Death looms ominously once again over the blockaded Gaza Strip, and innocent blood is once again falling down like rain. The sound of Israeli drones buzzing high above 24 hours a day set the scene the tremors every 30 minutes or so.
Since Palestinian militants struck an Israeli school bus on Thursday afternoon, injuring critically a child and the driver, the spectre of another war on Gaza became frighteningly real again, just over two years since Israel’s aggression that left 1,400 Palestinians dead.
The morgues are back in business – in just two days, at least 18 Palestinians have been killed, 10 of them civilians – women, elderly and children, and more than 50 injured.
The numbers alone are shocking and rising by the minute – the deadliest escalation since Israel’s last war on Gaza. Until early Saturday afternoon we have witnessed the launching of 56 home-made rockets into Israel, another 17 longer-range Grad missiles and two type 107mm rockets and 66 mortars. Israel responded with 36 air-to-ground missiles, 57 mortars and tank shells and repeated naval fire.
But it is the clanking sound of Al Shifa Hospital morgue’s iron door, on Friday around midnight, that brought me to my senses.
“We’ve got two martyrs,” the watchman told me. “Why did you come so late? We had another two earlier from Beach Camp. These two are from Shajaiya.” Civilians?
“A 12-year-old and a 22-year-old student,” he tells me as he opens the first compartment. The corpse is completely rapped around a shroud full of blood. As the watchman moves forward to uncover him, he makes a sign to me to tell me he is headless.
Hell no, I scream. Leave him covered. I take a shot. Just one. His name is Bilel Al Areir, he was walking down the street when the F-16 dropped the missile.
“And this one was playing football in the same street,” the watchman tells me, opening the next cold steel container.
His chest and face scarred by the deadly shrapnel, Mahmoud Al Jerou was, until Friday night, the latest civilian victim of Israel’s military assault. Before him, a mother and her daughter, an elderly man and more than half of the total of Palestinians killed were the new “martyrs” in the long Palestinian tragic address book.
These are not victims of human error or collateral damage. Israel’s highly sophisticated weaponry make its killings religiously accurate, whether they’re targeting a militant on a motorbike, an operative in Sudan or an underground fuel pipe in Rafah.
Just as it is inconceivable to think of the Sammouni family massacre two years ago – when an entire extended family was made to gather into one house in Zeitoun only to be shelled soon after leaving 29 dead – as a mistake, irrespective of whether or not the judge appointed by the UN to investigate this war crime and others has had a change of heart.
What Goldstone did this week was to legitimise Israel in responding in whatever way it felt fit, guaranteeing its long-standing impunity. Because while the Palestinian militants targeting Israel with their rockets are undoubtedly committing war crimes, those pulling the trigger from the remote-controlled drones have been told it’s OK to bomb children to pieces.
“I’m not afraid to die, I’m just worried for my children,” Mohammed Khdeir, a gardener selling plants in Gaza City, told me today. “Whenever they hear the drones and the fighter jets they just panic. I don’t know what to do to protect them.”
Hamas has meanwhile called for a ceasefire, convening all factions and asking for restraint. But the Islamist movement’s own military wing, the Al Qassam Brigades, was lobbing more of its rockets towards Israel, saying it could not let its enemy’s assault go unpunished. Netanyahu replied Israel would “step up” its attacks.
“Have they ever stepped down their attacks,” my grocer, a refugee from Beersheba where some of the rockets tend to land nowadays, told me. “Have we ever stopped dying in vain since we’ve been chucked out of our land?”
As the escalation enters its fourth day, desperation, cynicism and the terrifying feeling that ordinary civilians have nowhere to hide are slowly sinking in. Cast Lead II is in the making.
