Below are some eye-witness reports on the carnage in Gaza in reverse chronological order.

 
Vittorio Arrigoni on the ground in Gaza, January 9, 2009


--------

 
My toothpaste, toothbrush, shavers and shaving foam. The clothes I'm wearing, the cough medicine I'm using to get rid of a persistent cough, the cigarettes I bought for Ahmed, and some tobacco for my arghile. My cell phone, the laptop onto which I compulsively type my eye-witness accounts from the hell surrounding me. All that's needed for a modest, yet dignified existence in Gaza comes from Egypt, and arrives on the shops' shelves through the tunnels. These are the very same tunnels that the Israeli F16s hasn't stopped heavily bombing in the last 12 hours, destroying along with them thousands of Rafah houses near the border.

A few months ago I had three teeth dodgy fixed, and at the end of the operation I asked my Palestinian dentist where he'd gotten all of his dental equipment from – the anesthetic, the syringes, ceramic inlays and all the other tools. With a sly look on his face, he'd made a certain gesture with his hands: from under ground. There's no doubt that through the tunnels underneath Rafah, explosives and weapons were also smuggled, the very same that the resistance is using today to try and contain the terrifying advance of the armour-plated Israeli death-machines. But it's next to nothing compared with the tons of consumer goods flowing into famished Gaza under this criminal siege.

It's easy enough on the internet to find photos documenting how even livestock comes in from Egypt through the tunnels. Sedated, strapped-up goats and cows are lowered into an Egyptian well, re-emerging on this side to provide milk, cheese and meat. Even the main hospitals in the Strip stocked up surreptitiously at the border. The tunnels were the only resource allowing the Palestinians to survive the siege, a siege which long before the current bombings, was the cause of a 60% unemployment rate and forced 80% of families to live off humanitarian handouts.

Our colleagues at the ISM in Rafah describe the umpteenth siege that they witnessed. Caravans of desperate refugees leaving their homes facing Egypt, on mule-drawn carts or hodgepodge vehicles. A déjà-vu scenario – in previous days, leaflets were raining down from the planes intimidating the Palestinians into evacuating. Since Israel always keeps its threatened promises, bombs are raining down from the planes now. Today's new homeless will spend the night with their relatives, friends and acquaintances in Gaza. No one dares crowd the United Nations schools anymore, after yesterday's massacre in Jabalia. But a considerable number haven't gone anywhere, as they have nowhere safe to go. They shall be spending the night praying to God that they'll be spared, since no one on earth seems to take any interest in their existence.

The death toll at present is at 768 Palestinians, with 3,129 wounded, and 219 children killed. The count of civilian victims on the Israeli side is thankfully still only at 4. At Zaytoun, an Eastern neighbourhood of Gaza City, the Red Cross ambulances could only rush to the scene of a massacre after several hours, under the coordination of the Israeli military summit. When they finally got there, they picked up 17 corpses and 10 injured, all belonging to the Al Samouni family. A perfect execution: in the tiny bodies of the children it was possible to notice bullet holes rather than wounds caused by shrapnel.

The last two nights in the Gaza City hospitals were quieter than usual, as we assisted a number of injured in the tens rather than the hundreds. Obviously after the massacre at the Al Fakhura school, the Israeli Army surpassed the daily budget of civilian casualties as an offering to its blood-thirsty government in view of the imminent elections. We have an inkling that tonight the morgues will once again be filled to bursting point.

With our sirens screaming, we continue to rush pregnant women into hospital as they give birth prematurely. It's as if nature and the conservation instinct were inducing these brave mothers to predate the arrival of these new lives to make up for the growing number of dead. These newborns' first cry, when they survive, can for a moment cover the rumbling of the bombs.

Leila, a colleague at the ISM, asked our neighbours' children to write some of their impressions on the atrocious tragedy we're enduring. Here are some extracts of their words, the horrors of war seen through the pure and innocent gaze of Gaza's children:

Suzanne, aged 15: "The life in Gaza is very difficult. Actually we can't describe everything. We can't sleep, we can't go to school and study. We feel a lot of feelings, sometimes we feel afraid and worry because the planes and the ships, they hit 24 hours. Sometimes we feel bored because there is no electricity during the day, and in the night, it is coming just four hours and when it comes we are watching the news on TV. And we see kids and women who are injured and dead. So we live in the siege and war."

From Fatma, 13: "It was the hardest week in our life. In the first day we were in school, having the final exam of the first term, then the explosions started, many students were killed and injured, and the others surely lost a relative or a neighbour. There is no electricity, no food, no bread. What can we do - it's the Israelis! All the people in the world celebrated the new year, we also celebrate but in a different way."

From Sara, 11: "Gaza is living in a siege, like a big jail: no water, no electric power. People feel afraid, don't sleep at night, and every day more people are killed. Until now, more than 400 are killed and more than 2000 injured. And students had their final first term exams, so Israel hit the Ministry of Education, and a lot of ministries. Every day people are asking when will it end, and they are waiting for more ships with activist like Vittorio and Leila."

Darween, 8: "I am a Palestinian kid,
I won't leave my country 
so I will have lots of advantages
 because I won't leave my country 
and I hear a sound of rockets
so I won't leave my country."

Meriam is four. Her siblings asked her, "what do you feel when you hear the rockets?" And she said, "I feel afraid!", before running to take cover behind her father's legs.

Gaza is sadly shrouded in obscurity in the last ten days. I can recharge my computer and phone only in the hospitals. We watch TV with the doctors and paramedics while waiting for an urgent call. We listen to the rumblings in the distance, and after a few minutes the Arab satellite networks refer exactly where the explosions take place. We often watch ourselves pull bodies out of the rubble, as if having seen it all in the flesh weren't enough already. Last night I switched over to an Israeli channel with the remote. They were showing a traditional music festival, complete with scantily-clad showgirls and firework displays in the end. We went back to our horror, not on screen but in the ambulances. Israel has every right to laugh and sing even while they're massacring their neighbours. Palestinians only ask to die a different kind of death – say, of old age.

Stay human

Vittorio Arrigoni


 

 

Jennifer Loewenstein; Beirut, Hamra; 1.10.09. 2:30am


Here are some newsworthy items out of Gaza that are unlikely to be making it to the Western presses. I received this information directly from one of the staff of the Mezan Center for Human Rights about twenty minutes ago.

1. Israel has begun a new policy in Gaza in the past two days called the "roof knock". This is when a "small" rocket is fired from Israeli military aircraft that is strong enough to blast open the roof of a targeted building. It is sent as a "warning message" to the building's inhabitants giving them between 2 and 3 minutes to evacuate before the building is completely destroyed. A number of cases of this new technique have been reported recently.

2. While the UN continues to claim that "only" 25% of the casualties from the attacks on Gaza are civilian, the Mezan Center for Human Rights (known for the care it takes not to overstate the numbers and for its strict verification policies) estimates that the number of civilian casualties is approximately 85%. In particular, the number of children has increased to over 200, and the number of women has surpassed 75. One reason for the lower civilian casualty figures used by the UN has to do with the reluctance to consider men -other than the elderly and sick- as non-combatants. In fact the overwhelming majority of men killed in "Operation Cast Lead" up to now have been non-combatants, including fathers, teachers, shopkeepers, construction workers, laborers, students, as well as the civil policemen. The vast majority are not "Hamas militants." Note that the civil police are considered 'non-combatants' under international law and are therefore not 'legitimate' targets in any military confrontation any more than traffic cops or firemen.

3. The UN announced this evening that "almost everyone in the Gaza Strip" is now in need of humanitarian aid. Indeed, even those with adequate food supplies are a) handing out what they have to people in "shelters" (which have been targeted consistently by Israeli war machines in the past); Even those with adequate food supplies are b) unable to obtain bread anywhere. Many are using rice or spaghetti to substitute for carbohydrates -- when these are availabe and when there is water and electricity to allow for cooking these items.

4. There are widespread reports now of forced evacuations of entire neighborhoods of people who go mainly to nearby schools or other public buildings not yet destroyed. These are considered no more secure than their homes but remain the only other places to go (other than to move into crowded dwellings with relatives; or places no more secure than their own homes). The congregation of so many people in these enclosed spaces increases the likelihood of major civilian casualties when airstrikes target the area.

PLEASE PROTEST THESE AND OTHER ACTIONS OF THE UNITED STATES AND ISRAEL, TWO COUNTRIES THAT CLAIM THE WHOLESALE DESTRUCTION OF A PEOPLE IS A MATTER OF 'SELF DEFENSE'.

--
Greta Berlin
Media Team
Free Gaza Movement
310 422 7242
www.freegaza.org
www.flickr.com/photos/29205195@N02/

 
 

 

 

Vittorio Arrigoni, Gaza, January 9, 2009

Take some kittens, some tender little moggies in a box", said Jamal, a surgeon at the Al Shifa, Gaza's main hospital, while a nurse actually placed a couple of blood-stained cardboard boxes in front of us. "Seal up the box, then jump on it with all your weight and might, until you feel their little bones crunching, and you hear the last muffled little mew." I stared at the boxes in astonishment, and the doctor continued: "Try to imagine what would happen after such images were circulated. The righteous outrage of public opinion, the complaints of the animal rights organisations…" The doctors went on in this vein, and I was unable to take my eyes off those boxes, sitting at our feet. "Israel trapped hundreds of civilians inside a school as if in a box, including many children, and then crushed them with all the might of its bombs. What were the world's reactions? Almost nothing. We would have been better off as animals rather than Palestinians, we would have been more protected."

At this point the doctor leans towards one of the boxes, and takes its lid off in front of me. Inside it are the amputated limbs, legs and arms, some from the knee down, others with the entire femur attached, amputated from the injured at the Al Fakhura United Nations school in Jabalia, which resulted in more than fifity casualties. Pretending to be taking an urgent call, I took my leave of Jamal, actually rushing to the bathroom to bend over and throw up.

A little earlier I'd been involved in a conversation with Dr. Abdel, an ophtalmologist, regarding the rumours that the Israeli Army had been showering us with non-conventional weapons, forbidden by the Geneva Convention, such as cluster bombs and white phosphorous. The very same that the Tsahal Army used in the last Lebanese war, as well as the US air force in Falluja, still violating international norms. In front of Al Auda hospital we witnessed and filmed white phosphorous bombs being used about five hundred metres from where we were, too far to be absolutely certain there were any civilians underneath the Israeli Apaches, but so terribly close to us all the same.

The Geneva Treaty of 1980 forbids white phosphorous being used directly as a war weapon in civilian areas, allowing it only as a smoke screen or for lighting. There's no doubt that using this weapon in Gaza, a strip of land concentrating the highest population rate in the world, is a crime all on its own. Doctor Abdel told me that at Al Shifa hospital they don't have the medical and military competence to say for sure whether the wounds they examined on certain corpses were indeed provoked by white phosphorous bullets.

But on his word, in twenty years on the job he had never seen casualties like those now being carried into the ward. He told me about the traumas to the skull, with the fractures to the vomer bone, the jaw, the cheekbones, tear duct, nasal and palatine bones showed signs of the collision of an immense force against the victim's face. What he finds inexplicable is the total lack of eyeballs, which ought to leave a trace somewhere within the skull even in case of such a violent impact. Instead, we see Palestinian corpses coming into the hospitals without eyes at all, as if someone had removed them surgically before handing them over to the coroner.

Israel has let us know that we've been granted a daily 3-hour truce, from 1:00 to 4:00 PM. These statements from the Israeli military summit are considered by the people of Gaza as having the same reliability as the Hamas leaders' declarations that they've just provoked a massacre of enemy soldiers. Just to be clear on this point, the soldiers of Tel Aviv's worse enemy are the very same who fight under the Star of David. Yesterday a war ship off the coast of Gaza's port picked out a large group of alleged guerrilla fighters from the Palestinian Resistance, moving as a united front around Jabalia. They shot their cannons at them. But as it turned out, they were their own fellow soldiers, with the shooting resulting in three being killed and about twenty injured. No one here believes in the truces that Israel declares, and as it happens, today at 2:00 PM Rafah was under attack by the Israeli helicopters. There was also yet another massacre of children in Jabalia: three little sisters aged 2, 4 and 6 from the Abed Rabbu family were slaughtered. Just half an hour earlier in Jabalia, once again the  Red Crescent hospital's ambulances were under attack. Eva and Alberto, my ISM colleagues were on board that ambulance and managed to film everything, passing those videos and photos on to all the major media.

Hassan was kneecapped, fresh from mourning the death of his friend Araf, a paramedic who was killed two days ago as he came in aid of the injured in Gaza City. They had stopped to pick up the body of a man languishing in agony in the middle of the road, when they were under fire by about ten shots from an Israeli sniper. One bullet hit Hassan in the knee and the ambulance was filled with holes. We're now at a death toll of 688, in addition to 3,070 injured, 158 dead children and countless missing. Only yesterday, we counted 83 dead, 80 of which were civilians. Thankfully, the death toll on the Israeli side is still only at 4.

Travelling towards Al Quds hospital, where I'll be working all night on the ambulances, as I raced along on board one of the very few fearless taxis left, zig-zagging to avoid the bombs, on the corner of one street I saw a group of dirty street urchins with tattered clothes, looking exactly like the "sciuscià" kids of the Italian afterwar period. They threw stones towards the sky with slingshots, at far away and unapproachable enemy who was toying with their lives. This is a crazy metaphor, which could serve as a snapshot of the absurdity of this time and place.

Stay human

 
Vittorio Arrigoni
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
DIGEST January 8, 2009

1) The Demolition of Rafah
2) Israel continues to target Palestinian medics in Gaza
3) Videos from al-Shifa hospital
4) Where would you go?
5) In the shadow of Gaza
6) Jan 5 night shift / UNRWA refugee schools attacked
7) Pity for the tiger is injustice to the sheep
8) Free Gaza Movement: We are coming back, and we are putting Israel
on notice


1) The Demolition of Rafah
(Gaza, 7th January 2009) Jenny Linnel a British ISM volunteer in
Rafah said following escalated Israeli attacks in Rafah, "Shortly
before midnight on the 6th of January, missiles began raining down on
Rafah in one of the heaviest Israeli air strikes since the current
atrocities began. Continuous sorties pounded the southern Gaza city
for over 12 hours. Many homes were destroyed or severely damaged,
especially in the neighbourhoods along the border with Egypt."

According to Fida Qishta Rafah resident and ISM activist, "Papers
dropped from planes in Rafah neighborhood ordered people to leave
their homes in the areas stretching from the borderline all the way
back to Sea Street, the main street running through the heart of
Rafah, parallel to the border. This area is hundreds of metres deep
and the site of thousands of homes. Most of these areas are refugee
camps, where residents are being made refugees yet again, some for the
third or fourth time following the mass home demolitions of 2003 and
2004 by Israeli military D-9 bulldozers.

People are told to leave their homes but even if they leave they are
attacked. Nowhere is safe in the Gaza strip. Where will these families
go? They are afraid to seek sanctuary in local UNRWA schools following
yesterday's massacres in Jabaliya. They are afraid to drive somewhere
and be shot down on the road like the Sinwar family was. They are
being temporarily absorbed by the rest of Rafah's population
friends, neighbours, relatives."

Jenny added, "We have a friend in Yibna, directly on the border, who
refuses to leave his home. We spoke to one woman in Al Barazil who has
a family of 12 and simply doesn't know where to go and another woman
in Block J who is literally in the street tonight. Her father is in
his nineties. The family home where ISM volunteers are staying is on
the other side of the city centre and has become a refuge for three
other families tonight. The house is filled with excited chatter and
lots of children. Palestinians have a long-learned talent of making-
do, but there is no escaping the deep sense of uncertainty.."
Referring to hundreds of homes that were demolished in Rafah along the
Egyptian border in 2002 former Israeli OC Southern Command, Yom Tov
Samiah, contended in an interview to the "Voice of Israel" on the 16
January 2002.January 2002 that, "These houses should have been
demolished and evacuated a long time ago, because the Rafah border is
not a natural border, it cannot be defended. Three hundred meters of
the Strip along the two sides of the border must be evacuated. Three
hundred meters, no matter how many houses, period."

The six hundred meter buffer zone that the former OC Southern Command
of the Israeli Occupation Forces referred to seven years ago seems to
be Israel's goal in the latest wave of demolitions.

ISM media coordinator Adam Taylor stated, "Israel wants a buffer zone
in Rafah in order to besiege Gaza more effectively. The tunnels that
ran under the border with Egypt have become Gaza's life line during
the prolonged Israeli siege and served as the only source for basic
necessities such as fuel and medicine that Israel did not allow into
the Gaza strip. This recent wide scale destruction of private property
of the occupied people of Rafah is not a military necessity. One war
crime is being committed in order to reinforce another - that of
collective punishment." Adam Taylor - International Solidarity
Movement

Photos: http://www.palsolidarity.org/main/2009/01/07/the-demolition-of-rafah
_______

2) Israel continues to target Palestinian medics in Gaza

(Gaza, January 7, 2009) A Palestinian medic, traveling with two
international ISM activists, has been shot by Israeli forces in
Jabaliya, northern Gaza.

Red Crescent medic, Hassan al-Attal, was shot through the thigh while
collecting a civilian killed by Israeli fire from Zemmo, east of
Jabaliya refugee camp.

Canadian and Spanish ISM activists were present as it happened;
"It was very clear that we were a medical team. Yet as two of our
team, wearing bright red medic uniforms, went to pick up the body,
they were fired upon 13 times by an Israeli sniper." - Eva Bartlett
(Canada) International Solidarity Movement.

"The Israeli's fired at the ambulance hitting it once. At least six
medics have already been murdered while fulfilling there duties. How
are the medics supposed to work? For every ten attempts the Red
Crescent make to co-ordinate their humanitarian missions with the
Israelis, only two are allowed. This means that the Israelis are
refusing to allow 80 percent of medical missions to operate with any
form of safety." Alberto Arce (Spain) - International Solidarity
Movement

At least six Palestinian medical personnel have been killed by Israeli
attacks in the eight past days.

International Solidarity Movement activists are accompanying
ambulances through out the Gaza strip. They are working with medical
personnel during the Israeli Occupation Forces' ground invasion into
the Gaza strip.

On December 31st, medic Mohammed Abu Hassera was killed on the spot as
his ambulance was shelled while trying to access the wounded. Dr Ihab
Al Mathoon, who was also on the ambulance, died in hospital a few
hours later. On the 4th January, Yaser Shbeir, Raf'at Al-A'kluk, Arafa
Hani 'Abdul Dayem and Anes Fadel Na'im were killed when Israeli shells
targeted the ambulances they worked in.

For the footage taken by Spanish Human Rights Activist Alberto Arce,
given to Ramatan News Agency inside Gaza: eutelsatw6. downlink
11691.08 horizontal symbol rate 2.894. this will work if ec is 3 over

4 (satellite co-ordinates)
Human Rights Activists in Gaza:
Ewa Jasiewicz - Poland/Britain
Alberto Arce - Spain
Dr. Haider Eid - South Africa
Sharon Lock - Australia
Fida Qishta - Palestine
Jenny Linnel - Britain
Natalie Abu Shakra - Lebanon
Vittorio Arrigoni - Italy
Eva Bartlett - Canada

For blogs from inside Gaza see:
www.ingaza.wordpress.com
www.talestotell.wordpress.com
www.palsolidarity.org
http://www.palsolidarity.org/main/2009/01/07/click-the-star-to-watch-this-topic-israel-continues-to-target-palestinian-medics-in-gaza
_______

3) Videos from al-Shifa hospital
Eva Bartlett
Gaza, 5th January 2009

http://www.palsolidarity.org/main/2009/01/07/videos-from-al-shifa-hospital
_______

4) Where would you go?
By Eva Bartlett in Gaza, see blog ingaza.wordpress.com
(Gaza, January 6, 2009) If your unbelievably small and overcrowded
land was being terrorized, pulverized by bombs from the world's 4th
largest military, and your borders were closed; if your house was not
safe, mosque (church) not safe, school not safe, street not safe, UN
refugee camp not safe. Where would you go, run, hide?
 
Over 15,000 have been made homeless, internal refugees from Israel's
house-bombings, shelling, and shooting. Some have been housed in UN
schools around Gaza. In Jabaliya today, Israeli warplanes bombed one
such school. Shifa's director conservatively estimates 40 dead, 10s
injured. It must be higher. I will go to the recieving hospital and
look at the mutilated survivors, maybe see the corpses come in. Then I
will tell and show you, if I'm not bombed.

The Shifa director also told me that emergency medics still cannot
reach the Zaytoun house that yesterday morning was bombed with
inhabitants locked inside. There are two main accounts of the story,
both criminal. One: Israeli soldiers rounded up the inhabitants of the
multi-story house, separated the men,15, I was told, and shot them
point blank in front of the women and children of the family, 20, I
was told. Then, laid explosives around the house and bombed the rest
of the extended family.

Two: Israeli soldiers rounded up the inhabitants of the multi-story
house, locked them in one room for a day, and bombed it the following
morning.

Either way, Israeli soldiers intentionally imprisoned and bombed the
inhabitants of the house. And are actively preventing medics from
reaching any potential survivors. The medics have tried to coordinate
with the ICRC (international committee of the red cross) without
success: no one can reach the house.

Is this logical, humane, moral? What's going on with the ICRC? Would
this happen in any other place, with any other invading force?
A house in Beach camp, off the coast and in Gaza city, was shelled
yesterday around 8:30 am, seven killed, including five children.
And of course, the bombing of residential houses in the north goes on.
I'm cut off from what happens in the central and southern areas, until
I'm able to sit with journalists and get the news. But I know they are
not excluded from this carnage.

Photos: http://www.palsolidarity.org/main/2009/01/06/where-would-you-go
_______

5) In the Shadow of Gaza
By Tara
(Gaza, January 7, 2009) While the world watches in horror as the death
toll in Gaza continues to rise, in the occupied West Bank, the Israeli
army is taking the opportunity to unleash a level of deadly force, in
the knowledge that, under the shadow cast by their war on Gaza, these
atrocities will go unseen by the international community.

Palestinian communities in the West Bank have responded to the war on
Gaza with daily demonstrations in cities and villages throughout the
region. Taking the form of marches, sit-ins and candlelight vigils, as
well as stone-throwing by young boys, these demonstrations have met
with lethal repression from Israeli soldiers in their role as an
occupying army.

In the village of Ni'lin, West of Ramallah, two young men, Arafat Al-
Khawaje and Mohammad Al-Khawaje were both brutally murdered in a spray
of live ammunition from Israeli soldiers during a demonstration
against the war on Gaza. Arafat, aged 22, was killed immediately as a
bullet cut through his back, stopping his heart. Mohammad, who was
shot in the head, held-on in Ramallah hospital in a critical condition
for four days, before dying on the evening of Wednesday 31st December.
A third young man, Mohammad Sror, was shot in the leg. International
eye-witnesses to the slaughter describe the attack as being "callous
and calculated", with Israeli soldiers feigning an invasion of the
village to lure the young men into the olive groves, where they had
concealed themselves, before opening fire from a distance of just 15
metres.

The attack took place with full knowledge that there was no ambulance
in the village, as Israeli forces had refused to permit it to pass
through the checkpoint. Once the shooting occurred, the ambulance was
detained for a further five minutes at the checkpoint, before the
soldiers allowed it to enter the village.

In the village of Silwad, another young man, 17 year old Mohammad
Hamid, was shot by Israeli soldiers from a guard-tower whilst at a
demonstration - dying in hospital from three gunshot wounds to the
chest and abdomen.

On 4th January, in Qalqiliya city, another young man was assassinated
by Israeli soldiers for throwing stones over the Apartheid Wall that
surrounds the city. Mofed Saleh Walwil, 20 years old, was killed with
a single sniper bullet to the forehead, when an Israeli jeep opened
fire on the boys.

Two more young men are in a critical condition after also being shot
by Israeli soldiers whilst demonstrating against Israel's "Operation
Cast Lead". Hammam Al-Ashari, 17 years old, from Abu Dis, near
Jerusalem, was shot in the head with three rubber-coated steel bullets
at close range, while he was walking up a stairwell with friends. For
30 minutes, the soldiers prevented a waiting ambulance from reaching
Hammam, significantly worsening his condition.

17 year old Mohammad Jaber is also in a critical condition after
Israeli soldiers again opened fire on a Gaza protest in Hebron, on
Sunday 28th December, shooting him in the head. In the period of two
days from 28th-29th December, Israeli soldiers in Hebron wounded at
least 21 demonstrators with live ammunition, according to doctors at
Hebron's al-Ahli hospital. International human rights workers living
in the area, describe this as a significant "escalation in the
violence used by the Israeli Occupation Forces."

The number of Palestinian youth shot by Israeli armed forces in the
West Bank continues to rise, with at least 3 more young men injured by
live fire from Friday 2nd to Sunday 4th December.
Severe repression has also been leveled at Gaza demonstrations in the
form of arbitrary mass arrests. In East Jerusalem 90 people were
arrested for taking part in a non-violent street march. Protesters
were all released upon the condition that they not enter Jerusalem's
old city for ten days, despite the fact that many of the arrestees
reside there. Many Palestinians living in East Jerusalem now express
fear of taking part in non-violent demonstrations, saying that the
consequences for such acts are too high.

Suppression of public dissent seems to be the motivation behind many
of the repressive tactics being executed by Israeli Authorities. This
is exemplified by the denial of entry to Al-Aqsa mosque in Jerusalem's
old city on Friday 2nd January for any men under the age of 50 years,
under the pretext that the first Friday prayers since the air strikes
on Gaza began would foment further protests. Further, Thursday 1st
January saw Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak momentarily invoke of
curfew across the entire West Bank for Friday 2nd; later downgraded to
a closure of all checkpoints between the West Bank and Israel,
including East Jerusalem.
In light of the violence and repression being leveled at Palestinians
in the West Bank, claims made by Israeli military spokespeople - that
they are attacking Gaza in order to put an end to rocket fire - ring
hollow. As Israeli authorities protest that their massacre in the Gaza
Strip is self-defensive, and that the civilian casualties are an
unfortunate by-product of Hamas members "hiding" amongst the civilian
population; as they proffer their occupation of the West Bank as an
example of their even-handed, democratic restraint in the terrain of
Palestinian Authority governance ("There are no rockets fired from the
West Bank, so we don't need to attack them"); the realities on the
ground paint a very different picture.

As the Israeli government continues their brutal occupation of the
West Bank - killing and injuring youths; firing tear gas in to
Palestinian civilian homes (leading to a house fire in the village of
Ni'lin on Thursday 1st January); continued invasions of cities and
villages, involving curfews, house occupations and arbitrary arrests;
the continued imprisonment of some 11000 Palestinian political
prisoners - including 327 children; and continuing settlement
expansion and settler violence - claims that Israel is not targeting
Palestinians as a people are increasingly difficult to believe.
Amidst the barrage of rehearsed Israeli government rhetoric,
Palestinian civilians are being killed by Israeli soldiers, in greater
or lesser numbers, regardless of where they live, or what their
political affiliations. In the occupied West Bank, Palestinian youths
will continue to die under the shadow of Gaza, as Israeli forces act
with impunity - immune to the international gaze and any potential
censure that may accompany it.

Photos: http://www.palsolidarity.org/main/2009/01/07/in-the-shadow-of-gaza
_______

6) Jan 5 night shift / UNRWA refugee schools attacked
By Sharon in Gaza, see blog at talestotell.wordpress.com
(Gaza, January 6, 2009) 8pm: I am due at Al Quds hospital for a Red
Crescent shift at 8pm, but as I am finishing up writing with the
seaside apartment's generated electricity, the strangest noise arrives
from the sea. It is a whooshing sound like a rocket coming very close;
V and I look at each other, look at the seaside window - he pulls his
cap lower and leans away from the window, I put my jacket over my head
so I can't see what happens. But instead of finishing with an
explosion, the sound decreases again into the distance.
It is then repeated several times, and I realise what we are hearing
is not rockets, but planes - very loud and incredibly fast, making me
think of the term supersonic, if that even means anything outside of
comics. I set off to walk the half hour dark route to Al Quds
hospital, but am only half way up the hill when more planes speed
over, and explosions start between me and the hospital. I completely
lose my nerve, stopping still under a tree and texting Eva that I
can't do this walk by myself. The planes have freaked her out as well.
I walk quickly back to the apartment, and try to work out what to do.
V suggests I walk the other direction, to Al Shifa hospital, and catch
an ambulance shuttling to Al Quds.

What is with these planes? This little bit of land doesn't even have a
proper army! The term "overkill" has never had more meaning. It takes
me some time to get up the courage to set off again, luckily the wierd
planes have gone.

10.45 I am still at Al Shifa, having been waylaid by a Press TV
reporter wanting to do an interview, but I've got into an ambulance
ready to head off. Just as it is about to leave, rockets fall either
side of the hospital and we retreat hurriedly back under the entrance
shelter.
By the time we get to Al Quds the atmosphere is hectic. They have just
received three men who were in a car outside a bombed house, I am not
clear if one is dying or already dead. We rush another of them to Al
Shifa for neurosurgery. Then we are sent off at high speed to
emergency calls, through a darkened city full of smoke. Double strikes
by Israel happen so often now that the ambulance workers' stress
levels are very high; the medics are doing everything at top speed and
shouting at the tops of their voices as they do it. Rubble covers the
streets from strikes minutes ago. The familiar smell of rocket fire
fills the air, the same smell the grey dead men give off whom we have
collected in the last days.

We peer into the darkness for someone watching for us; we spot a young
boy who runs back around the corner. He returns with his family, 25 of
them, mostly terrified young children. One boy is hopping. The medics
run to grab them, shouting what must be the equivalent of "Move, we've
got to get out of here!" Everyone is shoved into ambulances; a girl of
about six is posted through the half open window into my arms. We tear
back to the hospital, offloading them into comparative shelter, racing
back to collect a father with his daughter of about 8 in his arms, a
head trauma case.

Later, I go to see the family of 25, gathered in a room where they
have been given blankets and food. There don't appear to be any
serious injuries, though when I hear more that seems a miracle. I ask
two articulate and beautiful teenage English speakers from the family,
R and S, what their story is. They explain half the family is their
aunt and her children, who came to their house because their own was
destroyed. R says - "in the last 3 nights, we were hit 13 times the
first night, 3 times the next, and tonight 10 times. The 3rd floor was
gone, then the second floor, we were just left in the first floor, now
there is almost nothing." They translate the aunt's words to me -
"What is the solution for us? What?" The girls add, "We had no
solution from Fatah. No solution from Hamas. We just want peace! Just
peace!"
"Where will you go?" I ask them.
"We don't know." they say. "We have some other family but they left
their house too because Israel threatened to bomb it. We don't know."
I hear from E that she was borrowing internet in the Sharuch building
tonight, which houses Russia TV, Fox, possibly Reuters, and other
press offices, when it was struck 7 times one after the other. She got
safely to the ground from the tenth floor, with everyone else, but she
says she did think the whole place was going to collapse.

There is confused news through the night of more attacks on mosques
and homes throughout Gaza. After the hectic earlier hours, the middle
part of the shift is filled by collecting 5 women going into labour;
by the 5th call S thinks his dispatcher is joking. I am pleased to be
able to smile at our patients. Then S tells me about a 17 year old
woman who went into labour yesterday. Her sister-in-law's 1 year old
was killed in the last days in her arms, the bullet continuing on to
wound the mother. And her father-in-law is dead, but his body has not
been able to be collected.

4am: Behind the two reception desks opposite each other are two
families sitting on plastic chairs put in a circle. They are silent. A
medic explains that the residential building behind us here at Al Quds
has had a bomb threat. These families have evacuated to us here.
Others remain in the building.

6am: I speak to EJ in Jabalia on the office phone. I forgot to tell
you that the Red Crescent Ambulances again relocated their base, since
there was a concern that Karmel Adwan hospital as a government
hospital might be a target. So EJ, Mo, and A have done the night shift
from the new base of Al Awda hospital. EJ says that at about 5am, 4
ambulances went to collect wounded from a house attack. They returned
to get further wounded, again in a convoy of 4, and the Israeli army
shelled the house for a second time as soon as they arrived. The
medics outside the vans were injured by flying rubble. EJ was inside.
S tells me there was an attack on the Shatr UNWRA School, by Apache he
thinks, which killed three UNWRA volunteers helping with the refugees.
He is asked to take the ambulance to collect the body parts, as they
are near the bathrooms which is distressing for people. But the RC
boss says his is the only ambulance on standby so he must wait til
others return first.

5pm: We just heard in the last hour that the Al Fakhoura UNWRA School
was shelled, we think by tanks, and it is confirmed that 43 members of
the same extended family were killed. The UNWRA Schools are sheltering
refugees whose homes Israel has already bombed or threatened to bomb.
We have also heard a third UNWRA school was attacked earlier but we
have no further details yet. I cannot express the anger I am feeling
right now.

Our group is holding together but we are feeling the increasing strain
of not enough internet access, food, sleep, or hope for an end to this
insanity. The numbers of dead have exceeded 570 and the injured have
exceeded 2,600.

Photos: http://www.palsolidarity.org/main/2009/01/06/jan-5-night-shift-unrwa-refugee-schools-attacked
 
7) Pity for the tiger is injustice to the sheep
By Fida Qishta - ISM Co-Coordinator in the Gaza Strip, see blog
sunshire208.blogspot.com

(Gaza, January 8, 2009) The situation has been exploited very cleverly
by the Israeli Ministry of War. Yes, the Ministry of War. The soldiers
who call themselves soldiers defending Israeli security are continuing
a bloody history of war crimes against Palestinians, from 1932 until
2009. During the last two days when since ground incursion started,
things have been unbelievable, hard to watch or to talk about.
When the Israeli army evacuated people from the city of Jabalya city,
the people moved to UN schools. They thought it would be safe, but it
wasn't. An Israeli tank shells attacked them. 42 were killed, most of
them children, and more than 95 were injured. That increased the total
number of children and women victims, until this minute when I wrote
this piece, to 665 killed. 215 of them were children, and 89 were
women. And more than 2950 people were injured. The numbers will maybe
help you see the truth.

The Abu Asha family is one of the families that decided to leave the
northern Gaza Strip to be in what they imagined would be a safe place.
They were moving to the town of Deir Al- Balah in the middle of the
Gaza Strip. But on their way on the road along Gaza's seacoast,
Israeli gunboats attacked them, and all of them were killed. Seven
members of the same family were killed. They thought that they would
be in a safer place. But there is no safe place in the Gaza Strip, and
no safety with these killers.

Many Palestinian paramedics have been killed. The last week six
paramedics were killed and many injured. Most the fire stations have
been attacked. Do these people or these stations represent Hamas?
What's happening in Gaza Strip is a war crime, and we need the honest
people in the world to stop it.

These outrages, which have shocked the consciences of the world's
civilized nations, but they haven't moved their governments. These
governments hope to shape a new reality in Gaza and in Palestinian
affairs.

The situation remains extremely tense. What is happening in Gaza Strip
is the outcome of 14 years of failed consultation and negotiation.
This is Israelis peace and the world's democracy. I still don't
understand, if the world didn't like Hamas as a Palestinian party, why
did they accept their participation in Palestinian elections? When
they won, the world didn't like them. Why then did the UN send
observers to monitor the elections? There are many questions in
Gazans' minds which lead them to believe that there is no democracy in
this world, at least not from the USA not EU. Does the world call
right-wing parties in the Middle East terrorist because they are
Islamic Parties, and then accept Israelis right-wing and left-wing
Israeli parties who are killing Palestinians now in Gaza?

A big deal has been made of the homemade rockets which hit the Sderot
settlement which sits on Palestinian land stolen by these settlers in
1948 from Palestinians who then became refugees in nearby Gaza. And
nobody paid attention to the children and women who were killed in
Gaza when the world thought there was a truce. There was no truce
because over 21 Palestinians were killed and over 70 injured by the
Israelis army. Did you hear about them? I guess not. You just heard
about the rockets that hit Sderot, especially the Israeli woman who
was injured yesterday and the 42 year-old woman who was killed. No
worries about Palestinians and Gazans.

The humanitarian situation continues to deteriorate in the Gaza Strip.
Over 80 children, 40 women and 250 total civilians have been killed.
Most of these people were killed at home, or coming home from school
or work. Humanitarian aid is still a big problem, including the lack
of medicine and food. The Israeli government said that they opened the
border crossings to let Palestinians travel to Egypt for medical
treatment and for humanitarian aid to enter the Gaza Strip. It's like
the wolf killing the sheep and then selling its leather. Why did they
shoot them if they want them to be in good health? Why didn't they
stop the airstrikes before they killed and injured all these
civilians? They tell the world that the food trucks enter the Gaza
Strip. Do you know how many trucks? Do you know that the Gaza Strip is
cut into two parts now by the Israeli army? That means that if the
humanitarian aid gets through into Rafah, it will never reach Gaza
City, because they cut the main road into two parts. It reminds me of
the Abu Holy checkpoint which used to divide the Gaza Strip in two. My
friends and I used to wait to go to our university for hours and
hours. And at the end of the day we went back home, without attending
any classes. Our only class was on how to wait.

My mother is sitting in the door of our house counting the drones and
the F16s. I think that if I asked her to count the airstrikes she
would do it. People here still joke sometimes. One of my friends sent
me a text message that said:

Look outside, the F-16 smiling for you,
The missiles are dancing in front of you,
The Zanana (drone) is singing for you,
Because the Israeli nation requested them all to wish you a Happy New
Year

http://www.palsolidarity.org/main/2009/01/08/pity-for-the-tiger-is-injustice-to-the-sheep
_______

8) Free Gaza Movement: We are coming back, and we are putting Israel
on notice
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

(Larnaca, Cyprus, January 7, 2009) Today the Free Gaza Movement put
Israel on notice that we are sending another emergency boat to Gaza.
We will announce our exact departure date, time and route in the next
few days. We will travel from Cypriot waters, into international
waters, then directly into Gaza territorial waters, never nearing
Israeli waters.

The ongoing Israeli attacks on the Gaza Strip have killed over 640
Palestinians, including many children and women, and injured
thousands. These acts by Israel are severe and massive violations of
international humanitarian law as defined by the Geneva Conventions,
both in regards to the obligations of an Occupying Power and in the
requirements of the laws of war.

The United Nations has failed to protect the Palestinian civilian
population from Israel's massive violations of international
humanitarian law. Therefore, we concerned citizens from Belgium,
Columbia, France, Canada, Great Britain, Greece, Ireland, Jordan,
Kuwait, Scotland, Spain, and the United States, feel that it is our
moral duty to try to do just that.

The Israeli military violently attacked an earlier attempt by the Free
Gaza Movement to send an emergency boat filled with doctors and
medical supplies to Gaza. In the early hours of Tuesday, December 30,
the Israeli Navy rammed our boat, the DIGNITY, in international
waters. Neither the DIGNITY, nor its passengers and crew constituted
any kind of threat to Israel, and the Israeli government had been
alerted to the boat's mission, the previous day. Yet we were violently
rammed three times on the side without any warning from the Israeli
Navy, in an obvious attempt to disable the vessel, jeopardizing the
lives of the 16 passengers on board.

We are not deterred by the violence of the Israeli military and intend
to sail to Gaza again and again. We are physicians, journalists,
members of parliament, and human rights observers who intend to reach
the people of Gaza to deliver much needed medical aid and witness the
atrocities being committed against the Palestinians there.
We are willing to put our bodies on the line to stop Israel's unlawful
massacres of the Palestinian people (we have received death threats
warning us not to repeat our attempt) and bring the attention of the
world to the war crimes happening in Gaza against 1.5 million
Palestinians.

Contact:
Huwaida Arraf (Cyprus): +357-96-723-999
Angela Godfrey-Goldstein (Jerusalem): +972-547-366 393
Ramzi Kysia (U.S): +1-703-994-5422

http://www.palsolidarity.org/main/2009/01/07/free-gaza-movement-we-are-coming-back-and-we-are-putting-israel-on-notice


--~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~
Thank you for your continued interest and support for the International Solidarity Movement!

Please consider a financial donation to help continue the important work of the ISM. You may donate securely online at our website: http://www.palsolidarity.org/main/donations

For more information, visit the ISM website at http://www.palsolidarity.org
PLEASE FORWARD THIS UPDATE WIDELY
-~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
 
 
 
 

By Vittorio Arrigoni in Gaza on January 7


They parade in fear, their eyes looking upwards, surrendering to the sky showering terror and death upon them, fearing the earth that keeps shaking under every step they take, opening craters where there were houses, schools, universities, markets, hospitals, and burying their lives within them forever. I've seen caravans of desperate Palestinians evacuate Jabalia, Beit Hanoun and all the refugee camps in Gaza, crowding the United Nations' schools like earthquake survivors, like victims of a tsunami which is eating into the Gaza Strip day by day, along with its civilian population, without pity or compliance with human rights and the Geneva Conventions. Most of all, without a single Western government stirring a finger to stop this massacre, or sending medical staff out here, or stopping the genocide that Israel is smearing its hands with in these hours.

The indiscriminate attacks against the hospitals and medical staff continue. Yesterday, after having left the Al Auda hospital in Jabalia, I received a call from Alberto, a Spanish colleague at the ISM – a bomb had been dropped there and Abu Mohammed, a nurse, had been seriously injured to his head. Just moments before, in front of a café, I'd been listening to his stories of the heroic deeds of Communist Abu Mohammed's heroes, the leaders of the Popular Front: George Habbash, Abu Ali Mustafa, Ahmad Al Sadat. His eyes lit up when he heard that the first notions of what Palestine and its immense tragedy were, had been passed onto me by my parents, both Communists through and through. By my mother, a "raissa", or Mayor of a town in Northern Italy. He asked me who had been the truly revolutionary leaders of the Italian left from the past, and I said Antonio Gramsci. For those of today I took my time, telling him I'd have replied to that question today. But Abu Mohammed now lies in a coma, in the same hospital where he works. He spared himself my disappointing reply.

Towards midnight I received another call, from Eva this time – the building she was in was under attack. I know that building well, in the centre of Gaza City. I've spent a night there with some Palestinian photojournalist friends of mine. They try to capture through images and words something of the unnatural catastrophe we're enduring in the last ten days. Reuters, Fox News, Russia Today and many, many other local or foreign agencies were under fire by seven rockets shot by an Israeli helicopter. They managed to evacuate everyone on time before anyone was seriously injured – all those cameramen, photographers, reporters – all Palestinian, considering Israel won't allow any international journalists to set foot in Gaza. There are no "strategic" targets around that building, nor a resistance fighting off the deadly armoured Israeli vehicles, which can be found a way away towards the North. Clearly, someone in Tel Aviv cannot bear the images of the massacres of civilians clashing with the ones that the Israeli officers' briefings provide while offering the mercenary journalists their aperitif. Through these press conferences they're declaring to the world that the bombs' targets are only the Hamas terrorists, not those atrociously mutilated children we pull out of the rubble every day.

At Zetun, about ten kilometres from Jabalia, a bombed building crumbled over a family, leaving about ten victims. The ambulances had to wait several hours before they could reach the spot, as the military persist in shooting at us. They shoot at ambulances and bomb hospitals. A few days ago, while I was on the air with a well-known Milanese radio station, an Israeli "pacifist" clearly spelt out to me that this was a war where both sides used all the weapons at their disposal. I thus invite Israel to drop one of its many atomic bombs upon us, those they keep secretly stashed away, defying all treaties against nuclear proliferation. Why not just drop that decisive bomb of theirs and put an end to the inhuman agony of thousands of bodies, lying in tatters in the overcrowded hospital wards I visited?

I took some black and white photos yesterday, the caravans of mule-drawn carts, overloaded beyond belief with children waving white drapes pointing skywards, their faces pale and terrified. Looking through those snaps of fleeing refugees today, I felt shivers down my spine. If they could only be superimposed with those witnessing the Nakba of 1948, the Palestinian catastrophe, they would be a perfect mirror image of them. The cowardly passiveness of self-styled democratic states and governments are responsible for a new catastrophe in full swing right now, a new Nakba, a brand new ethnic cleansing befalling the Palestinian population.

Until a few moments ago we counted 650 dead, 153 murdered children, in addition to 3,000 injured, and innumerable missing. The number of civilian deaths in Israel has thankfully stopped at 4. But after this afternoon the death toll on the Palestinian side requires an urgent recount since the Israeli Army has started attacking the United Nations schools. The very same that had been offering shelter to the thousands evacuated under threat of an imminent attack. They chased them off the refugee camps, the villages, only to collect them all in one place, an easier target. Three schools were attacked today, the last being at Al Fakhura, in Jabalia, which was hit full on its head. Over 80 dead. In a heartbeat, men, women, elderly people and children were wiped away, believing themselves to be safe within those blue-tinted walls adorned with a UN logo. The other 20 UN schools are now shaking in fear. There's no way out anywhere in the Gaza Strip. This isn't Lebanon, where the civilians in the Southern villages targeted by the Israeli bombs could flee to the North, or to Syria or Jordan. From one enormous open-air prison, the Gaza Strip has become a deadly trap. We look at one another in bewilderment and ask ourselves whether the UN Security Council will finally unanimously condemn these attacks after their own schools have been targeted. Someone out there has really decided to turn this place into a desert, and then call it peace.

A long night on the ambulances awaits us now, even after dawn has become an illusion around here. Antenna towers for our mobile phones all along the Strip have been destroyed and we've stopped relying on them. I hope I may one day be able to see all the friends I can no longer contact, but I'm under no illusions. Everyone bar none in Gaza is a walking target.

The Italian Consulate has just contacted me, saying that tomorrow they shall evacuate a fellow Italian, an elderly nun who'd lived near the Catholic church in Gaza for the last twenty years, and had by now been adopted by the Palestinians in the Strip. The consul gently urged me to seize this last opportunity and escape this hell with the nun. I thanked him for the offer, but I'm not moving from here – I just can't. For the sake of the losses we endured, before being Italian, Spanish, British or Australian, right now we are all Palestinian. If only we could do that for just one minute a day, the way we were all Jewish during the Holocaust, I think we would have been spared this entire massacre.

 

Stay human

Vittorio Arrigoni
 
 
 
 
 

Many Stop the War supporters will remember Ewa Jasieiwcz translating the Iraqi Oil Union speaker the first time he came to Manchester.
 

Riding on fire and a third intifada
By Ewa Jasieiwcz, in Jabaliya and Beit Hanoun, Gaza
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 are 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 asked 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, ‘It’s 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

---

Add this page to your favorite Social Bookmarking websites