the Burge al Sultan, in Jabaliya. Three dead, two of them children, and five injured. Again Daniel brought them in. He’s sitting in the ambulance stunned and staring into space. ‘In all my days, I’ve never seen anything like this’, he says. ‘First they fired one missile at the roof of the building, this got people running out of the building. Then they fired another one, at the people outside, and then when we turned up, they fired another one. I don’t understand. And they were all civilians’. The weapon of choice was a Kadifa – a tank shell that releases tiny flachettes; spiked arrows that tear into flesh at lightning speed. Daniel went on to say that ambulance staff and helpers were shot at by snipers when evacuating casualties. Ashar al Battish, 33, lost his two brothers in the attack. ‘Kids were playing in the street, and then three missiles were shot at us. He – he says, gesturing to his brother on an ER bed – was shot by a sniper in the chest, and another sniper’s bullet grazed his face’.

When I began writing this I was on the fifth floor of the Al Awda Hospital, a few things have happened in between. I was buying coffee, snickers bars to chop up for the guys, and some shampoo when from the local shop when we got a call at around 9.30pm, to pick up casualties from the Bier Najje area, Western Jabaliya. We wove our way up, a column of rickety vans. Our ambulance had a plastic bin bag held up with brown parcel tape for a back window after it was blasted out last week – too close to an F16 repeat attack.

When we reached the casualty zone, near a mini roundabout flanked with painted portraits of pale PFLP fighters, and orange groves on our right, we drove slowly up towards the leading ambulance which had stopped up ahead. As we were approaching, the crew suddenly came running towards us, waving their arms for us to move, move, get back, get back. We reversed sharply and a minute later advanced again as they receded back to the ambulance. I jump out with the stretcher and start to assemble it but I’m told, ‘Get back inside, get back inside, this is a dangerous area!’ They have their casualty, we pick up another with a leg injury on our way back, and when we get back to base it transpires that a surveillance plane missile was shot directly onto the crew ahead but failed to explode. Unknown to us, it had been lying beside the ambulance when we came up to see about the injured.

As well as this, there were two F16 missile strikes on targets just a few hundred metres away from Al Awda. Both enormous bangs shook the building, shattered a window and sent everyone running for cover.

An empty dead-zone

I asked the paramedics, what happened when they went to collect bodies and the injured from the areas where street fighting is taking place, places like Tel Al Zater, Salahadeen Street, Atahtura, Azbet Abu Rubbu - closed to everyone and anyone but the Israeli Occupation Forces. During 1-4pm there is supposed to be a ceasefire and co-ordination between paramedics and the Israeli army, through the Red Cross. Of the three paramedics I asked, all of their replies were the same. ‘We saw noone’. ‘It was like a ghost town’. Despite being finding bodies over the past week, including one baby which had been half eaten by dogs – photos, film and witnesses at Kamal Adwan confirm it – and bodies which had been run over by tanks, when they went yesterday, they found nobody, and came back to base empty handed. ‘I think the Israelis must have taken the bodies away, I think they must have taken them away by bulldozer and buried them’. The terrifying this is that there are still people trapped in their homes if their homes are still standing, without food, water, or electricity. Refugees at the Al Fakhoura school report not being able to recognise their areas, their streets after the heavy fighting and destruction of so many houses. When these areas are finally accessible to people, the full extent of the killing and destruction will at last be known.

Meanwhile, as the killing continues, the Ministry of Health ambulances in the north are becoming slowly paralysed. Four M.O.H ambulances based at Kamal Odwan have no fuel and have been grounded, two have just half a tank each. One in Beit Hanoun has also been immobilised. A senior source co-ordinating the rescue services who did not wish to be named, said, ‘We haven’t go the capacity now to respond. The Civil Defence and the Red Crescent will go out, we cannot, only in case of a major emergency. In case of another strike like the one at Fakhoura, the injured will have to be transported by donkey cart. People will die’. Petrol is available, just a short drive away in

Salahadeen Street
, although Israeli Occupation Forces control the area and won’t let any vehicle pass. To add to the M.O.H’s woes, the radios they’ve had since the beginning of the invasion have had no service – there’s been no radio contact between the base and ambulances and the Jawwal mobile network is also frequently down.

So everybody who can, still keeps going. Israeli war planes keep targeting civilians. The evidence piling up points to a deliberate campaign and policy of targeting civilians. And the bombs keep falling, thudding all around all of us, everywhere we go, everywhere we sleep, everywhere we walk, drive, sit and pray. Everyone is exhausted and just wants these attacks to end and for a real ceasefire to materialise.

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www.sundayherald.com/news/heraldnews/display.var.2480800.0.a_boy_next_to...

Hello, this is a bit old now and so so much has happened in between here
but, more writing to come, just too tired to do it right now.
All the best
Ewa

'A boy next to me, he went crazy, he was overwhelmed, he saw the
massacre, the street was full of blood, the nails from the shells were
as long as your hand'

GAZA: The conflict is having terrible effects on Gaza's children. Ewa
Jasiewicz reports

THE SHAQOURA family live in the Moaskar Jabaliya area in the north of
the Gaza Strip. They are originally from the town of Majdal in 1948
Palestine, now Ashkelon in present-day Israel. Their simple white,
one-storey house is just yards away from the Fakhoura UN school where 42
people died, 20 of them children, when Israeli tanks opened fire on a
busy intersection. Paramedics and eyewitnesses reported seeing nothing
but "limbs and meat" in the street at the time. Witnesses report that
four tank shells smashed into the ground releasing flying chunks of
burning shrapnel.

Mohammad Shaqoura, aged nine, had been playing marbles with friends in
the street at the time. Mohammad's father, Bassem Ahmad Shadoura, was
close by. He describes the scene: "I saw an explosion, after which there
was black smoke everywhere - the area was pure black. They hit twice in
the same area. I saw a boy with his finger in the air saying I am a
witness to God' and I picked him up to take him out. Then I saw my son,
he had been hit twice, in the legs and in the head. His brain was out'."

Mahmoud, 15, recalled what he saw, his eyes widening with trauma. "We
saw legs everywhere, flesh, some people without heads, meat. A boy next
to me, he went crazy, he was overwhelmed, he saw the massacre, the
street was full of blood, the nails from the shells were as long as your
hand."

I am sitting in the Shaqoura house. The women of the house are in their
second day of collective grieving. Mohammad's mother, stunned and
silent, is flanked by her sisters, aunts, and daughters Najah, 17, Iman,
12, and Shahed, two, all remembering Mohammad. Their home is very basic,
the living room area is partially open, with a grooved roof with white
pigeons nesting within it. You can see Apache helicopters emitting
bright dazzle-flares through the metre gap all around it.

Three cats, one, a tiny ginger kitten, stretches in the sunlight. The
floor is covered with woven coloured mats, the walls lined with foam
mattresses and there is a poster of a cousin, Nidal, 24, short-haired,
clean-shaven, with serene eyes. He was an Islamic jihad fighter.

He was killed directly by an Israeli missile two months ago. As with all
families here, there is little political homogeneity. Bassem was a first
commander in the Fatah Authority and his brother a police intelligence
officer.

Bassem isn't working but still gets paid a $700-a-month salary from the
Fatah authority in Ramallah. But even this doesn't stretch far with his
family of seven children. Rent for their one-bedroom house is $100 per
month. Cooking gas - the price of which has more than doubled here since
the siege - is around $120 for a 6kg canister. It lasts around two
weeks, when they can get it. When they can't, they cook on a primitive
mud clay stove, powered by wood and paper. All nine members of the
family sleep in one bedroom.

There was no water in the house. The electricity lines had been smashed
down by the tank shell attack on Tuesday and the family's water system
is electrically powered. Even without the attack, power is only
available some four hours a day.

Najah, 17, wants my phone number. She's a lively teenager in black
mourning clothes and hijab. Of course, I give it to her. I ask her what
her brother was like. "He was the best one of us all. He was very kind.

"When he would watch TV he would get very scared of all the killing -
all the children being killed."

We eat our dinner by candlelight. A small plate of tinned tuna, two
small bowls of "Gaza Salad" - chopped tomatoes with onion and chilli
peppers - a kind of Palestinian salsa, olives from the family olive
tree, cold mujaddara (no gas to heat it) a mix of rice and lentils, and
bread. After tucking in, the whole family and I sit under one blanket,
all focusing on their new house guest. Children make up 51% of the
population of Gaza and witness everything.

"So many of our neighbours have died," explains Foad. Iman, 12, knew one
of the daughters of Nizar Rayan, a senior Hamas leader who was killed
along with his four wives and 11 children. Aya Rayan, 12, died when
eight bombs fired by an F16 fighter jet slammed into the family home. A
further 10 houses were also wrecked in the attack. I saw the site
myself, giant slabs of concrete criss-crossed on top of one another,
pulverised homes, a pile hundreds of metres wide, flanked by at least
four wall-less apartments revealing living rooms, coloured walls with
pictures of loved ones and sunsets, smashed kitchens, with families
picking through their wreckage and, below it all, dusted white, a dead
horse twisted on to one side.

"Look at this," says Mahmoud, 15. He hands me a lump of rock the size of
a pineapple. "This came through the roof of my grandmother's house next
door the day of the attack. It wrecked their roof. If we had been there
it would have killed us," he says.

Mohammad's father drinks his sweet amber tea slowly. "You've made the
children here very happy", he says.

He puffs on his cigarette. "I worked in Israel, I lived with Israelis,
Jews from Europe, from Iraq, the Arab world and we all got along, we
were friends. They're good people, 100%. Twelve years I spent working
there, but nothing has changed."

Bassam was jailed in 1983, before the first intifada broke out. He was
just 16 years old and spent three years in an Israeli prison. "Do you
know why?", he asks me, his small, wizened, embattled features squinting
in the darkness. "For throwing a stone."

"I couldn't complete my studies, I wasn't allowed to, and the Red Cross
didn't do anything for us. They just gave us some clothes."

We look up at the poster of Nidal. "He was a fighter," says Bassem. "My
son, he was nine years old, he wasn't doing anything. In our religion,
our son is in heaven. He'll be drinking water in heaven. Our son is a
martyr."

We get ready to go to bed. Its 8pm and everything is a gentle dim orange
in the candlelight. The sound of falling bombs shakes the house, a
swooping zip and slam-thud sound. "We hear it all night," say the
children.

Reem, mother of Mohammad, is only 36 but looks 10 years older. She is
taking Mohammad's clothes out, putting them up to her face and smelling
them, then folding them.

She starts crying in the gentle orange light. "Where, where?", she says
gently. Her sisters comfort her. Im Qusam is one of them. "You know we
can't sleep, we can't live, no gas, no bread, no water."

Bassem recalls the funeral procession for the 42 dead. I attended, too.

"It was the first time in one-and-a-half years that we all marched
together, we all prayed together, every faction, every flag was there. I
wanted my son in the funeral, my son is the son of the people."

Usually each faction has their own funeral procession and burial.
Mahmoud 15, recalls the burial. "We had gone to bury the dead and the
Israelis shot at us, we were so afraid, we ran. We're afraid all the
time, all the time that we'll be hit."

Sitting on a small sandy hill, listening to a beautiful, sorrowful,
deep-voiced song, I saw the mass of mourners run, streaming over
gravestones for the gate, as shot after shot rang out of the crowd.
"Kannaas" snipers, my friend said to me grimly.

I ask Ahmad, 16, how he feels about the rockets from the Palestinian
resistance. "They hit us with missiles and we shouldn't react? Ours are
like games, they're like toys compared to theirs. But ours lift our
spirits."

We go to sleep to the sound of thudding missiles, the ones close by
shake the house. Terror leaps in our chests. "That one was a house! It
was a house," breathes Reem in the middle of the night. The house of the
Salha family in the Beit Lahiya projects area was bombed at 4.30am. Six
family members, four of them under 15 years old, were killed. They had
moved there for shelter, according to friends.

We wake up to the sound of bombing. I count 15 Israeli missile strikes
between seven and 8.30am. Two crunky old Palestinian missiles make off
in response. Ten of us share a plate of maybe five scrambled eggs dusted
with pepper and four discs of white bread.

The family pause together. "Jabaliya used to be so beautiful," says
Roweeya, 17, a visiting aunt, pouring tea for us. "There is a garden
close by, full of orange trees. The Israelis keep blasting missiles into
it."

_______________________________________

The Bombing of the UNWRA Elementary School, Beit Lahiya

Saturday January 17th 2009

The roads of Beit Lahiya were lit up with phosphoric flaming ordinance. 6am on Saturday morning and hundreds of smoking burning darts were raining down onto the deserted streets. We were driving down Beit Lahiya main street in our ambulance responding to calls from terrified residents and the elderly suffering from chemical inhalation and reports of burns. The roof of the Salim Mosque was on fire. Flames were licking upward from the flat rooftops of homes, from down alleyways, atop kerbs, and all along

Beit Lahiya Street itself.

Families were beginning to flee their homes, both the young and the infirm, scarves and rags up to their mouths to prevent choking on the thick chemical mist. We were picking them up, packing our ambulance full of them, 20 people at a time, with oxygen for the elderly, encourgament and kindness, and elf salamaats (a thousand blessings) for everyone . Some were carrying plastic knotted bags of full of clothes, blankets over shoulders, belongings scrambled together in terrified hands. An imminent invasion was expected, the white fog a cover for troops to advance and take up new positions, occupy new homes and install fresh snipers. People had heard of the blasting and bombing and crushing of homes in Atartura, North Beit Lahiya. The bulldozing of arable land, lemon groves, greenhouses and graveyards. The use of Beit Lahiya High School as a prison for most of the area’s men aged 16 to 40.

We took the families, trip after round trip, from the Beit Lahiya roundabout to Kamal Odwan hospital. At around 6.30am we got the call – Beit Lahiya UNRWA elementary school had been bombed.

When we arrived at the school, panic reigned, people were screaming, some were holding onto one another under metal shelters in the playground, terrified of another strike, others had their heads in their hands, sobbing. Arms were pointing here and there to mystery wounded. A UN car was on fire. Suddenly there was another hit, everyone ran for cover. Where were the casualties? 'Cover' didn’t exist, even the flimsy metal shelters or the brick buildings could be no match for 2 foot long tank shells that could pierce them like a hot rock through butter.

Phosphoric flares continued to fall down around us. Wearing surgical masks, we searched for casualties, running to and fro to avoid the burning darts around us. A man carried a lifeless, limp boy into our ambulance. He had a deep, round shrapnel wound to his thigh. 'Lets Go' – we had to move, we reversed out, another flare exploding above us raining more poisonous darts down onto the playground. ‘He’s a shaheed’, said one of the volunteers with the ambulance, ‘a martyr’. ‘He’ was Bilal Mohammad Ashkar, aged seven from Beit Lahiya.

Both he and his brother Mohammad Ashkar, aged five, died from multiple explosive injuries, and major traumatic injuries to the head when a two-foot long tank shell smashed into the classroom they were had been living in. Blood and flesh were stuck to the walls and ceiling of the room. 35 people had been sheltering inside. Two people were killed and 36 people injured including 14 children and three cases requiring amputation of limbs.

The boys’ mother, Anjoud Al Ashkar, 29, was lying on a rickety bed at Kamal Odwan Hospital when we came in. Her bandaged head was seeping blood – her skull fractured by flying shrapnel. ‘My sons, My sons’, she was groaning and moving her part amputated hand up and down. Days later, at the men’s grieving house in Beit Lahiya, I would learn that she had been transferred to Egypt for brain surgery, had had her whole right hand amputated and that ‘She doesn’t know that her two sons have died, she could die if she knew’.

Salah Shehde Al Ashkar, 35, was in a room below when the attack happened. His 18-year old daughter Mona was seriously injured. ‘We were drinking tea at the time and then we heard a great smash. I thought it had happened outside the school, I said don’t worry to everyone, don’t worry, its outside, and went downstairs to see what was happening. Then I saw my daughter, Mona, her leg was all gone, just shredded, I took her to the ambulance and we went to Shifa directly’. Mona’s leg could not be saved, and was amputated from the thigh down.

Both Salah and other relatives had deliberately avoided sheltering in Government schools, fearing they could be attacked. ‘We came here for shelter and never imagined that they would hit and then they hit the women and the children on the third floor’.

I came across Sahar Askar, 42, the boys’ aunt along with their sister Madleen Ashkar, 7, in the parking lot of the Al Awda Hospital a few hours later. They were both dusty and shocked; Madleen barefoot with shrapnel injuries to her face and Sahar dazed and walking gingerly due to shrapnel wounds to her thigh. Sahar explained to me. ‘A missile hit our room on the third floor. Missile and rock pieces fell on top of us’. I asked what they were doing immediately before the hit. She said they hadn’t been sleeping, there had been too much noise. ‘We were putting out our mattress to dry, on the balcony, because Mohammad had wet the bed in the night, he was so scared of the bombing. The building behind us had been hit with phosphorous, then after 15 minutes, they hit us. There was one bomb that hit the roof, and then another as we were coming down the stairs. We couldn’t see anything, everything was black smoke, from the dust or the phosphorous, I don’t know’.

After evacuating Bilal, we had returned to the school and picked up Nour Basoura, five years old, suffering shrapnel injuries to the back, She had dry hair, stiff hair and a small stiff body. Her eyes were huge with shock and she couldn’t speak.

According to Shelter manager Ashraf Madhoum, two tank shells – around two feet long - and four phosphoric bombs had been fired onto the area – the tank shells and one phosphoric bomb hitting the school directly. He confirmed that there were no fighters or armed men in the area at the time.

When we returned again to the school a room was on fire on the third floor. We kicked the door in and tried to gain entry but thick black acrid smoke smothered our sight. UNRWA Co-Ordinator at the shelter Raouf Asfour explained that 40 people had been staying in the second classroom that was hit. Thankfully they had evacuated after the first shelling. Inspecting the blacked shell of a room, we saw charred discs of white bread mangled with plastic bags of belongings and foam mattresses, broken glass, torched nappies and burnt blankets.

‘If the international community is talking about war crimes, then this is one’, said Raouf Asfour, Shelter co-ordinator. He's a resilient, welcoming, can-do man who says he hasn’t seen his own family for weeks. Asking how sustainable the shelter is he explains, ‘As long as we are here, we will keep going’. Yet he recognises that no-one can be kept safe. ‘Most are asking are we safe here? This is a question we can’t answer’.

The Market round the corner from the school had been bombed four days before the school attack. An F16 had struck at 1.30am. Raouf explains, ‘Much of the glass of the windows was smashed, it shattered onto people, many needed hospital treatment, they were terrified’. The night before the tank shell attack, 13-year-old Palestine Tamboura was sleeping in her bed. An Apache fired bullet entered through the window and struck her in the leg as she slept. She had to have one of her legs amputated at the knee.

Families are still living in the UNRWA School. Many came from the Atartura and Sheyma areas, now in ruins following Israel’s three weeks of intensive bombing, home demolitions and killing. Many have no homes to return to. An estimated 40,000 people have been made homeless through Israel’s onslaught and wilful property destruction, in violation of the fourth Geneva Convention of the protection of civilian and state property. Israeli authorities justify each demolition with the charge of

‘Military Necessity’.

The Israeli military justifies the crushing of homes as a means to knock out possible fighter posts, vantage points and any structure or foliage or trees which obscure Israeli occupation forces’ lines of sight and movement. All must be razed and crushed in the name of advancing and cutting deep into Palestinian territory in an endless ‘war on terror’.

This physical bulldozing over land and international human rights law matches a political advancement of a colonial project of long-term occupation, spearheading these repeated incursions and assaults, backing them up and pushing them forward and leaving churned deserts in the heart of communities, scorched earth and fresh graves for those who ‘got in the way’ deliberately or not, armed or not.

Israel also openly practices illegal collective punishment in the form of targeting the homes of wanted fighters and their families, political activists and suicide operation martyrs. Thousands of homes in the West Bank and Gaza Strip have been levelled under this policy.

But more sinisterly and more acutely felt by people here, is that a historic, obvious and long-term campaign of terror is being waged against the Palestinian people, with the aim of forcing a mass transfer, an eviction and an expulsion of a people from their land which an occupying power seeks to control. Every attack in this context, is seen as systematic and pre-meditated, the terror exacerbated by the fact there is no shelter and no protection by or through any state, international organisation, political faction, Hamas authority or personal relationships. As Shadi Yassin Ashkar, 60, the grandfather of Mohammad and Bilial, explained to me, 'I told them, we shouldn’t all stay in one place, what if they hit us like they hit families in Fakhoura? We could all be wiped out, better to keep apart, spread apart, so we cannot all be killed at once'.

The vast majority of the people here don’t feel the Hamas authority has been the sole target of Israeli F16s, apaches, white phosphorous bombs, surveillance drones, snipers, tanks and bulldozers – they think it's them and their homes and their children. It ordinary Gazans that bear the scars on their bodies, who have lost their homes and limbs and members of their families, bearing this loss and ruin and constant insecurity in the dark tents and shelters they now live in.

Israeli forces continue to attack despite the 'ceasefire' – according to Kamal Odwan Hospital authorities, farmer Nasser Salah Nasser, 20, was shot in the head yesterday in Eastern Jabaliya, and tank fire injured a woman and her child in Beit Hanoun two days ago. Gun ships have continued to shell the coast, military bulldozers have continued to shred land north of Beit Lahiya, F16s kept soaring low over the population and spy drones keep menacing the skies above us – all reminding us that the threat of open war upon Gaza remains hanging over our heads.