If Hull Were Gaza, 3rd January 2009 (2/2) By Martin Deane

(1/2), (2/2),

All the schools have been evacuated. There's shattered glass everywhere. Those exams won't be happening then. But then, you'd want your kids at home at a time like this. Your kids throw stones at the tanks and the APCs when they can. You don't blame than anymore. Hull Royal Accident and Emergency has a 4 hour wait.

Oh, wait, it already does, Ok, it has a ten hour wait with only the direst casualties being seen first. But people are rallying around and helping out, if they have some training.

But if the rate of casualties goes up, with the lack of medicines because the soldiers turn away drugs and medicines - and often food and fuel too - then before long some will just be left to die. A lot of people have left over the years. A lot. Like millions. They've gone, abroad, for good, maybe, and put as much distance between here and there as they can. You'd leave too. If you could.

News travels fast: they've opened a checkpoint, they've let a medical supply truck through or food supplies, or fuel. You try to find out where they've gone. There's a UN depot in the city, for refugees. But we're all refugees now. It used to have flour but the city's run out and it doesn't now. People have to rely on their local bakeries and whatever flour is left in town.

Oh, and it's not your army. It's a foreign army that largely hates you. It's really hard to understand. And this has gone on so long.

You're grateful for some among you that fight back in different ways. There's the odd tunnel been built, secretly, and things sneaked in. But they find them eventually and bomb them or blow them up, even with people in them, preferably with, in fact. It's like wartime only worse. It is wartime. And yet it's not really seen as a war. It's called an occupation. And it's turned our city into our prison. No point having Hedon Road!

Your own elected officials can barely keep the place together. None of the schools have windows. Few have the shops have much in. If Hull were Gaza, imagine something like that for 60 years. That's Palestine today. Notes - Gaza: 1.5 million population / 6.25 = Hull, 240,000 population. Take 2400 casualties (say 400 dead and 2000 wounded) 2400 / 6.25 = 384.

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