[News] Nightmare in Beit Hanoun

[Anti-Imperialist News]

http://www.counterpunch.org/

November 9, 2006


Nightmare in Beit Hanoun


How Gaza Offends Us All

By JENNIFER LOEWENSTEIN

An opened jaw with yellowed teeth gaped out of 
its bloodied shroud. The rest of the head parts 
were wrapped in a plastic bag placed atop the jaw 
and nostrils, as if to be close to the place to 
which it once belonged. The bag was red from the 
pieces that were stuffed inside it. Below the jaw 
was a human neck slit open midway down: a fleshy, 
wet wound smiling pink and oozing out from the 
browned skin around it, the neck that was still 
linked to the body below it. Above him, in the 
upper freezer of the morgue lay a dead woman, her 
red hennaed hair visible for the first time to 
strange men around her. More red plastic wrapped 
around an otherwise absent chin. She was dead for 
demonstrating outside a mosque in Beit Hanoun, 
northern Gaza where more than 60 men sheltered 
during the artillery onslaught by Israeli tanks and cannons.

Most of the others still had their faces intact. 
They lay on their silver morgue trays stiffly as 
unthawed frozen food. One man had a green Hamas 
band tied around his head; he looked like a 
gentle shepherd from some forgotten, pastoral 
age. Another's white eyes were partially opened, 
his face looking out in horror as if he'd died 
seeing it coming. Then a muddy, grizzled blob on 
the bottom left tray, black curls tangled and 
damped into its rounded head and blessedly shut 
eyes. A closer look revealed a child, a boy of 4: 
Majed, out playing his important childhood games 
when death came in like thunder and rolled him up 
in a million speckles of black mud. The other dead had already been taken away.

Muslim burials take place quickly, a god-send to 
the doctors, nurses and undertakers who, at the 
hospitals and morgues, desperately need the space 
for next batch of casualties who would sleep on 
the same sheets, same steel-framed beds, in the 
same humid heat, in the same close, crowded, 
grief-stricken rooms, often on the floors, with 
the same tired, unpaid attendants doing their 
rounds without the proper supplies to help them 
if they were still alive. And some would die on 
the operating table like the young man gone now 
to the Kamal Adwan hospital morgue when his 
wounds became too much for his body to bear. Two 
young girls preceded him earlier the same day. 
Blessed are they who leave this human wasteland 
washed and shrouded for a quiet, earthy grave.

Today the hospitals will be filled beyond 
capacity again when the 18 civilian dead from a 
pre-dawn attack on Beit Hanoun -- women, men and 
children blasted out of their sleep into human 
chunks -- roll out of the ambulances and into the 
freezers of Shifa or Kamal Adwan hospitals in the 
northern Gaza Strip. How dare they sleep in their 
houses at night when the tanks are barking out commands.

Do you believe this was an accident? that an 
international investigation will ever take place? 
Like after Jenin? Like after Dan Halutz and his 
2000 pound bomb which was dropped on an apartment 
building in Gaza City killing 15 people, 9 of 
them women and children? Like after the siege of 
Jabalya in the fall of 2004? Like after Operation 
Rainbow in Rafah? Like after Huda Ghalia's family 
was blasted into nothingness during an outing on 
a Gaza beach? Will US eyes, glued to their 
glaucousy TV screens to find out which marketed 
candidate won the corporate-managed midterm 
elections, ever know that that another massacre of Palestinians took place?

At Shifa hospital, Gaza's central hospital, where 
Dr. Juma' Saqa and his staff cope with the daily 
shortages of supplies from kidney dialysis 
machines to fans and clean linens; where cancer 
medications are unavailable to the increasing 
rate of cancer patients and elective surgeries, 
such as for hernias or tonsils, are a thing of 
the past. This is where doctors and nurses 
witness how the water that Gazans drink causes 
innumerable ailments, rotting teeth, anemia in 
children and kidney dysfunction because of its 
brackish, poisonous quality. This is where 
children lie half naked in their beds, white tape 
across their noses holding tubes to their faces 
so that they may eat or breathe-- like Ahmad aged 
3, also from Beit Hanoun, who took a bullet in 
the right side of his belly that exited on the 
left. His mother stands over him passively, 
grateful. Ahmad, at least, is going to live. But for what?

Each night in Gaza City that first week in 
November, explosions sounded in the northeastern 
corner of Gaza: a succession of bullets, booms, 
bombs, canon fire. On the first night of the 
onslaught we could still see lights from Beit 
Hanoun 10 miles from us blinking and twinkling as 
if nothing were really happening; it was all a 
dreamófireworks, a distant celebration perhaps. 
But then, by the second night only a swath of 
blacked out space lay in the place of Beit 
Hanoun, electricity-less and water-less as the 
booms continued unabated for an hour or more and 
the hum of the pilot-less drones circled round 
again and again above us, above Beit Hanoun, 
above Gaza, automated people-monitors taking 
stock of the activity below. Nobody from Beit 
Hanoun could leave by day to get to work without 
announcing to the tanks and the drones that he 
was prepared to sacrifice his life for a 
semblance of normalcy. All men between the ages 
of 16-35 were rounded up onto trucks and hauled 
away for "questioning". What will happen to them 
and their families? Will anyone follow up? Will 
they add to the 10,000 Palestinian prisoners in 
Israeli prisons, left to rot while their wives 
and children, sisters, brothers, parents go on struggling to survive?

There lies Gaza stretched 28 miles long in a 
tumbledown graying, decaying heap, yawning, 
tired, wretched, full of garbage. Tape gauze over 
your nose to avoid the smell of sewage and 
burning trash. Try not to notice the 
metal-shuttered shop fronts, the empty stores, 
the proliferation of horse- and donkey-carts 
clopping along the streets for lack of fuel, the 
ribs of the tired beasts jutting out from their 
bellies as boys whip them along to keep going. 
The joke is the cerulean blue sky illuminating 
the rubbish tip, the palm trees and purple 
flowers beaming in the November sun ñ natural 
non-sequiturs, like the box of fresh chocolates 
offered to the journalists filming the woman's 
wounded son as she yells out her frustrations and 
horror at the Americans and the Israelis who are 
killing her family. Why? She asks. Why, why, why?

Ask Mark Regev, Israel's eager, hideously sincere 
government spokesperson. On CNN's international 
news he tells us in earnest that this is Israeli 
self-defense. The Qassam fire into Sderot and 
Ashkelon must stop. Israelis have the right to 
defend themselves. The "operation" in Beit Hanoun 
will not stop until the Qassams stop. Each word 
drivels out of his mouth into a bubble of 
obscenity for everyone watching from the vantage 
point of Gaza. Verbal pornography, 
sado-masochistic jargon from the prince of 
Hasbara leaks onto the dust like poisonous bile 
bought, paid for and sought after by the lords of 
power and their occupying machinery.

The shoddy, home-made Qassams hiss like cornered 
alley cats when they are fired into the skies. 
Stupid and bestial, they zing across the border 
like crazed beasts not knowing where they are 
going. They'll dash forever like this until the 
occupation of Palestine ends. The Gazans know 
this, Hamas knows it, Fatah knows it, the PFLP 
knows it; In Israel, Labor and Likkud know it, 
Meretz knows it, Yisrael Beiteinu knows it, Shas 
knows it; Peretz, Olmert and Lieberman know it, 
Sharon knew it, the Israeli people know it, 
official America know this, so 40 years after 
1967 and 58 years after 1948, why is the occupation not yet over?

Because Israel does not want it to end. Because 
Israel wants the land and the resources without 
the people. Because you have to eviscerate a 
culture in order to maintain total control over 
it. Because the United States says that's just 
fine with us, you serve our purpose well. You 
help make the war on terror convenient. You help 
fit Iraq into the scheme. You'll help us with 
Iran as well. Who the hell cares about a million 
and a half poverty-stricken Gazans and their 
dust, their sand, their stinking, crumbling heap of a disaster area homeland?

What a terrible shame it is that Gazans have not 
yet attained the status of Human in the eyes of 
the Western powers, for the resistance there will 
continue to be an enigma until this changes. For 
now, however, the slaughter will continue unabated.

Leaving Gaza 6:30am Saturday morning, November 
4th 2006, I hear a loud explosion. My cab driver 
picks me up and we drive down the main street in 
Gaza City toward Erez. Suddenly, unexpectedly, 
there is a smoldering mass of wreckage in front 
of me, a car surrounded by boys picking at its 
still-hot exterior. Inside are four blackened, 
seared human shapes, crispy at the touch, 
faceless from the burns, charcoal, shreds of 
steaming cloth, a smell of barbecued human flesh, 
sirens in the distance. Burnt and vaporized metal 
looks like what you see in a science fiction 
movie. Burnt humans look like singed paper mache 
monsters whose pieces fall off at the hint of a breeze.

Gaza is sorry for these indiscretions, this poor 
taste, this unseemly topic of conversation. You 
are right to express your indignation. How Dare 
Gaza Speak of These Things!? But it can no longer 
contain its secrets even with the blockade of 
visitors to its vile shores; its voice is shrill 
even when sublimated through the layers of media 
deceit. The smoke rises higher in the skies each 
time. The prison is imploding and the resistance will never end.

Jennifer Loewenstein is a Visiting Research 
Fellow at Oxford University's Refugee Studies 
Centre. She has lived and worked in Gaza City, 
Beirut and Jerusalem and has traveled extensively 
throughout the Middle East, where she has worked 
as a free-lance journalist and a human rights 
activist. She can be reached at: 
<mailto:amadea311 at earthlink.net>amadea311 at earthlink.net


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