... are we really so coward to call it "war"?
Also tonight I cannot stand from write the last news from Vittorio Arrigoni, the la Italian in Gaza during this true masked terroristic operation that but the real enemys of Hamas is aiming volutarly innocent civilians, women, children and is demolishing on purpose any building mosques, schools, civilian houses or hospitals full of casualities.
I would apologize for the "though" photo I'm reporting from Vik's blog, but I'm not really be able to do that because there is no "political correctness" or "taste" about that: for all of us this is only a picture that brings to us a sense of indignation making us aware of what for those people are only stills from an infernal reality!
«"To the innocent people of Gaza, our war is not against you but against Hamas, if they don't stop to launch rockets you will be in danger". It is the transcript or a recording that is possible to hear in these hours pulling up the receiver of every phone in Gaza. Israeli Army is broadcasting this message deceiving that the palestinians don't have eyes and ears. Eyes to see bombs hitting almost exclusively civilian targets, as mosques (15, the last one was the Omar Bin Abd Al Azeez in Beit Hanoun), schools, universities, markets, hospitals. Ears not to hear the screams of pain and terror of the children, innocent victims and nevertheless innocent victims of every bombing. According to hospital sources, in the momento when I'm writing 120 are the minors killed under the bombs, 548 the total dead, more thant 2700 the injured, dozens and dozens the missing.
Two days ago in the red half moon hospital in Jabalia's refugee camp, there the night haven't never fell down. From the sky the Apache helicopters dropped flashing bombs continously, that we weren't aware of a kind of difference from sunset to dawn.
The repeated cannon shootings from a tank placed less than a kilometer from the hospital damaged seriously the walls of the building, but we resisted till next morning. Around 10.00AM, bombs fell on the open field near the building, all around machine gun shooting, and for the red half moon doctors that was a message to us, sudden evacuation, or we would have been killed. We transfered the injured in other hospital infrastructures and now the operative base for the ambulances is on Al Nady road, the medical staff sits on the sidewalks waiting for the calls, that are following one another.
For the first time from Israeli attack I saw in the hospital some corpses of palestinian resistance. A tiny number in proportion with the hundreds of the civilian victims, that after the ground invasion are rising exponentially.
After Jabalia mosque attack, at the same time with the tanks entering, that made 11 victims and about 50 injured, for all the saturday night escorting the ambulances, we were aware of the tremendous destrctive power of the tanks projectiles, even if we didn't feel the absence on even more destructions on previous days. In Bet Hanoun a family was hit by one of this deadly shot, they were in their home just warming up themself beside a tiny wood stove. We took 15 injured, 4 were in desperate conditions.
After that, around half past 3 AM we answered to a call, but we arrived too late: in front of an house door three women in tears, gave us in the arms a little 4 years old girl in a white blanket, that was her shroud and she was already icy-cold.
A further family was hit at full, this time by the aviation, in Jabalia, two adults got bomb fragments inside their body. Their two sons had light wounds, but as they were shouting and crying it was evident the psycologic trauma they were living, something that will mark them for their whole life, far more than a slash on their cheeks. Even if nobody is remembering to take them into account, thousands are the children affected by serious mental illness caused by the terror of the contious bombing, or even worse, by the sight of their parents or brothers and sisters torn into pieces.
The crimes Israeli is committing in these hours are well beyond the limits of immagination.
The military don't let us go to take care of the survivors of this huge artificial catastrophe.
When the injured people are near Israeli tanks which attacked them, we are not allowed to get near with our red half moon ambulances because soldiers begin to shoot at us.
We would need the escort of even an ambulance from the red cross, and of their coordination with the Israeli military heads, before to run to save lives.
Try to imagine how much time would need a procedure like that, that's for sure a death sentence for the injured needing for transfusions and emergency treatments.
Even more the red cross has his casualities to think about, and could not be available at every call from us. Then we must every time in a "safe" area, (this is like a "joke" here in Gaza) waiting for the relatives to bring us the dying people, often on their very backs. Like this happened about at 5.30AM this morning, we shutdown the ambulance's engine in the middle of a road cross and told by phone our position to a relative of the injured people there. After about ten minutes of frustrating waiting, when someone had already decided to switch on the engine to go to another call, we saw around the corner coming to us, slowly, a little cart full of people, pulled by a mule. A couple with their two little sons. The best representation of this "non-war". This is not a war because there aren't two armies fighting on a front, this is a siege from an Air Force, a Navy and now even from the Infantry that are ones of the most powerful in the world, and for sure the most advanced in means of hi-tech military equipment. They attacked a miserable strip of land of 360 square kilometers, where the population is moving still thanks to mules and where there is a resistance army that has the only strenght of being ready for its own martyrdom. When the little cart was enough near to us we get to meet them, and with horror we discovers its terrific load. A little child laid down with his head broken, his eyes were literally outside his head, moving on his face like the crabs ones. We took him and he was already breathing. His brother intead had his body torn, we could see and count his white rids beyond his torn flesh pieces. His mother held his hands on that "opened" body, as she was trying to fix what her love could generate and what the anonymous hatred of a soldiera, obeying strictly to sadistic orders, destroyed forever.
I must denounce a further crime, and our further personal mourning. Israeli army is going on aiming at the ambulances. After the doctor and the nurses dead in Jabalia 4 days ago, yesterday was the turn of our friend Arafa Abed Al Dayem, he was 35 and leaves 4 sons. About at 8.30AM yesterday morning we got a call from Gaza City, two civilians where shot machine gun fire from a tank, one of our ambulances went there. Arafa and a male nurse took the two injured in the ambulance, closed the doors ready to start the run for the hospital, an then they were hit at full by a tank shot. The hit beheaded one of the injured, and killed our friend, Nader the nurse survived but now is in the same hospital where he works. Arafa, primary school teacher, offerd himself as paramedic volunteer when were no professionals enogh. We are all under a death rain, and no one called him. Araf went at the hospital by himself, and was working knowing the danger he was dealing with, because he believed that beyond his family there were other human beings to defend and to take care of.
We miss his jokes, his irresistible and contagious sense of humour that gladden the hospital even his its darkest hours when the dead are more than the injured and everyone feel himself guilty not to have done something to save them, pressed as we are by an inesorable force: the dead machine of Israeli military.
Someone must stop this tragedy, I saw things in these days, heard thunders, smelled awful odors, that if I will have descendants one day, I won't have the courage to tell them. Is there anybody out there? The desolation to feel isolated and abandoned to our doom, is as the view of a Gaza district after a huge raid campaing. On Saturday evening they passed me on the phone Milan's place in protest, I passed the phone as well to the heroic doctors and nurses we are working with, I saw them take heart for a moment. The prostest all over the world demonstrate that still exists someone to believe in, but the protests aren't enough big to make the needed pressure in order that the western governments will force Israel to assume its responsabilities as criminal of war and against humanity.
Many are the terrified pregnant women that in these hours are giving life to their sons in premature births.
I personally was present at three births. One of these women, at the seven months, gave birth to a small child called Ahmed. Riding with her on board ambulance heading Auda hospital leaving behing us in the ambulance mirrors the scene of death and destruction where just before we were taking corpses, I thought for a moment that this life just at its bloom could be a wish for a future of peace and hope.
Illussion dissolved witht the first rocket that fell apart our ambulance when we were getting back from Auda to Jabalia center. These brave mothers are sadly giving birth to creatures that took as the first light in their eyes no more than the military green of the tanks and jeeps, and the intermittent flashes that come just before the loud thunders from the explosions. What are could be the life expectations of these children that are feeling all this suffering and this destructions from the very first seconds of their life?
Let's remain humans
Vik»