Sami Abdel-Shafi:
… it is hard to take seriously Israel’s claims that it is not deliberately targeting civilians. I am still alive, but I feel I am losing hope. How can we rebuild the Gaza Strip once this all ends when we fear even to raise ours heads?
Our business and commerce had already been destroyed by the long blockade. Now, Gaza’s public sector and civil institutions, as well as a hospital and several clinics and schools, have been reduced to rubble. Gaza’s civilian population is left without any safety net or feasible means of subsistence.
While the world witnesses from afar the tragic destruction, death and injury visited on Gaza, with grim effects on its civilians, the international community is deliberately shielded from how it is carried out by Israel’s refusal to admit foreign media to Gaza. It has been incredibly traumatising for ordinary people here to be subjected repeatedly to massive and simultaneous attacks from air, sea and land, in assaults that seem to target large areas at once. For the people of Gaza, it is a process of psychological torture – like being in prison and hearing a guard beating an inmate in the cell next door. [more]
mirabile dictu 