Israel Gave This Gaza Family a Five-minute Warning. Then It Bombed Its Home

Nell'ultimo round di bombardamenti a Gaza, lo scorso maggio, lo stato-canaglia israeliano ha completamente distrutto circa 100 edifici, lasciando senza un tetto 327 palestinesi, tra i quali 65 bambini di età inferiore ai 5 anni. Hamis Ziada era il proprietario di uno degli appartamenti distrutti, a cui israele ha lasciato solo cinque minuti di tempo per scappare prima che iniziasse il bombardamento. La sua unica colpa, e quella degli altri abitanti del palazzo, è stata quella di possedere un'abitazione nello stesso edificio in cui vi era la sede di un ufficio della Jihad islamica. E poi ci si chiede perchè, nel mondo, israele attiri così poche simpatie...

Israel Gave This Gaza Family a Five-minute Warning. Then It Bombed Its Home

'How can the Israelis remain silent? In Gaza there are people with no arms or legs, there’s not a house without someone dead,' says Hamis Ziada, who lost everything in an Israeli air force attack
By Gideon Levy Jun 06, 2019

At 4:40 P.M. on Sunday, May 5, the ringing of a cell phone woke Hamis Ziada from his nap. It was an unidentified number. A voice on the other end said, “Am I speaking with Hamis Ziada? You’re talking to the Israeli Shin Bet. There’s a school opposite your house. Are there people in it at this time of the day?” Ziada replied that there was no one in the school in the late afternoon on that particular day, the first day of the Ramadan fast, and in any case school had been canceled because of the Israeli bombing raids. The security service agent continued, “Are you sure there are no women and children in the school? Are you positive there’s no one?” And then, “I’m giving you five minutes to tell your family and everyone in the residence you live in to go outside. We have to blow up the building in another five minutes.”

Dumbstruck, Ziada tried to protest. He explained to the mysterious caller that it was impossible to evacuate a seven-story building – where 15 families, including some with children and elderly people, lived – within five minutes. The Shin Bet man replied: “That’s of no interest to me. I already told you: You have five minutes.”

Thus began the most nightmarish five minutes in the life of Hamis Ziada, 54. After they ended, his home was destroyed, his world fell apart, and his life was ruined. In the month since then, he has lived in a lean-to, together with his two wives and 12 children, the youngest of whom is 4.

The Israel Air Force attack left a heap of rubble; the apartment building imploded in seconds, raising a thick dark cloud of dust. It was the last day of the most recent round of fighting in the Gaza Strip and in the Israeli communities around it. As usual, the Israel Defense Forces wanted to end it with the resounding crescendo of the toppling of a multistory residence.

Ziada wasn’t able to save a thing – neither his belongings nor his apartment, which he was only able to purchase only after working for years as an electrician in the garage of the Egged bus company in Holon. Nothing survived, not so much as a shirt.

Ziada, who now does annual car inspections for the Palestinian Authority, dredges up the Hebrew he learned in Holon years ago. He used to read bus repair manuals in Hebrew, he says. He worked for Egged from 1987 until 1993 – those were good times, he says.

His second wife, Donya Daher, 42, joined the extended Skype conversation I had with Ziada last week. His first wife, Fat’hiya, who’s 45 and a relative of senior Palestinian negotiator Saeb Erekat, also lives with him along with their children. “Everyone lives in the building that the planes finished off,” he tells me.

Their apartment, which Ziada bought 10 years ago, was in a building in Gaza’s Tel al-Halwa neighborhood. He finished paying off the mortgage two years ago. During the past three years he’s earned only 1,000 shekels (about $280) a month, because the salaries of PA employees in the Strip have been cut in half. As the son of refugees who had to leave Jaffa in 1948, he receives food aid from UNRWA, the United Nations refugee agency.

Ziada’s first-floor apartment had five rooms. The office of Islamic Jihad’s welfare agency was on the floor above it – which is why the air force demolished the entire building. Every morning between 9 A.M. and noon, he says, needy families would come to the office to receive assistance. For the rest of the day the office was empty; no other activity took place there. There was no one there when the building was bombed, either. All the other apartments in the building were private residences.

The first time Ziada’s building was damaged was five years ago, in Operation Protective Edge, when a drone fired a warning missile at it; as the occupants rushed out, an Israeli helicopter sprayed it with machine-gun fire. Two or three days later, the occupants returned home. It took until a year ago to finish repairing the damage. But on May 5 of this year, their luck ran out. “Until about 4:30 that afternoon everything was fine,” says Ziada. “And then it was all over.”

In the morning he had gone shopping with Daher. When they returned at 3:30 P.M., he went to sleep. After the Shin Bet called to warn about the impending strike, Ziada shouted to his wives and children to go downstairs fast. His son Amar, 24, rushed to the top floor of the building, making his way down after knocking on the door of every apartment and shouting to everyone to vacate the premises immediately.

Donya Daher wrings her hands as her husband continues to describe the horrors of the evacuation.

Ziada: “Everyone in my home started to shout and cry, and in the middle of it all I was on the stairs yelling at everyone to leave, that in another five minutes they’re going to bomb the building. One woman, who’s 30, became stiff as a board and couldn’t budge, out of fear. My son put her on his back and carried her all the way downstairs. Women who need to cover their heads before leaving the house went outside without a head covering. We were barefoot; none of us managed to find our shoes.

“Old people and children ran around and cried – that’s what happened in the five minutes we were given by the Israeli authorities. There was hysteria. We’re still in hysteria. During those five minutes, we became hysterical. Up until this very moment, a month later, all the people who were in the building are living with the fear of what happened to us during those five minutes. Do you know what it’s like to evacuate a multistory building in five minutes?

“Finally, I went downstairs, too,” Ziada continues. “We had Amar’s wedding a month before the bombing, so I took with me the new suit I had bought. Other than that, I didn’t manage to take anything. Neither documents nor money. Nothing. The children didn’t take anything, either. Do you know what they did to us in those five minutes? Created madness in the brain. Up until this moment, as I’m speaking with you, I’m afraid.

“I worked in Israel for many years to buy that home. On the days of the work strikes during the first intifada, I walked to the Erez checkpoint so I wouldn’t lose a day of work. I left home at 3 A.M. and got back at 6 in the evening. I burned up years of my life in Israel so I could buy that apartment. And now I have lost not only my home, I’ve lost my life. I’ve lost my daughters’ lives. How will I buy another house at my age? I’m naked.

“The pants and shirt I’m wearing I got from other people. Someone gave me underwear. Someone gave me shoes. I’m like nothing. And what they did to my mind, to the minds of my wives, my children. The children wake up in the middle of the night and say, ‘We want to go back home. Back to our books.’ And I say, ‘Where do you think we will go? We have no home.’

“Your government and your army – how can they do something like that? Don’t they know we are civilians? Don’t they know? I’m not just talking about myself. There are people who didn’t finish paying off their mortgage. If we’d been bombed and had stayed inside the building, it would have been easier for us than those five minutes. It would be more convenient if we had died.”

His voice breaks. The Skype connection also breaks off for a few minutes. Our conversation was made possible thanks to the devoted work of Gaza Strip field researchers Olfat al-Kurd and Khaled al-Azayzeh, from the Israel human rights organization B’Tselem. They had heard about the story and arranged for us to speak, since we Israeli journalists are not allowed into the Strip.

Once the building’s residents were on the street, they all ran as far and as fast as they could from the building. The Shin Bet agent called again, to ascertain that the building was empty. The people stood down the street, appalled, and watched as their homes were bombed by pilots of the “moral” Israeli air force. Neighbors gathered with them. “We watched as our house was bombed. As it came down. We all waited to see how the planes fired missiles at the building. How it came down.”

A drone fired three or four warning missiles at the roof – a tactic called “roof knocking” – and then, at 5 P.M. precisely, on the fifth day of the fifth month, the warplane fired the missile that caused the building to collapse instantly. The noise was earsplitting. Clouds of smoke and dust columned into the air and lingered there for a long time. The former occupants scattered in every direction, unable to bear the scene of destruction, spending their first homeless night with neighbors and relatives. The Ziada family spent the night in a shack near the home of relatives. People donated mattresses, clothing, blankets.

“It was very, very hard for us,” Ziada explains. “We slept like dogs, like animals. I couldn’t fall asleep: The next day was [still] Ramadan, I had to fast and I needed to live with this day. We drank tea. We drank water. Neighbors brought us halvah and we got through the night.” They stayed in the lean-to for a month. “We had nowhere to go. We were like beggars. We begged people to help us. One person brought us pita, another one brought rice.”

It was only this week that the family succeeded in renting a three-room apartment, for $200 a month. The Palestinian Employment Ministry will help to pay the rent for six months. What happens after that? Ziada has no idea. No one has spoken to him, neither from the PA or from Hamas: “They didn’t even come to offer their condolences. That makes me angry. At least let them say a few nice words. No one came to us.”

The morning after, occupants of the building came back to see the devastation. People tried to salvage a blanket or a shirt, to poke through the rubble to find a document or a certificate, maybe a photograph, amid the piles of stones and mounds of dirt and dust. They found only shreds of blankets and tatters of clothing. Nothing was left of the furniture or the utensils. The destruction was total.

The best air force in the world.

The IDF Spokesperson’s Unit this week issued the following statement to Haaretz: “The building in question is one that had been under the control of Hamas since it was erected in 2010, and was used for the digging of an important network of tunnels beneath it. Hamas used the building for military purposes in clear exploitation of the local population living within and around it as a means for hiding and protecting the terror infrastructure under its authority.

“It must be stressed that before the attack, precautionary evacuation measures were taken in the area in order to prevent harm to uninvolved individuals as much as possible. (This was done several hours before the attack and not five minutes beforehand, as is claimed in the article.)

“The IDF plans its attacks in a way that will ensure operational achievements while minimizing harm to citizens and their property.”

According to UN data, about 100 buildings, containing a total of 33 residential units, were completely destroyed by Israeli bombing in the recent round in Gaza. Fifty-two families, 327 individuals, including 65 infants and toddlers under the age of 5, were left homeless. Hundreds of other apartments and buildings sustained damage.

The junk dealers started to show up at the site with their mule-drawn carts to try and pull out metals and other construction materials from the wreckage. This week, the rubble was still there, where the apartment building stood until a month ago.

What does he miss most? “The photos,” says Ziada. “The photos of my father, of my mother, of my wife and of the children. Everything that reminds me of the days that are gone. My heart is burned. Life for us is burned. They burned everything that was beautiful in our life. Like paper they burned it.

“How can the Israeli people be silent about what happened? We are the closest peoples to one another. We worked together, ate together, slept together, lived together. You used to come to our weddings. How can the Israeli people be silent when it sees what is happening to us? You used all the missiles in the world against us, including some that are banned. Where is the Israeli people when it sees its government doing this? In Gaza there are people with no arms, no legs; there isn’t a home without someone dead. How can you, a democracy, behave like that?

“I only hope this gets to the government, that this article will reach Netanyahu and the Israeli people. We’ve been left with nothing. People are wandering around here with diseases and can’t leave; in some cases their children have died. Are you pleased about that? Are you pleased at what you are doing to us? We are not animals. We are human beings, just like you are human beings. Don’t you want us to live? Do you want us to die? You’re toppling buildings on our heads? Leave us alone to live. The same way you live – we want to live.

“We are all cripples in Gaza. You close the sky to us, close the sea to us, close the land. What do you want from us? You are making us hate all Israelis,” Ziada says. “We don’t want that. Open Gaza and let us live, and maybe we’ll forget what you did to us.”

Gideon Levy

(Source)

Thanks McDonald’s for Reminding Israel There Is a Green Line, and Even a Red Line

By refusing to open branches in the settlements, McDonald’s took a step very few companies are willing to take, but that all companies should have taken long ago

Gideon Levy - 6.6.2019

McDonald’s presents: a model hamburger. It doesn’t appear on the menu and the company obscures its ingredients, but it’s clearly the flagship item – a boycott of the settlements. There are no Big Macs in Ariel and there will be no McRoyales in Efrat.

The right is now demanding that this traitorous company be barred from opening a branch at Ben-Gurion Airport. A group called the Disabled Veterans’ Forum for Israel’s Security posted warning signs this week at the entrance to the company’s restaurants in Tel Aviv, modeled after the warning signs that tell Israelis not to enter the Palestinian Authority. It terms the McDonald’s boycott of the settlements “a disgraceful decision” and is urging a boycott of the company.

That’s what happens to a hamburger that seeks to raise its head and do more than just sell an extra-large portion, that chooses to heed its conscience and not just be a hamburger.

McDonald’s is a senior partner in the crimes of the meat industry and the holocaust of animals. It’s a symbol of globalization and capitalism. Its products are harmful to people’s health and the environment, and it doesn’t let its workers unionize.

Nevertheless, we must now applaud its policy, which dates back to 2013, when its Israeli franchisee, Omri Padan, opposed opening a branch in Ariel. People of morality must therefore contemptuously cross through the warning signs that the right has posted at the chain’s branches and demonstratively buy a green salad with corn sticks as an act of support for the company’s courage and determination. It must not suffer because it took a step very few companies are willing to take, but that all companies should have taken long ago.

The company’s official explanation may seem evasive, but it goes to the heart of the matter: “Alonyal [the franchisee] never had a license to open branches in the West Bank.” Boom. There is a Green Line. There’s even a red line.

It’s true this separation is artificial, and it’s been dead for a long time already. It’s ridiculous to boycott the settlement of Itamar but not Tel Aviv, which funds it, guards it and legalizes its crimes.

Nevertheless, McDonald’s has issued a resounding statement: The West Bank and Gaza aren’t here. It has said yes to Israel, no to the occupation, which counts for more than 1,000 protest signs at a demonstration. The franchisee never had a license in a piece of land to which Israel also never had a license.

Thomas Friedman once wrote that there will never be a war between two countries which both have McDonald’s branches – a thesis that was destroyed by the Second Lebanon War of 2006. But this company is now breaking boundaries, and above all setting boundaries.

Hamburger joints aren’t moral leaders. McDonald’s merely said what should have been self-evident to every commercial company: The franchisee for Israel isn’t necessarily the franchisee for the colonies of the occupation. Many Israeli and international companies ought to follow in its footsteps. Just as every law-abiding company has an obligation not to traffic in stolen property, so too it must not operate on stolen land.

Decent companies don’t operate in crime-ridden areas. They don’t invest, they don’t buy, they don’t rent and they don’t sell. It’s dangerous there, and illegal.

And there’s no other way to define the occupied territories and the settlements built there in violation of international law except as crime zones. Can a law-abiding company set up a legitimate business in Ofra, a settlement in which more than half the houses are built on privately owned land that was stolen by force from its legal owners? This bears no connection to ideology, or even morality, but only to operating within the law.

Sad experience shows that in the end, the Jewish and Israeli lobbies will extort a victory. They forced Airbnb to capitulate, and they may also defeat McDonald’s.

But until the McDonald’s Drive-Thru opens in Ma’aleh Mikhmash – and we hope it never will – we can suggest that the settlers eat at McDonald’s inside Israel, or set up an alternative fast-food chain: McDavid’s. In the 1980s, when McDonald’s hadn’t yet come to Israel, a chain by that name operated here. It got sued by the American company over the misleading similarity of its name. The food tasted horrible, and the chain closed, leaving ruin behind it, and only one branch.

Gideon Levy

(Source) 

Democracy for Every Israeli and Palestinian. It’s Not Hard

Israel is stuck in neutral. Everything is at a standstill. So it’s time to fantasize, to dream about a general election, but a different kind, a dream about democracy. It won’t happen soon, but one day it will. Israel will have to become a democracy because it doesn’t have the right to exist otherwise.

Without real elections, it’s not a democracy. What it imagines as democratic is an electoral trick. A fundamental rule in democracies is the universal right to vote. One person, one vote. Equality. There’s no democracy without that. There’s no such thing as democracy in installments for one ethnic group or one geographic area.

If the United States decided to deprive the southern states of the right to vote, it would cease being democratic. If Germany did the same against the country’s Jews, it would again be declared a threat to humanity.

Elections in Israel aren’t general elections and so they’re not democratic. The country can continue to masquerade as the only democracy in the Middle East. A new law letting the Knesset override Supreme Court decisions could represent the final declaration of the end of Israeli democracy. The end of the masquerade.

If adjoining towns are distinguished by their right to vote in elections that determine the fate of both, that’s not democracy. If the West Bank settlement of Itamar goes to the polls, but not the West Bank Palestinian city of Nablus, that’s not democracy. If the Jews of the West Bank town of Hebron vote in elections but the Palestinian residents of Hebron don’t, that’s apartheid. It’s that simple and that’s how things are.

As long as Israel uses the cover that the situation in the West Bank is temporary, it’s tolerable. But the ruse is up. No significant political camp in Israel will ever intend to end the occupation, whether on the Zionist right, left or center. Nobody.

As a result, Israel is defining itself as undemocratic. And when the world understands that, it will come at a price. And when Israel understands it, the country will ask itself if it’s willing to pay that price.

Only one path remains: democracy for everyone, for everyone living under Israeli rule. It’s astounding that this even needs to be stated. And even more astounding is that it’s considered subversive. The redress will come in a general election. Just imagine.

Imagine an election for a constituent assembly for the second time in the country’s history. Imagine starting over, that the September 17 election were declared Israel’s last imitation election. It would be followed by a real election with the participation of everyone living in the country, whose fates are determined by government ministries and the army in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv.

An election commission representing both peoples would set the election rules and time frame. Fatah and Kahol Lavan, Hamas and Likud, Islamic Jihad and United Torah Judaism, the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine and Habayit Hayehudi. Any slate could run as long as it disarmed its military wing. And all the country’s residents would be eligible to vote and run for office.

The constituent assembly would draft a constitution guaranteeing equality and providing a basis for forming the government. The best people would win. Fanatics would be isolated and weakened. The first law passed by the new country would be an immigration law that would guarantee equality to Jews and Palestinians.

And before raising the prospect of a bloodbath, it should be said that resistance to this would be much more intense in the Jewish camp than among the Palestinians. But Israelis who have been frightened and brainwashed will be astounded to witness how the Palestinians conduct themselves when they’re finally treated as equals and are free for the first time in their history.

The country’s president would be Palestinian and the prime minister Jewish, or vice versa. The defense minister would be from the Deheisheh refugee camp and the foreign minister from West Jerusalem, or vice versa. West Bank settlements would remain in place and the country’s borders would be recognized around the world. Not a single country would oppose the just state arising from the bloody past, and it would be awash in financial assistance, from Washington to Riyadh.

That dream from one clear night will come true at some point because there is no genuine alternative. And a suggested date to begin? January 25, 2020, exactly 71 years after the first election to a constituent assembly. Oops, that comes out on a Saturday. That’s a problem.

Gideon Levy

(Source)