Pictures of Gaza:

there's a warning on this collection of photos which tells us that some of them might be disturbing. And indeed they are.

They're disturbing because you know that whatever you're feeling about the pictures, someone else, in the real world, is experiencing the noise or the silence, the shock waves and the shock, the dust, the dryness, the heart pounding, the heat, the fear, the movement of the earth below their feet, the smells of blood and death.
They're also disturbing because of the tendency we have to flick through them, almost inured to the actual content.

Looking more closely at the content, they're disturbing because you see the stark differences between what the people of Gaza are experiencing and what the Israelis on the frontline are experiencing. The people of Gaza are depicted in dusty, messy, desolate, frightening landscapes. They're mourning, running, hanging on, crying. It's mostly grey apart from the flashes of colour on peoples' clothes.

The Israeli soldiers and civilians on the other hand, with some exceptions, are depicted in much more relaxed surroundings.They're getting on with routine things - shaving, hugging, resting. They're in a land of colour.
They are of course, mourning their losses too. For each Israeli family who has lost a loved one, the grief must be as sore as it is for the people in Gaza. There's certainly anguish and sadness but not clouded with whatever it is in the faces of the Palestinians. Their grief seems to be fixed with anger, horror, tension, numbness.
It's not because Palestinians are a different kind of people. Under the pain and the fear, they're all the same. Perhaps it's because what the Palestinians experience is relentless.

I am sure that the fear felt by the Israelis closest to the front line is very real.  They must feel fear but it must be a different kind of fear. The front line for Palestinians is everywhere. There's no longer any safe place and no safe time. Even the occasional cease fire must offer no relief now - every time they think there's a break in the madness, it all comes crashing down before the deadline. In a ceasefire situation, the palms of their hands must tingle with fear, waiting for the first shell or the first rocket.

There are people sitting watching outside Gaza- spectators to a massacre. You wonder what allows them to watch or sleep or relax in an open space when there is carnage unfolding all around them. What allows them to watch trail of light and smoke left by the rockets, knowing that in that spot where they land, someone is invariably bereaved in the most horrific of circumstances.

The photo of the two lads running through Shejaiya put me in mind of the photo of Fr Daly on Bloody Sunday. Carrying a white flag seems so futile but those lads made it because they believed it would protect them. What was going on in their heads as they crafted that wee flag. They put work into that; they must have expected something from it.