Amira Hass, Haaretz, November 15:
The management of the Beit Hanun hospital decided to dig a well in the hospital’s yard. By Saturday, labourers and bulldozers were already on the job. That is how the hospital is readying itself for the next invasion by the Israeli army.
The hospital, like the rest of Beit Hanun, has faced serious water supply difficulties due to the week-long military assault on the city and its 43,000 inhabitants. On the third night of the invasion, the army removed about 300 people from their homes in anticipation of the planned explosion of a nearby building. Everyone went to the hospital, joining the many injured individuals who were already there. Women and children who had gone out to the street Friday morning were also sent to the small hospital by soldiers.
Hundreds of people gathered there, exhausted and frightened by two sleepless nights, by the unending weapons fire from the positions taken up by the Israel Defense Forces in the houses it had occupied, by the sound of explosions and roar of dozens of tanks and armoured personnel carriers that advanced through the streets shredding the roads, knocking down electricity poles, breaking water and sewage pipes, and destroying walls and fences.
The lack of desire by the Israeli public to know is reinforced and completed by the “lack of space” in the media and the hierarchy of editing that deletes critical information about the Israeli army and, in effect, about Israeli society – a society that is constantly manufacturing destructive capabilities, and sending its twenty something-year-olds to destroy lives, cities and futures.…