Beit Hanoun

I have been struggling to find away to make sense of the killing of 19 Palestinian civilians from the same family in the town of Beit Hanoun in Gaza by Israeli Defense Forces. After coming up with no answers, I decided to let my Palestinian friends in the West Bank and Gaza speak for themselves. Here is an email that I received last week.





Usama writes:
Dear Friends,
Greetings from Bethlehem. I hope you are well in these days. Here in Bethlehem we are excited to see the weather changing as we begin to make preparations for an exciting winter.Please absorb this poignant email written by a friend of ours who is working in Gaza City. I watched the news from Gaza in my neighbor's house last evening and we saw Ali on the television. It doesn't matter what your politics or religion may be. There is no justification for any of this. Children are being killed every day. When will it be enough?I was struck by the image of the candle. Could you respond in one simple way to this email? Could you, at some point today, light a candle in your own home and say a prayer for all of those who are sitting in the dark silence mourning? Peace to you,
Usama
This is Beit Hanoun
by Philip Rizk
From the main road the town of Beit Hanoun looks like any other part of Gaza. Cars are driving in and out, although most of them are leaving, going far, far away, but where, I don’t know. There are only 365 km2 to this place called the Gaza Strip and over the past week 80 human beings have been killed in Beit Hanoun.
I entered the town from a back road since the main road was torn up by bulldozers and is inaccessible. At first things seems rather normal, just another bumpy road, one of many in Gaza, but then through the darkness you see, something else. Many homes remain only skeletons with gaping holes staring through walls, streets turned into mud piles, lamp posts are broken like match sticks, the whole place is covered in a semi darkness, there is no electricity in Beit Hanoun. In the midst of all the chaos an electrician is up one of the electricity poles trying to fix something. The stench of sewage fills the air, the Israeli tanks and bulldozers also broke many sewage pipes.
I got to the two homes that had been shelled that morning after the Israeli troops had pulled out of Beit Hanoun. There was an eerie silence in the area. It was dark and quiet. The first home I entered was lit up by a candle, sitting on a counter. Behind it you could see what was once a well kept kitchen, the windows looked expensive, but the huge hole in the wall and the rubble covering the floor let any visitor know something was not right here. I met Ali there. He lost relatives and neighbors. 17 people in total, 13 of them from one family. Ali’s eyes were swollen, I could see the grief in his face, his spirit was broken. A tank shell had gone through the roof of the building he lived in. He escaped unscathed, others were not so fortunate. "Life and death are the same", Ali exclaimed. He explained to me how just days before the Israeli soldiers had occupied the very home which had been shelled that morning. They had been tired and had slept in the beds of the Palestinians who that day were killed in the very same beds. One couple was found dead, lying in their bed, with their young child sleeping in between them. The attack happened at 5:30am. Ali was among the people that fled the scene and fire followed them, to the next building where they tried to take refuge. "What religion allows this?" Why? was the question he kept asking, and the question that goes through my mind still.
Why are we silent?

Mathew Price, the BBC correspondent in Israel/Palestine wrote a moving piece about this tragedy in which he talks about his driver in Gaza:
“How many of your family have you lost, I asked? "All of them. They all had the same grandfather."
"I feel hate," he added. He did not spit it out like people so often do. He just said it. "I hate George W Bush. I hate Israel of course. I hate the Arab world. I hate Europe." His eyes, though, did not say hate. They said pain.” (To see the whole article click here)

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