Amid leveled-down houses, on his half-cracked wooden chair, with every sip of his wretched cigarette, a sigh burst. And the flashback of that sore scene with her voice echoing overwhelmed his words which clobbered all languages. His wrinkled face, mingled with melancholy, can deeply be delved into.
Prefacing his heartbreaking story with her last words ever, “Get me out of the rubble, please uncle, for God’s sake, don’t leave, I am alive ” elucidates that his memory has no space for more grief as he lost his son and daughter in a blink of an eye by the hands of the Zionists. How hard to have the same scenario of such a chronic pain!
In every calamity we pass, we are always consoled and told that everything in life begins very small and starts to grow except grief which is the only thing that begins great and starts to decay by time passing. However, this equivalent is overturned. In Gaza, grief can never ever fade away, for it begins great and overflows gigantic.
Talal Alhelo, 54 years, is one of those people displaced along with 7 members of his family from Alnazaz street in Al Shejaiya neighborhood where the Zionists implemented the scorched earth policy, scorching 3150 houses, yet they miserably failed to scorch people’s wills and persistence to live.
Went with the Wind
“All of the things went with the wind; my brother, his 11 family members, our memories, hopes, dreams, promises…,” Talal bemoans.
On July 20th after the sun set, the Zionist ground invasion mercilessly launched, and people had no exit to escape from heavy artillery shelling. “We were escaping from a room to another in every bomb hit despite the bitter fact that no place was safe. When rockets showered us like hail, my brother, Gehad (58 years) whose house was adjacent to mine yelled loudly from his balcony to check on me saying: “Are you okay, brother?” I never imagined that I wouldn’t hear his cozy and passionate voice again, wouldn’t see his merry face. Wouldn’t have him!” Talal grumbled.
Within Minutes
It is not a newly-used policy by the Zionists to inform people to evacuate their houses within few minutes. Gehad Alhelo was forced to evacuate his house with 11 members of his family including his wife (56 years), his 3 daughters (Asma’a 24, Tahrir 22, Najeya 14) his two sons (Mohammad and Ahmad), Ahmad’s wife (Hedaya) and his two twin sons (Kareem and Karam, 6 months) and daughter (Maram, 2 years) fleeing to his brother Galal’s house, which was next to his.
“At 3:00 am, Gehad called Galal to ask for a permission to shelter at his house. A few minutes were more than enough to sweep their souls down by striking F16 rockets on Galal’s house where they havened. Their death was unavoidable like a ghost chasing,” Talal said.
What to Do?!
100 families were completely annihilated like Gehad’s family, and over 1800 are now orphans. Moreover, many corpses are still buried under the rubble and others are missing. “After they bombed my brother’s house, I could hear some of them howling to get them out of the rubble, but I was totally helpless. Their voices out of the rubble demonstrated that they extremely clung to life like a baby crying at the moment of his birth.” Talal burst into tears continuing. “They were hopeful that life would resurrect them, exactly as I was hopeful that my 14-year son, who was killed by a Zionist artillery while he was hunting birds with his cousins, would return home. This happened in 2002, he got injured at 4:00 pm, and was taken by the Zionist army, and we were waiting for any news about him. Sorrowfully, the army delivered him dead the next day. They did not treat him but tortured him more and left him bleeding until death. Is hunting birds a crime?” he lamented.
“Disheveled, barefoot, terrorized, rushing to drive away on foot from heavy fire like goods smuggled at nights; this was the real picture of us when fleeing at 5:00 am until arriving to Al Shifa hospital. I urged my family to flee, telling them that as if we stayed at home under shelling, we all would be killed, but if we ran away in the street, one or two may be killed, we had to risk,” Talal said with a shivering voice.
Her Voice Echoing: Death in Life
How aching, agonizing and tormenting when remembering someone close to your heart dying to grant him a moment of breath, of life, of futile hope!
“I was told that Asma’a, my niece, was yelling to shoulder her, so I hurried to move to Al Shejaiya during a 2-hour truce. ‘Why did none of you come to get me out of the rubble? Get me out of the rubble. Please, uncle, for God’s sake, don’t leave, I am alive.’ Those words were the first and the last of hers,” Talal groaned with waterfalls of tears.
“Her eyes grasped at me, I tried to help her for once, twice and thrice, but I couldn’t as there was a concrete slab over her head. Then fire started to be so heavy, and I surged to flee while she was repeating the same words “No, you can’t leave, please, don’t leave me alone.” The ambulance could reach her after a day, but she was in a coma for 24 hours and died.”
“I can’t hear any voice but hers. I can’t see anyone but her eyes. I just remember her in every second,” Talal concluded in agony.
It is so tragic to live the reminiscences of someone you always adored, to do all of the things without him, to live life as if you were dead.
You’ve captured the essence of human suffering with this detailed history, Ishraq. So much struck me forcefully, including this:
““I was told that Asma’a, my niece, was yelling to shoulder her, so I hurried to move to Al Shejaiya during a 2-hour truce. ‘Why did none of you come to get me out of the rubble? Get me out of the rubble. Please, uncle, for God’s sake, don’t leave, I am alive.’ Those words were the first and the last of hers,” Talal groaned with waterfalls of tears.”
and
“Is hunting birds a crime?””
No. But hunting humans, torturing them, and massacring them most certainly is, and that is what Israel did/does.
how to erase a memory like that. it’s something you have to live with for the rest of time.
Joe Catron @- EI:
………….
““My ears broke”
In the hallway outside Thaer’s room, his father, Issam, recalled the airstrike that ended the lives of his wife and four children two days earlier.
“At 4:00 pm, I was inside the house,” he said. “All the rest of my family was sitting in the front hall. Their mother was standing in the middle of the boys. They were playing as they were accustomed. ”
“As Rahaf was coming inside, I heard a massive explosion. My ears broke. I saw a huge mass of dust in the area and shrapnel scattered all over the hall.”
“After the blast, my daughter Rahaf grabbed my neck. She was screaming ‘Father! Where is my mother? Where are my brothers?’
“Shrapnel everywhere”
After checking his surviving daughter for injuries, Issam said, he told her to leave the house quickly. Looking at the rest of his family in the hall, he said, “They lay with shrapnel everywhere and a pool of blood around them. It’s like they were swimming in it. There were six of them, five killed.
“I heard the voice of my son saying, ‘Dad.’ The others were scattered everywhere. You couldn’t distinguish between them because of the heavy shrapnel wounds in their faces.
“The voice was Thaer. I carried him and left the house quickly. I felt my body cut from the shrapnel as I carried him. Then our neighbors took him and the rest of our family to al-Awda hospital.”
At the hospital, Issam said, Thaer was alert, asking him for water. “In another bed, I saw my little boy, Usama. He was smiling in his sleep. I tried to hug and kiss him. There was no response.
“I tried to convince myself that he had returned my smile. And I refused to listen to anybody saying that he was dead.”
On Saturday, Issam said in passing, he had bought his youngest son a track suit for the winter.
In another bed, he recalled, “I saw my wife covered by a sheet. I removed it quickly, and saw that she was also dead.”
His other three children had been transferred to a separate hospital, Kamal Edwan. By the time he arrived to identify them, he said, staff had moved them into the refrigeration units used to store the dead before burial. “You could not recognize the features of their faces and heads.”…………..”
http://electronicintifada.net/content/these-are-war-crimes-says-father-gaza-family-wiped-out-israeli-airstrike/13811
Hillary really cares about those voices calling out from the rubble. She will be our next POTUS.
“One of the darkest days of the US occupation of Iraq was relived in a Washington courtroom on Wednesday as the prosecution of four Blackwater security contractors accused of killing 14 civilians in a mistaken attack in Baghdad reached an emotional and legal climax.
Seven years after the bloody shooting in Baghdad’s Nisour Square that left a total of 17 Iraqis dead and more than 20 seriously wounded, jurors were told of the “shocking amount of death, injury and destruction” that saw “innocent men, women and children mowed down” by private guards working for the US State Department.
In closing arguments, assistant US attorney Anthony Asuncion claimed three of the four defendants were guilty of manslaughter and a fourth of murder for showing extreme disregard for human life in retaliating against what they mistakenly believed was a car bomb attack on their convoy.
But the defence summed up its case with a blistering attack on the government for ignoring evidence of alleged incoming machine gun fire at the convoy, which it also accused Iraqi police of helping to cover up.
The controversial case, which will go to the jury next week, is one of the few in which US forces have been tried for civilian deaths in Iraq and has already been abandoned once after an earlier judge questioned the way evidence was gathered.
But federal prosecutors pulled no punches on Wednesday as the closing stages of the second trial, which has lasted for 10 weeks, saw emotional scenes from attorneys on both sides.
Pointing at the four accused – Nicholas Slatten, Paul Slough, Evan Liberty and Dustin Heard – Asuncion said: “These men took something that did not belong to them; the lives of 14 human beings … they were turned into bloody bullet-riddled corpses at the hands of these men.”
After he described at length the fate of individual Iraqi civilians attacked by the Blackwater convoy, Asuncion’s voice was shaking, and he was asked to repeat a key line for the court stenographer to hear. “[The witness] opened the door and his son’s brains fell out at his feet,” Asuncio told the jury a second time. “As [the witness] put it, ‘the world went dark for me’.””
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/aug/27/blackwater-trial-prosecution-closing-arguments?commentpage=1
There are certainly many, many more that deserve to be put on trial here in the US. I can only hope that many Israelis will face trial somewhere soon for targeting and massacring Palestinian civilians.