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"Hope betrayed in Gaza" by Fares Akram
From time to time, the
Palestine Center distributes
articles it believes will enhance understanding
of the Palestinian political
reality. The following article by Fares Akram
was published in The
Independent on 8 January 2010. To
view this article online, please go to http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/middle-east/fares-akram-hope-betrayed-in-gaza-1861417.html.
"Hope betrayed in Gaza"
By Fares
Akram
It has been a year since we
huddled in our homes in the dark, waiting
sleeplessly for the sound of the bombs to stop.
It is a year this week since my father, a
48-year-old lawyer with no link to Hamas, the
Islamist movement that governs Gaza, was killed
by an Israeli air strike, supposedly on Hamas
militants. And it will soon be a year since my
first child was born, as fleets of ambulances
queued up outside the A&E unit of the same
Gaza City hospital with the wounded, maimed and
dead.
Twelve months after the invasion
of Gaza, not a single house has been rebuilt,
and we, the 1.4 million people trapped inside
this blockaded territory, dream of escape but
our heads stay haunted by unbearable
memories.
First came the terrifying
aerial poundings by F16s and then the second
phase, the tanks and ground troops. In between
the night bombing and shelling, Gaza City in
the first three weeks of January was a ghost
town except for an hour or two every afternoon
during the temporary ceasefires. That's when
everyone rushed around hunting for food and
fresh water to buy, or in the case of my wife,
dashed to the maternity clinic for blood
pressure checks.
Alaa was nine months
pregnant with our first child when the
nightmare began and her big fear was how to get
to the hospital when she went into labour.
Reluctant to leave her fretting in the
apartment, I began to relate our experiences
for a diary in The Independent, often by phone
in the dark because of the power
blackouts.
I had little idea, when I
started sending my reports, just how directly
we would be affected by the Israeli assault.
Our lives were to be shattered just hours into
the ground invasion, when my father and a
17-year-old cousin were killed at the family
farm, struck by a massive bomb dropped by an
Israeli warplane directly on the property. They
had gone there, to our beloved refuge with its
lemon groves and almond trees, to make sure the
farm animals didn't die of starvation during
the conflict. The farmhouse was blown to rubble
and powder. Mahmoud's body was found 300 metres
away in a neighbour's field.We could hear the
rattle of machine gun fire as we buried Dad and
Mahmoud. Israeli tanks were just three
kilometres away.
The first anniversary
of that shocking day was painful to say the
least. On the way to my office I went by the
graveyard, said some silent prayers at Dad's
grave, but couldn't control my tears. Later we
hosted a meal for relatives and neighbours as a
mark of respect.
Of course hundreds of
others in Gaza are still mourning multiple
losses. By the end of the 22-day Israeli
"operation", launched to stop Hamas from firing
rockets on towns inside Israel, 1,400 Gazans
were dead, most of them civilians. In the last
few months I've helped families to travel to
the Eres checkpoint at the crossing with Israel
so they could be interviewed by Israeli
military police investigating the deaths of
their loved ones. I longed to tell them my own
story But the many appeals we have sent to the
Israeli authorities through various human
rights groups for an inquiry into the
circumstances of my father's needless death
have been ignored. He was a Palestinian
Authority judge who believed in a two-state
solution, not a terrorist. But they don't want
to know.
My mother is still coming to
terms with the loss of my father. At least she
counts herself blessed to have been chosen for
a travel pass to go on a pilgrimage to Mecca in
November.
A year ago it wasn't just our
grief that we had to contend with, but a
collective fear and anxiety which became almost
intolerable. The Israelis dropped leaflets
warning us to evacuate our districts, but there
was nowhere safe to run to.
The cruelty
was that the Israelis were telling us to move
but had closed off all our exits. We eventually
took what belongings we could and moved in with
relatives in the west of Gaza City. This was
fortunate because our apartment took an
indirect hit one night. "They killed Akrem [her
husband] and now they're destroying the few
belongings he left behind," my distraught
mother had wept as she stood in the house the
next morning. Twelve months on we've replaced
the furniture and got hold of new glass for the
windows, but what can you do with glass and no
frames? Israel won't allow the import of
aluminium so I've had to fix up temporary
frames which could collapse any
time.
Yet our housing problems are
nothing compared to those who saw their homes
completely bombed out or crushed by retreating
tanks. More than 6,000 houses were totally
destroyed in the 22-day campaign. Now thousands
of families in the remain displaced or
homeless.
Hamas removed a lot of rubble
in preparation for reconstruction after the
war. But the rebuilding never materialised
because Israel's blockade of the strip means we
can't legally get hold of most building
materials.
The neediest families are
being built small homes by the UN, who have
resorted to mud bricks to get around the
Israeli ban on the import of cement. One man I
know used to have a solid concrete two-storey
house. Now the family have a small dwelling
made of clay. It's better shelter than a tent,
I suppose, but this can't be a solution for the
whole of Gaza. Those who can afford it are
renting houses but rents have
rocketed.
In Beit Lahiya in the north of
the Gaza Strip, a tented camp went up at the
end of the war. There are fewer tents now but
40 are still there with seven to 10 families in
each. I visited them last week and met Ziad
Khader, 67, who told me his family fled their
cement-built, well-furnished house when tanks
and bulldozers rolled into their farming
community. "We got out with just the clothes we
were wearing," the 67-year-old said as he sat
on a brick outside his tent. For people living
such an ordeal, asking what the new year holds
makes no sense.
Rasmiia, 12, spends most
of the day studying in her family's tent and,
before sunset, she walks about 200 metres back
to her uncle's house. "I miss my tidy desk that
used to have in our destroyed house, I miss my
clean and neat books," she told me. "It's sandy
here in the tent but at least it's calm. I'm
determined to get ahead in my studies so I can
help rebuild the house in the future."
I
can't share Rasmiia's optimism because
politically, nothing has changed in the last 12
months, except that Hamas, reduced to
communicating with the people via pre-recorded
video tapes during the offensive, are very
proud now. Imagine, they say, an Israeli
onslaught would have toppled bigger governments
or regimes, but a small islamic movement held
fast and could not be defeated.
All the
factors behind the current misery are still in
place. The Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit,
captured by Hamas in 2006, is still a hostage
and so Israel maintains the blockade. But now
the Egyptians are building a new steel barrier
as well which will cut off our only economic
lifeline, the smuggling tunnels. Without them
day to day will be even
bleaker.
Recently I took a Western
journalist to the supermarket. He was shocked.
Food imported from the Israeli side was in the
refrigerator corner; yoghurt, cheese, hummus.
On the other shelves, 90 per cent had been
brought in from Egypt via the
tunnels.
People here are confused and
deeply frustrated. They thought that their
houses would at least be rebuilt. Now, almost
worse than losing their homes, they're losing
hope. Little or nothing has been done to help
people pick up the pieces psychologically.
Children are desperately in need of help in
dealing with the trauma but most NGOs have had
to focus on emergency relief like distributing
food parcels. What's troubling is that we sense
the ominous atmosphere that preceded the war is
back. There is scant hope of reconciliation
between the rival Palestinian factions Hamas
and Fatah, and Israeli voices are threatening a
resumption of hostilities. And whenever there's
uncertainty rumours here go wild. "Will there
be another surprise attack?" is a question I
hear people ask.
At the turn of the
year, I gathered at the Light House, a
beachside restaurant, with my wife, my
daughter, and our closest family. My brother
was there with his fiancée. They postponed
their wedding after my father's death. We held
our little gathering because I felt that even
with sweet or bitter memories, life has to
continue. Back in January 2009 I wrote in this
newspaper that my daughter Somaya, born into a
scene of violence and chaos just 10 days after
my father's funeral, was the first light in our
darkness. Now as we prepare to celebrate her
first birthday, she again is a reason to go
on.
Fares Akram had a diary in January 2009 for The
Independent describing the ordeal of life in
Gaza during the Israeli military assault.
The views
expressed in this article are those of the
author and do not necessarily reflect
those of The Jerusalem
Fund.