For the tenth night in a row, Israeli warplanes pounded the densely populated refugee camps of the Gaza Strip. By daybreak, 18 Palestinian civilians had been killed, all in their homes as they cowered with their families. The Israeli artillery and navy were also involved last night. The targets were, without fail, civilian institutions and homes.

As usual, the first thing we do here when we wake up is turn on the TV to get the latest out of Gaza. The radio stations here have all stopped regular programming and music, devoting their airtime to nonstop coverage and nationalistic songs. It’s horrible to hear 18 people were killed overnight and be relieved the number was not higher. But it would get higher. In fact today would be the bloodiest day since Israel began this massacre and slaughtered 250 Palestinians that Saturday, 10 days back.

It is worth noting, if only in passing, that Israel continues its occupation and oppression in the West Bank. Settlements expand daily, checkpoints are set up continuously, land is confiscated hourly, and Palestinians are arrested arbitrarily. Amongst those rounded up last night was the father of a friend, Abdallah. Abdallah’s dad has spent almost half his life in Israeli jails, tried by military courts, without ever being presented with the evidence against him. He was last released from jail a year ago, having spent five years in administrative detention (no charges, no trial, just indefinite imprisonment).

And where Israel’s occupation forces don’t want to get their bloody hands dirty, Mahmoud Abbas’ security forces take up the job for them. I mentioned the demonstration carried out by Birzeit University students yesterday against the massacre in Gaza, which was brutally put down by the Palestinian Authority. The brother of a colleague, who comes from a family of hardcore Fatah supporters, was amongst the protesters. He saw a member of the security forces push a girl to the ground and assault a young mother. Livid at the perpetration of such brutality against people protesting the massacre of their own, he hit back at the officer, before being engulfed by other members of the security services and arrested. His family connections within Fatah ensured his safe release, but this episode demonstrates just how low the PA has sunk. It has reached a point where it is fighting all Palestinians, regardless of political affiliation.

Back in Gaza, Israeli warplanes and artillery batteries continued to target civilian homes. A day after wiping out the Samouna family in their house, Israeli jets leveled a four story home belonging to the Dayyah family in the Zatoun neighborhood. Thirteen members of the family were killed. Where else do families get routinely wiped out by sophisticated warplanes deliberately targeting them in their homes?

I would lie if I said the extermination of an entire family killed me. It has happened before. It happened yesterday, to the Samouna and Abu Eisha families. It happened last March, to the Abu Meiteg family. It happened last year, to the Othaimeen family. It has happened, at the hands of Zionist barbarians, countless times over the past sixty years.

I called my uncle Mohammad in Gaza City in the afternoon, but his daughter Nada picked up. It’s strange talking to Nada or her brother Adham or their cousin Mustafa. All are preteens, yet sound so much older. Their manner of speaking lacks the playfulness and innocence of their age. They sound too serious, too calm. I asked her if she was okay, if she was scared, what she was doing. She replied that she was scared, but she was just hanging about the house. I asked her if she could hear any shelling or air strikes. She said she could, but it was a bit far. I asked her if she had managed to sleep well. She told me she had gotten used to the noise now, but an explosion had woken her up at 6 in the morning and she hadn’t been able to sleep since.

I asked to talk to her dad. I didn’t bother telling her it would get better soon. I guess I was hoping that if she had any innocence left, I wouldn’t want to take it away by lying to her. Her dad came on the phone, and has been the case over the past few days, I had trouble recognizing his voice at first. He just sounds too tired, too mentally and physically and emotionally strained, too exhausted. I apologized first for not calling him before I went to sleep last night as I’d promised. I told him I had been up writing until 3AM, and figured he would have been asleep. He told me he hadn’t been.

I asked how things were now. He told me they were a bit calmer in their area, but he could hear distant shelling and explosions in the north (in Jabalya and Beit Hanoun and Beit Lahiya) and the east (in Zatoun). I told him the BBC was reporting, based on Israeli army statements, that the occupiers had entered the outskirts of Gaza City. He rubbished the claims. They haven’t been able to move an inch, he said. They’re still having trouble, three days into the ground invasion, moving into the outskirts of Zatoun and Jabal al-Kashef in Jabalya. I asked him if he thought Zatoun would hold out much longer. He said he didn’t know, but he prayed it would. After Zatoun, the next neighborhood is Tal al-Hawa, where he lives.

I asked him if any major target had been hit since we last talked, but he reiterated what I had known; all the attacks had been targeting civilian homes. I told him that after the resistance had claimed it had killed three occupying soldiers last night, the Israeli army had admitted to the three fatalities, but said they had died due to friendly fire. We agreed that was most probably a lie, since the resistance had announced the number of dead and wounded soldiers before Israel admitted to them.

I talked to my uncle Jasim in Khan Younis next. He told me, for the second day in a row, Khan Younis had been effectively calm while Gaza City and the north burned. He was standing outside in the street again, getting some sun. I asked him if there really were no air strikes. He said the helicopters were still in the sky, and there was some artillery shelling in the east, but they were targeting open fields there, seemingly softening up the terrain and trying to blow up booby traps before moving in. I told him Israel had just admitted that another of its soldiers had been killed by ‘friendly fire’. He laughed, bitterly. I asked him, as I did yesterday, if he feared the quiet in Khan Younis was just the calm before the storm. He told me it may well be. There was a real fear that the horrors being endured in Gaza City, Zatoun, Beit Hanoun, Beit Lahiya and Jabalya would soon move to Khan Younis.

Barely half an hour after that conversation, the news came in over the radio: Israeli aircraft were bombarding Khan Younis, and tanks were moving at the border.

As Gaza was being bombarded from all sides, a large number of foreign doctors gathered at the Rafah crossing, waiting for Egypt to allow them to go through to aid the overburdened doctors inside the beleaguered Strip. It seems like they’re going to be waiting for a long time.

As the workday drew to a close, I called Areej. I was hoping she would be feeling better today, after the attack on the neighboring residential building had left her close to hysterics yesterday. She told me, flat out, that she was feeling worse. The apartment wasn’t empty when it was hit, like she had thought yesterday. Someone had been killed in there, and a little girl had lost her leg. She told me she kept seeing her kids being killed in front of her. I told her to calm down, that things would improve sooner or later. She told me she just didn’t feel that she could protect her kids. I asked if my uncle was around, but he had gone downstairs to see their neighbor, the doctor. She told me she hated when he left, that she begged him to stay, but he had taken to avoiding her eyes when he left the house. I knew what it was. I heard the stress and helplessness in his voice every time I talked t
o him. I knew that, just as his wife felt helpless to protect their kids, he felt the same way, and that he could not stand being around his kids while failing at the most basic tenant of parenthood: protecting your children.

She told me she understood and she still couldn’t stand it. She said she was trying to keep some semblance of normality going in the home, but it was proving impossible. The apartment had become a mess, and she could barely keep up with the baby, Yazeed, or the younger girls, Haya,5, and Dina, 4, who were always fighting. She told me she just needed to feel safe. I begged her, again, to go down to their neighbors apartment, but she cut me off. She told me that the neighbors that had fled before returned today, because the homes they had taken shelter in were being shelled by the Israeli forces.

I had to stay late after work for a meeting, and one of the topics discussed was the state of telecommunications in Gaza. If fuel didn’t reach the telecoms company’s generators within two days, all telecommunications would be down in Gaza. It was as we were discussing this that the most horrific news of the day came in: Israel had bombed one of the UNRWA schools that had been turned into shelters for terrified families, and killed forty civilians.

As a friend put it, I guess mosques just weren’t enough. I don’t know if its worth talking about red lines anymore. In that past 11 days, Israel has destroyed dozens of mosques, and dozens of homes. It has used chemical weapons (white phosphorous) in the most densely populated region on earth. It had attacked schools and killed schoolchildren. But the UNRWA schools had been announced as places of shelter for families. It was well known who was in there. The UN has said that it gave Israel the GPS coordinates for the locations of the schools. And yet Israel attacked the Shokara School in Jabalya, where hundreds of civilians were hiding.

My boss lamented that in the 1970′s, a Palestinian schoolgirl was shot to death by an Israeli soldier in Nablus. The act was so heinous and cowardly that the story of Linah al-Nabilseye became enshrined in Palestinian national lore when Marcel Khalife sang a tribute to her fallen spirit. These days, he went on, we have 50 Linahs a day, and nobody cares.

Amongst those killed were the relatives of an acquaintance, whose cousin had lost five of her daughters last week when an Israeli air strike had buried them under the rubble of their own home. Today he lost three cousins, in the UNRWA school assault. He said that his cousins received a call last night from the army telling them to evacuate the house as they planned to hit the neighboring house. They, along with the neighbors, fled to the UNRWA school for shelter yesterday. And were murdered by the Israeli air force today.

It is a condemnation of the international community’s unwillingness to enforce its own human rights charters and reign in Israel’s barbarism that schools run by the United Nations are being bombed and scores killed inside. Deliberately bombing schools is a despicable, outrageous crime, and a damning indictment of Israel’s morality. Within hours, Israel’s spokespeople in the White House had brushed aside the slaughter of 40 human beings in a clearly known safe zone by claiming, without any proof whatsoever, that Hamas had used victims as human shields. Israeli spokespeople jumped on the bandwagon, claiming mortars had been fired from the school.

The UN officials in the area, however, have said that there was no such attack launched from the school. Some would question the assertion that Israel’s would bomb a civilian installation if no fighters were there. But Israel has proved throughout its history, and particularly the last 11 days, that attacking civilians is a tactic it condones. As Dr Mads Gilbert, one of only two foreign doctors in al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza City said, amongst the hundreds of casualties that have come through the hospital’s doors, only one was a fighter.

And here I want to make a comment regarding the UN’s count of Palestinian civilians murdered in this rampage. In Gaza, the definition of civilian seems to have changed to mean only women and children. Of the 660+ killed in the last eleven days, about a third have been women and children. But this definition has legitimized the murder of all men in the Gaza Strip by not counting them as civilians. If we take into account the 120 policemen killed on the first day of this massacre, then the percentage of ‘civilians’ killed exceeds 50%-without including all the other male noncombatants.

In all, 135 Palestinian civilians-men, women, parents, children, friends, colleagues and neighbors-were murdered by Israel today. The numbers are astronomical, yet, tragically, they are becoming acceptable. 440 Palestinians were wounded by Israeli arms today. More than 660 have been murdered these past ten days. 3,000 have been wounded, many maimed for life.

Turkish Prime Minister Tyep Erdogan gave a rousing speech in the Turkish parliament today in which he forcibly denounced Israel for breaking the ceasefire, blockading a refugee population, and trapping them inside a prison camp. He called Israel’s actions today unforgivable, and that his sympathies lie firmly with the people of Gaza. A few hours later, Venezuela became the first state to expel the Israeli ambassador for its crimes in Gaza.

As the UN Security Council convened in New York to discuss Gaza, I called my family there again. Areej picked up in Gaza City. She was extremely tired. My uncle had decided to sleep over at his neighbors, while other neighbors had come with heir kids to stay with Areej. She told me she was the only one awake; even the other mother had fallen asleep. I asked her to describe how things had been since we last talked, but she sounded confused. She told me things had been quiet all day. I reminded her of the attacks on the homes and schools. She told me the schools had been attacked on the first day. I explained that two schools had been hit today, with 40 people dying inside one. She paused a bit, before saying that she remembered now. The exhaustion and worry were really affecting her now. She told me things had been calm for a few hours, but that in earlier she had seen a huge cloud of white smoke descend from the sky. I told her that was probably white phosphorous, a chemical weapon, and to make sure they stayed away from it as much as possible. She told me it made a lot of smoke, it covered everything from sight.

I told Areej how exhausted she sounded. She told me she was really scared again. I asked her if there were planes in the sky, but she said there was only a drone. She was frightened by the calm. It is unnatural, she said. They’re planning something. Its very scary.

I asked her to try and take advantage of the calm and get some sleep, and that I’d call her tomorrow, before my mom got on the line to try and calm her down more.

I called Khan Younis, but my uncle Jasim was asleep. His wife picked up. I asked her if things had gotten more heated in the area and she told me they had been bombing all afternoon, but things were also eerily calm in the south. I asked about the kids; she told me her youngest, Lama, starts crying when she hears any explosion. The power line in front of the house had fallen earlier, and the sound had let Lama to tell everyone that she had just witnessed a missile attack. We laughed, again bitterly. If only missile attacks were that benign. I called my uncle Mahmoud again. He had heard Erdogan’s speech and the news from Caracas, and it had given him a morale boost. He told me the Israeli jets had bombed the road from Khan Younis to Rafah, effectively isolating the towns from each other, and had been bombing the Qarara area to the east. The navy had been bombing the sites of the former settlements of Gush Katif on the beach. I asked him what was there for them to bomb. The area included several new developments, including a university campus and media city, and
these new developments were the targets.

He told me he hoped the calm was because the UN Security Council would pass a resolution calling for a ceasefire. I told him to stop being so optimistic, the international community would keep buying Israel time until it realizes that it can’t achieve its goals. Only then would a ceasefire be adopted. Ehud Olmert had already stated that if such a resolution were passed today, Israel would underline its rogue state status and ignore the will of the international community.

Israel is no stranger to ignoring the will of the world. In fact, no other state flouts as many UN resolutions as Israel. The Zionist state portrays itself as the shining beacon of Western liberal democracy, when it is in fact the vanguard of Western colonialism and racism. Many Palestinians maintain that international law is the basis on which to solve the Palestinian-Israeli conflict-that getting Israel to abide by the treaties and conventions it is a signatory to would be the just platform onto which a lasting peace could be built.

I’m not sure so many of us believe in international law anymore. In the face of a blatant massacre, the United Nations and its member states have delayed and hampered the passing of any resolution, giving time for Israel to slaughter hundreds more. Those with the military might can stomp all over international law and face absolutely no consequence. It has become clearer than ever that Palestinians, and oppressed people everywhere, are given only two choices in this world: capitulate, or die. Gaza has chosen neither. It has chosen to fight with whatever means it can. If death is the outcome, it will be the manifestation of one of the most famous lines ever spoken in the struggle for freedom:

Give me liberty, or give me death.

Remember Gaza

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3. Gaza: 24 hours into the ground invasion
4. Gaza: raising us up from the terror
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