Imagine being grateful for the chance to return to your demolished home and sift through the rubble, to try to retrieve personal belongings, ID cards and papers, still-useable clothes and pots… Imagine your house had been bulldozed, you’d been given 5 minutes to leave it, not been allowed to collect any of those cherished possessions,… Read More expanding illegal no-go zones leaves 100s homeless
Remarkably, the staircase in Yousef Shrater’s bombed and burned house is still intact, as are the 14 people that make up the 3 families who were living in the house. Shrater, a father of four, walks over broken cement blocks and tangles of support rods and up stairs laden with more chunks of rubble, Israeli… Read More Israeli soldiers leave hate & death graffiti in Palestinian house they occupied
Two of her boys worked to pull pieces of clothing, books, and anything reachable from under the toppled cupboard. Every item is sacred. She led me through her house, pointing out the many violations against their existence, every graffitied wall, each shattered window and glass and plate, slit flour bags –when the wheat is so… Read More ezbet abed rabbo area: remnants of houses and Israeli soldiers’ presence
*Israeli soldier’s trousers, left, shit-laden, in bathtub of occupied house, eastern Jabaliya. There are many stories. Each account, each murdered individual, each wounded person, each burned-out and broken house, each shattered window trashed kitchen strewn item of clothing bedroom turned upside down bullet and shelling hole in walls offensive Israeli army graffiti…is important. I start… Read More Abed Rabbo area: one family’s story
My friends and the journalists and cameramen at Ramattan are so good-natured and selfless that I forget many of them have lost their houses, or family members. Yousef is always impeccably-groomed, and somehow smiling, yet hasn’t had a working toilet since his home in the northwest was destroyed. “I can’t use the bathroom at home,”… Read More beneath the surface
link: IPS By Eva Bartlett *7 year old Ahmed Hassanin, shot in the head outside his home by Israeli soldiers from Gaza’s eastern border, January 22nd. On the 5th morning after Israel declared a ‘ceasefire’, Israeli gunboats began shelling, as they had on several mornings since halting the 22 day air and land bombardment of… Read More it’s a ceasefire…just not on the beach, not in your home: Israeli soldier shoots 7 year old boy in head, Israeli gunboat shelling injure 6, mostly children
On January 18, the first day that Israel stopped most of the bombing all over Gaza (navy shelling continues to this moment), after learning that my friend’s father was alive in eastern Jabaliya, I went on to Attatra, the northwest region, which had been cut off since Israeli troops invaded. As expected, the destruction was… Read More 1st views of Attattra, northwestern Gaza
By Eva Bartlett The streets leading from the seriously-damaged Wafa rehabilitation centre in Sheijaiyee were filled with black filth smelling of sewage. The hospital, attacked on January 12th with a chemical bomb that may well be white phosphorus and which set fire to the roof, and whose 4 different buildings were shelled intensely on January… Read More the white phosphorous bombed and machine-gunned Wafa rehabilitation hospital
**ambulance which Arafa Abd al Dayem was loading when he was shelled by an Israeli tank dart bomb, dying shortly after being shredded by the thousands of razor-sharp darts. The ambulance was unrecoverable until two days ago, when access finally became possible to the Attrata area where Arafa was murderded and where corpses lay unretrieved.… Read More a few short updates: continued Israeli shelling, F-16s and drones after the ceasefire
Today was the first day that medics and journalists were able to reach areas occupied by the invading Israeli troops. Palestinians by this point, by weeks ago, were desperate for any semblance of a normal life, though normality here is far from normality anywhere else. They were desperate to return to their homes, survey the… Read More waiting
In Gaza 