Email from Vittorio; The aftermath of war!

Home is where your heart is

I crossed the threshold of my house in Almina, facing Gaza City port, after several days of absence. Everything was exactly as I had left it – the gas cylinder still anorexic (feeding it is too expensive) and the electric current cut off by foreign shears. The once pleasant panorama outside my window has changed and no longer gladdens my spirits from the misery of living under siege. On the contrary, it now rubs salt in the wound, a trauma that won't heal with its reminder of a massacre. Twenty metres from my front door, where the fire station once stood, a huge crater now gapes wide enough for children to mess around in, as if to expel their parents' demon. 

The afternoon call to prayer no longer has the same comforting quality of the muezzin's chant that I had grown accustomed to. I wonder where he's gone, if he managed to survive at the top of one of the few minarets that were left intact. The last time I listened to him, this anonymous muezzin had to interrupt his solemnly chanted liturgy because of a chesty cough. It's an affliction I'm familiar with myself, as the gases of the bombs in Gaza have spared no one. I found a note at the foot of the French window looking onto a small balcony, as if it had been put there by a friendly hand. The street and garden were littered with these same leaflets. They had been dropped from Israeli airplanes warning the Palestinians to stay alert, and be aware that the walls had ears and eyes. 

"At the slightest threatening action against Israel we'll be back to invade the Gaza Strip. What you've seen these days is nothing compared to what awaits you." Some kids in the streets had picked up the leaflets and folded them into paper airplanes, seemingly sending the message back to its destination. 

Ahmed told me on the phone about a new kids' game – until a few days ago, they amused themselves by relighting the fires, simply by kicking the fragments of white phosphorous bombs found scattered all over the Strip. The debris left by these devices with high chemical potential has very long-lasting inflammable properties. Even when picked up several days after their detonation, it still catches fire if shaken about. The Al Quds hospital paramedics speak of how they gave up trying to put out the fires provoked by these illegal bombs – their flames seemed to feed off the water being thrown at them.

 "The consequences of all the shit that's been thrown at us in these last three weeks will surface in the near future, with new cancer cases and deformed babies", Munir, a doctor at Al Shifa hospital told me. Even Gaza's neighbours seem to be worried by this massive use of weapons forbidden by all international conventions. In Sderot, and likewise in Ashkelon, Israeli citizens have formally asked their government for clarifications regarding the weapons that have been used to torment us. It's obvious that impoverished uranium and white phosphorous scattered in such a criminal manner all over the tiny patch of land that is Gaza won't discriminate between Jews and Muslims when it comes to provoking generic illnesses.

The truce ought to have started by now, but today I was woken in my bed by the deafening rumble of cannon shots from the war ships, exactly like a few days ago. Some brave Palestinian fishermen had ventured from the port on their tiny boats equipped with fishing nets. The Israeli Navy pushed them back. Nowadays, the only edible fish found in Gaza are the Egyptian cans of tuna that came through the tunnels months ago. Yesterday, yet two more casualties of "collateral damage" were caused by Israeli bombs. East of Gaza City two children were blown up when playing with an unexploded device. The witnesses we heard spoke of active mines in front of the Tal el Hawa houses' ruins. Some bomb disposal experts sent over by Hamas defused them and, judging by the care with which they loaded them onto an off-road vehicle, I think the al qassam brigades will soon return that message of death directly to its lawful owner.

Looking from Naema's roof, the Israeli-Palestinian border has never seemed so easy to pick out. On one side lie the green hills which are constantly watered by the Israeli kibbutzim, on the other you see the parching thirst of a land robbed of its water springs and herds. Naema wished to tell me all about her last few days – a tactile, aural and olfactory account of the massacre, considering that Naema is blind. The soldiers threateningly ordered her fellow villagers to evacuate their homes only a few minutes before storming the place. The men loaded smaller children onto their shoulders and ran away, along with their women. Naema chose to stay so as not to slow down their escape. She took refuge in her own house, believing herself to be safe, and welcomed her neighbours, who had nowhere to go: three women, an elderly lady and a paralyzed old man. The tanks and bulldozers then trespassed and started spreading death and destruction, devouring acre by acre, until they stopped in front of Naema's house. Standing on a small hill, the building she inhabits is the tallest in the village, and the soldiers of Tsahal, who found it was strategically positioned, let themselves in and occupied it for two weeks. 

"They came in and pointed their weapons at us, pushing us into a small room, where they locked us up for eleven days." Naema continues her story: "During that entire time they brought us water to drink only twice, and food came in the form of the soldiers' rations' left-overs. They never let us go to the bathroom, so we had to go to the toilet in one corner of the room. 

They wouldn't let us talk amongst ourselves, and they would come in and beat us when at night, huddled in a circle, we tried to gather some strength in prayer. Sometimes they'd come over and, intimidating us by touching our bodies with the cold metal of their weapons, they threatened us with death to confess our support for Hamas. I gave them my cell phone, so they could check my phone book and the calls I'd made. Even this gesture didn't mellow their spite." 

At the end of the eleventh day of imprisonment, the international Red Cross finally arrived and released the six prisoners from their jailers. "They didn't allow us to pick up anything, not even my sunglasses", Naema brings her story to a close, adding that when they came back to her house, they found out about the thefts that had been carried out by the soldiers. They had taken all their gold trinkets and hidden savings, after having destroyed their few possessions, two TV sets, a radio, a fridge, and the solar panels on the roof. I saw tears in this woman's eyes, hidden behind her new dark glasses. They seemed the most vivid I had ever seen. In fact, what Naema "saw" is a lot more that any young woman her age will ever get a chance to see, if she had the bad luck of being born in this tormented land. 

Stay human

Vittorio Arrigoni

(Translated from italian by Daniela Filippin)

Email from Vittorio, still in Gaza

 

In Gaza, only the dead have seen the end of war.

For the living, no truce can make up for the daily battle for survival. They have no running water, gas, electrical power, and no bread and milk to feed their children. Thousands of people have lost their homes. Humanitarian aid seeps through the passes in drips and drabs, and you get the feeling that the benevolence of the killers' accomplices is only temporary. Tomorrow, Ban Ki-Moon, the UN's Secretary General will travel to Gaza, and we're pretty sure that John Ging, Chief of the Palestinian Refugees' Agency, will have many stories to tell him after Israel bombed two UN schools, assassinated 4 of their workers, bombed and destroyed the UNRWA centre in Gaza City (which reduced tons of medicine and food supplies destined for the civilian population to ashes).

Gaza's mountains of rubble continue to spit corpses back up to the surface. Yesterday, between Jabalia, Tal el Hawa in Gaza City and Zaitun, the Red Crescent paramedics, with some help from the ISM volunteers, have pulled out 95 corpses from the ruins, many of which are in an advanced state of decay. Walking through the streets of the city and no longer feeling constantly terrified by the thought of a bomb surgically aimed to decapitate me, I still tremble at the sight of stray dogs gathering in a circle, imagining what could reveal itself before my eyes as their meal. The relieved men go back to hang out in their mosques and cafés, but their attitude of feigned normalcy is easy to detect. Many of them have lost a relative or have nowhere to live. 

They pretend to go back to their everyday routine to boost their wives and children's  spirits – somehow, even this catastrophe must be dealt with. This morning we drove with some ambulances to the most devastated neighbourhoods in the city, Tal el Hawa and Zaitun. Questionnaire in hand, we went door to door and compiled a list of the damage suffered by the buildings , and wrote down the families' most urgent requirements: medicine for the elderly and sick, rice, oil and flour, basically the essentials to feed themselves. All that we've been able to give them so far are metres of nylon, to be used in lieu of their shattered windowpanes to block out the cold.

ISM colleagues in Rafah informed me that the municipality has handed out a few thousand dollars – mere pennies – to the families who've had their houses completely razed to the ground by the bombs, the very same that according to Israel, had been dropped to destroy the tunnels. After the end of the conflict with Lebanon, Hezbollah donated millions of dollars in cheques, to refund the homeless Lebanese citizens. In Gaza, under siege and embargo, Hamas is barely able to refund its people with what "will scarcely be enough to rebuild a barn for livestock", says Khaled, a Rafah farmer.

The truce is unilateral, hence Israel unilaterally decides not to respect it. Khan Yunos, a Palestinian boy, was killed yesterday, and another was injured. East of Gaza helicopters have showered a residential area with white phosphorous. The same happened in Jabalia. In Khann Younis today, the war ships fired their cannons at an open plain, thankfully without harming anyone. But while I write, the news of storming tanks has just reached me. We're not aware of any Palestinian rockets having been fired in the last 24 hours...

International journalists are clamouring for news all along the Strip, as they only managed to get in today. Israel granted them a pass only now that the massacre is winding down. Those who got here in the thick of the battle have seriously risked being killed, as I was told by Lorenzo Cremonesi, a correspondent for Corriere della Sera. Israeli soldiers shot potholes into the car that he was traveling in . Standing by the blackened skeleton of what remains of Al Quds hospital in Gaza City, an astonished BBC reporter asked me how the army could possibly have swapped the building for a terrorists' den. 

I said: "For the very same reason that children running away from a burning building were put in  sight of the snipers on the roofs, who don't hesitate to kill them, spreading their grey matter all over the road", to which the journalist furrowed his brow further. The enormous difference between us eye-witnesses and first-hand victims of the massacre, and those who hear about it through our stories, is now further highlighted. From Rome I'm told that the EU intends to freeze the funds assigned for the reconstruction of Gaza as long as it's  governed by Hamas. The European Commissioner for External Relations, Benita Ferrero-Waldner, has made her point clear on this score. "The aid for the reconstruction of the Strip", stated the European diplomat, "will only arrive if Palestinian President Abu Mazen will once again re-establish his authority over the territory." 

For Gaza's Palestinians this is an explicit invitation from the outside to engage in civil war, or in a coup d'état. It's equivalent to legitimising the massacre of 410 children, who died because their parents chose democracy and freely elected Hamas. "The EU is diligently echoing the criminal policy of collective punishment imposed by Israel. Why not entrust the funds to the UN? Or some governmental organisation?" "The Unites States are free to elect a war-monger like Bush, Israel can choose leaders with bloodied hands like Sharon or Netanyahu, but we, the people of Gaza, aren't free to chose Hamas…", suggested Mohamed, a human rights activist who never voted for the Islamic movement himself. I have no arguments to contradict him.

The surviving Palestinians learn from their dead; they learn to live while dying, right from the tenderest age. Truce after truce, the general perception here is that of a macabre pause between one massacre and another during which to count the dead, and  peace has never felt so elusive. Scouring Gaza City on board an ambulance with the siren switched off for once, the war is still everywhere, among the ruins of a city robbed of its smiles and now populated only by frightened gazes, eyes that insist upon scanning the sky for planes still endlessly flying overhead. Inside a home we visited with some paramedics, I noticed some pastel drawings on the floor. It was clearly a child's hand that had abandoned them after evacuating the house in a mad rush. I picked one of them up – tanks, helicopters and a body in pieces. In the middle of the drawing a child with a stone had succeeded in reaching the sun's height and was damaging one of the flying death machines. It's been said that in a child's drawing, the sun represents his desire to be, to appear. The sun I saw was crying tears of blood in red pastel. Is a unilateral truce enough to heal such traumas?

Stay Human!
Vittorio Arrigoni

www.freegaza.org
 

Tragically Hip & Cool - January edit.

All right,  So we've had a month of; War in all it's gruesome reality! We've seen historic changes about to happen... And now, after having raided the freezer for all the Ben & Jerry Ice cream, I could possibly eat, before turning greenish - I find it's time, to revive my old 'hit' ! (And also a sign of utterly lazy bones mood) And reintroduce the monthly (or that rather depends!) ; 

                                                                                                                         

                               Tragically hip & Cool Posts; 

And today I bring you these Tees and such; For the smaller ones amongst us! Let them be our hope for a much better world!....... In keeping with the Palestine and Anti war posts, I didn't stray to far and I found them here at The Michael Franti and Spearheads site! He's a long time earning his wings, with different causes as Oxfam, Amnesty International etc. (By the way; They make great, great music! & Heaps of gracias goes to Ninon the nopostslately Mermaid for telling me)

I found "Birdie" here

 "Power Peace" here

                                                                                                      

This "Stay Human" tee, I posted as a cadeau/Saludo para Vittorio! Riding his ambulance all over Gaza, come rain, White Phosphur or what ever, his enemies can dream up, to throw at him! 

Buy the Tee here

A new Email from Vittorio in Gaza!

ps. Olmert is Pinocchio,

h 2.10am in Gaza city,  apaches are bombing with phospore....

 

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Dante Alighieri could never have imagined circles as hellish as the wards of the damned in Jabalia's hospitals. The laws of divine justice are turned on their head around here: the more innocent the victim, the less likely that they'll be spared martyrdom through bombing. At Kamal Odwan and Al Auda hospitals, the ceramic tiles in the first aid units are always shiny. The cleaners are permanently busy wiping away the blood dripping copiously from the stretchers constantly carrying in the massacred bodies. Iyad Mutawwaq was walking in the street when a bomb tore open a building not far from him. He and other passers-by rushed over to try and bring some aid when a second bomb was dropped on the same building. It killed a father of 9, two brothers and another passer-by who had rushed over to help. The same story could be told over ten, or one hundred times. The perfect terrorist technique is being immaculately carried out by the Israeli army. You drop a bomb, wait for the first-aiders, then drop another bomb on the wounded and the first-aiders.

In Iyad's eyes, those were American bombs, but they also carry the stamp of Mubarrack, the Egyptian dictator who rivals Olmert here in Gaza when it comes to provoking hatred. Behind Iyad's bed, an elderly man with both his arms in plasters is lying staring at the ceiling, and I'm told he's lost everything: his family and his home. He stares at the cracks in the falling plaster, as if seeking an answer to the sheer destruction of his existence.

Khaled worked in Israel for 25 years, prior to the first Intifada. In recognition, Tel Aviv hasn't even granted him a pension, only a series of missiles from land and air onto his house. He suffers from shrapnel wounds all over his body. I ask him where he plans to go after he's been discharged from hospital. He says he'll join his family, out in the streets. Not unlike Khaled's, many families don't know where to find shelter. The most fortunate were offered hospitality by relatives and acquaintances, but can you really say that one hundred people crammed into two apartments counting three rooms each is really a life? Two bombs were dropped onto Ahmed Jaber's home and though his family fled, for some of them it was too late. A third explosion buried 7 of his relatives under the rubble, including two children aged 8 and 9 – his neighbour's children. He says: "They made us leap back in time, back to 1948. This is their punishment for our attachment to our country. They can tear my arms and legs off from my body, but they won't make me leave my land." A doctor takes me aside and tells me that Ahmed's 7-year-old daughter, or what was left of her, was just brought in inside a tiny cardboard box. They don't have the heart to tell him and make his already precarious health condition any worse. In the evening they took the phone away from Iyad as well, to prevent him from receiving any more bad news. A tank had hit his sister's house full in the middle, beheading her in the process.

In the end, our Free Gaza Movement boat never got to the port in Gaza. About 100 miles from their designated destination, in international waters, they were intercepted by 4 Israeli war ships poised to open fire and kill its cargo of doctors, nurses and human rights activists. No one must dare to obstruct the massacre of civilians now in full swing for the last 3 weeks. 

East of Jabalia, in front of the border, eyewitnesses speak of numerous decaying bodies in the streets. Their rotting meat is being eaten by the dogs. There are also hundreds of people unable to go anywhere, many of whom are injured. The ambulances simply cannot get anywhere near, with the trigger-happy snipers all over the place. Palestinians are sick of languishing in the midst of this general indifference, and many even accuse the international Red Cross and the UN of not doing enough, including not fulfilling their duties, nor risking their lives to save hundreds. We ISMers will thus equip ourselves with some stretchers and proceed on foot to the areas where humanity has surpassed all boundaries, eclipsing itself in the process. 

The heavy-bottomed settlers sitting in the pristine lounges of armchair politics harp on about military strategies against Hamas, while we're being literally massacred out here. They bomb hospitals, and yet there are some who still champion Israel's right to self-defense. In any self-styled civilised country, self-defense is proportionate to the attack. 

In these 20 days we've counted 1,075 dead Palestinians, 85% of whom were civilians, and over 5,000 injured, of whom half were under 18 years old. 303 children were atrociously massacred. It's equivalent to saying that for Israel, butchering at least 250 Palestinians is a justified blood-bath in avenging each dead civilian on its own side. How can this lop-sided reaction not take one back to some of modern European history's darkest pages? 

Let's get straight to the point: are we seriously talking about self-defense? For journalists like Marco Travaglio, Piero Ostellino, Pierluigi Battista and Angelo Panebianco, who harp on with the refrain of Hamas having full responsibility for this genocide as well as for breaking the truce between Israel and Palestine, I would like to remind them of the United Nation's position on the matter. Professor Richard Falk, special rapporteur for human rights with the United Nations, has clearly expressed his views: it was in fact Israel that broken the truce in November, by blatantly exterminating 17 Palestinians. In the same month zero Israeli victims had been recorded, zero in October and likewise in the previous month, as well as the one prior to it. We were also recently reminded of this by Nobel prize winner and ex US President Jimmy Carter. It really is a crying shame that a journalist like Travaglio, who's earned our admiration as a proud upholder of freedom of the press, is now sporting an IDF helmet and entertaining the masses on TV while amusing himself with the pastime most in vogue at the moment – infant-shooting in Gaza.

As I tap on my keyboard in the Ramattan press agency office, all the Palestinian reporters around me are wearing bullet-proof vests and helmets. They haven't come straight from riding in a tank – they're simply sitting in front of their computers. Two floors above, the Reuters offices were recently struck by a rocket, which seriously injured two. Almost all the floors in the building are empty at the moment, and only the most heroic of journalists are still around. The story of this hell must somehow continue to be told. And yet earlier this week, the Israeli army had assured Reuters it wouldn't need to evacuate, as staying in their offices would be safe. This morning many casualties were also caused by the bombing of the United Nations building, built among others with money from the Italian government. Berlusconi, where are you?

John Ging, chief of the UNRWA, UN agency for Palestinian refugees and eye witness, clearly spoke of white phosphorous bombs. In the Tal el Hawa neighbourhood in Gaza city, a whole wing of Al Quds hospital is presently in flames, and Leila, an ISM colleague is also trapped inside it along with forty doctors and nurses, and one hundred patients. She describes these last dramatic hours to us via phone. A tank stands in front of the hospital. There are snipers everywhere, ready to shoot at anything that moves. All around is destruction. At night, from their windows, they could observe a building going on fire after having been struck by a bomb. They heard the cries of whole families with children, imploring help. They were impotent to help as they watched the bodies devoured by the flames, running into the street and then be reduced to ashes. Hell has switched places and come to the centre of Gaza, and we are the damned designated by an inhuman hatred.

Stay human

Vittorio Arrigoni

 

(Translated from italian by Daniela Filippin)

Todays Email from Gaza

Jan. 14. 2009

The sea no longer yields its generous fruits, there's nothing left of the ripples reflecting the sky, and death was the only dowry left by the war ships plowing through its ghostly liquid. We still try to create routes of salvation, make a breakthrough to this tormented land, now confiscated and imprisoned, every inch of it raped and reduced to a cemetery for a dead without rest. For a few days now, even funerals have become targets of the Israeli air force, as if the murdered Palestinians deserved an additional punishment in death as well.

 

If a humanitarian passage is struggling to make its way and come in aid of a people at the end of their tether, the "Spirit of Humanity", one of our Free Gaza Movement boats, will be there for them. It sailed from Larnaca, Cyprus just today and will bring tons of medicine (from the European Campaign to End the Siege) to Gaza's port aside from about forty doctors, nurses, journalists, European Parliamentaries, and human rights activists representing 17 different nations in all. Truly human beings, like myself, like many in Italy who vent their indignation, who are ready to risk their lives rather than lounge passively in their living rooms in front of a TV which reveals only a tiny fraction of the massacre being inflicted upon us. (The SPIRIT OF HUMANITY passengers were threatened by the Israeli Navy, told they would be shot and the boat returned to Cyprus this morning.)

On December 27th my friends tried to come with "Dignity", but they were attacked by the Israeli Navy, which tried to sink them. They launched an SOS and had to flee to Lebanon with engine failure and a leak in the hull. On that occasion it was only by pure chance that no one was badly hurt, so we hope human rights as well as the lives of the activists will be spared tomorrow. There are terrifying natural catastrophes in this world, such as earthquakes and hurricanes, which are inevitable. But in Gaza has an unnatural humanitarian catastrophe under way, perpetuated by Israel, damaging a people long reduced to abject poverty and submission. This is a desperate people without bread or milk to feed its children. They no longer shed any tears when mourning, as their eyes are also on a strict, imposed diet. The entire world cannot ignore this tragedy and if they continue to do so, we don't want to be included in this world. Every day we invoke someone above us to stop the genocide, but for tomorrow all we ask is for our small boat to land in Gaza with its cargo of compassion, peace, love and empathy. May the Palestinians also receive the same rights that Isrealis, or any other people on earth enjoy. The sea as anchor of hope, or as a destination of destruction.

According to the Ma'an press agency, with Reuters echoing their statement, the United States are about to ship 3000 tons of weapons to Israel, via cargo ships sailing from Greece. Weapons and enormous amounts of explosives and fuses, and all that's needed to raze thousands of houses to the ground in the Gaza Strip. There are 120 thousand homeless from Gaza to Jabalia already, but most, including many of my friends haven't moved and have nowhere to flee. Journalists, doctors and gravediggers: for 16 days non-stop now, these have been the busiest professions in Gaza. The circling vultures beyond the bomber planes stir up more hatred, especially those seated where the late lamented Arafat used to sit. They now itch to come and take over the throne on Gaza's ashes, or what will remain of it. The death toll is now at 923, with 4,150 wounded, including 255 horrendously butchered Palestinian children. The death toll on the Israeli side is still thankfully at 4. Rumour has it that Olmert had informed his side that hitting the 1,000 civilian death mark was the limit before putting a halt to this brutal attack and infanticide. It's a bit like what happens at the Vucciria markets in Palermo, where beef quarters are hung to drip blood out in the open, and you haggle for the meat – so much per kilo.

Few Palestinians now miss Ismail Haniyeh's appearances on the small screen, here in the Gaza Strip. You can't speak of a truce without simultaneously establishing a stop to the siege in advance. Continuing to keep Gaza under siege now that it's been reduced to a heap of rubble, not allowing the provisions and medicine to come through, preventing the sick and injured from getting out means condemning them to a more prolonged agony. These in brief were the words spoken by Hamas's leader, spoken from an underground bunker God knows where. These words find an echo in Gazan public opinion. This was the speech of a leader who could have fled and taken refuge elsewhere, but who on the contrary decided to risk having a bomb drop on his head like everyone else. 

This current prose piece of mine was just interrupted by the usual intimidating phone call ordering us to evacuate the building before a bombing. I find myself in the building where the main international media agencies operate, among others Al Jazeera, Ramattan and Reuters (it was just bombed this morning and one journalist was injured. Israel clearly knew the location of the office provided by Reuters in Jerusalem).

 

We were forced to unplug our PCs, rush downstairs and crowd the street, where we kept our eyes glued to the sky trying to pick out where the destructive thunder would strike from. There won't be any cameras or reporters around to document the civilian massacre tonight, as we suspect that the innocent victims will be more numerous than usual. Still standing in the street, I stare at Alberto and wink at him; he comes closer and I whisperingly ask him whether he thinks it's plausible that the threatening phone call had been made especially for the two of us, after the discovery of the American website which put a price on our heads: ALERT THE IDF MILITARY TO TARGET ISM

 

#1 ISM TARGET FOR THE ISRAELI AIR FORCE AND IDF GROUND TROOPS:  VITTORIO ARRIGONI IS CURRENTLY IN GAZA ASSISTING HAMAS" The future will pronounce its sentence without appeal: of how hatred like this was the purest of all feelings, and how spite towards what's different fuelled whole armies and was the feeling that brought masses of people together.

 

There's no need for my enemies and those who wish for my martyrdom to dial that number. The Israeli Army knows exactly where to find me tonight – on the Al Quds hospital ambulances in Gaza City.

Stay human
Vittorio Arrigoni

Link to; Free Gaza.org

 And Link to;

The Israeli Information Center for human rights in The Occupied Territories : B'Tselem

OBS - OBS !!

"Update on the ship "Spirit of humanity" Israeli forces threatens to shoot innocent and unarmed civilians on board supply ship."!!!

 read here;Free Gaza.org

Another Email from inside Gaza

Vittorio Arrigoni on the ground in Gaza, January 9, 2009

 

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My toothpaste, toothbrush, shavers and shaving foam. The clothes I'm wearing, the cough medicine I'm using to get rid of a persistent cough, the cigarettes I bought for Ahmed, and some tobacco for my arghile. My cell phone, the laptop onto which I compulsively type my eye-witness accounts from the hell surrounding me. All that's needed for a modest, yet dignified existence in Gaza comes from Egypt, and arrives on the shops' shelves through the tunnels. These are the very same tunnels that the Israeli F16s hasn't stopped heavily bombing in the last 12 hours, destroying along with them thousands of Rafah houses near the border.

A few months ago I had three teeth dodgy fixed, and at the end of the operation I asked my Palestinian dentist where he'd gotten all of his dental equipment from – the anesthetic, the syringes, ceramic inlays and all the other tools. With a sly look on his face, he'd made a certain gesture with his hands: from under ground. There's no doubt that through the tunnels underneath Rafah, explosives and weapons were also smuggled, the very same that the resistance is using today to try and contain the terrifying advance of the armour-plated Israeli death-machines. But it's next to nothing compared with the tons of consumer goods flowing into famished Gaza under this criminal siege.

It's easy enough on the internet to find photos documenting how even livestock comes in from Egypt through the tunnels. Sedated, strapped-up goats and cows are lowered into an Egyptian well, re-emerging on this side to provide milk, cheese and meat. Even the main hospitals in the Strip stocked up surreptitiously at the border. The tunnels were the only resource allowing the Palestinians to survive the siege, a siege which long before the current bombings, was the cause of a 60% unemployment rate and forced 80% of families to live off humanitarian handouts.

Our colleagues at the ISM in Rafah describe the umpteenth siege that they witnessed. Caravans of desperate refugees leaving their homes facing Egypt, on mule-drawn carts or hodgepodge vehicles. A déjà-vu scenario – in previous days, leaflets were raining down from the planes intimidating the Palestinians into evacuating. Since Israel always keeps its threatened promises, bombs are raining down from the planes now. Today's new homeless will spend the night with their relatives, friends and acquaintances in Gaza. No one dares crowd the United Nations schools anymore, after yesterday's massacre in Jabalia. But a considerable number haven't gone anywhere, as they have nowhere safe to go. They shall be spending the night praying to God that they'll be spared, since no one on earth seems to take any interest in their existence.

The death toll at present is at 768 Palestinians, with 3,129 wounded, and 219 children killed. The count of civilian victims on the Israeli side is thankfully still only at 4. At Zaytoun, an Eastern neighbourhood of Gaza City, the Red Cross ambulances could only rush to the scene of a massacre after several hours, under the coordination of the Israeli military summit. When they finally got there, they picked up 17 corpses and 10 injured, all belonging to the Al Samouni family. A perfect execution: in the tiny bodies of the children it was possible to notice bullet holes rather than wounds caused by shrapnel.

The last two nights in the Gaza City hospitals were quieter than usual, as we assisted a number of injured in the tens rather than the hundreds. Obviously after the massacre at the Al Fakhura school, the Israeli Army surpassed the daily budget of civilian casualties as an offering to its blood-thirsty government in view of the imminent elections. We have an inkling that tonight the morgues will once again be filled to bursting point.

With our sirens screaming, we continue to rush pregnant women into hospital as they give birth prematurely. It's as if nature and the conservation instinct were inducing these brave mothers to predate the arrival of these new lives to make up for the growing number of dead. These newborns' first cry, when they survive, can for a moment cover the rumbling of the bombs.

Leila, a colleague at the ISM, asked our neighbours' children to write some of their impressions on the atrocious tragedy we're enduring. Here are some extracts of their words, the horrors of war seen through the pure and innocent gaze of Gaza's children:

Suzanne, aged 15: "The life in Gaza is very difficult. Actually we can't describe everything. We can't sleep, we can't go to school and study. We feel a lot of feelings, sometimes we feel afraid and worry because the planes and the ships, they hit 24 hours. Sometimes we feel bored because there is no electricity during the day, and in the night, it is coming just four hours and when it comes we are watching the news on TV. And we see kids and women who are injured and dead. So we live in the siege and war."

From Fatma, 13: "It was the hardest week in our life. In the first day we were in school, having the final exam of the first term, then the explosions started, many students were killed and injured, and the others surely lost a relative or a neighbour. There is no electricity, no food, no bread. What can we do - it's the Israelis! All the people in the world celebrated the new year, we also celebrate but in a different way."

From Sara, 11: "Gaza is living in a siege, like a big jail: no water, no electric power. People feel afraid, don't sleep at night, and every day more people are killed. Until now, more than 400 are killed and more than 2000 injured. And students had their final first term exams, so Israel hit the Ministry of Education, and a lot of ministries. Every day people are asking when will it end, and they are waiting for more ships with activist like Vittorio and Leila."

Darween, 8: "I am a Palestinian kid,
I won't leave my country 
so I will have lots of advantages
 because I won't leave my country 
and I hear a sound of rockets
so I won't leave my country."

Meriam is four. Her siblings asked her, "what do you feel when you hear the rockets?" And she said, "I feel afraid!", before running to take cover behind her father's legs.

Gaza is sadly shrouded in obscurity in the last ten days. I can recharge my computer and phone only in the hospitals. We watch TV with the doctors and paramedics while waiting for an urgent call. We listen to the rumblings in the distance, and after a few minutes the Arab satellite networks refer exactly where the explosions take place. We often watch ourselves pull bodies out of the rubble, as if having seen it all in the flesh weren't enough already. Last night I switched over to an Israeli channel with the remote. They were showing a traditional music festival, complete with scantily-clad showgirls and firework displays in the end. We went back to our horror, not on screen but in the ambulances. Israel has every right to laugh and sing even while they're massacring their neighbours. Palestinians only ask to die a different kind of death – say, of old age.

Stay human

Vittorio Arrigoni

Link to original Blog in Italian - (Apt for Google -page translation)

Link to "The Free Gaza Movement"

Email from Gaza

Vittorio Arrigoni, Gaza, January 9, 2009

Take some kittens, some tender little moggies in a box", said Jamal, a surgeon at the Al Shifa, Gaza's main hospital, while a nurse actually placed a couple of blood-stained cardboard boxes in front of us. "Seal up the box, then jump on it with all your weight and might, until you feel their little bones crunching, and you hear the last muffled little mew." I stared at the boxes in astonishment, and the doctor continued: "Try to imagine what would happen after such images were circulated. The righteous outrage of public opinion, the complaints of the animal rights organisations…" The doctors went on in this vein, and I was unable to take my eyes off those boxes, sitting at our feet. "Israel trapped hundreds of civilians inside a school as if in a box, including many children, and then crushed them with all the might of its bombs. What were the world's reactions? Almost nothing. We would have been better off as animals rather than Palestinians, we would have been more protected."

At this point the doctor leans towards one of the boxes, and takes its lid off in front of me. Inside it are the amputated limbs, legs and arms, some from the knee down, others with the entire femur attached, amputated from the injured at the Al Fakhura United Nations school in Jabalia, which resulted in more than fifity casualties. Pretending to be taking an urgent call, I took my leave of Jamal, actually rushing to the bathroom to bend over and throw up.

A little earlier I'd been involved in a conversation with Dr. Abdel, an ophtalmologist, regarding the rumours that the Israeli Army had been showering us with non-conventional weapons, forbidden by the Geneva Convention, such as cluster bombs and white phosphorous. The very same that the Tsahal Army used in the last Lebanese war, as well as the US air force in Falluja, still violating international norms. In front of Al Auda hospital we witnessed and filmed white phosphorous bombs being used about five hundred metres from where we were, too far to be absolutely certain there were any civilians underneath the Israeli Apaches, but so terribly close to us all the same.

The Geneva Treaty of 1980 forbids white phosphorous being used directly as a war weapon in civilian areas, allowing it only as a smoke screen or for lighting. There's no doubt that using this weapon in Gaza, a strip of land concentrating the highest population rate in the world, is a crime all on its own. Doctor Abdel told me that at Al Shifa hospital they don't have the medical and military competence to say for sure whether the wounds they examined on certain corpses were indeed provoked by white phosphorous bullets.

But on his word, in twenty years on the job he had never seen casualties like those now being carried into the ward. He told me about the traumas to the skull, with the fractures to the vomer bone, the jaw, the cheekbones, tear duct, nasal and palatine bones showed signs of the collision of an immense force against the victim's face. What he finds inexplicable is the total lack of eyeballs, which ought to leave a trace somewhere within the skull even in case of such a violent impact. Instead, we see Palestinian corpses coming into the hospitals without eyes at all, as if someone had removed them surgically before handing them over to the coroner.

Israel has let us know that we've been granted a daily 3-hour truce, from 1:00 to 4:00 PM. These statements from the Israeli military summit are considered by the people of Gaza as having the same reliability as the Hamas leaders' declarations that they've just provoked a massacre of enemy soldiers. Just to be clear on this point, the soldiers of Tel Aviv's worse enemy are the very same who fight under the Star of David. Yesterday a war ship off the coast of Gaza's port picked out a large group of alleged guerrilla fighters from the Palestinian Resistance, moving as a united front around Jabalia. They shot their cannons at them. But as it turned out, they were their own fellow soldiers, with the shooting resulting in three being killed and about twenty injured. No one here believes in the truces that Israel declares, and as it happens, today at 2:00 PM Rafah was under attack by the Israeli helicopters. There was also yet another massacre of children in Jabalia: three little sisters aged 2, 4 and 6 from the Abed Rabbu family were slaughtered. Just half an hour earlier in Jabalia, once again the  Red Crescent hospital's ambulances were under attack. Eva and Alberto, my ISM colleagues were on board that ambulance and managed to film everything, passing those videos and photos on to all the major media.

Hassan was kneecapped, fresh from mourning the death of his friend Araf, a paramedic who was killed two days ago as he came in aid of the injured in Gaza City. They had stopped to pick up the body of a man languishing in agony in the middle of the road, when they were under fire by about ten shots from an Israeli sniper. One bullet hit Hassan in the knee and the ambulance was filled with holes. We're now at a death toll of 688, in addition to 3,070 injured, 158 dead children and countless missing. Only yesterday, we counted 83 dead, 80 of which were civilians. Thankfully, the death toll on the Israeli side is still only at 4.

Travelling towards Al Quds hospital, where I'll be working all night on the ambulances, as I raced along on board one of the very few fearless taxis left, zig-zagging to avoid the bombs, on the corner of one street I saw a group of dirty street urchins with tattered clothes, looking exactly like the "sciuscià" kids of the Italian afterwar period. They threw stones towards the sky with slingshots, at far away and unapproachable enemy who was toying with their lives. This is a crazy metaphor, which could serve as a snapshot of the absurdity of this time and place.

Stay human

Vittorio Arrigoni