The management of the Beit Hanun hospital decided to dig a well in the
hospital's yard. By Saturday, laborers and bulldozers were already on
the job.
That is how the hospital is readying itself for the next invasion by
the
Israeli army.
The hospital, like the rest of Beit Hanun, has faced serious water
supply
difficulties due to the week-long military assault on the city and its
43,000
inhabitants. On the third night of the invasion, the army removed about
300
people from their homes in anticipation of the planned explosion of a
nearby
building. Everyone went to the hospital, joining the many injured
individuals
who were already there. Women and children who had gone out to the
street
Friday morning were also sent to the small hospital by soldiers.
Hundreds of people gathered there, exhausted and frightened by two
sleepless
nights, by the unending weapons fire from the positions taken up by the
Israel
Defense Forces in the houses it had occupied, by the sound of
explosions and
roar of dozens of tanks and armored personnel carriers that advanced
through
the streets shredding the roads, knocking down electricity poles,
breaking
water and sewage pipes, and destroying walls and fences.
Normally, the hospital uses
The hospital learned other lessons as well. The refrigerator in its
morgue had
room for three bodies. Another refrigerator has been added, with room
for six
additional corpses. The hospital will also purchase an underground
diesel fuel
tank. The western part of the hospital was hit during last week's
invasion, a
precedent whose lesson is that in the future, flammable materials must
be kept
out of the range of IDF bullets. The hospital also asked for a budget
for
ambulances with front-wheel drive, since the current ones could not
easily
navigate the streets torn up by the tank treads.
The assumption is that the Israeli army will continue to invade,
destroy and
damage infrastructure - either intentionally, or because that is the
nature of
tanks - impeding water and electricity supplies and shooting at
civilian
institutions. The army will not change, and no one will restrain it.
Therefore,
appropriate preparations must be made.
But how can one prepare for the complicated and prolonged to the level
of
life-endangering coordination involved in evacuating the sick and
wounded?
Hospital director Dr. Jamil Suleiman tells the story of a man, about 50
years
old, who suffered a heart attack. The medical team waited for about two
hours
before receiving permission from the army to rescue him. The man died.
In the
case of a woman who was about to give birth, the coordination took five
hours
and eventually she gave birth in the ambulance. It took about 10 hours
to bring
a man with leg injuries to the hospital by ambulance. The ambulance
kept
running into tanks that blocked its progress.
The sterile, deceptive expression "IDF operation" commonly used in
the Israeli media, conceals thousands of details of killing,
destruction and
terror carried out by the Israeli war machine and the commanders and
soldiers
that operate it - in Beit Hanun last week and in other assaults and
invasions
over the past six years that were termed "operations."
One of those who disappeared in this manner is Bara Fayyad, aged four.
Soldiers
burst into the Fayyads' home, made of tin, plaster and asbestos,
through the
wall they destroyed using explosives. The meager house and its contents
were
badly damaged by the explosion. Throughout Beit Hanun, frightened
children
clung to their parents everywhere they went. Bara and his brothers were
clinging to their parents at dawn Friday when the latter went outside
to wash
their hands in a sink in the yard prior to morning prayers. A missile
fired
from a helicopter or an unmanned aerial vehicle - the neighbors do not
know which
- hit the yard and created a deep hole. Bara was killed.
Also among those who disappeared are Abu Bassam, 52, and his two sons.
All
three were injured when an Israeli missile landed on, and badly
damaged, their
house. Abu Bassam was wounded again, in the leg, by sniper fire when he
went to
the outhouse in the yard of relatives he was staying with after
suffering his
original injury.
At least four civilians were shot and injured twice by soldiers. They
disappeared from Israeli public awareness, like Mazen Kafrana, one of
thousands
of men rounded up from their homes, arrested, briefly interrogated and
released. Mazen was released at the Erez crossing and walked home. The
area was
under curfew, and soldiers shot him to death.
Twenty-five houses also disappeared from the media. They were destroyed
completely, while another 400 were damaged, some of them so badly they
have to
be demolished. All told, about one-tenth of the 4,500 residential
buildings in
the town were damaged. The Beit Hanun municipality estimates the cost
of the
damage at about $14.5 million, in addition to the $6 million in damages
from
July's attack.
The lack of desire by the Israeli public to know is reinforced and
completed by
the "lack of space" in the media and the hierarchy of editing that
deletes critical information about the Israeli army and, in effect,
about
Israeli society - a society that is constantly manufacturing
destructive
capabilities, and sending its twenty something-year-olds to destroy
lives,
cities and futures.