Tales of Terror from Jabaliya

Husam Maarouf 

The Electronic Intifada 

4 November 2024

People carrying belongings, children and bags of rice are displaced from Jabaliya

Israel’s assault on northern Gaza has forced tens of thousands from their homes, here on 25 October.  Mahmoud Issa

Doomsday.

That is how residents are describing the situation in Jabaliya and northern Gaza as Israel’s offensive there nears its second month.

Israel has ordered every resident to head south, but has also erected checkpoints preventing people from moving.

Out of an estimated 400,000 people in the north when the assault started in early October, over 100,000 are understood to remain.

Israel has all but cut off humanitarian aid to the territory in an apparent attempt to starve people out.

It has bombed with abandon, killing some 1,200 over the past four weeks, including over a hundred in a single strike on a house for displaced people in Beit Lahiya on 30 October, as well as 150 in a series of strikes on 10 buildings in Jabaliya on 24 October.

“You cannot imagine what’s happening in Jabaliya,” said Nadia al-Kafarna, 69. “The sky is black with smoke, and the ground is scorched.”

Nadia spoke to The Electronic Intifada over the phone, despite an unstable network. The Israeli military had forced her out of her shelter in the Jabaliya refugee camp on 17 October, but she is still in Gaza City in the north.

“Nothing has been spared from destruction. The sounds of explosions are strange, different from before, terrifying and bone-shaking, as if they would tear you apart,” a deeply upset Nadia said.

“Inside me, everything is shattered and broken from the horror of what I saw. Even now, my heart is clenched and I am gripped by fear.”

Doomsday, she said. “I have witnessed doomsday horrors.”

Relentless aggression

Nadia said soldiers showed “no mercy … There are decomposing bodies of women and children throughout the camp, in homes and on the streets.”

The Israeli military has spared no one. Mahmoud Basal, of Gaza’s civil defense, said all operations in the northern region had to be halted following attacks by Israeli forces, causing at least three injuries, while several personnel have been detained.

There is barely any water or food in the camp. The UN says Israel obstructed 83 percent of humanitarian aid from entering the north in September. The people of Jabaliya are painfully hungry, many resorting to tying stones to their stomachs to dull the hunger pangs – a practice rooted in Prophetic tradition.

The camp’s residents are also thirsty, with only limited drinking water entering the camp, causing Save the Children International’s Rachel Cummings to describe the situation as “absolutely catastrophic.”

“People are being constantly bombarded with aerial attacks, and of course, we know that the food and the water are not sufficient. The convoys of food and water are being denied into the north … It is absolutely catastrophic,” Cummings said.

Nadia called the bombing relentless.

“The bombing never stopped, day and night, with no mercy or humanity. We recited prayers constantly, feeling death closer than ever with each terrifying explosion,” she told The Electronic Intifada.

“Our days are long, with my family and me battling hunger, thirst and fear. We make do with pieces of bread we baked inside the house, on an open fire. Bread and zaatar were our only sustenance for more than two weeks.”

Apocalypse

Nadia painted an apocalyptic picture of the situation in Jabaliya: faces pale for lack of sleep, children with names written on their arms for identification purposes, and constant fear.

Forced to leave their home, Nadia recounted how her family – her three sons, their wives and children, names on arms – were given ten minutes to comply with a military order to evacuate.

“I heard collective trembling and parents murmuring prayers for protection from God as we left. I gazed at my children and grandchildren’s features, thinking it might be the last time I’d see their faces.”

And, as others have reported, leaving Jabaliya brought its own horrors.

“At the entrance of our alley, tanks were amassed, and a large number of soldiers. The scene resembled a slaughterhouse – men were gathered, stripped to their underwear, their hands tied behind their backs, and then blindfolded. Nearby was a deep pit where the mothers were held without their children, while the children cried and screamed from a third area.”

There was a fourth area, she added.

“There was a fourth pile – a heap of bodies piled at the entrance of my neighbors’ house, more than fifty near-naked corpses executed earlier. I wish I hadn’t seen this.”

A soldier called to Nadia over a loudspeaker.

“He ordered me to move south and threatened to kill me if I didn’t move fast. When I ventured to ask him about the children and my daughter and daughters-in-law, he allowed me to take them with me. But all the men were left behind, their fate unknown, in the hands of killers.”

A miracle

M.D., 57, declined to reveal his name out of fear of reprisals. He believes he and his 15-year-old son survived the soldiers and drones that swarmed Jabaliya Camp “only by a miracle.”

“When I learned that Israeli forces were advancing on our neighborhood, my son and I took indirect paths through the camp to reach a safer area in northern Gaza. Just as we thought we were safe, we saw that soldiers blocked the end of the road we had taken. We retreated slightly, and took shelter in a house with a broken door.”

Inside, he told The Electronic Intifada, he saw four bodies.

“Two men and one woman, executed by gunshot, and an elderly woman left to starve to death in a room. She seemed bedridden, in poor health, left alone to fight death. We spent an entire night trapped among the dead, unable to sleep and unable to leave. The soldiers sat outside the door, laughing and playing, as if they were at a picnic.”

They seized a moment when there was a shift change by the soldiers.

“We managed to escape across the road and headed toward Gaza City. I couldn’t believe we had survived! I felt as if I had been granted a new life.”

Nevertheless, said M.D., the experience has scarred him. Reflecting on his survival, he said, the worst part was not spending a night “among the dead” nor the death and destruction he had seen.

“I couldn’t provide my son with any sense of safety. I stroked his head, whispering, ‘We’ll be okay.’ But he witnessed death and terrifying torment. He has not spoken for days now and is in a state of severe distress.”

Most residents of Jabaliya have refused to leave. They see their departure as unreasonable, and say that they are rooted to their land.

S.K., 49, who also declined to share his name, is one of the ones who have refused to leave. His home, he said, is surrounded.

“Israeli soldiers are only hundreds of meters away. They, who kill women, children, and the elderly in cold blood, who bring down concrete and steel onto innocent people’s heads. These occupation soldiers show no compassion whatsoever. They are the dragon of evil of our time.”

There be dragons

S.K. is adamant about staying in his home.

“There is no justification for forcibly removing me from my home. The camp is not a battlefield. I will not leave my home and the land of my ancestors. I remain here like a tree whose roots grow deeper every day. I can only be uprooted by death.”

But his steadfastness comes at a cost, as the Israeli military seeks to starve people out.

“I feel dizzy much of the time,” S.K. told The Electronic Intifada. “My vision blurs from lack of food. All we eat is bread and zaatar. Whenever I think of my children enduring this deprivation and danger, I cry. How is it acceptable that a child be subjected to such brutality?”

He said people in Jabaliya are sleep-deprived and terrorized by the Israeli military.

“Believe me when I say that since the extermination of this camp began, we haven’t slept. There is constant bombing, and shells rain down with an unbearable roar that fills us with dread. Imagine a pricking sensation over your entire body simultaneously. That’s the fear we live with.”

Drones hover constantly in the skies above the camp, he said, moving between houses, descending and rising, targeting anything that moves. Countless bodies lie discarded. Animals, too – donkeys, cats and horses – have been left for days, their carcasses decomposing.

“We fear stepping outside, looking out our windows or turning on lights at night. Everything is a target here, with drones picking us off. Just meters from my house, there’s a body. I cannot go out to bury it, and many people have been left to bleed to death in the camp’s streets and homes.”

It is a measure of how pronounced the lesson of the 1948 Nakba is among the people of Jabaliya that so many are determined to stay despite the slaughter to avoid the fate of their parents or grandparents, who were forced from their homes and lands, never to be allowed to return.

“I will not leave my house under any circumstances, despite my intense fear,” S.K. told The Electronic Intifada. “It feels like Judgment Day. We are not safe; we are threatened with death, even though we are not fighting. We are dying here, with no one coming to rescue us.”

Husam Maarouf is a journalist and writer from Gaza.