The elderly, the invisible victims of the Gaza war

There was no mercy for Naifa al Sawada. She was 92 years old and had terminal senile dementia when the Israeli soldiers forced her children at gunpoint to leave her alone in her home in the Al Rimal neighborhood of Gaza City, her grandson, Ayman, says from Toronto (Canada). Ayyad. “His mind was long gone from her,” the man explains. The old woman could no longer eat, drink, or move without help, but her relatives’ pleas to the military to allow them to take her with them were of no avail. The woman died in her apartment sometime between March 21 and April 1. That is the only certainty that her family has, that they do not know how exactly she died. After searching tirelessly for her all that time in the hospitals, one of her sons found in her apartment the “little that was left of her in this world,” says her grandson: a few charred vertebrae, fragments of bones that they are sure are hers, buried by rubble and ashes. The Israelis “had set fire to the building. She was alone for ten days,” muses her grandson. In her voice, there is something that goes beyond desolation.

The childhood of the elderly woman, born in 1932, had passed in the Palestinian city of Bir as Sabi, which Israel later renamed Beersheva, about 110 kilometers south of Tel Aviv. The Gaza Strip as such did not exist. Yes, the homonymous city in the British mandate of Palestine. Already married, while still a teenager, she had moved with her husband to Gaza City when, in 1948, her entire family had to flee Bir as Sabi due to the Nakba (catastrophe), the expulsion or flight from their lands of 750,000 Palestinians. in the face of the advance and massacres of the Zionist militias. More than 1.7 million of the 2.2 million Gazans are refugees due to this exodus inseparable from the creation of Israel.

Gaza is a land of young people. Only 4.7% of its population is over 60 years old, according to Palestine’s central statistical office. With so many teenagers and children injured, maimed or on the lists of the more than 34,000 killed by the Israeli military offensive of the Gazan Ministry of Health, the deaths of the elderly have gone almost unnoticed.

A report by the Euro-med Human Rights Monitor organization warned in March of the “high” number of elderly victims, especially in relation to their low weight in the population: around 7% of those killed in the war were elderly. Some of these victims died in bombings, by sniper fire or by extrajudicial executions. One of them is reflected in a video by the authors themselves released by Al Jazeera. In it, an Israeli soldier brags about killing an elderly deaf man in Gaza.

Other elderly people have died from starvation, malnutrition, dehydration and “inadequate medical care,” says Euro-med Monitor. The health of the elderly is more vulnerable. In Gaza, even more so. According to official Palestinian data, more than 70% of the elderly in the enclave have at least one chronic illness. Before the war, the NGO Juzoor estimated that 45% went to bed hungry at least one night a week.

Like Al Sawada, many older people have perished in the most dangerous area of ​​Gaza: the north. In the mass graves recently discovered after the army withdrew from Kamal Adwan Hospital, there were elderly people. A large number “did not even arrive” at that or other hospitals, says Euro-med Monitor. They were killed or died in their homes and many of those deaths are not recorded. They are the “hidden casualties” of war, emphasizes the NGO HelpAge.

die alone

Naifa Al Sawada’s last days were spent amid shelling, tank fire and Israeli sniper fire during the second assault on the nearby Al Shifa hospital in mid-March. At two in the morning on the 21st, the soldiers blew up the doors of his house.

“We started shouting: We are civilians, women and children,” says Amal (who asks not to give her real name), daughter-in-law of the old woman, from southern Rafah. “They stripped the men naked and took them away tied up. They held us women at gunpoint and then ordered us to go south. I begged the soldier: ‘My mother-in-law is very old, she can’t eat or drink. Let me take her in her wheelchair. “I can’t leave her alone.”

Amal continued to plead “for 20 minutes.” The soldier refused. He “started screaming. He pointed his gun at me. ‘If you don’t leave, I’ll kill you,’ he told me,” he remembers.

The woman had put the old woman to bed: “I covered her and gave her the little food we had. She stayed lying on her right side.”

Her children tried to re-enter the apartment, but the “snipers were shooting at everything that moved,” Warda, also the false name of the old woman’s daughter, explained by phone from Gaza. The family then began a frantic search. They asked people who said they had seen the soldiers taking their mother; They asked the Red Crescent for help, they toured the hospitals. They even turned to an Israeli NGO and the newspaper’s journalist HaaretzAmira Hass, who asked the Israeli army about the old woman. Her response was that they didn’t know anything. Warda went to the morgue of the Baptist hospital in Gaza. There she saw “hundreds of mutilated, decomposed or charred corpses.” Her mother was not among them.

The Israeli army withdrew from Al Shifa hospital on April 1. That same day, the family entered the old woman’s building. They didn’t find her. On April 8, one of the sons returned to the apartment to search again. Covered in ash and debris, he found her bones. They were lying on their right side. “We will never know how she died. Hungry? Dehydrated? They burned the building… That’s how atrocious her death was,” laments her grandson.

Caught up

Not far from that building, Sami Mushtaha, 85, can’t stop crying. Over the phone, he explains how an Israeli missile tore off his legs and killed three of his grandchildren, ages 14 to 18.

“I was sitting on the patio and asked my daughter-in-law for coffee. She entered the house and my grandchildren followed her. Suddenly, everything shook. Something hit my leg. The neighbors came running and pulled me out from under the rubble. One of them carried me on his shoulders to the hospital. I asked: ‘Where are my grandchildren?’

Doctors amputated one of his legs. Two weeks later, the other. When he was about to leave the Al Shifa hospital, they had to amputate his first limb even higher. He is now trapped with his wife and one of his children in Gaza City. In a wheelchair, he cannot obey the Israeli evacuation order.

Many elderly Gazans were already dependent on wheelchairs or walkers to get around before the conflict. A Christian Aid consultant explains by email that his 85-year-old father-in-law is displaced in Rafah, along with three other elderly members of the family. The man suffered a stroke some time ago and is in a wheelchair. The virtual destruction of the Gazan health system has forced this and other elderly people to try to obtain the medication they need at their own expense.

“Older people often have little mobility. They cannot flee or travel kilometers looking for medicine, food or water,” says Dr. Umaiyeh Khammash, founder of Juzoor, from Ramallah (West Bank). This NGO assists more than 3,000 seniors in 50 shelters in northern Gaza. Many “are without family members.” A large number, the doctor deplores, suffer from “serious depression problems.”

Ibrahim, 80, died on February 17, his daughter Hend said by phone. “My father started his life with the Nakba and ended it in this war.” This “affectionate father” was born in Karatya, in what is now Israel. At four years old, he was one of those children thrown barefoot onto the roads shown in the Nakba photographs. He grew up in the Gazan refugee camp of Al Shati.

Four years ago, he had gone blind. The “proud old man who refused help” had to escape with his family from Gaza City and “face a strange environment.” He began to “isolate himself, stopped talking and refused to take his medication. He told us to take him to where the Israelis could shoot him. He could not bear such horror. We tried to get them to help him at the hospital, but they were overwhelmed by the wounded. [más de 77.000, según las autoridades de la Franja]” laments Hend.

Ibrahim “never forgot the thirst he suffered during the Nakba,” explains his daughter. Those memories that the poet Mahmud Darwish said made “the invaders afraid” always accompanied him. He is buried in Rafah, in the land of Palestine, as was his wish. And that is one of the “few consolations” Hend has left.

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