What’s new in Gaza today? I found myself asking that question repeatedly as the day went on. I wasn’t paying as much close attention to the news anymore. It was always on of course, on the radio at work, on TV at home, online wherever I was. But it didn’t mean anything. The story was the same as the day before, and the day before that. Thirty civilians killed. Fifty civilians killed. Eighty. One hundred. So what? Almost 900 have now died in the last 16 days. What does that mean? It means nothing. Today the Israeli leadership announced it was close to achieving its goals in Gaza. We all know that is not true, because there aren’t any goals. The fight won’t stop. They said so themselves, and now they say they are close to achieving those goals. They are going around in circles, there is nothing, and the Palestinians keep dying.

What new targets have been hit? Sure, Israeli warplanes and warships and war tanks again battered the impoverished prison where they had sent hundreds of thousands of refugees and their descendants to live (live is not the word-they never intended to allow them to ‘live’). But what is there left to hit? The hundreds of airstrikes that were part of the first phase of this war destroyed just about every part of Gaza’s civil infrastructure. Ministries and mosques. University buildings and water wells. Cell phone towers and sports clubs. Schools. Hundreds upon hundreds of homes, with hundreds upon hundreds of lives inside. All destroyed.

So back to the question: what new targets have been hit? Homes. That is all I see, homes and the people who once called those homes home. There is not a single inch in Gaza that is safe. They’ve bombed the police stations, around the schools. The kids don’t go to school anymore. They’ve bombed the empty schools. They’ve bombed the schools that have families sheltering in them. They’ve bombed those passing out urgent food aid, to stop the people from starving to death. And they’ve bombed those trying to save the ones death couldn’t wait for. They’ve bombed those praying to God to protect them. And they’ve bombed the cemeteries, where the ones God didn’t protect are buried.

This isn’t a war against Hamas. This is an escalation of a 60 year old war against a people. Hamas is a pretext. There has always been a pretext. When your goal is to create a religiously pure state in a land that you stole, you need to make up a pretext, because your goal is inhuman.

In the seven years of the first intifada, between 1987 and 1994, some 800 Palestinians were killed by Israeli forces. It was a heavily trying time in our history; the Israeli army was ordered to brutally break the bones of unarmed protesters. We thought it was the pinnacle of barbarism. During the so called peace process years, from 1994 until late 2000, a similar number of Palestinians were killed. The outbreak of the second intifada saw Palestinians killed in their hundreds. Between 2000 and 2003, more than 3,000 Palestinians were killed. More than 1,000 Israelis were killed during this time too, paying the unnecessary price for their state’s refusal to recognize the human rights of those it had displaced.

And now we come to Gaza in 2009. Almost 1,000 Palestinians killed in two weeks. I remember reading Israeli estimates, more than a year ago (Israel’s leaders openly admit that the massacre has been planned many, many months in advance), of how many Palestinian civilians would be killed when the army went in to Gaza. The numbers would usually predict that it would take 800, 900 Palestinian deaths for the Israeli army to invade Gaza (which it definitely has yet to do). I used to think that even Israel would balk at such a huge number. It seemed impossibly large. Today, however, 800, 900 is just a figure running across the ticker at the bottom of the news channels. And not even all the news channels.

Sometimes I want to write about the Geneva Conventions and how Israel has made an absolute mockery of them in Gaza. Sometimes I want to point out that Israel is a rogue state, in violation of more UN resolutions than any other country. Sometimes I want to point out that for years, the Palestinians have said they would stop lobbing home-made rockets over Gaza’s prison walls if only the border crossings would be opened, that the people be allowed to live. But it really doesn’t matter anymore. Sometimes I pity those who try to make those arguments now. They don’t mean anything.

I called my uncle Mohammad in Gaza City, earlier than usual. It was just before 11PM. He sounded drowsy. That was a bit of a relief. Tal al-Hawa had been the scene of intense bombardment during the day; the tanks had tried to move forward from Netzarim but had met tough, determined resistance. So they bombed everywhere. Everywhere. I’d known that their neighborhood was under heavy bombardment all day, but I didn’t want to call them. What would I say? I would have heard the bombs over the phone as the exploded and destroyed, just a couple hundred yards away. What would I say to that? So when I called him and he came on the line sounding drowsy, it was a relief. It meant the bombing had calmed a bit, enough for them to try and get some sleep before the next rohttp://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=6358737und began.

He told me they had been up since 2AM, because that is when the bombs and artillery and missile attacks had intensified. The kids had been put to sleep an hour ago. His wife Areej was sleeping with the baby, Yazeed. The youngest girl, Dina, had fallen sick. She had caught a cold because the freezing night had come through the ever-open windows. He had spent a few hours walking around during the day, looking for an open pharmacy. He found one, almost out of supplies. But it had the medicine he needed.

Dina had a cold. But on TV I’d seen Jamilah. She didn’t have her legs anymore. And Luay didn’t have his eyes. His eyes. The shrapnel had shredded his face. He didn’t know he was blind yet. And he didn’t know that the two other boys who had been with him, just outside their house, had died. No pharmacy in the world had the medicine that brought one’s eyes back. Nor one’s friends.

I saw these scenes on TV. My uncle told me he had visited al-Shifa and seen the hundreds of gruesome, intentional injuries for himself. He had friends and relatives that worked there. He told me they couldn’t believe the injuries they were seeing. Limbs were burned right through to the bone. X-rays couldn’t detect microscopic internal injuries, but within minutes the victims would be dead. Nobody is sure what the weapons are that are causing these injuries. They must be illegal. But I’m not going to talk about that. Ethnic cleansing is illegal. So is occupation. So the methods used to maintain them must also be illegal. Fix the cause, and there won’t be a hideous effect.

He told me an overwhelmed doctor had received a patient suffering serious internal bleeding. He inserted a tube in the victim to drain the blood. Then he inserted the other end of the tube into an artery. The lack of supplies, of blood units, of medicine, of gauze, of anesthesia, of electricity, of materials, of space, of rest, of order, of humanity was resulting in this. I say this because I don’t know what to call it. Insanity seems too tame.

The bombs began going off. I could hear them nearby over the phone. They weren’t as loud or as sharp as the F-16 missiles, but I heard Areej waking up, groaning. He told her to go back to sleep, it was just a shell. We tried to keep our conversation going, but the shells were intent on interrupting our talk, and probably a life somewhere. I told him the Israelis were saying they were close to achieving their nonexistent goals. He told me Israel was slaughtering the people of Gaza, but it was Egypt and Mahmoud Abbas that were holding them hostage over their future. I told him the world was with them, a hundred thousand had demonstrated in front of the Israeli embassy in London yesterday, and in Ge
rmany, and Spain, and France and…he cut me off. He told me it was nice to know, but on the ground it didn’t mean a thing. They were dying. Even those that were alive were dying, because death could be in the very next breath.

More shells exploded nearby. Areej woke up and the baby started crying. The building was shaking. He told me we’d talk tomorrow. There was nothing to say.

I called Mosab. He had finally managed to charge his phone somewhere. He told me they had been living in the Shati’ beach refugee camp for a few days. His grandfather had married twice, and his surviving wife lived abroad, so they had broken into her home in the camp. There were no windows there; they had been blown out when a neighboring home had been bombed.

I asked him what happened to their home, why they had left. He told me two nights ago his mother and sisters had decided that they wanted to be with him and his brother and father, no matter the danger, and had gone back to the house just north of Gaza City. But that day the tanks had moved forward. They left. Mosab wasn’t home at the time. His parents called him, begging him to join them. They knew his friends, his neighbors, the men, they would stay behind and that he would stay with them. But they kept begging him not to go back. His dad kept calling him, crying, imploring him to leave.

They had gotten to the house in the Shati’ camp but he was trapped in an area about 2 kilometers away. Night was falling, and nobody walked Gaza’s streets after dark. He could’ve stayed at his friends’ house but his parents knew that if he didn’t follow them to the camp that night, he would go back home the next day. So they kept begging him to come. He crouched, crawled and ran through the shadows, creeping against the walls and in the twisted alleys of Gaza, trying to remain invisible to the helicopters and drones and snipers. He made it, safely. But he was bitter. He knew if the tanks moved any further, many of his friends, the men he had grown up with, would be dead. He still wanted to go back. I told him to use his mind, it wasn’t the time to be emotional. He told me he knew it would be wrong to go back, but he felt like he was betraying his boys. If the tanks move tonight, he said, I’m going to be at al-Shifa all day tomorrow. I told him he couldn’t do anything there, he knew he couldn’t. I just want to be there if any of them are injured, he told me.

One family left the neighborhood later than the others. A man, his pregnant wife, his parents-in-law. Mosab knew them well. For whatever reason, they had been late to leave. The man had a car, a Subaru Mosab said, and they had all piled into it. The car had barely moved forward 20 meters when the first missile struck. It hit the wall next to the car, so the man climbed out and tried to help his family escape. They had no chance. The second missile didn’t miss.

He asked me, as he had done the last time we talked, if I thought that things would remain unbearable once the massacre ended. I told him if Hamas, despite the fight it has put up, caves in to Egypt, the PA and Israel’s demands and doesn’t get a guarantee that the Rafah crossing would be operational, things would remain bleak. Some sort of mechanism, I said, even if it gives Mahmoud Abbas some superficial control (after all, the PA was perfectly content to have superficial control over the border crossings during the ‘peace process’ years). I told him the Israelis and their allies still don’t seem to understand that the Palestinians won’t stop fighting for their rights, because they have no other option, especially in Gaza. He agreed. Even if Israel kills every fighter in Gaza, he said, and re-invades the entire Strip, people would still fight. You can’t stop that. Its not bravado, its human nature.

He told me that nobody was really thinking about that there though. Everybody was concerned with when the next missile would hit, which family would be next to be wiped out, which friend would be killed. He told me that if a house is bombed but doesn’t collapse, the people will bulldoze it. I asked him why. He told me the reason was that the Israelis will bomb again and again until the target is turned into rubble. So they bulldoze it, to save the neighboring houses any more damage.

I asked him if the buzzing I could hear so clearly was an Israeli drone. He told me it was. The buzzing must be maddening. He told me it was like sitting in a dumpster with flies around you all day long. Except flies don’t fire missiles at people. Drones do.

The north, he told me, was an open graveyard. He had heard that bodies were lying in the streets, some eaten by wild dogs. He doubted their home would survive. Even though it seems like Israel is preparing to end its operations within the coming days (I say that with absolutely no optimism that this will indeed be the case), I’m sure, and he is sure, that Israel won’t leave without a final phase of destruction and death that will dwarf what we have seen so far. But he isn’t quite so sure that the house they are staying now will survive either. The Shati’ camp is notoriously cramped, crowded and right on the beach. A single attack by the warships will leave large tracts of the camp destroyed.

His battery was dying, so I told him we’d talk tomorrow. He told me he would try to go out tomorrow and find a place to charge it. I hope he won’t be going back home.

I was about to dial my uncles in Khan Younis in the south but decided, for the first time, against it. The area had seen heavy bombardment all night and all day. There had been extremely violent clashes between the occupiers and the resistance to the east of the town, and the eastern village of Khuza’a had been rained with white phosphorous. I just didn’t feel like listening anymore. I heard the shells falling all around my uncle Mohammad and his family in Tal al-Hawa. I heard Mosab telling me about how he is almost certain he will lose his friends in the next few days. I heard him tell me of his harrowing trip to the house in the camp-a refugee becoming a refugee again before he is ever allowed to go home. I heard Yazeed crying when a bomb exploded. I heard terror. I heard defiance. Always defiance. It always seems to stand out amongst the terror. But the terror is there. It is total.

I didn’t want to hear about the bombs on Khan Younis, how little Lama or Hosam or Hanan had been wetting themselves or shaking from the bombardment. I didn’t want to hear Mahmoud or Jasim tell me that somebody they know had his house burned down by white phosphorous in Khuza’a, or that they had suffered burns right through to the bone. I didn’t want to hear the voice of men knowing that they might never see another sunrise. Maybe I’m a coward. Maybe. But it doesn’t matter, because there would have been nothing to say anyway.

It’s ironic how most Israelis and their blind cheerleaders believe that this attempted annihilation of Gaza will increase their security. It’s just another aspect of Zionism that is incompatible with reality; the idea that killing and destroying and expelling and occupying and imprisoning a nation will pacify them. There is a belief amongst Zionists that the Palestinians must be taught a lesson, that we are too backwards to understand that we cannot win. But the lesson that must be learned here is that people, by their very nature, do not capitulate to oppression. They will always fight back. We don’t fight because we enjoy it. We fight because 60 years ago our basic rights were stripped from us by foreign occupiers who refuse, till now, to grant them back. In Gaza today, Israel is seeing that it has failed, and will always fail, to crush the struggle for justice out of us.

Remember Gaza.

Related posts:

1. Gaza: the fight to keep the flame of liberty alight
2. Gaza: raising us up from the terror
3. Gaza’s New Year doesn’t break from the last
4. Gaza: the horrors of a cruel war
5. Gaza: 24 hours into the ground invasion