HOSSAM MADHOUN’S MESSAGES ABOUT HIS EXPERIENCES DURING THE ISRAELI ATTACK ON GAZA IN 2014
15/08/2014
Yesterday I wrote to Hossam and Jamal to ask how things were going during the truce. After sending an SMS yesterday evening, Hossam wrote this message:
Dear Jonathan
I was planning to reply tomorrow as I said in the SMS I sent you earlier tonight, as I am really tired and need to sleep but how can anyone in Gaza sleep with this noise above our heads? The drones? Do you know what this is? Planes without pilots flying by remote control! The noise they make drives us crazy!
Let me tell you what it is like. Imagine an old noisy washing machine operating just beside your bed or a fly getting inside your ear and trying to get out or sleeping beside your car while the engine is on all the time! Can you sleep however tired you are?
I will answer: yes, you sleep exactly the same way a very sick man falls unconscious, this is how we sleep in Gaza. So instead, I decided to write to you, my dear, until I fall unconscious.
The 120 hours truce is good and very bad at the same time. Good because there is a possibility that there will be no bombing or killing, so people are moving; you walk in the town centre and you’d believe that there had been no war and life is normal but… but just move a little bit out of the centre, toward Shejaea, Khozaa and Beit Hanoon in the north of Gaza, or towards the Alnada neighborhood, east Bureij, east Maghazi, east Khan Younis, east Rafah, things are different. People there are cleaning the remains of their homes, moving rubble to rescue a mattress or a blanket or anything that could be useful; some are trying to clean up their homes, many others are moving around with empty jerry cans looking for some water. Complete streets totally destroyed and empty.
Back in the town center, at the present time more than 300.000 people are still in the schools (the shelters). For many of them their homes are not destroyed but they are afraid to go back as they don’t trust the truce or the Israelis; they have already lost a loved one, a son or a father or an uncle or a neighbor. They are afraid to go back, but also they have nothing at home, the shelter at least provides some food (never enough, only 2 meals a day, no breakfast) and some safety (although they know that 6 shelters have already been bombed).
The negotiations in Cairo!!! What is it about? Some easing of the borders to get some more consumables and some cement to fix some of what has been destroyed in this war, By the way, even today they have not finished fixing the homes destroyed by the Israelis in Rafah and Khan Younis in 2001 and 2002. What more? An extra 3 metric miles for fishing? We used to have this but it did not make our life better at all. The catastrophe in these negotiations is that they discuss humanitarian needs rather than human freedom. They are talking about the possibility of 5000 permits per month for people to leave Gaza (oh God, what about the 1.7 million people?)! It means we need 100 years until every Gazan will get the chance to leave Gaza! What are they negotiating? To allow farmers to plant their lands near the borders?! Is this to be negotiated for God’s sake ??? A farmer needs a permit to plant his land??
You ask me about the truce and what does it mean? We have a saying in our culture: having the catastrophe happen is much better than waiting for it! People are terrified, my dear, they are completely exhausted; they can not bear any more bombing or killing. The war was never against Hamas; the war was never against the resistance or the armed resistance, the war was against Gaza and what Gaza has, against civilians first of all, against people’s dreams and their future, against everything alive in Gaza!
I am so tired, my dear, very sleepy, but this sound does not make it easy, it is driving me mad, as it does to every single one of us in Gaza.
You know how much I hate numbers my friend and you know why, but please allow me to share with you some numbers and please try to see what lies behind them. How many families will not have a place to go back to? How many dreams have been killed? How many memories assassinated? How many years of work and pain and building have been wasted? How many individual tragedies? How many children’s toys broken? How many parents’ presents destroyed? How many family photos lost or burned?
Unfortunately the table below only shows how much money is needed to rebuild the stones and the concrete!! Anyway it is a table from the UN agency. They can not and they don’t know how to calculate the other losses.
dear Jonathan,
I miss you a lot my friend
love,
Hossam
I will try to get some sleep if I can
In fact the table that Hossam sent didn’t come through properly.