The Aftermath. Sarah Helm

      1

      The Erased

      “At least 2,200 Gazans are now known to have died in the 50-day Israel-Gaza war, which broke out on 17 July 2014 after escalating violence on both sides. Israel lost 64 soldiers in the same conflict and six Israeli civilians died … ”

      In a house in Rafah in southern Gaza, near the Egyptian border, Nabil Siyam, aged 34, slowly lays out pictures. He only has one arm – the other was blown off by an Israeli bomb during the summer war.

      The pictures show his wife, Shireen, and children – Mustafa, nine, Ghaida, a girl, aged eight, Abdul Rahman, six, Badruddin, five and Dalal, also a girl, aged nine months. All but Nabil and Badruddin were killed by the same bomb; the little boy lost a kidney and now plays on his father’s lap. Also killed were two of Nabil’s brothers, two of his brothers’ wives and three of their children, who also lived in this house.

      Staring ahead with bloodshot eyes, Nabil, a vegetable farmer, says that when war broke out in July, the family felt safe here. Gazans nearer the border came to this area to flee shelling where they lived. Nobody could escape into Egypt which had closed its crossing at Rafah and obviously it wasn’t possible to escape across the Israeli border into the line of fire. On the other side was the sea. “Everyone was trapped.”

      On 21 July 2014 Israeli rockets hit the house next door and at 6am Nabil and his terrified family fled.

      “We ran into the street. Children were with mothers. We got 10 metres away when I heard a drone. I heard the sound of the bomb – it is a special sound – and looked up. The Israelis must have seen us. Drones see everything. The next thing I knew was a cloud of dust and I looked around for my children.”

      Nabil picked up his phone and we were suddenly staring at scenes of the slaughter. “That was Ghaida,” he said, playing the phone video over again. We looked away.

      He showed more photographs, including the whole family together on a beach. “It was taken here by the sea at Rafah a week before the war,” he said. By now everyone in the room was crying.

      As well as the 12 members of Nabil’s family who died outright in the bomb, two cousins were badly injured including 15-year-old Mohammed, who lost a leg and was transferred to a Palestinian hospital in east Jerusalem for surgery. Fighting for his life, he was transferred again, this time to Turkey, so doctors could remove shrapnel from his lung.

      “If I die I want to come home to be buried with my family,” Mohammed told his grandfather, who accompanied him to Turkey. The family said that Israel refused permission for the body to be flown into nearby Tel Aviv, so Mohammed’s grandfather brought the boy’s body home via Jordan, then over the Allenby Bridge by ambulance across the West Bank and Israel to Gaza’s Erez crossing and down to Rafah.

      It was dark when Mohammed and his grandfather reached Rafah. Immediately a fire was lit in the cemetery and the body cremated, his ashes interred near his cousins, bringing the total number killed in the family to 13.

      At least 2,200 Gazans are now known to have died in the 50-day Israel-Gaza war, which broke out on 17 July 2014 after escalating violence on both sides. Israel lost 64 soldiers in the same conflict and six Israeli civilians died, mostly from Hamas rocket fire.

Amongst the Palestinian dead were scores of families defined by Palestinian human rights groups as totally or partially “erased”, because so many in that single family have died. The Palestinian Centre for Human Rights in Gaza has defined 74 families with as many as 24 members killed from the same family, but the counting is still ongoing. The PCHR has also identified 165 Palestinian families that lost at least two members per family, and United Nations’ figures stand at 142 families with at least three members killed.^[1]