December 8th, 2015 | International Solidarity Movement, Gaza team | Khan Younis, Gaza strip, occupied Palestine
Mohamed Abu Taima, 29, had to undergo two surgeries
A week ago Mohamed Abu Taima, 29 years-old and father of a small girl, was working his land 450m from the separation fence when an Israeli sniper shot him. At 4pm, he had arrived to his land in Al Faraheen, Khan Younees, South of the Gaza Strip. He was shot a few minutes after he started to work. The bullet passed through one of his legs and exploded inside the other one.
The bullet went through one leg and exploded in the other one
A few minutes after arriving in the hospital Mohamed underwent a first surgery, and days after a second one. Until now, the doctors don’t know if Mohamed will ever be able to walk properly again.
These kind of attacks have been frequent during the past two weeks. Several farmers were expelled from their lands by the Israeli snipers when they were working or intended to work their lands between 400 and 500m from the fence, meaning outside of the “buffer zone” imposed by the occupation.
Layla and her daughters with the turkey in Faraheen (Photo: Radhika Sainath, Notes from Behind the Blockade) - Click here for more images
It all started with a simple question from Jabar, a Palestinian farmer from Faraheen, during Eid al-Adha, the festival of sacrifice.
“Is there an American eid (holiday) where you slaughter an animal?” he asked Nathan, a colleague here in Gaza, a few weeks ago.
Thanksgiving and turkeys came to mind.
And so, I found myself celebrating “Thanksgiving,” Gazan-style, this afternoon in the small, southern Gazan village.
Nathan painstakingly put together a variety of ingredients over the past couple of weeks to make a proper meal: turkey, baked beans, sweet potatoes, biscuits and chocolate chip cookies! We had to nix the stuffing, gravy was too difficult, and pie, out of the question.
After six weeks of falafel (delicious as it is), I was really looking forward to Nathan’s Midwestern cuisine. But would it all come together given Gaza’s regular power outages, Israel’s recent shooting at farmers in the area and the lack of key ingredients due to the siege?
We rose early to accompany farmers in Faraheen to their land within Israel’s 300 meter ”buffer zone” – or “kill zone” – as Palestinians here frequently call it.
The week had not been a good one, and I was concerned that our belated Thanksgiving would turn into Black Friday.
On Wednesday, the Israeli army had shot live ammunition in the air when our group went with farmers to the buffer zone in nearby Khuza’a.
The day before, the Israeli army had called the Palestinian Office of Coordination and told them that they “wanted to shoot” us and twenty Palestinians while we were in northern Gaza nonviolently protesting the Israeli occupation, the buffer zone, and 63 years of dispossession in the buffer zone. The Palestinian Authority frantically looked for the phone number of Saber Zanin, the organizer of the weekly Beit Hanoun protests and told him, “We are trying to ask the Israelis not to shoot you. They wanted to shoot you and kill you.”
And yesterday, 3 nautical miles of the coast of Gaza, an Israeli naval warship chased our small humanitarian boat, the Oliva, along with several Palestinian fishing boats, towards the shore for no apparent reason.
Today just couldn’t be good. Would our Gazan Thanksgiving look more like the original Thanksgiving — a symbol of land seizure, dispossession and ethnic cleansing — than the delicious turkey-filled version I was hoping for?
I rose early, gulped down a cup of sugary tea and dry floury date cookies that Jabar’s wife Layla made before heading out to the buffer zone. The sky cleared and I heard Israeli drones overhead.
On the way to the buffer zone, we met 26-year-old Yusef Abu Rjeela, the farmer who want was hoping to sow wheat on his land. We asked him what he wanted to do if the Israelis started shooting.
“Stay on the land,” he said. If the Israelis shot in the air, he didn’t want to run. And if they shot at us, well…
We continued onward, and my cell phone rang. It was Nathan. “I put the beans in the pressure cooker for 30 minutes and they’ve become bean soup!” he exclaimed. “Layla says I shouldn’t have soaked them and used the pressure cooker.”
“Stay calm,” I said. “Do you have more beans?” He did. We continued on our way.
Five of us foreigners donned our yellow vests, and accompanied Yusef and another farmer as one sowed wheat and the other plowed the land. The drones went away.
All seemed quiet on the eastern front.
An Israeli military tower stood in the distance. A white balloon equipped with an aerial surveillance camera flew overhead. The former farmland was dry and brown from years of Israeli bulldozing and tank traffic.
After a while, we made bets on when the Israelis would start shooting. It was 11:25 a.m., and I put in for 11:45 a.m., another person for 11:50 a.m. Hussein, a Palestinian university student who came with us, didn’t think the Israelis would shoot at all.
At noon, the farmers had finished and we all started to walk back to the village. Yusef explained to us the lawsuit his family had filed against the state of Israel for murdering his younger brother the day after Operation Cast Lead ended in January 2009. His father, who had witnessed the murder, had gone to Israel to testify.
As we left the buffer zone, I congratulated Hussein on being right about the shooting. Then we heard it — Israeli army gunfire in the distance. The time: 12:05.
We promptly head back to Jabar’s house in the village. There, Nathan was immersed in a whirlwind of preparation.
“Get the baking soda out of the bag!” he directed.
“You mean baking powder?” I asked him, looking the plastic bag he had brought from Gaza City.
“No, soda.” There was no baking soda. We were in for a biscuit disaster. Moreover, Layla and four of her five children were swirling around the kitchen, unsure of these strange American preparations.
Beans with sugar? In the oven? Nathan opened the ancient iron contraption, and held out a spoon for me. I stuck my tongue out and slurped up the brown deliciousness.
“Is it good?” asked Layla, suspiciously. “Is Nathan a good cook? Can you cook better?”
“Zacky ikthir,” I responded. Very tasty. “Not quite done,” I said to Nathan. “I can cook, but maybe Nathan is better than me,” I added to Layla. She didn’t seem convinced.
Nathan shooed everyone away, but we stayed in the kitchen, it was the warmest room in their small, cement block, metal sheet-roofed house. And, I was clearly the only one cut out for the role of taster. Layla turned to more important questions.
“You’re a lawyer, can you sue Israel for me?” she asked. “All our problems come from Israel. When I was 14, they shot me in the hip. Then they bulldozed our olive trees and took our land. What can we do?” I hadn’t realized that Layla’s limp stemmed from about 1980, when the Israeli army entered her school and shot her as she tried to help a wounded friend.
She turned away to take the turkey out of the pot. The oven wasn’t big enough for a whole bird, which was only sold in pre-cut pieces. All in all, it was a delicious lunch, and no one got shot. And that, is something to be thankful for.
29 May 2011 | Nathan Stuckey, International Solidarity Movement – Gaza
Many of you here have known Victor longer than I. I will not tell you about what a great person Victor was, you already know that. I will instead offer you a Victor you might not have known, a Victor that fate never allowed.
Victor was a writer. He had “Muqawama”, Resistance, tattooed onto his arm. The same ink that had inscribed Resistance onto his arm flowed from his pen to inscribe resistance onto paper when he wrote.
Victor studied accounting as a young man. Imagine, a young Victor dreaming of being an accountant; the accountant of resistance.
You are all familiar with Yasser Arafat’s famous speech to the UN with the gun and the olive branch. Try to picture Victor giving a speech there instead of Arafat. Victor strides out to the lectern. He raises his arm. The crowd can see that he does not have a gun in his hand, what he has is Resistance inscribed onto his arm. I have never been able to write his speech, but I can imagine it. It is about the importance of fighting for justice, for freedom, the importance of not closing your eyes.
Victor came to Gaza three years ago. He came to be part of a struggle for freedom, for justice; to oppose a modern state intent on erasing a people; to protest a Kafkaesque world where fisherman fish in tunnels carved from sand deep under the earth instead of in the welcoming arms of the sea; a world where concrete is forbidden; a world where farmers are forbidden to plow their lands while their children live on food from cans.
Victor had inscribed resistance onto his body. Look around yourself. Look at the person sitting next to you, your friends here, your family. How many of you have resistance inscribed on your bodies? I do not know many of the people here, but I do know the family of Jabur Abu Jeila. I cannot think of a family more appropriate to host this memorial, to have hosted Victor in their home so many times. This is a family with Resistance inscribed on their bodies. Just as the house we stand in front of is scarred by the bullets of the occupation, so too is Jabur’s family. Jabur has a bullet in his stomach, Leila has a bullet of the occupation in her hip, Etufa’s face is washed by tears for her murdered friend, killed just days before the murder of Vik. Look around yourself, think of your friends and neighbors, think how many of them have resistance inscribed on their bodies. They are all Victor. When you resist, you are Victor. As long as there are people with Resistance inscribed on their bodies, as long as you are willing to inscribe resistance on your body, Victor lives. He lives on in you. Thank you. Stay Human.
A 20-year-old Palestinian man, Sliman Abu Hanza, is in a critical condition in hospital after being shot in the abdomen with a ‘dum dum’ bullet at a demonstration in Al-Faraheen, Khan Younis, on Sunday.
The injury was inflicted during one of three non-violent demonstrations which took place on Sunday; in Beit Hanoun, Maghazi and Faraheen near Khan Younis – four members of the International Solidarity Movement also attended. The explode-on-impact ‘dum-dum’ bullet which hit Abu Hanza is the same type that was shot into the leg of Ahmed Deeb, 20, during a demonstration in Nahal Oz in April this year – severing his femeral artery and killing him.
All three demonstrations occurred at locations that have seen frequent protests against the Israeli-imposed ‘buffer zone’. This large area of land, along the Gazan side of the border, makes 35% of Gaza’s arable land, inaccessible to farmers because of the dangers of Israeli fire. The devastating effects on farmers and fisherman of these additional restrictions are outlined in a recent United Nations and World Food Programme report: ‘Between the fence and a hard place’ (opens as pdf).
The protests on Sunday targeted Israel’s continuous settlement building, which is in violation of international law and is further used to annex Palestinian land, a key tactic that accompanies the relentless ethnic cleansing of Palestinian Arabs from the region. Organiser and National Committee Secretary A’tah Abu Zarqa said the rallies were organised to show Palestinians’ vehement opposition to the Israeli policies that have expropriated Palestinian land on a continuous basis since Israel was created in 1948 on the ruins of Palestinian refugees. He said that the international community should never accept Israel’s attempts to unilaterally change the geography and demography of Palestine and that in light of this, Abbas should withdraw from negotiations immediately.
At the demonstrations in the Beit Hanoun and Maghazi, although live ammunition was used by Israeli occupation forces in the latter, there were no reported injuries. The demonstration in Maghazi was the first there since three protesters were shot and injured 5 months ago, including the International Solidarity Movement activist Bianca Zammit.
In Faraheen. over 200 people attended the demonstration, which began as a procession towards the border with speeches and chanting, and a large women’s group was also present. A group of young men headed towards the border fence, still on Palestinian land. Sliman and a friend Kamal, also 20, planted flags near to the border fence. Kamal described what happened:
“I was with Sliman and we both put a flag near to the fence – just a flag. When the Israel Jeeps came they opened fired on us and I ran back for cover in a ditch. Suddenly I saw Sliman shot in his abdomen. It was clear it was a single shot intended to hit him. I helped carry him back over the fields with many others. He lives in the area near to the border.”
One of the major concerns for Sliman is the fact that he had to be carried over 500 metres across fields by many of the other demonstrators and then driven off in a ‘Tuk Tuk’ bike trailer to reach medical attention. This way of transporting casualties echoed the horrific scenes during the 3 week Israeli assault on Gaza over the New Year of 2009 when over 1400 people were killed including over 400 children. Because the medical services were so overwhelmed – and were often shot at when approaching the injured – many of the casualties were transported in the boots of cars or on donkey carts. A Press TV team captured the protest on film and interviewed ISM activist Adie Mormech about the shooting.
According to the Doctors at Europa hospital where he was taken, Sliman suffered extensive internal damage to his abdomen, 3 injuries to the small bowel, the left iliac vein, rectum and some intestinal damage. He has had a series of operations been given blood transfusions – the next 24 hours are crucial. Like Ahmed Deeb, the immediate threat to his life was from loss of blood sustained from his injuries. When ISM volunteers left the hospital after visiting Sliman yesterday, he was in a critical but stable condition and was about to be moved to the intensive care unit.
Sliman is another victim of the frequent attacks on civilians near to the border, many of which ended in fatalities such as the three farm workers killed in Beit Hanoun two weeks ago, and last Friday the fisherman Mohamed Bakri killed only 2 miles out at sea by an Israeli Gunship, a month before his wedding.
Besides the crippling and internationally condemned siege, Palestinian life in Gaza is littered with such tragedy, lives ended in a flicker in accordance with the whims of the Israeli sniper on duty and who he or she chooses for execution. If Sliman survives his injuries, he’s sure to join the thousands of Palestinians who must continue the rest of their imprisonment in the Gaza ghetto with permanent debilitating disabilities.
Despite this, people continue to demonstrate in large numbers across Gaza, preferring to face Israeli violence with nothing but flags and a desire to walk on their land, despite the risks that this shooting – all too common a story – exemplifies.
Interview with a 16 year old Palestinian farmer who got injured by shrapnel, above his eye, on the 15th of July while working about 500 meters from the Green Line between the areas of Abassan Jedida and Al Faraheen, in Gaza Strip.
The interview was taken the next night, after the boy got out of the European Hospital in Khan Younis and returned to his house. Although that day there was exchange of fire between the Israeli Occupation Forces and the Palestinian armed resistance, the boy, his family and other Palestinians in the area insist that the injury was caused by Israeli gunfire. They showed also some kind of bullet collected that day.
A 20-year-old Palestinian man, Sliman Abu Hanza, is in a critical condition in hospital after being shot in the abdomen with a ‘dum dum’ bullet at a demonstration in Al-Faraheen, Khan Younis, on Sunday.
In Faraheen. over 200 people attended the demonstration, which began as a procession towards the border with speeches and chanting, and a large women’s group was also present. A group of young men headed towards the border fence, still on Palestinian land. Sliman and a friend Kamal, also 20, planted flags near to the border fence. Kamal described what happened: