From our correspondent in Gaza
For twenty years Samir had looked up from the pages of the book and checked whether the bell on the door was announcing a boy or a girl. Of the two floors of the library, the one that filled him most with pride now empties him of everything except pain: it was dedicated to titles for children and teenagers. At Samir Mansour – the shop bears his name and surname – the students of the nearby university passed by and who in Gaza can afford to spend money on a book.
An Israeli missile on Tuesday brought this dream back down to earth, to the level where the crumbled roof now stands above the rest. Here the rescuers did not try to pull out lifeless bodies but what gives life to the bodies. Reading, imagination, the desire to learn and discover. Samir takes a copy covered in mud, it’s Agatha Christie, one of Poirot’s investigations. The Gaza bookseller cannot solve the mystery: why this very building has become a military target. «My father was a publisher, I started working with him, he taught me how to spread the culture. I have accumulated thousands of books. All lost ». Even Maher Al Kolak fails to understand how the Air Force may have targeted his family home. List the floors and for each floor a profession, almost to say jobs and lives too boring, without jolts to end up shattered in 30 seconds. On the ground floor the father’s electrical shop, above his brother the lawyer, then the accountant and at the last the engineer.
Israel-Gaza, the conflict: insights
Rimal is a residential area, the streets descend towards the sea and the port, the jacarandas on the paths soften the dusty gray of the light, around the corner from the rubble is the rPalmera pastry shop that has been serving shawarma for almost thirty years, the loaf filled with a little bit of everything and chicken meat, sweets, fruit juices (alcohol is forbidden by the fundamentalist vice squad).
2009, 2012, 2014 and until yesterday: these are the conflicts between Hamas and Israel, cyclical since the fundamentalists took control of the Strip from the Palestinian Authority with a coup 14 years ago. “The neighborhood has always been safe – repeats Maher, pharmacist – away from the heaviest bombings ».
In these 11 days the danger has approached: 50 meters higher the building inhabited by other middle-class families has also come down, for what may exist in the midst of the misery of the Strip. In the same night, between last Saturday and Sunday, 45 people were killed, 14 were relatives of Maher. The Israeli army spokesmen explain that the missiles hit the underground tunnels used by the irregular Hamas troops and the chasm involved the buildings. The victims of the war are 243 (66 minors), in its death accounting the Ministry of Health in Gaza does not distinguish between civilians and militiamen.
From the mosque loudspeakers, the imams relaunch Friday sermons and ritual prayers for those who have not yet had a funeral. It is the fighters who remained buried in the tunnels, one of the strategic objectives defined by Aviv Kochavi, the Israeli Chief of Staff: to destroy what intelligence calls the “subway”, the kilometers of tunnels built by Hamas and Islamic Jihad, trenches under the sand and under the houses from which to prepare ambushes in the event of a raid by soldiers and from which to move the rockets towards the launch pads. In less than two weeks, 4,360 were shot at Israeli cities: 13 were killed, including a 5-year-old boy and a 16-year-old girl.
In Khan Younis – the village of Yahia Sinwar, the head of Hamas in the Strip – the Ezzedin Al Qassam brigades celebrate 9 “martyrs” in a stadium, the bodies wrapped in the organization’s green flag and lined up on synthetic grass. The minibuses drive the children to the center of Gaza to wave the same banners, the megaphones amplify the proclamations of victory, for now the leaders have not left the bunkers, the Israeli threat remains to eliminate them. The one who speaks in public – from comfort and security in Qatar – is Ismail Haniye: “We have triumphed and destroyed the normalization project,” he declares referring to Israel’s agreements with the Arab Emirates and Bahrain. “We have seen our nation awaken, rise to Jerusalem.” The movement’s bosses have claimed rocket fire at the start of hostilities as a response to Israeli police charges on the Temple Mount. Even yesterday the agents dispersed the Palestinians who fired Molotov cocktails, the demonstrators praised Hamas. So he gets what he wanted with this conflict: to extend his influence over the Palestinians in Jerusalem and the West Bank to the detriment of President Abu Mazen.
Egyptian intelligence men arrived in Gaza to try to consolidate the ceasefire. The weapons stopped at 2 am on Friday without an agreement, the risk is that the calm will not last long: «We won and the rules of the game have changed. Hamas is wrong if it thinks that we will accept the sporadic launch of rockets as in the past, ”warns Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister. “Truce or no truce, our finger stays on the trigger ”, is the response of the fundamentalists.
May 21, 2021 (change May 21, 2021 | 21:29)
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