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Onward,
Alexander, Jeffrey, Becky and Deva
November
9, 2006
Nightmare in Beit Hanoun
How
Gaza Offends Us All
By JENNIFER LOEWENSTEIN
An opened jaw with yellowed teeth gaped
out of its bloodied shroud. The rest of the head parts were wrapped
in a plastic bag placed atop the jaw and nostrils, as if to be
close to the place to which it once belonged. The bag was red
from the pieces that were stuffed inside it. Below the jaw was
a human neck slit open midway down: a fleshy, wet wound smiling
pink and oozing out from the browned skin around it, the neck
that was still linked to the body below it. Above him, in the
upper freezer of the morgue lay a dead woman, her red hennaed
hair visible for the first time to strange men around her. More
red plastic wrapped around an otherwise absent chin. She was
dead for demonstrating outside a mosque in Beit Hanoun, northern
Gaza where more than 60 men sheltered during the artillery onslaught
by Israeli tanks and cannons.
Most of the others still had
their faces intact. They lay on their silver morgue trays stiffly
as unthawed frozen food. One man had a green Hamas band tied
around his head; he looked like a gentle shepherd from some forgotten,
pastoral age. Another's white eyes were partially opened, his
face looking out in horror as if he'd died seeing it coming.
Then a muddy, grizzled blob on the bottom left tray, black curls
tangled and damped into its rounded head and blessedly shut eyes.
A closer look revealed a child, a boy of 4: Majed, out playing
his important childhood games when death came in like thunder
and rolled him up in a million speckles of black mud. The other
dead had already been taken away.
Muslim burials take place quickly,
a god-send to the doctors, nurses and undertakers who, at the
hospitals and morgues, desperately need the space for next batch
of casualties who would sleep on the same sheets, same steel-framed
beds, in the same humid heat, in the same close, crowded, grief-stricken
rooms, often on the floors, with the same tired, unpaid attendants
doing their rounds without the proper supplies to help them if
they were still alive. And some would die on the operating table
like the young man gone now to the Kamal Adwan hospital morgue
when his wounds became too much for his body to bear. Two young
girls preceded him earlier the same day. Blessed are they who
leave this human wasteland washed and shrouded for a quiet, earthy
grave.
Today the hospitals will be
filled beyond capacity again when the 18 civilian dead from a
pre-dawn attack on Beit Hanoun -- women, men and children blasted
out of their sleep into human chunks -- roll out of the ambulances
and into the freezers of Shifa or Kamal Adwan hospitals in the
northern Gaza Strip. How dare they sleep in their houses at night
when the tanks are barking out commands.
Do you believe this was an
accident? that an international investigation will ever take
place? Like after Jenin? Like after Dan Halutz and his 2000 pound
bomb which was dropped on an apartment building in Gaza City
killing 15 people, 9 of them women and children? Like after the
siege of Jabalya in the fall of 2004? Like after Operation Rainbow
in Rafah? Like after Huda Ghalia's family was blasted into nothingness
during an outing on a Gaza beach? Will US eyes, glued to their
glaucousy TV screens to find out which marketed candidate won
the corporate-managed midterm elections, ever know that that
another massacre of Palestinians took place?
At Shifa hospital, Gaza's central
hospital, where Dr. Juma' Saqa and his staff cope with the daily
shortages of supplies from kidney dialysis machines to fans and
clean linens; where cancer medications are unavailable to the
increasing rate of cancer patients and elective surgeries, such
as for hernias or tonsils, are a thing of the past. This is where
doctors and nurses witness how the water that Gazans drink causes
innumerable ailments, rotting teeth, anemia in children and kidney
dysfunction because of its brackish, poisonous quality. This
is where children lie half naked in their beds, white tape across
their noses holding tubes to their faces so that they may eat
or breathe-- like Ahmad aged 3, also from Beit Hanoun, who took
a bullet in the right side of his belly that exited on the left.
His mother stands over him passively, grateful. Ahmad, at least,
is going to live. But for what?
Each night in Gaza City that
first week in November, explosions sounded in the northeastern
corner of Gaza: a succession of bullets, booms, bombs, canon
fire. On the first night of the onslaught we could still see
lights from Beit Hanoun 10 miles from us blinking and twinkling
as if nothing were really happening; it was all a dreamófireworks,
a distant celebration perhaps. But then, by the second night
only a swath of blacked out space lay in the place of Beit Hanoun,
electricity-less and water-less as the booms continued unabated
for an hour or more and the hum of the pilot-less drones circled
round again and again above us, above Beit Hanoun, above Gaza,
automated people-monitors taking stock of the activity below.
Nobody from Beit Hanoun could leave by day to get to work without
announcing to the tanks and the drones that he was prepared to
sacrifice his life for a semblance of normalcy. All men between
the ages of 16-35 were rounded up onto trucks and hauled away
for "questioning". What will happen to them and their
families? Will anyone follow up? Will they add to the 10,000
Palestinian prisoners in Israeli prisons, left to rot while their
wives and children, sisters, brothers, parents go on struggling
to survive?
There lies Gaza stretched 28
miles long in a tumbledown graying, decaying heap, yawning, tired,
wretched, full of garbage. Tape gauze over your nose to avoid
the smell of sewage and burning trash. Try not to notice the
metal-shuttered shop fronts, the empty stores, the proliferation
of horse- and donkey-carts clopping along the streets for lack
of fuel, the ribs of the tired beasts jutting out from their
bellies as boys whip them along to keep going. The joke is the
cerulean blue sky illuminating the rubbish tip, the palm trees
and purple flowers beaming in the November sun ñ natural
non-sequiturs, like the box of fresh chocolates offered to the
journalists filming the woman's wounded son as she yells out
her frustrations and horror at the Americans and the Israelis
who are killing her family. Why? She asks. Why, why, why?
Ask Mark Regev, Israel's eager,
hideously sincere government spokesperson. On CNN's international
news he tells us in earnest that this is Israeli self-defense.
The Qassam fire into Sderot and Ashkelon must stop. Israelis
have the right to defend themselves. The "operation"
in Beit Hanoun will not stop until the Qassams stop. Each word
drivels out of his mouth into a bubble of obscenity for everyone
watching from the vantage point of Gaza. Verbal pornography,
sado-masochistic jargon from the prince of Hasbara leaks onto
the dust like poisonous bile bought, paid for and sought after
by the lords of power and their occupying machinery.
The shoddy, home-made Qassams
hiss like cornered alley cats when they are fired into the skies.
Stupid and bestial, they zing across the border like crazed beasts
not knowing where they are going. They'll dash forever like this
until the occupation of Palestine ends. The Gazans know this,
Hamas knows it, Fatah knows it, the PFLP knows it; In Israel,
Labor and Likkud know it, Meretz knows it, Yisrael Beiteinu knows
it, Shas knows it; Peretz, Olmert and Lieberman know it, Sharon
knew it, the Israeli people know it, official America know this,
so 40 years after 1967 and 58 years after 1948, why is the occupation
not yet over?
Because Israel does not want
it to end. Because Israel wants the land and the resources without
the people. Because you have to eviscerate a culture in order
to maintain total control over it. Because the United States
says that's just fine with us, you serve our purpose well. You
help make the war on terror convenient. You help fit Iraq into
the scheme. You'll help us with Iran as well. Who the hell cares
about a million and a half poverty-stricken Gazans and their
dust, their sand, their stinking, crumbling heap of a disaster
area homeland?
What a terrible shame it is
that Gazans have not yet attained the status of Human in the
eyes of the Western powers, for the resistance there will continue
to be an enigma until this changes. For now, however, the slaughter
will continue unabated.
Leaving Gaza 6:30am Saturday
morning, November 4th 2006, I hear a loud explosion. My cab driver
picks me up and we drive down the main street in Gaza City toward
Erez. Suddenly, unexpectedly, there is a smoldering mass of wreckage
in front of me, a car surrounded by boys picking at its still-hot
exterior. Inside are four blackened, seared human shapes, crispy
at the touch, faceless from the burns, charcoal, shreds of steaming
cloth, a smell of barbecued human flesh, sirens in the distance.
Burnt and vaporized metal looks like what you see in a science
fiction movie. Burnt humans look like singed paper mache monsters
whose pieces fall off at the hint of a breeze.
Gaza is sorry for these indiscretions,
this poor taste, this unseemly topic of conversation. You are
right to express your indignation. How Dare Gaza Speak of These
Things!? But it can no longer contain its secrets even with the
blockade of visitors to its vile shores; its voice is shrill
even when sublimated through the layers of media deceit. The
smoke rises higher in the skies each time. The prison is imploding
and the resistance will never end.
Jennifer Loewenstein is a Visiting Research Fellow at Oxford
University's Refugee Studies Centre. She has lived and worked
in Gaza City, Beirut and Jerusalem and has traveled extensively
throughout the Middle East, where she has worked as a free-lance
journalist and a human rights activist. She can be reached at:
amadea311@earthlink.net
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