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Supreme emergency
The Gaza crisis compels us to interrogate when, if ever, we consider armed resistance acceptable The Guardian, Monday 12 January 2009
Four years ago, during a visit to Gaza to interview the boys throwing blast bombs at the Israeli troops then protecting the settlements in the coastal enclave, the question came up repeatedly over why parents permitted it. It was a moot point. For not only was the activity largely pointless - few of the bombs came close to their targets, and were more dangerous to those who threw them - but the inevitable return of Israeli fire hurt far more of the children. The approximation of an answer that I gleaned was complex, but nearly five years later it has a resonance for one of the most compelling questions of the continuing Gaza crisis: why is it that the militant factions have persisted with rocket fire that has almost no military value?
It is not to be found in the bravado that says it welcomes the Israeli ground invasion as an opportunity to kill Israeli troops. Instead, it is to be found in a more subtle conjunction of motivations revolving around the idea of resistance. It served - said my interview subjects - multiple functions: as a form of psychological release; as a focus for social cohesion and national identity, generating "martyrs" to celebrate; and, finally, as a constant reminder to the "other" - the enemy - that the Palestinians had not been defeated.
It was intimately interwoven for me then with another issue: the rejection of non-violent resistance by large sections of Palestinian society. While that issue retains its urgency, these days it is interwoven with a second, equally compelling, point of interest - when do we regard armed resistance as being acceptable?
In recent years, it has been seen as unremarkable to support the rights of groups to turn to violence in order to pursue ambitions of statehood, seceding from regimes that they complain suppress both their human rights and desire for self-determination. In both Kosovo and Darfur the west has sided with the secessionists.
In the context of Gaza and Israel - as Michael Walzer, author of Just and Unjust Wars, argued in a 2002 essay on the region - one of the problems is the oversimplification of the struggle between Israelis and Palestinians. The reality, he argued, was that there were "four wars" being fought at different times, each of them requiring a different moral response: a Palestinian war to destroy the state of Israel; a Palestinian war to create a state alongside Israel and end the occupation; an Israeli war for security within the 1967 •borders; and an Israeli war for a Greater Israel, for settlements and the occupied territories.
The difficulty is that the wars in Israel/Palestine that people believe they are fighting overlap - and in the moral realm are often contradictory. So Walzer categorises the war to destroy Israel as "unjust", while arguing that the war to create a Palestinian state - while in pursuit of a legitimate "goal" - could have been pursued without violence. "Winning the second war," he argues, "depends on losing the first."
Walzer also famously propounded the notion of the "supreme emergency" - his framework of permission for state terror, founded on the fire-bombing of German cities in the second world war when the allies were faced with the prospect of defeat by the Nazis. It saw the targeting of civilians, against his general view that civilians should never be targeted.
Although Walzer would perhaps deny its applicability, the consequences of Israel's economic blockade of Gaza come close to the idea of a supreme emergency (much in the same way that Israel has justified its attack on the Gaza Strip in similar terms). Under the blockade, Gazan society has been brought close to disintegration: Gaza's economy has suffered irreparable damage; one in two residents live in poverty; and its always fragile social, kinship and political relationships have violently broken down.
What has made the issue even more murky - as Conor Gearty, professor of human rights law at the LSE has noted - is the way in which terrorism is less and less regarded as a "technique", albeit a horrible one, in pursuit of a political agenda. Instead, it has been deliberately redefined, largely by states, to mean a "category of person" - making it easy to ignore the underlying causes while concentrating on the acts.
None of the above should be read as a defence of terror, or even as an argument for armed resistance. The tragedy of Gaza is the acceptance on both sides that killing and oppression have more value than negotiation. And while many in the international community - and in Israel - remain stuck on the idea that the Jewish state has a monopoly on the deployment of the language of "supreme emergency", more violence is inevitable.
Four years ago, during a visit to Gaza to interview the boys throwing blast bombs at the Israeli troops then protecting the settlements in the coastal enclave, the question came up repeatedly over why parents permitted it. It was a moot point. For not only was the activity largely pointless - few of the bombs came close to their targets, and were more dangerous to those who threw them - but the inevitable return of Israeli fire hurt far more of the children. The approximation of an answer that I gleaned was complex, but nearly five years later it has a resonance for one of the most compelling questions of the continuing Gaza crisis: why is it that the militant factions have persisted with rocket fire that has almost no military value?
It is not to be found in the bravado that says it welcomes the Israeli ground invasion as an opportunity to kill Israeli troops. Instead, it is to be found in a more subtle conjunction of motivations revolving around the idea of resistance. It served - said my interview subjects - multiple functions: as a form of psychological release; as a focus for social cohesion and national identity, generating "martyrs" to celebrate; and, finally, as a constant reminder to the "other" - the enemy - that the Palestinians had not been defeated.
It was intimately interwoven for me then with another issue: the rejection of non-violent resistance by large sections of Palestinian society. While that issue retains its urgency, these days it is interwoven with a second, equally compelling, point of interest - when do we regard armed resistance as being acceptable?
In recent years, it has been seen as unremarkable to support the rights of groups to turn to violence in order to pursue ambitions of statehood, seceding from regimes that they complain suppress both their human rights and desire for self-determination. In both Kosovo and Darfur the west has sided with the secessionists.
In the context of Gaza and Israel - as Michael Walzer, author of Just and Unjust Wars, argued in a 2002 essay on the region - one of the problems is the oversimplification of the struggle between Israelis and Palestinians. The reality, he argued, was that there were "four wars" being fought at different times, each of them requiring a different moral response: a Palestinian war to destroy the state of Israel; a Palestinian war to create a state alongside Israel and end the occupation; an Israeli war for security within the 1967 •borders; and an Israeli war for a Greater Israel, for settlements and the occupied territories.
The difficulty is that the wars in Israel/Palestine that people believe they are fighting overlap - and in the moral realm are often contradictory. So Walzer categorises the war to destroy Israel as "unjust", while arguing that the war to create a Palestinian state - while in pursuit of a legitimate "goal" - could have been pursued without violence. "Winning the second war," he argues, "depends on losing the first."
Walzer also famously propounded the notion of the "supreme emergency" - his framework of permission for state terror, founded on the fire-bombing of German cities in the second world war when the allies were faced with the prospect of defeat by the Nazis. It saw the targeting of civilians, against his general view that civilians should never be targeted.
Although Walzer would perhaps deny its applicability, the consequences of Israel's economic blockade of Gaza come close to the idea of a supreme emergency (much in the same way that Israel has justified its attack on the Gaza Strip in similar terms). Under the blockade, Gazan society has been brought close to disintegration: Gaza's economy has suffered irreparable damage; one in two residents live in poverty; and its always fragile social, kinship and political relationships have violently broken down.
What has made the issue even more murky - as Conor Gearty, professor of human rights law at the LSE has noted - is the way in which terrorism is less and less regarded as a "technique", albeit a horrible one, in pursuit of a political agenda. Instead, it has been deliberately redefined, largely by states, to mean a "category of person" - making it easy to ignore the underlying causes while concentrating on the acts.
None of the above should be read as a defence of terror, or even as an argument for armed resistance. The tragedy of Gaza is the acceptance on both sides that killing and oppression have more value than negotiation. And while many in the international community - and in Israel - remain stuck on the idea that the Jewish state has a monopoly on the deployment of the language of "supreme emergency", more violence is inevitable.
Children of Gaza: stories of those who died and the trauma for those who survived
Rory McCarthy reports from Gaza City on the individual stories of some victims and the physical and psychological toll on an estimated 350,000 youngsters
* guardian.co.uk, Friday 23 January 2009
Amal Abed Rabbo, two: one of the children killed during Israeli raids on Gaza
Amal Abed Rabbo, two, photographed by her family after she died in an Israeli attack outside her house in the village of Izbit Abed Rabbo, Gaza, on 7 January 2009
Amira Qirm lay on a hospital bed today with her right leg in plaster, and held together by a line of steel pins dug deep into her skin. For several days after her operation Amira, 15, was unable to speak, and even now talks only in a low whisper.
In her past are bitter memories: watching her father die in the street outside their home, then hearing another shell land and kill her brother Ala'a, 14, and her sister Ismat, 16, and then the three days that she spent alone, injured and semi-conscious, trying to stay alive in a neighbour's abandoned house before she could be rescued last Sunday.
Ahead of her, she has a long recovery. First there is an imminent flight to France for the best possible medical treatment, many more operations and then months of rehabilitation and psychiatric care.
Only now, after most of the dead have been buried, is the first properly researched reckoning of the toll emerging. What already stands out is the striking cost borne by the children of Gaza, who make up more than half of the 1.5 million people living in this overcrowded strip of land.
The Palestinian death toll after three weeks of Israel's war was 1,285, according to the Palestinian Centre for Human Rights, or 1,268, according to the al-Mezan Human Rights Centre. Among those dead were at least 280 children.
The impact will be felt by many more for years to come. Among the more than 4,000 people injured more than a quarter were children, some left with severe disabilities. The Gaza Community Health Programme estimates that half Gaza's children – around 350,000 – will develop some form of post-traumatic stress disorder.
Amira Qirm, who lived in Tel al-Hawa, the scene of some of the heaviest fighting in Gaza City, is among the few in line to receive medical treatment abroad.
Already she has a dream to fulfil once she returns to Gaza. "I want to be a lawyer," she said today , "and to stand in court facing the Israelis for what they have done."
Most of the other children will have to make do with treatment in Gaza. Last week some psychologists were walking through the ruins of a house in Atatra, talking to a boy from the Abu Halima family who had lost his father, three brothers and an infant sister in a horrific fire after an Israeli phosphorus shell hit the house.
"The problem is they are not feeling safe even in their own homes, on the streets, in the mosques," said Ehassan Afifi, the psychologist. "This boy is seeing what happened as if it is an endless movie. The physically affected can be operated on, sometimes cured. But these mental problems may lead to problems for the rest of their lives."
Israel has consistently rejected international criticism that its forces used excessive and indiscriminate firepower.
Asked about the criticisms, the prime minister, Ehud Olmert, said in an interview yesterday in the Israeli paper Ma'ariv that the mental health of the children of southern Israel had suffered in recent years. He added: "So now there is talk about Israel's cruelty. When you win, you automatically hurt more than you've been hurt. And we didn't want to lose this campaign. What did you want, for hundreds of our soldiers to die? That, after all, was the alternative."
On the Israeli side 13 died in this conflict, three of them civilians. In total in the past eight years, 20 people in Israel have died from rocket and mortar attacks launched by militants in Gaza.
Halting this rocket fire was Israel's primary goal and for the last few days, at least, it has achieved its aim.
But Eyad al-Sarraj, a prominent psychiatrist who leads the Gaza community health programme, said that years of violence in Gaza had only fostered radicalism among its young people, who have seen their fathers humiliated and now left defenceless.
His organisation is training 1,000 people to spread out across Gaza to offer help with grief and mourning and to pass serious cases on to professional therapists.
Already there were reports, he said, of children bed-wetting, stuttering, falling mute, having trouble sleeping, becoming violent or restless and losing their appetites.
The difference between this war and the uprisings, like the first intifada of the late 1980s, was that whereas there was once a frontline, with tanks near the border, now the bombing and artillery reached deep inside Gaza's urban areas and into the homes of ordinary families. "Yes, we have developed a coping strategy but we are still frightened of the Israelis doing this again and again," said al-Sarraj.
"The devastation is a reminder of what the Israelis will do. You need to give children a protective environment and give a chance to the fathers to regain their status as protectors and providers by giving them jobs and homes to live in … This is a massive, man-made disaster and we have to tackle the results."
* guardian.co.uk, Friday 23 January 2009
Amal Abed Rabbo, two: one of the children killed during Israeli raids on Gaza
Amal Abed Rabbo, two, photographed by her family after she died in an Israeli attack outside her house in the village of Izbit Abed Rabbo, Gaza, on 7 January 2009
Amira Qirm lay on a hospital bed today with her right leg in plaster, and held together by a line of steel pins dug deep into her skin. For several days after her operation Amira, 15, was unable to speak, and even now talks only in a low whisper.
In her past are bitter memories: watching her father die in the street outside their home, then hearing another shell land and kill her brother Ala'a, 14, and her sister Ismat, 16, and then the three days that she spent alone, injured and semi-conscious, trying to stay alive in a neighbour's abandoned house before she could be rescued last Sunday.
Ahead of her, she has a long recovery. First there is an imminent flight to France for the best possible medical treatment, many more operations and then months of rehabilitation and psychiatric care.
Only now, after most of the dead have been buried, is the first properly researched reckoning of the toll emerging. What already stands out is the striking cost borne by the children of Gaza, who make up more than half of the 1.5 million people living in this overcrowded strip of land.
The Palestinian death toll after three weeks of Israel's war was 1,285, according to the Palestinian Centre for Human Rights, or 1,268, according to the al-Mezan Human Rights Centre. Among those dead were at least 280 children.
The impact will be felt by many more for years to come. Among the more than 4,000 people injured more than a quarter were children, some left with severe disabilities. The Gaza Community Health Programme estimates that half Gaza's children – around 350,000 – will develop some form of post-traumatic stress disorder.
Amira Qirm, who lived in Tel al-Hawa, the scene of some of the heaviest fighting in Gaza City, is among the few in line to receive medical treatment abroad.
Already she has a dream to fulfil once she returns to Gaza. "I want to be a lawyer," she said today , "and to stand in court facing the Israelis for what they have done."
Most of the other children will have to make do with treatment in Gaza. Last week some psychologists were walking through the ruins of a house in Atatra, talking to a boy from the Abu Halima family who had lost his father, three brothers and an infant sister in a horrific fire after an Israeli phosphorus shell hit the house.
"The problem is they are not feeling safe even in their own homes, on the streets, in the mosques," said Ehassan Afifi, the psychologist. "This boy is seeing what happened as if it is an endless movie. The physically affected can be operated on, sometimes cured. But these mental problems may lead to problems for the rest of their lives."
Israel has consistently rejected international criticism that its forces used excessive and indiscriminate firepower.
Asked about the criticisms, the prime minister, Ehud Olmert, said in an interview yesterday in the Israeli paper Ma'ariv that the mental health of the children of southern Israel had suffered in recent years. He added: "So now there is talk about Israel's cruelty. When you win, you automatically hurt more than you've been hurt. And we didn't want to lose this campaign. What did you want, for hundreds of our soldiers to die? That, after all, was the alternative."
On the Israeli side 13 died in this conflict, three of them civilians. In total in the past eight years, 20 people in Israel have died from rocket and mortar attacks launched by militants in Gaza.
Halting this rocket fire was Israel's primary goal and for the last few days, at least, it has achieved its aim.
But Eyad al-Sarraj, a prominent psychiatrist who leads the Gaza community health programme, said that years of violence in Gaza had only fostered radicalism among its young people, who have seen their fathers humiliated and now left defenceless.
His organisation is training 1,000 people to spread out across Gaza to offer help with grief and mourning and to pass serious cases on to professional therapists.
Already there were reports, he said, of children bed-wetting, stuttering, falling mute, having trouble sleeping, becoming violent or restless and losing their appetites.
The difference between this war and the uprisings, like the first intifada of the late 1980s, was that whereas there was once a frontline, with tanks near the border, now the bombing and artillery reached deep inside Gaza's urban areas and into the homes of ordinary families. "Yes, we have developed a coping strategy but we are still frightened of the Israelis doing this again and again," said al-Sarraj.
"The devastation is a reminder of what the Israelis will do. You need to give children a protective environment and give a chance to the fathers to regain their status as protectors and providers by giving them jobs and homes to live in … This is a massive, man-made disaster and we have to tackle the results."
Amid dust and death, a family's story speaks for the terror of war
48 members of the Samouni family were killed in one day when Israel's battle with Hamas suddenly centred on their homes
* Rory McCarthy in Zeitoun guardian.co.uk, Monday 19 January 2009 21.26
Helmi Samouni knelt yesterday on the floor of the bedroom he once shared with his wife and their five-month old son, scraping his fingers through a thick layer of ash and broken glass looking for mementoes of their life together. "I found a ring. I might find more," he said.
His wife Maha and their child Muhammad were killed in the second week of Israel's 22-day war in Gaza when they were shelled by Israeli forces as they took shelter nearby along with dozens of relatives. In total 48 people from one family are now known to have died that Monday morning, 5 January, in Zeitoun, on the southern outskirts of Gaza City.
Of all the horrors visited on the civilians of Gaza in this war the fate of the Samounis, a family of farmers who lived close together in simple breeze-block homes, was perhaps the gravest.
Around a dozen homes in this small area were destroyed, no more than piles of rubble in the sand yesterday. Helmi Samouni's two-storey house was one of the few left standing, despite the gaping hole from a large tank shell that pierced his blackened bedroom wall. During the invasion it had been taken over by Israeli soldiers, who wrecked the furniture and set up sand-bagged shooting positions throughout.
They left behind their own unique detritus: bullet casings, roasted peanuts in tins with Hebrew script, a plastic bag containing a "High Quality Body Warmer", dozens of olive-green waste disposal bags, some empty, some stinking full - the troops' portable toilets.
But most disturbing of all was the graffiti they daubed on the walls of the ground floor. Some was in Hebrew, but much was naively written in English: "Arabs need 2 die", "Die you all", "Make war not peace", "1 is down, 999,999 to go", and scrawled on an image of a gravestone the words: "Arabs 1948-2009".
There were several sketches of the Star of David flag. "Gaza here we are," it said in English next to one.
Helmi's brother Salah, 30, had an apartment in the same house. He too was pulling out what he could, including an Israeli work permit once issued to his father. "They gave him a permit and then they came from Israel and they killed him," said Salah. In the attack he lost both his parents, Talal and Rahma, and his two-year-old daughter Aza.
During the war, Israel banned journalists from entering Gaza. But the accounts of Salah and his neighbours outside the rubble of their homes yesterday corroborate the accounts from witnesses given in the days after the attack, accounts which led the UN to describe the killings at Zeitoun as one of the gravest episodes of the war and the Red Cross to call it, in a rare public rebuke, "a shocking incident".
More than a dozen bodies were pulled from the rubble on Sunday, and one more yesterday, bringing the Samouni death toll to 48, according to Dr Mouawia Hassanein, head of Gaza's Emergency Medical Services. With more bodies being recovered each day, the death toll from Israel's three-week war now stands at 1,360. On the Israeli side, 13 were killed.
On the second Saturday of the war, after a week of Israeli air strikes, there came a wave of heavy artillery shelling which preceded the ground invasion of Gaza. That night, Salah Samouni took shelter on the ground floor with 16 others from his family. By the next morning, Sunday 4 January, more neighbours had come looking for shelter and the number now there was approaching 50.
"They fired a shell into the upstairs floor and it started a fire," said Salah. "We called the ambulance and the fire service, but no one was able to reach us." Soon a group of Israeli soldiers approached. "They came and banged on the door and told everyone to leave the house," he said. They walked a few metres down the dirt road and entered the large, single-storey home of Wa'el Samouni.
There they stayed for the rest of the day, now a group of around 100 men, women and children, with no food and little water. Though there may have been Palestinian fighters operating in the open fields around the houses, all the witnesses are adamant that those gathered in Wa'el Samouni's house were all civilians and all from the same extended family.
On the Monday morning, four of the men - Salah among them - decided to go out to bring back firewood for cooking. "They fired a shell straight at us," Salah said. Two of the four were killed instantly, the other two were injured. Salah was hit by shrapnel on his forehead, his back and his legs. Moments later, he said, two more shells struck the house, killing dozens of them.
Salah and a group of around 70 fled the house, shouting to the soldiers that there were women and children with them. They ran to the main road and on for a kilometre until ambulances could reach them. Others stayed behind.
Wa'el Samouni's father, Faris, 59, lived next door to the house where the crowd had taken shelter. He had a single-storey house with only a corrugated iron roof and so his family had moved next door to shelter, but he had stayed behind. He was unable to leave his building for fear of being shot, but on the Tuesday the survivors called to him to bring water. He ran quickly the short distance and joined them.
"Dead bodies were lying on the ground. Some people were injured, they were just trying to help each other," he said. There among the dead Faris found his wife Rizka, 50; his daughter-in-law Anan; and his granddaughter Huda, 16.
Only on the afternoon of the following day, the Wednesday, were the survivors rescued when the Red Cross arrived to carry them out to hospital.
The Israeli military has said it is investigating what happened at Zeitoun. It has repeatedly denied that its troops ordered the residents to gather in one house and said its troops do not intentionally target civilians.
Others in the family saw a different but equally grim fate. Faraj Samouni, 22, lived with his family next door to Helmi and Salah. Again on the Saturday evening the family had sought shelter from the heavy shelling, a group of 18 of them gathering in one room for the night. On the Sunday morning the Israeli soldiers approached. "They shouted for the owner of the house to come out. My father opened the door and went out and they shot him right there," said Faraj.
With the body of his father Atiya, 45, slumped on the ground outside, the soldiers fired more shots into the room, he said, this time killing Faraj's younger half-brother Ahmad, who was four years old, and the child's mother.
Yesterday there was blood on the wall of the small room where the child had been sitting.
Then the troops ordered them to lie on the floor. But when a fire started burning in the room next door, sending in acrid smoke, they began shouting to be allowed out. "We were shouting 'babies, children'," Faraj said.
Eventually the soldiers let them out and they ran along the street, passing the others who had gathered in Wa'el Samouni's house and making their way out on to the main road and to safety.
When Faraj returned, he found his home completely destroyed, a pile of twisted iron bars and concrete. On a small outdoor grill were the charred remains of the eight aubergines that the family had been cooking that Sunday morning for their breakfast.
Only on Sunday was he able to bury his father's body and even then there was a final injustice: Gaza's graves are now so crowded and concrete so scarce because of Israel's long blockade that he had to break open an older family grave and put his father in with the other corpse.
"How can we have peace when they are killing civilians, even children?" said Faraj. "I support the ceasefire now. We have no power. If there wasn't a ceasefire we couldn't even bury our dead."
Some Gazans speak privately of their anger at Hamas, blaming the Islamist movement that rules the small territory for dragging them into this conflict. But by far the larger majority are speaking now of their bitter anger at Israel and their deep resentment at the apathy of the Arab world and the rest of the international community, which failed to halt the destruction and the killing.
"We blame everyone," said Ibrahim Samouni, 45, who lost his wife and four of his sons in the killings at Zeitoun. "We need everyone to look at us and see what has happened here. We are not resistance fighters. We are ordinary people."
* Rory McCarthy in Zeitoun guardian.co.uk, Monday 19 January 2009 21.26
Helmi Samouni knelt yesterday on the floor of the bedroom he once shared with his wife and their five-month old son, scraping his fingers through a thick layer of ash and broken glass looking for mementoes of their life together. "I found a ring. I might find more," he said.
His wife Maha and their child Muhammad were killed in the second week of Israel's 22-day war in Gaza when they were shelled by Israeli forces as they took shelter nearby along with dozens of relatives. In total 48 people from one family are now known to have died that Monday morning, 5 January, in Zeitoun, on the southern outskirts of Gaza City.
Of all the horrors visited on the civilians of Gaza in this war the fate of the Samounis, a family of farmers who lived close together in simple breeze-block homes, was perhaps the gravest.
Around a dozen homes in this small area were destroyed, no more than piles of rubble in the sand yesterday. Helmi Samouni's two-storey house was one of the few left standing, despite the gaping hole from a large tank shell that pierced his blackened bedroom wall. During the invasion it had been taken over by Israeli soldiers, who wrecked the furniture and set up sand-bagged shooting positions throughout.
They left behind their own unique detritus: bullet casings, roasted peanuts in tins with Hebrew script, a plastic bag containing a "High Quality Body Warmer", dozens of olive-green waste disposal bags, some empty, some stinking full - the troops' portable toilets.
But most disturbing of all was the graffiti they daubed on the walls of the ground floor. Some was in Hebrew, but much was naively written in English: "Arabs need 2 die", "Die you all", "Make war not peace", "1 is down, 999,999 to go", and scrawled on an image of a gravestone the words: "Arabs 1948-2009".
There were several sketches of the Star of David flag. "Gaza here we are," it said in English next to one.
Helmi's brother Salah, 30, had an apartment in the same house. He too was pulling out what he could, including an Israeli work permit once issued to his father. "They gave him a permit and then they came from Israel and they killed him," said Salah. In the attack he lost both his parents, Talal and Rahma, and his two-year-old daughter Aza.
During the war, Israel banned journalists from entering Gaza. But the accounts of Salah and his neighbours outside the rubble of their homes yesterday corroborate the accounts from witnesses given in the days after the attack, accounts which led the UN to describe the killings at Zeitoun as one of the gravest episodes of the war and the Red Cross to call it, in a rare public rebuke, "a shocking incident".
More than a dozen bodies were pulled from the rubble on Sunday, and one more yesterday, bringing the Samouni death toll to 48, according to Dr Mouawia Hassanein, head of Gaza's Emergency Medical Services. With more bodies being recovered each day, the death toll from Israel's three-week war now stands at 1,360. On the Israeli side, 13 were killed.
On the second Saturday of the war, after a week of Israeli air strikes, there came a wave of heavy artillery shelling which preceded the ground invasion of Gaza. That night, Salah Samouni took shelter on the ground floor with 16 others from his family. By the next morning, Sunday 4 January, more neighbours had come looking for shelter and the number now there was approaching 50.
"They fired a shell into the upstairs floor and it started a fire," said Salah. "We called the ambulance and the fire service, but no one was able to reach us." Soon a group of Israeli soldiers approached. "They came and banged on the door and told everyone to leave the house," he said. They walked a few metres down the dirt road and entered the large, single-storey home of Wa'el Samouni.
There they stayed for the rest of the day, now a group of around 100 men, women and children, with no food and little water. Though there may have been Palestinian fighters operating in the open fields around the houses, all the witnesses are adamant that those gathered in Wa'el Samouni's house were all civilians and all from the same extended family.
On the Monday morning, four of the men - Salah among them - decided to go out to bring back firewood for cooking. "They fired a shell straight at us," Salah said. Two of the four were killed instantly, the other two were injured. Salah was hit by shrapnel on his forehead, his back and his legs. Moments later, he said, two more shells struck the house, killing dozens of them.
Salah and a group of around 70 fled the house, shouting to the soldiers that there were women and children with them. They ran to the main road and on for a kilometre until ambulances could reach them. Others stayed behind.
Wa'el Samouni's father, Faris, 59, lived next door to the house where the crowd had taken shelter. He had a single-storey house with only a corrugated iron roof and so his family had moved next door to shelter, but he had stayed behind. He was unable to leave his building for fear of being shot, but on the Tuesday the survivors called to him to bring water. He ran quickly the short distance and joined them.
"Dead bodies were lying on the ground. Some people were injured, they were just trying to help each other," he said. There among the dead Faris found his wife Rizka, 50; his daughter-in-law Anan; and his granddaughter Huda, 16.
Only on the afternoon of the following day, the Wednesday, were the survivors rescued when the Red Cross arrived to carry them out to hospital.
The Israeli military has said it is investigating what happened at Zeitoun. It has repeatedly denied that its troops ordered the residents to gather in one house and said its troops do not intentionally target civilians.
Others in the family saw a different but equally grim fate. Faraj Samouni, 22, lived with his family next door to Helmi and Salah. Again on the Saturday evening the family had sought shelter from the heavy shelling, a group of 18 of them gathering in one room for the night. On the Sunday morning the Israeli soldiers approached. "They shouted for the owner of the house to come out. My father opened the door and went out and they shot him right there," said Faraj.
With the body of his father Atiya, 45, slumped on the ground outside, the soldiers fired more shots into the room, he said, this time killing Faraj's younger half-brother Ahmad, who was four years old, and the child's mother.
Yesterday there was blood on the wall of the small room where the child had been sitting.
Then the troops ordered them to lie on the floor. But when a fire started burning in the room next door, sending in acrid smoke, they began shouting to be allowed out. "We were shouting 'babies, children'," Faraj said.
Eventually the soldiers let them out and they ran along the street, passing the others who had gathered in Wa'el Samouni's house and making their way out on to the main road and to safety.
When Faraj returned, he found his home completely destroyed, a pile of twisted iron bars and concrete. On a small outdoor grill were the charred remains of the eight aubergines that the family had been cooking that Sunday morning for their breakfast.
Only on Sunday was he able to bury his father's body and even then there was a final injustice: Gaza's graves are now so crowded and concrete so scarce because of Israel's long blockade that he had to break open an older family grave and put his father in with the other corpse.
"How can we have peace when they are killing civilians, even children?" said Faraj. "I support the ceasefire now. We have no power. If there wasn't a ceasefire we couldn't even bury our dead."
Some Gazans speak privately of their anger at Hamas, blaming the Islamist movement that rules the small territory for dragging them into this conflict. But by far the larger majority are speaking now of their bitter anger at Israel and their deep resentment at the apathy of the Arab world and the rest of the international community, which failed to halt the destruction and the killing.
"We blame everyone," said Ibrahim Samouni, 45, who lost his wife and four of his sons in the killings at Zeitoun. "We need everyone to look at us and see what has happened here. We are not resistance fighters. We are ordinary people."
Monday, 26 January 2009
Ultimate aim remains unclear as government prepares for next move
Chris McGreal in Jerusalem The Guardian, Monday 12 January 2009 Article history
The problem is to define victory. At first, Israel said that the goal of its onslaught against Gaza was to stop the Hamas rockets. But after more than two weeks and nearly 900 Palestinians killed, almost a third of them children and young people, the rockets are still flying into Israel by the dozen each day.
So then Israel said the end game was deterrence - to make Hamas recognise that the price of breaching the next ceasefire was so high it would no longer fire the rockets even if it has them.
But there are many among Israel's political and military elite who doubt that deterrence works with the Islamist group. Every rocket fired into Israel is a victory for Hamas and it is unlikely to stop unless a ceasefire comes with major Israeli concessions, such as lifting the economic blockade of Gaza. And then Hamas would claim its own victory.
So the army has been preparing militarily and politically for phase three - an escalation of the assault that is thought likely to include a major offensive into urban areas such as Gaza City, with all the risks that street fighting brings.
Hamas has said that if Israel attacked the city it would fall into its trap and that the Israeli military would lose so many soldiers battling through the warren of narrow streets, facing roadside bombs and hit-and-run attacks, that the Israeli public would never stand for it.
The army claims Hamas's armed wing has taken a severe beating and that the relatively low number of Israeli casualties so far - with nine soldiers killed, four of them by an Israeli shell - is evidence that resistance is failing.
"The experience so far shows that Gaza is not turning in to a death trap for the Israeli forces," said Shlomo Brom, a former chief of strategic planning in the Israeli military. "I don't think fear of casualties is the concern here. The concern is to decide what this operation is for. The political cost will be dependent on what is in phase three."
The military and the politicians are divided not only over whether to go to phase three, but what it is intended to achieve.
Brom said one goal would be to ensure that Hamas could no longer smuggle weapons into Gaza through tunnels under the border with Egypt.
"If there is breakdown in the next ceasefire the rockets will be launched not only against Be'er Sheva but Tel Aviv," he said. "We want to prevent it, and that was not achieved yet. That is not simple to achieve because we don't expect Hamas to deliver it.
"We expect the Egyptians to deliver it, so one of the purposes of the continuation of the fighting is to put pressure on Egypt or the international community to put pressure on Egypt."
If that is the goal, then the focus of the next phase of the assault will be along the border with Egypt where Israel may reoccupy the frontier and bring the Gazan town of Rafah under its control. Israel has tried occupying Rafah before and been forced out by the high number of Israeli casualties.
However, there are those in the military who see phase three as serving another purpose entirely.
The Israeli press reported yesterday that the officer in command of military operations in Gaza had urged the cabinet to allow the army to make the most of a "once in a generation" opportunity.
"If we don't do that we'll be missing a historic opportunity," Major General Yoav Galant is reported to have said.
Brom said Galant's history opportunity was a desire to topple Gaza's Islamist government.
"I think the main risk in this campaign is that through a series of incremental decisions to go a step further we may find ourselves in a situation in which eventually we change the objective of the war, and instead of the objective being to create this new balance of deterrence, the objective will be to topple Hamas, to destroy Hamas," he said.
Such a move would be fraught with danger, not least the risk of becoming trapped in Gaza in order to maintain control if the Hamas administration is toppled, he continued. "I think we are capable of taking the city of Gaza with a relatively small number of casualties.
"The problem is whether we are not changing our political aims and creating a situation in which we are bogged down in Gaza, in the sense that we reoccupy the Gaza Strip and now we have to decide what we are going to do with this poisonous beast."
Military stages
Phase One On the first day of the week-long air bombardment of Gaza about 250 Gazans were killed, many of them policemen at a graduation ceremony. In the following days, much of the public infrastructure was bombed.
Phase Two During the ground invasion a week later, Israeli tanks and troops seized large parts of northern Gaza, principally areas from where Hamas fired rockets into Israel. They also laid siege to towns and refugee camps.
Phase Three This is the planned ground operation into urban areas such as Gaza City. Hamas has said the city streets will be the soldiers' graveyard. But some in the army believe Hamas has been considerably weakened and such an operation would topple it from power.
Phase Four Plans for the complete reoccupation of Gaza have been drawn up, but the Israeli government says this is not on the cards.
The problem is to define victory. At first, Israel said that the goal of its onslaught against Gaza was to stop the Hamas rockets. But after more than two weeks and nearly 900 Palestinians killed, almost a third of them children and young people, the rockets are still flying into Israel by the dozen each day.
So then Israel said the end game was deterrence - to make Hamas recognise that the price of breaching the next ceasefire was so high it would no longer fire the rockets even if it has them.
But there are many among Israel's political and military elite who doubt that deterrence works with the Islamist group. Every rocket fired into Israel is a victory for Hamas and it is unlikely to stop unless a ceasefire comes with major Israeli concessions, such as lifting the economic blockade of Gaza. And then Hamas would claim its own victory.
So the army has been preparing militarily and politically for phase three - an escalation of the assault that is thought likely to include a major offensive into urban areas such as Gaza City, with all the risks that street fighting brings.
Hamas has said that if Israel attacked the city it would fall into its trap and that the Israeli military would lose so many soldiers battling through the warren of narrow streets, facing roadside bombs and hit-and-run attacks, that the Israeli public would never stand for it.
The army claims Hamas's armed wing has taken a severe beating and that the relatively low number of Israeli casualties so far - with nine soldiers killed, four of them by an Israeli shell - is evidence that resistance is failing.
"The experience so far shows that Gaza is not turning in to a death trap for the Israeli forces," said Shlomo Brom, a former chief of strategic planning in the Israeli military. "I don't think fear of casualties is the concern here. The concern is to decide what this operation is for. The political cost will be dependent on what is in phase three."
The military and the politicians are divided not only over whether to go to phase three, but what it is intended to achieve.
Brom said one goal would be to ensure that Hamas could no longer smuggle weapons into Gaza through tunnels under the border with Egypt.
"If there is breakdown in the next ceasefire the rockets will be launched not only against Be'er Sheva but Tel Aviv," he said. "We want to prevent it, and that was not achieved yet. That is not simple to achieve because we don't expect Hamas to deliver it.
"We expect the Egyptians to deliver it, so one of the purposes of the continuation of the fighting is to put pressure on Egypt or the international community to put pressure on Egypt."
If that is the goal, then the focus of the next phase of the assault will be along the border with Egypt where Israel may reoccupy the frontier and bring the Gazan town of Rafah under its control. Israel has tried occupying Rafah before and been forced out by the high number of Israeli casualties.
However, there are those in the military who see phase three as serving another purpose entirely.
The Israeli press reported yesterday that the officer in command of military operations in Gaza had urged the cabinet to allow the army to make the most of a "once in a generation" opportunity.
"If we don't do that we'll be missing a historic opportunity," Major General Yoav Galant is reported to have said.
Brom said Galant's history opportunity was a desire to topple Gaza's Islamist government.
"I think the main risk in this campaign is that through a series of incremental decisions to go a step further we may find ourselves in a situation in which eventually we change the objective of the war, and instead of the objective being to create this new balance of deterrence, the objective will be to topple Hamas, to destroy Hamas," he said.
Such a move would be fraught with danger, not least the risk of becoming trapped in Gaza in order to maintain control if the Hamas administration is toppled, he continued. "I think we are capable of taking the city of Gaza with a relatively small number of casualties.
"The problem is whether we are not changing our political aims and creating a situation in which we are bogged down in Gaza, in the sense that we reoccupy the Gaza Strip and now we have to decide what we are going to do with this poisonous beast."
Military stages
Phase One On the first day of the week-long air bombardment of Gaza about 250 Gazans were killed, many of them policemen at a graduation ceremony. In the following days, much of the public infrastructure was bombed.
Phase Two During the ground invasion a week later, Israeli tanks and troops seized large parts of northern Gaza, principally areas from where Hamas fired rockets into Israel. They also laid siege to towns and refugee camps.
Phase Three This is the planned ground operation into urban areas such as Gaza City. Hamas has said the city streets will be the soldiers' graveyard. But some in the army believe Hamas has been considerably weakened and such an operation would topple it from power.
Phase Four Plans for the complete reoccupation of Gaza have been drawn up, but the Israeli government says this is not on the cards.
'This one to the morgue, this one to intensive care'
Rory McCarthy in Jerusalem and Hazem Balousha in Gaza City The Guardian, Monday 12 January 2009 Article history
Karem Batniji, a young surgeon at the Shifa Hospital, Gaza's main medical facility, worked straight through the first 48 hours of Israel's war in Gaza. These have been gruelling days for Gaza's doctors: long hours, immense pressure and thousands of horrifically wounded patients to treat - many of them civilians. In the initial days of the Israeli offensive, hundreds of patients would arrive at once.
"I was dealing with some people in the corridor, even making operations in the corridors," he said. "On the first day we were just looking for the good cases, the people most likely to make it. With the badly injured we'd spend a long time, exhaust ourselves and take up a lot of staff, so we just had to find the good cases and focus on them," he said.
"When they brought the bodies in, I found myself standing there saying: this one to the morgue, this one to the intensive care unit, this one the morgue ... It was very hard." Among the dead have been medics: at least 11 medical staff had been killed and another 17 injured as of Wednesday last week, according to health officials.
After two days on duty, Batniji went home. "I couldn't sleep. I was just remembering: the cases, the blood, the operations, the corridors. I thought a lot about the difference between life and death. It's often just a few seconds."
Batniji, 29, trained to be a doctor in Egypt. But nothing there prepared him for what he now sees every hour in the operating room.
After operating on a 50-year-old woman with a serious stomach injury one day last week, he slipped out for a quiet cigarette. Before he could finish it he was called back in for emergency surgery on Osama Lobbed, 18, who his family insisted was a civilian. A first-year university student, he was hit by shrapnel from an Israeli shell as he stood outside his Beit Lahiya home. He was clinging to life: both his legs almost completely severed, his stomach full of shrapnel, his liver sliced in two.
The boy's family stood outside in the corridor to wait. Three hours later, the patient was sent down by lift to the intensive care unit, with a nurse operating a manual ventilator, and the family crowded round Batniji as he stepped out of the theatre. "What's going on? How's Osama?" they all shouted at once. "He's in a very bad situation," the surgeon told them. What he could not bring himself to say was that although he had avoided amputating Lobbed's legs, the boy would almost certainly die.
Batniji and some colleagues later discussed the contorted politics of Gaza. "Sometimes I disagree with these Hamas people but we are human beings, we are one people. I'm a doctor and dealing with patients as a doctor," he said. "Nothing more."
Even some of the world's most experienced war surgeons have found the situation at the Shifa particularly difficult. "It's quite gruesome. The hospital is the place where you have the ultimate confrontation with the facts of this kind of armed conflict," said Harald Veen, a Dutch surgeon who is part of a four-person team from the International Committee of the Red Cross who have spent the past week helping at the Shifa.
Because the hospital is in the centre of a city under heavy bombardment, patients who might otherwise have died are often brought in and operated on within 20 minutes of being hurt and sometimes survive, though with terrible scars and disabilities.
He said the doctors, whom he knows well from several years of visits to the Shifa, were well trained and that any large western hospital would be overwhelmed by the number of casualties they had seen. He was struck by the commitment of the doctors but said even for Gaza this was an unprecedented burden. "It's never been like this. That's obvious for everybody," he said.
Veen has worked in conflicts for the past 16 years, most recently in Iraq and Chad. But he is still struck by the appalling injuries. "One day started with a girl, six years old, with one arm blown away and a tear in her lung, and that's just the first operation," he said. "If they survive it's a lifelong disability. The day before, a man with both legs blown away. I fear in the western media we are too clean. War wounds are horrible, especially blast injuries due to high explosives. Simply put, bombing causes horrible injuries. This is the routine of daily life in the Shifa."
Karem Batniji, a young surgeon at the Shifa Hospital, Gaza's main medical facility, worked straight through the first 48 hours of Israel's war in Gaza. These have been gruelling days for Gaza's doctors: long hours, immense pressure and thousands of horrifically wounded patients to treat - many of them civilians. In the initial days of the Israeli offensive, hundreds of patients would arrive at once.
"I was dealing with some people in the corridor, even making operations in the corridors," he said. "On the first day we were just looking for the good cases, the people most likely to make it. With the badly injured we'd spend a long time, exhaust ourselves and take up a lot of staff, so we just had to find the good cases and focus on them," he said.
"When they brought the bodies in, I found myself standing there saying: this one to the morgue, this one to the intensive care unit, this one the morgue ... It was very hard." Among the dead have been medics: at least 11 medical staff had been killed and another 17 injured as of Wednesday last week, according to health officials.
After two days on duty, Batniji went home. "I couldn't sleep. I was just remembering: the cases, the blood, the operations, the corridors. I thought a lot about the difference between life and death. It's often just a few seconds."
Batniji, 29, trained to be a doctor in Egypt. But nothing there prepared him for what he now sees every hour in the operating room.
After operating on a 50-year-old woman with a serious stomach injury one day last week, he slipped out for a quiet cigarette. Before he could finish it he was called back in for emergency surgery on Osama Lobbed, 18, who his family insisted was a civilian. A first-year university student, he was hit by shrapnel from an Israeli shell as he stood outside his Beit Lahiya home. He was clinging to life: both his legs almost completely severed, his stomach full of shrapnel, his liver sliced in two.
The boy's family stood outside in the corridor to wait. Three hours later, the patient was sent down by lift to the intensive care unit, with a nurse operating a manual ventilator, and the family crowded round Batniji as he stepped out of the theatre. "What's going on? How's Osama?" they all shouted at once. "He's in a very bad situation," the surgeon told them. What he could not bring himself to say was that although he had avoided amputating Lobbed's legs, the boy would almost certainly die.
Batniji and some colleagues later discussed the contorted politics of Gaza. "Sometimes I disagree with these Hamas people but we are human beings, we are one people. I'm a doctor and dealing with patients as a doctor," he said. "Nothing more."
Even some of the world's most experienced war surgeons have found the situation at the Shifa particularly difficult. "It's quite gruesome. The hospital is the place where you have the ultimate confrontation with the facts of this kind of armed conflict," said Harald Veen, a Dutch surgeon who is part of a four-person team from the International Committee of the Red Cross who have spent the past week helping at the Shifa.
Because the hospital is in the centre of a city under heavy bombardment, patients who might otherwise have died are often brought in and operated on within 20 minutes of being hurt and sometimes survive, though with terrible scars and disabilities.
He said the doctors, whom he knows well from several years of visits to the Shifa, were well trained and that any large western hospital would be overwhelmed by the number of casualties they had seen. He was struck by the commitment of the doctors but said even for Gaza this was an unprecedented burden. "It's never been like this. That's obvious for everybody," he said.
Veen has worked in conflicts for the past 16 years, most recently in Iraq and Chad. But he is still struck by the appalling injuries. "One day started with a girl, six years old, with one arm blown away and a tear in her lung, and that's just the first operation," he said. "If they survive it's a lifelong disability. The day before, a man with both legs blown away. I fear in the western media we are too clean. War wounds are horrible, especially blast injuries due to high explosives. Simply put, bombing causes horrible injuries. This is the routine of daily life in the Shifa."
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