War is a Force That Gives Us Meaning - Chris Hedges [40]
“This is what I worked so hard to prevent,” he said, his voice hoarse and low. “I took Ali with me every day to my restaurant at 6:00 in the morning on al-Bahar Street. I made him promise he would not go to the dunes to throw rocks. Yesterday he asked to go home at 3:00. He said he had to study for the makeup sessions they are holding for all the school closings this year. A half-hour after he left, people came running to tell me he was shot in the leg. I ran through the streets to the hospital. They would not let me in. They said he would be discharged soon. They told me he was OK. I forced my way inside and saw him lying in the corridor dead with a bullet hole in his heart. I fainted.”
Several small boys stood glumly at the edge of the tent. They said they had called to Ali as he walked home to join them on the dunes.
“We all threw rocks,” said ten-year-old Ahmed Moharb. “Over the loudspeaker the soldier told us to come to the fence to get chocolate and money. Then they cursed us. Then they fired a grenade. We started to run. They shot Ali in the back. I won’t go again. I am afraid.”
On the Sunday afternoon I witnessed, the Israelis shot four boys or young men, one of whom would die from his wounds the next day.
The residents in the camp, who had time to study the taunting, insisted that the Arabic accent over the loudspeakers was Lebanese. They believed that mercenaries from the South Lebanese Army, once a Christian proxy army for Israel and long a bitter foe of the Palestinians, had been integrated into the Israeli force. The word in Palestinian Arabic for “shoot”—ahousak—was not used over the loudspeakers; in its place I heard the Lebanese word in Arabic—atoohak. And the camp residents said they heard Lebanese music coming from the guard posts.
Ali’s small body was loaded onto the back of a truck. A cadre of young men, some bearded and in robes, others dressed in black and wearing wraparound sunglasses, marched with automatic weapons pointed in the air in three rows behind the bier. They fired rounds in the air. The crowd of several hundred, egged on by the speakers mounted on the truck, chanted Islamic and anti-Israeli slogans.
“Mothers of Jews!” they shouted. “We will make you weep like Palestinian mothers.”
The funerals had added another dimension to the religious life of the camp, one that increased the reach of the Islamic militants. The truck, with a generator in the back and stacks of huge loudspeakers on the cab, lumbered ahead of the procession. It blasted out verses from the Koran, calls to die, and promises of glory for martyrs. Swarms of young boys ran along behind. The crowd passed the graphic murals and graffiti on the walls. One showed an Israeli bus, marked by a Star of David, on fire and smashed from an explosion. “Don’t be merciful to those inside” read the slogan underneath. “Blow it up! Hit it!” It was signed “Hamas.”
There was a frightening symbiotic relationship between the Israeli soldiers taunting children on the dunes and the Islamic militants who promoted martyrdom. It spun Gaza into an ever faster and more passionate dance with death.
Neamon Mohammed Faid, twenty, pulled up his shirt when I entered his hospital room in Nasser Hospital to reveal a flesh-colored bandage wrapped mummy-like around his torso. He had been shot below the heart. The bullet had spun out of his body in his lower back. Part of his kidney had been removed, along with much of his stomach and his spleen. His father and mother hovered over him.
“Yes, it was on the dunes,” he said wearily. “The Jews were saying, ‘Your mother is a bitch! Fuck your mother!’ And then they would say, ‘Come! Come!’”
He was with four others pitching stones at the jeep when the soldiers opened fire. He had been told moments before by the Palestinian police, who watched the daily shootings with resignation, to leave.
In Khan Younis’s second hospital, al-Amal, thirteen-year-old Fahdi Abu Ammouna lay on a bed, his feet propped up on a pillow. Patches of dried blood covered