By Djenar Siti
Hi all,
today too I'm here to make my part to spread the real news from the Gaza Strip attack to make people aware of the actual humanitarian tragedy that is happening there.
This is another post and luckily also an Italia newspaper story by Vittorio Arrigoni, the last Italian in Gaza.
The piece was translated and reported by the Free Gaza Movement, on their website you can find a comprehensive coverage of the situation.
They parade in fear, their eyes looking upwards, surrendering to the sky showering terror and death upon them, fearing the earth that keeps shaking under every step they take, opening craters where there were houses, schools, universities, markets, hospitals, and burying their lives within them forever. I've seen caravans of desperate Palestinians evacuate Jabalia, Beit Hanoun and all the refugee camps in Gaza, crowding the United Nations' schools like earthquake survivors, like victims of a tsunami which is eating into the Gaza Strip day by day, along with its civilian population, without pity or compliance with human rights and the Geneva Conventions. Most of all, without a single Western government stirring a finger to stop this massacre, or sending medical staff out here, or stopping the genocide that Israel is smearing its hands with in these hours.
The indiscriminate attacks against the hospitals and medical staff continue. Yesterday, after having left the Al Auda hospital in Jabalia, I received a call from Alberto, a Spanish colleague at the ISM - a bomb had been dropped there and Abu Mohammed, a nurse, had been seriously injured to his head. Just moments before, in front of a café, I'd been listening to his stories of the heroic deeds of Communist Abu Mohammed's heroes, the leaders of the Popular Front: George Habbash, Abu Ali Mustafa, Ahmad Al Sadat. His eyes lit up when he heard that the first notions of what Palestine and its immense tragedy were, had been passed onto me by my parents, both Communists through and through. By my mother, a "raissa", or Mayor of a town in Northern Italy. He asked me who had been the truly revolutionary leaders of the Italian left from the past, and I said Antonio Gramsci. For those of today I took my time, telling him I'd have replied to that question today. But Abu Mohammed now lies in a coma, in the same hospital where he works. He spared himself my disappointing reply.
Towards midnight I received another call, from Eva this time - the building she was in was under attack. I know that building well, in the centre of Gaza City. I've spent a night there with some Palestinian photojournalist friends of mine. They try to capture through images and words something of the unnatural catastrophe we're enduring in the last ten days. Reuters, Fox News, Russia Today and many, many other local or foreign agencies were under fire by seven rockets shot by an Israeli helicopter. They managed to evacuate everyone on time before anyone was seriously injured - all those cameramen, photographers, reporters - all Palestinian, considering Israel won't allow any international journalists to set foot in Gaza. There are no "strategic" targets around that building, nor a resistance fighting off the deadly armoured Israeli vehicles, which can be found a way away towards the North. Clearly, someone in Tel Aviv cannot bear the images of the massacres of civilians clashing with the ones that the Israeli officers' briefings provide while offering the mercenary journalists their aperitif. Through these press conferences they're declaring to the world that the bombs' targets are only the Hamas terrorists, not those atrociously mutilated children we pull out of the rubble every day.
At Zetun, about ten kilometres from Jabalia, a bombed building crumbled over a family, leaving about ten victims. The ambulances had to wait several hours before they could reach the spot, as the military persist in shooting at us. They shoot at ambulances and bomb hospitals. A few days ago, while I was on the air with a well-known Milanese radio station, an Israeli "pacifist" clearly spelt out to me that this was a war where both sides used all the weapons at their disposal. I thus invite Israel to drop one of its many atomic bombs upon us, those they keep secretly stashed away, defying all treaties against nuclear proliferation. Why not just drop that decisive bomb of theirs and put an end to the inhuman agony of thousands of bodies, lying in tatters in the overcrowded hospital wards I visited?
I took some black and white photos yesterday, the caravans of mule-drawn carts, overloaded beyond belief with children waving white drapes pointing skywards, their faces pale and terrified. Looking through those snaps of fleeing refugees today, I felt shivers down my spine. If they could only be superimposed with those witnessing the Nakba of 1948, the Palestinian catastrophe, they would be a perfect mirror image of them. The cowardly passiveness of self-styled democratic states and governments are responsible for a new catastrophe in full swing right now, a new Nakba, a brand new ethnic cleansing befalling the Palestinian population.
Until a few moments ago we counted 650 dead, 153 murdered children, in addition to 3,000 injured, and innumerable missing. The number of civilian deaths in Israel has thankfully stopped at 4. But after this afternoon the death toll on the Palestinian side requires an urgent recount since the Israeli Army has started attacking the United Nations schools. The very same that had been offering shelter to the thousands evacuated under threat of an imminent attack. They chased them off the refugee camps, the villages, only to collect them all in one place, an easier target. Three schools were attacked today, the last being at Al Fakhura, in Jabalia, which was hit full on its head. Over 80 dead. In a heartbeat, men, women, elderly people and children were wiped away, believing themselves to be safe within those blue-tinted walls adorned with a UN logo. The other 20 UN schools are now shaking in fear. There's no way out anywhere in the Gaza Strip. This isn't Lebanon, where the civilians in the Southern villages targeted by the Israeli bombs could flee to the North, or to Syria or Jordan. From one enormous open-air prison, the Gaza Strip has become a deadly trap. We look at one another in bewilderment and ask ourselves whether the UN Security Council will finally unanimously condemn these attacks after their own schools have been targeted. Someone out there has really decided to turn this place into a desert, and then call it peace.
A long night on the ambulances awaits us now, even after dawn has become an illusion around here. Antenna towers for our mobile phones all along the Strip have been destroyed and we've stopped relying on them. I hope I may one day be able to see all the friends I can no longer contact, but I'm under no illusions. Everyone bar none in Gaza is a walking target.
The Italian Consulate has just contacted me, saying that tomorrow they shall evacuate a fellow Italian, an elderly nun who'd lived near the Catholic church in Gaza for the last twenty years, and had by now been adopted by the Palestinians in the Strip. The consul gently urged me to seize this last opportunity and escape this hell with the nun. I thanked him for the offer, but I'm not moving from here - I just can't. For the sake of the losses we endured, before being Italian, Spanish, British or Australian, right now we are all Palestinian. If only we could do that for just one minute a day, the way we were all Jewish during the Holocaust, I think we would have been spared this entire massacre.
Stay human
Vittorio Arrigoni
(Translated from Italian by Daniela Filippin)
By Djenar Siti
Also tonight I cannot stand from write the last news from Vittorio Arrigoni, the la Italian in Gaza during this true masked terroristic operation that but the real enemys of Hamas is aiming volutarly innocent civilians, women, children and is demolishing on purpose any building mosques, schools, civilian houses or hospitals full of casualities.
I would apologize for the "though" photo I'm reporting from Vik's blog, but I'm not really be able to do that because there is no "political correctness" or "taste" about that: for all of us this is only a picture that brings to us a sense of indignation making us aware of what for those people are only stills from an infernal reality!
«"To the innocent people of Gaza, our war is not against you but against Hamas, if they don't stop to launch rockets you will be in danger". It is the transcript or a recording that is possible to hear in these hours pulling up the receiver of every phone in Gaza. Israeli Army is broadcasting this message deceiving that the palestinians don't have eyes and ears. Eyes to see bombs hitting almost exclusively civilian targets, as mosques (15, the last one was the Omar Bin Abd Al Azeez in Beit Hanoun), schools, universities, markets, hospitals. Ears not to hear the screams of pain and terror of the children, innocent victims and nevertheless innocent victims of every bombing. According to hospital sources, in the momento when I'm writing 120 are the minors killed under the bombs, 548 the total dead, more thant 2700 the injured, dozens and dozens the missing.
Two days ago in the red half moon hospital in Jabalia's refugee camp, there the night haven't never fell down. From the sky the Apache helicopters dropped flashing bombs continously, that we weren't aware of a kind of difference from sunset to dawn.
The repeated cannon shootings from a tank placed less than a kilometer from the hospital damaged seriously the walls of the building, but we resisted till next morning. Around 10.00AM, bombs fell on the open field near the building, all around machine gun shooting, and for the red half moon doctors that was a message to us, sudden evacuation, or we would have been killed. We transfered the injured in other hospital infrastructures and now the operative base for the ambulances is on Al Nady road, the medical staff sits on the sidewalks waiting for the calls, that are following one another.
For the first time from Israeli attack I saw in the hospital some corpses of palestinian resistance. A tiny number in proportion with the hundreds of the civilian victims, that after the ground invasion are rising exponentially.
After Jabalia mosque attack, at the same time with the tanks entering, that made 11 victims and about 50 injured, for all the saturday night escorting the ambulances, we were aware of the tremendous destrctive power of the tanks projectiles, even if we didn't feel the absence on even more destructions on previous days. In Bet Hanoun a family was hit by one of this deadly shot, they were in their home just warming up themself beside a tiny wood stove. We took 15 injured, 4 were in desperate conditions.
After that, around half past 3 AM we answered to a call, but we arrived too late: in front of an house door three women in tears, gave us in the arms a little 4 years old girl in a white blanket, that was her shroud and she was already icy-cold.
A further family was hit at full, this time by the aviation, in Jabalia, two adults got bomb fragments inside their body. Their two sons had light wounds, but as they were shouting and crying it was evident the psycologic trauma they were living, something that will mark them for their whole life, far more than a slash on their cheeks. Even if nobody is remembering to take them into account, thousands are the children affected by serious mental illness caused by the terror of the contious bombing, or even worse, by the sight of their parents or brothers and sisters torn into pieces.
The crimes Israeli is committing in these hours are well beyond the limits of immagination.
The military don't let us go to take care of the survivors of this huge artificial catastrophe.
When the injured people are near Israeli tanks which attacked them, we are not allowed to get near with our red half moon ambulances because soldiers begin to shoot at us.
We would need the escort of even an ambulance from the red cross, and of their coordination with the Israeli military heads, before to run to save lives.
Try to imagine how much time would need a procedure like that, that's for sure a death sentence for the injured needing for transfusions and emergency treatments.
Even more the red cross has his casualities to think about, and could not be available at every call from us. Then we must every time in a "safe" area, (this is like a "joke" here in Gaza) waiting for the relatives to bring us the dying people, often on their very backs. Like this happened about at 5.30AM this morning, we shutdown the ambulance's engine in the middle of a road cross and told by phone our position to a relative of the injured people there. After about ten minutes of frustrating waiting, when someone had already decided to switch on the engine to go to another call, we saw around the corner coming to us, slowly, a little cart full of people, pulled by a mule. A couple with their two little sons. The best representation of this "non-war". This is not a war because there aren't two armies fighting on a front, this is a siege from an Air Force, a Navy and now even from the Infantry that are ones of the most powerful in the world, and for sure the most advanced in means of hi-tech military equipment. They attacked a miserable strip of land of 360 square kilometers, where the population is moving still thanks to mules and where there is a resistance army that has the only strenght of being ready for its own martyrdom. When the little cart was enough near to us we get to meet them, and with horror we discovers its terrific load. A little child laid down with his head broken, his eyes were literally outside his head, moving on his face like the crabs ones. We took him and he was already breathing. His brother intead had his body torn, we could see and count his white rids beyond his torn flesh pieces. His mother held his hands on that "opened" body, as she was trying to fix what her love could generate and what the anonymous hatred of a soldiera, obeying strictly to sadistic orders, destroyed forever.
I must denounce a further crime, and our further personal mourning. Israeli army is going on aiming at the ambulances. After the doctor and the nurses dead in Jabalia 4 days ago, yesterday was the turn of our friend Arafa Abed Al Dayem, he was 35 and leaves 4 sons. About at 8.30AM yesterday morning we got a call from Gaza City, two civilians where shot machine gun fire from a tank, one of our ambulances went there. Arafa and a male nurse took the two injured in the ambulance, closed the doors ready to start the run for the hospital, an then they were hit at full by a tank shot. The hit beheaded one of the injured, and killed our friend, Nader the nurse survived but now is in the same hospital where he works. Arafa, primary school teacher, offerd himself as paramedic volunteer when were no professionals enogh. We are all under a death rain, and no one called him. Araf went at the hospital by himself, and was working knowing the danger he was dealing with, because he believed that beyond his family there were other human beings to defend and to take care of.
We miss his jokes, his irresistible and contagious sense of humour that gladden the hospital even his its darkest hours when the dead are more than the injured and everyone feel himself guilty not to have done something to save them, pressed as we are by an inesorable force: the dead machine of Israeli military.
Someone must stop this tragedy, I saw things in these days, heard thunders, smelled awful odors, that if I will have descendants one day, I won't have the courage to tell them. Is there anybody out there? The desolation to feel isolated and abandoned to our doom, is as the view of a Gaza district after a huge raid campaing. On Saturday evening they passed me on the phone Milan's place in protest, I passed the phone as well to the heroic doctors and nurses we are working with, I saw them take heart for a moment. The prostest all over the world demonstrate that still exists someone to believe in, but the protests aren't enough big to make the needed pressure in order that the western governments will force Israel to assume its responsabilities as criminal of war and against humanity.
Many are the terrified pregnant women that in these hours are giving life to their sons in premature births.
I personally was present at three births. One of these women, at the seven months, gave birth to a small child called Ahmed. Riding with her on board ambulance heading Auda hospital leaving behing us in the ambulance mirrors the scene of death and destruction where just before we were taking corpses, I thought for a moment that this life just at its bloom could be a wish for a future of peace and hope.
Illussion dissolved witht the first rocket that fell apart our ambulance when we were getting back from Auda to Jabalia center. These brave mothers are sadly giving birth to creatures that took as the first light in their eyes no more than the military green of the tanks and jeeps, and the intermittent flashes that come just before the loud thunders from the explosions. What are could be the life expectations of these children that are feeling all this suffering and this destructions from the very first seconds of their life?
Let's remain humans
Vik»
By Djenar Siti
Hi all, I finally write on this pages because, even if I don't have that free time, I cannot resist from tell what is shocking me for some days...
I decided to do a simple thing: copy and try to translate the one that is up to now the latest post from an Italian human rights actvists on his blog. He is the only Italiano living inside Gaza Strip at the moment. The post was written on December 29th, and there is only an "half interview" as an update because of the very hard communications problem of these hours.
I'd ask you not to comment this post. The most intelligent thing you can do is to shut down the TV and the mainstream media and to spread voices like this one. Free voices, without any interest and thanks to this totally pure in their indignation.
Here you are my best wishes for a 2009 far from the common and comfortable point of views, to be able to listen, understand and move other people to be aware of what is happeining in these complicated circumstances rather than shout stupid, ignorant and commomn judges in black and white forgetting common people lives.
Pungent sulphur smell in the air. Flashes lit between clanging thunders.
Now my ears are dull because of the explosions, and my eyes dry of tears before the corpses.
I'm in front of Al Shifa Hospital, the main one in Gaza. It's just arrived the terrible threat that Israel would have decided to bomb the new section of the building, currently under construction.
This wouldn't be a news, yesterday was bombed Wea'm Hospital along with a drug warehouse in Rafah, the islamic university (destroyed), and several mosques along all the Gaza Strip, not to mention dozens of CIVIL buildings.
It seems that finished the "considerable" targets, the air force and the navy are delighting aiming at holy places, schools and hospitals.
It's a 9/11 at every hour, every minute, here around, and tomorrow is always a new identical mourning day.
You can hear the helicopters and the fighters constantly over your head. When you see the flash, you're already dead, it's too late to save yourself.
There are no bomb shelters in all the Strip, there is no safe place.
I can't get in thouch with any friend in Rafah, neither the ones that live north of Gaza City.
I hope that it is because of the overloaded lines. I hope.
It's been 60 hours without sleeping for me... and this is the same for all the Gazawi.
Yesterday me and other 3 fellows from ISM (International Solidarity Movement) spent the night in Awda Hospital in the refugees camp in Jabalia. We went there because we were afraid from the militry operation on the land, that in the end did't happen.
But Israeli tanks stand ready along all the border with the Strip, and their belts hungry of corpses it seems that will move to their funereal march this night.
Around 11:30PM a bomb exploded about 800 meters away from the hospital, the shockwave broken several windows... wounding already wounded people.
An ambulance went to the site of the burst, they saw a destroyed mosque, luckily empty at that time.
Unfortunately, but this is not an accident, it's a criminal and terrorist will to do a civilian massacre, the bomb destroyed the building near the mosque too.
We saw six corpses of six little sisters taken from the rubble. Five of them are dead. One is dire injured.
They laid down the littles girls on the burnt tarmac, and they look like broken dolls, put away because useless.
This is not an error, this is a voluntary cynical horror.
The dead are 320, the wounded people about a thousand, according to a doctor in Shifa the 60% of the injured is doomed to die in the next hours or days after a long agony.
Dozens are the missing people, in the hospitals desperate wives look for their husbands, their sons and daughters for two days and often in vain.
It's an awful scene at the mortuary.
A male nurse told me that a palestinian woman after hours of search between the corpses parts in the mortuary, recognized his husband only from an amputate hand.
That was all that remained of his man, with still the wedding ring of their endless love the promised to each other.
Of a two-family house there is very few human remains, to their relatives was shown an half-body and three legs.
Just now one of our ships from the Free Gaza Movement is leaving the harbour in Larnaca, Ciprus. I spoke with my friend on board. Eroes, they put drugs everywhere on the ship.
They shoul land in Gaza tomorrow at 08:00AM.
Hoping that the harbour still exists at that time after this night of continuous bombing.
I'll be in thouch with them al this time.
Someone stop this nightmare.
To be silent means to support this current genocyde.
Shout your indignation, in every capital of the "civil", in every city and place, please overcome with your protest our screams of pain and terror.
Here there is a part of humanity that is dying in pitiful listening.
Vik in Gaza
Vittorio Asriconi
