As war returns to Gaza, it is the children who are frozen in fear

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/jul/19/gaza-israel-palestine-terror-children

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I'm taking pictures on a deserted Gaza street by the beachfront one evening at dusk when a solitary figure in a grey robe walks into the frame covering his face.

He approaches and asks angrily why I am photographing the buildings. I show him the picture, in which he appears as a small figure, his face not visible. A paranoid conversation ensues until he is largely placated. The man walks away in a hurry, talking into his phone.

It is not an isolated incident. Another day a man sits next to me at the hospital in Beit Lahia. When I get up to make room for his friend, he pulls me down by the arm and asks urgent questions until he is happy about who I am.

These awkward, urgent men are the same watchers you spot in the crowds that gather at the sites of the Israeli air strikes or arrive with their wounded friends at Gaza's hospitals. They are the men who turn their heads quickly away from the camera or pull up a hood. It is not hard to guess who they are in a conflict that – for western reporters – is defined in large part by what is strikingly absent. They are men associated with the armed factions, most notably Hamas.

In most wars I have covered, you encounter one of the combatant parties, often both, but in Gaza, where death falls from the sky, those fighting are largely invisible except for the impact of their weapons. The result is that you see a war in Gaza through the prism of the suffering of the victims – a conflict in which those willing to offer an organising rationale are absent.

The reality is that the most visible sign of the Palestinian militant factions most of the time is the rockets they send whooshing over the rooftops. It is only at their funerals, their faces torn and yellow, bodies wrapped in their flags, that they are approachable. Otherwise you are compelled to guess.

There is the man sitting on a plastic chair reading a Qur'an outside a building by one of the city's parks. On approaching him, you can see the walkie-talkie inside his book.

I encounter another individual inspecting a small damaged building overlooking the Mediterranean. He asks what I want. On realising I am a journalist, he allows pictures to be taken of the group of other curious onlookers, but insists on being out of sight.

It is not only members of Hamas and the other militant factions who are nervous; the presence of the Israeli airmen and soldiers conducting the war on their own side is as much inferred most of the time as it is really tangible.

The sound of naval guns booms from ships invisible over the horizon like a drum being beaten by an impatient child. Leaflets are dropped out of the sky ordering civilians to evacuate, a message that is also delivered by text message or by phone calls from men and women whose Arabic has a heavy Israeli accent.

Occasionally you'll see the ever-present drones when the light catches their wings, but mostly it is the noise you hear, a humming like a vast electrical circuit.

I enter Gaza on the first day, seeing the first air strike from the car park on the Israeli side before crossing the border. The war at its beginning seems a random series of events. Bombs and missiles burst in the street, but as events they seem disconnected. As the days go on and the war intensifies, the spaces-that-are-not-war become subsumed. The conflict becomes omnipresent.

I am in a street when a house explodes in front of me; I'm on the terrace of my hotel on Gaza's beachfront when two rockets are fired at the nearby harbour wall and four children are killed, the bleeding survivors making it to our sanctuary, where we perform first aid. Suddenly the damage seems ubiquitous. You turn a corner to find glass and rubble in the street, trees felled or the road cratered.

Buildings fall in different ways. The bombs sheer off the front sometimes, as if with a knife, leaving the rooms inside exposed and furniture still sitting where it had been. Sometimes the bomb leaves nothing but a hole filled with lumps of concrete; at other times structures are concertinaed into asymmetric domes prickly with exposed steel reinforcing rods.

A few hours before the ground invasion on Thursday, I am sitting in the garden of Omar Shaban, director of the independent thinktank PalThink, at his home in Deir al-Balah. The sprinklers are watering his immaculate patch of lawn and well-tended flowers are growing in profusion.

He tells me that politicians cannot solve the problems of Gaza, but thinkers can. "I said two years ago, after the last ceasefire, that it couldn't last. I said it would not last two years. Why?" he asks. "Because Israel and the international community did not leave Hamas anything to lose. So 200 people die. But it could be 500 or 1,000. They can bear that. And it is not because they don't like people.

"We have two very stupid leaders," he says emphatically. "Abu Mazen [the nickname for the Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas] wants to weaken and humiliate Hamas. [Israeli prime minister] Binyamin Netanyahu is only interested in his own short-term domestic political agenda."

He is no less scathing about Hamas's own agenda and its own lack of achievements. "I look at this garden," he says suddenly. "I ask myself, can I live here another year? I can't while my neighbours are suffering."

He laughs a little bleakly. "But I don't have another passport or any other nationality."

I see those who do have other nationalities leaving one afternoon through the Rafah border crossing to Egypt, scared-looking and deflated. But they are a tiny minority. Most of Gaza's 1.8 million population cannot leave at all. Which means there is nowhere to hide, except the UN Relief and Works Agency schools opened up as refuges. They are seen by many, who have experienced them before, as a place of last resort, so people come and go, making judgments about the violence like the weather – calculating what they can bear at any given moment.

And as the war progresses and the violence gets worse, a fatalism appears to creep in. I hear the same refrain from those returning to their homes despite the Israeli warnings of attacks: with all of Gaza dangerous, they would rather be in their homes than in a strange and crowded place. And they do die in their homes.

The explosions rearrange and make incongruous what should be domestic and familiar. Clothes spill out on to the street, a toy plastic tiger lies on its side in the rubble and dust in a room where someone has died.

A day later I am driving through Zeitoun, to the south-east of Gaza City. I see a horse and wagon flying a white flag. Mohammad Abu Ajwa, 32, explains that he has a farm near the border with Israel. "I have a hundred cows there." He adds that he doesn't know whether the white flag will work. "I don't know if it will protect me, but in the past I've used it to reach our farm." However, where his farm is there are tanks and Israeli infantry.

"My house is a kilometre from the border. I want to move them to a safe place," he says. "I will try to get to them this afternoon if the situation becomes clear."

What is unsaid, but remembered by Gaza's farmers, is what happened to much of the livestock during the last major ground invasion by Israel in 2008-09. After the war finished the fields were littered with dead animals.

He tells us about the previous night's bombardment, the opening barrage of the ground invasion shellfire shaking his house as his family sheltered in one room.

We had watched the beginning of the bombardment from the safety of a family's balcony in Gaza City, as the flashes illuminated the skyline and flares dropped down on neighbourhoods that we tried to identify flanking the border wall.

Our hosts, hospitable as Gazans always are, brought coffee and fruit juice which we sipped in the dark as we watched the bombs fall, a strange spectator sport. The lights in whole districts to the north go out, one after another, making the pillars of flame thrown up by the air strikes seem more vivid still. A large Hamas rocket is launched from the city and turns towards the sea, heading towards the coast. An Israeli Iron Dome battery over the border wall engages it and the missile disintegrates into a dozen fading golden fragments of light.

At moments like this, the war does not seem quite real, until a siren sounds in the distance and the realisation dawns that you, too, now have to drive back through the city.

On the 12th day of the war, amid reports that the UN secretary general Ban Ki-moon was heading to the Middle East to help end the conflict, Omar Shaban's words come back to me. The awareness of two previous conflicts in Gaza in five years, of two ceasefires that failed to stick in the long run, underlines the growing suspicion that none of the participants knows how to end this one. There is no mediator that both sides trust. Hamas does not trust an Egypt now deeply hostile to it, or its putative partner in the Palestinian unity government, President Abbas. For its part, Israel does not want Qatar involved. The US government wavers between rhetoric that backs Israel and impotence in face of the horror.

Both sides, you sense, having played this game before and not achieved what they set out to win, have adopted maximalist positions – which are equally unrealistic – to which they have lashed themselves. Despite the mounting death toll, seen from Gaza the international community seems weary of this problem, short on outrage.

In the Kamal Odwan hospital in Beit Lahia, there is a different kind of weariness. On Friday morning I meet Dr Mohammad Shaheen, an orthopaedic surgeon, just after the arrival of three children from the Musallem family killed by a tank round. "It is difficult for us, even as doctors. So difficult to see this," says Shaheen. He says he has not slept properly in several days.

A few minutes later I come across the dead children's sister, a girl aged about seven with a long dark ponytail, cheeks glistening with tears. She is sitting on a bank of chairs with her mother, Muna, who is comforting a younger sibling. She looks to her mother, lost in her own grief, to the journalists and staff watching, and back to her mother looking for an explanation, a reassurance no one can give.

A troubled history

Gaza was ruled by a succession of dynasties before becoming part of the Ottoman empire for four centuries until 1917. For the next 31 years, it was under the British mandate for Palestine, which lasted until Israel's creation in May 1948.

1948: Palestinian refugees flood into Gaza

About 750,000 Palestinians – half the population - leave their homes in what becomes Israel. Around two-thirds of Gaza's 1.8 million-strong population are still refugees or their descendants. About 78% of Palestine becomes Israel; the West Bank and East Jerusalem come under Jordanian control, and Gaza is run by Egypt.

1967: Israel occupies Palestinian territories

In the six-day war, Israel captures Gaza, along with the West Bank and East Jerusalem. It establishes settlements in Gaza and its troops dominate the tiny strip of land, one of the most densely populated places on Earth.

1987:The first intifada

The Palestinian intifada (uprising) is triggered after four Palestinians are killed in Gaza when an Israeli military vehicle crashes into their cars. In 1994, following the signing of the Oslo accords which gives limited self-rule to Palestinians, their leader, Yasser Arafat, returns from exile.

2005: Israel withdraws from Gaza

Ariel Sharon orders Israeli settlers to leave Gaza. Palestinians hail the evacuation of settlers and the withdrawal of troops as a victory.

2006: The rise of Hamas

Created in 1987 as an offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, in 2006 Hamas wins an unexpected victory in Palestinian elections. Hamas and other groups begin firing rockets into Israel.

2007: Israel tightens blockade

After Hamas takes control, Israel declares Gaza a "hostile entity" and drastically tightens its blockade.

2008-09: Operation Cast Lead

Israel launches a massive military assault on Hamas in Gaza, killing around 1,400 Palestinians. Operation Pillar of Defence, follows in 2012.

2014: Operation Protective Edge

Following the military coup in Egypt in July 2013 and the arrival of a new regime hostile to Hamas, conditions in Gaza worsen. The UN warns that Gaza is becoming uninhabitable. After a rise in Hamas rocket fire and the abduction and murder of three Israeli youths in the West Bank, Israel launches its third military offensive in six years.