Fares Akram writing in The Independent:
It has been a year since we huddled in our homes in the dark, waiting sleeplessly for the sound of the bombs to stop. It is a year this week since my father, a 48-year-old lawyer with no link to Hamas, the Islamist movement that governs Gaza, was killed by an Israeli air strike, supposedly on Hamas militants. And it will soon be a year since my first child was born, as fleets of ambulances queued up outside the A&E unit of the same Gaza City hospital with the wounded, maimed and dead.
Twelve months after the invasion of Gaza, not a single house has been rebuilt, and we, the 1.4 million people trapped inside this blockaded territory, dream of escape but our heads stay haunted by unbearable memories.
First came the terrifying aerial poundings by F16s and then the second phase, the tanks and ground troops. In between the night bombing and shelling, Gaza City in the first three weeks of January was a ghost town except for an hour or two every afternoon during the temporary ceasefires. That’s when everyone rushed around hunting for food and fresh water to buy, or in the case of my wife, dashed to the maternity clinic for blood pressure checks.
Alaa was nine months pregnant with our first child when the nightmare began and her big fear was how to get to the hospital when she went into labour. Reluctant to leave her fretting in the apartment, I began to relate our experiences for a diary in The Independent, often by phone in the dark because of the power blackouts.
I had little idea, when I started sending my reports, just how directly we would be affected by the Israeli assault. Our lives were to be shattered just hours into the ground invasion, when my father and a 17-year-old cousin were killed at the family farm, struck by a massive bomb dropped by an Israeli warplane directly on the property. They had gone there, to our beloved refuge with its lemon groves and almond trees, to make sure the farm animals didn’t die of starvation during the conflict. The farmhouse was blown to rubble and powder. Mahmoud’s body was found 300 metres away in a neighbour’s field.We could hear the rattle of machine gun fire as we buried Dad and Mahmoud. Israeli tanks were just three kilometres away.
Read the rest here.
