Life behind the Gaza blockade

An Irish documentary shows the resilience of the Gaza Strip residents, writes EOIN BUTLER

WHILE FILMING in the Jabaliya refugee camp last year, documentary maker Dearbhla Glynn stumbled upon one of the thousands of bombed-out homes and apartment blocks that clutter the war-ravaged landscape. “Three storeys had ruptured into a giant V,” she recalls. “It looked as though a gentle push would be enough to knock the whole thing down.” As she admired the eerie beauty of the bombed-out structure, she noticed, to her astonishment, that there were people inside.

"We discovered an entire family living in the rubble. The children had their books out and were doing their homework. Their mother was cooking on a stove." The scene is one of the most jarring in Glynn's short documentary Gaza: Post-Operation Cast Lead, which has been nominated for an Irish Council of Civil Liberties (ICCL) Human Rights Film Award. "The children's cousins, who had lived across the road, were killed in the bombing. But this family stayed put. They had nowhere else to go."

On December 27th 2008, after months of sporadic rocket fire into Israel from Gaza, the Israeli army launched its latest all-out assault on the besieged enclave, codenamed Operation Cast Lead.

In the three-week offensive that followed, 1,434 Palestinians were killed (including 431 children) and another 70,000 were displaced. The survivors – “trapped, traumatised and terrorised” in the words of Irishman John Ging, the head of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency in Gaza – were often forced to live without electricity or running water.

This was the situation that confronted Glynn, the Irish director of Dust Devils and Dambe – The Mali Project, when she arrived in Gaza in summer 2009. “I don’t think anyone can fully appreciate what’s happening there unless they have witnessed it themselves,” says Glynn. “Police stations, cement factories, graveyards and hospitals were all completely destroyed in the 2008/09 War. This was a very deliberate attempt to crush the infrastructure of the place.”

Despite the hardships endured on a daily basis, the siege has not yet broken the spirit of some of Gaza’s 1.5 million residents. An old man Glynn encountered while shooting the documentary told her that his home had been destroyed, his son killed and he had lost everything he owned. When she met him, he was busy planting a new garden.

“They seem to have this amazing faith that Allah will help them, that they have to get on with things. Even the family living in the toppled house welcomed me with these wide, beautiful smiles. They welcomed me into their home, invited me to sit down on a brick and made me a cup of tea. In times of hardship, people’s faith becomes stronger. That’s what keeps them going.”

Gaza: Post-Operation Cast Leadis one of five films nominated for the ICCL Human Rights Film Awards. See humanrightsfilmawards.org. The finalists will be screened and the winner announced at the Light House Cinema, Dublin on June 17