Mohamed Farra hadn’t seen his sister Simat in a quarter of a century. Now he knows he will never do it again. The war is just ending thousands of Palestinian families who have lived in the West Bank for decades, cut off and divided by the Israeli blockade of Gaza. Cameraman Mohamed Farra, 45, originally from the Strip, was doing a live broadcast for Al Araby during a protest in the West Bank city of Ramallah on Wednesday when he learned he had carried out an Israeli bombing that had already killed more than 7,000 people just took the lives of his sister, brother-in-law and three nieces. Both spoke on their cell phones for the last time that same morning, around seven o’clock, he reports.
“As a people, we have no hope,” he complains, devastated and with red eyes, in the living room of his house. The room hosts something like a wake without the dead, a funeral in the distance. “I’m sorry I can’t do anything,” he laments between calls from people expressing their condolences. In addition, he is aware that he has to endure the bitter grief from far away, even though Ramallah is only a hundred kilometers away from Khan Yunis, where the attack took place. If Farra had no access to Gaza before, this is even less the case now, under the bombs and surrounded by an army preparing to invade the land. Barely able to speak a word and in tears, it is one of his sons who offers the visitors coffee and dates.
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“We are fine,” was the news that the cameraman awaited daily by phone or social networks, confirming that his relatives were still alive under the constant bombings. Since violence increased with Hamas’s attack on Israel 20 days ago, Farra has made little attempt to maintain contact with them despite communication difficulties. He had ordered them never to be all together in the same place to avoid a missile killing them all at once.
The editor who accompanied him on Wednesday, Fadi al Asa, explains that when they learned of the fatal result, they tried to remove Farra from the scene without really knowing how to break the news to him. But misfortunes fly like bombs, and soon his phone rang. He was still wearing the bulletproof vest, as shown in the video taken at the scene as he was taken away in a car.
Video: Al Araby.
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Life goes on and so does the war. Al Asa maintains the rhythm of live broadcasts on Thursday, covering a demonstration in Ramallah’s central square in solidarity with the victims of Gaza. A sign made of traditional ceramics marks the distance to Jerusalem: 15 kilometers. In the middle is the concrete fortress of the Kalandia Pass, controlled by the Israeli security forces.
About 200 people, provided photos of corpses from Gaza, march through the streets surrounding the square in Ramallah, the West Bank’s administrative capital. They chant slogans against the occupation, deny being terrorists and rail against Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. “Please make our words heard,” asks Ama Matjar, a 61-year-old participant in the march.
Yasser Amor, a 45-year-old interpretation professor at Bir Zeit University, carries a white cardboard box in his hands explaining the reason for his presence at the protest. “The end of (Israeli) terrorism, the end of the Israeli occupation of Palestine and the right to self-determination,” he explains as he runs his finger over the text written in English. “Everything has gotten worse since 1948,” he comments, referring to the date of the founding of the State of Israel. That same year, the Palestinian people experienced the so-called Nakba (Catastrophe in Arabic), in which 700,000 people – more than half of the total population, according to the UN – were displaced by Israeli forces. In recent days, a million civilians have been displaced from the northern Gaza Strip by the bombardment after Israel issued an ultimatum. An exodus reminiscent of that of 75 years ago and to which Palestinians continue to refer today.
Mohamed Farra is originally from Gaza, but married a woman from the West Bank in 1998 and has lived in Ramallah ever since. During this quarter of a century he has not been able to return home. The last time was exactly when he returned from his honeymoon in Tunisia, he remembers. He added that he tried to return to the Gaza Strip five times, but the Israeli forces prevented him from doing so. This enclave is surrounded and isolated from the rest of the world by an authentic fortress, which consists of concrete walls, barbed wire, surveillance cameras, towers and hundreds of Israeli soldiers who control the entrance and exit of the Palestinian enclave.
The house in a four-story building in Khan Yunis (southern Gaza Strip) where Simat, Farra’s sister, lived with her husband Esam and their five children was hit by a projectile on Wednesday morning. In addition to the parents, the three daughters died: Adian, Rosol and Tuka, and the two sons were injured: Hatem and Khalil, rescued from the rubble. “We are all fighters for the country!” Hatem sings, among other religious phrases, on a hospital stretcher, according to a video published on social networks that shows his uncle Mohamed Farra. The teenager is still covered in dust and blood and his head is bandaged. “This is not a war. They’re just killing us,” Farra says as he stands to shake hands with two new visitors who have just arrived at his home.
The attack, which killed five members of that family, came hours before another Israeli bombing killed the wife and two children of Wael Dahdouh, Al Jazeera’s chief correspondent in the Gaza Strip. Since the Hamas attack on Israeli territory on October 7, around twenty Palestinian journalists have died in army airstrikes and the headquarters of 50 media companies have been destroyed or damaged. Farra is heartbroken just 24 hours after losing an important part of his family, but is already thinking about returning to the streets. “We have to continue telling stories as quickly as possible,” he defends.
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