Barcelona He is only 14 years old, but Baraa G. has already experienced the horrors of war first hand. And of a war that has crossed all the red lines. They arrived in Barcelona just ten days ago: he was able to flee Gaza because he and his sisters, Lamisse (11) and Dana (9), have Spanish passports. Abir, their mother, was able to accompany them, and the father, Mouhamin, has stayed in the Strip to take care of the grandparents.
Sign up for the International newsletter What seems far away matters more than ever
Sign up for it
They suffered the worst days of the war in their grandmother’s family home in the town of Zaitoun in central Gaza. The boy explains himself very clearly, calmly and coherently, and relates details that hurt. Things that no one, let alone a creature, would have had to live through. But in Palestine childhood ends very quickly: Baraa, who was born during the 2008 war, has already lived through three. And that has grown between Gaza and Barcelona.
The war in Gaza from the eyes of a Catalan-Palestinian teenager
“On October 7, I was about to get on the school bus, but the driver told us that there was no school because the war had started. We were locked in the house for 10 days, until a man came to us to say that they would bomb our building. With my mother, we could only put our passports, money and valuables in a backpack and we went to Zaitoun, to the house of the…”. “Grandma’s at home,” says the younger sister, who listens attentively and helps him with Catalan when the boy stumbles.
The mother shows us the photographs of her house, next to the beach in Gaza, where the dwarfs spent the best times in the summer, despite the harshness of life in the Strip, with or without bombings. El Baraa has fond memories of it, because despite the power outages and limitations on water and food due to the blockade, he had all his cousins close by. “And school was cooler,” recalls the little girl. The mother then tells her that, like many of her classmates, her Arabic teacher has died in the Israeli attacks. “She too?” the little girl asks in a husky voice, opening her big brown eyes. The mother nods her head yes. Abir keeps sliding his finger through the gallery of images on his mobile phone until the house in ruins appears. They have lost almost everything. “We couldn’t even take a change of clothes with us,” he says. What was supposed to be a stay in Gaza to visit family and for the children to study Arabic turned into hell.
At the grandmother’s house, the father’s brothers gathered with all their children and some close friends. There were about eighty of them. “It’s an old house, with very thick walls, and there you didn’t feel the bombardment as strong – says the teenager -. At night, when the bombs fell, the whole sky turned red. They bombed more at ten o’clock at night, so that we would go to sleep with fear, and at seven in the morning so that the fear would last us all day: we spent three days without being able to sleep,” he explains. The adults did everything they could to reassure the little ones, but it was impossible: “Mother hugged us tightly and told us it would be over soon, but we knew it wouldn’t.”
Queues to get dirty water
The boys were in charge of fetching water with bottles that they filled from the fountains, although it was dangerous: they had to risk going out into the street. One of the nearest wells was at the Greek Orthodox Church of Saint Porphyry, which the Israeli army bombed on 19 October. “There was a very long queue: you had to wait two hours for your turn and it was very dangerous, because when the Israeli planes saw a lot of people in a place they bombed there,” recalls the boy.
Church of
Saint Porphyri
Church of
Saint Porphyri
Church of
Saint Porphyri
Because the water purification plants were destroyed or could not operate due to lack of fuel, the liquid coming out of the springs was very dirty. “There were chillies and we had to filter it with a towel, and because it tasted really bad we put a squeeze of lemon on it,” recalls the boy. One bottle per person per day to drink, clean, go to the toilet… It seems impossible that you can resist like this for so many weeks.
And with food it was not easier. In the first days of the war, when there were still provisions in the warehouses, the family managed to buy 80 kilos of rice, but because they ran out of water they had no way to cook it. They had to resort only to a sack of dates. Three dates per person per day. Abir decided to give his ration to his children: he arrived in Barcelona in a dry state.
The family was lucky to have obtained an e-SIM card to be able to connect a mobile phone to the internet and receive news from the outside, despite the communications cut off imposed by Israel. One of the cousins would go up to the roof at night “for just 5 minutes to download the news” and come down quickly, Baraa says. So at night they could get an idea of what had happened during the day. “The neighbors knew and came to ask us what was going on.”
The father has stayed in Gaza
The hardest time for all of them was when they had to separate. Israel authorized the evacuation of people from Gaza with foreign passports. The dwarves would leave with the mother, but the father would stay behind to take care of the grandparents (their parents and in-laws), who could not even leave the house. The family’s link with Barcelona began when the father traveled to the Catalan capital in 2008 to heal from the severe burns he had suffered on his face in an Israeli bombardment in the 2008 war, shortly before the boy was born . The man underwent facial reconstruction surgery at the Hebron Valley Hospital that could not have been done in Gaza. And he ended up settling in Barcelona, where the rest of the family later moved. It was then that he and the children obtained Spanish passports. The woman only had a residence permit and applied for citizenship two years ago, but it was still being processed when the war caught them by surprise in Gaza again.
The woman and three children made the journey alone to Rafah, along the Salah Dine road, which crosses the Strip from north to south, with other Gazans following the evacuation order issued by the Israeli army. But instead of letting the civilians go, the soldiers stopped all the men. “There was a river of people and we walked in a line and every minute they stopped us. They fired a shot in the air and everyone stopped. With megaphones the soldiers gave instructions: “The one with the yellow jacket should come, the one with the mobile phone should stop. .. – the boy recounts – “The man in front of me was stripped and beaten, and when his wife tried to stop them they told her that they would take her too, so he had to keep walking.” It took 13 hours to walk the 30 kilometers between Zeitoun and Khan Yunis. And when they arrived, the next day, at the Rafah border crossing, they still had to wait another 11 hours because, since the mother did not have a Spanish passport, “the Israeli soldiers would not let her through.”
Now, a little calmer and knowing they are safe in Barcelona, hosted at the home of a Palestinian friend until they can return to the Barcelona neighborhood of La Sagrera, where they lived and went to school, they are grateful to have been able to escape from hell But they are consumed by anguish for their father and the rest of the family they have left behind. The eldest is clear: “What the Nazis did to the Jews, they are now doing to us.” Dana, when we ask her what she thinks will happen, answers, opening her big brown eyes: “That they will kill everyone in Gaza.”
2023-12-03 13:36:56
#Mother #hug #night #bombs #stop #knew #wouldnt
