Recently updated on August 6th, 2024 at 12:53 am
Still, hell rains down on Gaza. Israeli bombs level more neighborhoods, bury more burned bodies under rubble, “sadness upon sadness.” Fuel runs out, hospitals shut down, the “smell of death is everywhere,” genocide made manifest. In the U.S., MAGA idiots harass our sole Palestinian lawmaker for “insurrection” as the world remains largely mute, empathy gone missing. Gaza is left alone, “being slaughtered from vein to vein,” as mothers write their children’s names on them so “our legs will tell our story.”
In what the U.N. called “the latest atrocity to befall the people of Gaza” – though God knows not their last – Israel has continued to massacre civilian residents of Jabalia refugee camp in the north, one of the most crowded corners in one of the most densely populated places on Earth, a half-square mile home to over 116,000 people. Despite the claim their initial airstrikes the day before had targeted – and killed – a Hamas commander, ongoing strikes by lethal JDAMs, or joint direct attack munitions, pulverized at least two more camp neighborhoods, leaving behind massive craters, crumbled buildings collapsed earthquake-like on themselves, and dead and wounded everywhere. In “a scene no one can imagine,” rescuers desperately dug with their hands through dirt, steel, concrete searching for survivors buried near the surface. “My three kids are gone,” wailed one man. “No one is alive.” At last report, the Jabalia blasts had killed over 200 people, including seven Israeli hostages; most of the dead were women and children.
Israeli airstrikes on Thursday hit multiple other sites in Gaza: the crowded Bureij refugee camp and Zawaida area in the central Strip – said an elderly wounded woman, “We were baking bread when Israeli warplanes bombed us” – Tel al-Hawa south of Gaza City. Battles on the ground between Israeli and Hamas soldiers also escalated on the outskirts of Gaza City, home to Gaza’s largest hospital and other key facilities. An IDF official said forces were “surrounding” the city, fighting “in a dense and complex urban area (that) requires professional combat and courage.” He declined to mention an investigation showing many Israeli strikes have taken place in areas south of the so-called safety zone Israel has urged civilians to flee to, suggesting the “humanitarian evacuation” was in fact an “attempted illegal forcible transfer” to places without safety or relief. The dead now number over 9,000 – almost 4,000 of them children – with at least 32,000 wounded, and UN experts say the Palestinian people are at “grave risk of genocide.”
Exacerbating the horrors is a long-neglected and besieged infrastructure whose medical system was already “hanging by a thread.” Perhaps half of Gaza’s 35 hospitals in Gaza are already not operating, as are three-quarters of its primary care centers. Doctors are exhausted, hospitals are overwhelmed, thousands of dazed survivors huddle on their grounds seeking safety where there is none; searing photos show distraught medics weeping and kids in shock and bloody bandages. Many of Jabalia’s wounded were rushed to Indonesian Hospital, the nearest, largest facility in the north and the only one offering cancer treatment; after days of grimly warning they were running out of fuel, their main generator did, shutting down neo-natal ventilators, oxygen stations, morgue refrigerators, dialysis and chemo machines. Cancer and other patients have already started dying. Inside the hospital, burned, wounded children with “catastrophic injuries,” found by strangers, screamed for their parents. Outside, body bags piled up.
At frantic Al-Shifa hospital, Gaza’s largest, equipment is faltering, pain medicine is running out, people lie are on floors atop one another. Dead bodies are carted out like “slaughtered animals being moved,” said one woman sheltering outside. “It makes you weep.” After an air strike hit al-Shifa’s maternity ward, many patients were moved to al-Helou Hospital, which was then also bombed; pregnant women who survived were reportedly undergoing emergency C-sections by flashlight, without anaesthetic. In occupied East Jerusalem, where Gazans with Israeli-issued permits had brought patients for treatment, Israeli forces even stormed al-Makassed hospital and arrested at least a dozen Palestinians for “hiding” in the hospital illegally because their permits were revoked after the Oct. 7 attack. Said one doctor, “You couldn’t, as a human being and a medical officer, bear this situation.”
Meanwhile the violence swells in the Occupied Territories. Israeli forces in the West Bank launched raids on Nablus, Jericho and long-ravaged Ramallah, the PA’s seat of power, where over 128 Palestinians have been killed and 2,000 wounded. Vigilante attacks by far-right settlers have soared after Israeli authorities handed out thousands of weapons to “settlement defense squads” in the wake of the Hamas attack; they also accelerated recruitment and training of settler “militiamen,” including those with criminal records they could “overlook” depending on the crime. In occupied Deir Sharaf, rampaging settlers burned homes and shops as IDF soldiers fired teargas and blocked Red Crescent crews from helping 20 Palestinian children trapped and suffocating inside a bakery warehouse. In Jenin, the IDF removed the iconic Jenin Horse, a sculpture honoring the camp’s children after a deadly 2002 Israeli raid, which for 20 years “stood fierce and strong.” Across West Bank villages, residents found leaflets reading, “Wait for the great Nakba” and “The day of revenge is coming.”
And so it is. This week, amidst Israel’s ongoing genocidal rhetoric – the IDF’s aim must be “revenge, zero morality, maximum corpses,” there “is no population in Gaza, (just) 2.5 million terrorists” – Likud MP Galit Distel-Atbaryan said Gaza needs to be “wiped out” after she viewed Hamas body camera footage of the Oct. 7 attack. Until recently an extremist Public Diplomacy Minister – she shrugged off criticism with, “They call me Goebbels here, Goebbels there” – Distel-Atbaryan wrote Israeli officials must invest their energy “in one thing: erasing all of Gaza from the face of the Earth.” In this, she echoed a newly leaked report of an Israeli plan to ethnically cleanse Palestinians from Gaza “to bring about a significant change in the civilian reality.” Conceding mass evacuation of the population from Gaza to Sinai “may be complex in terms of international legitimacy,” the report urges PR campaigns to convince the U.S. and other Western countries, “even at the price of a “scolding.” The message to Gazans dreaming of return: “Allah decided you should lose this land.”
Notable among the report’s depravities is the hubris of an imperial occupier arguing it can use “advertising” to sway world opinion in the face of a savage military assault and its unprecedented civilian devastation: Over 9,000 dead, including almost 4,000 children or infants, 420 a day killed or injured; at least 32,000 wounded; tens of thousands missing; much of Gaza leveled. Calls for a ceasefire are on the rise from the UN, EU, virtually every international rights group and around the world, including several Latin American countries who cut diplomatic ties to Israel. In the U.S., Biden’s unwavering support for Israel is increasingly under fire, especially after the news that a task force on preventing atrocities routinely assembled during global crises didn’t meet until two weeks after Israel began its assault; when it did, State Department officials said they and their expertise were being dangerously sidelined. Unconscionably, it also took weeks for Biden to finally call for a “humanitarian pause” – not to stop the slaughter, but to help free Israeli hostages.
Equally unhelpful was a lone moment of dark comic relief in the response to Gaza’s tragedy: A twisted effort by hate-mongering “lawn ornament come to life” and Jewish-Space-Laser Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene to censure Palestinian-American Rep. Rashida Tlaib for leading “an anti-Semitic insurrection” in D.C. on Oct. 18 when she joined over 500 Jewish and Muslim protesters in prayer and song to demand a ceasefire. In a long, sputtering, “whereas”-filled resolution, Greene said Tlaib has “exhibited her hatred for America” by insisting on ending the Occupation and its apartheid system yada yada – a weird move given Greene’s long, dumb, anti-Semitic history, most recently on Yom Kippur when she posted a “wildly offensive” Chanukah menorah. Jared Moskowitz: “Different Jewish Holiday. Yom Kippur is where you atone for your sins. Lord knows you will be very busy.” When the censure failed, Greene ripped opponents for voting to “destroy our country,” shrieking Tlaid is “literally a terrorist in the House of Representatives.” Pot/kettle.
Back in the real world, even the mainstream likes of CNN’s Wolf Blitzer have begun questioning Israeli atrocities. After the first strike on Jabalia, he confronted an IDF spokesman’s vacuous claim that the goal of killing a Hamas commander in a “very complicated battlespace” justified the ensuing carnage. But you know there were a lot of innocent civilians there too, right? Blitzer kept asking. Calmly, the Lt. Col nodded: “This is the tragedy of war, Wolf.” On Friday, that “tragedy” was still somehow escalating. In one of three attacks on Gazan medical sites, Israel bombed a convoy of ambulances transporting patients from outside al-Shifa Hospital towards Rafah, killing at least 15 people and injuring dozens more; video of the chaos shows Palestinians trying to push a battered ambulance forward as a health worker weeps, “It’s a massacre.” Israel charged Hamas was using the ambulance; Palestinian health officials denied the claim; the “shocked” head of WHO insisted patients, doctors, facilities are #NotATarget.
Also Friday, Israeli strikes in the north targeted a convoy of civilians trying to flee south on what Israel has termed “safe routes,” killing at least 14 people; 20 more were killed in an Israeli attack on a school sheltering civilians; the UN, which has seen at least 38 workers killed at their facilities, says it can no longer provide safe shelter under the UN flag. Oxfam said it is “gravely concerned” about half a million Palestinians trapped in a “siege within a siege” in northern Gaza with no food, water or electricity; an Israeli “near-complete stranglehold” on the northern region has effectively cut the enclave in half, making it “virtually impossible” to get aid: “Our children are suffering.” A few thousand of over18,000 Gazan workers stranded in Israel were deported back to the ravaged Strip, likely with no place to go; many others are already being held, and reportedly abused, in prison as “enemy non-combatants.” Some of those lined up Friday had tried to call family back in Gaza; asked one young daughter, “Why are you working in Israel? They are killing us.”
Observers suggest the upsurge in violence is a sick sign Israel knows it’s losing international support, most worriedly in the U.S. “What minuscule pressure the Biden Administration is putting on them is proof unconditional support cannot go on forever,” said one. “They’re trying to kill as many Palestinians as possible in this window of opportunity (when) they’re confident the US (will) go to bat for them no matter what they do.” Sensing that perilous desperation, over 180 activists held sit-ins Friday at eight senators’ D.C. offices to pressure lawmakers to demand a ceasefire; 52 were arrested. Noted one advocate, “The U.S. government is arresting human rights defenders protesting genocide while arming the war criminals.” In Israel, Sec. of State Antony Blinken urged Netanyahu to pause the offensive to allow aid in, a plea quickly rejected until all hostages are released. Israel will continue “with full force,” asserted Bibi; deep in his warped and bloody moral universe, he said ceasefire demands are “calls for Israel to surrender to terrorism.”
For much of the world, the annihilation in Gaza is reflected in an ever-soaring death count. For Gazan journalist Tareq S. Hajjaj, it’s in “thestories I never wanted to write…Stories of people whose lives came into my own. I saw them in life, and I saw them in death…Each death writes its own story.” At the start of the madness, he avoided social media, which was “like walking through a minefield,” seeing ghosts of his past. Now, “I make a point of looking to see who’s still alive…focusing on the details of every person around me, wanting to take them all in, to sear their faces into my memory before I lose them” so they are not “a mere memory of a person snuffed out by the Israeli war machine.” “Sadness replaces sadness – people have little time to grieve,” he writes mournfully. “They come together, they die together, they are buried together in the same shroud…This is the life we lead. All we can do is write their stories as we wait for our turn.”
Some stories are about the 36 Palestinian journalists killed while wearing clothing clearly marked “Press”; still, “We are killed one after the other.” Rushdie Sarraj, a co-founder of Gaza’s Ain Media Group and award-winning film producer with a wide network of contacts, was killed in his home with most of his family: “His dreams and aspirations could not even be contained by Gaza’s skies.” Returning to the field again and again, he lost friends of his own, including Ain co-founder Yasser Murtaja, who refused to leave his homeland. On Friday, Palestine TV’s Mohammed Abu Hatab was killed by a strike on his home in Khan Younis along with 11 family members, including his wife, son and brother; an hour before, he’d produced his latest report from Nasser Hospital. “He was here, half an hour ago,” said tearful colleague Salman al-Bashir shortly after on air; then he pulled off his useless press vest and helmet. “We can’t take it anymore,” he said. “We are exhausted. We are victims, live on air, awaiting our turn to be killed.” As he raged, the show’s host covered her face with her hands and sobbed.
Some stories are caught in video snippets: The young boy lying bloodied and bandaged in the hospital, comforting his wounded, tearful father prone on the next stretcher: “Don’t worry dad, I’m fine. Enough crying. Stay strong. Don’t worry.” Some in memories: Hajjaj grew up buying sweets from street vendor Ismaeel Barda, married with three daughters and a son; they were all killed in an airstrike as they fled in a refugee convoy: “The Occupation saw (them all) equally guilty. It had no problem in passing the sentence.” Wa’d Abu Shouq, 27, “a bird, light and agile,” had three daughters, 7, 5, and her youngest Judy, 3. She fled northern Gaza to join 25 relatives in the South and was sleeping with Judy in her arms when the apartment was bombed; her husband and older daughters were critically injured; Wa’d died cradling Judy. At the hospital, no one could free Judy’s lifeless body from her mother’s, so they were buried together. Though her parents had long urged her to join them in exile, she refused: “She loved her sea and her sun, her land and her people.”
Maram Shaqalia, a 32-year-old accounting manager, dreamed of marriage and children; when she was blessed with a daughter, she named her Yumna: “Her happiness was indescribable.” On Oct. 15, Yumna, less than a year old, was killed by shrapnel from an Israeli bomb. Days later, Maram had fled to another building when it was hit by a strike; everyone was killed, including Maram, “the mother of the martyred Yumna.” Novelist and poet Heba Abu Nada, 32, was killed in her home south of Gaza City by an airstrike. Her final tweet: “Gaza’s night is dark apart from the glow of rockets, quiet apart from the sound of bombs, terrifying apart from the comfort of prayer, black apart from the light of the martyrs. Good night, Gaza.” Playwright Inas al-Saqa was killed with three of her children, Leen, Sara and Ibrahim; poet Khaled Juma wrote of her grief, “Today, my friend, the curtain has fallen.” One of al-Saqa’s daughters survived, and is now in intensive care. Surely for all of gutted, keening Gaza, her land and her people, an anguished friend asks, “How long, oh God?”
“Some parents in Gaza have resorted to writing their children’s names on their legs to help identify them should either they or the children be killed.” – CNN, 10/22/2023
Write my name on my leg, Mama
Use the black permanent marker
with the ink that doesn’t bleed
if it gets wet, the one that doesn’t melt
if it’s exposed to heat
Write my name on my leg, Mama
Make the lines thick and clear
Add your special flourishes
so I can take comfort in seeing
my mama’s handwriting when I go to sleep
Write my name on my leg, Mama
and on the legs of my sisters and brothers
This way we will belong together
This way we will be known
as your children
Write my name on my leg, Mama
and please write your name
and Baba’s name on your legs, too
so we will be remembered
as a family
Write my name on my leg, Mama
Don’t add any numbers
like when I was born or the address of our home
I don’t want the world to list me as a number
I have a name and I am not a number
Write my name on my leg, Mama
When the bomb hits our house
When the walls crush our skulls and bones
our legs will tell our story, how
there was nowhere for us to run
—Zeina Azzam
