Gaza: Broken lives

20 January 2009

Oxfam's Mohammed Ali continues to report from his home in Gaza City during the aftermath of the Israeli military offensive.

My children haven't left our home for three weeks. My sister will not leave her house; she is still scared that something terrible might happen if she steps out of her front door. Since the ceasefire started, she has encouraged her children to return to sleeping in their beds. She awoke this morning to find her kids curled together in the centre of the living room, like they had been doing for the last three weeks. It will take them weeks, months if not years for their wounds caused by this conflict to heal.

I still have not heard from all of my friends, I do not know if they are dead or alive.

I went outside today for the longest time since Israel's offensive on Gaza began. There were many people on the streets all moving cautiously. There is little food available in the market and the price has reached a level that is unaffordable for most Gazans. Now that banks have finally opened, queues of people line the streets eagerly awaiting cash so that they pay back the debts they have accumulated to trusting shop owners.

Tens of thousands of the homeless are staying in United Nations schools where I spent my day; I was there to support Oxfam's delivery of water. We are reaching up to 60,000 people daily in the Gaza Strip, trucking water to those who need it the most.

Most of the people I spoke with had returned to find their destroyed homes buried with their possessions and memories under a pile of rubble - homes, which took them years of hard work to build. Who will compensate these people? What about those who have lost family members? A pay cheque will not bring back the dead.

The last three weeks of horror seem to have etched their lines into people's faces; the terror inflicted on them still remains in their blurred eyes.

I am exhausted and depressed, we all are. We are angry too. As civilians we feel as though we have been collectively punished for a crime we did not commit. More than 1,300 Palestinians were killed, nearly a third of them children; these figures are likely increase as rescue workers retrieve more bodies. There are 5,400 injured people, countless homeless, disabled, and traumatised...what did we do to deserve this?

I was thinking today that most European prisoners have more than we do in Gaza; they have three meals a day, constant electricity, clean water, TV sets ... they may not have their freedom but this is their punishment for their crimes. I ask, what crimes have we as civilians committed to be brutally punished like this?

We need time to mourn our dead, to stand up and go on. We need world leaders who could have stopped this to stand up and help us to live a dignified life. We need all crossings to open so that humanitarian support can reach people who are in dire need of help, so that food, construction material and people can get in.

For our futures, we do not ask to go to the moon or to Hawaii, we simply ask to be able to go to the market and find affordable food, to have clean water to drink, to live in safety and not to have to depend on humanitarian aid to survive. We want to be able to leave our country without weeks of humiliation only to be denied at the end of it the freedom to leave and return- we are asking for our basic human rights.