As war returns to Gaza, it is the children who are frozen in fear

 

"I am in a street when a house explodes in front of me; I'm on the terrace of my hotel on Gaza's beachfront when two rockets are fired at the nearby harbour wall and four children are killed, the bleeding survivors making it to our sanctuary, where we perform first aid. Suddenly the damage seems ubiquitous. You turn a corner to find glass and rubble in the street, trees felled or the road cratered.

Buildings fall in different ways. The bombs sheer off the front sometimes, as if with a knife, leaving the rooms inside exposed and furniture still sitting where it had been. Sometimes the bomb leaves nothing but a hole filled with lumps of concrete; at other times structures are concertinaed into asymmetric domes prickly with exposed steel reinforcing rods.

In most wars I have covered, you encounter one of the combatant parties, often both, but in Gaza, where death falls from the sky, those fighting are largely invisible except for the impact of their weapons. The result is that you see a war in Gaza through the prism of the suffering of the victims – a conflict in which those willing to offer an organising rationale are absent."

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As war returns to Gaza, it is the children who are frozen in fear | World news | The Observer