När jag läser olika tidningar om Gaza (DN, DN, SVD, SVD, ABLD) så blir allt abstrakt, rökmoln vid horisonten, nummer på antalet döda, analyser på parternas taktik. Jag får aldrig en känsla för vad som händer inne i Gaza. Eva’s blogg från Gaza blir en sån kraftig kontrast. Hon jobbar på Röda halvmånens ambulanser inne i Gaza. Väldigt starkt, väldigt bra, ett måste. Utdrag från senaste inlägget:
”From the news office in central Gaza, I cannot believe the sounds of bombing, though they are targeting the area from which I’ve just come, as they did throughout the night. From here it sounds like…like a massive sledgehammer smashing this land, smashing to pieces. And from what I saw last night, and the wreckage today, it could’ve been. Thunk. Thunk. Thunk. The louder thuds rattle this building, as if being hit by a battering ram, though it is just the impact of the shockwaves from some kilometers away. Try to imagine how it is to actually be hundreds of metres from those blasts.
The hits are seconds apart, relentless. Somehow the drone’s buzz manages to be louder, its high pitch advertising that everything is still being surveyed, everything will still be bombed.
The 9th floor affords a view of tunnels of smoke everywhere, thick, dark, noxious, and concentrated especially in the Jabaliya region and further north and west, in Beit Lahia.
I smelt this smoke throughout the night and saw the haze this morning. The sky illuminated with explosions and Israeli flares. At one point, in the lightless bathroom, I looked out the window. Here, without voices to distract, it was the night and I: the bombing hundreds of metres away, the senseless killing. I lost my faith in humanity again.
What strikes me more now, more than the dismembered and burned corpses I saw two nights ago, more than the intensity of the missiles hitting all around us last night and the feeling that at any moment, Israeli special forces soldiers could enter shooting… was the panic on residents faces. Panic fleeing, panic trying to flag an ambulance for the wounded, the dead, panic even in the ambulance drivers and teams. They’ve seen a lot, many have done this work for a decade or more, but this is far, far worse than any have seen, or imagined, they tell me. In the morning light, as our ambulance tries to reach another wounded, I see new streams of women, children and men, carrying some few possessions. Two 8 or 9 year old children in one family clutch bags of bread.”
…Locals, including children around 10 years old, wave us on, give directions on how to avoid the army’s shelling. As we crawl further up the track, the driver gets agitated, though he is competent and experienced. Further on and no injured, no people, we turn back.
A man looking more panicked than I could imagine ran at the ambulance, waving at the hill to his left. “They’re up there, three dead,” he tells the driver. “There’re soldiers up there also.” There is no way to retrieve the bodies, and the man has to return to his heavily-shelled neighbourhood.
Alberto points to a school 20 metres down the road. “There’s a massive hole in the side of it; direct hit,” he says. He’d been in an ambulance earlier which had retrieved two injured young men, family members, who’d been delivered by cart and donkey. “I tried to help. The medics picked up one guy, and another medic started to pick up the second. I tried to grasp his shoulders, to help. My hand went inside him.” The medics explained the man’s shoulder was torn open. Alberto adds: “I could see his chest open, from the neck to his ribcage. I could see his lung. And two ribs. His right arm had completley fallen off.” The dead was 25 years old. The other, unknown age, “had an eye out” and severe head injuries.
It’s more than gruesome here.
…If only you could hear this, smell this, feel the vibrations, taste the terror.”
