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.

Haaretz: Rachel Corrie’s family sues Israel, IDF

By Amos Harel, Haaretz Correspondent

The family of Rachel Corrie, a pro-Palestinian activist killed by an Israel Defense Forces bulldozer in Rafah two years ago, sued the State of Israel and the IDF for damages in the Haifa District Court on Tuesday.

The 24-year-old Corrie was killed on March 16, 2003 when she tried to block an IDF bulldozer from demolishing a Palestinian house near the Philadelphi Route, the strip of land in the Gaza Strip bordering Egypt.

An IDF investigation ruled the incident was an accident and that the driver did not see Corrie, and the military prosecutor’s office decided not to press charges in connection with Corrie’s death.

Corrie’s parents, brother, and sister, who are represented by Umm al-Fahm attorney Hussein Abu-Hussein, argue Corrie was killed despite the fact that she was wearing bright clothing and had identified herself as an activist with the pro-Palestinian International Solidarity Movement.

Corrie’s family argues that the bulldozer driver intentionally used unreasonable force. According to the family, there was no fighting in the area at the time and there was no threat to soldiers’ lives.

The family has asked for roughly $324 thousand in direct damages, as well as punitive damages. They also said they have yet to receive all of the material from the IDF investigation into the matter.

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.

Report From Hebron

by Ian

It’s the first day of Eid. After the long fasting days of Ramadan, families all over the city are coming together to celebrate. This year, though, the festivities have a sombre undertone. Arafat was buried yesterday in Ramallah.Posters showing his image next to that of Hebron’s Ibrahimi Mosque are plastered over walls and the windscreens of cars and taxis.

11 year-old Mohamad from the family upstairs has just arrived to wish us a happy new year. He’s in his new suit, very smart and proud. We all wish him the same, in excruciating Arabic. But in Hebron the happiness of children like Mohamad depends on circumstances beyond his control, and beyond the control of his huge, close, protective family. His good fortune will ultimately depend on how the occupying forces are feeling. A bored young soldier at a checkpoint can, on a whim, turn your day into a nightmare. Everyone you meet has a story of physical abuse from soldiers and police. Everyone.

A group of us are staying in an apartment owned by Mohamad’s father. A dozen or so young children constantly tumble in and out. None of us has much Arabic, but it’s OK. Everyone tunes in to the universal language of football, hide and seek, mimicry, giggling…

It is an inspiration to be living among these beautiful, generous people. Palestinians don’t have much, but whatever they have they share. Hospitality isn’t a way of life here, it is life itself. Food materialises at regular intervals. People greet you in the street, bring you out sweets and biscuits. Already, this feels like our neighbourhood. Sometimes, when you’re walking in a remote suburb, there’s tension – strangers here almost always mean trouble. You get the occasional stone thrown. Almost always, people intervene when they realisewe’re not army or settlers, but it is heartbreaking to see so many kids brutalised by the conditions here. A collapsed economy, severe poverty – stone throwing’s the only game in town.

Now Eid has arrived, all the children have cheap new toys. Girls have many different cheap new toys. All the boys have cheap new toy guns. Evenings are mostly spent talking. drinking tea, smoking argilah – a soothing, fruit-flavoured hookah job which is really welcome after a hard day. There’s a lot of laughter here. Someone mentions the new graffiti that’s appeared in the Old City: ‘Arabs to the gas chambers.’

No matter how prepared you are for life under the Occupation. you have to see it to understand just how fatuous the common perceptions are back home. Politicians, terrified of being accused of anti-Semitism if they criticise Israeli government policy, talk constantly of how ‘both sides in the conflict’ must take action to secure a just and lasting peace. Bollocks. Both sides? The oppressor and the oppressed?

Mohamad and his family are not a ‘side’. They are part of a Palestinian community being relentlessly and ruthlessly driven from their homes and their land. Illegal settlers control this region – the army and the police defer to them – and they act with total impunity. A couple of days ago we were forced to wait for half an hour while ID was checked. A recently-arrived settler had spotted that we were with a member of the local Christian Peacemaker Team (CPT). The settler was clearly theone giving orders. He took the passport from the soldier and insisted on further scrutiny. The soldier just did as he was told. Every settler you encounter seems unhinged. The sort of person you pray doesn’t sit next to you on the bus. Secure behind the armed Israeli checkpoint barrier, he ostentatiously celebrated Arafat’s death, punching the air in jubilation. He joked to anyone who listened that Arafat had AIDS.

He was from Quebec. Lucky Quebec.

The CPT does great work here – accompanying local children to school, trying to protect them from settler attacks. Two CPTers were recently severely beaten by masked settlers armed with baseball bats and chains. We met one of them while olive-picking the other day. She suffered a broken arm and severe bruising. The other guy got broken ribs and a punctured lung. Here’s a test for the ‘both sides’ brigade: what concession should children walking to school between illegal settlements make in the cause of peace? Less provocative lunch boxes?

Another Occupation Myth is that the West Bank settlements are few, remote and isolated. And that they keep themselves to themselves. Hebron, where the earliest Zionist settlement in Palestine was founded (Kiryat Arba) is now surrounded by illegal development on stolen land. And it’s closing in. Since 1968, Israelis – many arriving here from far beyond the Middle East – have seized 48% of the land in Greater Hebron region for their settlements. A further 24 ‘outposts’ have been staked out for inevitable expansion.

That’s how it works here. Some distance from a main settlement, a caravan or trailer appears overnight. A week later, another. Then another. One or two settlers with dogs and guns move in. Fences are erected (for security).

The army establishes a presence (for security). Which means a road. And more fences. More trailers. Barriers. Gates. Walls. The construction of houses. In a matter of months, it is a fortified, illegal and rapidly expanding settlement. A ‘fact on the ground.’

Having encircled Hebron, the next objective here is absolute control. Ethnic cleansing and cultural erasure are now well underway. The area around Shehada Street, close to the mosque, was once a thriving market area.

Now it’s a dead zone, only marginally less terrifying in daylight than in darkness. Shehada Street itself has been commandeered for settler use only. Ancient stone gateways are blocked by steel gates with slip bolts on the ‘Israeli’ side.

Through intimidation – and that other great weapon of oppression through the ages, bureaucracy – souk traders have been forced out. Houses are deserted, or have been taken over by the army for observation and sniper posts.

Street closures are often arbitrary, but always sudden. And when they close yourstreet, you can’t use your front door. It means you and your family must exit via the roof, enter a neighbour’s house and get out through their front door.

Only a few years ago there were around 7,500 Palestinians living in the central Old City area. Now there are fewer than 1,500. In the same area between 450-500 settlers have moved in. They’re guarded by 2,000 soldiers. At times of increased tension, 4,000.

Along the main street that runs through the Old City there is chain link fencing. It’s the same fencing used by the Israelis to sketch out the boundaries of their land grabs, before they ink them in with concrete and steel. Here, though. it is has been erected horizontally, not vertically, and by Palestinians.

Why? A section of the street is unroofed. There, squatting on the alley wall itself, is the towering bulk of the settlement’s flank wall. The chain link fencing is to protect passers-by from being pelted with objects thrown from settlement windows. There, trapped in the improvised netting is the forensic evidence of a feral hatred: discarded cans, bottles, food. Rocks. Bricks. Sometimes they tip out their piss.

Another myth is the idea of an Israeli Defence Force. Defence is not what’s happening here. It is aggression. A civilian population suffers routine humiliation and casual violence at the hands of the IDF every day. From our apartment window we can see the neighbouring hill, blanketed with homes.

At the summit are three new schools. Not that they were schools for long. Shortly after opening they were taken over and turned into a heavily armed police station. When resistance fighters started firing shots at neighbouring settlements, they sent tank shells randomly into residential areas. It was two days before we discovered that the hole in our living room wall was the result of one of these blind reprisals. Hebron is a microcosm of the West Bank: Palestinians gradually walled in and forced out by intimidation. Rubble everywhere. Everything possible has been done to crush the spirit of these people, but it hasn’t worked. There must be more children here per square mile than anywhere I’ve been.

Hope may be thin on the ground among the older people, but the sheer weight of children’s optimism is what keeps you going. And in the end, it’s the children’s faces that stick in the mind. The settlers’ children, for instance, who stood with their parents at a demo the other day, watching as the soldiers soundbombed and teargassed us. Blank faces. What were the parents telling them?

That we are evil, that we are Nazis, that we should be exterminated? Lovely, gentle Mohamad in his new suit. What will the future hold for him, and Aseel, and Marwan, and Razar, and Asme, and all his other brothers, sisters, cousins? How long before he is arrested for the first time, plucked at random from the crowd, simply for being a Palestinian teenager in the Occupied Territories? When will he be beaten for the first time?

We will be leaving here in a few days. Everyone has promised to stay in touch, and I for one will miss the kids, just having them round, just about the only sane, recognisable part of life here in this devastated place. We’ll probably never see them again. And if anything happens to them, it will beyour fault and mine, because we didn’t shake off this wicked Occupation. That’s where the ‘peace process’ starts, and it must start now.

The Israelis categorise every Palestinian as a terrorist, and use this as an excuse to brutally repress them. It is the Roman Empire. It is white-controlled South Africa. Those empires fell, as this one must.

Mohamad’s back. ‘Hello. How are you?’ he says in careful, perfect English.

How am I? I’m afraid, and guilty.