REPORT FROM GAZA, PALESTINE

Riding on fire and a third intifada

Ewa Jasieiwcz, Jabaliya and Beit Hanoun
Thursday January 8th 2008

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

An aerial curfew

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

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

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

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

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

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

Dead for buying bread

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Homes crushed

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

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

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

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

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

Forced out

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

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

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

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

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

The fabric of life

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

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

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

The global intifada

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ewa Jasiewicz is an experienced journalist, community and
union organizer, and solidarity worker. She is currently
Gaza Project Co-coordinator for the Free Gaza Movement.
http://www.FreeGaza.org