“Gaza is uninhabitable and it will remain that way. We will wipe the smile from the Palestinians, but the screaming will remain.”Bezalel Smotrich, Minister of Finance Israel.
Something in me broke yesterday.
I saw a petite figure, behind a broken window. A mouse trapped in raging flames that consumed the building where in she slept an hour earlier.
A toddler in purgatory.
An innocent creature looking for a way out of Hell, whose silhouette stood out sharply against the furious scorching glow engulfing her makeshift home; a dusty mattress on the concrete floor of the Fahmi Al-Jarjawi School in Gaza City.
A building where families who had been bombed out of their homes, that already lost everything, with the exception of their lives, found shelter. A place that, according to every right, law and reason, should have been a sanctuary.
Her name is Ward Jalal Al-Sheikh Khalil a name that means flower. Not A Hamas Fighter. A fragile daffodil. Only six years old.
She was the only one of her entire family to survive this umpteenth night of murder in Gaza.
One of God’s little miracles.
I saw her picture on twitter. And it struck me. She is almost the same age as my youngest daughter, with big hazel eyes and brown curls.
I wanted to gently pick her up, wrap her in my Superjan cape and take her with me, fly away from that fiery pit, where there is no mercy left.
But Superjan on twitter, is just an old man in real life, who can’t do anything for her, except to write her name in the hope that someone will read it and pray for her in the hope that someone will hear it.
I looked beyond and saw another girl, a little older, with a ponytail and a purple T-shirt, while she was pulled out from under the filthy debris of that same school. Men desperately digging and screaming, while taking her by her broken arm that was hanging limply by her side.
She, too, was, Praise the Lord, still alive, at least until she reached the ambulance.
That night, just in that one cursed place in Gaza alone, there were 36 dead and 55 wounded.
The Fahmi Al-Jarjawi School became the umpteenth pop up crematorium in Gaza. A smoldering, blackened tomb smelling of human flesh; a place where innocents should have been safe.
Innocents such as the nine children of Dr. Alaa and Dr. Hamdi Al Najjar: Yahya, 12 Rakan, 10 Eve, 9 Jubran, 8 Ruslan, 7 Reval, 5 Sadin, 3 Luqman, 2 and Sidar of 6 months, who were deliberately and purposefully killed.
And this was only part of yesterday’s bitter bomb harvest.
So much of the blood that is shed in Gaza every day, hardly seeps through into the columns of the newspapers, the news programs..
So little suffering reaches the trend lists of Twitter, where, hiding behind the hashtag “Gaza”, I saw the marble body of a little boy, with a serious, but undamaged face. Wrapped in a beige cloth, with a “neat” indentation on his chest. Without a drop of blood. A small perforation, right where his heart was beating last week.
They said it was a drone with a machine gun. Remotely controlled by a soldier and his joystick, aided by artificial intelligence. New technology that ensures that the creation of little holes in children is done accurately. Without gaping holes or torn off limbs.
How convenient in this world dominated by images.
Every day I see the children of Gaza, curled up like shrimps. Their faces in a stiff grimace and uncomprehending eyes. Babies in incubators, so malnourished, that they are barely recognizable as humans. Casually trampled, like the insects for which they are taken by the world.
Their fate ridiculed because they stand out so sharply against their still prosperous-looking mothers, in whose bodies one is much less likely to notice an acute lack of food.
I see three mannequins with porcelain faces, lying motionless on a white, plastic tarpaulin. Are they brothers and a little sister?
I see the softly smiling face of journalist Hassan Majdi Abu Wardanu, PRESS on his blue helmet and clothes. With his killing, the number of journalists killed in Gaza has risen to 166.
He probably won’t make it into any western newspaper.
Just like those two Red Cross people, you will never hear about, Ibrahim Eid and Ahmad Abu Hilal. Killed only yesterday, when their home in Gaza was bombed.
I read the reports about the murdered surgeons, nurses and doctors. In their modest hagiographies. Exhausted, but still smiling into the camera. Selfless heroes, who tried to save what was left to be saved in the chaos, the stench, this sheer hell on Earth.
Heroes who had to pay with their lives for their humanity.
Dr. Saeed Joudah, the only remaining orthopedic surgeon in Gaza, who was shot in his eye by an Israeli drone, a week after the death of his son.
Dr Adnan Bursh, who was murdered after months of torture in an IDF cellar.
Dr. Mohammed Al-Nouno, a pharmacist at Al Shifa Hospital, was executed in front of his patients.
Prof. Hassan Hamdan, Head of the burns unit at Nasser Medical Complex. Killed, together with his whole family.
Dr. Hadi Badran, a Palestinian anesthesiologist who traveled to Gaza from the safety of England to help wherever he could, despite his own terminal lung cancer.
He died yesterday in Gaza.
I read stories of patients, killed in their hospital beds, babies dying of cold, reports of the last Cancer Hospital in Gaza being crushed to rubble with people still in it. Toddlers who were shot in the head by mercenaries. Seen the “funny” videos of goofing IDF soldiers wearing the underwear and make up of the women they killed or chased out of their homes. Soldiers who proudly pose for Tik Tok videos, while erasing entire neighborhoods, whole city blocks, in one giant blow. Playing Joshua in Jericho.
I saw the story of Hind Rajab, a six years old, who sat for days in the back seat of a car, among the corpses of her parents, until she herself was killed. Just like the ambulance brothers who tried to rescue her.
I saw the stories of Awni AlDous, Mahmoud Al-Kilani, Mustafa Yassin, Khaled Al-Zainati, an infant, Omar, a toddler who perished together with his beloved cat.
At least twenty thousand children’s names, faces that remain buried under the stinking rubble of history. Names you probably will forget within the hour.
We forget.
Because we don’t want to remember.
Because we are not made to process this much suffering.
Because even mass murder gets boring, if only it drags on long enough.
Because every effort is made to smear the people of Gaza. By equating everyone, even babies to Hamas fighters, by continuously criminalizing their faith and holding infants responsible for the political choices of their fathers and grandfathers. A strategy so effective that no compassion remains. Not even for Ward. The little flower in the flames.
Because we ourselves no longer know who or what to believe. Which death rate is real and which horrifying picture is false.
Because in television shows, many widely loved, prominent opinion leaders, continue to smear 80 year old suffering in our faces. Like a bloody rag, covering our eyes, making us blind for their current atrocities.
A penance ritual, seemingly intended to give Israel a license to kill, torture and act unbelievably sadistic.
As if a group that was once ruthlessly hunted down and killed with impunity, somehow has the right, to act as beasts themselves.
As Erza Yachim, a reservist in the Israeli army (95) said: Erase them, their families, mothers and children. These animals can no longer live.
Because we shy away from even imagining the possibility, that once innocent victims can also become monstrous perpetrators. Afraid of being banished from civil society.
Because we are forced into a false “left, right dichotomy”, in which you may never agree with the other side, because this is immediately perceived as a betrayal of the clique.
If Gaza is a leftist issue, a person perceived as rightwing, which I regrettably am, is regarded as a traitor, for just being human.
So many can’t handle the peer pressure.
Because so many have been fooled into thinking, that Gaza was promised to a Chosen People.
Since when is any promise, a valid reason to go murder, rape, torture and pillage?
Because we are distracted with heated discussions about whether or not the atrocities in Gaza count as a genocide, when it is not about words, but about the fact that every day innocent children violently die there, due to lack of care or food, by a targeted bullet or under the rubble, after a rainstorm of bombs. A storm of steel, we in the west made possible.
Our silence may not make us guilty, but it makes us complicit.
I see a city of millions, crushed to the horizon into moonstone and powder by a hundred thousand kilos of explosives.
I see the foundation for a glittering Gaza Beach resort, with luxury penthouses, yachts, fancy restaurants and sandy beaches, where rich tourists and miljonairs will soon enjoy the sunset on the pulverized bones and skulls of a forgotten people.
I see an extermination camp, surrounded by unscalable walls, being flattened with the power of six Hiroshima bombs. Turned into dust, with the people still in it.
A war crime of a level, even the Nazis, to my knowledge, have never lowered themselves to.
What happens in Gaza is worse than genodice.
It is the Holocaust is in plain sight.
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