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| Hind Rajab Khoudary, 6 |
The fourth month of Israel's ongoing invasion and bombardment of Gaza has begun, and they have started bombing Rafah - with a threat of a full-on ground invasion.
Rafah, the town on the southernmost border of Gaza, where 1.5 million Palestinians have fled to, leaving behind everything but the clothes on their backs as they fled in terror from the Israeli bombardment of homes, schools, hospitals, mosques, churches, universities, colleges, buses, cars, barns and even horses. This is a city that usually is home to 200,000 people. The town has been overwhelmed with internally displaced refugees. The threat of a ground invasion of Rafah is not an empty threat - it is a threat that has echoes of the attack on al-Shujaeyya in 2016 -- the images of that night still seared into the mind of anyone above ten years old in Gaza - the relentless Israeli bombardment that went on an on and on until the people of al-Shujaeyya (in eastern Gaza City) fled for their lives. It echoes back to Deir Yassin, the massacre of a village in 1948 where the men were lined up and shot by the Haganah (the Zionist militia that was the precursor to the Israeli military), with the order given to those who survived to spread the word to the other villages - that if they don't comply to the order to leave, they, too, will end up like Deir Yassin.
Deir Yassin, which became a wooded 'park' funded by two generations of Americans, including Kamala Harris, who said in her biography that she remembers growing up in California and collecting money for the Jewish National Fund to 'plant trees in Israel'. Trees to cover their crimes. Oz Shelach, the Israeli writer, wrote Picnic Grounds: A Novel in Fragments detailing his childhood of going on field trips with his school and exploring the ruins of 'ancient villages' which were actually only depopulated a generation earlier, in the time of their parents and grandparents, in 1948, and again in 1967 when Israeli forces "took back Jerusalem" and have been working hard since then to ethnically cleanse that incredibly dense and diverse city house by house by neighborhood by neighborhood.
And the area of Deir Yassin, now a park, was the location where another horrifying incident took place on July 2, 2014 - the kidnapping and murder of Mohammed Abu Khdeir by a gang of Israeli youth. He was a slight boy of 15, small for his age, who was grabbed from outside the mosque where he was waiting for pre-dawn prayers to begin at 4:30 am. He was taken to the dark, unlit woods built on the site of that 1948 massacre, tortured, forced to drink petrol, then set on fire and burned inside and out. His charred body another reminder, another echoing cry that filled young Palestinians with terror: this, this could happen to you. Americans may not have heard of this incident, but I guarantee you every Palestinian, every Jerusalemite, knows the name of Mohammed Abu Khdeir.
The images we have all seen over the past four months, seared into our memories - the little boy trembling, reaching out to hold his little brother, also trembling, who looks up with a blank, frightened stare. Little Reem and her grandfather, holding her dear little body with her Princess Leia buns, his most precious darling. The little boy and his mother, seen from above, holding a white flag in the empty street, walking slowly with their arms up, til his mother is shot and the little boy scrambles back to save his own life. The hostages, shirts off, waving the white flag and shouting in Hebrew, shot by their own army. The invented tale of "tunnels under al-Shifa hospital" and the feeble attempts to show that such tunnels exist. And most recently, little Hind, trapped and terrified in a car with her father and brothers, telling the ambulance workers to please come, they are next to the tank, then screaming in terror and begging them to come quickly. The voice of the ambulance worker on the phone, so kind and gentle, calling her 'amo', which is essentially calling her 'my niece', then rushing to her aid, then the terror of two days passing, three days, the world of social media asking "What happened to Hind??", then a week after the fateful phone call, the bodies were found - Hind, her relatives, the two medics who had responded to the call, all of them dead, shot by Israeli artillery fire.
She is just one of the now 30,000 bodies lying in the ruins of what, 140 days ago, was a society of homes, schools, hospitals, mosques, universities, churches, parks, beaches, cafes, markets. Now it is a place of screams, wailing cries of pain and anguish, bodies under rubble, children shaking in shock and fear that is non-stop and has not gone away.