Meet Me in Gaza Read online

  But while they are here, certain places in Gaza – most of them sites where numerous members of the same family have been killed together – have become press stomping grounds. It’s strange – all these journalists are competing to scoop news stories from the aftermath of what Al Jazeera calls the Israeli ‘war on Gaza’, yet they have a curious herd instinct. Most seem to visit the same places and interview, photograph and film the same survivors, one after another. For example, they head off to Zeitoun, on the south-eastern edge of Gaza City, to interview survivors of the al-Samouni family.

  On Sunday, 4 January 2009, the Israeli military corralled up to 100 members of the extended al-Samouni family into one building within their large family compound. The following morning, the Israelis shelled that building, burying many of the al-Samounis alive. Those who could ran for their lives. The Israeli military refused to allow ambulances into the compound for the next seventy-two hours. Upon entry, medical personnel found twenty-seven corpses, including eleven children. Scrawled on the walls of Helmi al-Samouni’s house, which Israeli soldiers had used as a temporary base and a toilet during their assault on the compound, were the words, ‘Arabs need 2 die.’49 Having survived hell, the al-Samounis are now besieged by journalists all wanting their piece of the action. Others, like the Abdul-Dayem, al-Dayah and Shurrab families, also face this worst kind of fleeting fame of being international war victims.50

  Bruno has no doubt already ‘done’ the al-Samouni story too. And from the way he’s crowing right now, it’s clear he has just emerged from another press stomping ground – the tunnels down at Rafah.

  ‘Right down the shaft!’ he exclaims. ‘I tell you – I got some great photos … really shot the atmosphere.’ As hacks raise their hands in greeting and call out his name, Bruno can hardly contain his glee, strutting cock-like across the sunny al-Deira terrace, where Shadi and I are having a late lunch with a few friends. I cannot take my eyes off this man called Bruno. Even when I realise that I’m sitting bolt upright with my mouth open and a glass of fresh orange juice poised halfway to my lips, I keep staring until he stops right in front of me.

  ‘What is it?’ His voice is not aggressive, but punchy and clipped. He looks and sounds northern European.

  ‘Where are you from?’ I ask him.

  ‘I am Bruno and I come from Belgium. You?’

  ‘I’m, er, Louisa. From Scotland.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘Who do you work for, Bruno?’

  ‘A few different agencies … I go wherever the contracts are.’

  ‘And you’ve just been to Rafah – to the tunnels?’

  ‘Yeah!’ And for a few seconds his pale, sun-blushed face lights up. ‘I dropped 25 metres right to the bottom and crawled along there with one of those local boys. Got some mean shots …’

  Bruno, I should add, is smothered in cameras. They are draped around his neck, his torso and his back; he has one strapped either side of him, like gun holsters, and another resting on top of his money belt, resembling a slightly out-of-place codpiece. They are all black.

  I am staring at him because I’m trying to count them, but when I get to fourteen I start feeling crossed-eyed. Damn it – I wish I had my little pocket camera with me. I would love to take his photograph. I don’t know why I am so fascinated by Bruno. He’s pale, thick-skinned and middle-aged. I don’t fancy him – but I have never seen or heard anyone like this before.

  ‘You’re a war photographer?’ I say. It is not so much a question as a witness statement.

  Bruno is already gazing over my shoulder, but now gives me a look that says: ‘Oh, for fuck’s sake, what does she want?’

  ‘I am a well-known professional photographer. But, my dear! – my work is not restricted to war zones.’ His voice curdles with each word. ‘It is more complicated than that, you see. I go wherever the tension is. I do tension zones.’

  Not all the foreign press are assholes like Bruno. Some are very competent and there are a few excellent investigative journalists, like Amira Hass. The only Israeli journalist to have lived in Gaza, she moved here in 1993 and stayed for more than three years. In November 2008 she returned here, on another vessel chartered by the Free Gaza movement, but just a few weeks later she was ordered out of Gaza by Hamas. Incandescent at being locked out during the war, Amira crossed back into Gaza via the Egyptian border within days of the Israeli military pulling out.

  When I first meet Amira at the Centre, she looks exactly the way I expected her to: a bespectacled academic dressed in baggy clothes, with a stern gaze. She tells me she will be staying here for several months and we exchange numbers. For weeks afterwards I catch fleeting glimpses of her as she strides through the Centre on her way to various meetings. But then one evening she calls out of the blue, and invites me to dinner. We meet at the Palmyra Restaurant, named after the birthplace of the legendary Syrian Queen Zenobia, lover of philosophy and poetry, who briefly ruled Gaza in the third century AD.

  As we chomp our way through plates of kofta and salads in the busy restaurant, we talk. Actually I do most of the talking. Amira is an exceptionally good listener – which probably explains why she is such a formidable journalist – and I find myself offloading at length. I tell her about the bullying immigration police officer who held me at the Erez crossing as I was on my way back inside.

  ‘This is the last time you are going to Gaza,’ he warned me. ‘I am giving you one more month [inside Gaza] – but you need to be back here before the end of that month. It will be better for you.’

  I have already been back inside Gaza more than a month, and intend to stay until my visa runs out in eight weeks. But I know that the day I leave, he will be waiting for me at Erez. Amira jokes that we could leave Gaza on the same day and get arrested at the crossing together.

  ‘My family came from Bosnia,’ she tells me a little later. We are still at the restaurant, lingering over dessert, and she has finally dropped her guard and opened up a little. ‘When people ask me why I chose to live in Gaza, I tell them it’s because here I found my own shtetl,’ she adds, and we both smile.

  Amira calls herself ‘a Gaza addict’ and says the only people she is frightened of here are Hamas. ‘But it is my job to stay here for the next few months to document the scale of what my country is doing to the people here.’

  ‘You are the bottom line,’ I say.

  She doesn’t reply but concentrates on finishing her slice of cake, her face closed. She is one of the very few Israeli dissidents who have defiantly made their home in the Palestinian West Bank, a small community who dedicate their lives to unravelling Israeli government myths about Palestine and Palestinians. She’s not sentimental about Gaza, though, and deplores the internal violence and the die-hard patriarchal attitudes. But she wants Israeli society to confront its military occupation of Palestine, and she is their witness.

  While we are talking, her mobile phone rings: it is her lawyer calling from Israel and she apologises because she needs to take this call. Sitting across the table from an Israeli journalist speaking Hebrew in a crowded Gaza restaurant, I feel my spine tense. But when I look around, nobody is taking any notice at all. Hundreds of thousands of Gazans have worked in Israeli restaurants, factories and workshops over the years and I’m sure that many would go there to work, even now, given the opportunity. Many Gazans speak fluent Hebrew and Amira’s presence does not cause a whiff of fear or anger. When we finally go to pay our bill, Amira and the Palmyra Restaurant owner greet each other in Arabic, then Hebrew, exchanging news as the tables fill up around us.

  How-How

  A couple of weeks after the spectacle of Bruno strutting across the terrace of the al-Deira Hotel, Shadi and I are on our way to Rafah. We have come to visit one of his friends, who lives near the tunnels where Bruno took his mean shots.

  ‘You know the Israelis have not stopped bombing the tunnels of Rafah,’ he says, as we drive south down the coast. His ‘best-in-the-West’ rust bucket is somehow still roadwor
thy. ‘My friend Farrah and her family are still evacuated every week. They’re facing six thousand, six hundred and sixty-six dangers every single day.’

  ‘You really do have your ear to the ground,’ I say.

  ‘I told you, habibti, if they whisper in Rafah, then I hear it up in Beit Hanoun,’ he grins, steering the best-in-the-West with one hand, a half-smoked cigarette in the other.

  We drive through the tattered centre of Rafah City, then head west, towards Salah al-Din Gate, where the Rafah International Crossing lies. Taking a smaller road that curves towards the Egyptian border, we enter the district of al-Salam, which lies adjacent to the network of smugglers’ tunnels snaking between the Egyptian and Gazan sides of Rafah. Now we are beyond the boundary of Rafah City itself, in an area of sandy streets and ragged buildings, where children play against a backdrop of broken walls smothered in graffiti. It looks like the worst parts of Beit Hanoun, another lonely edge of Gaza. Except that now we are at the eastern tip of the Sinai desert.

  Shadi parks beside the last house standing at the end of a track. When I climb out of the car, I can see tarp-covered entrances to the tunnels just metres away. Gazans started building tunnels at least twenty years ago, back in the mid-1980s, maybe just to bypass Israeli and Egyptian customs. Since the Israeli blockade tightened in June 2006, the tunnels have burgeoned into Gaza’s most lucrative domestic industry. There are hundreds of them now, and more are still being built. The market in Rafah is the best-stocked souq in the whole Strip.

  I’ve visited the tunnels before, and watched the men being lowered 20 metres below the earth by electric winches. The tunnellers I met were from all over the Strip, young men proud of the money they were earning for their families (I once hailed a cab in the centre of Rafah and the teenage driver asked with a cheeky wink whether I would like to see his tunnel). Hamas have cashed in on the trade, taxing the owners of the tunnels, who still stand to make fortunes smuggling goods, including car parts and livestock, into Gaza. This is why some of the tunnel owners apparently paid renegade fighters to fire rockets towards southern Israel during the tahdiya. They did not want to lose their cash cow.

  A woman is walking from her gate towards us. Her loosely tied silver hijab sparkles as it catches the light.

  ‘Ahlan wa sahlan,’ she calls. ‘Welcome to my home.’

  ‘This is my friend, Farrah,’ says Shadi.

  Farrah laughs out loud as she greets Shadi with affection, though they do not touch each other. He has already told me they are old school friends. She has deep-set green eyes, almond-shaped and fringed with thick lashes, and a voice that rings with confidence. We follow her through a low gate. Her home is a long, low building with a flat roof, flanked by a wide yard. In one corner, a few hens are scratching inside a wire coop. In another is a shaded sitting area of mattresses, embroidered cushions and wall hangings, with a tarpaulin roof. But suddenly I realise that we are surrounded by cats, prowling and watching us, slit-eyed, from the roof.

  ‘Cats,’ I say, dismayed. I hate cats. They make me itchy and asthmatic.

  ‘Ah, we have too many cats,’ says Farrah breezily.

  ‘How many?’ I ask, suspiciously.

  ‘Twenty-five, I think, maybe more – it is too hard to tell now!’

  Tinkling with laughter, she goes off to brew coffee.

  ‘I trained as a teacher,’ Farrah tells me a little while later, as we slump against the cushions, slurping our coffee. ‘Then I worked as a private tutor for a few years, with local kids who are struggling at school. But there is no work around here now. Many people have left and my neighbours have no money to pay a tutor. It is a shame; many of the kids are still struggling at school. And after this war they are very nervous.’

  Israel launched its assault on a Saturday morning, just as thousands of children were entering and leaving their schools. As the bombs began to explode, Shadi dived in and evacuated classrooms of screaming children from the school near his home.

  I lean back against the cushions, still keeping an eye out for the damned cats.

  ‘How is the situation for you now?’ I ask Farrah.

  ‘Difficult,’ she replies, with classic Gazan understatement.

  ‘This is the hardest place to live in Gaza,’ states Shadi, stubbing his cigarette out in a tin ashtray.

  Farrah nods. ‘We have to leave our house maybe three times in a week. We are just 500 metres from the border with Egypt, and the men in the tunnels, they dig all day and night – except for Fridays of course! Sometimes we cannot sleep because of the noise. If we hear the zananas or the Israeli planes coming, we know they are going to bomb the tunnels, so we have to run.’

  ‘Where do you go?’

  ‘To our neighbours who live a few streets back. It is a bit safer there. Or to my sister’s house – she lives in the next district.’

  ‘How long have the Israelis been bombing the tunnels?’

  ‘For years.’

  ‘How long have you lived here?’

  ‘All my life.’

  ‘Do you ever feel safe?’

  This time she shakes her head. One of the skinny kittens is sitting in her lap, rheumy-eyed and purring. She strokes it. ‘Who feels safe here in Gaza? I want to move away from this area, it is too dangerous. But my father is old and stubborn; this is his land and he refuses to leave.’ Farrah’s father also has his own corner of the yard, a tatty mattress beside a small fire of smoking twigs. He looks as though he has camped here since the day he was born.

  Farrah’s mother strides across the yard with a dish of almonds. She greets Shadi enthusiastically and berates him for not having visited for too long. Then she returns to the kitchen to prepare lunch. It’s a makeshift kitchen that has been built onto the side of the house, with a roof of corrugated iron stapled over the top.

  ‘We used to have a kitchen inside,’ says Farrah, following my eyes. ‘But a few years ago our house was damaged by a bomb and the kitchen was ruined. So now we cook out here.’

  She insists we stay for lunch and Shadi and I gladly accept. It’s a Saturday and we are in no rush. This is a welcome break from the constant demands of work. Shadi stretches, then flops down among the cushions, and for once makes no effort to check his jawaal.

  ‘If you like, we can stay here all afternoon,’ he says, clearly relishing this time out.

  Our lunch is a mound of rice and vegetables and fresh, homemade bread. Afterwards, Farrah and her mother pray while Shadi and I smoke. Then she offers to show me around the neighbourhood. Shadi opts for a snooze in the shade of the shelter as Farrah and I set off together.

  I follow Farrah through a gap in the fence to the garden next door. Right where her neighbours’ house should stand is a crater half-filled with rubble where the building has collapsed in on itself.

  ‘Where are your neighbours?’ I ask, hoping they’re not dead.

  ‘They are OK, they left before the house was destroyed last year. Now they live there.’ She points to a domed tent in the garden, set in a small grove of olive and orange trees. As we’re talking, a woman steps out of the tent door. She is small, elderly and her face is inked with faded blue tattoos. Like Farrah her hijab hangs loose over her hair; her name is J’meeah.

  ‘Marhaba – You are the foreign lady who has come to visit?’

  Word gets around here fast. J’meeah begins to ask me questions, but I am gazing at her inked face. Only elderly Bedouin women still bear these distinct tattoos.

  ‘Are you Bedouin?’ I ask, slightly hesitant.

  ‘We are both Bedouin,’ cries Farrah, slapping my shoulder to make her point. ‘So many of the people round here are Bedouin.’

  This makes sense: the Gaza Bedouin mainly seem to live in isolated enclaves on the Strip, like here and in Siafa, and in the unvisited Bedouin camps.

  J’meeah invites us in for tea, but Farrah says we are going for a stroll and we’ll see her later. As we take our leave, J’meeah says something to Farrah, making a sound like a growl or a b
ark. Farrah nods, and takes my arm.

  ‘What did she say?’ I ask as we cross the garden to the lane outside.

  ‘How-How are outside, so we have to be careful,’ she answers, jerking her chin towards the road ahead, and guiding me towards a gap in the fence.

  ‘How-How?’

  Her green eyes flash. ‘The Hamas police.’

  After this war, many Gazans have hardened against Hamas. Where were the fighters, people ask, when Israeli ground forces invaded the Strip? Many people mock them as cowards who hid in the other network of subterranean tunnels, up in northern Gaza.51 As they lose popularity, the Hamas leaders become more militant, and the rank and file more heavy-handed and paranoid, especially with dissidents and outsiders, and the Bedouin are both.

  Farrah and I cross into the small lane. It is lined on both sides with bombed-out and shelled houses. An occasional single wall has been left standing, or half a room. The scale of destruction is like the worst bombed-out sites in the north of Gaza. I know some of these houses were bombed back in 2005, when Israel carried out large-scale house demolitions across the district of Rafah. But here on the front line, it seems they have never stopped.

  We walk for maybe an hour, through rubble-strewn streets. Farrah tells me the men in her neighbourhood spend much of their lives repairing their homes, which are badly damaged by Israeli bombs that penetrate deep into the tunnels, burying alive anyone who is inside. Meanwhile the smugglers accuse the Egyptian authorities of sealing tunnels with cement, and even pumping gas inside, to scare them off. It’s a dangerous, dirty business; dozens of Gazans have been buried alive in these tunnels. But even so, the money is a magnet that attracts new hopefuls from all across the Strip every day.