[R-G] Inside Gaza

[Anthony Fenton]

Inside Gaza
EYEWITNESS: By Ewa Jasiewicz
http://www.sundayherald.com/news/heraldnews/display.var.2479079.0.inside_gaza.php

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.
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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".

Ewa Jasiewicz is a journalist and activist. She is currently the co- 
ordinator for the Free Gaza movement and one of the only international  
journalists on the ground in Gaza