[R-G] Oh Quiet Night, Only Six Homes Were Bombed

[Anthony Fenton]

January 12, 2009
Oh Quiet Night, Only Six Homes Were Bombed
The Ceasefire in Gaza

By EWA JASIEWICZ

http://counterpunch.org/ewa01122009.html

Beit Hanoun and Jabaliya in the Gaza Strip.

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

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

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

Back to Tel Al Zater, we searched with micro torches, sweeping over  
slabs of broken homes and free running water from freshly smashed  
pipes. A black goat was trapped in a rubble nest. We stepped over  
broken blown in metal doors off their hinges. Nothing, none,  
‘snipers’, on our minds. We ended up leaving with one casualty,  
lightly injured, more in shock that anything else. Explosions  
continued through the night. Abrupt slumps into concrete echoing  
around the hospital, like rapid beats to a taut drum skin.

This morning was a different story. I’ve been finding that the most  
missile-heavy times seem to be between 7-9am. I counted 20 strikes in  
those two hours this morning. I’d come to Mohammad’s house. He went  
straight to bed, exhausted. I’d caught some sleep spread across the  
front seats of the rickety ambulance, waking up periodically to  
respond to calls.

At Mohammad’s I did some badly overdue washing and went towards the  
roof with it. ‘Ewa, do you want to martyr yourself?’ said Sousou,  
Mohammd’s 19 year old sister, a bright sciences student unable to  
finish her studies due to her university – the Islamic University –  
having been bombed last week. Hanging out washing on the roof here is  
a potential act of suicide – there are stories of people having been  
shot dead on rooftops. Walking down the street to buy bread, also a  
potential act of suicide. Visiting family, going to the market,  
drinking tea in your own home – a potential act of suicide? In the end  
I do go up, with 9 year old plucky Afnan, who hands me pegs nervously  
as we scan the skies periodically, while the murderous sneer of  
Israeli surveillance drones leers above us.

Zomou

The call comes as soon as I get to Al Awda. It’s 11.40am. A strike in
Mahkema street, Zoumou, Eastern Jabaliya . The streets of Moaskar  
Jabaliya are fuller than I’ve seen them for weeks. Fruit and vegetable  
sellers with wooden carts full of clay clodded potatoes, tomatoes,  
cucumbers, aubergines, mountains of strawberries, bags of flour,  
plastic bottles of vegetable oil and rice, line the streets. The  
reason everyone’s here, exposed like this is because with the market  
being bombed, the streets have become the market.

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

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

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

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

Kamal Odwan's 'Mosque'

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

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

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

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

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

A house upon them

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

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

Bombing civilians

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

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

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

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

An empty dead-zone

I asked the paramedics, what happened when they went to collect bodies  
and the injured from the areas where street fighting is taking place,  
places like Tel Al Zater, Salahadeen Street, Atahtura, Azbet Abu Rubbu  
- closed to everyone and anyone but the Israeli Occupation Forces.  
During 1-4pm there is supposed to be a ceasefire and co-ordination  
between paramedics and the Israeli army, through the Red Cross. Of the  
three paramedics I asked, all of their replies were the same. ‘We saw  
none’. ‘It was like a ghost town’. Despite being finding bodies over  
the past week, including one baby which had been half eaten by dogs –  
photos, film and witnesses at Kamal Odwan confirm it – and bodies  
which had been run over by tanks, when they went yesterday, they found  
nobody, and came back to base empty handed. ‘I think the Israelis must  
have taken the bodies away, I think they must have taken them away by  
bulldozer and buried them’. The terrifying this is that there are  
still people trapped in their homes if their homes are still standing,  
without food, water, or electricity. Refugees at the Al Fakhoura  
school report not being able to recognise their areas, their streets  
after the heavy fighting and destruction of so many houses. When these  
areas are finally accessible to people, the full extent of the killing  
and destruction will at last be known.

Meanwhile, as the killing continues, the Ministry of Health ambulances  
in the north are becoming slowly paralysed. Four M.O.H ambulances  
based at Kamal Odwan have no fuel and have been grounded, two have  
just half a tank each. One in Beit Hanoun has also been immobilised. A  
senior source coordinating the rescue services who did not wish to be  
named, said, ‘We haven’t go the capacity now to respond. The Civil  
Defence and the Red Crescent will go out, we cannot, only in case of a  
major emergency. In case of another strike like the one at Fakhoura,  
the injured will have to be transported by donkey cart. People will  
die’. Petrol is available, just a short drive away in Salahadeen  
Street, although Israeli Occupation Forces control the area and won’t  
let any vehicle pass. To add to the M.O.H’s woes, the radios they’ve  
had since the beginning of the invasion have had no service – there’s  
been no radio contact between the base and ambulances and the Jawwal  
mobile network is also frequently down.

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

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.