Features » January 28, 2010 » Web Only

SLIDESHOW: Glimpses of Gaza

One year after “Operation Cast Lead” concluded, a look back at its aftermath.

By Matthew Cassel

From the roof of a mostly destroyed medical clinic for the Palestinian government in Gaza, tents are seen setup for Palestinians whose homes were destroyed by Israeli attacks in the Atatara neighborhood of Beit Lahiya, in the Gaza Strip. (All images by Matthew Cassel)

Twenty-two days of non-stop Israeli bombardment left the Gaza Strip devastated. Armed with F-16 fighter jets, Apache attack helicopters, battleships, unmanned aerial drones, tanks and ground troops, beginning in late December 2008 Israel destroyed homes, mosques, medical facilities, elementary schools, universities, farms, factories and businesses in Gaza.

Nearly 1,400 Palestinians were killed, and more than 5,000 injured—the overwhelming majority civilians. Palestinians, armed with smaller weaponry, including rockets—the ostensible reason behind Israel’s assault—killed 13 Israelis, 10 of whom were soldiers. The widely condemned attacks were part of Israel’s ongoing siege of the Gaza Strip that began in 2006 shortly after the Islamist Hamas movement won a majority of seats in parliamentary elections held in the Occupied Palestinian Territories. [Text continues below slideshow…]

Like nearly everyone in the Arab world during the attacks, in Beirut I watched Al-Jazeera’s around-the-clock coverage of the assault. Its reporters had been in Gaza prior to the attacks, and the Arabic-language satellite channel aired raw and uncut footage of the killing and destruction. The outrage across the Middle East was widespread, as hundreds of thousands of people took to the streets in protest. Most foreign media were prevented from entering the territory by Israel once the attacks started, and were forced to cover events from afar. Switching between Al-Jazeera and CNN International, it was difficult to believe both stations were covering the same events.

After the attacks ended in January, Israel and Egypt temporarily opened their borders with Gaza, allowing foreign journalists and small amounts of humanitarian aid to enter. I quickly flew from Beirut to Cairo and traveled by land through the Sinai desert until I reached the Gaza Strip. I was surprised to discover that most of the hundreds of journalists massed along the border waiting to enter Gaza did not enter once the attacks ended and they had the chance to do so. As one Palestinian journalist said to me in Gaza, “no one pays attention once the bombs stop falling.”

As I traveled across Gaza during the next eight days, I saw building after building in ruins. Because of the large artillery and bombs used during the attacks, Gaza felt more like the scene of a natural disaster than war. There were few structures partially damaged—in Gaza, it was all or nothing. Reconstruction since my visit has been very difficult, as the ongoing siege blocks cement from entering the territory. Some have begun using an age-old technique of building homes out of mud to compensate.

As with all my trips to Palestine, when I went to Gaza after the assault I was surprised by Palestinians’ fortitude. A population that was already mostly refugees when Israel was created in 1948 now survives on basic goods smuggled through underground tunnels on the border with Egypt. One year after the bombs stopped falling, still under a tight siege and occupation, 1.5 million Palestinians in Gaza continue to eke out a fragile existence.

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• Reader Comments

  Israel’s wholesale attack on Gaza was a horrible overreaction to the years of on & off attacks on civilian populations in southern Israel, which immediately followed Israel’s total withdrawal from the Gaza Strip in the summer of 2005. Not to mention this basic history is like writing and photographing the devastation of Germany and Japan without acknowledging that these two countries were the criminal aggressors in World War II.

  A negotiated peace agreement must end this conflict, but both Israel and the Palestinian Authority are splintered politically (the Palestinians more so than the Israelis) and led by parties that seem to prefer posturing to negotiating. And Hamas,  the authoritarian ruling party in Gaza, does not, in principle, even believe in a peace agreement with Israel, but there may be wiggle room in this regard. Let us hope so.

  Posted by rseliger on Jan 28, 2010 at 4:22 PM

  I live and I wonder if this war will end once. Those people were not so sick of war? I think yes.

  Posted by bogdan on Jan 29, 2010 at 5:22 AM

  I’m afraid that the non-Israeli Arabs of the Levant are in for a big wait. Hamas cannot be seen to be weak by backing down so the Israelis will never raise their blockade, nor will the Egyptians who fear fundamentalist Islam more than they fear the Israelis (remember Sadat). They equate Hamas with its mother organisation the Muslim Brotherhood.

  As for the Jordanians, they have had their own troubles with the Palestinians, the Hashemites (20% of the population) slaughtered tens of thousands of Palestinians (more than Israel in the total of its existence) during the Black September uprising of 1973, so they dread a free Palestinian state too.

  The rest of the Arab states are happy to have the Palestinians in a state of despondency as it enables them to distract their own populations from their kleptocratic despotism. They claim that the goal of freeing their Arab brothers from bondage is much more important than political reform. This enables them to export their more radical citizens and has the rest watch this living soap opera on al-Jazeera.

  The Europeans may wring their hands about the Palestinians but, in reality, the fate of a couple of million non-Europeans means nothing to them as long as the oil flows. The last time they pressured Israel was 1973 during the OPEC oil boycott that ended the Yom Kippur war.

  The Americans want a solution to this on the grounds that they’re sick of being portrayed as “bad guys” in the Arab world but they sure as hell aren’t going to abandon the only democracy in the region to the tender mercies of Hamas, Hizb’Allah and Ahmadinejad.

  In short, no-one really cares about the Palestinians except the Palestinians, and they are effectively powerless. Their occasional outbursts of rage (first and second Intifada and rocket attacks on Israel) merely provoke the Israelis. What they really need is a leader who can survive telling them that they will never return to their “homeland” and, simultaneously, a moderate Israeli government. Good luck with that.

  The wild card is Iran. God help us all if they get nukes.

  Sorry for the history lesson (and Australian spellings) but please don’t let this post turn into another Arab-version vs Jewish-version catfight. It gets boring really quickly.

  Posted by Todd Hill on Jan 29, 2010 at 6:14 AM

  Setting aside the immorality/illegality of collective punishment, or the motives behind blaming the victims of war crimes rather than its perpetrators, rseliger’s “basic history” of the events leading up these crimes is simply false, and counterproductive to achieving the “negotiated peace agreement” he claims to seek.  See the Huffington Post, article entitled ‘Israel Rejected Hamas Cease-Fire Offer in December.”  The article states:

  “...The ceasefire agreement that went into effect Jun. 19, 2008 required that Israel lift the virtual siege of Gaza which Israel had imposed after the June 2007 Hamas takeover.  Although the terms of the agreement were not made public at the time, they were included in a report published this week by the International Crisis Group (ICG), which obtained a copy of the understanding last June.

  In addition to a halt in all military actions by both sides, the agreement called on Israel to increase the level of goods entering Gaza by 30 percent over the pre-lull period within 72 hours and to open all border crossings and “allow the transfer of all goods that were banned and restricted to go into Gaza” within 13 days after the beginning of the ceasefire.

  Nevertheless, Israeli officials freely acknowledged in interviews with ICG last June that they had no intention of opening the border crossings fully, even though they anticipated that this would be the source of serious conflict with Hamas…

  Despite Israel’s refusal to end the siege, Hamas brought rocket and mortar fire from Gaza to a virtual halt last summer and fall, as revealed by a report by the Intelligence and Terrorism Information Center (ITIC) in Tel Aviv last month.  ITIC is part of the Israel Intelligence Heritage & Commemoration Centre (IICC), an NGO which is close to the Israeli intelligence community.

  In the first days after the ceasefire took effect, Islamic Jihad fired nine rockets and a few mortar rounds in retaliation for Israeli assassinations of their members in the West Bank.  In August another eight rockets were fired by various groups, according to IDF data cited in the report.  But it shows that only one rocket was launched from Gaza in September and one in October.

  The report recalls that Hamas “tried to enforce the terms of the arrangement” on other Palestinian groups, taking “a number of steps against networks which violated the arrangement,” including short-term detention and confiscating their weapons. It even found that Hamas had sought support in Gazan public opinion for its policy of maintaining the ceasefire.

  On Nov. 4—just when the ceasefire was most effective—the IDF carried out an attack against a house in Gaza in which six members of Hamas’s military wing were killed, including two commanders, and several more were wounded…

  After that Israeli attack, the ceasefire completely fell apart, as Hamas began openly firing rockets into Israel, the IDF continued to carry out military operations inside Gaza, and the border crossings were “closed most of the time,” according to the ITIC account…”

  Here is the link to the full article:

  http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/01/09/israel-rejected-hamas-cea_n_156639.h html?page=2&show_comment_id=19558888#comment_19558888

  And rseliger’s comparison of the actions of Palestinians in Gaza to those of WWII Germany and Japan is likely the result of an over-consumption of the Zionist narrative that insists that the conflict must be portrayed in neutral symmetrical terms, that the Zionists are not the aggressors in Palestine, and that any resistance to such aggression must simply be irrational justifying even the commission of war crimes.  His post demonstrates how over-indulgence of this narrative can hinder identification of the true causes of the conflict, and in its worst manifestations, justify even the unthinkable.  Pointing out the errors of this narrative, in my opinion, is the first best step towards peace.

  Posted by Imran on Jan 29, 2010 at 10:06 PM

  Imran, quoting someone else’s article doesn’t make it so.

  If you wish to introduce morals into politics, you enter dangerous territory. For example, one could easily state that the Jewish people lived in Israel long before the Arabs. The counter-argument, that the Arabs had been there so long that this claim was null introduces the might-is-right argument - we took it fair and square. This would then enable the Israelis to make the same claim against the Levant Arabs.

  Please be careful confusing relative “right and wrong” with absolute “facts”.

  Posted by Todd Hill on Jan 30, 2010 at 2:41 AM

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