All eyes are focused on Lebanon, but this piece in Slate at a photographer’s experience in Gaza (as well as his photos) is worth more than a glance.
While it may seem odd to commute between Gaza and New York, I’ve been working here off and on for almost three years, and the situation now is as bad as I have seen it. My photographer friends here tell me that Israel’s incursion into Rafah in spring of 2004 was worse—so many bodies piled up in one neighborhood that locals had to keep them in a walk-in vegetable cooler—but I wasn’t here for that. More than 100 people have died since what the Israelis are calling “Operation Summer Rains” began, and while a lot of them were militants, a lot of them were not.
Most days here in Gaza begin in the morgue. My driver and fixer, Mahdi, picks me up at my occasionally air-conditioned hotel in the morning and we head to whatever hospital is closest to wherever the Israelis are currently. The Israelis have been moving around a lot—a few days here, a few days there. The militants tend to operate only in their own neighborhoods, so the press corps has been speculating that the Israelis are trying to attract the most intense militants in each area to the tanks and then kill them all. Whatever the plan is, that has certainly become one of the results. The problem, of course, is that these clashes are taking place in and around residential neighborhoods, so every time a tank shell misses the militants, there’s a good chance it’ll hit someone’s home or someone’s kid.