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Queuing for Cooking Gas

I left the market and headed toward Salahaddin Street. There was no transport in the market between the thousands of people and the crowds. I walked in the direction of Khan Younis to meet my colleagues to prepare a report on their work providing psychological support to children in the schools where they had sought refuge.  There were a few old, battered cars working on cooking gas or cooking oil mixed with petrol. A choking smell came out of them.  No alternative.  The prices were a joke. No stable prices but no price was less than three times normal.  And if you complain, there is a ready answer.  The gas has been cut. Cooking oil costs three times its normal price, like everything else.  Everything sold in the market costs at least three or four times the normal price. In a cart in which four people fit, the driver will stuff 5 or 6 passengers.  You have no right to complain. That’s what’s available. Shall I take it, or shall I leave it? You arrive with your muscles aching with the pressure on them from the journey.

The road from Nuseirat to Khan Younis, Salahaddin Street, remains in tact.  It hasn’t yet been destroyed. On both sides of the street, from time to time, you see demolished buildings, houses, factories, bakeries or a bank, all bombed and destroyed. Some of the rubble from the destroyed buildings is scattered on the road.  Cars avoid it easily because the road is wide.  

On the horizon you see a long line.  As the car gets closer you can make out that they are cooking gas cylinders weighing 12 kilograms and next to each cylinder stands its owner.  The queue stretches for more than a kilometre till it reaches the filling station on Salahaddin Road. Hundreds of those queuing will not get their turn for days.

There are hundreds of beggars

There are hundreds of beggars, of all ages, boys and girls, women and men. They cling to those they think may be able to spare a bit of money. They ask for money insistently. Hunger drives them. Hunger is humiliating. People are hungry. Before the war 48% of the population was unemployed. Now life has stopped completely, and no-one is working. The businesses, factories, shops, cafés, restaurants are all closed. Even the 40,000 employees who receive their wages from the Palestinian Authority in Ramallah have not been paid.  Israel cut the budget of the Palestinian Authority by the amount used to pay civilian employees in Gaza.

Israel is strangling us by any means.  They turned off our water, electricity, communications, stopped the cash and the money from the Palestinian Authority which is meant to be sent by Israel through their crossings and not kept by them.

Survival is what drives the people of Gaza – like animals in the jungle, and as in the jungle, there are the weak and there are the strong, the one who lives with the tribe and the one who lives alone.

With hunger and pride and need, terrifying things start to appear: robberies, shops robbed night and day. A gang appears in a shop shouting and screaming in a savage way and start taking whatever comes into their hands, ransacking as they flee. 

When a house comes under bombardment, people are terrified, hoping they don’t die under the rubble. Someone will sneak in between and steal whatever he can.

I arrive at the market after a journey of an hour (more or less)

The market.  Market Street which divides the camp from Salahaddin Street in the east all the way to the west and the sea. The market stops there.  Many of the buildings have been bombed: two bakeries, a supermarket, clothes shops, electrical goods shops, a pharmacy, an apothecary.  Between each bombed house and another one, is a house partially or completely destroyed. Most of the shops are closed after 50 days of no goods getting through.  The shops ran out of everything.  They were completely empty.

Another market was shut down, only street vendors walking up and down or people spreading their goods on the ground, or on cardboard boxes or small tables, or on a donkey cart.  The only available goods were four types of vegetables: potatoes, tomatoes, green peppers, lemons.  The prices rose daily – day after day. Some of the materials distributed by UNRWA to the displaced in the schools – tinned beans, meat, tuna fish, sugar and rice and lentils, sweet potatoes, a piece of plastic 4 or 5 meters long to cover the roofs dripping rainwater onto the heads of those living in poor houses.  Displaced people eat what they could of the UNRWA food, then spread blankets on the ground in the market so they can sell what they have left or have denied themselves and their children to make the money they need to buy the essentials that UNRWA doesn’t distribute, like winter clothes for their children, sanitary towels for the women, medicines for the sick, cigarettes and coffee for selfish fathers, who prefer cigarettes and a cup of coffee to proper food for their children.

Gaza between the sea and the fence

The sea to the west and the fence to the east, and the north and the south.

I walk towards the east, not the west.

The sea is not mine.  I have no horizon.  The road is long and exhausting.  A long section of this dusty road, old-tarmacked road. A part is full of holes and a part is alright. We pass onto a street with a shrine on the wall of the central cemetery of the camp.  Piles of rubbish stretch along the length of the cemetery wall. The road is painful.  The sewage runs in the streets because the foundations of buildings in many areas have been destroyed. There are piles of garbage on both sides of the road.  The foul smells fill your nose and infect the land.

We travel on a broken journey.  We come across holes dug in the road, sewage and garbage. You try to avoid it.  We don’t always succeed.  Sewage sometimes mixes with clean water when the road widens, and sometimes overwhelms it completely. There is no escape from your heels sinking into the shit.  You feel nauseated, sad, angry, but you carry on.

There’s no alternative.  Bombed houses, demolished on both sides of the road.  From them, the smell of gunfire mixed with the smell of concrete, rubble or the smell of a water tank filling with sewage.

The houses were bombed day after day, till bit by bit there was no more room for the cars on the road.  The road was reduced to one lane.

 If it rains, once or twice, the hole left by the demolished house fills and overflows until it divides the road completely.  There has been no replacement, no alternative to what exists.

Apprehension

People who have left their houses because of the threats of the Israeli army, steal what they can.  They rip the doors of companies off their hinges and steal whatever they can.

This is happening in Gaza now. And it’s not surprising when you create famine in people who are under siege in a small area and the rule of law disappears.  No accountability, no police.

Survival begins by justifying every action

Fear is now everywhere.

Fear of death from the Israeli bombing, fear of your inability to find shelter, water and food, fear of robbery, or of being injured, or being killed.

The biggest fear is the delayed fear, a fear of what will happen after this war.

The Gaza Strip has been entirely destroyed – every building, from the foundations up, the roads, communications.

More than 200,000 houses were demolished.  The war starts again.  More than a million people have no house to return to.  What kind of life awaits us?  What future awaits our children? What authority will rule in Gaza? An Israeli military occupation? A return of the Hamas government to power?  Will it be the return of the corrupt Palestine Authority?

Or International forces to enjoy our humiliation? When will you have enough of the humiliation of our people by Hamas and the Authority?

When will we have had enough of the humiliation and violence of the occupation? 

What are we waiting for from tomorrow?  I mean, what will we wait for, what is left of us, tomorrow?

 

Like every day

I wake up at 6am.  My wife’s father, a kind 70 year-old man, wakes up before me.

And the fire has been lit and the pot of tea and a kettle full of warm water are on the fire. Also a pot of water awaits me to place 3 eggs in it so they can continue cooking on the fire. 2 of the eggs are for my mother and one is for my dog, Buddy.

After washing and drinking a cup of cheap Nescafé, which I managed to get from a proper shop before it was emptied, it’s time for my mother.  I change her diaper.  I clear the bits of food which have fallen around her and I prepare an egg for her and a piece of bread, and cup of tea.  Tea is readily available because it is part of the supplies from UNRWA which are sold in the market at reduced prices.

I feed my dog the third egg.  I put on whatever clothes I can reach.  I’m not bothered about what colour, or if my shirt is ironed.  These are concerns we’ve given up on completely after 51 days.

I get ready to go out.  My mother’s prayers follow me. The road is 2.5 kilometres to Nuseirat market from the house in Sawarha, an agricultural area between Nuseirat refugee camp and Al Zuwayda village on the sea.  The house is 600 meters from the sea, more or less.  But these days, it feels like China is nearer than the sea. When Israel launches its rockets towards the West, it points its tanks towards the beach or wherever suits them.  The horizon of the sea is the only horizon available to the people of Gaza.  In narrowed Gaza, there is no horizon only buildings and streets veiling the horizon, and some even veil the sky.

 

Suffocating Traffic Jam

Thousands in the streets of the market.   As far as you can see, there are heads and bodies jamming and closing the way.  Walking between the people in Nuseirat camp which had a population of 35,000 people and now has an extra 150,000, is exhausting and annoying. It seems as if most of them have agreed to meet each other in the market; young men and young women, children, adolescents, boys and girls…

Women, men, children, the elderly with and without walking sticks, some in wheelchairs. Pregnant women, women carrying their nursing babies.  Young men and women bumping into each other, walking up and down…some carry on walking in silence.  The smell of perspiration comes from them. No exaggeration. No-one complains about anyone else.

Including me. Like them, I have no chance to wash everyday.  Water is scarce. 

The market street is itself dirty.  No one clears away the rubbish from the shops.  It piles up day after day, emitting all sorts of smells.  All of them are harmful.  I think many diseases will start to appear. 

People have started to sell the contents of their houses, reckoning that others might need them.  An old mattress, used clothes, worn out shoes…some people are more creative.

Nearby there is a man who sells chickens.  When there is no electricity for him to run the machine that cleans the chickens, he lights a fire on which he puts a big pot of water.  He kills and cleans the chickens by hand and puts them in the boiling water for a few minutes and then plucks the feathers and goes out into the middle of the market. No one minds. No one blames anyone else.  There are no alternatives.

AT THE DOORS OF THE UNRWA OFFICES – A QUEUE TO REGISTER TO RECEIVE FLOUR

Queues of hundreds of people to register and obtain a number and appointment to receive flour.  It’s an ongoing daily queue.

Queues at the doors of the supermarket and commercial shops…stampedes and traffic jams.  The queues continued to form at the entrances of the shops until the goods ran out.  Then these queues disappeared.

Queues at the Bank

A daily queue at the ATM to withdraw cash.  Short queues of a few dozen people.  Most people don’t even have cash in the banks.  Only those who are employed and some rich people….Several thousand out of millions of people in the Gaza Strip stand in front of the ATMs. These are daily queues.

Current Queues:

Current queues started with the truce, queues for cooking gas, for solar power and for petrol, delivered in limited amounts to several gas stations.

Hundreds of cars and carts arrive and line up in a queue stretching for a more than a kilometre, hoping to get fuel whose price has leapt up on the black market.

War is ruin, war is destruction, war is death.  War steals from human beings the most important thing that distinguishes them.  War steals their humanity.  This is something that Israel knows.  This is what Israel is doing in Gaza.

QUEUE

QUEUE

During the fifty days, there were many queues.

Queues started, then disappeared.  There were queues, and there still are.  New queues started when the truce began.

A queue for bread, the first queue. Thousands of people standing in a queue in front of the bakery to get the permitted amount of bread, barely enough for one day for a family of 5 people. An orderly queue.

But from time to time, there is a selfish person who pushes himself in front of others, so problems arise.  It ends up with him being shoved far away until he takes his proper place in the queue.

These queues disappeared bit by bit.  In Nuseirat, for example, there were four bread bakeries. The Israelis bombed two of them.  So there were bigger queues at the remaining bakeries until there was no more flour in the market and the gas, upon which the baking and dough-making machines depended, was all used up.

What happened in Nuseirat happened in all the cities of the Gaza Strip.

Half the bakeries in the Gaza Strip were bombed and collapsed on the heads of those working all night long, preparing the bread to answer the needs of the people.  And some closed their doors when there was no more flour left in the market.

And so, in a scheduled way, the people were driven towards famine.

My mother once again

With the tear in her stomach, vomiting happening from time to time, eating nothing for 2-3 days and bleeding in her gastro-intestinal system, the hospital is a must, just to stop the bleeding. Nexium 40mm twice a day in her veins. I bought everything as we did last time, when we asked a neighbour who is a nurse to do the procedure.

The neighbour nurse is not there. She lives in the house next to my father-in-law’s house that was warned it would be bombed. They evacuated.

What can I do? Went out in the street. I don’t know the people; it is not my neighbourhood, I am a stranger here.

I asked people on the street if they know of a nurse nearby. Amazing, at the third house a man said:

  – My wife is a nurse.

I explained to him what we needed. He entered his house and within 5 minutes came out with his wife. We went to our home. She did what needed to be done but my mother’s veins are closed up, they do not absorb the medicine. The nurse said sharply: 

  – She must be taken to hospital!

I’ve kept some fuel, enough for 50km, inside my car for an emergency. Enough to drive us to Rafah. 

This is an emergency. I took my mother to a community hospital in Nuseirat Camp. While driving there the bombing did not stop, as usual, at every minute.

Arrived at the hospital. Outside they have installed a big tent like a field hospital. Some beds inside with some injured people and doctors treating them. Many people moving on all sides, an ambulance arrives, people automatically clear a space for the ambulance. 3 Bodies covered with blankets. Another ambulance arrives, 4 injured; a woman, a young man and 2 children. The young man lost a leg, lots of blood. I did not know what to do. My mother can’t be a priority in this situation. While standing by the entrance, a gentle nurse approached me asking if he could help. I explained my mother’s situation. He said: 

   – Normally we must make a haemoglobin blood test, heart and blood pressure tests, but you see how messy the situation is. I’ll get the Nexium and syringe, inject it with 40mm saline. Come inside.

I went into the first corridor; many people, blood on the floor, a lady is busy cleaning, a bucket of clear water, in 2 minutes it became red, she took it, disappeared for 5 minutes and came back with the bucket refilled with clear water. Some people crying in sorrow, nurses and doctors moving at speed all over the place. The nurse left me, I had been there for 20 minutes when he came back with the cannula, dressing, syringe and the Nexium. He was very good. In 2 minutes he did all that was needed.

My mother slept in her wheelchair. I took her out, lifted her into the car and drove back home.

Night fell. Usually I am a man who likes evenings and night-time, it is my relaxing time, I play cards with my friends, watch favourite movies, lie down lazily on my couch. Now I am unable to like evenings or nights. As darkness falls, life stops, frozen, no movement, no activities, no sounds but the sound of bombing and drones which double in the silence a million times.

My mother woke up with her hallucinations again, her internal fear that I can’t help. She sees people and things, people that provoke her and things that frighten her. She screams out of fear, she sees me doing bad things and she curses me, and I am helpless. The calming pills do not help this time. From 5pm until the following morning at 8.20am she suffers from her hallucinations and I suffer from insomnia and helplessness. I went downstairs to get her breakfast. 10 minutes later, I came up and she was asleep. I did not wake her, she needs to sleep. She needs to rest.

I called Dr Yasser Abu Jamei. He is a psychiatrist and the General Manager of Gaza Mental Health Program. Explained to him my mother’s case, he sent a message with the name of a medicine that I should give her, one pill every evening. I left my mother asleep, or maybe unconscious and went to the UNRWA clinic. No internet, could do nothing, just wrote part of this piece, bought the medicine and went back home. Back at home my mum was still asleep. It is 6.13pm. She is still asleep. The breakfast is still there, untouched. Is this good? Is this bad? Shall I wake her up and give her the medicine? But I am afraid that she’ll wake up with her hallucinations and spend another night of fear and insomnia. Is it ok to let her sleep this much? I don’t know. I will wait. I took some food, my first meal of the day. I washed my body with some water, a shower is an unavailable luxury. It is 8.15pm. She slept 12 hours. 11.25pm, 15 hours! Finally I decided (selfishly) to leave her asleep and see what would happen.

By the way, now I only have fuel in my car for 40km.