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  • Bloodied in Gaza

    Ceylon Daily News, Sri Lanka
    Jan 1 2009


    Bloodied in Gaza



    Silently, the world watches. And silently, governments plotted: how
    shall we make the clouds rain death on to Gaza? Comments (...)

    `There is a complete blackout in Gaza now. The streets are as still as
    death.'

    I am speaking to my father, Moussa el-Haddad, a retired physician who
    lives in Gaza City, on Skype, from Durham, North Carolina in the
    United States, where I have been since mid 2006 - the month Gaza's
    borders were hermetically sealed by Israel, and the blockade of the
    occupied territory further enforced.

    He is out on his balcony. It is 2 a.m.


    Palestinian men and medics remove bodies from the site of the
    destroyed former office of Palestinian president Mahmud Abbas
    following an Israeli air strike in Gaza City on December 27. Israel
    launched a massive wave of air strikes on Hamas targets in Gaza,
    killing more than 400 Palestinians after warning of a fiery riposte to
    ongoing rocket fire, officials said. AFP

    I can only see grey plumes of smoke slowly rising all over the city,
    everywhere I look,' he says, as though they were some beautiful,
    comforting by-product of some hideous, malicious event.

    My father was out walking when the initial strikes began - `I saw the
    missiles falling and prayed; the earth shook; the smoke rose; the
    ambulances screamed,' he told me.

    My mother was in the Red Crescent Society clinic near the
    universities, where she works part-time as a pediatrician.

    Behind the clinic was one of the police centres that were
    levelled. She said she broke down at first, the sheer proximity of the
    attacks having shaken her from the inside out. After she got a hold of
    herself, they took to treating injured victims of the attack, before
    transferring them to Shifa hospital.

    Now, three days later, they are trapped in their own home.

    My father takes a deep restorative sigh, before continuing. `Ehud
    Barak has gone crazy. He's gone crazy. He is bombing everywhere and
    everything ... no one is safe.'

    Explosions are audible in the background. They sound distant and dull
    over my laptop's speakers, but linger like an echo in death's
    valley. They evoke terrifying memories of my nights in Gaza only two
    years ago. Nights that till this day haunt my four-year-old son who
    refuses to sleep on his own.

    `Can you hear them?' my father continues. `Our house is shaking. We
    are shaking from the inside out.'

    My mother comes to the phone. `Hello, hello dear,' she mutters, her
    voice trembling. `I had to go to the bathroom.

    But I'm afraid to go alone. I wanted to perform wudu' before prayer
    but I was scared. Remember days when we would go to the bathroom
    together because you were too afraid to go alone?' She laughs at the
    thought.

    It seems amusing to her now, that she was scared to find her death in
    a place of relief; that she is now terrified of the same seemingly
    ridiculous scenario.

    It was really the fear of being alone. When you `hear' the news before
    it becomes news, you panic for clarity - you want someone to make
    sense of the situation, package it neatly into comprehensible terms
    and locations. Just to be sure it's not you this time.

    `It's strange, my whole body is shaking. Why is that? Why is that?'
    she rambles on, continuous explosions audible in the
    background. `There they go again. One boom after
    another. Fifteen. Before that, one or two, maybe 20 total so far.'

    Counting makes it's easier. Systemising the assaults makes them easier
    to deal with. More remote.

    We speak to each other throughout the day. Last night, she called to
    let me know there were gunships overhead, as though there was
    something I could do about it; as though my voice would somehow make
    them disappear.

    Eventually, her panic subsided ...'OK, OK, your father says it was the
    navy gunships ... they hit the pier ... the poor fishermen, it's not
    like it's even a real pier ... it's just the pier, just the pier ...'

    They cracked the windows opened, to prevent an implosion.

    `By the way we are sleeping in your room now, it's safer,' she tells
    me, of my empty, abandoned space.

    My mother's close friend, Yosra, was asked to evacuate her
    building. They live in a flat near many of the ministry complexes
    being targeted. They were advised not to go to the mosque for
    services, lest they be bombed.

    Another family friend, an elderly Armenian-Palestinian Christian and
    retired pharmacist, is paralysed with fear and confined, like many
    residents, to her home. She lives alone, in front of the Saraya
    security complex on Omar al-Mukhtar Street. The complex has already
    been bombed twice.

    The rains of death continue to fall in Gaza. And silently, the world
    watches. And silently, governments plotted: how shall we make the
    thunder and clouds rain death on to Gaza?

    It will all seem, at the end of the day, that this is somehow a
    response to something: rockets; broken truces; irreconcilability ...

    It is as though the situation were not only acceptable, but normal in
    the period prior to it all.

    As though a calm that provides no relief - political, economic, or
    otherwise - for Gaza's stateless, occupied, besieged Palestinians were
    tenable. As though settlements did not continue to expand; walls did
    not continue to extend and choke lands and lives; families and friends
    were not dislocated; life was not paralysed; people were not
    exterminated; borders were not sealed and food and light and fuel were
    in fair supply.

    But it is the prisoners' burden to bear: they broke the conditions of
    their incarceration. Nevertheless, there are concerns for the
    `humanitarian situation': as long as they do not starve ...

    The warden improves the living conditions now and then, in varying
    degrees of relativity, but the prison doors remain sealed. And so when
    there are 20 hours of power outages in a row, the prisoners wish that
    they were only eight; or 10; and dream of the days of four.

    My friend Safah Joudeh is also in Gaza city. She is a 27-year-old
    freelance journalist.

    `At this point we don't feel that it is Hamas being targeted, it's the
    entire population of Gaza,' she says.

    `The strikes have been and I need to stress this, indiscriminate. They
    claim that the targets have been buildings and people that are
    Hamas-affiliated, but the employees in these buildings are public
    sector employees, not political activists ... other targets include
    homes, mosques, the university, port, fishing boats, the fish market.'

    No one has left their home since Saturday, she says.

    `The streets were full of people the first day of the attacks,
    naturally. They were unexpected and came at a time when people were
    going about their daily business.

    The streets have been completely empty the past two days. People have
    closed up shop and trying to stay close to their families and loved
    ones. Many homes are without bread, the bakeries stopped working two
    days before the attack because of lack of fuel and flour.'

    The small shop down the street from my parents' home, next to the Kinz
    mosque where many of the Remal neighbourhood's affluent residents
    attend, opens for a little while after prayer. My father goes and gets
    whatever he can - while he can.

    They have one package of bread left, but insist they are OK.

    `Habibi, when we see each other again - if we see each again - I'll
    make it for you.' he promises. The very possibility seems to comfort
    him, no matter how illusory.

    It is my daughter Noor's birthday on January 1. She will be one year
    old. I cannot help but think: who was born in bloodied Gaza today?

    http://www.dailynews.lk/2009/01/01/fea03.a sp
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