| April
17 , 2006
Dispatch from Gaza
The Earth is Closing
in on Us
By LAILA EL-HADDAD
The
shells keep falling. They’ve gotten inside my head, so that
it’s not just my house shaking but but my brain throbbing.
It’s like someone is banging a gong next to my ear every few
minutes; sometimes fives times a minute, like last night. And just
when I savor a few moments of silence, it starts again as if to
say “you're not going to get away that easily.”
We
went to sleep to the rattling of our windows and invasive pounding
and after-echo of the shells. We sleep as they fall.
We
pray fajir, and they fall again. We wake, and they are still falling.
When
they are closer, when they fall in Shija'iya east of Gaza City,
they make my stomach drop.
And
I want to hide, but I don't know where.
The
Earth is closing in on us.
That's
the thing about occupation-it invades even your most private of
spaces. And while the shells were falling inside my head, they also
killed little Hadil Ghabin today.
A
shell landed on her home in Beit Lahiya, shattering her helpless
body and injuring five members of her family, including Hadil's
pregnant mother, Safia, and her 19-year-old sister.
My
headeaches seem inconsequential when I think of little Hadil. Sometimes
people here say they prefer death to this existence; you’ll
frequently here at funerals: “Irta'at”…she’s
more
comfortable now anyhow-what was there to live for here?
The
Earth is squeezing us. I wish we were its wheat
so we could die and live again.
That
has become our sad reality. Death provides relief.
Sometimes
it feels like we are all in some collective torture room; who is
playing God with us this night, I wonder? When I look up into the
sky, and hear the shells, or see the faceless helicopter gunships
cruising intently through the moonlit sky, I wonder, do they see
me?
And
when the shells start falling again, I can’t help but imagine
some beside-himself with boredom 18-year-old on the border, lighting
a cig or SMSing his girlfriend back in Tel Aviv “just a few
more rounds to go hon.….give it another whirl, Ron, its been
2 minutes already.”
Sometimes,
when I’m on edge, I might just yell out and wave my arms at
them.
Do
they hear me?
We
decided to escape this evening to my father’s farm in central
Gaza, where we roasted potatoes and warmed tea on a small mangal,
as we listened to thikr about the Prophet on the occasion of his
mawlid from a nearby mosque, under the ominous roars of fighter
jets, patrolling the otherwise lonely skies above.
“Where
are you heading off to?” asked Osama, the shopkeeper downstairs.
“Off to the farm. We’re suffocating,” I replied,
Yousuf tugging at
my arm …
“Mama…Yallah!
Yallah!”
“Wallah
Laila, we’re not just suffocating…we’re asphyxiating.
I feel I can’t breathe anymore. And my head is pounding and
pounding. All I hear is BOOM boom now.”
The
Earth is closing in on us.
And
little Hadil is dead.
This
came to CounterPunch via the Rafah sister cities project, Olympia,
WA.
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