A Hospital Scene - by: Rana Abdulla

From:nidah@yahoogroups.com
on behalf of abd@istar.ca

Dear all human beings:

As of the writing of this letter, the operation enters into its sixth day and more than 420 Palestinians have been killed and over 2,100 have been injured. Victims of this monstrosity - mothers, fathers and children, besieged in hunger, starved for life, and killed in front of us, live on TV so the world can see.

How many Palestinians are dead in Gaza? Dozens? Hundreds? How many hundreds? Does it matter? At what point does the slaughter become a massacre. At what point does a massacre become genocide?

I am yet to absorb the hardships and the lack of food and electricity in Gaza and all the appalling and collective punishment on the Gazans. Denying them any human rights, no freedom, no food, cut off by land, sea and air, no reliable power, little water, tortured by hunger and diseases... this is what we know as a medieval siege.

No human being should be forced to try to comprehend the killing of hundreds of people, the torture of children, the sight of bodies being found in the rubble of their deliberately destroyed homes, or of corpses rotting in the streets of countless neighbourhoods.

As I sit watching, scenes of wailing families as their mangled bodies of their loved ones are brought to Al-Chifa hospital - scenes of doctors in emergency rooms trying to save the young lives of people. One doctor tried to revive the youth by frantically pushing his hand down hard on the boy?s chest and then releasing it, trying to keep the heart beating. But the doctor?s battle to save the life of the young man was hopeless. A crowd of other doctors and nurses huddled around another body, doing everything they could to bring those youth back to the woes of their world.

The Israeli raids chase the wounded people even into the hospital. Early on Sunday, F16 fighter jets dropped two bombs on a mosque on the other side of the road, sending shrapnel and debris flying toward the hospital. In the intensive care room, smashed glass fell on those hovering between life and death.

Piles of corpses are moved aside and houses lie in smouldering ruins. Children scream for their mothers ?mama, mama?. Even the hardest of hearts cannot be appalled by this. Ambulances and private cars rush those wounded or killed to the hospital, where staff use sheets as makeshift stretchers. In some cases, a single stretcher is used to carry several bodies. Torn limbs fall to the blood-soiled floor.

Overworked doctors and nurses can only deal with the most pressing cases. There is no space left in the morgue and bodies are piled up in the emergency room and in the corridors, while many of the severely wounded scream in pain.

The yard outside the Chifa hospital is chaotic as the families of those injured or killed wait to hear something. The hospital has stopped using the morgue because there is no more room for all these bodies. The mourning families before they can even process their once living loved one is no longer with them, are told in one breath ?he is gone? and in the second breath urged to bury the dead quickly for fear of epidemics because that is part and parcel during such an act of war.

A reminder of Jenin?s massacre drills my memory when a young boy is wearing new trainers, bought by sympathetic Palestinians, because he was stripped to his underpants by Israeli soldiers after he had surrendered to them. He surrendered because he could take no more of the bombardment. Three people were killed by rockets in the house where he had taken refuge. Others who did not ?respond? to the same indignity were badly beaten. The boy?s brother lies on a bloody mattress face down, his back wrapped in bandages. Is this the way a teenager should live?

Somewhere in the world (while some Palestinian children die) other more fortunate children tangle over a soccer ball. Across the carpet of green, yellow and dry brown leaves crumble onto the sea of grass. It is difficult for me to comprehend why there has to be such a cruel contrast between these fortunate children and the Palestinian children who have to fight for their lives and their freedom in an indifferent world against an armed Israeli militia who does its best to kill, mutilate and silence them without conscience. The same Israeli militia who descend from people who survived the one of the worst crimes ever perpetrated by men. The same militia who know that what they are doing is in violation of every human right and convention devised to protect humanity. They say ?We must never forget?... it was they who forgot. They who was once the victim, is now the perpetrator.

What I see is the fact that normal daily life has completely stopped. The State of Israel has the ability to literally bring to a halt to every aspect of daily life and kill in cold blood. Each day is the same with little to distinguish one from the other. The news is always the same and the international community continually fails to intervene and end this madness. How many times will we hear another talking head call for an end to the ?violence? without doing anything about it? I get so angry at the thought of losing these days. I wonder how many days native Palestinians have lost. This is the reality of the Israeli occupation. This is its essence. There is no balance regarding the truth nor is there balance regarding firepower.

The US Administration and their media keep repeating the Israeli lies that it is doing this mass killing, in retaliation to Hamas breaking the cease fire and launching rockets on settlers just outside of the Gaza Strip. Neither have the decency to think for a minute and investigate these fabrications and stretches of the truth. What is happening is something completely different from what is being espoused on western telecasts.

Is it fair that Israel has nuclear weapons and Apache helicopters while Palestinians are forced to fight with rifles and home-made explosives? There is no balance about land originally held by Palestinians over which Israel now controls. There is no balance between the human rights that Israelis enjoy while Palestinians live in an open air detention centers which lack medical supplies and are isolated from the rest of the world. When I see the shanty towns of worn and weary people and in the distance, in the distance that an eye can see, beautifully manicured lawns watered by sprinklers under the desert heat, beside nicely paved roads and lovely homes that are even nicer than many homes here.

But you don?t see that because then you would see a side of Israel that torments and reminds the native people who they not are or entitled to be.

Israel wants to rain a war on Gaza. Then there must be a balance in describing what has happened in Gaza, what IS happening in Gaza.

This humanitarian disaster is engulfing the people of Gaza while a silence engulfs its bystanders and the Arabs are cowed into silence. All western media have conveniently chosen to focus coverage on every other scene of tragedy, in a daily game to block the untold murders of Israill... and the world continues watching the barbarity against the rightful inhabitants of the land, a land they have lived for thousands of years. This is their crime?

Why is this crime taking place in the name of Americans, using their tax dollars are allowing Israel to systematically destruct the people by proxy in billions of arms and aid? They aid an army that does not confront another army in a battle field; they aid an army to attack civilians living under occupation.

It is important to speak out against what is happening in Gaza. Israel will reprimand you, brand you an anti-Semite, perhaps expel you. Be forewarned. It reminds me a time when those tried to protect the Jews of Eastern Europe were tortured and killed for taking the same steps. Those people today who are considered heroes for not joining in those massacres and pogroms that killed children and mothers and families the same. I ask every Israeli ? what are you thinking?

Israel, whose existence is based on the expulsion of a nation from the lands of their parents, is reasserting its essential exploitative nature. Israel is the oppressor, the occupier, which parks its tanks on plundered land, killing and destroying in order to inherit. For over 60 years Israel has taught the world that they are clever jailers and torturers.

Why should Jewish children whose parents had their own homes in other countries take away be okay to take and occupy what was and is rightfully Palestinian? Why do world leaders condone the killing of Palestinian children but are outraged when one or two Israelis are killed? Don?t those children deserve to be as happy as children anywhere else on God?s good earth? I see the contrast and it takes me to a place so deep and painful it is overwhelming. My tears are their tears, these Palestinian mothers crying for their dead or wounded children.

What Gaza used to be is not what it is now. Even when Gaza was occupied for all those years there was some semblance of functioning. After the settlers were forced to leave, the Gazans found their wells filled with cement, their power cut and or vandalized, roads torn apart, hundred year old orchards burning or simple bulldozed. If we can`t have it, well neither can you. And this attitude if you can call it, just continues. With world apathy which is approval by proxy, those whom the Israelis don`t kill, will be driven away because the land will be so unfit that this eventual happening will be reported as abandonment other than by any other truth.

Gaza is now a place filled with newly dug graves watered by the tears of mothers who will not know the children or enjoy any future other than mourning, poverty and oppression.