The group of South Africans who were evacuated from the Gaza Strip where they had been stuck since the beginning of Isreal’s siege on the enclave have given rather horrifying accounts of the situation there.
Nineteen of them arrived in South Africa on Tuesday on board an Ethiopian Airlines plane and were received by emotional loved ones and officials from the Department of International Relations including Director General Zane Dengo.
“Its a total ethnic cleansing that is going on there. Each time we found a hideout the Israeli aircrafts would start hovering above warning us the building is was about to be bombed. As we tried walking to safety we saw buildings been brought down in the all directions,”said Zakira Chothia, a South African who was in Palestine preparing for her son’s wedding. Chothia said images being published on various media platforms showed just a part of the brutality.
“We saw thousands of limps, legs, heads, everything belonging to different people and as I looked closer I noticed that the mothers had written names on the children on the legs cause they were they knew if they died they may not be able to identify them,”she said.
She said Israeli soldiers demanded to be worshipped including not being looked at and are trigger-happy.
“I saw a woman being shot in the head for doing nothing. She died right in front of us and I couldn’t even look back to try and help as I was going to be shot too. You get shot for merely looking at the Israeli soldiers,”said Chothia about movement control by Israeli soldiers in occupied Gaza. Another survivor Heirda Eid called for the international community to follow South Africa and isolate Israel.
“We need a military embargo right now in order to put an end to the ongoing genocide otherwise tomorrow there’ll not be a single person living in Gaza. So it is time for the international community to boycott apartheid Israel, to disinvest from companies benefiting from Israel’s system of oppression and impose sanctions, that’s what we need,” he said.