Dear President Biden,
I am writing to you for the second time. I first wrote to you on November 4 after 47 members of my community, including 36 members of my own family, were murdered in a single attack by the Israeli Occupation Forces (IOF). The massacre took place in the Khan Younis refugee camp, located in the southern region of the Gaza Strip, where people were supposed to be safe, as your ally Israel claims.
I don’t know if my first letter reached you or if your media team informed you of its contents. Either way, you haven’t changed your position. Your unequivocal support for Israel, including through significant arms transfers, means that many more such massacres have been committed since then with your help.
Since I wrote this letter, I have lost 220 more members of my own family.
Just a month ago, on January 31, my father’s cousin, Khaled Ammar, 40, displaced to Khan Younis, was killed along with his entire family when the place where they were staying was bombed by an Israeli tank. Khaled’s wife, Majdoleen, 38, their four daughters, Malak, 17, Sarah, 16, Aya, 9, and Rafeef, 7, and their two sons, Osama, 14, and Anas, 2 years old, all died in the attack.
The victims also included Khaled’s disabled brother Mohammed, 42, and their mother Fathiya, 60. Their bodies remained unburied for more than a week. Khaled’s surviving brother, Bilal, 35, made repeated appeals for help to the Palestinian Red Cross, but they were unable to send a rescue team to search for survivors because the IOF did not contact them. not granted permission.
Majdoleen and her two young daughters, Rafeef and Aya, came to see me last summer during my visit to Gaza. I still remember Rafeef trying to get on my youngest niece, Rasha’s, bike. I still remember them running down the street, eating the candy they bought at my cousin Asaad’s store. Their laughter still rings in my ears.
But today, Mr. President, there is neither Aya, nor Rafeef, nor Asaad, who was also killed by the IOF along with his wife, his children, his mother, his two sisters, his sister-in-law and their children. There are no roads, no houses, no shops, no laughter. Only echoes of devastation and the deafening silence of loss.
Today, the residential area of the Khan Younis refugee camp where I grew up is reduced to ruins. Tens of thousands of refugees, including all surviving members of my extended family, are now displaced to al Mawasi and Rafah. They live in tents. They are not doing well, Mr. President.
I haven’t heard from them for a while because Israel cut off communications. On February 10, my nephew Aziz, 23, walked three kilometers despite danger to reach the outskirts of Rafah and use the Internet. He told me that death had avoided them several times but that it had spared them for now. They are hungry, thirsty and cold.
There is no electricity, no sanitation, no medicine, no communications, and no services available to them, despite the International Court of Justice ruling that Israel must ensure the delivery of aid to Gaza.
If people survive Israeli bombs, they may not survive injuries sustained during Israeli bombings and the explosion of communicable and non-communicable diseases. The health system has collapsed under the Israeli onslaught.
In February, IOF besieged Nasser Hospital in Khan Younis, the second largest in the Gaza Strip. There were 300 medical staff trapped in the hospital, alongside 450 patients and around 10,000 displaced people seeking shelter in or near the hospital.
For days, IOF did not allow a World Health Organization (WHO) relief team to evacuate patients and staff or deliver much-needed food, medical supplies and fuel. Throughout this period, medical staff showed remarkable courage and dedication to their patients, trying to keep them alive in the face of Israeli attacks. A striking example is Dr. Amira Al Assouli, who rushed under Israeli fire to help one of the wounded in the hospital courtyard.
Countless people seeking shelter in the hospital premises were killed or injured; some of these murders were filmed.
On February 13, IOF sent a young man named Jamal Abu Al Ola, whom Israeli soldiers had arrested and tortured, to the hospital to tell the Palestinians sheltering there to leave. Dressed in a white PPE suit and with his hands tied, he delivered the message then, as instructed, walked towards the hospital gate, but was shot dead. His execution was documented by a journalist at the hospital and made public.
Will you order an investigation, Mr. President? Will you demand that those responsible for the murder of Jamal and many others at Nasser Hospital be punished or will you once again accept the OIF’s version of events?
On February 15, IOF attacked the hospital, evicting thousands of people under heavy bombardment and forcibly disappearing hundreds of people – including at least 70 medical staff. This continues a trend started in Gaza City. When IOF attacked Al Shifa Hospital, they arrested some of its staff, including Dr. Mohammed Abu Salmiya, the hospital’s director, who remains in Israeli prison. The excuse then, as now, is that they were looking for a Hamas command center – a false narrative that you, Mr. President, have happily embraced.
During the raid at Nasser Hospital, the cutoff of electricity and oxygen led to the death of at least eight patients. When a WHO team was finally allowed into the hospital, its staff described it as “a place of death.” After hundreds of patients were evacuated, some 25 medical staff remained behind to care for the hospital’s remaining 120 patients, without safe access to a supply of food, water or medicine.
Among the regular patients at Nasser Hospital was my relative, Inshirah, who suffered from kidney failure and required dialysis every week. She lived in the Al Qararah region, east of Khan Younis.
When IOF bombed her area, she moved to a camp for displaced people. When IOF attacked the camp, she moved to Hay al Amal. When the latter was bombed, her children decided to move her near the Nasser hospital.
As conditions at the hospital deteriorated, the frequency of his dialysis sessions was reduced to once every 2 weeks and then once every 3 weeks, causing him significant suffering. When IOF besieged the hospital, Inshirah was forced to leave. Then we lost contact with her and her children. We don’t know if she survived.
The vast majority of people with chronic illnesses like Inshirah cannot access proper healthcare after Israel’s systematic destruction of Gaza’s healthcare system. It’s a death sentence for them. Destroying a health system is a war crime, did you know that, Mr. President?
Mr. President, 2.3 million people in Gaza live in a concentration camp. They are relentlessly starved and killed. They are bombarded in their homes, in the streets, while they fetch water, sleep in their tents, receive aid and even cook. In Gaza, people tell me that drinking water costs blood, that a loaf of bread is dipped in blood, and that moving from one place to another means bleeding.
Even just looking for food to feed your children can kill you – as happened to many parents on February 28. Some 112 Palestinians were murdered by IOF while trying to obtain flour to feed themselves and their families.
Their deaths are painfully real. Just like the death of little babies like Anas, children like Aya, mothers like Majdoleen and elderly people like Fathiya. They are among the more than 30,000 who have been recorded in the official death toll; thousands more have perished but are registered as “missing”.
Some 13,000 of those murdered are children. Many are starving. Israel kills 6 children every hour. Each of these children had a name, a story and a dream that will never come true. Don’t the children of Gaza deserve to live, Mr. President?
Palestinians are among the most educated nations in the entire Middle East. They are a very curious people. The most burning question they ask themselves today is: “why”? Why must the Palestinian people endure a genocide perpetrated by your ally with your weapons and your money, while you refuse to call for a ceasefire? Can you tell us why, Mr. President?
The opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial position of Tel Aviv Tribune.
