The earth is closing in on us

author : Lailia El-Haddad topic : Palestine

by Lailia El-Haddad

[In the two-and-a-half weeks preceding the Tel Aviv suicide bombing of April 17 that killed nine Israeli civilians, the Israeli military killed 26 Palestinians -- at least five of them children -- and injured 161 more. At the time of this article, Israel had been continuously pounding Palestinians in the Gaza Strip with hundreds of artillery shells per day. Israel has also severely limited the flow of goods to and from the Gaza Strip, in a move designed to freeze the Gazan economy and, as senior Israeli advisor Dov Weissglas joked, put the Palestinians on a diet.

All of this has received scant attention from the mainstream US press, compared to the Tel Aviv suicide bombing, to which the New York Times website dedicated a full photo slideshow of the scene of devastation, in addition to full analysis of how the single incident would impact Palestinian and Israeli relations and pondering how the Israeli government would "retaliate."

Laila al-Haddad runs the Raising Yousuf blog from Gaza City, at http://a-mother-from-gaza.blogspot.com ]

gaza city, 10 april 2006 -- 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 sms-ing his girlfriend back in Tel Aviv, "Just a few more rounds to go, hon...Give it another whirl, Ron, it's been two 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.