SENT TO ME BY A FRIEND: This account was just posted on FB. Translated by Amal Amireh. A quick translation of Mahmoud Ismails account of the Khuzaa massacre. ------------------- We were three thousand people. We ignored the threats and orders of evacuation, and decided, each on his own, to stay in our homes. It wasn’t heroic. The truth of the matter is that some of us would have had a nervous breakdown sleeping elsewhere, others were too lazy to deal with evacuation, and yet others, like me, could not have imagined, in their worst nightmares, what was awaiting them in a few hours. The first raid destroyed the road connecting Khuza’a with Khan Younis. The second hit electric power, the third the mobile phone tower, the fourth the phone landlines. Alone we were in Khuza’a’s jet-black night under non-stop shelling: planes attacking everything; glass shattering; and shrapnel piercing your house and everything around you. And there is you hiding in a place you think is less dangerous in a position you think will protect you. You calculate raids and probabilities: Is this the sound of a missile coming at us? Has the shell landed in the house? Why hasn’t it exploded? Was it aimed at so and so’s house? So and so’s mosque? This is an F16 raid; this is artillery shelling. A whole night trying to keep sane. In the morning, they said leave. The red-cross at the entrance of the town will safeguard your exit. Leave, the army does not want to hurt you. The operation is aimed at your houses, streets, land and all aspects of your life. But your life itself is not a target. We got out. Three thousand of us marched solemnly just like the residents of Shuja’eyeh did a few days ago and just like our grandparents did sixty six years ago. We walked looking with amazed eyes at the enormous destruction that one night of shelling has brought about. We walked as if we were saying farewell to what is left. But all this doesn’t matter. You freeze your feelings and you focus on your feet. You arrive where they directed you. You find only tanks. Before you realize the trap you just walked in, bullets sound everywhere. Then what? Bullets, screams, chaos. We were three thousand. Now we are fifty. We gathered in one house. Half of us are strangers to the house but this is of no consequence. We divided ourselves into three rooms so that we don’t all die together when the time comes (yes, in such moments people try to convince themselves that an old wall separating two rooms can limit the destructive power of a rocket taller than any of us and heavier than all of us put together). In the room with me there were two old people who increased my anxiety. One by comparing wars he lived through and the other by his insisting demand for a sip of water before the fast, forgetting for a thousand times that a sip of water is not available in the house because the army destroyed the water tanks. Kids did what kids usual do: they cried out of fear, they cried out of boredom, they cried out of thirst. The others, like me, we listened silently to the two old people talking while watching the window and time waiting for morning. (There seems to be a legend, whose source I don’t know, which states that the probabilities of death decrease with the first ray of light). Light came. And the first rocket hit the stairs of the house. What is worse than the sound of the explosion? The silence that follows. Or rather what your ears think is silence. Shrapnel hits everything. Gray is all you see. A few moments then you get back your hearing and the dust clears. Fear turns into corpses and the color red takes over the gray. Your mother and brother? Still alive. You look at your feet. After sixteen hours of laziness now their job is to run. You get away from the place. The second rocket hits. You hear its whistle. You make sure you are ok. You run to your house. Minutes and your house is hit. You run again. Many people running in many directions. The helicopter in the sky above you draws for you with its bullets the only way out. You run to it. You run as if your life depends on it. Because your life actually depends on it. You run over those who fell. You run next to dead bodies. One eye on the destruction and the road that is trapped with holes, and one eye on your family that is disappearing in the flood around you. I got out with my family and some other families. We made it. Why? I have no clue. What is more important is those who didn’t get out. Dead bodies are still in the streets and under the ruined houses. How many? Maybe 20, 50, 100… No one knows for sure. The pictures that emerged out of Khuza’a up to now are from the Israeli army and reveal a level of destruction that fill one with anger and is heartbreaking. The peaceful days for this quiet village and its good people are over and will not be back soon. Or ever.
Posted on: Mon, 28 Jul 2014 22:02:56 +0000
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