What is really happening in Gaza?! A human massacre. Within 21 days, 1,400 people, including 417 children and 108 women, were killed and more than 6,000 wounded. For some people, these are just numbers, but in reality these are human lives taken by all kinds of massively destructive weapons.
The Gaza Strip is a 139-square-mile area on the Mediterranean Sea, boarded by Israel on the north and the east, and by Egypt on the southwest, with a population of approximately 1.5 million and a population density ranked sixth in the world. As the state of Israel was established in May 1948, many of the original Palestinian residents were forced to seek a refuge in the West Bank and Gaza and the nearby countries of Jordan, Syria, Lebanon and Egypt. About 67 percent of the Gaza population are refugees or descendants of refugees from 1948.
Gaza was under the Israeli occupation until 2005 when, forced by the local resistance and the United Nations, Israel pulled back and cleared its settlements from Gaza. A Palestinian election was held January 2006, the election was monitored by the United Nations and the Carter Center, led by former U.S. President Jimmy Carter. Hamas won the election in a full democratic process, and so formed the government. On the Israeli side, officials were not happy with the results of the democratic process.
In 2007, Israel started a brutal siege on Gaza to punish the Palestinian people for democratically electing Hamas. As a consequence, a shortage in food, medical supplies and fuel occurred, children started to struggle because of the lack of food and people in hospitals couldn’t get necessary treatment. With no power, food or water, people of Gaza were sentenced to a slow death. As a result, they started fighting back for their lives to end that blockade using stones and homemade rockets.
A ceasefire between Hamas and Israel was reached through the international community led by Egypt. The rockets stopped, but the siege never stopped. In November 2008 the Israeli army broke the ceasefire by killing six Palestinians, and they would take responsibility for such an action. In response, the Palestinians started to launch their homemade fireworks (or what Israel described as rockets) in self-defense. December 27, Israel started its barbarian assault on the unarmed Palestinian people residing in Gaza. All kinds of weapons were fired from earth, sky and sea. In a place like Gaza, with a population density of 11,060 per square mile, the targeting of civilians was inevitable.
Civilians in Gaza, already trapped in disgraceful humanitarian conditions, were victims of Israeli air strikes and intensified attacks while the siege continued to deny them the food and medical supplies they desperately needed. The results were catastrophic, a complete destruction of the Gaza Strip’s infrastructure, schools, mosques and hospitals were completely demolished. One thousand four hundred people, including 417 children and 108 women, were killed, more than 6,000 wounded and more than a half million people were left homeless. On the Israeli side, 13 Israelis, including 10 soldiers and three civilians, have been killed in the same period.
Even though Israel made sure to hide the human massacre by not letting the media into Gaza, the horrific images from inside started to leak out and the whole world started to see the massive destruction in Gaza. Protests all over the world took place. No human being could agree or justify such a barbaric attack; the number of civilian deaths has provoked an international outcry, with senior U.N. officials demanding an independent investigation into whether Israel has committed war crimes, many countries all around the world cut their diplomatic relations with Israel and members in the U.S. House of Representatives started questioning the government about its support to Israel. All that pressure from all over the world forced Israel to halt the attack after 21 bloody days.
Now, after the attack is over, the true scale of destruction starts to reveal itself. Horrific stories were told by those who managed to survive the massacre.
“It is the holocaust of the modern history,” said Mohammed Yusuf, a Palestinian professor who was trapped in Gaza during the attack.
Scores of bodies have been discovered in the rubble of destroyed buildings. Abed Sharafi, an ambulance driver, said on Monday that he had helped pull out the bodies of 15 children and women from under their house. “They were so badly decomposed that we couldn’t distinguish boys from girls. Some had been there for 15 days,” he said.
Dr. Mads Gilbert of the Norwegian Aid Committee (NORWAC), one of the doctors allowed into Gaza to give emergency medical aid, said, describing what he saw in Gaza: “I think we could sum it by saying that it’s been a living hell for the Palestinians.”
Dr. Jan Brommundt, a German doctor working for Medecins du Monde, described the injuries he had seen as “absolutely gruesome.” Israel has used “new weapons” that inflict horrific injuries most surgeons have not seen before.
Now the question is, what was the real motivation for this attack and why now? Was it really those homemade rockets? And what kind of excuse can justify such a crime?
The real cause is politics. In Israel, the elections are approaching. The current Israeli government is enormously unpopular, and so such action was needed to secure more votes in February; on the other hand, the U.S. is now in a transition state between two administrations. It was the perfect timing to launch the attack before [Barack] Obama enters the White House. Actually, according to the Israeli media, the attack on Gaza had already been planned in August.
Michel Warschawski from Alternative International said, “The hundreds of victims of the Israeli bombardment and shelling of Gaza are collateral victims of the Israeli elections campaign; in order to increase their popular support before the coming elections, all Israeli leaders are competing over who is the toughest and who is ready to kill more.”
Finally, we, as Palestinian students at MSU, hope this article helped clear the image of what is going on there and why it is happening. We encourage all students to Google “Gaza” and see the truth. While we know it is not going to be easy – the effect of war, especially on those kids who spent days near their parents’ dead bodies, will take a long time to heal – we still keep that hope of freedom for our people and all the oppressed people around the world in our hearts, and we still believe that someday the whole world will stand with our just cause.
Anas Mahmoud is a graduate student in computer science. He can be contacted at [email protected].