11th February 2014 | International Solidarity Movement, Gaza Team | Gaza, Occupied Palestine
(Photo by Rosa Schiano)
Friends and relatives, as well as local and international activists, gathered Monday morning at the International Committee of the Red Cross in Gaza to demonstrate, like every week, in support of the Palestinian prisoners in Israeli jails.
“My cousin was arrested during the 2006 Israeli invasion of Beit Hannoun,” Said Attallah Abu Oudah said. “He is detained in the Ramle prison. He is 31 years old and has been in jail for almost eight years. Only his mother and his sister can visit him. I hope one day all the Palestinian prisoners in Israeli jails, as well as Palestine itself, will win their freedom.”
Outside the ICRC, the Muhjad al-Quds Association erected a stage in the middle of the street. The spokesman of the association gave a speech, appealing to all the Palestinian political factions to combine their efforts in support of the struggle of the prisoners. He spoke of all types of Palestinian detainees, from the sick prisoners to the released ones, from Ibrahim Bitar to Samer Issawi.
The Fatah delegation currently visiting Gaza from the West Bank attended the rally as well. Nabil Shaath, head of the delegation, spoke from the the stage about the current series of prisoner releases.
10th February 2014 | International Solidarity Movement, Rosa Schiano | Gaza, Occupied Palestine
(Photo by Joe Catron)
On Friday, 7th February, hundreds of Palestinian youth joined a weekly demonstration of popular resistance along the separation barrier east of Jabaliya, in the northern Gaza Strip.
Aware of attacks by the Israeli army, many were equipped with onions, water and yeast to relieve the pain of tear gas.
Palestinian youth between ten and 24 years old gather there to challenge the Israeli military occupation, approaching the separation barrier, throwing stones or placing Palestinian flags on the fence.
(Photo by Rosa Schiano)
Placing a Palestinian flag on top of the barrier that separates the Gaza Strip from the lands Israeli occupied in 1948 is a victory that worth life for many.
The Israeli army deployed Jeeps along the barrier. Three soldiers hid behind a small hill, pointing guns at the protesters. Some other soldiers came out of a Jeep and shot bullets and tear gas.
The wind was in protesters’ favor, the reason the tear gas did not initially hit them. Later, the Israeli army fired tear gas a long distance over demonstrators so all were surrounded by it. Many youth started to run, looking to the sky to avoid being hit by the canisters. The gas burned the eyes and lungs.
(Photo by Rosa Schiano)
“We are here to liberate Jerusalem and affirm the right to our land,” a young man said.
The protest was also attended by two young men wounded in previous demonstrations. One of them, on crutches, had an external fixator in his right leg. He had a big smile, despite everything.
The tension rose as time passed, and soon the tear gas was replaced with more bullets.
An ambulance reached the area shortly afterward.
At the end of the, day five youths were wounded, three by gunfire and two by tear gas.
Nizar Mahey El Dein Zaqout, age 23, was hospitalized at Kamal Odwan hospital in Beit Lahia. He suffered from a gunshot wound to his left knee that caused a fracture and from shrapnel. He underwent surgery the next morning and will remain under observation for control of his nerves.
Nizar had placed a Palestinian flag over the separation barrier and a soldier shot him. Some youth carried him to the ambulance.
The next morning in the hospital, he said he had risked his life “Because this is our land. Jerusalem belongs to us. They live in our land against our will.”
Nizar Mahey El Dein Zaqout. (Photo by Rosa Schiano)
Nizar also attended the protest also the previous Friday, when he was injured by tear gas.
His cousin Mahmoud Zaqout, age 19, was killed two years ago on 30th March during the Global March to Jerusalem near the Erez checkpoint in the northern Gaza Strip. Mahmoud had been shot while trying to place a Palestinian flag on the separation barrier.
Nizar said he will continue to go to these protests, which began again in Gaza about two months ago. He added that for about six weeks, the demonstrations have become more aggressive.
(Photo by Joe Catron)
“I could become a martyr fighting for the liberation of Jerusalem and to open a line between the Gaza Strip and the West Bank,” he said. “We also demonstrate for the rights of Palestinian women detained in Israeli jails.”
Ali Ziad Salim Abu Dan, age 19, was seriously injured and hospitalized in the intensive care unit at al-Shifa hospital in Gaza City. His father Ziad said that the bullet entered the chest and affected the heart and liver, at a distance of a few millimeters from the spine. His son arrived at the hospital in a coma, waking up the next day. He was hospitalized in the ICU with artificial ventilation. The last from his father on Sunday night reported that his condition was improving and he was breathing without ventilation.
(Photo by Charlie Andreasson)
Ahmad Mahmoud Al Najjar, age 23, was hit by a bullet in the right leg. His bones were not fractured and he was released from the hospital.
The other two youth, injured by tear gas, were released from the hospital.
Many of these youth risk their lives because they believe in the liberation of their land, and become martyrdom means to be remembered for having fought bravely for it.
Some of them likely risk their lives in part because they are desperate. Their life conditions, the siege, and unemployment do not give them any hope for the future.
(Photo by Charlie Andreasson)
ISM will continue to be witnesses, as Nizar asked, to give these youth a voice and be close to them in the fight for their rights, because the Palestinian issue is not only a humanitarian cause but also a political one.
Umm Muhammad, the mother of critically ill prisoner Ibrahim Bitar, with two of his neices at a weekly sit-in. She hasn’t seen her son in more than three months. (Joe Catron)
“We’ve garnered internal support for my brother, and created this popular campaign,” Ibrahim’s brother Mamdouh said last week. “It started within our family. Many of my friends participate in it. It’s a symbol of all the sick detainees.”
“All the funding is personal,” he added. “It comes from our own pockets.”
Ibrahim Bitar, now 32, was a fighter in Fatah’s Abu al-Arish Brigades. Israeli forces captured him on 7 August 2003.
“He was injured by the Israelis in his right eye during clashes,” Mamdouh said. “He was transferred to Egypt for treatment. The Israelis let him go to Egypt. During his return to Gaza, they detained him at the Rafah border.”
A military court sentenced him to 17 years, although Mamdouh said the prosecution had initially asked for a life sentence.
At the family’s house in Khan Younis, a town in southern Gaza, Mamdouh flicked through folders on his laptop. The campaign’s graphic designer, he showed the logos and posters he has created for it. He also collects photos of rallies for his brother, in both Gaza and the occupied West Bank.
Illness remains a mystery
Despite news reports on Ibrahim’s medical condition, his illness remains a mystery, at least to his family.
“They aren’t giving his family the proper diagnosis,” he said. “We still don’t know the exact disease he has. First, they claimed he was suffering from leukemia. They gave him medication for three years. Then, they found out he didn’t have it and stopped his treatment.
“Finally, they told him he had colon cancer. They gave him cortisone. Now he takes 15 types of medicine per day.”
Mamdouh recited a list of his brother’s ailments: chronic anemia, Crohn’s disease, rheumatism and a tumor on his back which was recently removed by surgery.
“We don’t have any details about the surgery,” Mamdouh said. “We only know that it was conducted. He still bleeds from it.”
Ibrahim’s mother, Umm Muhammad, said Israel’s occupation policies had limited her family’s contact with him.
“I haven’t been allowed to visit him for three months now,” she said. “We have gotten no messages or letters except through the lawyers. When other prisoners are released, they come visit us to tell us about his condition and send his regards.”
(Photo by Joe Catron)
Three goals
Their family’s campaign has three goals, according to Mamdouh.
“The aim is for Ibrahim to be released because of his health condition,” he said. “The second is for a health committee to have access, to find out his condition and give him the proper medication. Finally, we want the release of all the sick prisoners.”
By most official accounts, Bitar is one of at least 180 detainees in critical condition — including 25 with cancer — among roughly 1,400 sick prisoners.
“This number is the figure used by Palestinian groups dealing with the issue,” said Osama Wahidi, a spokesman for the Hussam Association, a prisoners’ society in Gaza. “But if you research among prisoners, you will find a higher number. This is the one registered in the files of the Israel Prison Service and humanitarian associations.”
Because of his family’s efforts, Bitar’s detention has emerged as a flashpoint for the families of sick prisoners in general. When crowds gather outside the Red Cross during the weekly rallies, signs depicting other prisoners mix with those Mamdouh has designed for Ibrahim.
“If every Palestinian detainee’s family did like Bitar’s, it would be a turning point for the issue of detainees,” Wahidi said. “There would be no need for the associations. And it would mount great pressure against Israel, more effective than the work of all the Palestinian factions.
“What they are doing is very helpful for everyone. They are trying to highlight him as a symbol of the issue of sick detainees.”
Broad support
The living room of Nahid al-Aqraa’s home in Gaza City’s Sheikh Radwan neighborhood is decorated with posters of his image issued by Islamic Jihad, Hamas and Fatah.
Al-Aqraa, a fighter for the Popular Resistance Committees’ al-Nasser Salah al-Din Brigades, hails from none of these organizations. But their paraphernalia offers a visible reminder of the broad, strong support he and other sick detainees attract in Palestine.
Like Ibrahim Bitar, Nahid al-Aqraa was captured by Israeli forces while returning to Palestine from medical treatment in Egypt. They detained him on 28 July 2007, at the Allenby Bridge between Jordan and the occupied West Bank, when the Rafah crossing between Egypt and the Gaza Strip was closed.
A military court sentenced him to three life sentences.
“I visited him for the first time since his detention very recently,” his wife Jahadir said. “His father and mother live in the West Bank, but his children and I live in Gaza. His parents have been able to visit him. For me and our children, it has been impossible.”
The al-Aqraas have three daughters and a son. Israeli forces have not allowed two of his daughters, aged 12 and 15, to visit him since his detention. “I send him voice messages through a radio station, and written messages through the ICRC,” 15-year-old Nisma said in June last year.
Under the current occupation policy, their son Raed, who turned ten in December, has not been able to see his father since the family’s first visit either.
(Photo by Joe Catron)
Visits blocked
For more than five years between June 2007 and August 2012, Israeli forces had blocked all visits to detainees by family members in the Gaza Strip.
Israel ended this comprehensive ban as part of an agreement to settle the mass Karameh (“Dignity”) hunger strike in April 2012, but continues to bar categories of relatives, including children who have reached the age of ten, from traveling through the Erez checkpoint to its prisons.
“Before I was allowed to visit my husband, both the older girls started crying,” Jahadir said. “I threatened them that if they kept crying, I wouldn’t go. They said no, I should go, even if they couldn’t.”
“My daughter Nada was very upset that she couldn’t hug her father, since she is over the age of eight,” she added. “It was the first time she had ever seen him.”
Another occupation policy bans physical contact between detainees and their children who, like Nada, have turned eight.
“When we saw him, Nada started crying and asking to stay with her father,” Jahadir said. “I told her it was up to the Israelis, not me.”
Now 44, al-Aqraa is one of 18 sick detainees held permanently in the Ramle prison clinic. In June, he and another Ramle detainee, Mansour Muqada of Salfit in the West Bank, undertook a dramatic protest when they swallowed potentially lethal quantities of pills.
“We were ignored in the Shalit deal [a prisoner exchange agreement in 2011], and we don’t want current talks to ignore us too,” they wrote. “Death has become easier than living with sickness aggravated in our bodies” (“Ministry: Two sick prisoners attempt suicide,” Ma’an News Agency, 6 August 2013).
Their attempt, along with a subsequent hunger strike by Ramle prison clinic detainees, led to slightly improved medical treatment, Wahidi said.
Meanwhile, Nahid al-Aqraa’s condition has continued to deteriorate.
“He has inflammation in his legs,” his wife said. “Parts of both were amputated. The first was in Gaza, before his detention. The second was inside the Israeli jails. The Egyptians did some surgery on it, but it didn’t succeed.”
“While I visited him, he didn’t want me to know he had problems. He just said he had a little inflammation and tried to hide his second amputated leg. But his lawyer told me the truth.”
Both families said that Ibrahim Bitar and Nahid al-Aqraa were not receiving proper treatment.
“Many lawyers have met Ibrahim,” Mamdouh Bitar said. “They have told us his condition is in the terminal stages.
“The bleeding from his surgery still has not been treated. Many times, they have taken him to the Ramle prison clinic or Assaf Harofeh hospital, then sent him back to the prison the same day under the pretext that there are not enough beds in the hospital.”
“The Israelis delayed his medical treatment,” Jahadir said about her husband Nahid. “They could have cured him if he had the proper medication. But he didn’t.”
“We don’t trust Israel”
Last year claims of Israeli medical negligence that followed the deaths two sick Palestinian detainees, Maysara Abuhamdia and Hassan al-Turabi, sparked protests across the Gaza Strip and West Bank.
Addameer, an advocacy organization for Palestinian prisoners, argued that al-Turabi’s death on 5 November was “the direct result of the Israel Prison Service policy of medical negligence which is being practiced against all Palestinian political prisoners and detainees.”
“We’re not asking the Israelis to only give them the proper medication,” Wahidi said. “They need their freedom. We don’t trust the Israel Prison Service to give them the right treatment.”
9th February 2014 | International Solidarity Movement, Charlie Andreasson | Gaza, Occupied Palestine
(Photo by Charlie Andreasson)
I have seen her standing there more then once, at the edge of the port, looking out over the boats in the harbor and then towards the horizon. And for a short second, I have seen myself, when as a child I took my bicycle down to the harbor just to stand at the pier and gaze, for a long, long time, at the boats that disappeared beyond the horizon, and wonder what was beyond that line. And I have briefly asked myself if she does the same. But she is not a child, she is a young, adult woman. A strong woman.
I asked a good friend to arrange a meeting with Madleen Kolab, 19 years old and Gaza’s only fisherwoman, for an interview. Later, she would reveal this was only to tell me face to face tell me that she does not give interviews. For almost two years, she has declined all requests from journalists because they, as she says, only writes for their careers. But she decided to make an exception when she recognized me and knew that I was involved in the rebuilding of Gaza’s Ark, and thus in work for Palestine. Her firm look told me that she was serious and I felt honored, but also a little embarrassed, and was grateful that I could lower my eyes towards my notepad.
When she was six years old, she already accompanied her father when he was fishing, and she knew early what her coming profession would be. She loves her work. It gives her a sense of freedom to be on the sea, and she was careful to point out that nobody forced her to become a fisherman. Her rapt answers to my questions, that she never needed any consideration, unwavering eyes and lack of hesitation left no doubt or room for me to think otherwise. I could not doubt her word when she said that the other fishermen respect her as an equal colleague. It was only after I stressed that women all over the world find it difficult to break into an extremely male-dominated industry like fishing that she confessed she too has been fighting for her rights, and has been treated with prejudice, but that has now changed.
Madleen is the eldest of four siblings. She fishes with the younger of her two brothers on a hasaka, a small open boat, with an outboard motor. Earlier she had a type of boat she needed to paddle. Now she has the opportunity to go to deeper water and get somewhat better catches. Besides, it is safer. But she has been attacked by Israeli patrol boats, and she says it has been common for bullets to whiz around the boat. Once she feared she would be arrested, but when the Israeli soldiers discovered there was a woman on board the boat, they ordered her to instead head back to the harbor, obviously unsure of how they would deal with the unfamiliar situation. Madleen knows that will not save her forever, and she avoids the edge of the group of boats that go out, preferring to fight over the catch with others than try to get a bigger share for herself in more open water. But she also knows that when the Israeli military has decided to take a particular boat, it will also be the one they separate from the others.
(Photo by Joe Catron)
I asked her about the escalation of violence. In January, thirteen attacks on fishermen were carried out, one at the six nautical-mile limit and the others three or less than three nautical miles from the coast. She knows from experience that if it is allowed to go out six miles, the Israeli navy keeps them within five miles, and when they were officially allowed to go only three miles, it was in reality only two. But Madleen believes they now attack so close to land because it is a high season and Israel wants to make it difficult for Palestinian fishermen to support themselves. This view is consistent with those of fishermen I have talked to after they were temporarily arrested and had their boats and gear confiscated. And the Israeli military know they can continue their abuses, since the world is not protesting.
But what would she do if there was no blockade? Would she leave Gaza? Madleen did not hesitate. She would stay. Palestine is her home. But she would fish further out, away from the overfished and shallow waters. And she wish that global society could make Israel stop the illegal and inhumane blockade. Fishermen themselves cannot. And as Madleen rightly points out, they have the right to fish in their own water. Right now, everything is like a dark dream, she continues; the future seems bleak. Still she hopes that one day they will be free from the blockade. And to hope is the only thing they can do.
Her phone rang. Someone wondered where she was. Madleen had never meant to be away for any length of time, and she asked me if I had any more questions. I took a few photographs of her and thanked her for her time. Before she left, she offered her help to launch Gaza’s Ark back into water. But I think I will see her again, standing there at the edge of the port. And it strikes me that I never asked that question, what she thinks about when she gazes towards the horizon.
7th January 2014 | International Solidarity Movement, Nablus Team | Qusra, Nablus District, Occupied Palestine
On the 7th of January in Qusra, two farmers working on their land were threatened by settlers carrying guns. Villagers helped them to chase the invaders away before being violently repressed by the army.
On Friday, at 10:30 a.m., two Palestinian farmers were working their land around the village of Qusra when they were ordered by two armed settlers to stop their work and leave the area. The two farmers refused to obey, and called members of the municipality. Soon, about 50 villagers reached the scene, immediately followed by seven Israeli military vehicles, most of them from the border police. They demanded all the Palestinians to leave the area within five minutes.
When the villagers refused to leave, the army began firing tear gas, rubber-coated steel bullets and stun grenades. The attack lasted until 3:00 p.m. Seven Palestinians were injured; four of them were less than eighteen years old.
The two settlers responsible for the attack are from the illegal colonial outpost Raheir, totaling less than ten permanent residents.
Friday’s events mark the 65th recorded attack on the village of Qusra in the past two years. Since the beginning of January, 88 olive trees have been destroyed by the settlers and one young man suffered a severe head injury. In the year 2013, 870 olive trees were destroyed and 30 people were injured, five of them severely. 3,11 dunums of land were annexed and access to 500 more was declared forbidden for Palestinians for “security reasons .”
Israeli soldiers fire tear gas at the villagers of Qusra (Photo by Mohammed Abu Ridah)
