Gaza and Israel: bloggers' voices
Updated on 06 January 2009
Those on both sides of the conflict are using blogs and Twitter to give eyewitness reports from inside and around Gaza.
Gaza
Laila El-Haddad, a Palestinian mother and journalist from Gaza, blogs about flyers dropped by Israeli aircraft, and "robo-calls" from the Israeli Army:
"One such flyer seeks to recruit Palestinian collaborators. Signed by the 'Israel Defense Forces command', and addressed to 'the residents of the Gaza Strip', the flyer states: 'You hold the responsibility for your own fate!'
"It invites Palestinians to call or email the Israeli army 'to inform us about the location of rocket launching sites and the terrorist gangs that made you hostages of their actions.' "
"My father has received a number of calls- including one as we finished another CNN interview, and we were on Skype. He tried to put the phone on speaker for me.
"The rough translations: 'urgent message: warning to the citizens of Gaza. Hamas is using you as human shields. Do not listen to them. Hamas has abandoned you and are hiding in their shelters. Give up now'. "
"What made the situation more complicated was the screaming of kids all over the quarter. It was the only thing you could hear after the airstrikes."Jawad Harb, CARE project manager and blogger
Jawad Harb, a CARE project manager living in Gaza, 500m from the Egyptian border, in which he recounts the screams of children after airstrikes on 28 December.
"What made the situation more complicated was the screaming of kids all over the quarter. It was the only thing you could hear after the airstrikes.
"All the children in the neighbourhood ran downstairs to the main road, crying and screaming in such a way I have never witnessed in my whole life.
"The street was full of parents trying to find their kids and bring them back home. Among this chaos, I barely gathered my own children and went back home."
Professor Said Abdelwahed describes a series of Israeli air raids on the Moments of Gaza blog, which features contributions from activists and citizens inside Gaza.
"One four-storey building was totally destroyed by a bomb from F16s. Hundreds and hundreds of people escaped their lives from fight zones at the outskirts of the city.
"They resorted to their relatives inside the city, or took refuge to UNRWA [UN relief agency] schools."
Israel
From the other side, Sarah from Be'er Sheva, Israel, talks of what it's like to live under fear of missiles launched from Gaza.
"So, there have been quite a number of rocket attacks, and the accompanying siren warning beforehand," she posted on 2 January.
"We must drop whatever we are doing and get into a safe place. Inside, it is in our sealed room (steel reinforced walls and window, and shatterproof glass), and outside it is anywhere that looks safe.
"It could be in the stairway of the nearest building, or just lying flat where you are."
"OK, this is my first war in Israel," she wrote earlier today. "My first war ever, actually.
"It's been just about a week. The siren whipped me out of bed, cottonheaded, three times in the past 10 hours.
"The booms followed, faithfully. My kids are used to it. My nerves are shot."
"12:26pm: 16 additional Hamas rockets hit Israel, injuring an infant in the town of Gedera."Qassam Count on Twitter
Others have turned to micro-blogging service Twitter to get the word out about rocket attacks.
A group of developers in Sderot, a few miles North East of the Gaza Strip, have put together a news tracker Twitter account and Facebook application which allows others to track Qassam rocket impacts. A typical report: "12:26pm: 16 additional Hamas rockets hit Israel, injuring an infant in the town of Gedera."
Yesterday Jerusalem-based Tova Scherr Twittered a "half-joke" text message "received from friend going down south to report from Sderot: 'Anything you want to tell me before I die?' " .
David Lisbona used photo-sharing site Flickr to post a picture of pro-peace stickers in the town. "These pro-peace stop-the-occupation stickers are not that uncommon in Israel, especially in Tel Aviv," he wrote.
"They are however a welcome and unexpected sight in the town of Sderot in southern Israel which has suffered from Qassam rocket attacks from the Gaza strip on and off since 2001."
