Interview with Nassim, Ottawa Man with Relatives in Gaza

I asked Nassim, a Palestinian Canadian who has relatives in Gaza, if he could be interviewed for the blog. He agreed. I want to find out the general sentiment. He is in his 40s-50s.

"To be honest with you, I have not slept for the past fifteen days. Sometimes, I sleep for two hours, but then I wake up because I have a nightmare because I dream that my mother may have been killed." His brother and sister, in addition to his mother live there, in a densely populated area near the center of Gaza city.

"My brother does not get much sleep either. He is a nurse for a hospital for the United Nations. It used to be a clinic, but now it became a hospital. He sees horrible things, bodies without heads, people without arms or missing legs, mainly civilians. He can't sleep at night, but you do what you have to do, as someone has to do the job"

I asked what life was like in his neighborhood,

"Our house has two cracks and may collapse from the sound of the shelling. The neighbor's house was demolished, and this affected our house. We have no windows. " It is winter in Gaza. From his neighborhood of 9 families, two people died, a child and a young policeman on his first job.

"Water is a luxury. People are rationing the water tanks wisely. Gone are the days when people took showers or had the luxury of washing their clothes. There is a market that sells vegetables. But there is no gas for cars, and no public transportation. Cheap taxis used to be public transportation, but they became immediate targets of F-15 planes. The Israelis would assume all taxis may carry suspicious people and would shoot all. People rely on neighbors cars, and saving gas to visit relatives in the hospital. The cars you see on TV have rationed gas to drive a short distance."

"For heat and cooking, people take wood from their homes, and from the ruins of neighbors' homes and burn it to survive."

I asked what the situation was:

"The Israelis destroyed a row of houses on the Rafah border and divide Gaza into the three towns, surrounded and sealed the three towns. What they are doing is collective punishment. They are cutting of the means to live because we exercised our right to vote. Some, but by far not all Palestinians, voted for Hamas, which is why they are making life unlivable for the Palestinian civilians so that they force Hamas out of hiding. They won't. One Israeli general said on TV that he will turn Gaza back to the 1950s, to the horrible conditions when we were deprived of all means of life. I didn't believe it when I saw it on TV, but now he kept his word."

"They are not targeting Hamas. They are targeting the civilian population, because they think if life is harsh enough of the civilians, they'll make Hamas surrender. It is not Hamas, but the civilian Palestinian population that is punished collectively because it exercised its democratic right to vote. We are punished because some, but not all of Palestinians voted for Hamas. We will not surrender. The Israelis don't understand. We could live in luxury without democracy. However, it would be a life without dignity. We can not live without dignity. We can not live without our democratic rights. Therefore, we can not surrender. Israel doesn't understand. If they kill our children, we will just have more children, but they can't wipe every Palestinian off the face of the earth."

I asked him what are the prospects of peace and the future.

"It is hard to live a normal life. This gives me a lot of pain. It is impossible, will take so many years to forgive, if at all. I can't believe what Palestinians may think peace is possible after something like this! How can you make peace after Guernica? We will never forget, and it will always cause us pain. Take the Israelis for instance, after what happened to the Jews in the second world war, even today, 60 years later, some of them still go on TV and describe their pain. We are no different. We will never forget this. The pain won't go away. For us, this attack on the civilian population will always give us pain, pain for many years to come. It is impossible to forgive after that, will take many years to forgive, many years for the pain to go away. It will take many, many years for me to live a normal life after this." "I can't sleep at night, I worry about my family."