2023-11-18 10:46:00
In a dilapidated Palestinian refugee camp near Beirut, Hayat Chehadeh wrings her hands while watching the war between Israel and Hamas on television: her daughter, who is in Gaza, has not spoken to her for a week.
“I can’t sleep. I get up at three in the morning (…) and I watch television,” said this slim 69-year-old woman, in her dark apartment in the Bourj Barajneh camp.
“Sometimes she writes to me: ‘I’m fine’. That’s all,” because she can’t recharge her phone’s battery, she adds while one of her grandchildren plays on the ground with a flag. Palestinian.
She tries to keep calm by saying that her daughter decided to separate her three children, dividing them between different members of her family.
“She was crying, she said ‘I’m separating the children’ (…) so that if one dies, another stays alive,” says Hayat Chehadeh.
In the alleys of the camp, portraits of historic Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat adorn the walls, sometimes alongside slogans glorifying the “Al Aqsa Flood”, the Hamas attack on Israeli soil which sparked the war.
The attack on October 7 left 1,200 dead, the vast majority civilians, according to Israeli authorities. Retaliatory bombings in the Gaza Strip left 12,000 dead, mostly civilians, including 5,000 children, according to the Hamas Ministry of Health.
The small Palestinian territory, subjected since October 9 to a “complete siege” by Israel, under a deluge of bombings, lacks water, electricity, food and medicine.
Communications are cut off, due to lack of fuel to run the generators.
More than 1.5 million people, more than half of Gaza’s population, have been displaced by the war according to the UN, which has warned of an “immediate risk of famine”.
“We are fine”
Hayat Chehadeh explains that her daughter, in her thirties, lived in Lebanon, but a few months ago, “her husband came and took her” to Gaza.
“She is moving around (…) I don’t know where she is now,” she adds, asking that the young woman not be identified by her name.
All she wants is a quick message from him: “We’re fine,” she says.
The family of Hayat Chehadeh, survivors of the “Nakba”, the “catastrophe” represented for the Arabs by the creation of Israel, synonymous with an exodus for more than 760,000 Palestinians, took refuge in Lebanon in 1948.
She says her parents feared for their lives, especially after the Deir Yassine massacre, where Jewish paramilitary groups killed more than a hundred villagers in April 1948.
She herself was born in the Bourj Barajneh camp, partially destroyed during the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982, then besieged by militias in the mid-1980s during the civil war.
According to the UN agency for Palestinian refugees (UNRWA), around 250,000 Palestinian refugees reside in Lebanon.
“Nothing”
In her cramped apartment in the camp, Fatima al-Ashwah, 61, also has her eyes glued to the television, and prays that her family members in Gaza are not among the victims pulled from the rubble. She hopes to see them in the images of the displaced people in the shelters.
Also from the Acre region, she claims to have some 70 relatives in Gaza, including her cousins and their families.
They lived in Beit Hanoun in the northern Gaza Strip, which the Israeli army called on its residents to evacuate. Today “their houses no longer exist (…) because they are on the front line. There is nothing left.”
Fatima al-Ashwah’s relatives fled from place to place, some finding refuge in schools near the Rafah crossing with Egypt in the south.
She said she heard the bombs during the short calls she received from them. His relatives told him “we are hungry, we are afraid, the children are terrified”.
“The situation breaks your heart,” she adds.
Holding back tears, she recounts how she went to Gaza last July, where her family welcomed her and another relative with drums and dancing at the Rafah crossing.
“God willing, all this will end and Gaza will return to the way it was,” she says.
11/18/2023 09:45:25 – Beirut (AFP) – © 2023 AFP
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