Meet Me in Gaza (25 page)

Israel sealed the Gaza borders in mid-November 2008. Its military forces launched Operation Cast Lead on 27 December 2008, the biggest Israeli assault on Gaza for four decades. It lasted until 18 January 2009. I was unable to return to Gaza until the Israelis had withdrawn, when internationals were permitted to re-enter the Strip and Gazans who had been outside when the assault was launched were allowed to begin returning home.

All the invaders who set up camp in the city or on its borders left their mark, before moving on. But what the invaders left in the psyche of the people of Gaza was a hatred of occupation […] and the spirit of resistance […] From Gaza, too, sprang hope and the rivers of dreams. And Gaza has remained, as it is today, a city on the sea, dreaming of the sea.

Ibrahim Darwish
⁴⁶

The row of white cottages where the Swailams lived has been reduced to rubble, the land around it laid waste. No-man’s-land has expanded across this whole stretch of northern Gaza. There is nobody living here now.

As I walk through the Erez crossing into Gaza, I have violently conflicting emotions. I have been obsessed with returning to Gaza, but now part of me wonders what the hell I’m doing back here. And I never heard another word from Sakhar.

It is the last week of January. The Israeli military pulled out of Gaza just a few days ago and the aid workers and journalists swept in. So much has already been written about this assault, Israel’s most devastating offensive inside Gaza since it occupied the Strip in 1967. Gazans refer to it as
al-harb
(the war). The Israeli military killed 1,414 Gazans; the vast majority were civilians, including more than 300 children and 9 local paramedics. Up to 5,000 Gazans were also maimed and injured. The Israelis damaged or destroyed more than 14,000 homes and 219 factories across the Strip, mainly in northern Gaza and Gaza City itself. Thirteen Israelis were killed, including 10 soldiers and 3 civilians – though 4 of them died from ‘friendly fire’. Twenty-eight Israeli families had their homes destroyed by Gazan rocket attacks, and across southern Israel students were only allowed into schools with fortified classrooms and bomb shelters. Gazans sheltering inside UN schools were bombed with rockets containing white phosphorous, which burns through human tissue until it is deprived of oxygen. But these statistics say very little about what actually happened inside Gaza. The facts do not speak for themselves.
⁴⁷

A few days after arriving back in Gaza, I enter a shabby apartment building in Shaja’iya, in eastern Gaza City, with one of my colleagues from the Centre, a woman called Noor. We have come here to speak to surviving members of the ‘Olaiwa family. We are gathering testimonies from families whose children were killed during this war. The fieldworker who brought us here this morning has a thin face framed with long, dark hair and burning eyes; he looks like Jesus. He introduces us to a woman called Fadwa ‘Olaiwa and then leaves. He has a lot of work to get on with.

Fadwa is slender and middle-aged. She takes us upstairs to the fifth floor, where her brother, Hayder, has his apartment, two floors above hers. She has a key to his front door. As the lock releases, I hear her draw breath. The layout of the apartment is simple. It has a long living room with a kitchen and two bedrooms off to one side. I can see through the kitchen doorway to the balcony, which has a black wrought-iron railing. Sunlight is streaming into the kitchen, striking the back wall streaked with dust and congealed blood, and highlighting the dirty white kitchen cupboards, their doors hanging off. A stack of plates and bowls are still mouldering in the sink. On the other side of the kitchen, a square of the linoleum is faded, where the fridge used to stand before it was dragged away. In front of the faded square is a hole in the wall big enough for me to climb through.

On 5 January 2009, Hayder ‘Olaiwa, his wife Amal and their eight children were having a barbecue in this kitchen, with the door to the balcony open because Hayder was grilling meat. Families have barbecues during wars. They have to eat. And no doubt they were all hungry because it was four o’clock in the afternoon. As Amal stood next to the fridge, making salads to accompany the meat, a 122-millimetre Israeli tank shell burst through the window of the bedroom next door, where their daughters slept. The shell slammed into the wall between the bedroom and the kitchen, decapitating Amal and killing three of her sons and one daughter. Amal’s headless body was pinned beneath the fridge.

Fadwa was at home when the tank shell struck the apartment upstairs.

‘When I heard the explosion, I ran upstairs,’ she says, her voice quiet and flat. ‘After just a few seconds I came to this apartment and there was smoke everywhere. When I pushed the door, I saw Hayder: his face was black, with blood pouring down it, and he could not speak. He just raised his finger to the sky. Then I heard Ghadir [one of the ‘Olaiwa daughters] shouting, ‘Help me!’ I ran to her room and she was underneath her dressing table. It had fallen on top of her when the missile had passed right through her room into the kitchen. As I was helping Ghadir, I was calling for Amal because I couldn’t see her. Then I went back into the kitchen and I saw Amal underneath the fridge without her head. The four children were dead too. And Muntassir was there in the doorway, alive.’

Sixteen-year-old Muntassir, Amal and Hayder’s eldest son, saw it all.

Fadwa falls silent. The three of us stand in the ruins of the flat. I have written down everything she has said, but cannot take it in. Noor and I ask if we can look around and Fadwa nods, but does not move from the spot. Noor and I cross to the bedroom where the shell first entered the apartment. The dressing table is still overturned, the contents spilt across the room. I push my head through the gaping hole in the wall and wonder whether the blood at the back of the kitchen belongs to Hayder or Amal. But it doesn’t matter any more. Noor shakes her head and wipes her eyes. We enter the kitchen and stand in the middle without touching anything. The balcony door creaks.

When we walk back into the living room, Fadwa has not moved. Her small shoes are coated in a fine layer of dirty white dust, her face ashen with grief. She looks at us.

‘I cannot find any more words to describe what has happened to my family,’ she says.

But it is Noor who begins to cry quietly, and Fadwa who steps forward to comfort her. The three of us stand close together in this devastated dusty home. Then, behind us, set against the back wall of the living room, I notice a bookcase, crammed not with books but with shoes, each pair slightly warped into the shape of its owner. I step over for a closer look. A small child’s tattered sandals rest on top of a large pair of men’s shoes. There are grimy pumps and boots of all sizes, a single red high heel and a scuffed pair of women’s lace-ups that must have belonged to Amal, the dead mother. If she were alive, we would be exactly the same age. I stare at these shoes until Noor clears her throat, making me jump.

‘Muntassir is waiting for us downstairs in my apartment,’ says Fadwa.

We had also asked to speak to Hayder. But his jaw and face were so badly injured in the attack, he has trouble speaking to anyone now.

Muntassir is waiting for us in his aunt’s living room. He is a sallow-skinned boy hunched in an armchair that looks way too big for his slender limbs. He was injured in the attack too, and after two operations at Gaza’s al-Shifa Hospital, still has shrapnel embedded in his right leg. We sit down facing him and he stares at us with eyes so startled, yet blank, they are frightening. Noor speaks to him in her soft voice, explaining who we are and what information we need.

‘I was in the kitchen doorway,’ he says. And stares straight ahead without another word.

From that doorway, he saw half his family slaughtered in front of him. Now Muntassir sits in the armchair, staring, drowning, already oblivious that we are even here.
⁴⁸

Noor and I spend weeks travelling up and down the Strip by taxi, interviewing bereaved families, asking detailed questions and making precise notes. We need this information, and the parents answer all our questions. Some weep while telling us about their kids; others just stare blankly at the walls, speaking in dull monologues as if they are trapped inside fog. The men are uncharacteristically silent, often letting their women speak while they sit cross-legged and stare at a small space just outside themselves. I deliberately switch my emotions off while taking these testimonies. But Noor, who has just lived through this war with her husband and their three small children, often weeps during the interviews. And there are days when I cry in the taxi afterwards, on our way back to the Centre. Noor and I even laugh about how we take it in turns to weep, one of us always dry-eyed, propping up the other.

‘You know why I cry so much?’ she says to me one afternoon. ‘I cry because every time I look at those parents, I think that really could have been me.’

While I was stuck outside Gaza, I rang Saida repeatedly, frantic with worry when Israel launched its assault. Now that I’m here, Saida says little about it but she looks thin, tired and pinched. Her family hid beneath the stairs of their building for two days and nights, then fled to stay with friends as their area was being heavily bombarded. But their immediate relatives who lived in the apartment just below them in the same building stayed. On 7 January Saida’s young cousin, Muhammad, was walking in the street just outside his home when he was hit by exploding shrapnel that sliced off both his legs.

My friend Wafa’ and her family had to evacuate their first-floor apartment when the UN told them the area was going to be bombed.

‘I woke up in the morning and my family was frantically packing,’ she tells me. ‘We literally had minutes to get out of the house. I took nothing. My cousin is a journalist – he put us in his armoured car to drive us to my relatives, and as he raced down the road we could see the bombs exploding behind us.’

Up in Siafa, Manah and her family spent the war inside their remote hillside cottage. On the night of 17 January, they were ordered out of their home by the Israeli military, who used a loudspeaker to tell them: ‘You have fifteen minutes to leave your house. This house is going to be destroyed. No houses are allowed in this area.’

Manah, her daughters and son fled outside, then stood and watched as Israeli tanks rolled in and over their home and crushed it into the ground. Eight hours later, the Israeli military withdrew from the Strip.

When I walk the streets, many people still look dazed, their eyes dull and exhausted, like they have just emerged from a train crash.

As I settle back into my apartment and my work, I
am
glad that I returned. I’m proud of the work the Centre is doing, meticulously documenting how Israel has pounded Gaza. (One of my colleagues spent every day of the war at the door of the morgue at al-Shifa Hospital, writing down the name of each corpse that arrived.) But sometimes in the evenings, I slump on the couch in my living room, trying to slow my spinning mind. I didn’t call Sakhar when I first came back; I was too proud. When I bumped into him at a dinner party at Catherine’s a week or so later, the atmosphere between us was glacial. I tried to speak to him alone, but he skilfully avoided me. Now I feel scalded and angry, hackled with hurt and spite.

Late one windswept night, unable to sleep, I sit out on my living-room balcony, swaddled in blankets. I watch the near-full moon for a long time, as clouds storm across the scowling sky. The biting winter sea air clears my mind. I smoke, swig neat vodka, cry furious tears and fling Sakhar into the tempest, knowing I just have to let go: he will never tell me what happened. And then I brood over the awful inevitability of this war, the governments of Gaza and Israel locked in their terrible, fearful embrace. The wind begins to howl then scream around me, as angry clouds swell. I can almost hear the Mediterranean waves rising and hissing. This elemental violence heralds the end of this particular chapter of war in Gaza. But I can’t stop myself thinking that very soon, this too will be history.

The Israeli military may have withdrawn from Gaza, but now we are facing another invasion: the hacks have stormed into town. Their HQ is the al-Deira Hotel, which is doing a roaring trade, packed to the rafters with journalists and film crews. By day they stalk the Strip, and when dusk falls they surge into the al-Deira café, hollering into mobile phones, striding around at full speed as though they’re fully charged, greeting each other bloody loudly. Through the collective roar I can hear snatches of conversation: ‘Hey, Charlie! Haven’t seen you since Kurdistan!’ and ‘Serina – It’s been a while! Debbie says Hi. Y’know she’s embedded back in Eyeraq.’ They really do speak to each other like this.

Shadi, my friend and colleague from the Centre, spends most afternoons and evenings in the al-Deira café too, doing round after round of interviews with radio and print journalists from Europe, Scandinavia and the US. The second that an interview is finished, the journalists start typing their notes, mobile jammed between ear and shoulder. Shadi and his family spent most of the war sheltering in the basement of his brother’s house. Now he sits back, another interview done, lights up a cigarette and catches my eye. He is endlessly patient and gracious, and thinks that some of these journalists are very good. But there’s an air of them consuming details as fast as possible because they won’t be staying very long. This week, and maybe next, Gaza is on the front page. But we all know it won’t last. Very soon they will all be moving on to the next breaking story.