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. [More]

I remained silent
We mustn’t look the other way when blood of some becomes worth less than others
Laila M. El-Haddad

“Withdrawing” implies, in whatever vague and euphemistic sense, an end, or at least, a waning of hostilities. But yesterday I woke to discover that the Israeli army has perpetrated a massacre on a scale unseen in Gaza for a long time: 18 dead, including children, women, and the countless faceless others.

All members of the same family. Brushed aside as unfortunate mistakes, with a generous dollop of regret, from an otherwise morally superior, well-intentioned army. [More]

Mourning with Palestine after latest Israeli massacre
Rime Allaf, Mosaics, 8 November 2006

Ehud Olmert and his equally violent, racist cabinet members are clearly worried. They fear that the Palestinians will really come up with a national unity government which the “international community” would not obligingly boycott (which would put an inconvenient end to the strangulation of the Palestinian people) and with which Israel would have no excuse not to “negotiate” – an empty word, because human rights, including those of Palestinians, are not negotiable. [More]

We overcame our fear
Jameela al-Shanti, The Electronic Intifada, 9 November 2006

The unarmed women of the Gaza Strip have taken the lead in resisting Israel’s latest bloody assault

Yesterday at dawn, the Israeli air force bombed and destroyed my home. I was the target, but instead the attack killed my sister-in-law, Nahla, a widow with eight children in her care. In the same raid Israel’s artillery shelled a residential district in the town of Beit Hanoun in the Gaza Strip, leaving 19 dead and 40 injured, many killed in their beds. One family, the Athamnas, lost 16 members in the massacre: the oldest who died, Fatima, was 70; the youngest, Dima, was one; seven were children. The death toll in Beit Hanoun has passed 90 in one week.

This is Israel’s tenth incursion into Beit Hanoun since it announced its withdrawal from Gaza. It has turned the town into a closed military zone, collectively punishing its 28,000 residents. For days, the town has been encircled by Israeli tanks and troops and shelled. All water and electricity supplies were cut off and, as the death toll continued to mount, no ambulances were allowed in. Israeli soldiers raided houses, shut up the families and positioned their snipers on roofs, shooting at everything that moved. We still do not know what has become of our sons, husbands and brothers since all males over 15 years old were taken away last Thursday.

They were ordered to strip to their underwear, handcuffed and led away. [More]