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In 2005, actor Daniel Day-Lewis visited Gaza and witnessed the arrogance and crimes of the occupation up close. He narrated his experience, feelings and position in an influential five-page article that sparked the anger of the entity and its gang. These are excerpts from it:
“This is an apartheid state. It took me less than a week to lose neutrality. And through this I might throw stones at the tanks.”
In the Gaza Strip, the Israeli army responds to stone-throwing with bullets. He responds to bombings and attacks launched by Palestinian militants by bulldozing homes and olive groves in search of the perpetrators, punishing their families, and establishing buffer zones to protect Israeli settlements. It blocks access to villages and multiplies checkpoints, cutting off Gazans from the outside world. MSF psychiatrists try to help Palestinian families cope with the pressures of living within these borders, by treating severe trauma and listening to their stories. These visits are sometimes the only sign that they have not been abandoned.
Israeli tanks and armored bulldozers can come without warning, often at night. The noise alone, for a people forced to suffer these violations year after year, is enough to freeze the soul. Israeli snipers are stationed on rooftops. They order homeowners to leave; They don’t even have time to gather pots, pans, papers and clothes before bulldozers crush the unprotected buildings like dinosaurs trampling eggs. Those caught in the incursion area will be shot. Even those hiding inside their homes may be shot or bombed through walls, windows and roofs. The white flag carried by humanitarian workers offers little protection; We may be subjected to warning shots at least twice before the week is over.
Sometimes families do not leave the area being raided, because if they leave they will lose everything. Staying at home is a big risk. Sometimes the house is occupied by Israeli forces, and the family is forced to stay there as protection for the soldiers. Last year, an average of 120 homes were demolished per month. In the past four years, 28,483 Gazans have been forcibly evacuated; And the destruction of more than half of the usable land in #Gaza, which consists mainly of orchards. Last year, 658 Palestinians were killed in violence in Gaza, along with dozens of Israelis. This plowing, house after house, orchard after orchard, turns the community into a wasteland, scattered and combined with a stunted crop of broken glass, nails, books, and abandoned possessions. As we make our way toward the home of Abu Saghir and his family – one of many families we will visit today – we walk over broken histories and aspirations.
One day, Rafael Eitan, the former chief of staff, likened the Palestinian people to “drugged cockroaches moving and floundering inside a bottle.” In 1980 he told his officers: “We have to do everything to make them so miserable that they will leave.” He opposed all attempts to grant them autonomy in the occupied territories. Twenty-five years later, it seems to me that his position and policy have been implemented with great enthusiasm.
Watchtowers are these evil structures with malicious shadows of power all over the land. On our third day, as we stood at the torn edge of the refugee camp in Rafah, the forbidden border area between Gaza and Egypt, bullets pierced the sand a yard and a half away from where we were standing. In this place was Iman Al-Hams, a helpless schoolgirl who had been shot just weeks before. She ran and tried to hide here from the cruel death that came to her. I felt her presence. The sky shakes with its shallow, fluttering breaths of its last terror.
[Killing the little girl Iman]
Soldier 1: “We recognized a person standing on his feet 100 meters away. Soldier 2: “A girl about 10 years old.”
Soldier 2: “She is behind the trench, half a meter away, scared to death. The bullets were right next to her, one centimetre away.”
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