On the other side of the firing line
Spiegel, a German magazine that is not known for its friendliness to either America or Israel, has a quite amazing story today about a Gazan woman, pregnant with twins, who was allowed to enter Israel for treatment of her complications. While there, she was exposed to the same Israelis who are so demonized on her side of the border, and she got to experience personally one of the random rocket attacks. The story is a breath of fresh air in that it accurately describes the escalation of Gazan warfare against Israel despite the withdrawal, Israeli humanitarianism, the way in which Gazan fanatics terrorize their own civilian population, and the culture shock a woman experiences when removed from the cesspool that is Gaza (a Gaza, I need to remind you, that is kept cesspooly and insulated by Western funds):
In the past, Shafii [the pregnant woman] saw the Israelis exclusively as perpetrators, but in Ashkelon she is encountering, for the first time, victims of the acts of terror committed by her own people. One of them is nine-year-old Yossi, who is sitting in a wheelchair. A steel frame holds his left shoulder together. It was fractured by shrapnel from a rocket that landed in the city of Sderot. “The people in Sderot are suffering just as we are in Gaza,” she says.
There was a sharp increase in the Palestinian rocket attacks after Israel cleared the Jewish settlements in the Gaza Strip in September 2005. The Israeli military counted 2,305 hits last year, and there have already been 1,146 in the first two months of this year. Until now, almost all of the missiles have been Qassam rockets, which are made in the Gaza Strip and have a range of about 12 kilometers (seven miles).
But the breaching of the border fence between the Gaza Strip and Egypt by Hamas in January made it possible to bring in Russian and Iranian rockets with longer ranges. This means that cities considered safe in the past are now threatened. One of them is Ashkelon. On the second day after the birth of Bayan and Faisal, a Soviet-made “Grad” rocket landed on the hospital grounds. “I heard it hit, 200 meters away from me,” says Shafii. The neonatal unit was moved to a bunker the next day. “The groups that are firing the rockets are not fighting a just war,” says the Palestinian mother, adding that they are not abiding by what the Prophet Muhammad said: that wars may only be waged between soldiers, but not against civilians.
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Ashraf Shafii describes how young, masked men repeatedly set up their rocket launchers under the cover of houses in Beit Lahia. “They shoot at Israeli civilians, which is completely unacceptable,” says Shafii. “And they put us Palestinian civilians in grave danger, because the Israelis shoot back.”
Why doesn’t he object? “They are armed,” says Shafii, “and they shoot at anyone who gets in their way.”
The father is holding the first photos of his newborn twins in his hands. He is worried about the rockets being fired at Ashkelon. He says that he would never have believed it possible that he could be indebted to the Israelis for anything. “What a confusing situation,” he says.
