Meet Me in Gaza (16 page)

I went to Gazan-style aerobics with Saida once and still cringe at the memory. The instructor was a female gladiator. Ten minutes into her class, I was whimpering, as she lambasted me: ‘Louisa! One two three four!
Yallah
! One two three four!’

I shudder and reach for my cigarettes.

Saida rolls her eyes again, but now she’s smiling.

‘OK,
kaslana
(you lazy thing)! You can sit and talk to Catherine. I will do aerobics and then we can see if the sauna is working.’

We shake on it and arrange to meet at the Tulip Beauty Salon tomorrow after work.

The Tulip is situated on the second floor of a tower block, just a couple of minutes walk from my place. When I arrive, slightly late, Catherine is at the reception desk. She looks me up, then down.

‘You fat bitch!’ she says, grinning at me.

‘Nice to see you too, Catherine.’

‘You haven’t been around for weeks – where did you go?’

‘I was visiting Scotland.’

‘You must have stuffed your face the whole time!’ she chortles.

‘Your double chin’s doing very well these days!’ I shoot back.

She’s something of a Gaza legend, Catherine – a pale-skinned, dark-haired English rose from the Lake District, her Cumbrian accent still strong after twenty-four years in Gaza. She speaks rapid-fire Arabic and has a mouth like a sewer, but she’s really a big softie. While Saida works out in aerobics, she and I sit behind reception, drinking tea with milk and chomping on biscuits.

Catherine and her husband Muhammad met in Israel in 1980. She was on holiday with a pal and he was working in a hotel, back in the days when hundreds of thousands of Gazans worked in Israel. They got married the same year and moved to London. But her husband – she calls him Mo – couldn’t settle in London, and a few years later they decided to make their home in Gaza. Catherine often reminisces about their decision to do so.

‘It was 1985 and we were back here in Gaza again, on holiday. We were sitting at a restaurant on the beach, having a nice fish dinner. Mo asked if I thought I could actually live here. There was a beautiful sunset in front of us and I remember thinking – why not?’ She drains her cup. ‘This place, even now, it’s got
something.
Mind you – I’ve been slappin’ myself ever since!’

I dunk a biscuit in my tea and chuckle. I’ve heard this story before, but I still like it.

As we sit and chat, a stream of local women flow through the reception. Catherine and Mo opened the Tulip in 1999; it has a gym, hairdressers and a beauty salon. But the
pièce de résistance
has to be the ever-popular ‘breast vibrator’. Apparently it does wonders for droopy boobs.

At least half the Tulip staff are foreigners – Russian and East European women who met their husbands when they (the men) were studying at Russian and East European universities. There are several thousand long-term foreign residents living inside Gaza, most of them women married to Gazans. I get my hair cut by a lithe Russian blonde called Vera, who hails from a city called Kalashnikovo and is a dab hand with short hair. Vera has been in Gaza for six years now; she lives with her husband and children in the sprawling Beach Camp (another of the refugee camps), which begins practically next door to the al-Deira Hotel, but is a different world altogether. Once they marry and settle here, foreign spouses are obliged to apply for Palestinian ID cards and, as far as the Israeli authorities are concerned, they effectively become Gazans. The subsequent travel restrictions make it difficult for them to leave Gaza but, ironically, often even harder to return. Catherine hasn’t left Gaza for five years now and Mo has not set foot outside the Strip for almost a decade. He cannot secure a permit from the Israelis and she won’t go without him.

Catherine asks about my holiday. I tell her the news from the world outside, then ask what she’s been up to these last six weeks. She gives me the Gaza shrug.

‘You know what? While you were away, I don’t think I even left the building … you’ve seen our flat upstairs, on the thirteenth floor. It’s quiet, and we’ve got a nice view of the sea. I know it sounds a bit sad, but I don’t go outside for weeks at a time. I haven’t even been to the beach since about 1996.’

I stare at her and shake my head. ‘You know what, you need to get out more!’

Catherine tilts her head back and chortles. ‘C’mon, Lou – where is there to go?’

Catherine lives within a fragment of an already restricted space, a bit like confining yourself to one wing of an open prison. Most of the Gazans I know get out more than she does, but many people seem to have interior maps that restrict their lives even within the claustrophobic confines of the Strip. When I asked one of my friends recently if she liked the city of Rafah, in southern Gaza, she said, ‘I have never been there. I am from al-Rimal, where you live. The rest of Gaza is a dump.’ She had never been to the camps or swum in the sea. She wasn’t interested.

There
are
people who criss-cross the Strip, like my colleague Shadi. But the majority seem to stay within their neighbourhoods because of ties to families, or clans – and because there is nowhere new to go. As part of his work, Shadi monitors the traffic going in and out of Gaza, human and otherwise. He estimates that 2 per cent of Gazans are permitted to travel outside the Strip on any kind of regular basis. Tens of thousands of Gazan teenagers and those in their twenties, even their thirties, have never seen a day outside this Strip. Many pace or rage in silence, like caged animals; the pressure builds and explodes, at home or out on the streets. Men beat their wives, their children and each other (one afternoon I saw a man on the street pull off his heeled boot and use it to batter a young girl about the head and when I screamed at him to stop he screamed back at me, ‘She’s
my
daughter!’). Others take to alcohol – some brew their own hooch here – or drugs, like hash, or Tramadol, self-medicate themselves into lethargy, and start to slowly rot.

Meanwhile, as we wait to hear news about the
tahdiya
between Hamas and Israel, civilians, young and old, are being summoned to Hamas police stations as their political connections and allegiances are probed by this increasingly paranoid regime. I can see, and feel, the direct repercussions on the streets, where people are slightly more guarded about what they say and more nervous about hosting mixed parties with dancing and alcohol. These changes are subtle, like a fluctuation of one or two degrees in the air temperature, but isn’t that always how it starts? My local friends tell me that more moderate members of Hamas are struggling to keep the movement’s political militants at bay because the regime is isolated, and no match for Israel’s military might, and because they cannot do anything about lifting the siege. So instead, Hamas is beefing up its local military presence. Military training camps have opened up and down the Strip – including one on a piece of wasteland opposite the bottom of my street, next to Gaza’s Al-Azhar University where lines of masked men practise target shooting every afternoon, within range of thousands of coming-and-going students. With these added internal pressures, there is even less space for ordinary Gazans to breathe. Sometimes when I step outside my door, I can feel the tensions crackling round these streets.

I tell Catherine that, while back in the UK, I had a telephone conversation with the BBC journalist Alan Johnston, Hamas’s former hostage. We didn’t talk for long. But what stuck with me afterwards was his comment about how remarkable it is that Gaza still actually manages to function as a society, given the almost-unbelievable pressures on ordinary people. And this is from a man who spent his last four months here imprisoned in a basement.

Abdul never left Gaza either. He lived in Beit Hanoun, on the ragged northern edge of the town, in an apartment in a grimy tenement building where his mother keeps the heavy curtains closed. Thanks to its proximity to Erez – and Israel – Beit Hanoun is one of the most battered places in Gaza, a dreary town that no one else wants to visit.

Abdul attended the Beit Hanoun Agricultural Secondary School, just down the road from his home. After school he sometimes used to hang out and play football in the school yard, like most 13-year-old boys do. On 21 August 2007 Abdul and two of his friends, Fadi and Ahmad, were in the yard after school. They kicked the ball around for a while, then scampered over the low fence dividing the yard from a scrubby field with a small copse of buckled trees at the back. Abdul was small for his age, and wiry, good at climbing trees. At 5.45
PM
that afternoon, while the three boys were climbing round the twisted branches and trunks, an Israeli officer pressed a button that launched a surface-to-surface missile at them.

Abdul’s mother, Sabah, is draped in black when we meet at her home. She sits beside a lamp which casts her half in shadow, half in light.

‘He was a good boy,’ she says of her dead son, but her thread of a voice is so fine I have to lean forward to catch her words. A photograph of Abdul hangs on the wall above her, framed in gold, next to an identical framed photograph of his elder brother, who was killed by the Israeli military the previous year in circumstances I know nothing about.

Sabah sees me squinting up at the two framed photographs in the half-light and bows her head. She didn’t witness either of her sons’ deaths, but has the bearing of a woman emptied by grief. Abdul was dismembered by the Israeli missile and died in the field among the trees. Fadi died as he reached the local hospital. The third boy, Ahmad, was injured by shrapnel, but lived. The Centre where I work gathers data on everyone killed in Palestine by Israeli or Palestinian forces and I am helping to collate information on children who have been killed by the Israelis inside Gaza over the last twelve months.
³⁶

I am in Sabah’s home with Samir, the local community worker with the searing gaze and silver-streaked hair who recently took me to meet the Swailams. When we have finished drinking the coffee served to us by Sabah’s young daughter, Samir says he will show me the spot where Abdul was killed. As we rise to our feet, Sabah extends her hands towards me and for a moment she and I stand in silence together, our fingers clasped. I thank her for her time, tell her I am very sorry about both her sons and we say goodbye.

I follow Samir out of the tenement and down the dirty street. We walk side by side. Samir looks straight ahead, silent. A donkey cart trundles towards us. The beasts’ hooves are overgrown as calluses and the man riding the cart has a barrel of a belly. As they rattle past, he gives the donkey a surly whack with a hefty stick. But apart from them, the street is quiet; the local children are at school. I am not used to this near-silence inside Gaza; it makes me jittery.

At the end of the dirty street, I follow Samir through a gap in a crumbling stone wall, into a scrubby field with a handful of trees at the back. We walk towards the trees. As we approach, I see that a few of them are budding small white blossoms. The long, oblong building of the Beit Hanoun Agricultural Secondary School is to our left, just over a low fence. Samir stops and squats down beside a scoop in the ground at the edge of the trees, where the impact of the Israeli missile still marks the spot like a shallow grave. I squat down beside him, trying to make sense of what happened. Families from around Beit Hanoun have told me, and my colleagues, that they believe their children are targeted by the Israeli military to pressurise them into confronting the fighters launching rockets towards Israel.

‘Why do you think the Israelis killed the boys?’ I ask Samir.

‘Come.’

He stands up and walks away from the trees towards a ragged path that slices through the field to the school. I follow just behind him. When he stops, I look round but see nothing until Samir points out a rusty contraption lying on the ground among the grass and weeds near the side of the path. Neither big nor small, it looks like a stepladder with just one large rung in the middle. I squat down to touch it but Samir puts his arm out, blocking me, just like he did inside the Swailams’ house.

‘Don’t touch it,’ he says. ‘It is a rocket launcher.’

I whip my hand back to my side.

‘The fighters were firing rockets next to the school?’

‘It is an old rocket launcher, it is not being used any more. But the two boys who died were playing very close to it when they were hit.’

‘How do you know?’

‘I was here just after the attack, I filmed everything. I have the video if you want to see it.’

‘OK.’

When we stand up, I search Samir’s face for a reaction and he stares back at me with an expression I cannot read. Though my throat is dry, I light up a cigarette and realise that my hands are trembling.