MAP’s Paul Julien recently returned from a visit to Gaza. Here he contrasts what he witnessed following the 2009 conflict with the situation today following the July assault.
Each time I approach Gaza it is with a sense of dread. Visiting for the first time after the war on Gaza of 2009, overwhelmed by all that I saw, it seemed to me that Gaza was going through its own ‘Ground Zero’ moment. So the comparison isn’t new or even entirely accurate, but it does seem more powerful than it did four years ago.
We struggle with a figurative language that cannot cope with the physical reality. Now, walking street after street of carnage and annihilation in Shuja’iyya, a whole neighborhood blasted to ruins, phrases like ‘post-apocalyptic’ cry out to be used. Photographs cannot truly indicate the scale of the destruction, or the telling detail.
All along the border with Israel, in places like Khuza’a, what facades remain facing east are decimated or covered in bullet holes and worse. Shuja’iyya has to be seen to be believed. In some ruined buildings, a bathroom wall might still be standing, shelf and mirror intact. From others a concrete pillar or a heavy slab of floor might hang precariously at an angle – beneath which barefoot children scavenge for scraps, playing or surviving or both. In the rubble of a blasted school (adjacent to a bombed mosque), the eye falls on the scorched pages of exercise books.
Photographs can show us the rubble: but not the composition of that rubble. Yes, it is concrete and stone and metal; it is also largely made up of the detritus of everyday life, clothes, plastics, furniture, kitchen items, books, electronics, and toys.
I wonder again if the word ‘apocalyptic’ is too extreme, too biblical, too much the preserve of melodrama and action films. Not, perhaps, to the 91 entire families killed in these attacks. Not to the child whose blackened doll we found in the rubble of her bedroom. Not to the child whose English language exercise book was open at a page where she’d written the humdrum word ‘mango’. This is what remains visible of ordinary, mundane life and is what adds to the sense of apocalypse, the world’s end. Of course this isn’t the end of the world. But it was the end of that child’s world.
Nor can photographs show you the cut of dust in your throat, the unforgiving heat, or the smell. The air of Gaza hits you even before you’ve gone through the state-of-the-art Israeli terminal at Erez crossing, a mix of garbage, sewage and generator oil. The contrast with Israel, with its pine forests and greenery, couldn’t be more stark: take a look at a satellite map, and contrast the neat green agricultural spaces of Israel with the grey smudges of Gaza. Those grey smudges are camps and urban centres where 1.8 million people try to eke out a living: including almost half a million children under the age of eighteen.
MAP’s beginnings grew directly from one young surgeon’s shocked and indignant response to a well-documented massacre. She witnessed it whilst working in a hospital in a Palestinian refugee camp: Sabra & Shatila, 1982. Now, in Gaza, walking around the bombed remains of houses and schools and mosques and playgrounds; seeing the wholesale obliteration of entire communities; reviewing the raw statistics - 100,000 made homeless, 11,000 seriously injured, 1,000 permanently disabled, 2,000 people killed, 500 of them children; thinking about Israel’s military methods - the so-called ‘roof-knocking’, or the sinister prerecorded phone calls telling you to leave your home - your home - with your entire family, within minutes, at which point an Israeli warhead will completely destroy the building and with it your worldly belongings; now, pondering all of these things, it is difficult not to consider what happened in these 51 days as a massacre, equal to if not worse than the Sabra & Shatila massacre. Watched by the world, yes, and carried out with sophisticated military hardware; but a massacre all the same.
There is no choice but to rebuild. The people of Gaza are known for their resilience. Visitors who return from Gaza always talk about the unwavering hope but this time I sensed the fatigue, the erosion of hope, the bruised will of a people proud of their homeland desperate to leave: for anywhere, anywhere better than this.
What really can a British charity like MAP do? The answer is: we do what we can. The needs are immense, and health needs particularly so. Though destruction and despair were everywhere on this trip, it was reassuring to see so many health professionals and projects working hard to rebuild the healthcare services and people’s lives. It was good to see the hospitals that MAP is supporting, all of the medicines in the central store that MAP supporters have paid for, the community-based rehabilitation programme for people with disabilities and so much more.
At the malnutrition clinic in Khan Younis camp, we learned that 4,500 babies had been born during the recent attacks; mothers’ breast milk had been affected by the stress of war; food insecurity had worsened and the clinic’s caseload had increased. But MAP will continue to support the clinic staff and doctors doing all that they can to nurse children out of malnutrition and back to health. We met some of the young children who had been high risk and who, because of this project, are now in good health. The smiles of these toddlers are a powerful and moving thing to see, an image that I try to carry, to counter all the rest.