Meliha Çelik
“If I must die, you must live.
To tell my story…”
(Palestinian academic-poet Refaat Alareer)
We had two options to enter Gaza. Either Rafah in the south of Gaza on the Egyptian borderor Beit Hanoon (Erez) in the north on the Israeli border. So it was two crossings that youwould curse at each end. There was no other way. One was controlled by Egypt and the otherby Israel. In fact, Israel controlled both. The Palestinians’ passage through both gates was at their whim. All kinds of interrogations, mockery, insults and worst of all, permits that werenever given…
International aid workers, members of the press and a small number of Palestinian civilianswere usually allowed through Erez. You had to apply to the Israeli authorities weeks in advance to get a permit. Fortunately, we had permits because we were journalists.
Finally, when the huge iron gates were opened, we were able to enter Gaza… Anyone who has read the Israeli narrative and Palestine could see this gate as Rodin’s famous ‘Gates of Hell’. Or one could think that one was traveling on a fantastic adventure like Alice, who heard thephrase ‘Follow the white rabbit’. But Gaza was neither Dante’s hell, nor Alice’s wonderland, nor a place where Palestinian youth would joke “Welcome to Texas” when they found youfriendly. This was just Gaza. A place that was probably like no other.
Just a few weeks earlier we had set foot on the site of a terrible massacre! This was a placewhere, in July 2014, Israel launched its “Protective Edge” air, sea and land offensive, killingmore than 2,000 people and injuring around 11,000.
It was Gazans’ first holiday after the war and the first day of Eid al-Adha. Many places weregray rubble, with twisted rebar jutting out between them. Schools, mosques and hospitalswere among the buildings reduced to rubble by bombs. Even playgrounds, olive trees, strawberries in the fields and flowers on the balconies suffered from Israeli attacks.
Almost everywhere we were greeted by hundreds of empty, freshly dug graves lined up sideby side. Hundreds of pits competing with fresh graves. It would not take you days to visit thishandful of land consisting of five governorates. North Gaza, Gaza City, Deir el-Belah, KhanYounis and Rafah… Two days would be enough to visit every part of Gaza, even if youlingered a bit in some neighborhoods with tea and coffee breaks.
And the people of Gaza…
Gaza was an open-air prison, as everyone said. We could see the effects of the economicblockade everywhere in Gaza, where people were forced to live on less than 2 dollars a day.
Palestinians were like Erwin Schrödinger’s cat, the famous physicist who was put in a box andleft to his fate. Gaza was the object of many experiments. Could this really be a laboratorycreated by global powers for horrible experiments? A horrible laboratory where all kinds of chemical weapons and poisonous gases are carefully tested, where effects and resistance aremeasured! Were the Palestinians the test subjects in a parallel universe where their chances of survival were being monitored? If one’s ability to survive in this apocalypse and one’sresistance is measured, Gaza was passing this test with flying colors. By paying a very heavyprice, of course!
A neighborhood that has paid these heavy prices many times and passed through the toughesttests attracted our attention.
This was a neighborhood where Israel carried out the deadliest attacks in the Gaza Strip. Thisneighborhood, where they wanted to destroy not only the existing buildings and houses, but also its spirit, persistently refused to be defeated. As the residents said, they were stubborn tolive, to exist. Shujaiya, one of the largest neighborhoods in Gaza City, means ‘courage’ in Arabic. As Refaat Alareer, an academic, poet and activist who was deliberately targeted andkilled by Israel in December 2023, said;
“Shujaiya refuses to be defeated. Shujaiya is now the essence of the resurrection that refusesto kneel to Israeli barbarism.”
“We are the stories that are told to us,” said Alareer, who is also a Professor of Literature andhas been nicknamed ‘Son of Shujaiya’. And time and time again, he said, they are nevernumbers.
The Son of Shujaiya became a target after some of his social media posts were viewedmillions of times. Alareer described the Al-Aqsa Flood operation on October 7 as “legitimateand moral” and compared it to the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. After weeks of death threats, thebuilding where Refaat was staying was bombed and the Son of Shujaiya was martyred likethousands of other neighborhood residents.
“Shuja’iyya; A Children’s Republic”
The Shujaiyye neighborhood was one of the poorest and most populated areas of Gaza. I waslucky enough to visit the neighborhood twice, and I say lucky because it was a bastion of resistance and hope despite many attacks. It was also the neighborhood with perhaps thelargest population of children in the world. Shujaiya, the eastern gate of the Gaza Strip andone of the largest neighborhoods in the city, has its roots in the battles with the Crusadersduring the reign of Sultan Saladin. According to some sources, the area was named Shujaiyehafter Shujauddin Osman Kurdi, who excelled against the Crusaders.
During the Mamluk period, Shujaiyeh had an economically prosperous life that was the envyof other neighborhoods in the city. So much so that there were dozens of historical buildingsleft! All of them were destroyed one by one during the Israeli attacks. Among those destroyedwas the historic Mahkame Mosque, built in 1455.
Ibn Osman, one of the largest historical mosques in Gaza, was also in Shujaiya. It was thesecond most crowded mosque in Gaza on Fridays. Gazans call this Mamluk mosque the Great Mosque. The mosque, with its magnificent Mamluk architecture, was so named because it was built by Ahmed bin Uthman, a native of Nablus.
The northern part of the neighborhood was known as the Kurdish Shujaiyeh, while thesouthern part was known as the Turkmen neighborhood due to the large number of Turkishand Kurdish families who settled there during the Ayyubid period.
Shujaiyeh, where most houses had at least one martyr, was also a neighborhood of famoustribes with strong family ties. Hillis, Dogmus, Turkmen, Turkmen, Jendiya, Hasnin, Jaberi, Kuriqi, Almghani and Hajjaj were some of these large families.
Shujaiyeh was one of the most heavily bombed areas in the 2014 war, which went down in history as the “Shujaiyeh Massacre”. What we saw that year and what we heard fromwitnesses was horrifying. When we visited again in early 2017, we couldn’t believe our eyes. The destroyed neighborhood had quickly recovered from the devastation, the rubble had beencleared away and residents had rebuilt their homes. When describing that day, almost all of thepeople from Shujaiyeh started with the following sentence: “There were dead everywhere!” F-16s, tanks, the never-ending sound of bullets… Killing every moving creature withouthesitation, destroying children and the elderly as if they were playing a war game on a computer, not allowing ambulances, shooting health workers and journalists covering theincident… This brutality unfortunately still continues.
Although the neighborhood had been razed to the ground, there were still people living in thewrecked houses. We visited some of them. A 60-year-old woman asked us, “Where can wego? This is our home. They want to expel us all from our land. They want to destroy us fornot leaving.” Most of those we met had lost several members of their families. They coveredthe doors and windows with sheets or blankets and tried to survive in their destroyed homes. I met a young mother, about 25 years old, and walked through the rooms of her destroyedhouse. Her four-year-old daughter’s rocking toy horse stood among the rubble like a freshhope. “There is no water, no bathroom, no bed to sleep on, no food… But we will never stop living, never stop hoping,” she said.
Feyza, 47, lived among the destroyed houses with her four children and husband. There wasno way she could forget those terrible days and she remembered every detail. “It wasRamadan… When the first attack took place, it was very shortly before iftar. We threwourselves outside. In the second attack, it was nighttime when we left the house. When theystopped dropping bombs, I wanted to look at my house. I was walking towards the house. A tank was standing in front of it and my house was completely burnt. We had spent everythingwe had to build that house. You work your whole life to buy a house. With a lot of difficultyyou get a house and then you see it destroyed…!”
Former Israeli soldier Eran Efrati, an anti-occupation activist at the time, interviewed severalsoldiers involved in the Shujaiyeh attack. While Efrati stated that the soldiers carried out theattacks on official orders, the statements of some of the soldiers sent chills down our spines. The soldiers entered Shujaiyeh with tanks and drew an imaginary red line and decided amongthemselves to kill anyone who crossed it. And they killed everyone who crossed the line. Thisis how Salem Khalil Shamali, a 20-something man whose killing in the Shujaiyeh attack wascaptured on video and whose images shook us all to the core, should have been killed. In thevideo, Shamali was wounded by a sniper and was seen lying on the ground, trying to stand upand being shot again and again, even though he was unarmed.
So why were the occupying soldiers leaving no stone unturned in Shujaiyeh in their hatredand revenge? While doing a little research, I came across an article by author and historianMurat Bardakçı. Bardakçı makes interesting observations about Shujaiyeh and writes as follows. “Gaza’s Mantartepe, which we lost in November 1917 after the destruction of only thelast soldier of the 11th Company of the 32 Regiment, is today’s Shujaiyeh, where Israelibombs took at least 60 lives the previous day. One of the most strategic hills in Gaza, “Shuja’iyya”, or “Hayye’l- Shuja’iyya” in its full name, means “Neighborhood of Heroes” andwas named after the nomadic Turkmen and Kurdish tribes who settled there eight centuriesago during the Mamluks’ reign heroically stopped the Crusades in the 13th century, and thememory of the struggle was preserved with this name for centuries, and we call Shuja’iyya“Mantartepe” after the name of the “Ali Mantar Tomb” located there. Shujaiyeh, where manyinnocents are massacred almost every day, including children, children, men and women, wasthe grave of hundreds of Mehmet soldiers 97 years ago with British shells and bombs…
Therefore, today, as we stand with the helpless Palestinians whose lives are being taken byIsrael, we must also remember the hundreds of Mehmet soldiers of the 11th Company of the32nd Regiment who fell to the ground in Shujaiye 97 years ago, but whose bones are nolonger even left!” (Habertürk Newspaper- 21.07.2014)
For hours we wandered through many wrecked streets and between houses. A few youngpeople doing parkour in front of the destroyed Vefa Hospital was perhaps one of the moststriking sights of life here. On one side, the wrecked wheelchairs of the hospital and on theother side, young people doing parkour among the rubble…
We passed by a school in Shujaiyeh. The state of Subhi Abu Kereş Primary School, whichwas hit by bombs, was deplorable. Students were studying among piles of rubble. The greenblackboard hanging on the wall of one of the classrooms we entered was missing its center. The teacher was trying to scribble something on the riddled blackboard.
The teachers we spoke to told us that the children had difficulty sleeping, that the noise of thewarplanes was their biggest fear, and that they were sensitive to loud noises. They were doingtheir best to help them overcome their fears and forget what they had been through. But it wasn’t enough, because most of them had lost at least one family member or close relative, and most of the students went to ruined houses after school.
Headmistress Sahra Delu said: “When the children first saw their school, they were veryscared. Some of them were crying, their psychology was very disturbed. We organizedprograms with psychologists to help the students relax, and these programs gave them somerelief.” While we were filming, we encountered children on every street corner, doorstep, window or chimney, like the medicinal thyme of Gaza.
There were more than 20 thousand orphaned children in Gaza then, with a populationapproaching two million. Now this number is much higher. Most of them were children wholost their parents in the war… In other words, Gaza was not only a children’s paradise but alsoan orphanage. According to the United Nations, 1,500 children were orphaned in Gaza duringthe last attack in 2014.
Gaza had one of the highest birth rates and the highest population density in the world. This is why there are so many people per square kilometer. Gazans were born in order not to perish. This is what it must have been like to exist and multiply again and again in thousands whilesomeone was trying to destroy them.
Dr. Iyad Rantisi, an obstetrician and gynecologist who was arrested during the recent attacksand martyred in prison under torture, gave us an interesting piece of information. Rantisi said, “The rate of cesarean births in Gaza is around 25%. And cesarean births can be repeated eightor nine times. It is generally recommended that awoman should not have more than threecesarean sections. But this is not the case in Gaza, which loves children. Women who givebirth 8 times by caesarean section are as healthy as women who give birth once by caesareansection…” How so? But all we know… By the way, the martyred Dr. Iyad Rantisi said that he performed an average of 200 deliveries a month, 50 of which were caesarean sections.
Now there are no doctors, no hospitals, no Shujaiyye left in Gaza… All that is left is the epicand honorable resistance of a handful of people who defy the world…
