Who Cares About The Dead of Al-Saftawi Street?
“This is a struggle between the children of light and the children of darkness, between humanity and the law of the jungle,” Benjamin Netanyahu, prime minister of Israel, has said of the war on Gaza.
The leaders of the West agree: Hamas has shed innocent blood and so Hamas must be punished, wiped out, buried before it can shed more. But it wasn’t Hamas who came for Huda Hamada and the other innocents of Al-Saftawi street in the early hours of Tuesday morning.
It was still dark in the Gaza City neighbourhood when Bibi’s Children of Light sent their missile into it – but then it must be always dark in Al-Saftawi Street, it’s right in the middle of the jungle after all.
Huda, a veteran primary school teacher, her husband, their son Muhmmad Baalousha, their daughter Iman, another son Ayman and his wife were wiped out in the attack. The bomb also killed Abu Salah al-Mahlawi, his son Salah and two grandchildren, Hassan and Muhammad. They had defied an Israeli order to evacuate the north of the Gaza Strip, preferring not to leave one refugee camp for another. Taking such an audacious action, choosing to stay in their own home, made them fair game for the military planners.
It was around 4am on Tuesday morning when the ceilings came down on Huda, her family and their neighbours. The dawn prayer would not yet have been called. All must have been still in bed. Hopefully, they were still sleeping. In Washington DC, it was still Monday night. In the US capital’s bars and hotels, the journalists and diplomats and political hacks would have been deep in whiskey and debate about what price Gaza must be made to pay.
Shahd Absulama grew up with these two families in Al-Saftawi street – Huda taught her in the United Nations school in the Jabalia refugee camp, Iman went to school with Shahd’s cousins. The families were never missing from one another’s weddings and funerals, sharing joy and grief, leaving their mark on each other and their neighbourhood, intertwining themselves like ivy in each other’s affairs.
Huda’s house was similar to others on the street, the trees at the entrance making it look “beautiful”, a host of embroidered furniture inside, symbols of the land, “colourful collections”, all gone now, “disfigured” is the word Shahd uses. Two more families wiped off the face of some dusty Palestinian earth.
Huda, according to Shahd and others who knew her, dedicated her life to the children of the camp, instilling belief in their ability to overcome the deadening impact of a life lived under military occupation and, more recently, a crippling blockade. Her son Salah was a journalist and office manager for the Palestine Today media channel in Gaza. Her daughter Iman was a pharmacist. And now as Gaza cries out for people such as these, they are gone.
“She taught me all through primary school, she taught science. She was very kind. She believed in me. I was one of her favourite students,” says Shahd, with a laugh, of the late Huda.
“She, they, were loved by so many people... So they stayed [when the Israeli army told them to leave], that shouldn’t be a green light to murder people in their home. This is mad. It’s insane. This is a war crime. To massacre a family like that… a teacher, a journalist, a pharmacist, people who spent their lives trying to help others. We have no words left, outrage is no longer enough.”
After a life lived in each other’s pockets, the Abusalama family were denied the right to say goodbye to their neighbours this week. They had taken the road south last Friday – their room for manoeuvre strangled, they travelled six miles in all – to Al-Nusairat, another refugee camp. Shahd’s father Ismail, 71, initially refused to leave the home he had built with his own hands but was finally convinced to go with the rest. Now, they are in Shahd’s grandmother’s home – the old woman was herself forced to flee Ashdod during the original Nakba – crammed together with “other aunties and uncles and their children and grandchildren”.
Shahd’s mother Halima charges her phone off a car battery to let her children abroad know they are still alive. Every twelve hours is the routine, but when I talked with Shahd she hadn’t heard from Halima for close to a full day. The silence was becoming tortuous.
“I'm fighting my darkest thoughts; seeing my family TV massacred by Israel while I'm in the UK unable to say goodbye,” said Shahd from London.
“I feel that I'm looking for my loved ones in the faces on those pictured… They feel abandoned because they are abandoned. They have no water, no food, no fuel, Israel has bombed the bakery down the street from them. I’m struggling to imagine their situation, people crammed on top of one another, no room to think, no room to breathe… It is shameful.
“Israel has responsibility as an occupying power to ensure the safety and welfare of the civilian population and the rest of the world has a responsibility to ensure these standards are met. What is it that’s different about us that we can be bombed and shelled with impunity?”
As of Tuesday night, Euro-Med Monitor, a human rights body based in Geneva, had documented the killing of 1,046 Palestinian children in Israel’s then 10-day old war on Gaza, Hassan and Muhammad of Al-Saftawi Street now among them, with an estimated 167 others clinging on beneath the rubble. According to Save the Children, as of the end of August this year, 545 children had been killed in the 18 months of Russia’s war in Ukraine.
How pathetic, how sick and twisted it is to be comparing the statistics on slaughtered children between one place and the next. But does anything better signify the fact that we consider the Palestinians to be scum? What are the kids of Gaza worth anyway?
“We live in a racist world where powers act only out of their own geo-political interests,” added Shahd.
“We have a messed-up system, so messed up that if these crimes are allowed for the Palestinians – we may be got out of sight – but the target will move to another people. We are living through one of the darkest times in history.
“The people there [in Gaza] have seen, have felt nothing like this before in terms of the amount of bombs and munitions that are being dropped on them, nothing. I feel dehumanised in every sense. I can’t tolerate another day.
“We have been killed in our thousands before – and what happened then? Nobody is doing anything? Well, what did they do before? At least refugees should be able to go home, my people should be able to move around their own country without fear, their homes shouldn’t be their graves.
“I’m finding it hard that we still need to do the convincing that what is happening is an injustice. If there are decent humane people reading about the family of Huda, how could they not be so moved that they would try to make this stop, do something, anything?”
Timing his trip deftly with a couple of by-election defeats back home, British prime minister Rishi Sunak was in the Middle East on Thursday, and he decided to get all Churchillian on the darkness theme in Jerusalem.
“I’m proud to stand here with you in Israel’s darkest hour. As your friend, we will stand with you in solidarity, we will stand with your people, and we also want you to win,” Sunak said in a joint press conference with Bibi.
But who is it Sunak wants Israel to win against? Who is it that he wants the Israeli team to smash and grind down to powder? Is it the family of Shahd Abuslama, herself a British citizen? What about the Gaza-confined in-laws of Scotland’s first minister Hamza Yousuf? Must they die so Sunak can celebrate? Are the dead of Al-Saftawi Street a sure sign of progress?
“Even here, politicians like him, they are fuelling hatred among their own populations,” said Shahd of Sunak.
“They don’t care for us, they don’t see us as humans, they see us a problem.”
When the killing does stop, wise men like Rishi will say that what Gaza needs now more than ever before is educators and medicine women and tellers of uncomfortable truths – just not those like Huda Hamada and her daughter Iman and her son Muhammad, because they are gone, and the things they could have said if they were spared may have been just too uncomfortable to stomach.