Puzzled in Gaza

26^th December 2008 – Kassam and Russian Grad missiles were landing in Israel from Gaza more than 60 times a day.  Their range had broadened to Ashkelon, Netivot and Baer Sheva.  The Egyptian government warned Hamas that these acts of aggression against Israel would provoke a defensive strike.

28^th December 2008 – The Israeli Army attacked Gaza.

18^th January 2009 – Ceasefire between Hamas and the Israeli Army.

28^th January 2009 — I’m an English Jewish poet. I used to practice as a Barrister in The Inner Temple. I’m a Zionist and frequent visitor to Israel. The reports of the Israeli army (IDF)’s misconduct in Gaza were deeply disturbing. The streets of London rang with demonstrators declaring,

We’re all Hamas now

I felt compelled by conscience to go to Gaza and have a look and talk to people.  I left Tel Aviv at 6.30 a.m. by taxi and arrived at the Erez checkpoint at 7.15 a.m.  I showed the official my and press card.  I walked across the border alone.

In no man’s land porters pushed large old railway-platform trolleys one said,

It is good here.

I was met by my guide once I got into Gaza. He was a twenty-seven year old Palestinian journalist, he wore western clothes and designer stubble.

Do you want to meet Hamas officials? he asked.

I’m a poet and freelance writer, I’ve come to see the damage and civilian suffering caused by the war, not to talk politics, I answered. You choose where to start.

We drove away from Beit Hanoun to what was left of the ancient olive groves of Jebalia Reyes Hill.

The IDF bulldozed the trees because Hamas fire missiles from there on Schderot, my guide said.

He showed me the Abu Ayida hamoula’s compound on the hillside. All but one of its mansions, factories and guards’ houses had been flattened. Tasir Fouad Abu Ayida, a man of about thirty five years old, showed me three cars in the rubble — a Mitsubishi and two Hyundais. He said they were worth U.S $25,000 each and that he’d had a nine-hundred square metre house before the war, but he now lived with his ten children in one room in Jebalia.

There was a dead goat with a large rock solid stomach in the rubble between the cars. I went toward the only Abu Ayida house left standing, which the Israeli Army (IDF) had used as a base. It had a ground and upper floor and an unclad concrete exterior. The internal grandeur surprised me. It was seven-hundred square metres in size, its floors were marble and it had amber glass chandeliers. Its southern wall was pierced and afforded a view over an extensive plain. There were operational diagrams and instructions in Hebrew on the eastern wall. The house was otherwise undefiled.

As we left it, I was shown a flat piece of land to the north of the house where I was told the IDF believed there were tunnels. I began to walk over to take a look but my guide stopped me abruptly and asked me to follow him.

He took me downhill to the rubble of a small guard’s house and showed me a buckled red wheelchair which I was told belonged to a young girl who lived alone with her mother. I picked up a sheet of Arabic writing from the ground, which I was told was that child’s homework.  An old man had approached us and I asked him if I might keep the homework sheet. He said I could. I have it still.

How many people died here? I asked.

No one, the old man said. The Israelis leafleted and telephoned a warning to each house and factory half an hour or forty five minutes before they came.

I was incredulous and asked,

How could they possibly phone everyone?

They have all the telephone numbers here, each of us has identity cards. They know everything about us.

I asked him where all the people went and he said,

Everyone went to relatives in Jebalia.

I tried unsuccessfully to get one of the IDF’s warning leaflets that day.

To the north of the guard’s house, in a dell, there were 50 or so small khaki tents neatly erected in perfect rows. I neither saw nor heard any sign of activity from them. When I asked who’d put them there or was using them the old man said he didn’t know but he thought it was a charity, he then said,

Look at our fate.  I have suffered 60 years because of Israel.

We saw no other people at the site other than Tasir Fouad Abu Ayida and the old man. My guide offered to take me into the tents to find out more about them but I refused and asked to go to Jebalia. It was 9.30 am.

We arrived in Jebalia City at 9.50 am. Its concrete 1970’s low buildings looked intact and their open shop-fronts were hung with vivid kaftans. The roads were partially tarmacked and I saw some tank marks. The women on the streets wore traditional dress and some were veiled. Donkey carts were much more common than cars and small groups of sturdy looking unaccompanied children walked about wearing old fashioned woollen jumpers. I didn’t see any sweatshirts.

Puzzled by the City’s vibrant atmosphere I asked to be shown Jebalia refugee camp and we drove into that quarter at 10.10 a.m. Its teeming unmade-up streets were much narrower than those of Jebalia City. Its dwellings run off narrow alleyways from the main street buildings where as many as 10 related families build homes in mutual proximity. My guide told me that each of these tiny homes has an average of 10 children. I saw the remains of the Imad Akhel mosque which my guide said was bombed after the IDF leafleted and phoned warnings in the vicinity.

Four girls and their mother from the Fatah Ba Alusha family, who lived in one of the maize of dwellings which still stood intact in the alley adjacent to the Imad Akhel Mosque, had died. I asked whether other civilians left the area before the bombing. My guide said they had. I asked if the mosque was really the Hamas arsenal the IDF said it was. My guide said,

Look at the secondary explosion on You Tube

Seeing Jebalia refugee camp’s market was an astonishment. Huge fresh carcasses of meat hung on metal hooks in the open fronted shops. Vendors carts, piled high with pyramids of beautiful produce, stood in the middle of the road, the red radishes were the size of grapefruits. Shoppers came and went in throngs. I told my guide that no one in England would believe this abundance. That we all thought they were starving. He told me that everything I could see was produced in Gaza.

My guide emphasised that he wasn’t a refugee but a very proud Palestinian. He brought me to his grandparents’ birthplace, Shi Jaya the old city, east of Gaza City. The police station had been destroyed.

It wasn’t built by Hamas, my guide said. They seized it.

The Al Omari mosque, the oldest mosque in Gaza City was beautiful. The newly renovated Al Basha Palace, where Napoleon had stayed when he came to Gaza, had Mamluk animal symbols on its rough hewn stone walls. Three young women graduates in traditional dress introduced themselves by name to me outside there. One, a poet, spoke softly meeting my eye, and said,

Education is our power, we are suffocating here, we are dying slowly, I want to travel abroad but I can’t because I’m not married. That is our way.

Heavy set men hovered behind the young women and broke the intensity as they offered me white coffee (not coffee with milk), which I accepted and enjoyed.  The poet indicated a very young fair haired member of the three of them, whom she said was already the mother of twins, I told her I a mother of four and grandmother of three, have always thought bearing twins heroic and we all laughed. The very young mother of twins said,

My husband’s factory in Sallahedin street has been bombed.  From Netzarim, to the Erez crossing, all the factories were destroyed.

I said,

I’ve seen the Abu Ayida hamoula’s factories.

She nodded and continued,

In Attatra five people in one hamoula died.

The poet then interjected,

What will you tell your children and grandchildren when you get to England?

I answered,

I will tell them that you and your friends are clever and determined and will find answers because of the intelligence and bravery I’ve witnessed in you.

Suddenly a stern eyed woman came out of The Al Basha Palace and approached our group, my guide disappeared down the entranceway stairs. I felt I had to follow him. Once I found the car I fiddled with my phone and noticed I’d been messaged on my English mobile at 11.59 a.m.

Marhaba, smell the jasmine and taste the olives. Jawwal welcomes you to Palestine. For Customer Service Please dial 111 (chargeable).

I showed my guide the text said that I liked the terms in which his phone company expressed itself, and tried to relax.

The streets of Gaza City were wider than those in Jebalia City. Some of the buildings were 70s concrete built. The open fronted shops were hung with giant cooking pots. There were cars on the roads and a steady stream of people on the pavements. I also saw tall, intact, marble clad buildings with blue tinted windows which my guide said were new residential developments that had yet to be completed. He said that during the war the streets of the city were deserted until 4pm because Israel warned people not to go out. But when he showed me the main Hamas National Forces Compound, a five-acre site, just past the Al Hejaz petrol station, he said that a neighbour of his, Ashraf Abu Al Qumboz, died of injuries he sustained walking past at the moment it was attacked by the IDF. The compound was rubble save for radar or satellite dishes that looked like cobwebs on metal poles. My guide said ten’s died within the compound.

Time and again I saw surgical destruction of buildings Hamas used as headquarters. I was told Hamas were warned and evacuated in the same way civilians were before the attacks. I was told Hamas died in low numbers which led me to ask where the government and its army were all operating from now. My guide glanced first at our driver and then at a young man with a squared off beard dressed neatly in black trousers and a black shirt, guarding the Jawwal building we were just passing. He said,

They continued while they fought the war, directing the traffic and arresting looters.

All day I’d felt the menace of the hawkish, athletic men I’d seen guarding street corners but everyone including my guide behaved as though they were invisible. Unlike the other Palestinians I’d met or seen who generally moved or sat in groups, they stood alone and silent. I asked my guide if he was Hamas, he said he wasn’t. I asked him if Hamas knew this, he said they did. A friend of my guide, a female English literature graduate from the Gaza University had joined us by this stage, she was extremely beautiful, wore a western hairstyle, trousers and a large diamond ring on her right hand. Later my guide said to me privately,

Her fiancé’s a rich guy, there’s no middle class in here, Gaza.

As my audio tape record of the day evidences, my guide and his friend took me into Gaza City’s Shiffa hospital at 12.45pm. It comprises six concrete buildings which he told me Israel had built thirty years ago. The hospital floors were newly mopped throughout but there was no smell of disinfectant. The atmosphere was very ordered. I was told I was being taken to meet a little girl called Amira Kerem. I was told that in the last two days of the war her house was blown up, that her two brothers and father were beaten up and killed (that her parents were divorced and she had a step-mother but I wasn’t told where her step mother was during the attack). My guide’s friend said Amira was one of the wars saddest stories, that she’d left the rubble of the explosion and lived alone with her injuries for three days before she was found in the empty house which belonged to Imad Eid, a journalist who used to work for BBC’s Arabic office in Gaza.

To my right as I arrived at the hospital was a low wall with sliding metal, barred doors beyond them, which were open. I asked where those guarded doors led and my guide said,

This is is the intensive care unit for our fighters.

A large group of men in suits, two with long thin white fringed scarves edged in green Arabic writing swept through the barred doors to my right flanked by Hamas black shirted guards. I didn’t see where they went. I asked who they were and my guide told me they were inspecting the hospital. I asked where they were from and he answered into my microphone, “Turkey”, looked at me, paused then added “Malaysia and Indonesia”. I didn’t see any people I recognised as ethnic Malays or Indonesian in this group of men. Everyone stood back and looked down as they passed. No one, my guide and his friend included, looked at them with the polite but assertive curiosity I’d seen strangers excite in Gaza.

A few moments later a stocky sixty year old woman with dyed black hair, wearing an expensive suit and Italian moccasins, came out of the same barred doors and walked by me flanked by four guards. She looked haughty and incongruous. Again everyone drew back and lowered their eyes.

Once these people had left the entrance hall we turned right and climbed the stairs to room 522 to visit Amira Kerem. I felt ashamed as I took my turn after a bored European news crew had removed their tripod — they’d read their Blackberries as they’d filmed Amira in bed. She was thin and looked about eleven years old. I couldn’t see any marks or bandages on her. I admired her lilac hand-knitted hat with tiny artificial pearls sewn on at regular intervals and her cardigan. At first she was impassive. Three young women sat to her right. They wore long colourful dresses and were very sweet. I stayed there for a while and eventually made Amira laugh, my guide, as ever, interpreting. Her visitors joined in and we all voiced hopes for peace. I took out my recorder and asked if she or her visitors wanted me to take a message to the people of England for them, but they didn’t want to be taped.

When I left Amira’s room a woman (who’d been one of the Blackberry transfixed film crew) tried to talk to me, I had no heart for her.

Then I visited Mona al Ashkhor, aged eighteen. she was beautiful. I talked with her for a while, she was extremely shy. She told me about the day she had been injured outside the UNWRA school at Al Fakhora. Her left leg had been amputated below the knee and she’d lost the use of her left hand. On her clean crisply made bed to my left sat her mother and aunt and two younger women, her mother held a large covered aluminium pot on her lap. Before I left I asked Mona what she would like me to tell the people of England, my guide as ever interpreting, she replied looking at a girl who sat behind the older ladies,

I love her, my first cousin, very much and I am happy that today for the first time I left my bed and am able to sit in a chair.

Throughout my visit I was surprised by how quiet the hospital seemed. I saw empty beds there, including the second bed in Amira’s room. I saw clutches of Hamas guards in the entrance hall and a group of them crowded behind a solid metal door to the right of the first landing as I’d climbed past it to visit Amira.

Someone I took to be a doctor emerged from behind that door and pushed past the Hamas guards. He was close shaven, had a western haircut and wore fashionable glasses and shoes. He had moved down the stairs as I had ascended them, I caught his eye and he looked down nervously and accelerated his pace.

Once back in the car, I asked my guide where all the dead were, he told me mechanically, that they were in all the cemeteries of Gaza. That sometimes they’d buried five at once. I asked him where all the wounded were, why Shiffa was so quiet. He said,

The majority of the 5,500 people wounded in the war are receiving medical treatment in Egypt and Jordan.

I was bewildered by the fact that I’d not seen any press photos of the hospitals in Egypt and Jordan treating these patients. But I said nothing more.

As we drove from Shiffa past Abu Mazen square I saw what looked like a brand new building a street block in length which was a house made of stained pine and hewn stone, it looked part Swiss chalet and part mosque. My guide pointed out the Hamas guards outside it.

Then we went to Tallel Howa, Gaza’s biggest residential area, which he explained was booby trapped by Hamas prior to the war together with the residential section of Zeitun. He told me weapons were stored there and showed me where Hamas’ snipers had been positioned on the high buildings including the taller university buildings. I saw bullet holes on the lower levels.

He said that Israel occupied the area completely during the war. It comprises square, five storey, concrete apartment buildings. I saw the burnt out Al Kuds hospital, where government officials used to be treated. There was rubble in El Hillel street, from a medical warehouse which looked like a doll’s house which had had its front panel and all its contents removed but it’s exterior was otherwise intact. To the right and across the street from the medical warehouse I saw an ambulance protruding from a parking bay which looked as though its rear was a concertinaed flat pack, a section of the building above the parking bay had collapsed onto the rear of the ambulance. I saw a four storey building, with just the far right hand window of its top floor blown out, the external wall above it was blackened. I asked my guide,

Was that window broken by something going in or by something coming out?

Hamas fired from inside the building, he said.

I saw damage to the tall building’s of Gaza’s Al Aqsa University. I asked my guide how many were killed there, he said that thousands left those areas each day and went to relatives when the IDF had telephoned and leafleted instructions to everyone. He said the buildings were almost completely empty when the fighting took place and that thirty fighters died in the battle. I saw the debris of the Ministry of Prisoners, a one-acre site, my guide told me six Hamas were killed in that explosion. Neither my guide nor his friend furnished me with replies to my enquiries as to the dates and times of events, saying as they’d said all day,

You can see it all on the internet.

After Tallel Howa my guide explained that he was going to take me to the Al Samoun hamoula’s compound where a war crime took place. We drove through the farming section of Zei Tun, the road was neatly verged with sabar cactus and the extensive olive groves were well pruned. At 12.45pm we turned off past the ‘Rajab Company for Petroleum‘ sign to the site where my guide told me thirty one members of the Samouni hamoula were killed. He said there was no resistance there to the IDF, this hamoula were Fatah. I passed an orange painted metal shipping container which was buckled, as though by an implosion. It was externally unmarked, still locked [i]. It wasn’t possible for me to look inside it. The area which had previously comprised about ten four-storey houses where one hundred and sixty members of the Samouni hamoula lived was flattened, with the exception of one house. The compound had also been a chicken farm and some dead fowl floated in the water that was collecting in the extremely deep square craters surrounded by the house rubble. There were no craters at the Abu Ayida compound as far as I remember. Here there were buckled metal supports deep into the ground under each house. These craters were as empty as scoured pots. The air smelled heavily of chicken shit. I pulled from the rubble a medical x-ray and a red coloured, adult sized sweatshirt which I kept after asking permission.

I was told the Israelis had phoned the entire family and warned them to stay in the house ahead of me (the safe house) during the battle with Hamas. He said the IDF destroyed all the other houses and then bombed the safe house, killing thirty-one of the hundred-odd people sheltering there. I saw the house and its roof intact but for a top right hand window which had been blown out from within, a washing still hung on a line strung across the balcony below the blackened window [ii].

The safe house was four storeys high and about four-hundred square metres in size. I couldn’t ask to look inside, or for any further explanation than that I’d been given. Although I was puzzled by the fact its roof and exterior were intact when it was said to have been bombed.

My audio tape records the visit to a large open sided black tent at Al Samouni containing about twenty five men either standing or sitting on white plastic chairs around the family elder (the Sheikh). Two sat near the entrance on carpets. There were also two small carpets propped up with a stick one some feet to the right of the black tent and one twice as far behind it beyond one of the crates. These carpets made small shelters for women and children. I visited one where two women and four children under three years old, sat on a small carpet laid on the rubble. A thirteen-year-old boy stood outside to the left. The women fed the children rice. I addressed the eldest woman, Iftisan Samouni; she said,

I lost a teenage daughter and son here and my husband is in Saudi Arabia receiving treatment.

What do you want me to tell the people of England? I asked. She gave no answer.

Where do you sleep at night? I asked, and she said,

We are living with relatives and only come here during the day for the press.

I rolled the red sweatshirt I’d picked up and put it behind her to buffer the rough terrain. She acknowledged the gesture imperceptively by edging herself back very slightly on to it and said,

We lost many clothes here.

The younger woman told me that the thirteen-year-old boy was her brother, the two small children belonged to the cousin she was living with and that she and her brother had lost their mother. Inexplicably, she smiled at me and Iftisan all the while. I asked my guide why people weren’t angrier in Gaza, he said they were for two days but then it was over. That Allah decides fate.

All the men and children at the site ate liberally from identical plastic plates of green rice and meat which were presented on identical large round blue plastic trays covered in silver foil. I’ve kept some of their disposable utensils. I asked my guide where the food came from. He said a charity. When I’d asked Iftisan Samouni which charity sent the food, she met my eye earnestly, and said,

I don’t know.

She then invited me to eat. I didn’t accept. I never saw the women eating all day.

As we left Iftisan,  a young boy tried to coax us to the second womens’ shelter but I chose to watch the mens’ tent from outside for a while. There were two identical worn, banners in the tent. At the top of the banners there were cameo photographs of men. A large picture of Yassir Arafat was in the middle of the banners and under him there were soldiers in black and white headbands with their rifles trained on an IDF soldier. These banners hung behind the Sheikh.

My guide said the people in the cameo photographs were the victims of a genocide. He said the fighters on the banners meant nothing, that Al Quds militants made the posters for the hamoula. He explained it’s not the custom to depict women. Seven men and eleven women were named. I was told by my guide that children the Samouni’s had lost weren’t named on the poster and that sixteen of them had either died, been buried, or were unaccounted for. My guide and other people at the site told me that other members of the family were missing.

The Sheikh wore a red and white scarf, turban style with a roll-up cigarette sticking out of its side like a feather. In addition to the banners, a large handwritten page lettered in black and red hung on a string behind him. As I looked at it, a man slipped it behind the banners. I asked my guide to read it to me, he pulled it out and slipped it back again nervously, and said it was just a condolence letter. I offered my condolences to the Sheikh who agreed to be interviewed by me on audio tape. He began to speak to me, my guide translated rapidly, as the Sheik pointed to each cameo and narrated atrocities. Of the women named and represented by flowers on the banners, but not depicted, he clasped his breast and explained some were breast feeding when they were killed. I asked him how many of his family still survived, he said half.

He said he had a DVD of the atrocities being committed at the site. In June 2009 I gave evidence to Judge Goldstone’s U.N. Gaza Fact Finding Tribunal. My evidence included the audio tape of this interview with the Sheikh together with authority to play it to him when they met and ask for the DVD.

In the car my guide told me there were tens of cases like this. It was 1.30, Israel was going to close the border at Erez between three and four and I’d been advised by journalists to be there before 2.30. We began to head back.

All day the streets were full of children. I asked why weren’t they at school? He explained there were two shifts. I asked if the schools were good and when he said,

At the moment the children are only being taught how to hate.

The day’s interchanges had always been circumspect and my reaction to this direct comment was to joke that if I taught my children to go right they went left, if I said sing they spoke, if I said cut your hair, they grew it. I said to my guide and his friend,

You are such intelligent young people, you’ve got the internet, don’t tell me you can be taught anything you don’t want to learn.

I went on to acknowledge that the poor children we’d seen on the streets of Jebalia had no such opportunities for now — at this point the driver who’d been silent all day handed me his phone and showed me a photo of a dead baby with its left leg bone exposed.

My guide explained this was a baby buried in rubble and partially eaten by dogs. A small UN coach passed us as we passed the high walls of the UNRWA compound. I couldn’t see damage from the road but my guide told me it was assessed at $12,000,000. Beyond it on a whitewashed wall, I saw the only graffiti of the day it was a geometrically stylised heroic depiction of fighting between the IDF and Hamas.

We got to the reinforced concrete UNWRA school at Al Fakhora. The school was on a street corner. My guide pointed to the road perpendicular to the one we were on and indicated the buildings to the immediate right of the school from which Mona Al Ashkor had said Hamas fired mortar shells. His friend showed me the rocket marks on the road in front of the school. Mona had told us that Israel had leafleted and phoned to tell people that there was Hamas activity in the area and that the school would not be the safe shelter, UNWRA had previously said it was. Hundreds of people cleared the area. But forty people Mona had explained, including herself, didn’t believe the IDF warnings and ran towards it. The missile that hit the road was a silent drone my guide told me. My guide’s female friend said the IDF could see the civilians, could have hit Hamas, and pointed animatedly to the same building from where my guide had indicated Hamas were firing. Because the news worldwide had reported that the school was attacked. I was surprised that it was intact. I asked people in the street (through my interpreter) what had happened. They readily confirmed Mona’s account and what I saw. The consensus figure I’d heard for the dead was around ten.

I asked my guide and his friend if Hamas provided any air raid shelters or evacuation procedures. They both said there were none. I asked if any of the wealthy Gazans built shelters in their houses. My guide said yes, some did. But his friend contradicted him.

As we approached the border, I asked my guide and his friend to list places I hadn’t seen where civilians had died. Ezbet Ahued Raba, Rafah – scores died, Khan Younis – more than Rafah, Bet Lahia – scores and many other places of destruction, they said.

As they spoke a Hamas guard stopped us just before the Gazan border. I gave him my press card and my passport. He addressed me very harshly as “Green” and then asked questions which were clearly intended to intimidate me. He repeatedly asked me questions in English about what I’d seen but his command of English was clearly too limited for him to be able to understand my answers.

When he eventually returned my passport and press card he questioned my guide for several minutes and then my guide’s attractive friend. Both my guide and his friend seemed very uncomfortable. The driver was not required to show any papers and hissed through his teeth and generally displayed aggressive impatience with the Hamas guard.

At the border my guide and his friend were driven off quite suddenly with a screech of tires, leaving me alone at passport control, a wooden hut.

I was held up by a neatly dressed passport officer and asked again in a threatening tone, how I found the situation. I went through all the notes I had taken and he left me with no alternative but to take down the following dictated additions;

Attatra American school bombed by F16’s, Abu Drabba village, El Kashef, Dr. Zetina Al Ha Esh the gynocologist who works at Tel Hashomer hospital in Israel lost 6 members of his family – go and see him, a Jordanian hospital has entered into Gaza.

He could see I didn’t have a camera but he asked me if I had taken any pictures on my mobile phone. I said I hadn’t. I was very anxious about the time, the border was due to close.

His fellow customs officer, a much burlier man who never spoke English, seemed at this point to get bored and waved that I should be let through. I walked on the dust in no man’s land. As I got into the concrete corridor on the approach to Israel, I saw coming towards me a Gazan porter pushing a railway-platform baggage trolley with four cases and carrier bags full of Israeli High Street shopping. The porter’s client was a slight, young Gazan man, who wore trainers and looked very confident.

It was 2.30 pm, it took me an hour to complete physical security checks and re-enter Israel. Watching the journalists go through the process was very interesting. I heard a woman journalist say to a colleague,

I always come out at night because I’ve got kids.

A press office Department Head said on his mobile phone,

I’ve got a story and video but I have to bury it because the lady’s husband worked for the UN for years and he’ll lose his job and all his pension rights and who knew what else if the story gets out.

He later said to me,

It’s safer coming to Gaza now than it used to be. Hamas keep things in very tight control now.

Everyone’s relief after leaving Gaza was openly expressed. No one at Israeli passport control asked me any questions about my trip.

[ii] This appears clearly on BBC footage