Category: Gaza - Page 71 - International Solidarity Movement

Burying Ayoub

by Nathan Stuckey

11 March 2012 | International Solidarity Movement, Gaza

Twelve year old Ayoub Assalya was murdered today. He was walking to school when an Israeli missile landed next to him. It was seven A.M. He is another casualty of Israel’s latest attack on Gaza. For three days now Gaza has been under bombardment. Eighteen people have been killed. Dozens have been injured.

His funeral was held today in Jabalia, the refugee camp where he lived. We waited outside the mosque for midday prayers to end. The street outside was crowded with people waiting for the funeral. A bus was parked to carry those who could not walk the several kilometers to the cemetery. Ayoub was carried out on a stretcher, a stretcher held by a dozen men, his bloodied face the only thing visible, his body was wrapped in white cloth. His face appeared swollen.

The mourners carried his body east to the cemetery. A sound truck drove along with them. The crowd chanted, “God is great”, “there is no god but god”, and “the martyr is the beloved of God”. Music played and the black flags of Islamic Jihad floated above us. The men walked quickly, down the dusty road out of the camp and towards the cemetery. The day was hot; dust rose under the hundreds of pairs of feet that walked with Ayoub, people used Kleenexes to cover their mouths.

As we approached the cemetery you could see the border. This is the same border where the Israel shot four men yesterday. The four men had been attending the funeral of yesterday’s martyrs. The land leading up the border is barren, there are no trees, Israel bulldozed them all years ago. A giant Israeli gun tower looms on the horizon. These towers dot the border of Gaza, reminding everyone that Gaza is a prison. In the cemetery though, there are trees, trees growing amidst the graves. Perhaps the graves saved them from the Israeli bulldozers. The cemetery is beautiful, white graves under palm trees. Fruit trees also grow here.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q9sjdb5iI6w

As we enter the cemetery we see that there is another funeral already going on. A few hundred people gathered only a hundred meters away from us, burying yet another martyr. Ayoub is buried in a freshly dug grave. His grave is next to six other fresh graves, graves from martyrs of yesterday. They do not yet have gravestones, their names are written on cardboard attached to concrete blocks. They lower Ayoub into his grave and the men start to fill it with earth.

After the grave is full and a slight mound has formed over Ayoub’s small body one man keeps shoveling earth onto it, others tell him, “khalas”, enough, he doesn’t stop. The man shoveling dirt ignores them, he continues to shovel, finally, someone puts his hand on his arm and leads him away. He is led away, it is final, Ayoub is dead, the funeral is over. The mourning will continue for many years.

Nathan Stuckey is a volunteer with International Solidarity Movement

Gaza rally for Hana Shalabi on International Women’s Day

by Joe Catron

8 March 2012 | Mondoweiss

Hundreds of Palestinian women filled the street outside Gaza’s International Committee of the Red Cross this morning, marking International Women’s Day by demanding the release of administrative detainee Hana Shalabi on the 22nd day of her open hunger strike.

The rally contained Palestinian women of every age, including many university students and other youth.

Many girls joined their mothers to express their support for Shalabi.

During the demonstration, which lasted several hours, tired participants rested inside a crowded protest tent.

Thaer Abed Al Hameed Mahdi, murdered by the Siege

by Nathan Stuckey

8 March 2012 | International Solidarity Movement, Gaza

Thaer Abed Al Hameed Mahdi died on Saturday, March 3^rd, 2012. He was 23 years old. A rope snapped and he plunged down a shaft to his death. He died instantly. His coworkers Jamal Kamel Mahdi and Raed Jaber Mahdi survived, they are still in the hospital. Jamal is in the European Hospital with two broken legs and a broken arm. Raed is in Shifa Hospital. His back is broken. Three years ago Israel slaughtered almost 1,500 Gazans, and nobody was held accountable for that massacre, and no one even talks of the hundreds or thousands that have been killed and injured in the tunnels since the beginning of the siege. The tunnels that are Gaza’s only link to things like cement, whose import into Gaza is forbidden by Israel.

Thaer was just a normal young man; he wanted what all young men in Gaza want, to get married, to have a family. Those are things that he will never have. Marriage and family of his own were always a dream for him, but a distant dream. The money he earned from his job working in the tunnels went to help his own parents and his eight younger brothers and sisters. He started working in the tunnels six months ago; there was no other work to be found. His family needed the money; their only income was his father’s job as a doorman at Al Aqsa University. Money was tight. He went with his two friends, Raed and Jamal, and got a job in the place they could find one, the tunnels.

Even this job was only three or four days a week, when he got the call, he went to work. He never knew what he would be doing, unloading the cement his tunnel imported into Gaza, or working underground in the hot airless tunnel. On Saturday, the three of them went to work, they got on the seat that they rode down into the tunnel and started the descent, the rope broke, they fell. Thaer will never get married; he will never see his own children.

This is what we heard as we sat in the mourning tent with Thaer’s uncle. This was the story of Thaer’s life and death. Thaer died when a rope broke, but he was killed by the siege that strangles Gaza. His uncle said to us, “The main reason for the siege is the division between Fatah and Hamas, the division must end. The youth must be given a chance to live a normal life.”

Nathan Stuckey is a volunteer with International Solidarity Movement.

The seen and unseen in the No Go Zone

by Nathan Stuckey

7 March 2012 | International Solidarity Movement, Gaza

Today, like ever Tuesday, we marched into the no go zone north of Beit Hanoun. We gathered by the half destroyed Beit Hanoun Agricultural College and marched north, towards Jerusalem. A Jerusalem that few of the protesters have ever seen, they have never been allowed to go to Jerusalem, it is forbidden to them, just as the land in the no go zone is forbidden to them. Jerusalem and Al Aqsa are unseen. We demonstrated for Al Aqsa and the prisoners. The prisoners too are unseen; Gazans are not allowed to visit their sons and brothers and held in the prisons of the occupation. As we walked down the road toward the no go zone a giant balloon rose over the wall. We are the seen, watched from giant balloons, watched from soldiers in the towers that line the wall, seen from the sights of guns, an Apache helicopter roars in the distance. Local herders tell us that there are tanks behind the wall. For us, the soldiers who look at us through rifle scopes are yet unseen. Later, they will make their appearance. In the sky floats the black flag which flies over the occupation, most of the world refuses to see it, they refuse to recognize it for what it is, but for the people of Palestine it always floats in the sky, like the second moon in a Murakami novel.

We enter the no go zone and walk toward the flags that we have left during previous demonstrations. There are about forty of us, we have no guns, only our voices and our flags. We stop by row of flags we left last week. Sabur Zaaneen from the Local Initiative of Beit Hanoun starts to speak, “Khader Adnan told us that honor is more important than food, Hana Shalabi reminds us that freedom is more important than food, we will continue the struggle.” Both of them are held in Israeli prisons, neither of them have been charges with any crime. Three months ago few people knew who either of them were, they were unseen, but they still existed, within them both was a great power and a great determination. Both of them refuse to be oppressed in silence, their hunger strikes are calls for justice, for honor. They are inspirations to us all.

We sit down under the flags. Our goal is to spend twenty minutes in the no go zone. After only a couple of minutes the unseen Israeli soldiers start to shoot at us. Bullets whistle over our heads, thirty maybe forty of them. We stand up, retreat down a small hill and stop. The young men begin to chant, against the occupation, pledging their lives to defend Al Aqsa, an Al Aqsa that few of them have ever seen, in support of Hana Shalabi, a woman none of us has ever seen. It doesn’t matter that most of them have never seen Al Aqsa, or Jenin, or Hebron, or Jaffa, that they have never seen the homes from which their grandfathers were driven, the orange trees that fed their grandmothers, those things are still theirs, they are still inside of them. Theft does not change possession.

We leave the no go zone when we want, we are not driven out by the Israeli bullets which whistle over our heads. As we leave the no go zone the soldiers come out of hiding and watch us from atop their tower, we see them with our bare eyes, they see us through rifle sights. We have done what we set out to do today, we have tried in our small way to remind people that closing your eyes and saying that you don’t see something does not make it disappear. What is unseen is often more important than what is seen. Food we can all see, honor, none of us can see, but honor is more important than food. Al Aqsa is something that many of the people here have never seen, but it is something for which we are willing to give our lives. Justice cannot be seen, but all of us are willing to fight for it. The struggle will go on, a struggle mostly for unseen things, often unseeable things. It is a struggle for the only things really worth fighting for, justice, freedom, and peace. I have never seen Khader Adnan or Hana Shalabi but I would like to thank them both, for showing us what heroism looks like. Even those that have never seen Al Aqsa know that it is beautiful, that it is worth dying for.

Nathan Stuckey is a volunteer with International Solidarity Movement.

Red flags over Gaza: Palestinian leftists rally for Hana Shalabi

by Joe Catron

5 March 2012 | Mondoweiss

Hundreds of Palestinians, mainly from the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), the Palestinian People’s Party (PPP), the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine (DFLP), and other leftist factions, rallied for administrative detainee Hana Shalabi, now on her 19th day of an open hunger strike, outside Gaza’s International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) this morning, ahead of International Women’s Day Thursday.

Their presence bolstered the numbers of a protest tent already erected at the ICRC entrance, and maintaining a continuous presence there, to support Shalabi.

Among the crowd, different kinds of red flags mixed easily with the black and yellow ones of Shalabi’s Islamic Jihad Movement in Palestine.

Meanwhile dozens of Palestinians continued their weekly vigil for family members imprisoned by Israel, demanding that the ICRC fulfill its obligations to protect their rights.