Category: Journals - Page 133 - International Solidarity Movement

Letter from Nablus

by Lena

Nablus has the historical reputation of being at the heart of Palestinian resistance. The Israeli government apparently claims that this is still the case and the conditions of the occupation have been harsher here than elsewhere.

After the start of the second Intifada in September 2000 residents of Nablus were forbidden to leave the city and non-residents were forbidden from entering. People who needed to pass the checkpoints could only do so in ambulances and even then they would be delayed for extended periods of time.

About a year ago people under the age of 45 were allowed out of the city and this was then reduced to 35, then 25, until two weeks ago when people of all ages have been allowed to cross the checkpoints on foot. Vehicle access is almost non-existent.

Within the area of the surrounding checkpoints the population of Nablus is about 200,000, which includes four refugee camps and six or seven villages. A number of other villages lie outside the checkpoints, but these are regularly cut off from the city.

Curfews in the villages and closures at the checkpoints have rendered it exceptionally difficult for the villages to provide Nablus with the food upon which it once depended. Although these days it is easier for people to move around, there are still big problems getting agricultural produce in, and apparently the situation now is that a significant proportion of fresh fruit and vegetables are being supplied by the settlements. It is perhaps difficult to appreciate just how messed up this is unless you have a bit of an idea about the general situation here.

In 2001 a huge trench was built between Nablus and four neighbouring villages which was then filled with sewage from the settlement of Elon Mora. Thereafter all movement between the city and the villages was funnelled through two crossing points – one also houses an occasional checkpoint and the other is just a pipe crossing over the open sewage: only recommended for people with good balance.

Settlements and military bases are on top of most of the hills around the valley in which Nablus is situated. The settlements are distinctive by their location and the uniformity of the buildings – red rooftops on white square buildings. An extensive network of roads serves the settlements, which are out of bounds to the Palestinian population and carve up the entire West Bank and Gaza strip.

Once the settlements are established they expand and spread “like a cancer”, as a Palestinian friend once described to me. As well as the area of land that they cover, the surrounding area is also out of bounds to Palestinians, regardless of whether they own land there or not. In one place that I visited the last time I was here this was a radius of about five kilometres from the settlement. If Palestinians enter this area they risk being shot at, either by the army or by the armed inhabitants of the settlements. These people are scary: In many settlements they form a civilian militia made up of people who are fanatical religious fundamentalists. The settlements are paramilitary communities.

Things in Nablus are much less dramatic now than when I last stayed here in November 2002 – I haven’t seen a tank yet (what have they done with them? Lent them to the United States for use in Iraq? Perhaps they were on loan in the first place). Buildings have been rebuilt, the roadblocks – huge piles of rubble which would appear overnight turning busy streets into dead ends – have been cleared and all the shops are open. Curfews in the city haven’t been imposed for extended periods this year; sometimes they were enforced for months on end. In one village near Nablus they have spent one year out of the last five under curfew, if you add up all the days. The last major military incursion into Nablus was in September last year, although there are small scale incursions almost every night, particularly in the refugee camps and the old city.

The psychological impact of the occupation has been acute and the economic impact is still crippling. Since September 2000 per capita income in the West Bank has decreased from $1600 to $700, and this does not take into account the escalation in prices bought on by scarcity and the risks involved with transporting produce. In Gaza the figures are even worse: from $1400 to between $300 and $400 – about level with countries in Sub-Saharan Africa that are in the throes of conflict.

I have been staying in Balata refugee camp, the largest in the West Bank in population terms with about 35,000 people, but an area which is only 800 meters by 500. Refugee camps in Palestine are long-established places which house people who were evicted from their land in what is now called Israel, either in 1948 or 1967. Yesterday I met a woman who is over 80 years old who still lives in the house which the United Nations built for her when she arrived in 1948.

Meeting people in the camp is like being taken on a tour of human tragedy. We spent an hour or two yesterday in a family home and as they bought out coffee, juice, biscuits and fruit we listened to the stories of the people in the room. One woman had lost a son who was killed by the military a year before, whilst her other son was in jail serving a sentence of sixty years.

A woman of about 25 had herself spent two years in prison, and had lost her hearing in one ear as a result of one of the beatings she received. She described the conditions of solitary confinement and the actions of the prison guards who, sometimes high on drugs, subjected them to humiliating treatment.

Next to me was a woman who smiled and joked with me as she fed her two year old child on her lap. When she was seven months pregnant a soldier had thrown a sound bomb between her legs, and the pressure of the explosion meant that she had had to have an emergency caesarean. The child was born two months premature and will probably never be able to walk. One side of his brain is not working properly and half of his body sags, devoid of any strength. He had operations on both of his lungs, and he sat wheezing on her lap as she gestured towards the child and her heart. Her husband translated: “Her heart is bleeding for this one”, he said.

Throughout the period of the ‘ceasefire’ the military have continued to enter Balata camp at night-time, shooting down the streets at the young boys throwing stones, who never agreed to stop their resistance. To begin with, the fighters did not retaliate: they wanted to get their lives back, to stop running down the narrow alleyways of the camp, to spend a night with their families and not expect the next bullet to be headed towards them. As far as they understood, the ceasefire would mean that they were no longer ‘Wanted’ and could continue their lives as ordinary people. However, the army killed two people from the camp about a month ago and a couple of weeks ago they came in and arrested six people. As a result a young fighter from the camp ran through the streets, shouting at people to end the ceasefire. That night, when the army came into the camp, a big clash ensued – the first in months. No-one was killed then, but the next day Special Forces – a branch of the army – came into the camp undercover, lured the man who had shouted in the street out of his house and shot him. He was taken to Huwara military base where he bleed to death and his body was then returned to the camp and dumped in the street for medics to collect.

Last night one of the three international women in the flat where I am staying had a phone call at 9.45: Special Forces were in the camp. We put down our bowls of half-eaten food and rushed out to meet the local Palestinian ISM co-ordinator and an international who is working on some projects in Balata. They were in the middle of a crowd of young boys, and explained to us that two boys had been taken by special forces and then released. Our friends had walked down the road near the building that special forces were in, and shots had been fired from it in their direction, possibly to scare them off. It was unclear where Special Forces were and what they were planning on doing. Before long an army jeep pulled up on the opposite side of the main street to where we were standing. The boys with us started shouting and ran to grab stones from the floor as a second jeep pulled up nearby. We heard that there was also army at the graveyard at the other end of the camp. A phone call told us that there were fighters behind us and that they intended to resist the incursion. In this situation there is nothing that we can do – the last place for us to be is between armed Palestinians and the Israeli military. We formed a line and began retreating down the street at right angles to the main road, which is one of the three main streets of the camp. We held our arms out to indicate that we were unarmed and tried to look as ‘international’ as possible.

Back at the flat a series of phone calls updated us on the situation – the army were stationed at all entrances of the camp; in one place there were about 10 jeeps. We agreed that if someone was injured and the medics arrived and wanted us to be there we would leave the flat and accompany them. There were also Special Forces in the camp, a fact that worried the long term international that I was with because it seemed to indicate that one or more assassinations were about to take place. Possibly they were after one of the teenagers that we had seen earlier that day, walking through the camp with their automatic weapons over their chest (which one?). I saw nothing like this the last time I was here. We spent a couple of hours trying to distinguish between different noises and working out where the gunfire was coming from. Some of it sounded pretty close and a loud explosion happened nearby. Eventually we went to bed, not knowing what to expect this morning.

Thankfully, no-one was killed or injured last night and no houses occupied. We learnt that settlers had come to pray (??????) at a place called Joseph’s Tomb, which is across the road from the camp in Balata village, between the camp and Nablus itself, near where we initially saw the army jeeps last night. This evidently entailed a large military operation and explains why they surrounded the camp, preventing anybody from leaving or seeing what was happening.

Hellish Compounds in the Holy Land

by Lena

Dear all,

At Abu Dis, a small village on the outskirts of Jerusalem, the wall brings the road to an abrubt end, blocking what used to be the main route between Jerusalem and Jericho. About 9 meters high and solid concrete, it extends into the distance to the South, a huge snake carving up the hillside. To the north it pushes up the hill for 50 meters or so, after which there is a metal gate and then the wall of the compound of a building – a normal wall. Between the gate and the next wall there is a gap about a meter from the ground. I started to photograph a woman who was passing a small baby through the gap to someone waiting on the other side.

After a little while a landrover pulled up and one of its passengers got out to speak to someone on the pavement. It looked like an army vehicle but “Police” was printed on the side. I later found out that it belonged to the Border Police – a particularly nasty branch of the Israeli security forces. They are army but police as well and therefore have the authority to arrest internationals. I shifted the camera to include in its frame this addition to the scene. The border policeman started gesturing towards me angrily. I was aware that he wanted me to approach the vehicle but for some reason I didn’t move, just stood staring at him holding the camera to my chest. He walked up the hill towards me and as he got closer shouted at me to produce my ID. I told him that i did not have my passport on me, and had to repeat this a number of times. He made me follow him towards the vehicle before taking my bag and emptying it on the pavement to search it. I told him the name of the hostel i’m staying in and that in England we don’t all have to carry identity cards. He said that it is forbidden to photograph the security forces. I apologised and said that I didn’t know that, I didn’t know i had to carry my passport all the time, I’m just a tourist. He told me to go back to my hotel and get my passport and then i could come back if i wanted. I agreed and the vehicle drove off along the road that shadows the path of the wall.

On the curbside i replaced my things in my bag and looked at the concrete monstrosity towering over me. Grey monotony was peppered with grafitti, including messages of solidarity from people from around the world. In a prominent spot were the words “Friends cannot be divided”. As I sat there a number of communal taxis pulled up and deposited groups of women and children on the road in front of the wall. They walked past me up the hill and towards the gap. I hurriedly changed the film in my camera and by the time i reached the gap there was a group of about 25 people huddled round, waiting to climb through. 5 o’clock: rush hour. Young people waited as old women struggled to gain a foothold.

“Salam al eykum,” I said to a group of teenage girls who were standing at the edge of the group. “Shalom,” one of them replied, the Hebrew equivalent. Both greetings mean “Peace” – how ironic is that? By this point i was unable to hold back my tears – it was my first experience of the wall this trip – so i turned around and started walking up the hill away from them. After a short distance i realised they were following me and i stopped and turned around again. I just about managed to say “Majnoon!” – Arabic for “crazy” – gesturing towards the wall. They smiled widely at my tears and started speaking quickly in Arabic. I could only understand one word – “Yalla” – which means “Lets go”. It was enough. I followed them back towards the gap.

The group was smaller now but people seemed more impatient and a few young men had climbed onto the wall of the compound. Before long the Border Police pulled up again and this time the driver spoke to me, asked me the name of my hotel and then told me to have a nice day! But the guy who had initially spoken to me, who was black and therefore probably an Ethiopian Jew, was in the passenger seat closest to me and kept demanding that i go back to my hotel and get my passport. There wasn’t much else i could do, so I walked back down the hill towards a communal taxi and stood beside it, waiting for more people to fill it up. The landrover drove past and stopped a short distance away. I looked back towards the group and took one last photo as a young girl waved at me. No doubt, if i had made it through the gap, i would have been taken to the home of one of the young lasses and given tea, perhaps food. A neighbour who spoke English would probably have been found, and we could have exchanged information about ourselves. It wasn’t to be. I was experiencing the powerlessness of having to bow down to a higher authority – granted by whom? God? – that Palestinians must feel all the time.

When I looked back at the taxi I realised that the driver was waiting for me so I climbed on board. “Yalla,” I said and he grinned at me as he started the engine.

Today i felt, for the first time, the desperation that i was expecting from the moment I stepped off the plane in Jordan and have grown accustomed to from my experience of ‘developing’ countries. I had just passed through the Bethlehem checkpoint, which was the first that i encountered on my first trip to Palestine. I remember, back then, being confused, because we were passing from Palestinian territory to Palestinian territory and were not crossing any borders. Of course, it quickly became apparent that checkpoints are everywhere throughout the West Bank and Gaza: that is the reality of a military occupation. Anyway, today the beautiful young soldier with an automatic weapon draped across her chest told me to “have a nice day” after she checked my passport. I started walking down the street towards the wall – near the Bethlehem checkpoint it looks much the same as it does in Abu Dis – massive, solid, impenetrable. I waved to a group of boys who shouted a greeting to me from the opposite side of the road, and one of them got up and ran after me, trying to sell me a small bag. I didn’t want the bag but he persisted, saying he was hungry. We had reached the wall by the time he gave up, but his efforts were replaced by those of a man in his thirties, trying to sell me necklaces. “We are suffering”, he said, gesturing towards the wall. Next came the taxi drivers, driving next to me down the street as i walked towards my destination which i knew to be a short distance away. “Please. Business is bad…”

I’m not sure if this desperate persistence is a new thing or not, as the last time i was here i only came to Bethlehem once, at night, and there was no-one around except the military. I’m guessing that it is. The wall divides families, cuts people off from their land, blocks trade routes, discourages tourists. As C, a local Christian coffee-shop owner, kept saying to me “Everything has changed”.

…And yet… C refused to accept any money for my much-welcome coffee. A communal taxi driver also refused my shekels and was disappointed that i declined his invitation to stay with him and his family. It seems that the generosity of the Palestinian people cannot be defeated by humiliation, degredation, poverty. Yesterday i marvelled at the way people circumnavigated a huge physical obstacle and just got on with their lives regardless. Today i’m starting to appreciate the strength of character that that involves.

After the wall at the Bethlehem checkpoint you have to turn left and take a detour of about 15 minutes by foot. It is not possible to continue straight down what used to be the main road, as there is another section of wall further down. Between these two sections of wall there is Rachel’s Tomb, an important religious site for Jewish people. It looks as though it is buried somewhere in large military complex, although I did not visit it this time, preferring to ease my way into the occupation gradually.

My trip to Bethlehem ended up at ‘Shepards Field’ – the place where, legend has it, the shepards saw an angel. Father Michel has been guardian of the site for the last 15 years. On hearing that I’m from Britian, he told me that Blair is no good. “Bush and Blair”, he said, grinding his feet into the dusty ground, indicating his opinion. And Sharon? “War criminal.”

I wondered how many pilgrims have heard this message.

Letter from Hebron

by Ian

After a period of fine weather, the city now has Biblical floods and power cuts. It’s difficult to know what’s going on down the road, let alone in the UK. Still, droplets of news dribble in. Apparently campaigning for next year’s General Election is underway, and political debate is shifting to domestic issues. Law and order. Immigration. The National Health Service.

What a dream the NHS seems here. Despite the Labour Government’s fetish for privatisation, it’s still (so far) a free service for British citizens. Under pressure, like the rest of the welfare state, but it remains a cornerstone of our civilised society.

It has its critics. A running story in the national press for some time now has been the scandal of an NHS ‘postcode lottery’. Why should someone in Hampshire, say, have better services and shorter waiting lists than someone in Lancashire? Where you live shouldn’t affect your rights as a patient…

In post-Arafat Palestine too, an election looms, though the debate about domestic issues here now has a desperate urgency.

Law and order, for instance. The basic principle back home is to protect members of the public. What a miracle that would be for the Palestinian people, who have no say at all in how law and order is administered in the West Bank. The law is made in West Jerusalem and Tel Aviv, and enforced in Palestine by the occupying forces. On the ground, it is harsh, improvised and often lethal.

Unemployment? Someone told me the other day that unemployment in the militarised Hebron region is currently running at 78%. Impossibly high, but who knows? It’s impossible to verify. The economy here is as smashed as the infrastructure. Surrounded and controlled by a state raking in billions of dollars a year in foreign aid, Palestine’s poverty is in the third world league. Families scrape together whatever they can from any part-time, menial, temporary work they can get.

And immigration? This really is a mind-bender. There are plenty of people flooding into Palestine looking for a better life, but they’re not returning Palestinians. Nor are these new settlers asylum-seekers fleeing persecution, or migrants making a positive economic contribution in their host country. They are here for the subsidised housing in rapidly expanding settlements. They are here to steal farming land. Many of the latest wave of settlers in and around Hebron are from America, the richest country on earth, and they are here to rob the poor.

As for the state of the health service in Palestine, you need only visit the Mohammad Ali Hospital to see how the ‘postcode lottery’ operates in Hebron. The hospital is in H2, the eastern section of town that includes the Old City and inner suburbs. It is a military zone, and under an Israeli administration.

Before the second Intifada, the 280-bed hospital dealt with 80% of admissions in Hebron district. Now it deals with just 28%. Fear keeps people away. It’s not just the roadblocks patients must negotiate to get there, or the dangers of being detained by soldiers when you need urgent medical assistance. Simply being in an ambulance here is dangerous.

The Palestine Red Crescent Society isn’t ‘recognised’ by those who control H2. ‘Terrorists’ may be using ambulances, so emergency vehicles can find themselves the targets of gunfire. Snipers are everywhere. Tanks are stationed at high strategic points around the city. Six ambulances have been destroyed in the last three years.

‘You can be held up at a roadblock for two hours, even if you have called the DCO (the local Israeli administrative commander) to tell them you are sending an ambulance’ says senior consultant Firas Amro. ‘If it’s an emergency – someone with a serious myocardial infection – in half an hour he will be dead. A woman in labour – she can’t wait. We regularly have babies delivered at checkpoints.’

Getting patients to the hospital is difficult, but it’s just as difficult to attract money. There is no National Health Service here. Theoretically, treatment is paid for. Sometimes the Palestinian Authority will cover costs if a patient is sent down from Ramallah or Nablus. Sometimes patients will pay the full amount, sometimes half. Often they can afford to pay nothing.

Infant and paediatric services here are in crisis. Hebron’s population is over half a million. More than 50% are under 15 years old. Thirty new specialist paediatric spaces were created this year, bringing the district total to 100, provided by the PRCS and the district’s two government hospitals. A similar catchment area in Israel would have about 500.

Mohammad Ali Hospital is now the main centre for neonatal care in the southern West Bank. If premature babies survive the trip, they have a chance. And life in Hebron is very much a game of chance, the odds stacked according to your nationality.

The other day I saw three teenage settler girls strolling home along a Jewish-only road, barred to Palestinian traffic. They felt secure enough. They were being followed by an Israeli Defence Force jeep, meekly travelling at the pace they set. Now I am being told of a Palestinian boy, 17 years old, out with his friends when he was taken by Israeli soldiers. He was later admitted to hospital. Dead on arrival. He had been thrown from a moving jeep.

The death of a Palestinian may glimmer briefly in the day’s news. But beyond the grim, growing list of fatalities lies a vast number of less newsworthy victims – the maimed, the physically and mentally disabled.

This largely unseen problem, amplified to grotesque proportions by a brutal Occupation, is a huge project for the PRCS. Not only are they struggling to reach and deal with damaged children – particularly in rural areas – they are also battling traditional community attitudes to disability. Until recently physical handicap and mental illness meant shame for the family. The disabled were looked after by their nuclear family. And kept out of sight.

Now the PRCS is running social programs, bringing mobile care units to remote villages, offering respite care and rehabilitation services, raising awareness. A series of educational films on the causes of and treatment for disability (i.e a biological explanation rather than the infuriating default one of Fate, or God’s Bloody Will) is now airing on local TV stations. Almost anywhere else in the world, this public service would be paid for by the government in charge. The TV audience isn’t Israeli, though, so an international charity is funding the campaign.

Al-Raja Centre, just outside Hebron City, is a PRCS day care unit for 80 children, aged 6 upwards. There’s a range of activities – physical and psychological therapy, special needs teaching, even greenhouses and a chicken farm. Farming teaches, but it also feeds. And, importantly, produce earns money for the centre.

There’s some wonderful, progressive work going on here. As part of its awareness campaign, the PRCS has recently called for 5% of employees to be disabled, a target it already exceeds at Al-Raja. The ethos is integration – a regular kindergarten brings day care kids and local children together, and craft workshops teach embroidery and bamboo furniture-making.

This isn’t just occupational therapy. Older teenagers can move from Al-Raja into Hebron’s local craft industries. It is, staff say, one of the most satisfying outcomes of their work. Rebuilding bodies and minds – whether damaged at birth or splintered by the random violence of the Occupation – is a slow process. To see hope and self-esteem inch back over the years is gratifying. But to watch kids move from shameful sequestration at home to enlightened day care to a proper job is cause for jubilation.

The centre building is spartan. Built in 1981, it feels like a cheap 1960s comprehensive school. The rusting hulk of a clapped-out Red Crescent ambulance has been hoisted onto a roof as an improvised logo. For director Tayzir Maraqa, as with every senior health official, the job seems to be half admin, half fundraising. The centre plans to build another storey soon, increasing capacity to 140 (thanks, Spain) and at least the stone classroom floors are a bit warmer now – another overseas donor has provided carpets.

A long-term plan is to establish a bottle-making factory – Hebron glass is celebrated throughout the West Bank, even grudgingly in Israel – to generate more income and provide more jobs for Al-Raja children. But first they must find a donor. And then get the money. And then face another hurdle. ‘The problem is transferring the money’ says Maraqa. ‘The UN, whoever…you’re promised the money, they they (the Israelis) say this money is not to aid development, it is to build a bomb…’

PRCS staff are loyal, and patient. According to Firas Amro, ‘you maybe get a salary cheque every two or three months…’ Medicines and equipment are much harder to get since 9/11. ‘We used to receive funding from the UAE, Saudi Arabia. Now Bush says no money can be transferred, we are financially threatened. It is very hard.’

He too spends a lot of his time writing letters and emails to charities asking for help – ‘begging for aspirin, even. Much of the stuff we get from overseas is past its expiry date or surplus to requirements. I just wish most of the people I write to would even respond. Usually, there is no reply.’

When medicines do arrive, they can be held up for weeks at the airport, for security reasons or just out of bureaucratic spite, so that by the time they get to the hospital they are useless. Sometimes soldiers interfere: ‘We had a vaccination programme for 2-5 year olds recently. Soldiers stopped the ambulance trransporting the vaccine, which cannot be exposed to light, insisted we unload all the boxes and then opened them. They wouldn’t listen. The vaccine was ruined.’

At the PRCS ambulance and emergency unit in Hebron, there are two buildings. One is a low, beaten-up old block at the end of an unmade, potholed road. It functions both as a general treatment and dispensing centre and as the area’s main ambulance despatch station.

The other is an unfinished 7-storey building, Hebron’s new A&E hospital. The shell has been constructed ‘by the will of Allah and the help of some local and international NGOs…’ Like almost every other building in Hebron, it sprouts metal rods from the top. There’s no cladding, no glazing. They’ll have to find the money to complete it, then find the money to fit it out, then find the money for equipment…

For now, the nerve centre for Hebron’s emergency services is a cramped control room with what would be, at home, a sylishly retro swichboard with proper old-school telephone handsets. On the admissions sheet there’s a log entry for the 19 year-old admitted yesterday with serious wounds. He’d been demonstrating against the Apartheid Wall at Beit Ula and caught live fire. In through his shoulder, out through his back, taking his spleen and a kidney on the way. When we visited the site of the demo – a beautiful mountain valley dotted with ancient Canaanite caves and Roman ruins, just about the worst place in the world to erect a giant concrete barrier – people there were convinced an explosive bullet had been used, illegal under international law. Like almost everything else that happens to Palestinians. The young man will live but he’ll be permanently disabled.

Perhaps he’ll need a wheelchair. Today, the PRCS are celebrating the news that 100 chairs (another gift from far beyond the borders of the ‘only democracy in the Middle East’) are to be delivered this week. I hope they’re in better shape than the one I saw being unloaded from a PRCS ambulance amid the rubble of a devastated street.

An elderly woman was being decanted. It was the closest the paramedics could get to her home, wherever that is, as the road had been blocked by several lumps of concete, each a cubic meter. They create a ‘no go’ zone around Worshippers’ Way, a settler road.

This is how you end your days in Hebron, assuming you die of natural causes. Bumping through rubble onto a steep hill where your ambulance isn’t allowed. The PRCS has some burly volunteers for this. Many of Hebron’s roads are surreally steep. Some feel like they’re only a couple of degrees from being walls. There she was, the old lady, being trundled home along the same road where occupying forces escort their teenage children with jeeps following behind at walking pace.

And this is how you start your days in Hebron if you’ve arrived too early – at the Mohammad Ali Hospital, in the heart of H2. Your ticket in the postcode lottery. Born into a society abandoned by the world to the arbitrary will of an oppressive military power.

This is a place brutalised, traumatised by violence and death, where divorce rates are soaring, where job prospects are close to zero, where children play war games. Where, in postcode H1 outside the military zone, hospital doctors arive at work to find 250 patients waiting. Some have queued since 4a.m.

If the Occupation ended now, it would take years, generations, for the wounds to heal. ‘Our children face extreme violence every day’ says Firas Amro. ‘The psychological effect of this is unimaginable. You can cry, and you can stop crying. Something happens to people when they become used to families falling apart, when they can no longer depend on shelter, food, water, their brothers and sisters, when they know hate, when they believe they are going to die. Death has many faces here. One of them is Israeli.’

What could possibly upset a doctor on the Hebron front line, when this shit is going on round the clock, week after week, year after year? The medical director of Mohammad Ali, Said Natsheh, has seen more misery than most. Yet the incident he recalls now with a distracted look happened a decade ago. 1994, the year of the Oslo Agreement, was also the year of the Goldstein Massacre in Hebron. A Jewish settler (from what the AA guide Explorer Israel calls the ‘tough-minded’ settlement of Kiryat Aba) entered the Ibrahimi Mosque and opened fire on worshippers, killing 29 and wounding many more.

Ensuing violence in the town saw Mohammad Ali hHospital occupied continuously for three days by heavily-armed troops. And from his overflowing memory of the suffering this caused to patients and staff, and from all the death and pain he has witnessed since, this doctor is momentarly baffled and disturbed by one small memory.

A little girl, four or five years old with meningitis, siting in a chair. He remembers the soldier, searching for something to stand on to get a better view from a high window. He just grabbed the chair, spilling the child to the floor. As though she didn’t exist. Rage at this split second of callousness has burned inside him for 10 years.

And then we go upstairs to the premature baby unit. It’s difficult to write this. Not because I see anything horrible. Here, afer all, is hope. The babies here made it. Many don’t. There are four babies in incubators, born in Hebron and born too early – between 28 and 30 weeks.

Of these four, one has permanent brain damage (oxygen starvation) but will live. Another has meningitis and severe heart and lung problems and will die. The chances are good for the other two, and I’m looking at one of them now. He’s as big as a skinned rabbit, tubed up and wired in. The monitor is calm and steady. He has a lung infection but he will survive – another miracle.

He should be dead. His mother went into early, sudden labour. There were complications. This little boy without a first name on his medical sheet was born in a village house an hour away from the hospital. The family is poor – it can’t afford to pay for medical treatment, can’t afford transport.

A twist of fate – a nurse from Muhammad Ali is a neighbour. She brought the child in and has agreed to pay at least something towards his care in the premature unit.

And I am thinking about the 10 minutes or so before the nurse arrived to take control. This child had been abandoned at birth. Not dumped somewhere, or murdered, but born, loved and watched in despair. What must it do to your mind, to look at your newborn child and know that you are powerless, that you can only lie there with him while he dies?

I can’t get it out of my mind. I have seen both my children born, watched them grow and thrive. And I am standing here, trying not to fucking cry, trying to think myself into the head of a parent looking at this tiny thing and feeling only anguish. I may cry later, but for now I am burning with rage.

Leaving Biddu

by Mark

I have been in Biddu for three days without internet access as there has been a general strike in Palestine. Three days ago we had a pretty bad day there even by normal standards.

I only came to Biddu to deliver a bag. Two hours later and the shebab had saved me from a probable beating and certain arrest.

I arrived in Biddu as the protests against the murder of Rantissi were taking place. I quickly found the group of international activists among the villagers and they told me that during the demonstration the construction workers had moved into the village and started working on the “wall”. As soon as this demonstration was over the villagers were going to go down to the worksite to protest about the construction. There has been a terrific increase in community led non violent demonstrations in recent months as communities have once again engaged in the true spirit of the intifada. Budrus, a nearby town, has succeeded through protest and petitioning to have the wall moved back to the internationally recognised border. Other villages inspired by this victory have been busily protesting the sections of wall that cut deep into their land. In Biddu they have never had trouble with either soldiers or the nearby settlers. If it wasn’t for the wall being built on their land the intifada might almost have passed them by. If you think what we are doing is illegal it isn’t and the military courts have criticised soldiers for trying to prosecute arrestees. The court declared that protesting against the wall is not a criminal offence. Internationals who have been arrested have only been cautioned not to return to the demonstrations.

At about 2pm I found myself walking down a long road towards the sound of heavy machinery. As we rounded a corner I could see the diggers and the bulldozers flanked by a row of military jeeps. We could also see soldiers up on the roofs of the most distant buildings. These aren’t the IDF though but the Border Police a force much more brutal and with the power to arrest internationals. We were hundreds of meters away from the work site and hadn’t even begun to assemble into any demonstration when I heard the first crack of the tear gas guns. The multi shot canisters landed in front of us behind us and to the side of us so we moved out towards the fields and away from the Border Police. As we choked on the tear gas kids who kid read Hebrew read to us what it said on the containers:

“Not to be used within 50 yards of civilians”

We moved across a field which was difficult terrain and attempted to move again towards the site to re-assemble for the demonstration. Something that looked suspiciously like mounted police came into view and several people stopped to assess the situation. They were indeed mounted soldiers but we thought they might be used for crowd control if there was violence so we continued to move forward. No-one in Palestine has ever seen or heard of soldiers on horses being used in the territories before. The toxic tear gas was starting to take its toll and my eyes were streaming. Minutes later and I saw Palestinians running towards me. Generally if you see Palestinians running it is a good idea to run yourself, these people aren’t easily scared. As I turned to run I saw that the villagers and internationals were being charged by the baton wielding mounted soldiers.

I learned quickly, though perhaps should have already known, that a horse can run much faster than me, especially over roughly ploughed fields. The shebab (the word means youth but is frequently used as term for the young stone throwers) had lit fires on the hill to disperse the gas and I thought that if I ran through the fire the horse wouldn’t follow. As my tear gas filled lungs filled up with acrid smoke from the bush fires I wondered if this was such a good tactic. The horse hadn’t followed me but this may be because it was brighter than me.

Other horses thundered past me and the soldiers brutally lashed out with their batons at the fleeing villagers. I was stood just yards away as one of these mounted robocops smashed a middle aged villager over the head at the same time ramming him to the ground with the horse. I heard the crack and the thud as the blows landed and I heard the old man cry out in pain. My eyes streaming and lungs gasping I was torn between going back to help the man and risking arrest or to keep moving. The man got to his feet somehow with blood gushing from his head and the rider circled round him towards me. I backed away steadily, not running, but I could see another rider coming up beside him and several others to the side of me lashing out and beating the villagers with their big sticks.

I had time to think that it was like a scene out of Planet of the Apes and I would probably have been done for at this time but several of the older shebab who had already run to safety flew back down the hill and started hurling huge rocks at the Savages-sorry-Soldiers on horses. They threw them hard and fast and accurately hitting the rider and the horse making the soldier double up in pain and back up. As they continued to hurl the rocks they shouted at the soldiers “Just fuck off, just fuck off, leave us alone, go away!” In that split second I understood how the stone throwers felt, what motivated them and I wanted more than anything to stand and throw rocks with them against these horrible violent bastards on horses.

Naturally I didn’t throw stones but the badly bleeding Palestinian and I gratefully took our opportunity to leave and ran. By this time there were more border police on foot and they pointed something shiny and black at three of us internationals. “Come here” they shouted to us. Two of us decided against it and kept running. The other international, a Scottish woman, was arrested as was the beaten Palestinian who could run no more.

As they took away the only two people they had managed to catch the rest of us moved ever further up the hill on the other side of the valley where work is being carried out and sat and rested. The horses were gone and the soldiers were busy with the younger stone throwing shebab who somehow managed to stay in the street despite the vast volumes of tear gas they were enveloped in.

We sat for maybe 45 minutes watching the brave young kids fight tear gas, and by now rubber bullets, with stone after stone. Ambulances came and went as some were overcome by the gas and others were shot in the head by rubber bullets. And then it happened.

We were sat high up in the hills almost half a mile away from the soldiers and shebab sitting and chatting about how we can peacefully protest in these conditions when we heard a whooshing noise. None of us could place it at first but we thought it might be a bullet. We dismissed the idea as we couldn’t hear gunfire and what on earth were we doing to deserve being shot at? There are no armed militants in the village let alone the field.

After we heard the whooshing noise a couple more times we get nervous and walked up the hill another field to a big house where several villagers were sat. Five minutes later and the noise came again, closer this time. Now the Palestinians looked nervous. That is definitely bullets but where are they coming from? We can’t hear any shooting. We moved closer to walls and trees and looked around but we were very exposed up here and we had nowhere to go.

I guess it wasn’t until the Palestinian in the field below dropped to the floor that we knew for sure. Clutching his chest 24 year old Diyya Abed Al Kareem fell to the floor. He has been shot in the chest. They were shooting at us. Somewhere amongst those soldiers was a sniper and he was using a silencer. Against villagers and internationals sat in a field long after being violently dispersed somehow they felt they had to shoot someone?

An ambulance was called and Diyya was rushed to Ramallah and then East Jerusalem hospital. A villager came and guided us all off the hill and through side streets to safety. Everyone here in Biddu is getting sick from the tear gas, some people here having been taking it for months. No one has ever witnessed such a high level of violence against peaceful protestors. Lethal force used against a man standing under an olive tree. Live rounds fired over the heads of internationals doing no more than observing. Every day I am in Palestine another aspect of the occupation continues to shock me and the violence against the Palestinians increases.

At 22.00 we heard from the hospital that Diyya had died from his wounds. The bullet had exploded in his lung destroying it and taking his life with it.

There is only one clear aim of the occupation here and that is to violently subjugate any peaceful protest. Normally the protests here are made up of locals, internationals and Israelis. The Israeli group is known as Anarchists Against the Wall but today we didn’t need the Anarchists. We had the Israeli army cause Anarchy for us…

On the bright side I learned a) that I cant run faster than a horse b) Its never ok to run in to a fire and c) horses are much brighter than me.

If you are interested the story continues on www.rafahkid.net

Letter from Balata

by an International Women’s Peace Service volunteer

Today is the day after the international day of action against the Apartheid Wall. In Jenin 35 internationals and 25 Israeli anarchists backed by dozens of locals cut down a 12 metre hole in the fence there, while the army watched in amazement.

I wish I could say that that good news is the defining event right now, but no. In Nablus and Balata camp three Palestinians have died in the last couple of days including a father of five who was doing nothing against Israel or Israelis. Last week at 38 year-old woman was shot while exiting her house in the middle of the night in the Old City; she was cooperating with Israeli orders to evacuate the street. Another man died in the hospital after being shot in the leg a few days ago.

Last night the army appeared, searched two houses in Balata, and arrested nine people in the middle of the night. In each case the guy they were looking for was not there, and in one case I was told by the family has not been for six months. The army shot up every room in the house for good measure after putting the family outside from 2:30am in the rain and cold for three hours.

M-16 were shells visible all over and holes in closets and walls.

They also poured cooking oil all over the floor of the kitchen and actually shot a hole in the main gas supply risking burning the whole house down. And the obligatory wrecking of the water resevoirs on the roof.

In another Balata house the son sought wasn’t there so soldiers contented themselves with shooting a 17-year old brother in the stomach and then arrested him and threatened to return and blow up the house if the family don’t produce the suspect by tonight, a standard empty threat.

Much of this is in response to a suicide bomber being from a nearby neighbourhood in the city proper called Rafidia.

This morning i was just getting a cup of tea to my lips when it was time to move. Jeeps all over the entrances to the camp, greeted by the shebab, the street kids with rocks. The main throughway had couple of jeeps at either end and we split the team into two groups. In the main intersection internationals began inserting themselves between the jeeps and the rockthrowers, as per usual. Soon we were joined by a massive tank that four of us made a sad attempt to blockade on the road; it was ignored and Joey was the last to jump out of the way plus 12 inches from a tread.

That was seen to be a new level of aggression hitherto unseen here. Also new was the firing of a large ballistic projectile filled with rubber bullets. Mika got hit by one of them in the elbow stepping into a soldier’s line of fire. Not hurt. 73 year old Welshman Ray, on his seventh time here, took flak from live ammo fired at point-blank into the ground. This guy is calm as Buddha. A cut shin, no worse for him.

Likewise for Kelly, who marched at one point right up to between a jeep and a tank in the middle of the large intersection and had a soldier firing his rifle right past her head while she stood her ground and argued with them. Later one of the same riflemen was playing chicken and laughing while pointing his barrel at us both when he could risk opening his door to fire our way. At that point our way included half-a-dozen kids who’d been bringing it all morning from a storefront, one of them with a slingshot. Two of the younger kids made a point of standing right behind me.

Also unprecedented was the accidental appearance of a UN delegation that was simply here to see a school or some such thing. Ray and my Swedish buddy seized the opportunity to talk to them. Apparently they were Canadian parliamentarians and were quite interested, totally supportive, and got the fuck out of there right quick, hustled away by their handlers. But they got a photo or two first before they left.

The shebab were chucking lime-based paint in bottles as well today and my Swedish buddy came away looking like a milk bar-fight casualty, as did the tank and a jeep. One kid nailed a jeep side-mirror, which is always extra points as it restricts the drivers’ surveillance capacity. The whole three hour engagement left me with a distinct feeling of over-exposure, not least of which a result of taking a sound bomb at five metres. A bloody nasty interruption second thing in the morning.

The reality of living in a prolonged zone of conflict has made these refugees into some very tough people, and its beyond me to understand their tenacity. I think its beyond the Israelis as well who’ve no other response but endless rounds of collective punishment.