Solidarity activists joined approximately a dozen hunger strikers in front of the journalists' syndicate in Cairo.Riot police barricading protesters in Cairo. Protesters occupying the grounds of the French embassy.
This time is clearly different.
I have traveled to Gaza twice this year, in groups ranging from 40 to 60 persons, and although there was a lot of behind-the-scenes work involved in “greasing the wheels” with the Egyptian authorities, we pretty much sailed in. CODEPINK (the group that organized both of my previous trips) developed a well-earned reputation for being able to pull just the right levers to open the doors to the isolated enclave of Gaza — even more so than George Galloway’s Viva Palestina convoy, which is typically allowed in for only 24 to 48 hours (versus our four days).
But too many months have gone by with no change in the crippling isolation of Gaza imposed by Israel and Egypt, and it was time to risk our privileged access to take our efforts to break the siege up a notch. Our numbers had to be massive enough to threaten the jailers’ growing complacence and broad enough to send the message that this is a global movement that won’t stop until the Palestinian people are given the freedom and justice they deserve. Thus, this time CODEPINK allied with a number of other organizations around the world, and the number of participants quickly ballooned to more than 1,300 from 43 countries. Likewise, while we have collected or purchased thousands of dollars’ worth of school supplies, winter clothing and electronic devices (such as computers — currently only available via the tunnels and thus too expensive for the average Palestinian in Gaza), our message is also unapologetically political: the borders must be opened, to everyone, all the time. NOW.
We have obviously accomplished our objective. The jailers have taken notice and are running scared. So scared that we not only have been denied entry into Gaza, we have been threatened with arrest and deportation if we so much as carry a sign or gather in groups of more than six. Our reservation with a facility in downtown Cairo for an orientation meeting for delegates was canceled at the government’s order, and requests to hold educational workshops instead were refused. In an even more audacious move that was aided and abetted by participants’ own governments, consulate representatives were called to a meeting and apparently instructed to warn their residents not to come. In Spain, that warning was echoed in a news release. In Canada, individuals registered for the march or who had participated in past delegations received emails from their embassies. In Portugal, one marcher was called on his personal cell phone!
As word spread of Egypt’s refusal to open Gaza’s doors — announcing its decision long after thousands of internationals had purchased expensive airline tickets and mere days before they began boarding their flights — supporters around the world inundated Egypt’s embassies with calls, emails and faxes in protest. Many came from legislators and other government officials, past and present. Egypt only backed further into its corner in response, using the aggressive tone of some of the calls and emails to ignore the overall theme: the injustice of the collective punishment imposed on Gaza’s nearly 1.5 million Palestinians and Egypt’s refusal to allow supporters to help.
As I write this, we are still being refused entry to Gaza, and even permission to travel to al-Arish and Rafah on the border. Thirty-eight of our marchers tried to get to al-Arish on their own, but 30 were then put under house arrest in their hotel and eight were detained at the bus station. Every peaceful vigil or protest we staged was met with an “iron wall” — and sometimes, by violence.
When the French contingent of about 450 persons asked for help from their embassy, and occupied the grounds of the building in protest when initial promises negotiated with the Egyptian government were reneged, they were surrounded by heavily-armed and helmeted riot police and refused permission to leave — even for food or to use a toilet. At the time of this writing, their “occupation” is going on 48 hours now.
Similar “sit-ins” have been or are being waged at the US, UK and Italian embassies (with more to come). At the US embassy, 30 Americans were detained within a circle of police for eight hours (at the direction of their own countrymen, by the way) before being released. The only small victory was an (ultimately frustrating and fruitless) meeting for three of the protesters with one of the embassy’s higher-level officials.
The same treatment was received when vigils were staged at the United Nations, the journalists’ syndicate (in support of about a dozen hunger-striking marchers) and the Kasr al-Nil Bridge over the Nile.
However, there are a few, bright silver linings to this dark cloud. Groups on the left of the sociopolitical spectrum are known for being far less cooperative and cohesive than their conservative, reactionary counterparts. It truly gladdened my heart, therefore, to see the immediate mobilization in our support by groups ranging from the War Resisters League to Jewish Voice for Peace.
Meanwhile, it’s a truism that controversy attracts media coverage. Our missions to Gaza have been ignored by the mainstream media in the past, but this time, Egypt’s defensive and angry response attracted the attention of such mainstream media pillars as the BBC, the Associated Press, Newsweek and The New York Times. I am a communications professional, and Egypt has violated a tenet of Public Relations 101: The more you protest, the guiltier you look.
All images by Pam Rasmussen.
Pam Rasmussen is a peace activist and communications professional from Maryland who recently received a Community Human Rights Award for her work on behalf of Palestinians from the UN Association of the National Capitol Area. She can be contacted at peacenut57 A T yahoo D O T com.
On my way to visit a friend in the Abed Rabbo district, north of the Gaza Strip, the taxi driver handed me a small pack of biscuits for change. There are nearly no copper coins left here so cab drivers barter a half Israeli shekel for biscuits brought in from the tunnels between the southern city of Rafah and Egypt’s northern Sinai. Some Gazans, who once earned a respectable living, resorted to melting coins and sold the copper for food supplies.
This was not the first time I was forced into arcane methods of barter. A few weeks ago I was told that oil filters for our British-made electricity generator could only be brought in through the tunnels. One alternative was to fit a refurbished car-engine filter to the generator.
We had wood-fired coffee next to the rubble of my friend’s family’s former homes – all levelled during Israel’s three-week war on Gaza that started one year ago. His only source of income, a taxi, was crushed by Israeli tanks during the assault. He agonises about how his children no longer respect him as their father. He is unable to provide them with the security of a house and an independent family life; they lost everything.
The family is spread around relatives’ homes. But the family’s old man just moved into a 60sq m house built from mud and brick, standing next to the rubble of his 400sq m three-story house for which he saved for a lifetime. It was one of the first the UN Relief and Works Agency built after having seemingly lost hope in any Israeli intention to allow construction materials into Gaza. My friend’s daughter earns the highest grades in her class and is eyeing a scholarship for one of the universities in Gaza when she leaves high school. But this young woman’s resilience and motivation will go nowhere as long as Gaza is blockaded.
Almost nothing has been more deceitful than casting Gaza as a humanitarian case. This is becoming exponentially more problematic a year after the war. Gaza urgently needs far more than merely those items judged by the Israeli military as adequate to satisfy Gaza’s humanitarian needs. This list of allowable items is tiny compared to people’s needs for a minimally respectable civil life.
Gaza is not treated humanely; the immediate concerns about the situation have clearly given way to long-term complacency, while failed politics has now become stagnant. The humanitarian classification conceals the urgent need to address this. Moreover, many in the international community have conveniently resorted to blaming Palestinians for their political divisions, as though they were unrelated to Israel’s policies – most notably Gaza’s closure after Israeli disengagement in 2005.
It seems evident that most officials in the US, UK and other powerful nations in Europe and the Middle East do not – or perhaps cannot – pressure Israel to reverse its policy of forcing Palestinians into eternal statelessness. How Palestinians are forced into degrading living standards in Gaza, and how they have no means to repel the ongoing demolition and confiscation of property and land in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, is abhorrent. How Palestinians are still divided despite the increased suffering of their people is no less abhorrent. However, no one should fool themselves into believing that their reconciliation would alter Israel’s policy.
The international community must surely adopt a new approach – where it would not be seen as acquiescent to Israel’s policies. If the current policy continues then, at least, let it not be at the expense of Palestinian self-respect. Palestinians are a dignified people, as competitive and civilised as any other people in the world. It is far too humiliating for Palestinians to endure not only being occupied but to be made beggars.
For years it has been impossible not to suspect that Israel does not want peace. Of late, the US-backed state has consistently created impossible conditions for fair and equal negotiations with the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank, and it continues to undermine moderate voices and drive people towards extremism in Gaza. The fact that Palestinians still genuinely want peace should not allow Israel to reject the simplest rules of civility. The US and the EU should come to Gaza; then they could draw their own conclusions on an Israeli policy they have backed and funded without ever witnessing its consequences on ordinary civilians’ lives. Surely then they could not fail to see that changing their policy is a moral imperative.
Elders’ chair, Archbishop Desmond Tutu, has expressed his deep concern about the arrest and indictment of Abdallah Abu Rahmah of Bil’in and has called for his unconditional release.
Abu Rahmah is a school teacher and coordinator of the Bil’in Popular Committee against the Wall and Settlements, which has carried out a five year campaign of non-violent protest and legal challenge against the wall that separates Israel from the West Bank.
“My fellow Elders and I met Abu Rahmah and his colleague Mohammad Khatib in August when we visited Bil’in,” said Desmond Tutu. “We were impressed by their commitment to peaceful political action, and their success in challenging the wall that unjustly separates the people of Bil’in from their land and their olive trees. I call on Israeli officials to release Abu Rahmah immediately and unconditionally.”
Abu Rahmah was arrested by Israeli soldiers at 2am on 10 December 2009 and indicted on 22 December 2009 on several counts stemming from his leadership role in the Popular Committee. On 15 September Mohammad Khatib was severely beaten during a raid attempting to arrest Abu Rahmah. Since 23 June 2009, 31 residents of Bil’in have been arrested.
“Abu Rahmah’s arrest and indictment is part of an escalation by the Israeli military to try to break the spirit of the people of Bil’in,” said Tutu. “But they must realize that they cannot break the spirit of those who fight for freedom and justice.”
Abu Rahmah met six members of The Elders on 27 August 2009. The Elders visited the site of Bil’in’s weekly demonstrations near the separation barrier and also saw the memorial site paying tribute to Abu Rahmah’s cousin Bassem Abu Rahmah who was killed when he was hit in the chest by a tear gas canister during one of the demonstrations. (see photo)
The Elders who visited Bil’in were Desmond Tutu, Ela Bhatt, Gro Brundtland, Fernando Henrique Cardoso, Jimmy Carter and Mary Robinson. For more information go to www.theElders.org/middle-east
The Elders visit the memorial to Bassem Abu Rahmah in Bil'in, 27 August 2009. L-R: Gro Brundtland, Mary Robinson, Fernando Cardoso, Jimmy Carter, Desmond Tutu, Mohammed Khatib, Ela Bhatt, Abdullah Abu Rahma.
BACKGROUND INFORMATION
Abdallah Abu Rahmah
Abdallah Abu Rahmah was indicted in an Israeli military court on Tuesday, 22 December 2009. Abu Rahmah was charged with arms possession for collecting used tear gas canisters shot at demonstrators in Bil’in by the army and showcasing them in his home. The indictment also includes incitement and stone throwing charges.
On receiving the indictment Adv. Gaby Lasky, Abu Rahmah’s lawyer said that “the army shoots at unarmed demonstrators, and when they try to show the world the violence used against them by collecting presenting the remnants – they are persecuted and prosecuted. What’s next? Charging protesters money for the bullets shot at them?”
Abdallah Abu Rahmah was arrested from his West Bank home on 10 December, the International Human Rights Day. Seven military jeeps surrounded his house, broke open the door, and after briefly allowing him to say goodbye to his family; the army blindfolded and took him into custody.
Abdallah has been a member of the Bil’in Popular Committee since its conception in 2004. Following the initial construction of Israel’s wall on Bil’in’s lands in March 2005, Abdallah has participated in organizing almost daily direct actions and demonstrations against the theft of their lands. Garnering the attention of the international community with their creativity and perseverance, Bil’in has become a symbol for Palestinian popular resistance. Almost five years later, Bil’in continues to have weekly Friday protests.
As its coordinator, Abdallah has represented the village around the world. In June 2009, he traveled to Montreal to attend the village’s precedent-setting legal case against two Canadian companies illegally building settlements on Bil’in’s land and participate in a speaking tour. In December of 2008, he participated in a speaking tour in France, and on 10 December 2008, exactly a year before his arrest, Abdallah traveled to Germany on behalf of Bil’in, to accept the Carl Von Ossietzky Medal for outstanding service in the realization of basic and human rights, awarded by the International League for Human Rights.
Abu Rahmah’s arrest is seen as part of an escalation in Israeli military’s attempts to break the spirit of the people of Bil’in, their popular leadership, and the popular struggle as a whole – aimed at crushing demonstrations against the Wall. Recently, Adv. Gaby Lasky, who represents many of Bil’in’s detainees, was informed by the military prosecution that the army intends to use legal measures as a means of ending the demonstrations.
An exhibition of spent tear gas grenades and projectiles in the village of Bil'in for which Abu Rahmah was indicted on. Picture credit: Oren ZivActiveStills
Bil’in
Located 12 kilometers west of Ramallah and 4 km east of the Green Line, Bil’in is an agricultural village spanning 4,000 dunams (988 acres) with approximately 1,800 residents.
While construction of the Wall and opposition to it began in 2005, the majority of land had been expropriated from Bil’in earlier.
Starting in the early 1980’s, and more significantly in 1991, approximately 56% of Bil’in’s agricultural land was declared ‘State Land’ for the construction of the settlement bloc Modi’in Illit (Modi’in Illit currently holds the largest settler population of any settlement bloc, with over 42,000 residents and plans to achieve a population of 150,000).
In addition to grassroots organizing, Bil’in has held annual conferences on popular resistance since 2006; providing a forum for villagers, activists and academics to discuss strategies for the unarmed struggle against the Occupation.
Bil’in embraced legal measures against Israel as part of its multi-lateral resistance to the theft of their livelihoods. The village first turned to the courts in the winter of 2004. Three years after they initiated legal proceedings, the Israeli High Court of Justice ruled that due to illegal construction in part of Modi’in Illit, unfinished housing could not be completed and that the route of the Wall be moved several hundred meters west, returning 25% of Bil’in’s lands to the village. To date, the high court ruling has not been implemented and construction continues.
In July 2008, Bil’in commenced legal proceedings before the Superior Court of Quebec against Green Park International Inc and Green Mount International Inc for their involvement in constructing, marketing and selling residential units in the Mattityahu East section of Modi’in Illit
In an effort to stop the popular resistance in Bil’in, Israeli authorities intimidate demonstrators with physical violence and arrests.
Israeli armed forces have used sound and shock grenades, water cannons, rubber-coated steel bullets, tear-gas grenades, tear-gas canisters, high velocity tear-gas projectiles, 0.22 caliber live ammunition and live ammunition against protesters. On 17 April 2009, Bassem Abu Rahma was shot with a high-velocity tear gas projectile in the chest by Israeli forces and subsequently died from his wounds at a Ramallah hospital.
Out of the 78 residents who have been arrested in connection to demonstrations against the Wall, 31 were arrested after the beginning of a night raid campaign on 23 June 2009. Israeli armed forces have been regularly invading homes and forcefully searching for demonstration participants, targeting the leaders of the Popular Committee against the Wall and Settlements, as well as teenage boys accused of throwing stones at the Wall. 13 currently remain in detention, 4 of which are minors.
The Israel Defense Forces consider it a crime punishable by imprisonment for a Palestinian to possess used IDF weapons, according to an indictment filed by the military prosecutor against Abdullah Abu Rahma of the West Bank town of Bil’in.
Abu Rahma, 39, is coordinator of the Bil’in Popular Committee Against the Wall, which has been holding demonstrations against construction of the separation fence on the village’s land. A teacher by profession, he was arrested by IDF troops on December 10 and indicted in a military court last Tuesday.
In addition to charges of incitement and throwing stones, Abu Rahma was charged with illegal weapons possession due to his alleged possession of M16 rifle bullets and gas and concussion grenades – which, the indictment said, “the accused and his associates used for an exhibition that showed people the means used by the security forces.”
Abu Rahma’s associates confirmed that empty concussion and gas grenades used by the IDF to disperse demonstrators were exhibited in Bil’in, adding that no one tried to conceal the nature of the exhibition. However, they said, M16 bullets were not part of the exhibit, nor were they found in a search of Abu Rahma’s home.
Activists in Bil’in speculated that the M16 allegation stemmed from misinformation given to the army by one of the many young people the army has arrested in recent months. They charge that these arrests are made in an effort to obtain incriminating material against the protest organizers.
In the case of another local protest organizer, Mohammed Khatib, a military court concluded that evidence that he had thrown stones was fabricated, after it turned out that at the time of the alleged infraction, he was abroad.
South African Archbishop Desmond Tutu, who met with Abu Rahma and Khatib last summer during a visit to Israel, condemned Abu Rahma’s arrest and indictment on Wednesday and urged the Israeli authorities to release him immediately. Tutu’s summer visit to the region was under the auspices of The Elders, a group of global leaders formed by former South African president Nelson Mandela.
In his statement on Wednesday, Tutu said that he and his fellow delegation members – who included former American president Jimmy Carter, former Irish president Mary Robinson and former Norwegian prime minister Gro Brundtland – were “impressed by [Abu Rahma and Khatib’s] commitment to peaceful political action, and their success in challenging the wall that unjustly separates the people of Bil’in from their land and their olive trees.” He called Abu Rahma’s arrest and indictment “part of an escalation by the Israeli military to try to break the spirit of the people of Bil’in.”
Children play in the rubble of their homes in Jabaliya, destroyed by the Israeli offensive in January. Photograph: Ashraf Amra/Polaris/eyevine
Ghiada abu Elaish’s fingers twist in her lap and her eyes cloud over as she recalls the day an Israeli shell killed four of her cousins and left her in a coma for 22 days. She has had almost 12 months to reflect on the tragedy, a time in which hatred and anger might have consumed the 13-year-old. Remarkably, though, not only has she survived shocking injuries and a dozen operations, with many more to come, but she has retained both her sweet nature and faith in a bright future.
Which makes it all the harder for her to return each day after school, dressed in the ubiquitous Palestinian uniform of blue-and-white-striped smock over jeans and trainers, to the scene of the massacre – her family home.
It was Friday 16 January and Ghiada was studying for exams. Her father, a pharmacist, woke from a nap, demanding tea and shouting at the younger children to be quiet. “Suddenly I could hear my cousin downstairs, screaming ‘Dead! Dead!'” A shell had hit the building – a block of five apartments, housing the extended Abu Elaish family – smashing windows and causing extensive damage to the flat below.
In the ensuing panic, Ghiada defied her father and followed him downstairs. “One room was completely black. I saw Aya [my cousin], she was on the ground with wood on top of her. There was a big hole in the wall.”
Ghiada tried pulling Aya out from under the furniture. A second shell struck. “There was a big light for a second,” she says. “I saw some windows smash and I heard screaming all around. A piece of shrapnel hit me. I started to scream for help and then fell down unconscious.”
Ghiada’s father, Atta Mohammed abu Elaish, rushed into the room. “I saw bodies without heads and legs. I saw my daughter. I saw her mother screaming.” He ran outside to call an ambulance. “The Israelis stopped the ambulances 250 metres from the house. Some boys from the street came to start ferrying the bodies and the injured out of the building.”
The attack was one of countless assaults during Israel’s 23 days of war on Gaza – Operation Cast Lead – that began on 27 December. But it was also one of the most notorious because Ghiada’s uncle – Aya’s father – was a doctor who worked in Israeli hospitals and was well known to Israeli viewers for advocating peace and reconciliation. All through the conflict, Dr Izzeldin abu Elaish gave regular eyewitness accounts by phone in fluent Hebrew to Israeli television. Within minutes of the attack on his own family, he was back on the phone to a journalist in a Tel Aviv studio, weeping and begging for help as Israeli viewers listened: “My daughters have been killed.”
Indeed, they had: Bissan, 20, Miar, 15, and Aya, 14, were dead, along with another cousin, 17-year-old Nour. Ghiada was in a critical condition; another of the doctor’s daughters was also wounded.
The injured girls – thanks to that live TV broadcast – were unusually and swiftly evacuated to a hospital in Tel Aviv, where Ghiada was found to be suffering from multiple problems with her heart, kidneys, stomach and legs. She remained in hospital in Israel for four and a half months.
Now, Ghiada says, she thinks about that day “always”, but tries not to let others see her pain. “When I am crying, I go to my room and cry alone,” she says. Does she feel angry? No, she says, just sad. And she plans to stay put in Gaza: “Maybe others would like to emigrate, but that’s not for me.”
Toll of death and destruction
But if Ghiada expresses no bitterness, her father insists she is angry and so is the rest of the family. “It’s very hard for us,” he says. “That accident took Bissan, Nour, Miar, Aya – and my brother.” Dr Abu Elaish has left Gaza for Canada. “He is the eldest brother, the father of the family, and now he’s gone. How can we forgive?”
The shelling of the Abu Elaish family was unusual in that it caught the attention of the Israeli public, but what Ghiada continues to endure 12 months on is shared by many of Gaza’s 750,000 children – half of its population.
More than 1,400 Gazans were killed in the 23 days of the Israeli assault, including several hundred children. The actual number is in dispute. The Palestinian Centre for Human Rights (PCHR) documented 313 deaths, almost 40% of them less than 10 years old. Other Palestinian groups say the toll was much higher. More than 1,600 children were injured.
But the 23-day war is only part of the story. The long history of Israeli assaults on Gaza, and the two-and-a-half-year-long blockade of the territory after Hamas took power, has exacted a toll on almost every aspect of children’s lives: schooling, housing, leisure time, what they eat, what they wear, how they see the future.
A Gaza Community Mental Health Programme (GCMHP) survey earlier this year found that about 75% of children over the age of six were suffering from one or more symptom of post-traumatic stress disorder. Almost one in 10 ticked off every criteria.
“The majority of children suffer many psychological and social consequences,” says Dr Hasan Zeyada, a psychologist with GCMHP. “Insecurity and feelings of helplessness and powerlessness are overwhelming. We observed children becoming more anxious – sleep disturbances, nightmares, night terror, regressive behaviour such as clinging to parents, bed wetting, becoming more restless and hyperactive, refusal to sleep alone, all the time wanting to be with their parents, overwhelmed by fears and worries. Some start to be more aggressive.”
Dr Abdel Aziz Mousa Thabet, professor of psychiatry at al-Quds university in Gaza, says the conflict has a different impact on boys and girls. “Girls have more anxiety and depression, boys are more hyperactive.”
Some children no longer look on their homes as a place of safety, security and comfort. Others don’t even have a home to go to. The Israeli bombardment damaged or destroyed more than 20,000 houses, forcing some families into tents and others into crowding in with relatives. Hamas distributed money to displaced families to rebuild their homes but the Israeli blockade has created a desperate shortage of materials. Almost one year later, some children still have no roof over their head.
Hanan Attar, a slight 10-year-old wearing flip-flops several sizes too big for her small feet, is wistful as she recalls the house destroyed by an Israeli tank shell. “We had land, my father is a farmer,” she says. “We used to grow watermelons, but the land was too close to the border and we can’t get there now.”
Home is now a tent on a patch of scrubby sand, shared by 10 members of her family, including a 50-day-old baby sister with a pinched face and a tin of formula milk perched on her rusting iron crib. The baby, Haneen, is seriously underweight at only 3kg, and is not growing. Her mother, Arfa, 40, cannot breastfeed because she is taking medication for back problems; the formula costs 45 shekels (£7.50) a tin, money that the family has to borrow. The father, too, is sick as well as unemployed. He reaches on top of a tall fridge that dominates the tent to pull down a sheaf of x-rays showing how his leg, broken in the conflict, is pinned together with metal.
“We are civilians, we don’t belong to any faction,” he says. “What are we guilty of so that we have to live like this? I spent my entire life building up my home. In one hour everything was gone.”
Hanan doesn’t complain about the tent, but says “the house was better”. She adds: “A snake came one night and bit my mother. I can’t sleep at night; I’m scared of the snakes and the dogs.”
Meals are cooked on a Calor gas stove; the toilets – a hut donated by an Arab charity – are shared by all the families in the compound of tents. “There are big queues,” says Hanan. Winter is coming; the tent is “freezing”, she says.
There is a community of tent families, circled round the shared lavatories. The children play as all children do, kicking a football, wrestling, dragging sticks through the sand. The families are doing their best in near-impossible circumstances. Some families have even planted small gardens in the scrub: corn and a few flowers.
But Hanan – who wants to be a doctor so she can treat the sick – says she spends most of her time in the tent with her seven brothers and sisters. Do they think they will ever go back to a proper home? “God knows,” says Arfa.
Overcrowding, lack of privacy and poverty are contributing to what some in Gaza call the “mental siege” . Tensions within families are increasing, say Gaza’s mental health experts. “Some parents themselves have depression and anxiety. Some become more aggressive towards their children,” says Zeyada.
John Ging, director of UN operations in Gaza, puts it like this: “Parents are sitting there in their homes, very upset and very frustrated at the their situation, and that is of course having ramifications for the home environment.” Has there been an increase in domestic violence? “Of course . . . children are losing respect because of the breakdown of the role-model structure. They see their parents as incapable of providing for them, they’re seeing their parents as a failure.”
Lost childhoods
Part of the problem is the lack of release and entertainment for children. There are few gardens or parks, no cinemas or theatres, many sports facilities have been damaged or destroyed by Israeli bombing, and one of Gaza’s great natural advantages – a 25-mile stretch of sandy beach facing the Mediterranean – is hiding a fresh danger.
In the summer months, families flock to the beach on Fridays and Saturdays. The sight of children splashing in the waves is cheering until one remembers that every day 20m gallons of raw sewage is pumped into the water. Since Gaza’s sewage processing plant was bombed after the kidnap of Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit in July 2006, there has been no alternative means of disposal. Now, according to Save the Children, children are developing skin diseases as well as bacterial infections from swimming in polluted water.
“There are not enough safe places for children to play,” says Mona al-Shawa, head of the women’s unit at the PCHR. To counter this, the UN organised a hugely popular “Summer Games” during the long school break, despite objections from Hamas about boys and girls mixing together. “There were those on the political side saying kids should be going to summer camps, not doing sport and recreation, but preparing for a future life of militancy,” says Ging.
Ging says schooling has also suffered. Thirty-two of the UN’s 221 schools were damaged in the Israeli assault, plus scores more government ones. None have been repaired because Israel does not allow construction materials into Gaza, saying they could be used to make weapons.
“So the schools, where the windows were blown out or other damage was done, have been cleaned up, made safe, and continue in operation today without the physical repairs because we haven’t been allowed to bring in one pane of glass or one bag of cement since last January,” says Ging.
Israel did permit a consignment of wood into Gaza to make school desks for 8,000 children, but then blocked delivery of the steel necessary to complete them. “Now you see three kids squashed on to a desk,” says Ging. “How are teachers supposed to give each child the attention they need?”
There is also a shortage of school books and pens, and what does arrive mostly has to be smuggled through underground tunnels from Egypt.
The result is children attending overcrowded schools on a double or even triple shift system that has contributed to a continuing decline in education levels. One in five of the 200,000 pupils at the UN’s 221 schools in Gaza failed basic Arabic and maths exams this year.
Engendering extremism
“It’s shocking for them but it’s also alarming for us in terms of the future,” says Ging. “The objective of the [Israeli] policy is to counter extremism. Education is probably the most effective tool through which you will counter extremism, by developing a positive and well-educated mindset. And yet we are being prevented by the policy from educating these children.”
It is, he says, “facilitating the destruction of a civilised society and, worse than that, the development of an extreme society”.
One of the starkest examples of school destruction is the American International school, Gaza’s elite fee-paying institution in Beit Lahiya, which was bombed in the early hours of the morning of 3 January. The Israeli military claimed it was being used as a rocket-launching site. Now, where once stood science laboratories, computer rooms, a music centre and sports fields, there is a mountain of crushed masonry, twisted metal girders, broken glass and droppings from the sheep that roam the deserted site. To the side of what was once the main building lies a row of burned-out schoolbuses. The odd fragment of textbook can be seen amid the rubble.
Then there is the difficulty of trying to concentrate in class when children are clawed by hunger. Three-quarters of Gazans rely on food handouts, according to the UN. Save the Children says it is seeing newborn babies suffering from malnutrition. Anaemia, especially among girls, is common.
The UN has started feeding children in its schools because, says Ging, “they’re coming to school without breakfast and therefore their attention span is very short and the academic results will then reflect that”.
Food, at least, is something that is relatively easy to fix. There are many less tangible issues that concern child experts, such as a lack of healthy role models. “During the war, children could see that their parents could not fulfil their needs,” says Zeyada. “They see their fathers as weak, powerless. They see parents can’t give them feelings of security, can’t protect them. So they look towards other figures. That might be God as an absolute power – so children might go towards religion, become more fanatic. Some identify with fighters from Hamas and other groups.
“Without hope, we are moving fast towards more aggressive children, more fanatics. If the siege ended you would see positive changes among children. They [Israel] are creating their enemies. They are pushing a new generation of children to believe in violence as a way of solving their difficulties. They are creating their own enemies of the future.”
In September 2007 Israel declared Gaza a “hostile entity”. “I said at that time, and I continue to say it, that’s a self-fulfilling prophecy,” says Ging. “You designate it as a hostile entity, you treat it as a hostile entity and in fact what happens is you generate hostility. And that’s precisely what we have been witnessing here at the grassroots level for the last two and a half years under this illegal siege . . . We have more extremism in Gaza every single day.”
Yet through it all, it is striking how many Palestinians cling to a belief in a better future. For all her traumas, Ghiada hasn’t given up. She attends a thrice-weekly English lesson after school to improve her chances of fulfilling her dreams.
The teacher hands Ghiada a question to answer to the class in English: If you were a colour, what colour would you choose? The girl doesn’t hesitate. “Red,” she tells the class.
The teacher asks the students what the colour red means to them. Blood, suggests one; danger, says another, both witnesses to last year’s carnage. Ghiada considers for a moment, then replies: “It makes me happy. It’s the colour of love.”
And what will Ghiada do with her English? She wants to be an airline pilot, she says.
Ironically that’s one career choice that will certainly require emigration: Gaza has no aeroplanes and the runway of its only airport was bulldozed to rubble by the Israeli army years ago.
The 23-day war in numbers
Statistics from the Gaza Community Mental Health Programme
• 1,420 Palestinians killed, 446 of them children
• 5,320 injured, 1,855 of them children
• 4,000 houses destroyed
• 16,000 houses damaged
• 94.6% of children aged six-17 heard the sound of sonic jetfighters
• 91.7% of them heard shelling by artillery
• 92% saw mutilated bodies on TV
• 80% were deprived of water or electricity
• 50.7% left home for a safer place
• 25.9% report one symptom of PTSD
• 39.3% report more than one symptom
• 9.8% report full criteria of PTSD
Statistics from the Palestinian Centre for Human Rights
• 1,414 Palestinians killed during the conflict, including 313 children, of which: – 31% girls, 69% boys
– 15% under 5; 23.3% 5-10; 62% 11-17
– 73% died from bombs; 19.8% from artillery shells; 5.4% shot; 1.5% from white phosphorous
• 5,300 Palestinians injured, including 1,606 children
• 36 UN schools damaged
• Approximately 20,000 homes completely or partially destroyed
