I’ve had this open for two hours now, trying to write and finish earlier than usual so that I can get some real sleep tonight. But the words weren’t coming out. The constant, continuous and very real fear that every conversation with my family in Gaza might be the last, the hard-hitting anxiety I feel every time I hear of an air strike on Gaza City or Khan Younis, the dismay I feel at the continued justifications of mass murder has left me mentally and physically exhausted.

But I just got off the phone with my uncle in Gaza City, and I realized that I have yet to experience real exhaustion. If all those fears and worries are hypothetical for me, for him they are very real. Every time he sees his kids, he knows it might be the last. Every time he hears a missile screaming towards a target, he knows it might be him. Every time an Israeli war plane, or tank, or warship, or artillery battery fires, he knows.

We woke up today and, as ever, turned on the TV for any news out of Gaza. There was no real news on the fight between the resistance and the Israeli occupiers on the eastern outskirts of Gaza City and northern Gaza. But throughout the night, Israeli missiles had been landing in the center of crowded Palestinian neighborhoods, killing 18 civilians by 10AM. Amongst the targets: a health center adjacent to the Shifa hospital.

As the day went on, the news seemed to be repeating itself, the only variation the area were the civilians were being killed. The strikes were being targeted at civilian homes, with several families completely wiped out. The Samouna family in the Zatoun neighborhood suffered horrific losses, when the home that dozens of the clan had crowded into was hit by four missiles: grandparents, two uncles, a wife and 4 children were murdered in cold blood. A surviving grandfather held the limp bodies of some of his grandchildren, chests and heads gouged by shrapnel, and spoke through the cameras in Hebrew to the man who had ordered their murders, Ehud Barak.

A pregnant woman and her young child were killed by shrapnel wounds when a missile tore through their home. Another family, a mother and children, was wiped out in the Tufah neighborhood. Seven members of the Abu Eisha family in Jabalya, parents and their give children, were killed when an Israeli missile destroyed their home and their lives. And on and on and on. The majority of these strikes were deep inside Gaza City, i.e. far from the areas where Palestinians fighters were resisting Israeli ground troops.

Throughout the night, Israeli forces were using white phosphorous bombs, illegal under the Geneva Conventions. It seems timid to speak of such conventions now, when every red line has been crossed by the Israeli army in its rampage against Palestinian civilians. The people of Gaza have been demonized and dehumanized to a point where the war crimes committed against them are acceptable, even acceptable. Too few fully comprehend that the people in Gaza are, well, people. They have names and lives and families and jobs, hopes and dreams and goals, and they are suffering through one of the cruelest wars waged in recent years.

Getting a mobile line through to Gaza City to check on its residents is now virtually impossible. I tried calling Abdelrahman and Mosab all day but to no avail. Gaza City is completely cut off from the southern Gaza Strip by the tanks at the site of the former Netzarim settlement. But those on the ground say the Israeli’s have not set up any type of camp in the area, that the troops have not left the tanks and that there has not been a column of Israeli infantry crossing over.

The deliberate shelling of homes continued across central and northern Gaza: Al-Bureij refugee camp, Al-Shati refugee camp, Zatoun, Jabalya, Tufah, Mighraqa, Nuseirat refugee camp, Beit Hanoun, Beit Lahya, Al-Rimal, Tal al-Hawa, al-Sodaniya,Shujaya. All these heavily populated neighborhoods were pounded by the Israeli air force and navy throughout the day until the number of civilian deaths exceeded 80 today alone.

Over 50 Palestinians today alone, 550 over the last 10 days. The numbers are out of this world. Had a fraction of those killed been Israeli, the international community would have forced through a ceasefire last week. But, as has been demonstrated quite clearly by this massacre, Palestinian life is not held in the same esteem.

Luckily, there are millions around the world who identify with the Palestinian struggle and roundly condemn Zionist oppression and murder. Protests have been ongoing for the second week in a row across the world, but in the West Bank Mahmoud Abbas’ Palestinian Collaborationist Authority continued to repress any sympathy with our brethren in Gaza, violently breaking up a student demonstration at Birzeit University.

At around the same time, French President Nicolas Sarkozy stood next to the quisling Abbas in Ramallah and put the blame for the Israeli massacre in Gaza squarely on the shoulders of Hamas.

We called Gaza City just after sundown. My uncle Mohammad’s wife, Areej, was seemingly on the verge of nervous breakdown. Things had calmed down for a couple hours before sunset, but their hopes for some respite were shattered when Israeli artillery from across the border slammed into the residential building next door. She wanted to leave, all she could say was that she wanted to get out. But there is nowhere for them to go. She was fearful, rightly so, that they would be next. Out of the fifteen families living in their apartment building, only three remained. I begged her to leave and go downstairs to stay with one of the remaining neighbors, but she didn’t feel that it would make any difference. If the building was hit, they were all likely to be hurt or worse, no matter which apartment they hid in. She told me she wanted to get her kids out and just leave. I asked her where she wanted to go, and she said she knows there isn’t anywhere safer, but she just feels like she can’t accept staying where she is, with her kids in direct danger.

The reality is, every kid in Gaza is in direct danger. The air strikes on homes continued, parents and their children dying together.

I talked to Khan Younis next. They have almost total calm for two days now. There are still aircraft in the sky, but they have ‘only’ carried out two or three raids since the ground invasion began. My uncle Jasim tells me that he has been keeping in touch with my uncle Mohammad and others in and around Gaza City, and they seem to be in a different level of Israeli-created hell. I asked him if people in Khan Younis were worried that the relative quiet there was just the calm before the storm. He said it was a definite possibility, but Israel’s goal seems to be isolating Gaza City and destroying as much as possible in and around it. Again, the aim seems to be to punish the people of Gaza for supporting any resistance to their oppression. Yet Palestinian rockets, which had only targeted Sderot and the outskirts of Askalan before this massacre began, are now landing more than 50 kilometers outside Gaza. The military capabilities of the factions in Gaza seems to have barely been affected by this war, which leads to serious questions as to what Israel’s real goals are.

At around 9PM, Israeli artillery began shelling Gaza at a rate described by those living there as unprecedented. The shells were landing all over the eastern neighborhoods of Shujaya and Zatoun, while Israel’s F-16 jets were carrying low flyovers over civilian homes and bombing around the north and in Gaza City.

As I was watching a live feed from Gaza City on al-Quds TV, low-flying F-16s cut off the reporter, before 10 different explosions rocked the city. The sound of the aircraft was terrifying, their jet engines screaming above the heads of the coweri
ng refugee population. And the explosions were massive, reminding me of the explosions heard when the F-16s had attacked the Islamic University and left me shaking all the way in Ramallah.

I called my uncle Mohammad again. I thought I had woken him, because he sounded so disorientated, but when I asked him if that was the case he asked me, ‘What sleep? We don’t get any sleep.’

He told me the Saraya compound had been attacked. Again. The compound has been attacked many times over the last week, even though it is empty and destroyed. It proves how much they’ve failed, he said. They keep attacking the same destroyed places over and over again. Otherwise they’re attacking people in their homes. I asked him if the explosions had woken the kids. He told me the kids were probably awake, but Dina had been screaming until he calmed her down.

I asked him if he knew what was happening in the east, why there was such a heavy barrage over there. He said they were making absolutely no progress in Zatoun or Jabalya. For two whole days, they’ve been trying to enter Zatoun and have been held off, and they have been trying to take the Jabal al-Kashef hilltop just inside the border on the outskirts of Jabalya, but have gone nowhere. Local reports were saying paratroopers had landed just outside Jabalya and were pinned down by Palestinian gunfire. It seemed to be that the artillery fire was being using to cover an Israeli extraction force trying to get the paratroopers out. At the same time, news channels were reporting that an Israeli force had entered a home in the Zatoun neighborhood and suffered casualties when it was blown up by Palestinian fighters.

No matter. The strength and determination of the resistance has been, admittedly, surprising, but I suspect Israeli forces will eventually take Zatoun and Jabal al-Kashef. Those areas are the sites of real battles, albeit battles waged between lightly equipped Palestinians resisting the world’s fifth strongest military. But that is not where the casualties are falling. They are falling inside their homes, as Israel attacks cowering families with impunity. It is not attacking ‘Hamas operatives’. These are men, women, husbands and wives, brothers and sisters and cousins, just like my Uncle Mohammad and Areej and Nada and Adham and Haya and Dina and Yazeed. And they are being bombed and killed from the air, the ground and the sea. They have been, for years now, trapped in the world’s largest prison. They are the children and grandchildren of those forced out of the homes and lands where they were living in peace and safety for generations. They are being massacred because they have not forgotten, have not capitulated and because their resistance to this injustice grows ever stronger.

That is why the people of Palestine, and especially the people of Gaza, continue to fight. And that is why no matter how strong Israel is militarily, no matter how many it kills, how many it terrorizes, and how many it scars, it will never have peace until it ends its oppression of Palestinian rights.

Remember Gaza.

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2. Gaza: 24 hours into the ground invasion
3. Gaza’s New Year doesn’t break from the last
4. Gaza: raising us up from the terror
5. Gaza: the slaughter of a people