From the place, Father Gabriel Romanelli describes
the situation
to
Clarín
in the Palestinian territory.
Maria Laura Avignolo
05/17/2021 10:37 AM
Clarín.com
World
Updated 05/17/2021 10:40 AM
When the Israeli bombings in the Gaza Strip razed civilian buildings, Hamas tunnels during the day and night, Father
Gabriel Romanelli
prayed in his church of the Holy Family, in one of the poorest neighborhoods in the area.
As parish priest of the Argentine Incarnate Verb Congregation and with long experience in the Middle East, the Argentine priest missions in this
open-air prison
,
where 2 million Gazans cannot leave their territory due to Israeli control and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's open war against Hamas.
The latter is a fundamentalist group supported by Qatar and Turkey, which controls the strip and is at odds with the secular president of the Palestinian authority, the moderate Mahmoud Abbas.
Born and raised in Villa Luro together with the Jews of the neighborhood, Father Gabriel is today one of the few Argentines who is a witness to this long and intermittent Israeli military offensive against the Palestinians.
He is accompanied by nuns and another priest from the same congregation as they prepare their facilities to receive refugees fleeing their homes to save themselves from a bombing, which has already left at least 200 Palestinians dead, 50 children and 32 women among them and thousands of others. wounded.
Father Gabriel is one of the few Argentines who is a witness to Israel's military offensive on the Palestinians.
Photo: Noel Smart
“I have lived in the Middle East for 25 years.
I was in Jordan, in Egypt, in Palestine and Israel.
These last two years I was appointed here.
The situation was already chaotic and critical before this.
And God wants it to stop, to stop, to make at least a truce.
But if it stops, and God wants it to stop, the consequences are terrible, ”Father Gabriel told
Clarín
by video call.
-Tell us, where are you in Gaza and how is the situation at the moment.
-I am in my parish, in Gaza City, in a very popular neighborhood called Zeitoun.
I live here with another Egyptian priest from our congregation.
It is a congregation founded in Argentina, called the Institute of the Incarnate Word.
We are missionary Catholics.
And we are with a novice, a young man from here from Palestine, who wants to consecrate himself to our congregation and other sisters from three congregations.
In total we are thirteen religious.
We are fine, thank God.
-How was the situation these days?
-It's certainly very bad.
And it is getting worse because more and more victims are being added.
More than 190 are the dead, including women and children.
And there is already talk of about 1000 injured, many seriously, who are being evacuated to Egypt, which opened the border to take the most seriously injured to the hospitals they have in the Sinai Peninsula.
One of the things that tells us that the situation is bad is that the bombings do not stop day and night.
For Gaza or for the area, fighting is unfortunately common.
“Considerable stones have fallen in everything that would be the courtyard of the parish, and that being one hundred and a half meters away.
That is, that stone grabs a child or an elderly person and breaks his head "
Father Gabriel Romanelli
Although we have to say that COVID-19 brought a good thing: for a year and a half the bombs were not heard, unless at the sound of war.
There were occasional confrontations, but they always happened at night.
On the other hand, the one who is day and night is already talking about a war.
And not only that, along with the declarations of those responsible, that of not believing in a truce, of not wanting to stop, that except for a miracle, worse days are yet to come.
-They are attacking the buildings where civilians live. They also attacked the building where the Al Jazeera and Associated Press were located. Why?
-They are attacking civilian buildings, certainly.
What the Israeli army usually does is call for some buildings to be vacated.
Their intention - according to what they declare - is to avoid civilian casualties.
In any case, the deaths are produced by the bombings.
Sometimes they warn someone but they don't warn everyone.
For example, they notified the building that was destroyed today (by Saturday), where the journalists were.
But this building falls and damages all the surrounding structures.
It is one of the most central and prosperous areas of Gaza City.
-Why do they do it?
- I suppose that in a war there is also a lot of symbolic. It was the cybernetic center, the communication and information center. Here were all the international agencies: agencies that have no political denomination, that are neither from Palestine nor from Israel. In a war, everything is done that can be an impact, so that they are intimidated. We have seen these days that they have bombed the neighborhood next door, which is called Shejaiya, for three days - a neighborhood that borders our neighborhood, 100-200 meters from here, we are stuck. Yesterday, during the night and during the day, tear gas bombs were heard for people to leave. There are at least 10,000 people who have lost their homes permanently or temporarily. But permanently there are many,and that they are going to the UN centers for Palestinian refugees. The situation is certainly dramatic, because Gaza also has one of the highest population densities in the world.
-A minimum of 2 million people live in the Strip and it is like an open-air concentration camp.
-Yes, it is the largest open-air prison in the world.
Because people have not been able to go out for more than 12 years.
There is an embargo, for political reasons, that Israel has imposed on the authority (of Hamas) that governs here.
So people live locked up, in an area that is almost twice the Federal Capital, in the city of Buenos Aires.
They are 350 square kilometers, where 2 million people live.
Father Gabriel Romanelli, Argentine priest in the Gaza Strip.
Photo: Noel Smart
With the difference that in the city of Buenos Aires, people can go out, they can go to other provinces, other parts of the national territory and can use goods from other parts.
In contrast, these 2 million people have very little land available, since the property is above all horizontal.
The great towers are being pulled down.
The lands many times cannot be used because they are border areas or lands that were damaged from previous wars and also with the contamination of the water tables.
It is simply a tragedy and life here in Gaza.
"A tragedy, a crime"
-This weekend there were huge bombings. This building fell from the international press. Were there any casualties in that building or were there casualties on the sides when the building collapsed?
I do not have the secure data.
Because many times the data does not pass for different reasons.
In a war it's all kind of chaotic.
What we do know is that there are civilian victims of people who have nothing to do with this.
But a little further away from there, in the refugee camp that is over the sea, it is terrible.
For example, there are testimonies of a family that lost several children: I no longer remember how many children they lost.
The father's statement says that he lost his wife and he counts his children one by one and says that God left him the youngest, five months old.
But it is terrible.
It is a situation that is certainly terrible for everyone.
It is also terrible for an Israeli citizen to be hit by a rocket on a civilian bus.
And it is a tragedy and it is a crime.
-But it's a completely asymmetrical war, isn't it?
-Completely asymmetric.
The Latin patriarch of Jerusalem, that is, our spiritual authority, who knows the area very well, lived since childhood in Palestine and Israel, he precisely speaks of a disproportion in the response.
-Do you consider that there is a disproportionate use of force by Israel on the Gaza Strip and on civilians especially?
-Asymmetric is synonymous with disproportion.
In the face of an unjust aggression you can defend yourself, but it has to be proportionate.
Certainly there are immoral means that use factions to spread terror everywhere.
But a regular army just has to know that the reaction also has to be proportionate.
And one of the things that shows that it is not proportional, is the number of wounded, the number of deaths, the number of civilian victims and the fear and terror that one truly feels sorry for.
Father Gabriel Romanelli, Argentine priest in the Gaza Strip.
Photo: Noel Smart
The Israeli child suffers like the Palestinian child and the family that has to sleep in a shelter on one side of the wall, experiences the same anguish.
But if we go to the victims, there we talk about something that is truly asymmetrical.
That is why at this moment we are imploring for a truce.
For the victims to stop on one side and the other.
The conflict is not going to be solved, except by an extraordinary divine intervention.
But it is going to take a long time for them to heal and the situation to be fixed.
Because there is a fundamental question, which is the question of the Palestinian people, who also have the right to have their independent, free State, and a secure border.
-The Israelis claim that they attack civilian buildings because Islamic Jihad and Hamas commanders live there. Is that really true? And also, if they live, civilians also live in the same building with their children, their children, their dog and their cat, right?
-The truth is that I could not tell.
They will have the information, they are one of the strongest intelligences in the world.
But I suppose they will have other means to get them out as well.
Gaza is an aubergine.
There are people from families that have members of different brigades.
There are like 16 groups here.
Each group has its political part and its brigade part.
But that does not justify targeting civilians.
That there are innocent victims in every war, unfortunately, most of the time it happens that way.
It is one thing that by doing everything you have to do, morally speaking, there are victims, something that has escaped the will of the human being.
But it is another thing to look for it positively or to do nothing.
Only yesterday, I received messages that spoke of 115 injured children.
The gift of the word
-We are communicators.
I am a priest, I am not a journalist, I am not a politician, I am not a military man.
But certainly today we have to take into account the power of the word, the building power of the word and the destructive power of the word.
There are some articles from some international or national media that make you cringe.
It would seem like everything on one side everything is good, everything is bad on the other.
Whoever is writing on the side.
And the thing is not so simple.
The only perfect one is God.
And afterwards, all human beings cannot be the devil incarnate.
They have some goodness.
Besides, they are generalizing a whole society.
It's like saying, for example: "all of Indonesia is like this."
Gabriel Romanelli, in his parish in Gaza .: Noel Smart
I wish I had the power to say: "enough, the weapons are silent."
Who has power, decides.
But there is a reality and it is that they have a duty before God, before society, not to commit crimes.
And if human justice does not demand it, divine justice will certainly one day claim it.
But it is a very serious responsibility.
They are playing with populations.
After a death, after an attack, after an explosion, the traumas that remain are enormous.
-Did you associate these explosions with the one you heard in Buenos Aires when the AMIA exploded?
-In fact, I remembered today that in another journalistic note, many years ago, I was on vacation. I lived in San Rafael de Mendoza, where our congregation of the Incarnate Word has the seminary. And I went on vacation to Villa Luro, City of Buenos Aires, my neighborhood, with my mother and my brothers. And I remember an explosion, which I later learned was the AMIA explosion. But that explosion stayed with me for a long time, because it is not only an explosion. The deaths? The people who didn't die? What happened to the wounded? The traumas? That's left for a single blast. It changed the lives of so many people. In Argentina it is clearly a trauma. Also, because it has not been solved yet, to see who are responsible for that.
That is why I used the example of a rocket, which hits Israeli civilians in a bus line, which are civilians who go to school, who go for coffee.
They are not military.
They were not in the military service.
It changes their lives.
Either he loses it to life or the one who remains is beaten forever.
Or imagine that increased much more, because there are thousands of bombs that fall.
So I was thinking about the children here too, because here we have a lot of children.
These days we have closed all activities, people are at home.
Trauma in boys
-And how does that affect physically? The shocks throw people to the ground at times.
-I know some young people, who were children in 2014, who to this day cannot sleep with the light off in Gaza.
Which is a drama, because here there are usually only eight hours of electricity.
Others who get on top of it, others who stopped talking, others who have dyslexia, post-traumatic trauma, which is something for which we are also preparing ourselves.
Streets of Gaza deserted and in ruins.
Photo: Noel Smart
During this year and a half of COVID, which had its ups and downs here in the Gaza Strip, thank God we were able to do many activities.
Thanks to the fact that the government here, the Ministry of the Interior, even allowed us to do outdoor activities and take them to the sea.
We are glued to the Mediterranean.
So, with good sense, they gave us permission, because it was already a trauma, in addition to the situation of living in Gaza, living locked up by the Coronavirus.
And we'd been out of it for ten days, more or less.
-Father, do you have refugees in your church or where do the refugees go? Because all of this occurred in the middle of Ramadan. Where do people go?
-At this time we don't have. We are preparing one of the three Catholic schools that we have and all the services of other Catholic institutions. The Catholic Church in Gaza, in the middle of two million people, we are 133 people. All Christians are 1077. But Catholics are 133 people. Thank God it is a very active and very effective community. We are preparing a lot of things. For example, through Caritas Jerusalem, at least 60 percent of the cases have been assisted in the time of Coronavirus, which were thousands of COVID and above all, the most serious. More than the Ministry of Health.
At this moment we are preparing one of the three schools to receive refugees, which implies all logistics. Because schools have classrooms and bathrooms for children or adolescents. A small bathroom, they don't have a kitchen, they don't have a bed, they don't have a dependency, they don't have privacy. So for the moment we are preparing, but we are not using it because people are going to the centers of UNRWA, the United Nations department. That is, of all the nations of the world that make up the United Nations, for the Palestinian refugees. And they have always been a great help to the population. So people are going to those centers and they are given mattresses, they are given food, they are given water, because the United Nations is much stronger. As much as it was reduced in recent years,it remains a very powerful international force.
-How do the Israelis warn of these attacks? Do people have time to evacuate or not?
- The Israeli army habitually, for big objectives, calls and warns.
Then he calls him on a cell phone.
That's why people always have cell phones and respond.
Some with fear and trembling answer the phone because they are told: "in 20 minutes you have to leave." And sometimes very specific, they call another neighbor and say: "evict, there is a lady there." That is, they have a lot of I don't know where they will get data, but they know it. But no matter how much they warn, many times there are victims or people who have not found out or people who have not had time to leave. Or as I say, people who have been around.
Father Gabriel Romanelli is accompanied by nuns and another priest from the same congregation.
Photo: Noel Smart
The day before yesterday we had one of the biggest explosions, 100 meters from here and we were pierced by several solar panels, which are a huge thing that we have on the roof.
Considerable stones have fallen in everything that would be the patio of the parish, and that being one hundred and more meters away.
That is, that stone grabs a child or an elderly person and breaks their head.
And so there are many injured and so there are many fatalities.
-Another issue is that abroad there was first talk of a land invasion and an air attack by the Israelis. Then it was denied and said it was artillery from the edge and air attack. Are Israelis really on the streets of Gaza or not?
-First, the contradictory data.
I read an article today, in an Israeli newspaper, where it precisely expresses the unease of many Israelis at the contradictory information from the Ministry of Communication.
Why were they talking about a great invasion of land.
And then they have been denied.
There are conflicting data, I guess.
It is also partly a warfare tactic.
The truth is that no, in the city today there are no tanks, there is no army, at least it is all the data that reaches us.
There are no Israeli troops in the streets of Gaza, thank God.
Now that they have entered the border zone with tanks, it may be.
It would not be surprising and from time to time, they enter.
And the attacks are by air, be they airplanes or drones, or by tanks, or also by the naval fleet.
-When all this began, Ramadan was being celebrated, wasn't it?
-Unfortunately, the first day, the strongest day, was last Thursday, when we Catholics here are celebrating the Ascension of the Lord and we celebrate it together with Jerusalem and Rome.
In general, parishes in many parts of the world celebrate next Sunday.
Muslims were celebrating the first day of the festival of Ramadan.
It really was terrible.
I tell an anecdote that also shows a bit what everyday life is like here and how children, even though there may be many traumas, there is everything and there are children who in their innocence do not realize what they are living.
"The truth is that no, in the city today there are no tanks, there is no army"
Yesterday, when I was leaving the convent of the Sisters of the Rosary, I saw two small groups of children.
I saw a little more, but two caught my attention.
One of four or five little girls, all dressed up for a party.
Some very pretty dresses and some sweets, eating and talking, all flirtatious, walking.
And another group of boys, cleaning bicycles for a ride.
The point is that at that time there was shelling, there was noise of shelling, not over that area, but the noises were and were very loud.
But none of them are moved by anything.
They don't even blink.
That is the incredible thing about war.
People cannot understand that despite the bombings, in Gaza, in Lebanon, in Syria, people are trying to carry on with their normal lives.
When one has no experience in war, one says: "But you are petrified, what do you do?"
And there are people who have those terrors.
There are people who do not go out at all.
But most of the people try to live.
The first thing is to live.
And part of life is precisely saying: "We are not going to sit around and see if there is an attack, if they take away our house" ... In my view, despite the dramas that war brings, it also goes to strengthen a posteriori, for better or for worse.
Many people I knew who went through the war, took advantage of it, took advantage of it, knew how to take advantage of that terrible experience.
But there are other people who learned bad things from the war or who were shocked, who were injured and are already problematic as members of society.
A crater in the streets of Gaza.
Photo: Noel Smart
-Father Gabriel, there is another different and serious element in this new war: it is these
lynchings between Israeli Jews
and Israeli Arabs within Israel.
It's a new dynamic, isn't it?
-That's terrible.
The Latin Patriarch of Jerusalem, Pierbattista Pizzaballa, the bishop who has in addition to spiritual authority, a lot of moral authority, a man who has lived in the Holy Land for thirty years, lives in Palestine, Israel, knows Arabic and knows Hebrew perfectly.
And he has declared a few days ago that they are on the threshold of a civil war.
This is not only a problem of strength, to see who is stronger or to pass the odd bill.
This can degenerate into something much more.
And it is very serious.
He said that blind violence to that point has never been seen inside Israeli cities.
We know that, in Israel, 20 percent of the population are Arab, have Israeli nationality and most of them belong to the Muslim religion, which has a large group of Russians and a minimal expression, 2 percent, of Christians.
So they are giving violence to the interior of mixed cities.
That is why the truce is also necessary: so as not to stoke the fire.
The fire does not go out.
Afterwards, those who have moral obligations to govern, will have to see where they erred, how to repair.
But today, that situation is terrible.
Another issue is that from the outside it seems that they have been caught between two extremes.
On the one hand Hamas, which is a jihadist group, and on the other hand, Prime Minister Netanyahu, who is unable to form a government, who has a corruption case that can lead him to jail who wants to declare Jerusalem the capital of Israel occupied , which has generated a series of tensions and does not accept a Palestinian state.
-Is that reality or is that a sensation that is seen from the outside?
-That one part and another are trapped in their convictions, there is no doubt about that. That the statements are violent, even within parliaments, they are very extreme statements, there is no doubt. This is precisely what is criticized by a large part of the Israeli population. And as we said a while ago, the power of the word, the destructive power of the word. With a word I can kill a person or I can justify killing him. And I'm not just saying it as a priest. As a priest I have much more responsibility. That is why God enlighten me to be prudent and never cause harm, not only with what I do or with what I fail to do, not only with my silence, but also with what I say. That does not cause damage, that illuminates. And in this case, they are trapped in the closed principles that they put in.If by declaring you are taking six million people out of the way…. For example, the Palestinians of Palestine are roughly four million people, two million at least in the Gaza Strip and another two million in the West Bank and East Jerusalem. And then, inside Israel, there are about two million Israeli Arabs. The same would happen if the Palestinian side said: "No, Israel does not exist, the Israelis do not exist." So what are you trying to erase the existence of 7-8 million people?The same would happen if the Palestinian side said: "No, Israel does not exist, the Israelis do not exist." So what are you trying to erase the existence of 7-8 million people?The same would happen if the Palestinian side said: "No, Israel does not exist, the Israelis do not exist." So what are you trying to erase the existence of 7-8 million people?
-Do you believe that there are moderate voices and that the majority of Israelis and Palestinians want peace, want an agreement, want a ceasefire?
-Most of the world are people who want to live in peace.
People who want to live, people from the neighborhood.
I grew up in Villa Luro in Buenos Aires.
Many of my friends and colleagues are Jewish.
And what does it matter that they are Jews?
As a priest I would like everyone to believe in Christ, but I have no power to impose anything on anyone.
I can pray for everyone's salvation, so that everyone converts, loves God, gets to heaven.
And that's what I always do.
-En nuestra misma familia tenemos gente que no cree en nada, gente que tenía otras cosas, gente que abandonó la fe. Para mí es un grave pecado, pero no es un crimen. No se convierte en enemigo mío que lo tengo que destruir. A mí me parece que el hecho de la convivencia y de la paz está en el corazón de todos los seres humanos. Ahora que muchos se equivocan en la elección, sí. Y esos son también defectos de muchas democracias del mundo. En que las que uno no conoce quiénes son las personas. Yo nací en Argentina, soy argentino. Vivo en el extranjero, pero sigo los sucesos del país. Y muchas veces hay algunos legisladores, que decís: "¿Pero cómo pueden tener esos principios y cómo no puede haber gente buena, gente buena para que los voten?". Porque estamos engañados, porque no estamos acostumbrados o porque nos han adormecido. Entonces la mayor parte de la población israelí y palestina está harto de todo esto. Quieren vivir en paz ahora.
París, corresponsal
PB y AP
Mirá también
¿Cómo reacciona la gente en Israel ante la violencia con Gaza?