The one thing that made the September 11 attacks so shocking was that they happened in the most media saturated country in the world. From day one we saw not just jittery footage of planes hitting buildings, but the fear and suffering of the people in the WTC and the Pentagon, as well as the despair and sadness of their family and friends. What makes it so easy to ignore the pain and suffering of people in Iraq, Afghanistan and Gaza, is that they happen to faceless victims, only mentioned as depressing statistics in easily skipped newspaper reports, not as living, breathing people who suffered equally as the WTC victims. There are fewer cameras pointed that way, they don’t speak English and their rituals seem strange to us, so we don’t accord them the same feelings as we do our own dead.
Which is why it’s “good” to see the article in today’s Independent in which Fares Akram, the newspaper’s correspondent in Gaza, talks about the death of his father, killed in a airstrike at the age of 48:
The phone call came at around 4.20pm on Saturday. A bomb had been dropped on the house at our small farm in northern Gaza. My father was walking from the gate to the farmhouse at the time. It was our beloved place, that farm and its two-storey white house with a red roof. Nestled in a flat fertile agricultural plain north-west of Beit Lahiya, it had lemon groves, orange and apricot trees and we had recently acquired 60 dairy cows.
It was the closest farm to the northern border with Israel. Ironically, we always thought the biggest danger there was not from Israeli troops, who usually went straight past if they were mounting an incursion, but from stray Hamas rockets aimed at the Israeli towns north of us.
But shortly before sunset on Saturday, as Israeli ground troops and tanks invaded Gaza in the name of shutting down Hamas rocket sites, the peace of that place was shattered and my father’s life extinguished at the age of 48. Warplanes and helicopters had swept in, bombing and firing to open up the space for the tanks and ground forces that would follow in the darkness. It was one of those F16 airstrikes that killed my father.
The house was reduced to little more than powder, and of Dad there was nothing much left either. “Just a pile of flesh,” my uncle, who found him in the rubble, said later with brutal honesty.
In the ten days since Israel started this war, it has killed over 500 people like Akrem al-Ghoul, including 30 or more today when tIsraeli artillery struck an United Nations run school. But don’t worry, it was a legitamite military target, because there were militants firing nearyby, or if there weren’t, I’m sure there were a lot of Potential Future Terrorists sheltering in the school…