GAZA STRIP – A million-plus Palestinians wander the rubble-strewn wasteland of Gaza in a futile search for sanctuary. Israel’s rapacious bombing campaign to extirpate Hamas has rendered vast swaths of the coastal enclave uninhabitable.
Melanie Ward, CEO of relief group Medical Aid for Palestinians (MAP), recently toured the smoldering ruins. Her voice trembles as she recounts the apocalyptic scenes of anguish – children scraping empty pots with sticks, the wails of the wounded intermingling with the percussive thrum of naval bombardment.
“Every morning the staccato clap of gunfire from battleships jolts you awake,” Ward said. “That stomach-churning feeling – you never know when the next barrage will obliterate your very existence.”
Human Shields? Or Humans Being Shielded?
Israel portrays its unrestrained pummeling of Gaza as a regrettable necessity to defang the “terrorist” menace of Hamas. Yet this clinical framing belies the gratuitous human carnage on display.
Ward witnessed the hellscape firsthand at Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital, one of the few medical facilities still operational in decimated Deir al-Balah. Wounded civilians overflowed the floors, screaming juveniles among them, their ruptured bodies oozing and infested by flies impervious to the stench of seared flesh.
“There was a woman weeping, begging me to show the world the depravity being inflicted on her people,” Ward recounts. “But how can you explain that the world’s mayors not only bear witness to the atrocities, but enable them through interminable inaction?”
The hospital scene was quintessential Hieronymus Bosch – a Dantean representation of mankind’s boundless capacity for brutality against itself. Exhausted doctors desperately tried to triage the unending stream of Mutilated arrivals, their efforts hamstrung by the dearth of supplies stemming from Israel’s remorseless chokehold on Gaza.
“They have to re-use orthopedic fixators from the corpses,” Ward said, struggling to maintain her composure. “Scrubbing shreds of scorched necrotic tissue from the metal implants before reinstalling them into the bodies of newly lacerated victims.”
An Entire Society Unravels
What constitutes life for Palestinians in this 21st century ghetto lurches between the dystopian and the cons unending. Those few who cling to an existence amid the detritus face malnutrition and disease from the fossil putrescence of backed-up sewers mingling with the puddles where children play.
“I saw youngsters slurping fragrantly rancid water from streets turned to open-air latrines,” Ward said, her voice hitching. “Meanwhile, that interminable gunfire reverberated like a metronome of madness from unseen Israeli warships.”
For Gaza’s massively disadvantaged youth, the psychic trauma inflicted could reverberate across generations. A senior UN expert cautions the unremitting “psychological terror” may manifest in soaring rates of mental illness.
Ward confirms the omnipresent dread and despondency. “These people are utterly crushed – the harrowed faces, the thousand-yard stares,” she said. “They’ve surrendered to the reality that life is mere survival from one arbitrary mass death event to the next.”
Where Can They Possibly Go?
As the world tsk-tsks anew at this wholly man-made cataclysm, Gazans ponder their own looming Nakba, or catastrophe – an Israeli ground invasion to extirpate Hamas once and for all. Having absorbed months of relentless pounding, what refuge awaits the territory’s inhabitants?
“Everybody fears the inevitable boots on the ground – they’re petrified, frantically pondering where over 1 million displaced people can flee to from the tiny area around Rafah,” Ward said. “The chilling answer? Nowhere – they’re already consigned to the open-air prison of Gaza.”
Israel’s security establishment depicts the unconscionable suffering as regrettable collateral damage in service of a righteous goal – lasting security and deterrence of Hamas and its Iranian sponsors. The ends, it seems, justify the most extremity of means.
But to Ward and most objective observers, the gratuitous price paid by Palestinian civilians is self-evidently disproportionate. How many noncombatants must die, how many childhoods breached, how many communities obliterated, to disable one militant outfit’s rocket capabilities?
For Gaza’s surviving inhabitants, the interminable misery wears on, painted in viscera – with perpetually simmering rage and multi-generational psychic scarring the sole inheritance of its blameless progeny.
