Category: Gaza

Bittersweet Eid

by Lydia de Leeuw

19 November 2011 | A Second Glance

Donkey carts lined up opposite the market in Jabaliya refugee camp (Photo: Lydia de Leeuw, A Second Glance) – Click here for more images

Last week Eid al Adha was celebrated in Gaza and other Muslim communities worldwide. Eid al Adha is one of the most important holidays in Islam, marking the end of the Haj (annual pilgrimage to Mecca) season and symbolizing sacrifices for Allah as well as asking for forgiveness. The official day of Eid al Adha, which fell on Sunday 6 November this year, is celebrated by ritually slaughtering animals, such as cows and sheep, and parents giving their children a new outfit and some pocket money to buy toys. The meat of the slaughtered animals is divided among families and neighbours, and especially shared with those who cannot afford to buy meet.

While spending a wonderful time with friends and their families during Eid, I reflected on the essence of holidays. Regardless of the location, religion or traditions, celebrations of holidays seem to have three core elements in common: spending time with family, giving to others and a feeling of happiness. But what does a holiday look like without those?

Many families in the Gaza Strip had to celebrate another Eid without their brother, son, father, daughter, or sister. Following last month’s prisoner exchange between Israel and Hamas, there are still about 5,500 Palestinians[1] languishing in 22 Israeli prisons and detention facilities.[2] Over 700 of these prisoners are from Gaza and have not seen their relatives for many years as the Israeli occupation authorities have not allowed any family visits. On the second day of Eid several relatives (mostly mothers) of Palestinian prisoners gathered in front of the Red Cross Office in Gaza city. They held a weekly sit-in demonstration in support of their imprisoned family members. They have been coming together in solidarity, holding pictures of the sons, every Monday morning for the past 17 years. The constant sadness over the absence of their relatives seemed even more tangible during this important holiday. A woman sitting next to me showed me a picture of her son, saying she had not seem him for four years and that she always kept hoping that he would come home again the following day. She had been cherishing this hope for the past eleven years. There seems to be no other consolation than to hope that one day she would see him again, so we just repeated together “insh’allah” (God willing).

For Eid al Adha it is tradition to buy  a new outfit for your children and to give them some money for buying toys. However, the suffocating closure of the Gaza Strip has made increasingly difficult for parents to provide for their families, let alone giving their children something extra. The closure has brought the Gaza economy to a standstill and has driven the unemployment rate up to a staggering 42,5%. Approximately 75% of the people in Gaza receive humanitarian aid of some sort. So for many parents in Gaza Eid means more struggling and juggling; more borrowing, and trying to figure out a way to give their kids the traditional Eid gifts. Even more than usual, the high food prices were a ‘hot topic’ for conversation and everyone was eager to find out where to go for the best deal.

Two days before Eid, when I was on my way to visit a friend in the north, I learned about another absurdity of the circumstances in Gaza. Throughout the streets and fields I noticed there was an unusual number sheep, cows and goats. Since there is not a lot to eat here for those animals and many of them were grazing around rubbish dump sites, I started wondering: where had these herds of fluffy Eid meals come from? Turned out that a lot of the animals for Eid are smuggled (yes, smuggled) in through the tunnels with Egypt. Even though I could have expected this, I was still shocked. Even the holiday meals have become a smuggled commodity. Looking at these goats, sheep and cows and visualising their trip through the tunnels, the absurdity of the policies once again hit me.

Besides the absence of loved ones and the financial struggles, there is the ever present risk of army attacks from the border, the sea, and especially air. A week before Eid, 15 year old Rawand Tayseer Abu Mughassib was on her way to her grandmother’s house nearby, for an evening visit. They all live close to the border area in the central Gaza Strip. As Rawand headed for the front gate, separating the house from the road in front of it. Suddenly, an Israeli plane fired a missile which landed four to five meters away from her, on the road. She was lucky to be one step away from the gate, with the wall protecting her from most of the deadly shrapnel. The gate was blown out of the wall and only just missed Rawand.  She was injured in her left hand, and three houses (including that of her family) were damaged. The missile apparently targeted Palestinian fighters in the area. Since the attack, Rawand and her siblings are very anxious, especially after sunset, and are afraid of being alone. Rimas, Rawand’s little sister wakes up crying from nightmares every night and has started bedwetting. The father, Tayseer, says he does not know how he can comfort his children when they are so full of fear: “there is nothing I could do or say, instead of just being there with them”. He says he is also struggling with his own fears, but that he insists to no show this to his children. Rawand and her family started their Eid with fear, feeling abandoned and unprotected.[3]

In a place like Gaza holidays seem as much a test of the people’s resilience and strength as a time of joy and celebration.

[1] Among those thousands are 251 children, 37 women, and at least 124 prisoners who are detained for long periods without charges.

[2] Most of these prisons and detention facilities are located within Israel. The imprisonment of Palestinians from the occupied territories (Gaza Strip, West Bank) in Israel is illegal under international law and violates the Fourth Geneva Convention, particularly Article 76, which stipulates that “Protected persons accused of offences shall be detained in the occupied country, and if convicted they shall serve their sentences therein.”

[3] The Israeli occupation army often uses heavy airstrikes to target fighters in the densely populated Gaza Strip, often risking to cause civilian casualties, who will then be called ‘collateral damage’. Since January this year 18 civilians were killed and 16 injured in airstrikes which targeted fighters in the Gaza Strip. Of those who were killed, 3 were children.

Gaza lives on

16 November 2011 | Al Jazeera English

The Israeli blockade may have taken a heavy toll on Gazans, but this film reveals life and hope among the devastation.

Since 2007, most of the approximately 1.5 million Palestinians living in the Gaza Strip have suffered gravely from an intensified land, air and sea blockade imposed by Israel.

The blockade, deemed illegal by the United Nations, was implemented after Hamas, a Palestinian faction labelled a terrorist organisation by Tel Aviv, took control over the territory and ousted Fatah officials from power in the battle of Gaza.

After more than two decades of tight sanctions and even though Israel eased the restrictions on non-military goods in 2010, the blockade continues to take a heavy toll on Gaza’s civilian population, with many essential and basic goods banned from being exported or imported. This has led to rampant poverty and a massive unemployment rate in Gaza.

But Gaza once had thriving economy and was a major exporter of key staple foods, including fruits and vegetables, to countries across the world. Israel’s policies since the occupation, however, have forced the vast majority of Gazans to rely on foreign humanitarian aid for survival.

According to the UN, about one-third of Gaza’s arable land and 85 per cent of its fishing waters are totally or partially inaccessible due to the Israeli blockade.

Abu Anwar Jahjouh, who has worked as a corn seller for the past 15 years and lives in the Shati refugee camp in Gaza, says it is a daily struggle to scrape out a living: “Back in the 1960s, we used to export oranges. Ships would come from Turkey, Spain, Germany and all of Europe. We used to export oranges, lemons, clementines and grapefruits. But those ships stopped coming to Gaza after 1967. No one comes to Gaza anymore. We can’t export anything. That’s why we started selling corn here on the beach. We sell anything.”

Rebuilding … without materials

The Israeli blockade has also prevented construction materials from entering the Strip, with the exception of some materials intended for internationally-supervised projects.

According to an Oxfam report, in 2008, 95 per cent of Gaza’s industrial operations were suspended due to lack of access to material needed for production and the inability to export produced items.

Kamal Khalaf, a construction contractor, said Israel’s war on Gaza between 2008 and 2009, in which the UN estimates 60,000 homes were damaged or destroyed, made the blockade much more problematic: “After the siege, the import of construction material into Gaza was banned. We had no cement, no steel, nothing. I stayed for two years with no work. There was nothing to build.”

Even construction material needed to build schools has reportedly been blocked from entering the Strip. With half of Gaza’s population under the age of 18, children are attending overcrowded schools – with many running multiple shifts – which has severe repercussions for the quality of education they receive.

In addition to this, thousands of children remain displaced from their homes – having lost all that is familiar to them, including clothes, toys, school books and a secure environment.

Israel even bans fishermen from going more than three miles from Gaza’s shoreline for “security reasons”. Those who breach the rule regularly run the risk of being shot at by Israeli navy patrols. At least seven fishermen have been killed by the Israeli navy in recent years and many more have been injured or arrested.

An underground lifeline

As a result of the blockade, underground tunnels have been Gaza’s main lifeline to Egypt and the rest of the world.

“We wanted to live, so we had to look for solutions …. We started to bring sacks of concrete into Gaza through these tunnels. It was exhausting to lift those heavy sacks inside these tunnels,” Khalaf says.

As well as being used for the smuggling of goods, the tunnels have also helped reunite families unable to enter Gaza through legal means.

May Wardeh met her husband Mohammad in the West Bank, but had to travel for four days via Jordan to Egypt and then through an underground tunnel to reach Gaza. She says she almost died just to get to him in Gaza, but then they had a big wedding party at the beach and she now lives with her husband in the Nuseirat refugee camp in central Gaza.

“I thought I’d see a worsening situation in a city full of refugee camps. But when I reached Gaza, I saw something completely different from what I had imagined,” Wardeh says, recalling her first day in Gaza.

Sharif Sarhan is a photographer from Gaza who works with several news agencies and international organisations. He is amazed by the Gazans’ strength and determination to live their lives and rebuild their city despite the siege and destruction.

“You can always find life and hope in Gaza,” he says. “Amid this devastation, you can see that people still want to live.”

This episode of Al Jazeera World can be seen from Tuesday, November 15, at the following times GMT: Tuesday: 2000; Wednesday: 1200; Thursday: 0100; Friday: 0600; Saturday: 2000; Sunday: 1200; Monday: 0100; Tuesday: 0600.

Independence Day in the Buffer Zone

by Nathan Stuckey

16 November 2011 | International Solidarity Movement, Gaza

Photo: Hama Waqum - Click here for more images

Twenty three years ago today the Palestinian declaration of independence was released.  Written by Mahmoud Darwish, and unveiled to the world by Yasser Arafat in Algiers where he was living in exile like millions of other Palestinians.  Today, in Beit Hanoun, we, the Local Committee of Beit Hanoun, the International Solidarity Movement, and local citizens of Beit Hanoun marched into the no go zone just as we have done every Tuesday for the last three years.

We gathered on the road beside the Agricultural College, raised Palestinian flags, and started to sing as we marched.  We were about fifty strong.  Men and women, Palestinians and Internationals, marched together to celebrate independence.  As we crested the hill that lies on the border of the no go zone the person next to me commented how nice it was that the flag that we had placed in the no go zone was still there, the previous flag had been used by Israeli soldiers for target practice, we had found it laying in the dirt, it’s staff smashed by a bullet.  Our flag was still there, the flag that has been flying in the face of Israeli bullets for sixty three years, through the Nakba, the Naqsa, the Occupation, the Intifada’s, the flag still flies.

We marched into the no go zone, this area of life transformed into a place of death.  The scarred earth that so little is allowed to live in, ripped up every couple of months by IDF bulldozers.  Beyond our flag is giant concrete fence lined with towers full of guns.  Above us a giant white balloon to watch our every move.  Demonstrations in Gaza are not met my soldiers with batons, or tear gas, or even rubber bullets, they are met with live fire, sometimes with tank shells.

We paused by a giant concrete block that we had painted with the Palestinian flag in an earlier demonstration.  Sabur Zaaneen from the Local Initiative of Beit Hanoun climbed onto the block to speak.  He vowed that the Palestinian people “continue the popular resistance and the struggle, until the end of the Occupation and the Palestinians gained their freedom and independence.”  His message to the world was that “we invite you to work with us in the struggle for freedom in Palestine.  Free people of the world must reject political blackmail and bribes from Israel and America as we recently saw in the United Nations.”  His speech was followed by a release of balloons into the no go zone and debka dancing.

Palestine is still not free, the Occupation continues.  Declarations of Independence are not reserved for peoples that are already free; they are statements of desire, of hope.  The United States released its Declaration of Independence only one year into its war for independence, fighting would continue for another three years.  Palestine released its declaration of Independence one year into the first Intifada.  The struggle has continued for twenty three more years, it will continue until victory.

Meanwhile in Gaza

by Radhika S.

15 November 2011 | Notes from Behind the Blockade

Beit Hanoun locals march to Buffer Zone - Click here for more images

I awoke today with the news that the NYPD was clearing out Occupy Wall Street and that Israeli tanks were shelling “northern Gaza.”  In the West Bank, Palestinian Freedom Riders, inspired by the US freedom riders of the 1960s, were getting ready to board segregated buses to occupied East Jerusalem.

Here in Gaza, we head to Beit Hanoun for their weekly nonviolent protest in the buffer zone.  For three years, Palestinians in the north have been marching into the barren, no-man’s land which encircles the inside of the narrow strip like a slowly-tightening noose.

We arrived around 11 a.m. and gathered in front of a bombed-out house down a dusty road leading to the border. This was my second buffer zone protest. At my first, two weeks ago, the Israeli army had fired a few shots from the military towers at the border.  I wondered what would happen today.  As a foreigner, I was to don a reflective fluorescent yellow vest and walk in front of the Palestinians, which seemed to provide them a degree of solace.  They seem to think that the Israelis were less likely to use lethal violence when Americans, Italians, and Brits walked with them.

I was not so sure.

About two dozen people waving Palestinian flags marched down the dusty path towards the buffer zone.  The landscape reminded me of home, of California, with its thorny tumbleweeds and cactus.  It was hard to believe that only ten years ago fruit orchards and olive trees filled this area. But Israel had bulldozed it all, claiming it needed 300 kilometers of Gaza’s most fertile land, but in reality taking more.

Onwards we walked, the Palestinians singing songs and holding a giant Palestinian flag. I wondered what was in store for us today as Israel’s concrete wall and military towers became visible. Would they shoot in the air first? Or would they shoot at us? If they shot us, would they shoot someone standing in the middle first (as I was) or someone standing off to the side?  Would they shoot us in the legs?  And how good was their aim?

We past a small farm and the family waved at us. They were very brave to have stayed, I thought.  Another farm had stuck a large white flag in the dirt in front of their house, as I had seen other families near the buffer zone do. Other farm houses had clearly been abandoned.

We were getting close to the buffer zone now, and the journalists that had come along moved from the front to the back. They didn’t want to get shot either. I started to imagine what it felt like to get shot.  Excruciatingly painful, I decided.

At that point, I recalled that I had never made a will. If I died intestate, what law would apply? I had just moved from California to New York, but was I officially a resident of New York? And how would Gaza factor into it all?  Was Gaza like the West Bank, where Israel applied a strange patchwork of Ottoman, Jordanian and Israeli military law as it pleased? Not that I really had much to bequeath.

We continued on, and I could see the Palestinian flag we had planted in the earth two weeks before. It was a windy day, and the flag billowed beautifully. The Israeli army had not shot it down.  About 50 meters behind it loomed the wall and the military towers.

“Our flag is still there!” I exclaimed to Nathan, an American volunteer walking next to me.  The Israelis had used the last Palestinian flag as target practice.

“Do you want to sing the star-spangled banner?” he joked.  I smiled, I hadn’t intended to make the reference. Yasser Arafat had symbolically declared Palestinian Independence 23 years ago today, on November 15, 1988.

We stopped, well before the flag, at a large cement block painted red, black and green. Sabur Zaaneen from the Beit Hanoun Local Initiative, the leader of the march, had thought the area to be more dangerous in recent days.

He gave a brief speech on Palestinian independence and the countries that were standing in the way of Palestinian freedom. As he spoke, I stared at the Israeli towers and the wall, the Israeli flags on top and of the land beyond it on the other side. I wondered if at that moment, Palestinians were attempting to board Jewish-only buses in the West Bank, facing violence from Israeli settlers not unlike the KKK in the Jim Crow south.

The speech ended and the Israelis had not shot at us.  A few of the young men broke into a dabke dance, a Palestinian line dance of sorts, as one of them played the tabla and sung, and the women clapped in rhythm. I didn’t know the words but I clapped along as well.

We head back, and I had the star-spangled banner stuck in my head. “O! say does that star-spangled banner yet wave, O’er the land of the free and the home of the brave.”

One day, Palestine too would be free.

“Only one half of me is free, but the other half is still there, locked up behind Israeli bars”

by Shahd Abusalama

13 November 2011  | Palestine from My Eyes

A beautiful halo around Gaza’s full moon

In a nice restaurant overlooking Gaza’s beach, beneath a full moon with a beautiful halo surrounding it, I sat with my new friends who recently were released from Israeli prisons. Their freedom was restricted by Israel’s inhumane rules, including indefinitely deportation from the West Bank, away from their families and friends. However, they all shared one thought: “The problem is not here.  Both the West Bank and Gaza are our homeland. The problem is that our freedom will not be complete until our land and people are totally free.”

I listened carefully to their prison stories and memories of their families in other parts of Palestine. One of the most interesting things for me to hear was the warm, strong, and caring friendships they remembered from inside the painful cells. These unbreakable friendships were their only distractions from the wounds that used to hurt them deeply inside.

One of my new friends is Chris Al-Bandak, the only Christian of the released detainees, who was freed in the first stage of the swap deal. After I was introduced to him, I congratulated him on regaining his freedom, and he faked his smile and replied, “Only one half of me is free, but the other half is still there, locked up behind Israeli bars.”

I didn’t know much about Chris, except for his religion, but many things about him made me want to get to know him more closely. I was quite certain that this impressive 32-year-old man had many interesting stories to tell and learn from.

Chris said that he was one of the people besieged by the Israeli Occupation Forces at the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem in 2002. That alone made me impatient to hear the rest of his story. “The siege lasted for 40 days. It got more unbearable as time passed, with the food and first aid equipments dwindling. The injured people were under the threat of death, and the others’ lives were endangered as well as the IOF’s pressure increased.”

As Chris spoke, his eyes evoked anger and sorrow as they wandered to his right. He sounded like he was replaying a tape of his most difficult memories. Then he suddenly began stuttering as he said, “My best friend, Hafith Sharay’a, was one of the injured people.” I reminded him that he didn’t have to speak about it if it made him feel bad.

He pulled himself together and kept telling his story. “On the 28th day of the siege, we were on the top floor of the Church of the Nativity, responsible for the lives of the people downstairs and guarding the church, when he was shot in the right side of his stomach. With every drop of blood he lost, my soul burned inside. I couldn’t watch him die and do nothing.” Impatiently I interrupted, asking, “Was he killed?” He shook his head and continued. “His injury left me only two choices: let him bleed to death, or send him to the Israeli Army for treatment, while I was certain that he would afterwards receive at least a life sentence.”

Each option was worse than the other. Chris thought that if Hafith died, he would never see him again. If he was treated and then imprisoned, he might meet him, even though the chance was very small. Hafith and Chris were like soul mates. They didn’t share many things in common. Hafith is older and a Muslim, while Chris is a Christian. However, they prioritized their deep passion for Palestine above everything else. This overcame all their differences, and they share a magical strong friendship which will last forever.

So Chris chose to put his emotions aside and rescue Hafith from death by delivering him to the Israeli army. “On the 29th day, I somehow managed to sneak out of the church and escape.  But ten months later, I was kidnapped by the Israeli Entity’s army.”

Palestinians in Bethlehem are protesting in solidarity with Chris who is deported to Gaza

Chris described in detail the horrible story of his capture. He had gone to visit some of his relatives. Within 20 minutes of his arrival, the Israeli army arrived in great numbers and surrounded the house. He faked a name for himself and answered the police’s questions in a very sarcastic way. He told all his relatives to say his name was Fady if asked, which they did. He refused to admit that he was Chris. After several hours of investigation, pressure, and threats of bombing the house and arresting his mother and brother, one of the children was shedding tears out of fear. Seeing this, a policeman used the child’s innocence and tricked him. After the policeman said that the soldiers would leave if he said the real name of Chris, the child admitted it.

Chris was persistent, and didn’t admit his identity until they were about to bomb the house in front of his eyes. After his confession, he was asked where he had been sleeping at night. He replied, “You bombed my house, so where did you expect me to go? I spent my nights in the cemetery.” The interrogator was very shocked at his reply and asked him, “Weren’t you afraid among all dead bodies in their graves?” He answered, with an angry, challenging look in the Israeli soldiers’ eyes, “One shouldn’t fear the dead. They are dead. But we should be afraid of the living people whose conscience is dead!”

Then they blindfolded him, pushed him inside one of their Gibbs vehicles, and headed to an interrogation center, where he was psychologically and physically tortured for 43 days. Chris constantly thought of his friend Hafith, and hoped that his imprisonment would allow him to meet his best friend again.

This happened in a very narrow cell in Ramla Prison, as he waited to learn in which prison he would be jailed. The detainees were having “foura”, an hour-long break that detainees take daily outside their jails in a hall, and a very small window, closed with a revealing cover, separated him from the hall. Suddenly he glimpsed his friend Hafith and found himself screaming his name loudly to get his attention. “Our re-union was so emotional, especially behind a fenced barrier,” he said with a broken smile.

Their happiness didn’t last long, as they had to separate once the foura was done. Chris was transferred to Asqalan Prison, then to Nafha. “I stayed away from Haifith for over a year, but during that time, I never stopped hoping that God would be kind enough to bring us together again.”

Chris was in Nafha when his friend was transferred there, finally uniting them. Then they went through a series of separations keeping them apart for a total of four years. “A prison offers no sense of stability.” Chris said. “When we were imprisoned, we didn’t stop our struggle, but we started another stage of resistance of a different kind, determination and persistence mixed with hope.”

During the period before Chris was released, he shared a prison cell with Hafith. “Other detainees received the news of their freedom with screams of joy and happiness, but I received it with tears. I didn’t even feel 1% happy, as I realized that only I was included in the swap deal. Even now, I feel like my body is outside but my heart is still inside the prison with Hafith and all the other detainees,” Chris said with sadness on his face.

“I am very grateful for having Hafith as a big brother. But I am broken inside because he didn’t get his freedom back. I am sure that he’s such a steadfast man that nothing can depress his spirit,” he said, attempting to console himself.

Their friendship amazed me. It can’t be described in words. I pray that Haifith, along with all the Palestinian political prisoners, will be freed soon. I hope Hafith maintains his strength which used to inspire and strengthen Chris. Chris said that Hafith made him believe in his principle that “the prison’s door must unlock someday. It’s only an obstacle, and is bound to fade away at some point.” I hope it will be unlocked soon to let all prisoners breathe the sweet fragrance of freedom again.