By and large during this war, I have refrained from reading any online editions of UK newspapers. I spend more than enough time hunched over my computer as it is, working and keeping a frequent check on the latest developments via local news websites.
Online versions of newspapers can’t properly convey the overall feel of the print edition, however, and they don’t contain the advertisements. On my desk is a copy of yesterday’s Independent, given to me by my neighbour, who has just returned from London. In the paper there are three advertisements about the Gaza crisis, two of them full-page. One is from Save the Children Fund, which begins thus:
“For families in Gaza, every minute is now a fight for survival. Devastating attacks on both sides of this conflict mean thousands of people are caught in an impossible search for safety.”
This paragraph is the only reference in the whole advertisement to “both sides” and it is an oblique one at that.
Correct me if I’m wrong, but I don’t believe any similar adverts appeared during the past eight years, when missiles were falling on southern Israel, predominantly on Sderot. Last year alone, more than 3,000 rockets and mortars hit Israel. Now Katyushas and Grad missiles are hitting other cities, including Beersheva, Ashkelon and Ashdod.
Don’t the traumatized children of southern Israel need saving as well?
On Monday I went to Tel Aviv port, where there was a two-day fair for vendors from southern Israel, whose businesses have suffered from the constant Palestinian rocket fire. 200 small businesses were represented, selling a variety of goods, such as vegetable and fruit produce, flowers, toys and clothes.
I chatted to a number of vendors from Sderot and the surrounding villages, moshavim and kibbutzim who all told the same story: they are grappling with the cumulative psychological and economic fallout of living under attack for so long. The “tzeva adom” air raid sirens give people less than a minute to run to a shelter. It is a terrifying and exhausting experience.
Here is Leah’s story; just one of many that was told to me on Monday.
Leah, a single mother of four, is a specialist nurse in the dialysis day unit of Barzilai hospital in Ashkelon. Although the hospital is in the firing line - in February of this year a rocket from Gaza landed next to its helipad – it has become the major trauma centre for patients with injuries sustained in this conflict. The most essential departments have moved into an underground bomb shelter, and other patients – including those on dialysis – have either been sent home or to hospitals in the centre of the country.
As long as the dialysis day unit remains closed, Leah has to be on enforced leave. On Monday she was at the vendors’ fair helping her elder son who sells plants and flowers. He recently completed his military service but Leah’s younger son is in an elite combat unit. “Thankfully, he isn’t in Gaza at the moment,” she said.
Leah’s elder daughter is a lawyer in the IDF and her 15-year-old daughter, Yuval, is at school in Jerusalem all week, returning home only at weekends.
“Yuval was only seven when the qassam rockets started. She’s lived more than half her life in the terrible shadow of these attacks. A few years ago, a qassam landed nearby and the glass was blown out of the windows of our house. She’s growing up completely traumatized. If a door slams shut unexpectedly she starts to panic. When she’s away at school and hears that a rocket has landed in Sderot, she calls me immediately, and cries down the phone: “Imma, are you in the shelter? Promise me you’re in the shelter; promise me you’ll stay there.”
Since her divorce many years ago, Leah has worked long hours to keep her head above water. Families throughout Israel are struggling financially at the moment, but living in Sderot only compounds the difficulties. “When I was working on the wards a while back, I'd finish the evening shift at 11.30 pm, arrive home at around midnight, shower and go to bed. Some nights the tzeva adom would sound in the early hours and I’d have to go to the shelter, or I would lie awake anticipating it. Either way, I never had a good night’s sleep. Then I’d have to get up at 6.30 am to set off for the morning shift at the hospital. Looking back, I don’t know how I managed it for so long.”
Now, as the rocket attacks continue, Leah can also hear the bombing and gunfire from nearby Gaza. “It’s a nightmare. They are suffering so much over there as well.”
Leah is generally pessimistic about the future. “This is just the opening salvo in a much bigger war, in my opinion. If we do get the peace and quiet we all crave when this is over, I can’t see it lasting.”
She paused for a moment and then, as if to contradict her own bleak forecast, she added the well-worn Israeli expression: “Ha’kol yihiye b’seder [everything will be all right]. We have to believe that, don’t we, otherwise how could we go on?”