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The phone call came at around 4.20pm on Saturday. A
bomb had been dropped on the house at our small farm in northern
Gaza. My father was walking from the gate to the farmhouse at the
time. It was our beloved place, that farm and its two-storey white
house with a red roof. Nestled in a flat fertile agricultural plain
north-west of Beit Lahiya, it had lemon groves, orange and apricot
trees and we had recently acquired 60 dairy cows.
It was the closest farm to the northern border with
Israel. Ironically, we always thought the biggest danger there was
not from Israeli troops, who usually went straight past if they were
mounting an incursion, but from stray Hamas rockets aimed at the
Israeli towns north of us.
But shortly before sunset on Saturday, as Israeli
ground troops and tanks invaded Gaza in the name of shutting down
Hamas rocket sites, the peace of that place was shattered and my
father's life extinguished at the age of 48. Warplanes and
helicopters had swept in, bombing and firing to open up the space
for the tanks and ground forces that would follow in the darkness.
It was one of those F16 airstrikes that killed my father.
The house was reduced to little more than powder, and
of Dad there was nothing much left either. "Just a pile of flesh,"
my uncle, who found him in the rubble, said later with brutal
honesty.
Like most Gazans, my mother, my sisters and my wife –
who is nine months' pregnant – and I have spent the past week of the
Israeli onslaught trapped inside our flat in the city. But my father
had decided to stay up at the farm; he knew it would be impossible
to get back to tend the livestock if the expected troop invasion
began. But he called us every day.
The last time I saw him was on Thursday when he
brought cash and a bag of flour. We talked about the imminent birth
of my first child and how we would get my wife, Alaa, to hospital
amid the bombing and chaos. Of course, on Saturday evening there was
no hope of getting an ambulance up to the farm because the roads
were cut off by the Israelis. So my uncle and brother drove the 8km
and the rest of us sat, in shock, shivering in the dark apartment,
bed covers over us to keep warm, the sound of non-stop tank shelling
around us. Deep down we all knew Dad was dead. He would have been in
or near the house, and if an F16 strikes directly at your house you
know what it means.
They arrived to find a smoking pile of rubble. Most
of the cows lay dead; others had run off injured. Mahmoud, a teenage
relative, was with my father when the Israeli bomb smashed into the
house. The force of the airstrike threw him 300 metres. They found
Mahmoud's body in a neighbour's field.
We buried my father and Mahmoud yesterday morning in
a very quick funeral, knowing Israeli tanks were just 3km away, on
the outskirts of the city. We could hear the rattle of the
machine-gun fire accompanying the tanks. The Israelis may say there
were militants in the area of our farm, but I'll never believe it.
The most advanced point for rocket-launchers is 6km south. Up at the
border, it is just open farmland with nowhere to hide.
My father, Akrem al-Ghoul, was no militant. Born in
Gaza and educated in Egypt, he was a lawyer and a judge who worked
for the Palestinian Authority. After Hamas took over, he quit and
turned to agriculture. Dad's father, Fares, who had been driven out
of his home in what is now Israeli Ashkelon in 1948, had bought the
land in the 1960s.
During the second intifada and until the Israelis
withdrew from Gaza in 2005, the farm was taken over by Israeli
settlers, but after 2005 we went there every holiday. In Gaza, the
only escape is the beach or, if you are lucky enough, the farmland.
My father hated what Hamas was doing to Gaza's legal system,
introducing Islamist justice, and he completely opposed violence. He
would have worked hard for a just settlement with Israel and a
better future for Palestinians. When the PA gained control over the
West Bank, he moved to Ramallah to help establish the courts there.
My grief carries no desire for revenge, which I know
to be always in vain. But, in truth, as a grieving son, I am finding
it hard to distinguish between what the Israelis call terrorists and
the Israeli pilots and tank crews who are invading Gaza. What is the
difference between the pilot who blew my father to pieces and the
militant who fires a small rocket? I have no answers but, just as I
am to become a father, I have lost my father.
For Fares Akram, The Independent's reporter in Gaza,
the Israeli invasion became a personal tragedy when he discovered
his father was one of the first casualties of the ground war
By Fares Akram in Gaza
Monday, 5 January 2009
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