Letters from Palestine (41 page)

In the weeks that followed, our
communications were mostly about a story that Hanan had been
attempting to write for the book, one that, as she said, made her
cry bitterly to recall it. And it was during this time, as the end
of December drew near, that finally the threat of an imminent
Israeli attack turned into a dreaded actuality. On December 27, the
first wave of bombing hit Gaza, killing more than two hundred
people and wounding many more. These days were some of the worst of
my life, as I could only hope and pray that my friends there were
not among the casualties. I wrote to Hanan, desperate for a
response, and, finally, a few days later, on the last day of 2008,
in the midst of the relentless Israeli assault, I received this
note from her.

Dear friend Ken,

Thank you so much for your concern and your
noble feelings, I really appreciate them. You can say that I’m fine
but my people are not. You can never even imagine the destruction
and the horror we’re living in. Circumstances are the worstest. We
haven’t had electricity for two days, and we just got some. It’s
actually four o’clock after midnight now, and it is an awful night.
F-16 planes are joining our children with their dreams or what have
become nightmares. Sorry, I have no words to describe the situation
here.

Dear Ken, again thank you so much for your
concerning feeling. There is one thing I want you to know in case
something happens and I didn’t make it or haven’t the chance to say
so. I would like you to know that you are one of my best friends
ever and that it was a great pleasure for me to know you and to
communicate with you. I’ve really learned a lot from you and your
forgiveness personality was a source of inspiration and
admiration.

Take care of yourself, dear friend, and
excuse me for this short message but it might be the last,

Your little friend,

Hanan Hamouda

After that note, there was nothing more I
heard from Hanan.

About a week later, I received a letter from
a good friend of mine in Canada who knew I must be very concerned
for my friends in Gaza. In my reply, I wrote about Hanan:

First, here are some excerpts from Hanan’s
last note to me, a week ago—obviously, I have had no word from her
since. Of course, there is often no electricity, no water, no cell
phone service; it is winter there, but people have to leave their
windows open lest they shatter if there are explosions nearby.
Families huddle together just to keep as warm as they can. Under
such conditions, how can I expect Hanan to write? And how can I
know what her silence means? Anyway, here are her last—but I hope
not her final–words to me [and then I quoted from portions of the
letter I have just reprinted above].

After writing my Canadian correspondent about
another Gazan friend whom I already knew had narrowly avoided being
killed when a bomb struck near his house but about whose fate I was
still uncertain, I continued:

These are just two of my friends. There are
about 1.5 million Gazans, all of whom have friends and family,
mostly there, some elsewhere, and they all have similar stories to
tell. You can see why Gaza is so much on my mind. And there is no
end in sight. At least fifty-five more civilians died today, and
more than six hundred have perished now. At least eight hundred
children have either been killed or wounded, and, of course, the
hospitals, completely undersupplied and understaffed for years
because of the Israeli siege, can’t cope. One Norwegian doctor,
Mads Gilbert, who has been working there now for eight days, with
almost no sleep and little to eat himself, broke down in tears last
night because of the children he can’t help and can only see die.
And then he has to tell their parents—when they are alive to
tell.

Weeks passed, and there was still no word
from Hanan.

Then, finally, just after the twenty-two-day
invasion came to an end, my prayers were answered.

Dear Ken,

I really missed you. Thank you so much for
taking time to write and check on me and my family. We are all
fine, physically, I mean. However, I am feeling a huge pain in my
heart for those children who were killed with no concern for their
right of life during the war. I needed a friend to talk to about
all the horrible things that were happening, but I found none, and
my words also didn’t help me. I really need you to know what I and
the whole Palestinian people went through during the war. Dear Ken,
you are a dear friend of mine, and I need your support to survive
all this. Thank you again for everything, and thank you for your
friendship,

Regards from my dear hurt Gaza,

Hanan

Hanan has promised to write me more, and more
at length, about her experiences during the war and its aftermath.
But at the moment of this writing (February 10, 2009), she is back
at her university, taking her exams, and everything must wait until
after she has finished them. But at least I know she is still
alive, that her family survived the terrible ordeal through which
they suffered during the Israeli attacks, and that she will
continue to write to me.

I am happy to have been able to share these
letters from my beloved friend Hanan with you so that you can know
her, too, and understand better what it has been like for Gazans
like her to live, suffer, and sometimes die during the siege and
then the bombardment of Gaza. But at a more personal level, her
letters will also make you aware of what she has come to mean to
me. Hanan is the spirit of Palestine.

As I have already indicated several times, on
December 27, 2008, in the late morning, Israel began bombing the
Gaza Strip in an air attack and eventual limited ground invasion
that lasted twenty-two days. During this time, more than 1400
Palestinians, including more than 900 civilians, were killed. Among
the civilians, over 300 children and about 120 women were reported
to have died as well. In addition, more than 5000 persons were
wounded by the bombing and shelling, many seriously. Among these
were more than 1600 children and more than 800 women.

Thirteen Israelis, including ten soldiers,
lost their lives during the attack.

Beyond the loss of life, tens of thousands
of buildings were destroyed or seriously damaged, and upward of a
hundred thousand people were displaced.

During the invasion, there were widespread
reports and allegations of war crimes, particularly by the Israeli
Defense Forces, and worldwide protests took place for weeks against
what seemed to be a very one-sided and ruthless massacre of
innocent people who furthermore, because they were already penned
up like prisoners, could not flee the bombing and shelling but only
submit to it and hope that they and their families could somehow
survive the onslaught.

After the attacks ceased, several human
rights groups presented strong evidence of war crimes, such as the
deliberate targeting of civilians and the use of illegal weapons,
but the definitive report on the war was based on an investigation
commissioned by the U.N. Human Rights Council and carried out by a
distinguished South African Jewish judge, Richard Goldstone, which
likewise was harshly critical of Israel’s actions. His 575-page
report was overwhelmingly adopted on October 16, 2009 by the U.N.
Human Rights Council over the strenuous objections of both Israel,
which did not cooperate with Goldstone’s investigation, and the
United States.

For me, personally, the Israeli attack was
the worst and most painful period of my adult life. Never had I
been so affected by an act of war. Because of my having had a deep
involvement with a number of Gazans by the time it broke out, this
attack was very personal to me—heartbreaking and terrible and full
of anxiety. During it, I could not know whether any of my Gazan
friends and correspondents were still alive, or, even if they were,
if they had suffered serious injuries. I could only wonder, worry,
and pray.

Of course, for all that I was safe in
California. Obviously, whatever my dedication to the people of Gaza
and their cause, I was not there with them, threatened every day
with death and seeing my country destroyed. I could only read the
reports that were coming out of Gaza and view the carnage on
TV.

But eventually, fortunately, I did hear from
a number of those persons I had long been in correspondence with,
some of them by then dear friends despite my never having met them.
Their accounts of what they had gone through during these bombing
raids brought home to me more vividly than any itemization of
statistics, however grim, could what it is like to be the trapped
victim of indiscriminate bombing and be forced to witness what is
taking place around you.

In this concluding section of the book, you
will read three such accounts. They will tell you what Gazans had
to endure for these three weeks during the winter of 2008–2009. But
remember, there were
one and half million
people in Gaza
during these attacks. Imagine what it would be like if you had to
read the stories of all these people, not “merely” the three I
present here. If you can conceive of that, you might better be able
to appreciate the totality of the suffering that this attack caused
the inhabitants of Gaza, most of them children, and the persisting
traumas it left after the bombing had ceased.

The following interview was conducted by Eva
Bartlett, a Canadian journalist who was in Gaza during the Israel
attack, and is reprinted here with her kind permission. More
information about Ms. Bartlett will be found at the end of this
article. The interviewee, Professor Haidar Eid, was introduced in
the previous section.

An interview with Dr. Haidar Eid in Gaza

December 31, 2008

An interview with Dr. Haidar Eid. Testimony
taken December 30, 2008, 5:00 p.m. Dr. Eid is an Associate
Professor in the Department of English Literature, Al-Aqsa
University, Gaza Strip, Palestine.

I was lying in my bedroom when the first
strike happened, around 1:30 a.m. You know a strike isn’t just one
explosion, it’s a series of explosions. Boom, boom, boom, boom. The
whole building shook. I woke up and went to the bathroom first, and
within thirty seconds the second strike hit. F-16s were bombing the
Ministry of Foreign Affairs building, about five hundred meters
away. I could hear glass shattering everywhere. I went back into
the bedroom and saw glass everywhere, all over the bed which is
right up against the window. If I had been lying there still, it
would have shattered all over me, would have seriously injured me,
or worse, I don’t know. It was a very strong blast, and the glass
must have hit the bed with great force.

I brought a mattress into the living room,
which faces the sea, and lay down trying to sleep there. Moments
later, I heard a huge explosion, the third strike, this time from
an area closer to the sea. The front, sea-facing window exploded
into the room, landing on the desk and the floor, thankfully too
far from where I was lying.

I tried to call a friend who lives two
buildings away from the Ministries. He’s got five children, ages
five to fifteen. He said they were okay, but the children were
terrified, screaming.

I went into the third room, a spare bedroom,
and saw that the windows were already broken. I looked through the
shards of glass and saw that four ambulances had come as well as
two fire trucks. There were huge, black clouds. I was looking at
the ambulances and the people below when another strike against the
compound happened, the third series of explosions. Again, my
building shook from the impact. I heard people screaming, there was
more smoke, fire, and a terrible smell. I don’t know what . . . the
smell of death, I guess.

The radio reported that my friend, Dr. Fawaz
abu Setta, whose house is just in front of the ministry compound,
was buried under the rubble of his home. I was stunned, it really
affected me badly. He’s such a kind man, and I couldn’t believe it.
I called friends, I was so worried, and fifteen minutes later
finally learned that another friend had spoken to him: he and his
wife were okay in the basement of their house, locked in because
something had fallen against the door.

The compound has three or four ministries,
and each building has eight to ten floors. So I’d imagine you need
three missiles for each building. So far there’d been three sets of
hits against the buildings, as well as on-going strikes around Gaza
City and the Strip.

I could hear some of the explosions in
Gaza’s neighborhood, and the radio kept reporting the latest
explosions. They were everywhere: Sheik Radwan (a district of Gaza
City, where my brother and his family live. I started calling him,
but he didn’t answer), Zaytoun (another district of Gaza),
Jabaliya, Beit Hanoun . . .

All the time, the building was shaking, like
an earthquake. These were the loudest explosions I’ve ever heard.
It was terrible, frightening, confusing. And you know, you don’t
know where to run, what to do. I looked outside, but it was too
dark, too filled with black smoke . . ..I don’t know what kind of
bombs Israel is using, something that creates fire, and very dark
smoke. I could hear children screaming in my own building,
screeching from fear. My landlord is in his eighties, and his wife
had a stroke last year and cannot walk. They live on the twelfth
floor. I couldn’t imagine how they were feeling then, completely
helpless, the power out, no way of escaping if our building was
hit, or even if it wasn’t hit, but just to escape the terror.