Beit Hanoon, Part 2

Inside Gaza
By Ewa Jasiewicz

WHEN I got there, the gates of Beit Hanoun hospital were shut, with
teenage men hanging off them. The mass of people striving to get inside
was a sign that there had been an attack. Inside the gates, the hospital
was full. Parents, wives, cousins, emotionally frayed and overwhelmed,
were leaning over injured loved ones.

The Israeli Apache helicopter had attacked at 3.15pm. Witnesses said that
two missiles had been fired into the street in Hay al Amel, east Beit
Hanoun, close to the border with Israel. With rumours of an imminent
invasion this empty scrubland is rapidly becoming a no-man's land which
people cross quickly, fearing attack by Israeli jets.

But the narrow, busy streets of the Boura area rarely escape the
intensifying airstrikes.

Eyewitnesses said children had been playing and waiting in the streets
there for their parents to finish praying at the nearby mosque. "We could
see it so clearly, it was so close, we looked up and everyone ran. Those
that couldn't were soon flat on the ground," said Khalil Abu Naseer, who
was lucky to have escaped the incoming missile.

"Look at this, take it," insisted men in the street, handing me pieces of
the missile the size of a fist, all with jagged edges.

"All the windows were blown out, our doors were blown in, there was glass
everywhere," explained a neighbour. It was these lumps of missile, rock
and flying glass that smashed into the legs, arms, stomachs, heads and
backs of 16 people, two of them children, who had been brought to Beit
Hanoun Hospital on Thursday afternoon.

Fadi Chabat, 24, was working in his shop, a small tin shack that was a
community hub selling sweets, cigarettes and chewing gum. When the missile
exploded, he suffered multiple injuries. He died on Friday morning in
Kamal Adwahn Hospital in Jabaliya. As women attended the grieving room at
Fadi Chabat's home yesterday to pay their respects, Israeli F16 fighter
jets tore through the skies overhead and blasted four more bombs into the
empty areas on the border. Two elderly women in traditional embroidered
red and black dresses carrying small black plastic shopping bags moved as
quickly as they could; others disappeared behind the walls of their homes,
into courtyards and off the streets.

At Fadi's house the grief was still fresh. Nearly all the women were
crying, a collective outpouring of grief and raw pain with free-flowing
tears.

"He prayed five times a day, he was a good Muslim, he wasn't part of any
group, not Fatah, not Hamas, not one, none of them, he was a good student,
and he was different," said one of his sisters. She took me to see Fadi's
younger brother, who had been wounded in the same airstrike. Omar, eight,
was sitting on his own in a darkened bedroom on a foam mattress with gauze
on his back covering his wounds.

"He witnessed everything, he saw it all," the sisters explained. "He kept
saying, I saw the missile, I saw it, Fadi's been hit by a missile'."

The memory sets Omar off into more tears, his sisters, mother and aunts
breaking down along with him.
Nine-year-old Ismaeel, who had been on the street with his sisters Leema,
four, and Haya, 12, had been taking out rubbish when they were struck by
the missiles.

Ismaeel had been brought into the hospital still breathing and doctors at
first though he would pull through, but in the end he died of internal
injuries.

Within the past six days in Beit Hanoun alone, according to hospital
records seven people have been killed, among them three children and a
mother of ten other youngsters. Another 75 people have been injured,
including 29 children and 17 women.

As well as the fatalities and wounded, hundreds of homes have had their
windows blown out and been damaged by flying debris and shrapnel. Two
homes have been totally destroyed. Nearby the premises of two
organisations have been reduced to rubble. One of them, the Sons of the
City Charity, associated with Hamas, was blasted with two Apache-fired
missiles, gutting a neighbouring apartment in the process and breaking
windows at Beit Hanoun Hospital. The Cultural Development Association and
the offices of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, were
levelled by bombs dropped from F16 jets.

It is hard to imagine what the Israeli pilots of these aircraft see from
so far up in the sky. Do they see people walking; standing around and
talking in the street; kids with sticks chasing each other in play? Or are
the figures digitised, micro-people, perhaps just blips on a screen?

Whatever is seen from the air, the victims are often ordinary people. Last
Thursday night saw volunteers from the Palestinian Red Crescent Society in
Beit Hanoun take to the streets in an effort to save lives. Like all
emergency medical staff in Gaza, they risk death working in the maelstrom
of every Israeli invasion, during curfews and night fighting.

In one of the ambulances during an evening of total darkness caused by
nightly power cuts, I meet Yusri, a veteran of more than 14 years of
Israeli incursions into the Beit Hanoun district of Gaza. Moustachioed,
energetic, and gregarious, Yusri is in his 40s and a local hero. Seen by
people within the community as a man who rarely sleeps, he is a front-line
paramedic who zooms through Gaza's streets to reach casualties, ambulance
horn blaring as he shouts through a loudhailer for onlookers and the dazed
to get out of the way.

"Where's the strike?" Yusri asks locals, as we pick our way through a
gutted charred charity office and the house of the Tarahan family. Their
home, on the buffer zone, has been reduced to a concrete sandwich. There
are six casualties, but miraculously none of them are serious.

Beit Hanoun Hospital is a simple, 48-bed local facility with no intensive
care unit, decrepit metal stretchers and rickety beds. I drink tea in a
simple office with a garrulous crowd of ear, nose and throat specialists,
surgeons and paediatricians. The talk is all about politics: how the plan
for Gaza is to merge it with Egypt; how Israel doesn't want to liquidate
Hamas as it serves their goal of a divided Palestine to have a weak Hamas
alienated from the West Bank.

The chat is interrupted by lulls of intent listening as news crackles
through on Sawt Al Shab ("The Voice of the People"), Gaza's grassroots
news station. Almost everyone here is tuned in. It is listened to by taxi
drivers, families in their homes huddled around wood stoves or under
blankets and groups of men on street corners crouched beside transistor
radio sets.

It feeds live news on the latest resistance attacks, interspersed with
political speeches from various leaders, and fighter music - thoaty, deep
male voices united in buoyant battle songs about standing up, reclaiming
al-Quds (Jerusalem) avenging fresh martyrs, and staying steadfast.

News is fed through on operations by armed wings of every political group
active in Gaza; the Qasam (Hamas), the Abu Ali Mustapha Martyrs Brigade
(PFLP), the Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigade (which is affiliated with Fatah) and
Saraya al-Quds (Islamic Jihad). One thing is widely recognised - the
attack on Gaza has brought all armed resistance groups together. However,
everybody adds wryly that "once this is all over, they'll all break apart
again".

One of the surgeons asks me about whether I'm scared, and whether I really
think I have protection as a foreigner here. I talk in detail about
Israel's responsibility to protect emergency services; to cease fire; to
facilitate movement;, to respect the Geneva Conventions, including
protection of civilians and injured combatants. The surgeon talking to me
is an intelligent man, highly respected in the community, in his late 40s.
He takes his time, explaining to me in detail that all the evidence from
everything Gazans have experienced points to Israel operating above the
law - that there is no protection, that these laws, these conventions, do
not seem to apply to Israel, nor does it abide by them, and that I should
be afraid, very afraid, because Gazans are afraid.

He recounts a story from the November 2006 invasion which saw more than 60
people killed, one entire family in one day alone. About 100 tanks invaded
Beit Hanoun, with one blocking each entrance for six days. He remembers
how the Red Cross brought water and food and took away the refuse. All
co-ordination was cut off with the Palestinian Authority. The same will
happen this time, he insists. He remembers too how one ambulance driver,
Yusri, a maverick, a hero, loved by all the staff and community, faced
down the tanks to evacuate the injured. Yusri, the surgeon says, just
drove up to the tank and started shouting through his loudhailer, telling
them to move for the love of God because we had a casualty, then just
swerved round them and made off.

Yusri has carried the injured and dead in every invasion in the past 14
years. He shows me a leg injury sustained when a tank rammed into his
ambulance. The event was caught on camera by journalists, and a case
brought against the Israel Occupation Forces, but they ruled the army had
acted appropriately in self defence.

"Look in the back of the ambulance here, how many people do you think can
fit in here? I was carrying 10 corpses at a time after the invasion, there
was a man cut in two here in the back, it was horrific. But you carry on.
I want to serve my country," he says.

During a prolonged power cut in that six-day invasion there was no
electricity to power a ventilator, and doctors took turns hand pumping
oxygen to keep one casualty alive for four hours before they could be
transferred. Roads were bulldozed, ambulances were banned from moving,
dead people lay in their homes for days, and when permission was finally
given for the corpses' collection, medics had to carry them on stretchers
along the main street.

Today in Gaza everyone is terrified that such events are now repeating
themselves, only worse. Gazans now feel collectively abandoned. The past
week's massacres, indiscriminate attacks and overflowing hospitals, and
the fact that anyone can be hit at any time in any place, has left people
utterly terrorised. No-one dares think of what might become of them in
these difficult and unpredictable days. As they say in Gaza, "Bein Allah"
- "It's up to God".

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Ewa Jasiewicz is a journalist and activist. She is currently the
co-ordinator for the Free Gaza movement and one of the only international
journalists on the ground in Gaza.
http://www.FreeGaza.org