Ghostly
Streets, Ghostly Skies
By Laila El-Haddad
19 May 2007
Raising Yousuf
We're
used to things going from bad to worse very quickly here. But we never
expected the situation to get as bad as it has over the past few days.
After a terrifying 24 hours,
we awoke this morning to sporadic gunfire, and ghostly streets.
It was a welcome change.
Sleep-deprived and anxious, my colleague Saeed, on his first visit to
Gaza, and myself headed to Rafah in the southern part of the Strip to
continue shooting a series of documentaries we are working on.
Though the gunfire had subsided,
the gunmen were still patrolling the streets, each this time casually
manning their own turf, masked and fully armed.
Impromptu checkpoints were
still set up along the main Gaza-Rafah road, and we were stopped for
ID and affiliation checks.
As we approached Rafah, we
received word that clashes had broken out there, too, following the
funeral of four Hamas men killed in an Israeli air strike the night
before.
We decided to avoid the town
centre, and headed instead to film near the border area along Rafah's
edge. Young children blissfully flew handmade kites above the iron wall
separating them from the Egyptian Rafah. Their atbaq flirted in the
infinite sky above with kites flying their way from the Egyptian side.
"We play a game with the Egyptian kids" they explained of
their unseen counterparts. "We meet here, through our kites, and
see who can catch the other's kites quicker by entangling. So far we're
winning -- we've got 14 Egyptian kites," he announced proudly.
The children are small enough
that they can wiggle their way through the cracks of the large iron
gates along the wall, where once Merkava tanks made their unwelcome
entrance to battered camps here. And so they can call out to their Egyptian
friends, and learn their names and new kite flying techniques.
Even then, we could hear
the fearsome roar of Israeli fighter jets overhead, interspersed with
the banter of machine guns from feuding factions.
I then received a call from
my father back in Gaza City -- a tremendous explosion, the result of
F-16 jet bombing a nearby Hamas compound, had just sent intense shockwaves
through our house. It was so powerful that it blasted off the windows
from my cousin's home in the neighbourhood behind us. This attack was
followed by another then another, and then another.
Hamas's Qassam Brigades have
sent a barrage of rockets into Israel over the past two days. It has
been in an attempt to redirect the battle towards the occupation, they
say.
There have been six Israeli
aerial strikes since this morning. The latest one happened just as we
departed Rafah back to Gaza City. The victims this time were two young
brothers, standing near a municipality garbage truck that was obliterated.
Even as I record this from
back at home, we were shaken by another large explosion, Israelis tanks
are amassing at Gaza's northern border, and unmanned Israeli drones
are whirring menacingly, incessantly, overhead in great numbers patrolling
the ghostly skies that only the kites can reach, preparing, perhaps,
for yet another strike against an already bleeding, burning, and battered
Gaza.
Freelance journalist and blogger Laila El-Haddad lives in Gaza City.
Laila's blog, Raising Yousuf, is named after her two-year-old son.
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