EPF PIN members and long-time workers with Sabeel Maurine and Bob Tobin, recently spent a day in Gaza.  Here is their report.

Having read countless reports and viewed endless photos and YouTube videos, we thought we were prepared for what we would see on our visit to Gaza in early December 2014. But the reality was overwhelming. No video can capture the scope of the destruction, block upon block upon block of demolished apartment buildings, bullet sprayed shops and homes, sewage filled ponds in flooded streets, children picking their way over rubble, men with donkey carts searching among the debris for reusable stones. Whatever direction we looked, rubble and more rubble.

We arrived on a sunny Sunday afternoon, days after Gaza had been flooded by torrential rains, and were met by Suhaila Tarazi, Director of Al Ahli Arab (Anglican) Hospital. She and Ahmed, the hospital van driver, took us on a “tour” of northern Gaza, starting with the devastated industrial area of Beit Hanoun, a village near the checkpoint which had long since lost its citrus groves to an Israeli-created “no man’s land” and had struggled to survive through creative efforts to bring light industry to the area, now all wiped out, adding thousands to the pre-war unemployment rate of more 50%. On to what had been a family park and small zoo, where the playground and family center stood in ruins; while some of the zoo animals had been saved, the beloved lion had been killed, perhaps as a result of Israel’s need to “defend itself.”

Thinking we had seen the worst, we were knocked flat by Shujiya, a village on the edge of old Gaza City. This had been a neighborhood of native Gazans, those who are not part of the 2/3’s of Gaza residents who are refugees from 1948. Suhaila, a native Gazan, was in tears as she described families of the area she had known since childhood.   The lovely tiles strewn about testified to the quality of the homes that had been obliterated, and we were shocked to see people living among the debris – blankets over gaping holes attesting to habitation. We stopped to talk with man, wife, and small boy living in a sort of cave created by the fallen four floors of their apartment building. “Aren’t you worried the building will collapse on you?” Suhaila asked. “We have nowhere else to go and no money,” the man replied. We interrupted his lunch, the main meal of the day – two small slices of bread spread with a pepper jelly and bits of canned meat, the food distributed by UNRWA to the 80% of Gazans dependent on international aid for survival . His wife and son were not eating.

As we later learned from the pediatrician at Al Ahli, children under 18 make up 54% of the population of Gaza, and 70% of all children in Gaza are anemic and malnourished, some 20 – 25% developmentally delayed as a result. Bread soaked in tea in a staple meal for the smallest of children and even nursing babies cannot get adequate nutrition from malnourished mothers. And this does not take into account the almost universal post-traumatic stress disorder suffered by children who have experienced three devastating wars in the past 6 years. Even those able to go to university have nothing to look forward to, as there is work for fewer than 25% of these fortunate ones. Those who can, leave Gaza, and remain isolated from their families, for to try to return is to risk ongoing imprisonment.

Suhaila Tarazi is a wise and compassionate woman, and she insisted that we move on to what she called “my Gaza,” the Gaza in which she had grown up, the Gaza that might be if it were not a giant prison. We drove to the seaport as sunset approached to view the fishing boats returning, not from the 6 mile limit allowed by the recent peace agreement at the end of “Operation Protective Edge” but from the much more restricted area still imposed by Israel. It was a serene sight, reminding us of our local harbor in Maine – fisherman tending their boats, people strolling along the Hamas-built waterfront pavilion, some sitting on benches, a few kids still running into the waves. And it offered a view of the towering apartment buildings in downtown Gaza City.

Then the reality – people lived in deep fear that those tall buildings would be bombed, killing far more than the 2100+ who actually died, as some buildings hold 20 or more apartments. “What about the ‘warnings’ that Israel claims to have issued?” we asked. Some did receive warnings, but what good is a 10 minute warning to a family on the 4^th or 8^th or 12^th floor when there are children, old and sick people who cannot move quickly? They simply died in the buildings that were hit or were lucky to live in those not hit. Samira, Suhaila’s assistant, told us about her aunt, who had packed a small suitcase with valuable papers and a few vital items in case she had to evacuate. The “warning” came and in panic, she fled in her nightgown, leaving behind the suitcase and her coat. Fortunately, her apartment block survived, but many people were not so fortunate.

On and on this goes – we drove next to the Beach Camp, one of the densest refugee camps in the world with buildings separated by walkways where clothes hang to dry from windows and people in opposite buildings can reach out and touch one another. Ismail Haniya still lives there, and we stopped to talk to his “guard,” a couple of Hamas soldiers, who pointed out that his house had been damaged but not destroyed, though rumor was that he himself had been slightly injured. Channels had been cut from the camp to the beach to relieve the flooding and raw sewage, which flows directly into the sea. We then drove past a mosque that had been bombed to splinters, the only building hit in the area, so obviously one of the 73 mosques targeted for destruction.

Our day ended with a lovely dinner in a first rate restaurant and a night in a pleasant hotel, a stark contrast to what we had experienced all afternoon, mindful that the devastation we experienced was not limited to the small part of Gaza we visited but extended to the southernmost tip.   We were uneasy to be enjoying a sumptuous meal and a clean bed when some 250,000 have lost their homes and live in overcrowded shelters or hovels in the rubble. But our unease was mitigated by the conversation with Suhaila, Samira, and Dr. Maher, chief of staff at Ahli, and his wife. It became clear that these people who have suffered so much for so long and who work literally 18 hours a day on behalf of the neediest of the population felt compelled to share with us not only the stories of their own fears during the assault and the horrors they experience, but also their determination to live, to show us and remind themselves that life can be a pleasure, that people can gather for good food and good talk, tell stories and laugh, and to assert their faith that someday all Gazans will have that freedom and that opportunity.

The next day, we had an extended visit to Al Ahli to see the ongoing miraculously good work that small hospital does. Dr. Maher recounted the trauma of the 51 day assault – surgeons operating round the clock, efforts to transfer the most severe cases to larger hospitals, countless shrapnel and burn victims, and the horrifying puzzle of what new weapon the Israelis were testing in this war, not the white phosphorous of the previous attack, but something that caused the internal organs to become toxic after shrapnel had been surgically removed and the organs cleansed and re-sected, forcing the surgeons to repeat procedures two or three times to stop the infections if they were able to do so. We visited the pediatric unit, where mothers receive help with nutrition while their children receive medical care, the burn unit where a wide-eyed little boy stood waist deep in a hydrotherapy tub, soothing his badly burned legs. We talked with a young man receiving physical therapy for a shrapnel-shattered arm after 2 of his family were killed and 12 injured, and we visited a beautiful new diagnostic center recently built with funds from USAID funneled through ANERA because only American institutions can receive such funding.

The building proved to be the metaphor for our entire visit: we entered the state of the art structure with lead proofed rooms for high tech diagnostic tools only to find it completely empty! There is simply no money for the bone density scan, the CT scan, the MRI, the laboratory equipment, the mammography machines that are so desperately needed.   In fact, Ahli struggles just to pay the fuel bill to keep the generator working for the many hours a day when there is no electricity and to buy, when available, the urgently needed medical supplies. But it is there, and someday it will be a wonderful resource for this stricken community.

The building is a tribute to the faith and hope of the Ahli staff and its resourceful leadership even though it is an empty shell today. We were reminded of the Palestinian flags flying proudly on every collapsed building we saw; the fisherman tending their boats despite the fact that the risk their lives when they put to sea, likely to be confronted by an Israeli patrol; the palpable sense everywhere that the people of Gaza, despite the ongoing siege and the repeated assaults are determined to live. Some resist their oppression violently, unsurprising in the face of their reality, and some resist non-violently by refusing to lose hope in the future, as do the staff of Al Ahli. It is clear that the world has not responded to their cry for justice, but it is also clear that the people of Gaza, are “afflicted in every way, but are not crushed.” ( 2 Cor. 4:3)