Mass destruction reels in the neighborhoods and footpaths of Gaza. The air reeks of death and deteriorating human flesh everywhere. It’s a never-ending story of human horror and misery and definitely not for the faint-hearted.
Through its merciless bombings, Israel has turned the 365-kilometer strip into a bloody wasteland of wreckage, rubble and gorged caves tirelessly eaten into the earth.
No mercy
Here, there is no evidence of Hamas operatives as Israel and their western backers claim. There is only willful human-made disaster and acrimony of used-to-be homes of left-over utensils, slippers, an odd-scrawled pajama and cement-stained coloring book.
These were homes of age torn-out men, women, children, grandparents beaten once by the drudgery of life and its meaningless existence imposed by an Israeli occupation and a siege enforced for the past 16-years.
They are of ramshackle houses and delipidated apartment buildings facing relentless Israeli tanks, warplanes, massive nightly bombs dropped on them with harrowing strikes from the sea.
Three weeks into the war on Gaza, a total of 18,000 tons of explosives have been dropped on the beleaguered strip, right up from its north till it’s very south. Everything has been fair game for Israeli pilots. So far, and according to their estimations, they struck 11,000 “terror” targets. But is there as much in the densely-populated Gaza? What of the families and parents, husbands and wives, sons and daughters.
The Gaza cities, towns and camps have been subjected to the most cruel and heinous carpet-bombing campaign the Strip has ever experienced in its history. In the first week 6000 tons of explosives were dropped on Gaza.
But the “we want to get rid of Hamas” adage reverberates by Israeli politicians and military to the point it has become dull, mundane and uneventful because of the hundreds being murdered every single day. Figures are being reported daily but they are falling on deaf ears, to the point they are either becoming odd numbers or unbelievable and/or incredulous. And so, the “media noise” has done little. Gazans today, virtually stand on their own.
Shaming humanity
Gaza is shaming humanity but humanity doesn’t shame itself, zoning on opaque issues of cut-throat brand labels like terrorism. But what’s being done to children and babies is state violence when bombs and strikes are reigning down their heads and dying under the rubble or late at night when they are asleep. It’s a frightful existence knowing you might die in the next minute or two as statistics show that every 10, 7, or 5 minutes a child is killed in Gaza.
For the humans who dared/or cared to listen, pieces of torn flesh, limbs, torso and lifeless bodies have become a sobering reality in this war, giving the rescuer the feeling that the dead are peacefully sleeping amidst the rubble and the wreckage that came down tumbling down and took them to the ever after.
Gaza has become macabre, a mass grave of willful and wanton destruction as per the strong powers that be, powers that shamefully believe everyone is wrong and they are right. Disgraceful antithesis of mankind!
Yet the shame of destruction continues without the bat of an eyelid because the world is about the strong and not the weak. Plush neighborhoods like Al Rimal, once the professional pride of Gaza, has been turned into reckless rocks and rubble with whole buildings and long towers eyes-soured in different places because of the bombs and bullet-holes. It would take more wasted billions of dollars to put it back together.
It’s not hard to imagine where the people who once occupied these trendy apartments went to, though they must have joined the 1.5 million displaced persons who ruggedly made their way to the south of the strip in search of safe places but these are nowhere to be found. Death follows them everywhere!
But elsewhere, the sense of Israeli vengeance is just as shocking. Israeli warplanes would strike neigborhoods once, twice and thrice to make sure their bloodletting adrenaline has been completed.
Take the Jabalia camp for instance. It has been blown to the ground by state-of-the-art American-made Israeli machinery. Jabalia is one of the eight camps in the Gaza Strip which has been getting a special beating by Israeli jets because it was struck on 9, 12, 19 and 22 October with the Israelis saying the are looking for the ghost and specter of a top Hamas commander.
Unsatiable appetite
In this war, the Israelis are displaying an unsatiable appetite for destruction as they dropped six bombs each weighing one ton each. On the first day the camp was struck, over 400 people, mostly women and children were killed and injured. That day, Israeli warplanes also targeted al Shati and Nuseirat Camp with great relish and magnitude.
Still not satisfied, the Israeli targeted another area of Jabalia with 195 killed and 120 missing, presumably also killed under the rubble. This bombing was made in less than 24 hours and they made another attack soon after. You bomb and bomb and bomb till the job is done!
The Jabalia bombings are a representative of the destructive handiwork of the Israelis in other areas such as Shiekh Radwan, Deir Al Balah, Tal Al Hawa, Khan Younis, Rafah and many more. In just 23 days over 920 massacres were committed. Here, the concept of a surgical strike is non-existent because the houses are so near to each other, if one home comes tumbling down, it takes with it a whole row of houses, then squares and communities with countless human lives
The situation is mind-boggling but death, murder and strikes continue for what seems to be eternity. The Palestinians must bear that burden themselves for it is feared that nothing will stop the Israelis this time for more mayhem and murder.
