‘You can read the writing on them’

Most wars kill men, and leave widows and fatherless children. The war on Gaza follows a different pattern. According to the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, in 36 of the 224 Israeli strikes on residential buildings and tents for the displaced between 18 March and 9 April, ‘the fatalities recorded so far were only women and children.’ More than 15,000 children in Gaza have been killed since October 2023 and 39,000 have lost either one or both of their parents. According to Unicef, ‘Gaza has the highest number of child amputees per capita anywhere in the world.’ On 18 March, Israel killed 174 children in 24 hours. It isn’t hard to kill children when they make up 47 per cent of the trapped population that you’re carpet bombing. One young Gazan, when asked by an interviewer what she would like to be when she grows up, replied that children do not grow up in Gaza.

No aid has been allowed into the Gaza Strip since 2 March. Makeshift food kitchens are being targeted. On 4 April, the pipeline supplying 70 per cent of potable water to Gaza City was interrupted and not restored until 17 April. Power cuts to the southern desalination plant have slashed water production by 85 per cent. The water that remains is frequently salty, contaminated or both. In the North, Unicef reports, ‘families rely solely on water trucking.’ Tap water at home is a thing of the past. The cost of fresh water is exorbitant. I may have said this before, but the situation is not getting better, it is getting far worse. On 27 March, the Israeli Supreme Court ruled that Israel has no obligation to allow humanitarian aid into Gaza.

For more than fifty days a trapped, injured, hungry, grieving, orphaned and thirsty young population has been denied access to food, safe water, shelter and medical supplies from outside. During the fragile ceasefire earlier this year, they did not go south to leave Gaza; they walked north, to go home. They are not going to leave voluntarily.

More than 400,000 people are estimated to have been displaced between 18 March and 9 April. The Palestinians ‘will soon lose more and more land’, the Israeli defence minister Israel Katz said on 21 March. ‘The plans are prepared and approved.’ The film maker Meron Rapoport wrote recently in +972 Magazine:

Israel is preparing to forcibly displace the entire population of Gaza – through a combination of evacuation orders and intense bombardment – into an enclosed and possibly fenced-off area … Without mincing words, this ‘humanitarian zone’ … in which the army intends to corral Gaza’s two million residents, can be summed up in just two words: concentration camp. This is not hyperbole; it is simply the most precise definition to help us better understand what we are facing.

Concentration camps for Palestinians are not new. The Palestine Post reported on 3 October 1937 that my grandfather was arrested by the British in Jaffa ‘and sent to Acre Concentration Camp’.

My father, like many Palestinians, was partly educated at a UNRWA school in Damascus after being forcibly expelled from Jaffa. What is left of UNRWA – whose flag, one Gazan told me, he grew up believing was their national flag, as it flew over their homes, their schools and their recreational facilities – is now, after a sustained Israeli and US campaign of smearing, killing and cutting of funding, being obliterated. All UNRWA international staff have been ordered to evacuate the Gaza Strip for the first time since the agency was established in 1948. Palestinian UNRWA employees who have remained in Gaza are being redeployed to other organisations. Those Palestinian UNRWA employees and their families who left Gaza seeking safety, or medical treatment, have been removed from the payroll and left to fend for themselves. It is akin to dismantling the civil service and the education and welfare systems; hard under any circumstances, murderous a thousand times over in the current genocide.

On 23 March, eight Red Crescent medics and seven other humanitarian workers in Rafah were murdered in their ambulances by Israeli soldiers, who fired on one vehicle after another before killing the people inside and burying them in a mass grave. The Nasser Hospital in Khan Younis was struck the same day. Reports continue of the torture of doctors, including Hussam Abu Safiya, in Israeli prisons.

Following a visit by Netanyahu to Budapest at the beginning of April, Hungary withdrew from the International Criminal Court. The British chief prosecutor of the court, Karim Khan KC, recently described the situation in Gaza as ‘hell on earth’. ‘We’re at a pivotal point in the world order,’ he said. If ‘some people are denied protection of the law’, it ‘undermines the rule of law everywhere, for everyone’.

The Israeli army has many British passport holders in its ranks. Lawyers including Raji Sourani of the Palestine Centre for Human Rights (PCHR) in Gaza and Michael Mansfield QC, working with London’s Public Interest Law Centre, submitted a dossier to Scotland Yard’s War Crimes Unit, itemising the alleged war crimes of ten British nationals, on 7 April.

I asked Sourani recently if it was true that Gazans can hear the difference between a British drone and other drones. ‘Hear the difference?’ he replied. ‘You can read the writing on them.’

Sourani and his family are currently in Egypt. The deputy director of PCHR, Ihab Faisal, moved into the Souranis’ house in Gaza City with his wife and daughters, aged three and six. At around 2 a.m. on 16 January, Sourani told me, while they were sleeping, ‘a quadcopter hit the window from the southern area of the house at the first floor’. A ‘big explosion killed three of them on the spot, one of the girls’ screaming was heard but nobody dared to do anything, or reach them. In the morning they found them dead.’

Residents of Nuseirat refugee camp told Middle East Eye that Israeli quadcopters were playing recordings of women and children crying for help to lure Palestinians out of their homes. Those who respond to the cries are then shot at.

On 24 March, Israeli settlers beat up one of the directors of No Other Land, Hamdan Ballal, outside his house in Susya, in the West Bank. Ballal thought they were going to kill him. After the attack, Israeli soldiers came and threatened to shoot Hamdan, then took him (not his assailants) into custody, where they beat him up further.

There has been an increase not only in the amount but in the viciousness of settler violence against Palestinians in the West Bank. Ballal’s treatment follows a typical pattern of settlers being supported by the army. As Palestinian commentators have pointed out, someone shouldn’t have to win an Oscar for the Western media to notice that they’re being attacked by settlers. As well as shootings and beatings, settler attacks involve burning cars, smashing windows at night and releasing dogs on residents. At the same time, Israeli agricultural machinery moves onto Palestinians’ land.

Footage coming out of Fawwar refugee camp near Hebron shows children running screaming with their school bags on their backs as tanks enter the street. The incident is far from isolated, but reporting is getting increasingly patchy.

According to internal data obtained by Drop Site News from Meta, the owner of Facebook and Instagram, ‘Israel is the biggest originator of takedown requests globally by far,’ and 94 per cent of its requests since October 2023 have been complied with.

Al-Jazeera estimates that Israel has killed more than 230 media workers since October 2023. Five of them have been al-Jazeera journalists, including 23-year-old Hussam Shobat, who was killed when the Israelis targeted his vehicle without warning. I recall a clip of a girl leaning into his car, saying: ‘I want to be like you when I am older!’

Dina Khaled Zaurub, a 22-year-old artist who drew portraits of people who had been killed, was in a tent in a displaced persons camp close to Khan Younis when she was herself killed by an Israeli airstrike.

Fatima Hassouna, a 25-year-old photojournalist, was killed with ten members of her family, including her pregnant sister, in an Israeli airstrike on her home in northern Gaza on 16 April, a few days before she was due to be married. ‘If I must die, I want a resonant death,’ the young woman said. A documentary based on video calls between her and the Iranian-French director Sepideh Farsi will be shown at Cannes next month.

During Ramadan, the poets Alice and Peter Oswald walked 150 miles from Bristol to London, while fasting during the day in solidarity with Muslims, to raise money for the Hands Up Project, which connects volunteer teachers around the world, including the Oswalds, with Palestinian schoolchildren. ‘That kind of personal contact with schoolchildren who you know are being heavily bombed is something that you obviously can’t ignore,’ Peter has said. I was part of the crowd gathered at short notice to greet them in Parliament Square.

There was another, smaller, uninvited crowd with Israeli flags and banners that declared there is no genocide taking place. One of them was a large man with a megaphone. ‘Israel doesn’t start wars, Israel doesn’t lose wars,’ he blared repeating the lines: ‘You don’t like the war you started, that’s your problem,’ making it hard to hear.

‘We have national laws that protect free speech,’ Alice Oswald said, ‘and when they are broken, we have human, natural laws that protect human behaviour.’ The poets kept their dignity as the megaphone voice continued to jeer: ‘Am I shouting? Am I shouting?’