Mohammed Omer

By Mohammed Omer

THE ISRAELIS called it "Operation Rainbow"-and insisted the name was generated at random by a computer. To the men, women, and children of Rafah who endured the slaughter, however, it was a bitter footnote to a week of horror. In Greek mythology, the rainbow was a bridge between earth and Olympus, between men and gods. In the Old Testament, after sending a flood that destroyed the world, God set a rainbow in the sky as a sign of peace and renewal. But in May of 2004, the shells and bombs in the night sky over Rafah brought only death. "Operation Rainbow" is an appropriate name in only one way: a year later, the images are still vivid, their evidence of Israeli terrorism against a civilian population undimmed.

After nearly three years of intifada, the residents of Rafah were familiar enough with Israeli incursions-the American-made Apaches overhead, the tanks and the shelling, followed by the bulldozers that would destroy homes, infrastructure, lives. Like Israel's previous invasions, Operation Rainbow was undertaken "for security reasons," ostensibly to find and destroy alleged smuggling tunnels running from Rafah under the border into Egypt. In May 2004, however, the Israeli army began its onslaught in the northern part of Rafah-far from the border in Tal Al Sultan and El Barazil-tearing up streets completely, destroying electric, water, and sewer lines, flattening whole blocks of houses, even bulldozing Rafah's small zoo.

Israeli snipers commandeered taller houses and took up positions on rooftops, shooting anything and anyone who moved, even killing two teenagers whose "hostile activity" consisted of taking laundry off a clothesline and feeding pet doves. All the while, the shells from the Apache helicopters turned its victims into scattered body parts. As the week wore on, people ran out of food, water and medicine. Ambulances were pinned down by Israeli fire and could not reach the injured. The morgue in Al Najjar hospital was overflowing and, when no one could venture outdoors to bury their dead, a commercial refrigerator that usually stored vegetables was pressed into service to hold corpses.

By Mohammed Omer

JABALYA CAMP, Northern Gaza, Oct. 10, 2004-It smells unbelievably bad here. To walk down any street-if you dare to-you skirt, or sometimes unavoidably walk through, pools of blood. There are shreds of human flesh-some of them unrecognizable as human remains-all over, on rooftops, plastered to broken windows, on the street. The stench of rotting blood mixes with the more acrid odor of flesh burned to black char by the rockets fired by the Israeli army's American-made Apache helicopters.

The sky is full of black smoke, some from the rocket explosions, but even more, it sometimes seems, from the endless fires of tires and other debris that people keep stoking. The smoke confuses the heat-seeking unmanned drone surveillance planes, so setting fires in any relatively open area may draw fire and let a bomb explode somewhat harmlessly.

All this smoke mixed with plaster and cement dust is a blessing and a curse. The stench of burning flesh and rotting blood masks to some extent the smell of raw sewage from broken sewer pipes and the tens of thousands of bodies unwashed for over a week now. Water to drink is a rare and precious commodity here-baths and showers have become impossible luxuries.