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Voice from Gaza
Women’s rights activist Andleeb Adwan in Gaza: “The fact that we survived that night is a miracle”
A destroyed street in Gaza City
© AFP
In response to Hamas’ terrorist attack, the Israeli military has been bombing the Gaza Strip for a week. How do the local people experience the attacks? The women’s rights activist Andleeb Adwan is in Gaza and reports.
Andleeb Adwan, 58, was born as one of 13 children in the Palestinian refugee camp of Rafah in southern Gaza. Today she runs the Community Media Center in Gaza City. She has communicated with the star via voice messages in the past few days. This is how she experienced the Israeli attacks:
“I’m so tired. I can no longer speak, I can no longer express my thoughts. Every day, every second, there are images and videos circulating in the media of the rubble under which we are currently living. What value do these images have, what effect do they have? They? They don’t help us, they don’t save the several thousand women and children who were wounded and who don’t have space in the hospital. Those who had to leave their homes and are now hiding from the bombs in schools.
My husband has been in Egypt since before the war started. When the attacks started last Saturday, we left our house immediately. My son is a journalist for a Japanese agency. He couldn’t stay with us, so me, my daughter-in-law and the two children are staying with her family. The first few nights were bad, but we somehow got through them. But on the third night they bombed everything around us to rubble. We sat huddled together in a tiny basement room for 20 hours. The shelling began at twelve in the afternoon and lasted until nine the next morning. When it was over, we ran out. Every window, every door, the trees, the garden, everything destroyed. The fact that we survived the night in this house is like a miracle.
Two hours later the neighbors called us. They said the Israelis had just warned them: They were about to shoot at the two high-rise buildings across from us. We quickly fled, running over the rubble – we couldn’t take the car because the road was destroyed. When we got to a road, my son picked us up in the car and drove us to a hotel on the beach. After half an hour he came back shouting: “Quick, they’re shooting at the hotels!” We fled and found shelter in my daughter-in-law’s uncle’s house.
Life in Gaza: The constant escape from attacks
The next morning someone from the hotel called: It was safe there now, we could come. We sat in the lobby waiting for half an hour while they prepared the rooms for us. Suddenly they started shooting there too, from the sea. They shot at the hotel directly across from ours. Journalists from international media worked there. We ran outside and saw smoke coming from the street. We covered our noses with the clothes we had on and ran to the car. Now we are back at my daughter-in-law’s uncle.
30 people in one house, adults and children. We lack drinking water. The children are very difficult, nervous and aggressive towards each other. The adults are tired because we don’t sleep. We don’t do anything, we just communicate with our friends and relatives via our cell phones.
There is destruction everywhere. Dead people. women, children. We stick together and flee from one place to another. Even where you thought you were safe, death follows you. My colleague fled from northern Gaza to Dir el Balah in the south to join her relatives. She used to always joke that it was peaceful there, that it was safe there. Now they were being bombed. Her mother was killed, her sister’s husband, her son. The father is in the intensive care unit. She hadn’t noticed anything about it at first because she was in the hospital with her two sons to have their burn injuries treated.
I can not talk anymore. I’m at a loss for words, in English but also in Arabic.”