Israel’s “Days of Penitence” Drown Gaza In a Sea Of Blood

By Mohammed Omer

Washington Report, December 2004, pages 10-12

Special Report

http://www.wrmea.com/archives/December_2004/0412010.html

JABALYA CAMP, Northern Gaza, Oct. 10, 2004—It smells unbelievably bad here. To walk down any street—if you dare to—you skirt, or sometimes unavoidably walk through, pools of blood. There are shreds of human flesh—some of them unrecognizable as human remains—all over, on rooftops, plastered to broken windows, on the street. The stench of rotting blood mixes with the more acrid odor of flesh burned to black char by the rockets fired by the Israeli army’s American-made Apache helicopters.

The sky is full of black smoke, some from the rocket explosions, but even more, it sometimes seems, from the endless fires of tires and other debris that people keep stoking. The smoke confuses the heat-seeking unmanned drone surveillance planes, so setting fires in any relatively open area may draw fire and let a bomb explode somewhat harmlessly.

All this smoke mixed with plaster and cement dust is a blessing and a curse. The stench of burning flesh and rotting blood masks to some extent the smell of raw sewage from broken sewer pipes and the tens of thousands of bodies unwashed for over a week now. Water to drink is a rare and precious commodity here—baths and showers have become impossible luxuries.

Your eyes inevitably tear up from all the smoke—but then, that protects you a tiny bit from some of the more harrowing sights: recognizable body parts—a piece of a leg, an obvious part of a torso, and fingers—more scattered, individual, recognizable fingers than anyone should ever have to see. Volunteer crews are gathering these human fragments and bringing them to Jabalya’s two hospitals, but the ambulances cannot possibly keep up with the flood of newly dead and injured.

Funeral processions are everywhere, as are “houses of mourning”—the tents bereaved families set up in which to receive their families and friends. In fact, however, every house here—whether relatively intact or partly or wholly destroyed by the IDF tanks and bulldozers—is a house of mourning.

And nothing protects you from the sounds—the tears and laments of the mothers and fathers, husbands, wives and children of the dead, the screams of the injured, the wail of ambulance sirens, sniper fire, the thud of tank shells and the too-frequent explosions as another Apache shell explodes.

Time is distorted here—hours feel like days, days like weeks or months. This is Jabalya Refugee Camp in the northern Gaza Strip, one of the most crowded places on earth, where 106,000 men, women and children, the overwhelming majority of them unarmed civilians, have been under an all-out attack for over a week now.

It is only when I sit down to write up my notes made here in the last few days that the cruelty of the IDF name for this attack—”Days of Penitence”—hits me. They are not just slaughtering unarmed civilians, but language itself. “Penitence,” as I understand it, is voluntary remorse for wrongdoing. Is this massacre supposed to induce remorse in its victims? Are they supposed to mourn the deaths of four or five Israeli soldiers and two Israeli children, and accept the death of more than 60 Palestinian civilians as some kind of justice? To those of us trapped in Jabalya, it seems like Days of Revenge. It is unquestionably collective punishment, and illegal under the Geneva Conventions.

Perhaps we should not be surprised. Israel’s Prime Minister Ariel Sharon has announced this attack will last “as long as necessary,” that is, until there is “no further danger” from the Palestinian resistance’s homemade rockets. Sharon, of course, engineered the massacres of Sabra and Shatila over 20 years ago. Now, he is doing much the same, but with vastly improved weaponry.

Of course, the militant factions exist, and have been striking here and there during this last week, but they are vastly outnumbered, not to mention out-gunned, by the Israelis. Hamas, on its side, has distributed leaflets in Gaza City vowing to continue the rocket attacks on the illegal Israeli settlements in Gaza and any Israeli towns and cities their homemade ordnance can reach. International protests have been muted, and stymied by United States support for Israel. The lone, feeble voice from the U.S. State Department urged Israel to keep its “response” “proportional”—after, of course, the obligatory mantra, “Israel has a right to defend itself.” A strongly worded resolution condemning the attack brought before the U.N. at the beginning of the week was defeated by the U.S. veto.

There is no refuge anywhere in Jabalya. The hospitals are chaotic, supplies are short and all medical personnel have been working around the clock for days now.

I saw Abu Nidal, the father of 14-year-old Nidal Al Madhuwn, struggle to maintain his composure as he asked the exhausted doctors and ambulance drivers, “Was my son killed? Has he been killed?” (In fact, the boy was dead on arrival.) The majority of the dead and injured have been teens and children, obvious non-combatants.

I interviewed Dr. Mahmoud Al Asali, the director of Kamal Adwan Hospital, who told me he was forced to assume the Israeli army has been deliberately targeting civilians. Most of those injured by gunfire, he said, were wounded in the upper parts of their bodies, indicating the Israeli sharpshooters must have orders to shoot to kill.

Palestinian doctors have removed many flechettes from the dead and injured, indicating the IDF are using illegal fragmentation bombs. These release razor-sharp flechettes as they explode. Dr. Al Asali says these illegal fragmentation devices greatly increase the number of deaths and the number and severity of injuries. The IDF has refused to comment on this.

The hospital staffs and ambulance crews are so overextended that they are using volunteers for the gruesome task of collecting, sorting and attempting to match scattered human remains to return as much as possible to bereaved families. One of these medical workers, Ahmed Abu Saal, 26, from Kamal Adwan Hospital, told me, “One enormous difficulty we face is that these powerful bombs can scatter the parts of a single victim over a wide area. It is quite possible parts of one person could end up in Al Awda hospital in the east of the camp, while other parts of the same victim end up with us here on the western side of the camp.”

Shreds of clothing sometimes can help with the matching.

The Israeli army has frequently shot at the medical teams and at journalists. So far, two ambulance drivers have been injured, and a cameraman from Ramattan News Agency has been hurt. Of course, the ambulance crews and press all wear identifying gear.

Israel has closed all borders into Gaza and has severely restricted all movement within the Gaza Strip. There are three major “zones” separated by sealed military checkpoints, but recent days have seen numerous new checkpoints, roads closed by cement block and sand obstructions. People cannot move between cities, not even ambulances bringing patients to hospitals. Moreover, the main Israel-Gaza crossing is closed, even to international NGOs, humanitarian relief groups, and foreign journalists.

Intense as the military attack has been, it is certainly not the only danger to the people here. Many families now have been without food and water for days. In Tel Al Zatar, the eastern part of Jabalya, I interviewed Umm Ramzi, an elderly lady who spoke to me through the gaping hole a tank shell had left in her house. “We have been appealing to the Red Cross, to save our lives and the lives of our children,” she said, “but nobody has responded.”

Although they are well aware that the civilians need help, most of the NGO workers and relief organizations have assumed—logically enough—that they cannot get through the Israeli military lines that completely surround Jabalya. I managed to reach Simon Schorno, spokesman for the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), by phone. “I’m on my way to Gaza now,” he told me. “We have been talking to the IDF to get permission to bring food and water, but we were not able to get an OK for complete food distribution.”

Concerning the absence of the Red Cross in the past few days, when many families were in urgent need, Mr. Schorno said, “I feel terrible. We are trying to do our best to get food and water inside, but the damaged streets also delay us from reaching the people.”

A number of eyewitnesses among the camp residents told me the Israeli army has commandeered several high buildings as sniper posts and basically shoots anything that moves. One of the most recent victims was Islam Dueidar, 14, who took a chance during an apparent lull in firing to buy bread for her mother. However, she was shot in the head by an Israeli sniper.

In the southern part of the Gaza Strip, the Israeli army has increased the number of tanks and bulldozers in all parts of Khan Younis and Rafah. There has been shelling every night, with many injured and killed.

Looking back on it now, I can say without reservation that the attack on Jabalya was far worse than last May’s so-called “Operation Rainbow,” which killed 40 in my hometown of Rafah and prompted an international outcry. Now, the silence from America, in particular, seems to condone turning the Gaza Strip into a killing field. Sharon picked his moment well, when America was preoccupied with its presidential campaign and its invasion of Iraq, to decimate the civilian population of Gaza. I was in the middle of the worst of Operation Rainbow and called it hell, but I was wrong. In Gaza, hell has more depths than Dante ever dreamed of, and in Jabalya the people suffered a far worse hell. How many more hells must people here endure before the world speaks out?

Mohammed Omer lives in Rafah, Gaza, where he maintains the Web site <http://www.rafahtoday.org>.