Last night after S’s birthday party, I walked round the corner from Al Quds hospital complex with him to the re-occupied 101 Ambulance Dispatch Centre. (I suffered a momentary sense of homelessness when I went to Al Quds the other day and discovered the temporary dispatch room had returned to its former office identity and the “101″ sign was gone from the door.)
The regular Dispatch Centre is in the Red Crescent complex that they had to evacuate after the inital Dec 27 attacks, because of an unexploded rocket in it. It also includes a storage and distribution centre, and the ambulance park-up, which is burned and blackened, as are some of the ambulances.
I didn’t know, during those crazy days in Al Quds in Telal Howa, that Am, a friend of mine we’d lost touch with, actually was hiding very close to me in his family house there. Like Reem, (who by the way is doing ok in her business studies exams this week) they too were in the line of the tanks and didn’t dare move.
When I finally saw him last week, and my colleague N who stays with University professor Dr Asad’s family opposite the Red Crescent complex, they told me that the houses in that area had again that day received the recorded phone calls Israel sends to Gaza people, with the same instructions as were used during the January attacks: “Your houses will be destroyed - move away from them and go to the city centre”. I’d always thought Tel al Howa counted as the city centre. They and many others resignedly stayed home, though I imagine some families exhaustedly packed up again and vacated for a while. Nothing happened in their area, though shelling was occurring in Rafah around that time.
On January 19, the day after the “ceasefire”, I finally walked around this area, and understood just why everyone living in apartment buildings in this area ran to Al Quds hospital…
For more photos, go here.
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