Funerals and Festivities in Gaza after Truce

by AfpPhoto/Mahmoud Hams

Reporting any story, anywhere, is like those one of those mad game shows –the Japanese, rare connoisseurs of sadism, are the experts at this-- where the contestants race against the clock through a gauntlet of hairy spiders, fiery hoops and wade through vats of unspeakably vile liquids.

Reporting is not so different. It's an obstacle race against deadlines; you scramble to collect quotes, images, facts, and you try to find the elusive string of a narrative that seems true to the experience. But in the writing, plenty of material gets jettisoned. You prune the branches of the story that are tangential, too frail, or too idiosyncratic to reflect the larger truth.

A blog's beauty is its brevity. It's a narrative snack, compared to the rich, three-course meal of a Time magazine article. And it's a way to use some of the images and anecdotes that ended up on the mind's cutting-room floor, which, in their own way, can be as illustrative as a longer article.

So, a few snapshots from Gaza, on the day the truce between Hamas and Israel went into force:

Nobody trusts Anybody Dept: My Palestinian fixer phones a top Islamic Jihad commander to arrange an interview about the cease-fire. The Jhadi replies that, sure, he'd like to see us, but he's worried that after months of hiding from Israeli collaborators and the all-seeing, pilot-less drones circling over Gaza, “The Israelis might decide it's worth it to break the truce just to kill me,” he says.

Don't Cry for Dead Bad Guys. Don't be fooled by their impressive name -- the Army of Islam. These members of the Dagmush clan spread fear in Gaza through their extortions and kidnappings. (Israeli Corporal Gilad Shalit –still in Gaza captivity—and BBC's Alan Johnston passed through their grimy hands.) A Palestinian friend recalled that when a Dagmush kid tried to steal a bike from the neighborhood and was chased off, the kid came back with his scary older brothers who demanded the bike. They gave it to him.

So, for once, Gazans were grateful for an Israeli missile strike. On Wednesday, the day before the truce, an Israeli aircraft blasted a car carrying three Army of Islam commanders.

Hamas chiefs weren't too upset over this, either. After the BBC man was freed, Hamas quietly began cracking down on the “Army of Islam”. Their fighters kept turning up dead or simply vanishing. Rumors were that clan leader Mumtaz Dagmush was planning an attack on the Israelis to prove his Jihadi credentials and to get funds from rich Arab extremists in the Gulf. Dagmush had flirted with al Qaeda, not out of ideology, but because as a brand name al Qaeda has a certain cache in the Arab world, and accessibility to cash.

Martyrs' funerals are great social events. In fact, going to funerals is one of the major pastimes in Gaza, though maybe that will change now that the truce has started. The death of a Hamas militant brings a thousand men into the streets, shooting guns into the air and shouting “Allah is Great”.

The Dagmush were expecting a big crowd for the three Army of Islam guys killed by the Israelis. They had huge posters of the victims' faces, floating above the Dome of the Rock shrine in Jerusalem. They also cordoned off the street traffic and erected a long tent with hundreds of plastic chairs for mourners. The tent was empty saved for a few old men, probably the dead men's fathers and uncles.

“See?” says my friend, whose son had the run-in with the Dagmush kid over the stolen bike. “Everybody in Gaza hates them.” He adds: “For once the Israelis did us a favor.”

By Tim McGirk/Gaza