Operation Protective Edge, launched in early July 2014, was the third
major Israeli assault on the Gaza Strip in six years. It was also the
most deadly. By the conclusion of hostilities some seven weeks later,
2,200 of Gaza’s population had been killed, and more than 10,000
injured.
In these pages,
journalist Mohammed Omer, a resident of Gaza who lived through the
terror of those days with his wife and then three-month-old son,
provides a first-hand account of life on-the-ground during Israel’s
assault. The images he records in this extraordinary chronicle are a
literary equivalent of Goya’s Disasters of War”: children’s
corpses stuffed into vegetable refrigerators, pointlessly because the
electricity is off; a family rushing out of their home after a phone
call from the Israeli military informs them that the building will be
obliterated by an F-16 missile in three minutes; donkeys
machine-gunned by Israeli soldiers under instructions to shoot
anything that moves; graveyards targeted with shells so that mourners
can no longer tell where their relatives are buried; fishing boats
ablaze in the harbor.
Throughout this
carnage, Omer maintains the cool detachment of the professional
journalist, determined to create a precise record of what is
occurring in front of him. But between his lines the outrage boils,
and we are left to wonder how a society such as Israel,
widely-praised in the West as democratic and civilized, can visit
such monstrosities on a trapped and helpless population