I woke up this morning hoping that my uncle Mohammad would finally get a chance to leave Tal al-Hawa and get his wife and kids to a safer place deeper into Gaza City. After two weeks of heavy bombardment and constant terror, he decided that he couldn’t keep his frightened wife and kids in the apartment any longer.

We had been trying to convince him to leave since Israel unleashed the might of its first-world army on the besieged refugee population of Gaza. Tal al-Hawa is the first neighborhood of Gaza City north of the former Netzarim settlement where Israeli tanks have taken up positions. Despite the obvious danger, and despite the flight of many of his neighbors, I think I understand why my uncle was so reluctant to leave. My other uncles had told him to flee to Khan Younis before the roads were blocked, but I knew he probably didn’t want to go back to the refugee camp. Like all his siblings, like me, he had been born in the Khan Younis refugee camp. He had lived there for almost four decades, all the time working hard to save up enough money to move out. A few years ago he finally did, buying the apartment in Tal al-Hawa, on the outskirts of Gaza City, outside the refugee camps. Israel had sent his father to the camp and forced him to grow up there; he wasn’t going to let Israel send him back there so easily.

But the nightly bombing, shelling, missile strikes and machine-gun fire were terrifying his children and sending his wife, Areej, to the brink of a mental and physical collapse. It was time to leave. He promised me last night that they would do so first thing in the morning.

But in the middle of the night, the tanks came, blocking everything, blocking morning, blocking their escape. I woke up and saw the news-an incursion deep into Tal al-Hawa. I pretended to hope that they had left, but I knew they were stuck. On TV, thick columns of smoke rose up all over Gaza City, mixed with the residual white smoke of white phosphorous munitions. Several residential and office buildings were on fire. 20 Palestinians had been killed overnight. I left for work. It was cold outside. I thought of how people in Gaza had been sleeping with their windows open (or shattered) during the coldest part of the year.
At work, the news was the same. Airstrikes all over Gaza City, and heavy clashes between Israeli forces and the resistance in Tal al-Hawa. I kept thinking I should call my uncle, but I didn’t want to. I didn’t want to hear the kids crying and my uncle pleading and the bombs going off around them. I didn’t want to hear him try to end the conversation because he had nothing to say, and tell me we’d talk later if he was still alive.

So I tried to distance myself from what was happening, if only for a few hours. It was tough. The rescue workers had found 15 bodies under the rubble after the night’s bombing runs. A building in Tal al-Hawa was surrounded by tanks, with people trapped inside. Was it my uncle’s? Could be. I had no idea. Everything was a possibility. Everything was a target.
Around 1PM, I went downstairs for lunch and passed the big TV’s playing Aljazeera in the lobby. The Shurouq Tower, the building housing most of Gaza’s press, had been hit by a missile. This was as blatant an attack against the press as possible. Two members of the Abu Dhabi channel’s news team were seriously wounded.

On TV, the live pictures still showed thick, black smoke billowing from the rooftops of some of the highest buildings in Gaza. I wasn’t sure if they had been set alight by white phosphorous or by missiles, but they were a potent symbol of the indescribable destruction visited upon Gaza City.

I decided to call my uncle. I called the house. It rang and rang and rang, but nobody picked up. I tried his mobile, and then his wife’s, but I wasn’t getting through. Maybe their phone batteries had run out, since they had had no power for a long time. Maybe the network was down due to the bombing. Maybe worse. Maybe. There were lots of maybes. But I could not help but think of the worst.

I called my uncle Jasim in Khan Younis. He told me he’d talked to Mohammad a couple of hours earlier on Areej’s. He’d said the tanks had overrun their part of the neighborhood and there was no way out. Since then, he hadn’t been able to get in touch with him. My mom called next, asking if I’d tried to call them. I told her I was having no luck getting through. She too had spoken to them a couple of hours earlier, also on Areej’s phone. I told her to keep trying; we all were.

I went to see a colleague whose sisters were married and lived in Gaza, in the Bureij refugee camp. They were okay-the tanks were at the edge of the camp, but they lived further in. Back at my desk I couldn’t focus on work at all. I kept dialing and redialing Areej’s number, sometimes hitting the redial button as soon as I got the message telling me the phone wasn’t available. It was fruitless. I knew it was silly to expect a result by calling continuously, but they were in the middle of a battlefield, where the invading army had absolutely no qualms about bombing homes and apartments. I noticed I was holding the phone to my ear now, without even dialing.

I had a meeting with someone from our PR department. Before we started, he called a colleague in Gaza, in Deir al-Balah, in the middle of the Strip. When we asked how he was, the man laughed. We asked him why he was laughing. He said things were so bad, he had to laugh or he wouldn’t be able to take it.
For the rest of the day, I kept calling my uncle and Areej’s phones, sometimes trying the house phone too. Nothing was working. I tried calling other people I knew in Gaza City; my aunt’s husband, Tarek, my cousin Mosab, Abdelrahman. Nothing. I went home with another co-worker from Gaza. His aunts live in the Rimal district of Gaza City. His dad had called him sounding grave and told him to meet him in town. It might have had nothing to do with Gaza, but these days nobody can be sure. Every phone call is a cause for worry.

I got home, and as I walked through the door I saw the TV was still broadcasting a live feed from Gaza City. The sun was setting, and against the red-gold backdrop the thick black smoke continued to billow out of the city’s towers. My mom told me she had just gotten through to Tarek. He had spoken to my uncle Mohammad that morning, who had told him that they were leaving their apartment on the fifth floor to hide on the lower floors. That was why nobody was picking up the house phone. I called my uncles Jasim and Mahmoud in Khan Younis and told them that. They were still trying to call Areej’s mobile, but to no avail.
The al-Quds hospital and the Red Crescent hospital in Tal al-Hawa had both been bombed by the Israelis, the former housing 500 patients and staff. A fire had broken out in the building, trapping many of those inside. They were openly bombing the press. They were openly bombing hospitals. They were openly committing war crimes. They are openly defying international law. They have turned the UN into the laughing stock of international politics and humanitarian law.

UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon continued to embarrass himself, visiting Israel today. He described the death toll as having reached an intolerable point. But he will continue to tolerate it, because Ki-moon is either hopelessly ignorant about the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, continuously equating the oppressed with the oppressor, or is disgracefully complacent about the human rights violations and war crimes perpetrated against Palestinians in general, and the people of Gaza in particular.
As he met with the conglomerate of war criminals that make up Israel’s leadership, the Israeli army attacked yet another UN target, bombing the headquarters of UNRWA in Gaza City. There are 700 people hiding in the compound, which also houses emergency fuel tanks and food aid. Some of the food was set on fire. Ki-moon clai
med that he was outraged and demanded an explanation. He got two, neither true. First Israel’s Prime Minister, Ehud Olmert, said that Israeli forces were targeting militants in the compound. His war minister, Ehud Barak, said the bombing was a mistake, possibly breaking the record for the time between Israel changing lies to cover up one of its crimes.

Saeb Erekat, as ever doing his level best to make himself look like a fool, was on TV today angrily demanding that Hamas and the other factions fighting Israel’s massacre in Gaza accept the Egyptian ceasefire proposal. As I’ve said before, the Egyptian proposal is a joke. It calls for a temporary ceasefire and a humanitarian corridor, and the end to weapons smuggling. It does not call for Israel to pull out of Gaza immediately. It does not call for the border crossings to be reopened permanently. It basically demands that the Palestinians accept life under siege, with no chance for improvement. The Palestinian Authority is desperate for the proposal to be accepted because it maintains the crippling status quo, or at least the status quo before December 27th. They still hope to regain control of Gaza. They portray this as a purely humanitarian problem and not the political battle that it is. They follow the Zionist party line of ‘Hamas doesn’t care about Palestinian lives because it is still fighting despite the hundreds that have been killed.’

Today Mahmoud Abbas expressed hope that an international donor conference could be held to ‘rebuild Gaza’. Gaza doesn’t need donors. It needs freedom, and it needs security from Israeli barbarism. But this is the tactic Abbas uses to keep the West Bank pacified. He is forever soliciting donations from abroad to fund small-time projects that add virtually nothing to the economy and go nowhere towards achieving freedom and sustainability while Israel continues to appropriate and partition what remains of Palestinians land.

Back to Gaza. We did not stop dialing. Areej. My uncle. My uncle, Areej. The number you are trying to dial is not available. Please try again later. We tried later. We tried a bit later, and a lot later. No luck at all.

I called Khan Younis again. The jets had gone back to bombing down there too, albeit at a much slower rate than in Gaza City. I asked them if the local radio had reported anything about Tal al-Hawa. My uncle Mahmoud told me there was talk of a retreat, but it hadn’t materialized. He said he’d been calling around, trying to find the phone numbers of the apartments on the lower floors, but that had come to nothing. In Tal al-Hawa, they were completely cut off from us and from the world.
The fires were still raging across Gaza City, and the smoke was plainly visible even against the night sky. Everything burning was a residential or civilian building, apartment block, a home. Tens of homes, tens of deaths. By 8PM, the number of Palestinian killed today had exceeded fifty.

And then, 21 days into this rampage, Israel managed to kill a second Hamas leader. Said Siyam was killed, along with his son, brother and three others at the home of his brother by an airstrike. Siyam was the Interior Minister in Hamas’ government, and in charge of internal security. It is baffling as to why he would risk his own safety, even though he was a clear target.
Siyam used to be considered one of the more moderate voices within Hamas’ leadership, but took a tough stance against Fatah’s security services when they refused to carry out his orders as Interior Minister. He formed the now defunct Executive Force in a bid to establish law and order, and became a hated figure for the PA. Sadly, I am almost certain that there will be Palestinians celebrating his death.

I doubt his death will have a great impact on Hamas as a movement. The organization is structured so that no one death, or even several deaths, can destroy the leadership. But he was a popular figure amongst Hamas’ supporters and his death will have dealt a blow to morale. To me though, Siyam is now one of over one thousand Palestinians brutally murdered in the last three weeks. I was still worried about my uncle. He was still not picking up.

I called Khan Younis again. My uncle Jasim told me the news was sad, but he wasn’t any different to the hundreds of others that have been killed. He repeated what Mahmoud had told me before, that the radio was reporting a retreat in Tal al-Hawa, but nothing was clear. I called Mahmoud. He told me he’d still been trying to find a number to reach them, but the haphazard construction in Gaza meant that many buildings had no names, including the one my uncle Mohammad is living in. Without a name, it was hard to find out what was happening to them, whether the buildings surrounded by tanks included theirs, whether they had been shelled, whether they were alive, whether we’d ever see them again.

It is now 8:35AM. The last time anybody spoke to my uncle or his family in Tal al-Hawa was almost exactly 21 hours ago. Since then, we have not heard a word. We do know that Israeli tanks and bulldozers had overrun the area. We know there were continuous, violent clashes between the Israeli army and the lightly armed resistance. We know, according to eyewitnesses and news sources, that apartment buildings have been shelled on the lower floors. We do know they have been terrorized and terrified. We do know that Areej was unable to stand from the fear when the bombs were falling further away and the tanks weren’t on their doorstep. We do know they were planning on leaving for a slightly safer area. We don’t know if they are alive, wounded, or worse.

There is a lot that can be said about this, but I prefer to say little. Israel’s continued policy of state terror towards the Palestinians will not bring it peace or security. It won’t cause the Palestinians to pack up and leave their homeland. It won’t diminish support for those who fight it. Until it recognizes the basic human rights of Palestinians, we will continue to fight Israel and its oppressive policies. Whether my uncle Mohammad, his wife Areej, their kids Nada, Adham, Haya, Dina and Yazeed are still alive or not will not change those facts. Israel has killed tens of thousands of Palestinians since its founding, and their deaths have not changed those facts either. It can kill many more, and the fight for human rights and freedom will continue. We haven’t forgotten the nakba, because we still live it. To live as a Palestinian is to remember. And when this massacre is over and the suffering continues, we will continue to remember.

Remember Gaza.

Related posts:

1. Gaza: We don’t know if we’ll see the morning
2. Gaza: 24 hours into the ground invasion
3. Gaza: Death is more common than sleep
4. Gaza: What is there to say?
5. Gaza: Land of a thousand martyrs