I miss the Gaza Strip
Israeli journalists have been in Syria and Iraq, Libya and Afghanistan, but not in Gaza, an hour’s drive from Tel Aviv.
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The kindergarten teacher lies on a stretcher, her body covered with blood. The minibus is parked beside her. The cannon fires shells, the children lie on the road. This is a child’s drawing on the wall in the town of Beit Lahiya in the Gaza Strip. It was drawn 10 years ago, a day after an Israel Defense Forces shell hit the kindergarten minibus, killing the teacher and two children who were standing in the street.
This description was published 10 years ago today, in my last story from Gaza. For 10 years, the only Israeli journalists who have visited Gaza are Haaretz’s Amira Hass, who was there twice, once via the sea and the other time via Egypt, and the military reporters accompanying the IDF, who see nothing but the soldiers’ heroism. Israeli journalists have been in Syria and Iraq, Libya and Afghanistan, but not in Gaza, an hour’s drive from Tel Aviv.
Israel forbids such visits and nobody protests. During my last visit, I saw an elderly man lying wounded on a donkey-drawn cart in the courtyard of the shabby Kamal Radwan clinic. He had been hit by an IDF shell. Afterwards, we went with the children to the funeral of their kindergarten teacher, who had been killed in front of their eyes. It didn’t occur to me that this would be my last visit.
The toddlers have since become teenage boys and girls, some of them may have been killed. The IDF killed 344 children in the 2008-09 Gaza war, known as Operation Cast Lead; 180 toddlers and 366 children were killed in the 2014 Israel-Gaza conflict, known as Operation Protective Edge.
No Israeli journalist can write their stories any more. The Israeli reader knows nothing about them, nor does he want to know. For him, all the dead children are terrorists, or children that terrorists hid behind, as Israeli propaganda tells it. All of Gaza is Hamas, Israelis are told, and everyone in it wants only to destroy Israel.
I look at my last reports from Gaza. A visit to the remnants of the Abu Udah family – Mohammed, whose son Ismail and daughter Hanan were shot dead by soldiers; Dam al-Ez Hamad, 14, the only daughter of a paralyzed mother, was killed by a missile fired by Israeli Air Force pilots at the house next door. Dam was killed in her sleep, curled up in her mother’s arms. The IDF said it was an attack on a tunnel.