Meet Me in Gaza (13 page)

He raises a dark hand in salute, whips his beast into a comic, splayed-leg canter and races off up the beach, whooping as he races to catch up with his pals.

I wonder if I’m still drunk.

Twenty-four hours later, Operation Winter Heat is still ongoing, though the bombing is not so intense. I take a taxi to visit Saida. Muhammad the driver is sombre as we cross the city, which is sombre too. The shops have closed early again this evening.

‘Those families in Izbat Abed Rabbo cannot escape,’ he says as we turn into another unlit street. ‘There is nowhere for them to go, they just have to sit and fucking wait for this bombing to finish.’

The district of al-Tuffah, where Saida lives, is near Jabalya and now we can hear the helicopters again. I clamber up the stairs of Saida’s building and find her front door open. Her mother is sitting in the kitchen weeping. There’s a power cut, but their battery-operated radio is on and a broadcast is crackling over the airwaves. Saida is sitting in the kitchen too, holding her mother’s hand in the unsteady candlelight. I cannot understand much of what’s being said on the radio, so Saida fills me in. Two local fighters have been injured in eastern Jabalya. The Israeli military are on the ground in the area, and the men have barricaded themselves into an empty house. They have phoned for an ambulance, but the ambulance cannot reach them because it’s too dangerous right now. The two men are lying on the floor inside the barricaded house, both bleeding heavily. They have called this local radio station begging for help, because if no one reaches them soon they are both going to die.

I stand in the kitchen doorway listening to a voice rasping on the radio – I don’t know if it is the voice of one of the dying fighters or the radio presenter. I feel like someone has just slapped me very hard across the face.

Saida’s face crumples. She is a strong, proud woman, I’ve never seen her like this before, so young- and bewildered-looking. I stoop and take her hand. For a moment she clutches it, pressing my fingers into a tight bunch.

‘Why do they want to kill us so much?’ She shakes her head and bursts into tears.

‘I don’t know,
habibti
,’ I say.

I don’t know anything right now, except that the
hafla
, the jokes, the drinking, all of it was self-medication against the bloody reality that people are dying up the street.

After four days and three nights, the Israelis pull out of eastern Jabalya. Their operation is over.

A few hours later, I am in the district of Izbat Abed Rabbo with a small team from the Centre. We’ve come to document what happened during the military operation and to interview eyewitnesses. I am standing with one of my colleagues, Samer, in a first-floor living room with bullet holes in the walls, a shattered cabinet of ornaments and a bloodstained carpet. The door to the children’s bedroom, just off the living room, is open. Inside, the bedroom window is shattered and blood has congealed into a crust on top of one of the narrow single beds.

Abu Shebak, who lives directly beneath this first-floor apartment, is explaining what happened. Late on Saturday night he heard a burst of shooting, then screaming. He raced upstairs into this living room and found his young niece slumped dead on the floor. Her brother was lying close by, injured and bleeding, but still breathing. Abu Shebak called an ambulance, but as it sped the boy towards the local hospital, its sirens screaming, he died too. The children had been asleep in their bedroom. When gunshots shattered the window, they fled into the living room and were both hit by crossfire from Israeli and Hamas fighters.

Abu Shebak answers all our questions patiently and even offers us tea. But the living room is filling up with journalists and other human rights workers, all wanting their questions answered, and their pound of flesh as well.

Thanking the uncle, Samer and I tread back down the bloodstained stairs. The children’s mother is next door, holding the traditional condolences, which can take place now that the Israelis have pulled out. Samer urges me to pay her my respects. I push the door open into a large room filled with women sitting on the floor. They propel me towards the children’s mother. She is sitting on the floor too, her back against the wall. I squat down beside her.

‘I am so sorry, so sorry,’ I say to her in Arabic. I don’t know what else to say to this thin-faced woman who is weeping violently, her shoulders shaking. She opens her mouth but no words come out. She tries once more, but the only sound is a gurgling sob. The woman sitting beside her puts a hand on my arm. ‘She cannot speak,’ she tells me. ‘She just cannot.’

On every corner of Izbat Abed Rabbo is a condolence tent where the men are gathering to pay their respects to the families of the dead. So many Israeli tanks have driven through the main street, it looks as though it has been ploughed. Samer and I visit a dozen families and take testimonies about Israeli soldiers invading and smashing up their homes, tying them up, holding them and their children hostage without food or water, using their bedrooms for snipers’ nests and ripping floors and beds apart for barricades. The unshaven men stare down at the torn floors, the women weep in humiliation. It doesn’t look like Tom and Jerry to me.

In the late afternoon I follow Samer to one last house, where the front door has been torn from its hinges. His mobile rings and he pauses on the step outside. I step inside, to see if anyone is around. I call out and for a moment it seems there is no one and I am alone in this dark, cavernous hallway with debris scattered all around. But suddenly a group of a dozen women and girls appear. They make straight for me and demand to know if I speak Arabic.

‘Er, yes,’ I say.

They grasp my arms and march me along a dark passageway into a bare room with no windows. They shut the door, surround me, take my hands and begin to talk. Two or three of them wipe away salty tears, dirt streaking their faces as they gesture violently with wet fingers. Their voices are loud and shrill and I can catch only a little of what’s being said because they are all speaking at the same time, demanding my attention. I am too drained to make much sense of it all, but realise this doesn’t matter. They want to blurt out what has just happened to them and I simply need to listen. I do my best as we stand there pressed close together in this bare cell of a room until finally their anxious, quavering voices start to die down.

During Operation Winter Heat, the Israeli military killed 110 Gazans, almost half of them civilians, including 26 children. Gazan fighters launched some 200 rockets and mortars towards Israel during the operation. Some of them landed inside Israel, many fell to ground inside Gaza, and the fighters vowed to continue.

The morning after our visit to Izbat Abed Rabbo, I am in a portacabin near the Gazan side of the Erez crossing, just beside the yellow barrier that marks the beginning of no-man’s-land. I’m waiting for the go-ahead to cross no-man’s-land and enter the main Erez crossing terminal building, where Israeli security admits people into Israel, or not.

A man called Hani has his work desk in the portacabin. Hani spends his day telephoning Israeli security operatives inside Erez, coordinating permission for individuals to proceed across no-man’s-land, and still he manages to smile.

I have no idea how long it will take me to cross into Israel. Everything I’m carrying will be searched at Erez. The UN does not allow its female staff to walk through the crossing – they drive through in UN vehicles – as there has been a recent spate of incidents involving foreign women being subjected to ‘humiliating strip searches’ by the private Israeli security company working inside the crossing.

I have also heard about the room, deep inside Erez, with the grid floor where people are forced to stand, sometimes without their clothes, being interrogated by Israeli officials behind bulletproof glass. I am not looking forward to this at all.

And I feel jittery too about facing the outside world, with its space and crowds and too many choices of where to go and what to do. Maybe I’m getting a bit institutionalised, like a prisoner gradually becoming fearful of being released from her jail.

Hani answers his phone again, speaks in fluent Hebrew for just a couple of minutes and gives me the thumbs up.

‘You can go now,’ he says, quite casually. I wonder if he ever gets to leave Gaza.

I stand up and reach for my suitcase and handbag.

‘You coming back?’ he asks.

I smile and nod. ‘As soon as I can.’

‘
Salam
.’ He twinkles a smile back. ‘Enjoy it out there.’

A Gazan rocket meets an Israeli rocket up in the sky.

‘Where are you going?’ asks the Gazan rocket.

‘To Gaza, to kill terrorists!’ says the Israeli rocket, ‘where

are
you
going?’

‘No idea,’ says the Gazan rocket.

Gazan joke

With one thing and another, it is almost six weeks later when I finally arrive back at the Erez crossing, armed with a new visa and a new Gaza entry permit. But the crossing is closed. When I get out of the taxi, I can hear explosions in the near distance, inside Gaza. While my Palestinian driver keeps the engine running, I speak to an Israeli officer inside a booth at the main Erez entry gate. She says there is shelling in Beit Hanoun – a town on the edge of northern Gaza – and she doesn’t know whether the crossing will open today.

I hover outside the booth, considering my options. It’s late morning, so I can wait here and hope the crossing will open some time today; or take the taxi back to Ramallah, stay another night with Saida’s sister, Alla’, and drive back here again early tomorrow morning. I decide to wait it out. I’m not alone; at least forty other people, Gazans and foreigners, are hanging around the crossing gate too. The Israeli plain clothes security operatives prowling just inside the main gate have tinted, wrap-around shades and their index fingers rest on the trigger of their M16s. When I tell my taxi driver I’m going to stay, he merely nods. Bags in tow, I take my place on the low wall just outside the main gate.

Waiting to enter a hermetically sealed strip of land that is being shelled is not a position I ever thought I’d find myself in. But I have switched on to auto-pilot, or maybe it’s just denial. With nothing else to do, my mind drifts back to my six-week trip. I spent my first week outside Gaza snorkelling in the small Red Sea resort of Dahab, as I had planned; but found the first couple of days bizarrely stressful. After constant power cuts inside Gaza, the light of Dahab dazzled me and sudden loud noises made me flinch. The Egyptian manager of my backpackers’ hotel had tacked up a notice in the reception:

He told me it was a protest against Israel having just killed 100 people inside Gaza. I said it was pathetic. If he cared so damn much, why wasn’t he protesting to demand that his government reopen its Gaza border? A few days later I got chatting to a middle-aged American ‘living the desert dream’ with her local Bedouin husband. She asked me where I lived. When I told her I was working in Palestine, she told me I was helping Palestinians because my heart was wide open – and by the way, did I know about a website exposing what those powerful Jews in America are really up to? I didn’t know the website, and said I didn’t want to know it, and she looked away. I never heard poison like that inside Gaza.

After Dahab, I went back to Scotland. I had been invited to give a reading in the far northern Orkney Isles, where, the day after the reading, I crouched amid rocks laced with lichen and watched blubbery seals snorting as they basked in radiant early morning sun. I filled my lungs with Atlantic Sea air, and at that moment Gaza felt like a dark tunnel that would just swallow me up whole. But as soon as I got news of my new entry permit, I flew from grey-skied London (which Gazans call
Balad al-Dabaab
, the City of Fog) to Tel Aviv, drove to Ramallah and spent a couple of nights with Saida’s sister, Alla’, and her family before heading back to the Strip.

‘OK, now you have seen Gaza,’ said Alla’, ‘you can see it is a hell.
Khalas
! Stay here in Ramallah.’