By 
IN RECENT DAYS, Mazen Abukarsh has been thinking fondly about "my Seattle years."
He lived in Northgate and Ballard, studied at North Seattle Community College and ran a Middle Eastern restaurant in the University District.
That was a beautiful time compared with what he, his wife and three young sons are going through now.
They live in the Gaza Strip, near the heart of the recent bombings and bulldozing by the Israeli military.
"It is hell," he told me by phone from Gaza last week. "Words cannot explain."
The 35-year-old Muslim grocer painted a grim picture of suffering from the conflict zone.
Israeli airstrikes and soldiers leveled thousands of Gaza homes in a brutish campaign that began Dec. 27. Tens of thousands of Palestin-
ians are now homeless. Only recently, after two waterless, powerless weeks did electricity and running water return. Israel announced a cease-fire Jan. 18.
The Palestinian people, Abukarsh says, remain in dire need of food, medicine and construction materials. The Israeli government, meanwhile, says its sortie was "precise" -- targeting militants with Hamas, an organization that has fired rockets at southern Israel.
But let's be real -- the Israeli offensive has not been symmetrical or surgically precise.
More than 1,300 people, many of them women and children civilians, were killed in Gaza in just 22 days.
Compare that with about a dozen Israeli soldiers and three civilians killed in Israel in the same period, according to Human Rights Watch.
Survivors' tales tell another part of the story, and from those accounts it is clear: Palestinians, as I see it, were massacred.
http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/jamieson/397862_robert29x.html
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