The feelings of both sides

Ever wondered how it feels when your house gets destroyed on your head? And how does the pilot feel when he pushes the button that releases the bomb?

Let’s start with the story of my friend’s miraculous survival after her family’s house was demolished while they were still in it.

Haya Abu Dagga, 20, the oldest of seven children, was studying architecture; her childhood dream was to be an architect to help in building and rebuilding Gaza.

She has witnessed the second Intifada, the 2008-2009 aggression, 2012 aggression, the suffocating siege and now the current aggression. Haya can barely believe what’s going on, she can’t pull herself together.

At the start of the current Israeli assault of Gaza, Haya and her family had to leave their house in the middle of the night after Israeli forces attacked the area with poisonous gases. Their house was partly destroyed during the attacks.

The family stayed at her aunt’s house which was later bombed. They had to move again. One of their acquaintances gave them a small two-store house to stay in, but this was targeted by F-16 planes yesterday noon.

“Dad called me for lunch,” she said, “I told him I don’t want to eat, I just want to sleep and when I wake up I want to get out of this area, I hate it here and I don’t want to stay here anymore.”

She laid her head on the pillow and BOOM; a huge blast shook every corner of her house. It started to rain stones and shrapnel. “Suddenly, I found my siblings above each other and above me; I don’t know how it happened! It was horrific.”

“It was like a nightmare. For a moment I couldn’t believe it was real,” she said forcing words out.

We were covered by stones and sand, we couldn’t see anything through the thick smoke.

“It all happened in less than a second,” Haya said.

Her mum told them to come downstairs quickly, but that seemed impossible because the stairs were partly destroyed and nothing could be seen through the smoke.

Haya’s little sister fell down the stairs. The rest of her siblings managed to make their way to the ground floor, but Haya was trapped. “I kept rubbing my eyes trying to see but I couldn’t see anything, “she explained.

She started to lose hope, but she could hear her sister and started to move towards her voice, until she was reunited with her family.

They walked barefoot on a land full of thorns under the burning August sun. They didn’t know where they were heading; they were just running for their lives.

Haya’s mother and younger siblings couldn’t run very far, “my baby brother was crying, snuggling up to my mother, I took him, he was shivering,” she said.

When they finally made it to a safe place, her father told her to count all her siblings and made sure they were all there, he was bleeding but he didn’t even notice it until Haya told him. Both her father and brother were injured in the blast.

The Abu Dagga’s are not the only family who suffered in this way. Haya’s little brothers are not the only children with ruined childhoods, many families and children are suffering the same way.

Through the eyes of an Israeli soldier:

When a reporter asked Dan Halutz, an Israeli Air Force Lt. General and pilot, how it feels when he drops a bomb, he said: “No. That is not a legitimate question and it is not asked. But if you nevertheless want to know what I feel when I release a bomb, I will tell you: I feel a light bump to the plane as a result of the bomb’s release. A second later it’s gone, and that’s all. That is what I feel.”

“[To pilots] Guys… you can sleep well at night. I also sleep well, by the way. You aren’t the ones who choose the targets, and you were not the ones who chose the target in this particular case. You are not responsible for the contents of the target. Your execution was perfect. Superb. And I repeat again: There is no problem here that concerns you.”

The author is a blogger from Gaza; her writings have been published by Global Voices

The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Monitor.