At 11:15 p.m. on Nov. 13, Hamoud Abu Amra got a call from Israeli security warning him to evacuate his house in Gaza, the Israeli army was about to bomb it. He lives 500 meters from the Israel border, and this has now happened to him four times. He vows to rebuild. A refugee from Dimona, nothing will make him leave his land.
“What investigation could raise the dead?” Abdullah al-Sawarka, 45, asks, while standing distraught at the edge of a 50-foot-wide crater where his cousin’s tin shack stood. Israelis bombed the house in Gaza on Thursday killing eight family members. They now say it was a mistake but Gazans scoff at the idea that there will be any accountability for the crime. The file will be thrown in the trash, says an aunt of the children killed.
Nada Shaikh Deeb, a 23-year-old volunteer paramedic in Gaza, has attended every protest at the fence since March 2018. Even after an Israeli officer taunted her following the killing of paramedic Razan al-Najjar. “You’ve still got time to catch up with Razan,” he said. “Expect anything.”
Gazans do not approve of Joint List leader Ayman Odeh’s endorsement of Benny Gantz in the Israeli election because Gantz led attacks on Gaza. No one here, says Ayman Moin, “can easily forget a beloved who has been killed, or jailed for years, nor a house demolished by the same perpetrator.”
A formerly bustling stretch of street in Gaza City once was a thriving gold market with up to 100 kiosk-sized shops selling over 250 grams a day. Today, the road is quiet. Sales are down with more customers looking to pawn jewelry instead of purchase.
“Posters of the world’s cinema heroes are pasted on the walls outside Gaza, but the martyrs of the March of Return have become the heroes of our real life cinema here in Gaza,” explains 16-year-old Jamil al-Baz, who has drawn the portraits of dozens of the protesters who has been killed in the 66 weeks of the protest in Gaza so far.
On Tuesday Palestinians in the Gaza Strip cursed at Arab officials and burned placards of President Donald Trump in protest of the administration’s “Peace to Prosperity” summit in Bahrain to discuss economic aspects of the long-awaited “deal of the century.” Yasmin Abu Arafa, a civil rights activist, told Mondoweiss: “After long years of struggle and fighting, a new Oslo seems to be imposed upon us by the U.S. But this will not happen again as in 1993.”
Palestinian artists held a concert in a building destroyed by Israel just a week ago to call on the world to boycott the 2019 Eurovision Song Contest to be held in Tel Aviv. “Why doesn’t Eurovision arrange an event to let the music of dead, bombed-out buildings, and for the voices of mothers of the slain to be heard?” asked Sabreen Juma’a al-Najjar, the mother of slain paramedic Razan Al-Najjar, who attended the concert.
Azmi Doghmush says he got a phone call from an Israeli intelligence officer giving tenants of his apartment building five minutes to evacuate before it was destroyed Sunday. “I was screaming hysterically. Five minutes is not enough to pick up even a pencil, but the officer insisted that the countdown is running.”
Grey smoke and fire plumes erupted for the second day in Gaza and nearby Israeli communities after a cross-fire of deadly rocket strikes launched by both Israeli military and Gaza militants. The death toll rose to 21 in Gaza and four in Israel.