In Gaza

*Yahya abu Saif (20), missile victim.

*Maher Habashi (24), missile victim.

“They thought I was dead. I was covered in blood. They put me in the morgue fridge. I was in there for maybe 10 minutes. A neighbour came to say his good byes and saw that I was breathing. He took my pulse and discovered I was alive. I was transferred to an operating room and had surgery to remove the shrapnel from my abdomen and side.”

Maher Habashi was sleeping in his home in Shaff neighbourhood outside Gaza city when a tank shell hit the house. It was 1:15 am on 15 January. “I was with my uncle and a friend. We all ran outside after the tank shell.”

Two drone missiles followed minutes after, hitting the trio. The first hit two other people outside and injured Habashi in the torso and leg. The second was dropped as they continued to flee. This time it reached Habashi’s uncle and friend, killing them. post continues

“She was standing in the wheat field near her demolished home, about 800 m from Green Line border, when Israeli soldiers began shooting. The first two bullets hit the ground near her. The third hit her in the kneecap,” Wafa al Najar’s mother explained, sitting on an empty hospital bed next to her injured daughter.

We’d left Khoza’a after having been shot at by Israeli soldiers again -these shots, within one metre, the closest so far. The thought of the few desperate farmers who might try to go back on land worried me; I remembered Mohammed’s words about having no other choice, needing to risk it in order to provide for his 2 children and wife. post continues

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*Fara al Helo (1 year old) killed the day after her uncle, Mohammed al Helo (lower right), was killed by drone missiles

first published: Electronic Intifada

Amer al-Helo smiled wanly while saying he is broken inside. Twenty days after Israeli soldiers shot dead his 55-year-old father and his one-year-old daughter in front of him, also shooting his oldest daughter in the elbow and his brother in the shoulder, the pain of the 29-year-old had not diminished. Then again, he’d only just recovered the rotting corpse of his father six days earlier; his entire area of Gaza City’s Zeitoun neighborhood had been cut off from ambulances and emergency teams until Israel unilaterally declared an end to the extensive bombing of Gaza and pulled ground troops out of occupied areas on 18 January.  post continues

Jabaliya’s Rayan tent camp residents

In Jabliya’s Rayan emergency tent camp, 69 tents have been set up to serve a homeless population of 500 families, averaging from 5 to 12 people per family, whose homes were blown apart, burned, or razed to the ground by Israeli forces during the 3 weeks of attacks on Gaza. The tents, the barest of structures, are not sufficient against the heavy rains of the past days.

“The water came into our tents and flooded the floor. How are we supposed to live like this?” Abu Nimer, 52, asked. post continues

17 February

What caused the Israeli soldiers to shoot a deaf farmer today? Was he threatening? Was it because the group of farm labourers had successfully worked quickly to harvest their day’s wages? Was the sight of retreating, unarmed, clearly non-threatening civilians too tempting to resist?

Whatever the motivation, the result is another casualty of Israeli soldiers’ malevolence: a 20 year old deaf farmer, Mohammad al-Buraim, working the land to support his family of 16, may not walk easily again. The bullet which targeted his ankle penetrated straight through and landed in the tire of the truck he’d been pushing. post continues

*Abu Alaa, bringing food for his donkeys and camels

“I worked on farms in Israel for 15 years,” Abu Alaa, the owner of the land said.  “We had a good relationship, and the Israeli farmers loved my bread, Palestinian bread, and our baclawa (“baklava”) sweets. I had to stop working there when Israel closed our borders, stopped giving permits to Palestinians to work in Israel.”

Abu Alaa lives in Khan Younis and owns land in the newly-extended “Buffer Zone”, the strip of land along the Green Line which, from North to South, cuts into Palestinian land by a full 1 km now.  When the Buffer Zone was ‘only’ 300m, it was already 300 m too much land absorbed by the Israeli military occupation forces. post continues

*ambulance crushed by Israeli soldiers as the driver tried to reach critically-injured children just shot by Israeli soldiers

Violation after violation of international law, international human rights law, and of the Geneva Conventions, are being revealed and documented as Palestinians’ testimonies are taken of their aggressors and assassins, the Israeli soldiers and those authorities who commanded the slaughter of over 1,370 Palestinians in 3 weeks of incomprehensible bombing and terrorizing of the people of Gaza. Not only are testimonies being taken [more testimonies], but remnants of the illegal weapons and activities of the Israeli army in Gaza are being collected and documented for legal prosecution of the war criminals of Israel. [US lawyers report on Israeli crimes in Gaza] One of the more profound criminal acts little-discussed in the corporate media is Israel’s encaging of 1.5 million citizens while bombarding them, meaning that “No children, women, sick people or disabled people were allowed to leave. For the first time, the option of becoming a refugee has been withheld,” as highlighted by Richard Falk, the UN’s special rapporteur on human rights in the occupied Palestinian territories.

Nothing was ‘surgical’ about Israel’s strikes except the 100s of amputations that followed.

The sordid case of Khaled Abed Rabbo is among the numerous instances of clearly unarmed civilians –who by all accounts of survivors were not in an area of ‘crossfire’ or ‘clashes’ –being shot point-blank by invading Israeli soldiers. In this case 3 out of 4 of the civilians were children: Amal, a 2 year old girl and Souad, a 7 year old girl, both shot dead; and Samar, a 4 year old girl, now paralyzed from her multiple shots.  Abed Rabbo’s mother, also named Souad, was targeted, also at close range.  All were denied medical aid. post continues

In a region where cooking gas is either non-existent or exorbitantly-priced, where firewood is scarce and burnables becoming scarcer, where electricity cuts occur regularly, and where bread is a staple food, people strive to find practical solutions to the bread crisis.

During Israel’s 3 weeks of brutal attacks on Gaza’s civilians, the bread crisis was heightened by 16 hour blackouts in the cities, complete blackouts in the majority of the Strip, and depleted wheat stocks.  Those with flour handouts convoyed to the few places with electricity, including hospitals, to bake bread via a small, electric griddle.

While the attacks have ceased on the large scale (but continue daily with bombings on the Rafah tunnels, Israeli gunboats shelling at fishermen and residential areas along Gaza’s coast, sporadic tank shelling from Israel’s border, and still more drone missiles being dropped on civilian areas, as well as the on-going shooting at farmers and residents –in the Israeli-imposed (thus illegal), now 1 km wide (was already a 300m bite into Palestinian land along the length of the Green Line) ‘buffer zone’ –which has killed at least 3 farmers since 18 January when Israel proclaimed a cessation of the bombing of Gaza), the siege on Gaza continues in full force. A ravaged economy and health care system, and the denial to Palestinians in Gaza of every basic right –due to Israel’s western-backed strangle-hold on Gaza –meant that even before the onslaught of Israeli attacks Gaza was a politically-engineered humanitarian catastrophe. post continues

Ten hours after I had filmed 2 large missile craters near his home, Ayman Turban’s house was hit by two Apache missiles, he said.

I’d been there early in the morning, after a night shift with the Red Crescent.  It was 3 January, the first day of the land invasion, 8th day of Israel’s attacks on Gaza. Some friends had just fled their homes and I’d come to the area to see the newest F-16 craters they’d spoken of.

Like so many conical-rendered, or completely flattened, houses in the Ezbet Abed Rabbo area, Turban’s home had been symmetrically-walled and had housed 2 families, 17 people.  The family had stayed on in during the relentless, fearsome air-strikes, but a ground invasion was expected. With the experience of past Israeli army land invasions in mind, the men had left the house, feeling they were targets for interrogation, beating, abduction.  The women and children, in theory safe from these acts, were together taking refuge in a room on the west side of the house, ground floor.

After the Apache strikes and shelling from tanks, the family stayed huddled another two days inside, too afraid to leave.

“I heard the cries of people inside,” his neighbour said, “and knew that people had actually survived the bombing.  post continues