Testimonies from the collaterally damaged

From MIT Media Lab's Virtual Gaza project: The project is a space where ordinary Palestinians describe their experiences living under Israeli occupation in the Gaza strip. The diary entries, photographs, and video material gathered have been contributed by residents of Gaza. Most of the entries are geotagged...

15 year-old Ayman al-Najar is sitting up in his hospital bed at the Al-Nasser Hospital in Khan Younis. His back is covered with thick dressings. His doctor explains that he is suffering from severe chemical burns. Ayman is from Khoza'a, the rural community east of Khan Younis which endured a brutal incursion by Israeli ground forces on 13th January. He and his sister were sitting together under the stairs when a missile struck. Their grandfather was in the garden. His body was severed into two parts.

His sister, Alaa', 16, had been playing a game on her mobile phone. A third of her face was blown off, leaving part of her mouth, jaw and cheekbone missing. A massive part of her waist and pelvic area was destroyed with tissue loss exposing the bone. She was also badly burned. Medical staff at the Al-Nasser Hospital battled to save her and she pulled through 10 hours of surgery. She regained consciousness after the operation and wept when she heard about the death of her grandfather. However, five hours later she died suddenly.

It is time for Ayman's dressing to be changed. He cries out as the bandages are removed. A scarlet red wad of gauze is teased out of a deep hole in his back which it is filling in order to stem the bleeding. Five days after the attack, his wounds are still bleeding profusely. These are not normal burns. The wounds cover his upper back and right arm and his ankle has a deep wound down to the bone. He will need extensive plastic surgery. Shrapnel which entered Ayman's back penetrated one of his lungs and he has undergone surgery to repair several tears. He screams as iodine solution is applied. It is unbearable to watch his suffering.

Ayman is a civilian, a minor. He was at home with his family when they were attacked. Israel claims its bloody war has been on Hamas. Ayman, Alaa' and their grandfather were not Hamas operatives, neither were the thousands of other civilians killed and injured. Israel would call them "collateral damage". However, the atrocities committed against them amount to war crimes, especially if weapons have been used illegally. What exactly is the substance which has inflicted such wounds – not on Ayman alone but countless others also? Israel won't admit to the nature or composition of some of the less conventional weapons its military has been using on the population of Gaza.

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David Bromwich, Sterling Professor of English Yale University on the recent events in Gaza in the LRB:

In the United States, since this one-sided war began on 27 December, facts are not suppressed but fiction pervades the commentary. We are offered an analogy: what would Americans do if rockets were fired from Canada or Cuba? The question has been repeated with docility by congressional leaders of both parties; but the rockets are assumed to come suddenly without cause. The choking of the Gaza Strip by land, sea and air, the rejection by the US of the Palestinian Unity Government, the coup launched by Fatah and bankrolled by the US, which ended in the seizure of power by Hamas – all of this happened before the rockets fell from the sky. It is as if it belonged to a prehistoric time. American politicians exhibit an identification with Israel that is now in excess of the measurable effects of the Israel lobby. The blindness of the identification has led the US to respond with keen sensitivity to Israeli requests for assistance and moral support, and to underestimate the suffering caused by the Gaza blockade and by the settlements and checkpoints and the wall on the West Bank. Yet grant the potency of the lobby and the identification – even so, the arrogance with which Israel dictates policy is hard to comprehend on the usual index of motives. Ehud Olmert boasted to a crowd in Ashkelon on 12 January that with one phone call to Bush, he forced Condoleezza Rice to abstain from voting for the UN ceasefire resolution she herself had prepared. The depth, the efficacy and the immediacy of the influence are treated by Olmert as an open secret.