Saturday is my day off from being Reuters correspondent in Gaza and I usually sleep until noon. This Saturday things didn’t go to plan.
My 7-year-old son Abdel-Rahman and his sister Dalia, who is 12, came home early from school, as they have been doing their mid-term exams, to wake me up and ask me to take them for breakfast at a seafront restaurant not far from Gaza’s port.
We got in the car, and for some reason I didn’t take the usual coast road. The decision probably saved our lives.
We had barely taken our table overlooking the sea when we heard one explosion, then another, then a third.
Abdel-Rahman began to cry and Dalia covered her ears with her hands.
I rushed to the front to have a look and saw smoke pouring from the area of the port, and a series of explosions. I figured it was air strikes. Then I heard the roar of Israeli jets.
I radioed my colleagues in television and pictures and told them what I had seen. I tried to phone Reuters’ Jerusalem office — but the mobile phone signal died.
I went to the restaurant’s reception and called the office, but I had to keep running back to my children and wife, were, to calm them down.
“Dad, don’t leave us,” cried Abdel-Rahman. Dalia wept. “Dad, I am afraid. Why? Why did that happen? Do they want to kill us?”
I had no answer as the explosions continued to rock the place that is our home.
I was getting reports by radio about locations that had been hit, including the main police headquarters and another security compound near our house.
What later emerged was that more than 225 people had been killed in dozens of air strikes against the Hamas-ruled strip. Israel said the attacks were in response to daily rocket fire by Gaza militants, which intensified after Hamas ended a six-month ceasefire. On Saturday, one Israeli man was killed by a rocket after the Israeli strikes began.
My wife tried to call her friends in the house, but couldn’t get a signal. Then one of her friends got through to her and told her that there was shattered glass everywhere and the sky overhead was thick with smoke.
So we had to stay put in the restaurant and I had to struggle between coping with the tears of my children and the need to get to my office in Gaza.
Colleagues warned me against driving as my car could be hit if I unwittingly drove near any of the security compounds that the Israelis were attacking.
Then there was a lull in the bombings, and I put my family in the car. I took back roads, and drove as fast as I dared with hundreds of people milling around the streets.
“Dad, be careful,” Dalia said.
We arrived home to see that the adjacent Hamas security compound had indeed been bombed, and there were crowds in the street.
“I saw body parts and some people had their heads cut off,” one man said. “It was a real massacre, Israel has started a war,” said another.
In the compound, ambulance workers were still carrying out the injured as bodies, uniformed and in plain clothes, lay on the ground. Women wept and children huddled in the arms of their mothers and fathers.
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[...] suggested that journalist Nidal al-Mughrabi’s first-person accounts from within Gaza, such as this onein which he describes the horrified reactions of his children during an Israeli raid, disqualify him [...]
- Posted by Reporting in Gaza: Striving for fairnessI am 55 years old and I only really realised the suffering of the Palestinian people after spending 5 years in Saudi Arabia where I worked with some Palestinians. That was 6 years ago.
The pro Israel propaganda is incredibly well prepared and maintained. During my school days in Holland everything and everyone was pro Israel. They made the desert bloom. And they were slaughtered by Hitler.
The holocaust story will be repeated until eternity. The genocides in Cambodia and East Africe have long been forgotten or wiped out. Some genocides, like the one in Indonesia when Suharto came to power with help of the CIA, have never been widely publicised. The current slaughter in Darfur just goes on and on, nobody cares. Palestine, Cambodia and Indonesia do not have the likes of Steven Spielberg to make movies and they don’t have heavily financed propaganda machines.
So it is easy to deceive people in Western countries, especially in the USA where people know nothing about the world.
Add to this the religious fanaticism in the USA (Jesus will come back to Jerusalem when the world ends) and the enormous wealth and influence of the Jewish community in the USA…
Do I need to say more. It is a very sick situation and it will not stop until all Palestinians are either dead or removed.
But that is not genocide of course, that is God’s chosen people living their dream.
And the world leaders quietly look on and do nothing.
- Posted by Johan[...] bloggers, for the most part it may amount to journalists with mobile tools — like this great accountof the opening of the Israel’s bombing campaign in Gaza by Nidal al-Mughrabi on the Reuters [...]
- Posted by The Foundation for Middle East Peace… | BrnfrnkWhat unintended consequences is Israel’s attack on Gaza likely to have?
REVISING THE TERMINOLOGY OF TERROR:
A significant consequence of the escalation of armed Israel-Palestinian violence is that events on the ground are able to speak with a startling clarity as to the wider realities of this on-going conflict. Over time both sides have built up an armoury of words with which to battle for justification and control of the historical, legal and humanitarian context of this war. Many of us have drifted in accepting this lexicon of crafted terminology, however it is now looking very exposed indeed.
Perhaps one of the most striking illustrations of actual events is the ratio of 1:100 Israelis to Palestinians killed in the conflict. In this stark light talk of ‘Proportional Response’, ‘Precision Targeting’ and ‘Unfortunate collateral damage’ is very hollow indeed. It has become evident to the majority of observers how the words ‘Proportional’ ‘Unfortunate’ and ‘Precision’ are both miss-leading and not relevant in describing the situation.
This reveals a broader issue for the Israeli military and political establishment as they struggle to find a new global/US friendly narrative with which to align the cause and update their PR lexicon. The ‘War on Terror’ had proved a strong geopolitical narrative to replace the ‘Cold War’ and use in aligning Israel’s interest closely with the US. The ‘War in Terror’ lexicon is now looking pretty barren and suffering from extreme exhaustion courtesy of the Bush administration. So what next?
More of the same mantra of ‘Terror’-
“A necessary war on terror does not end with an agreement. We don’t sign agreements with terror; we fight terror.” (Israeli foreign minister January 2009). Tzipi Livni very succinctly excuses Israeli aggression as defensive, with ‘terror’ as a justification for Israel’s rejection of any form of peace process to end the occupation of Palestinian land.
However events on the ground provide a stark revision of who now owns the word ‘Terror’. If the Palestinians are clearly the more ‘Terrorised’ party, it surely begs the question who are the real ‘Terrorists’. There has been an assumption that ‘Terrorists’ work outside the structure of the nation state, do not come in the form of a disciplined uniformed national army. However the Israeli army’s ‘Terrorising’ of a dense civilian area and its stated strategic aim of using this military action to achieve a long term deterrence effect, does require us to reconsider the Israeli army as one of the best organised, equipped and most powerful ‘Agents of Terror’ in the world. Hamas’ action against the citizens of Sderot, makes them look like home-spun amateurs by comparison.
- Posted by graham sullivan