Palestinians across the world despair as entire families die

Middle-class diaspora waits for news, powerless to help their loved ones under bombardment in the Gaza Strip.

Pro-Palestinian rally in Washington calling for a ceasefire in Gaza. Picture: AFP

In previous rounds of conflict, relatives of people trapped in Gaza would phone to find out who had died in the latest airstrikes: a sister, a cousin or a nephew. Now, whenever a phone call is possible, they try to learn of the families that have died.

In the rush to take shelter, fleeing from the areas first in Israel’s line of fire, extended families are gathering in the darkness from a fear of isolation. When the bomb strikes, they die together, by the 10, 20, 30 or more. One family, the al-Astals, have lost 88 members.

“I have worked before to collate the names of the dead on Excel spreadsheets,” Izzeldin Bukhari, 38, said. “But I have never seen anything like this.”

In normal times, Bukhari is a celebrated Palestinian chef, who gives Levantine cookery classes and tours through Old Jerusalem.

Now he collates lists on a different scale. “The pages go on and on, name after name,” he said. “But all the same name, the same family.”

Bukhari lives in East Jerusalem but his mother is from Gaza and her family are still there – or they were. In one strike, her sister was killed, along with her brother-in-law, his brothers, their wives and their children – 31 people in all, in a residential block in Rimal, the most middle-class neighbourhood in Gaza City, where professional families such as his lived until it was levelled in the first two weeks of the war.

Gaza City is only 80km from Jerusalem and Ramallah, the de facto Palestinian capital on the West Bank. It is a telling sign that the lines of communication go round the world. Bukhari and his mother in Jerusalem were told of their loss by another sister, who lives in the United Arab Emirates and had been notified from Gaza.

Naila Ayesh, in Ramallah, was told by a surviving nephew in Turkey that his siblings and their children, along with other uncles and cousins, had been killed in another strike, 24 in all. Her sister was injured – burnt and her shoulder dislocated, but still alive.

Ayesh and her husband Jamal Zakout then had to tell their children, who live in Canada, that their cousins were dead.

The worldwide anger and protests at the air campaign over Gaza’s 227sq km might well in part be politically inspired. But they rest on a diaspora of lawyers and architects, such as Ayesh and Zakout’s son and daughter, and others who have sought a future where they can. Both siblings trained in Britain.

Gaza and the West Bank – with or without annexed East Jerusalem – are supposed one day to make up a unitary state in most well-meaning Western countries’ vision for the future resolution of the conflict.

They have never been further apart. It is hard to travel between them: permits are difficult to get. Before a work trip this year, ­Bukhari had not visited his relatives since 2008. His sister, who also lives in the Gaza Strip, has been able to visit Jerusalem based on her residency there, which a human rights foundation helps her maintain.

Modern communications help to keep these extended families in contact. Zakout is well known as a former adviser to the government in Ramallah and a leader of the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine, a secular left-wing faction. He grew up in a refugee camp in Gaza after his parents fled Ashdod, a city in what is now Israel, in the 1948 war. He says he and his wife have hundreds, even thousands, of relatives still in Gaza. When the lines go dead, as they did on Friday night, only the fear remains. Ayesh told her husband that all she could conjure of her family at the weekend was the face of her sister, covered with burns, as she had seen her on the video call they had been able to make after the strike.

“Those who died, died,” Ayesh said. “They have gone to their death. But my sister with her burnt face, her dislocated shoulder … that image I can’t get out of my mind.”

As an activist family, their life has been one of suffering. Ayesh suffered a miscarriage after an ­arrest. Their son, a lawyer in Canada, spent six months in prison with her as a baby. Zakout lost a brother, killed in an American strike in Lebanon during the civil war, and also spent time in prison.

He said the hours when the internet and phones went dead in Gaza at the weekend reminded him of being in solitary confinement in prison, when he knew the time only by the meals, counting the seconds in between, and nothing of the world beyond. “People are waiting to be killed in darkness, in blindness,” he said.

When the strike killed Bukhari’s cousins, his sister and her husband tried to reach the site. It was too late. A video from the scene shows the familiar crushed, blackened concrete, the concertinaed floors of their apartment block a gaping stump between the remains of the surrounding buildings.

He spoke to her again on Sunday to confirm that she had survived the long weekend. He said that even so, his relief was transitory. “It’s a game of uncertainty,” he added. “Even if you talk to your family at night, when you wake the next day you have no notion they are still OK.”

The Times