Tag: Beit Hanoun Local Initiative

Remembrance in Beit Hanoun

by Nathan Stuckey

9 November 2011 | International Solidarity Movement, Gaza

It is Tuesday, the third day of Eid, the Eid of the Sacrifice.  We, the Beit Hanoun Local Initiative and the International Solidarity Movement, have gathered near the bombed remains of the Beit Hanoun Agricultural College like we do every Tuesday in preparation for our march into the no go zone.  This Tuesday is different though, we are not gathered on the road that leads into the no go zone, but behind the bombed buildings of the College.  Like much of Palestine, history is densely packed, every place has a story, today, we would learn the story of this small area.   Today marks the five year anniversary of the Beit Hanoun massacre.  Before us, lie the graves of its victims.

On November 8, 2006 at six in the morning the Israeli army began shelling Beit Hanoun.  The shells landed on the houses of the A’athamnah and the Kafarnah families.  Not just one shell, the shelling continued for fifteen minutes.  Round after round fell on their houses.  Nineteen people were killed, nine children, four women and six men.  The youngest was only a baby of a couple of months, the oldest a 73 year old woman.  Forty more people were injured.  They were all civilians, not even the Israeli army bothers to claim that they were armed; they were sleeping in their beds.

The graves are just off the road, just behind the Agricultural College.  They are large; each of them contains several bodies, large gray slabs of concrete with names and prayers inscribed on them.  Abu Issa, from the Beit Hanoun Local Initiative speaks; he prays for the dead and asks us to remember the past.  This massacre is barely the past though; it is almost the present, even if forgotten in so much of the world.  His words end, as they must, on the present, “we did not ask for the occupation, we have always lived here, it came to us, but we cannot accept it, we must continue the struggle until the occupation ends.”   We hang a wreath next to the first grave.

We walk slowly down the row of graves; Abu Issa reads us the names of the dead.  We reach the grave of Maisa, age six.  I cannot help but look away, for I have my own Maisa, who was also six in 2006.  She isn’t my daughter, she is my English student.  He name is Maisa Samouni.  Twenty nine members of her extended family were murdered in much the same way by the Israeli army, herded into a house by soldiers, and then the house was shelled by the IDF.  I wonder what this Miaisa would look like today, would she be as smart and kind and beautiful as my Maisa?  As we reach the end of the graves we come to the graves that have been destroyed, destroyed by Israeli bulldozers in subsequent invasions of Gaza.

We turn away from the graves and look toward the border.  At the concrete towers which line it, full of snipers and computer controlled guns which kill at will.  Abu Issa begins to tell us about the area that we see in front of us.  It was here that the men of Beit Hanoun were imprisoned during the first week of November 2006.  Israeli forces had invaded Beit Hanoun; all males between the ages of 14 and 60 were rounded up and brought here.  For six days the slept in the open, in the cold, while the Israeli army took them for questioning.  Fifty three people were killed and over 200 injured during the invasion.  The day after Israeli forces withdrew; they fired the shells which would kill nineteen more, including Maisa.

After the memorial service we piled into the van and went to the east of Beit Hanoun to visit the Al Jareema family.  The Al Jareema’s are Bedouin family that lives right next to the no go zone.  They have not always lived there, the used to live in 1948, but they were expelled by the Zionists during the Nakba, them and 750,000 other Palestinians.  They settled in Gaza.  They lived right next to the border, their houses used to be 50 meters from the border.  Then, the Israeli’s decided to impose the buffer zone on Gaza, the family received a notice that they must move.  There was no appeal.  Israeli bulldozers came and destroyed their houses.  They destroyed the pens for the animals.  They destroyed the groves of trees that used to thrive in the no go zone.

Now, the family lives in a collection of tents and shacks about 500 meters from the border.  As you look toward the border you see a particularly large gray tower, it is from this tower that the Israeli army shoots at them.  They have nowhere to go, so they stay living here, surviving as best they can on the land that Israel has not seized.  We bring them sweets to celebrate Eid, they serve us tea and freshly made bread.  They ask us to stay for lunch, but we must go, there is a wedding going on in Beit Hanoun.  Life continues.  I pray that the children of the new couple grow up in a more just world, in a free Palestine.  This is what we struggle for.

Eid children’s fair in Beit Hanoun

by Radhika S.

6 November 2011 | International Solidarity Movement, Gaza

Photo: Hama Waqum - Click here for more images

In the afternoon, we went to a special Eid children’s fair at a park in Beit Hanoun, in the north of the Gaza Strip.  Fifty percent of the population in Gaza is under the age of 18, and as we arrived, that statistic became quite clear. There were kids everywhere.  Playing, dancing, singing –riding horses — all in their brand new Eid clothes.  Poofy synthetic dahlia barrettes were all the the rage among the girls. Volunteers from the Beit Hanoun Local Initiative, which works with children traumatized by Israeli violence (among other things) were singing and clapping as dozens of kids shrieked with pleasure as we arrived.

Then there was a sort of homemade karaoke where Arabic songs were played over speakers and kids would sing along.  Everyone got a prize.

This report was excerpted from a longer post on Notes from Behind the Blockade.

Honeymoon in Gaza

16 October 2011 | International Solidarity Movement, Gaza

I had just finished off a plate of homemade bread knaffe yesterday with a family in the south of Gaza, when we got the call: farmers in Beit Hanoun, a village in the north of the Gaza Strip, requested that ISM volunteers accompany them to pick olives near the buffer zone.

The buffer zone.  I had heard of this area back in the fall of 2002 when I had come to the West Bank for the ISM’s first olive harvest campaign.  Back then, Israeli two-ton Caterpillar bulldozers were crushing homes, orchards and all other life forms to create this dead zone between Gaza and Egypt.  Israel displaced more than 10% of the population of Rafah, Gaza’s sourthernmost town, at that time, making Palestinian refugees from 1948 refugees yet again.

Today, this unilaterally-imposed 300 meter buffer zone extends all around the sliver of land that is the Gaza strip, to the north, east, and south, an effective kill zone for all who dare enter it. (To the west is the sea, also patrolled by the Israeli navy).

Nonetheless, I was excited about the idea of going out with the farmers. I love picking olives! I love being out on the land, feeling the hard purple and green fruit pop off the branches and onto a tarp spread on dirt below. And besides, we weren’t going inside the buffer zone – those trees were long gone – just in some area nearby.

L, the woman who had baked the deliciousknaffesnack, and J, her husband, had also lost the majority of their farmland to the dead zone. J had just finished telling me about it, and L was quizzing me about my love life.

“Do you have any children?” she asked.

“No,” I said.

“Why not? Children are wonderful. I have five.”

I provide the response that seemed easiest at the moment. “Well I just got married a few months ago.”

“You should be on your honeymoon!” she exclaimed.  “Where is your husband? Your husband should be here!”

Alas, I’m not sure if she really believed I was married, and I promised that next week I would bring photographs of my wedding.

The next day, Saturday, our group head to Beit Hanoun to pick olives.

“Be prepared to get shot,” said Saber, the founder of the Local Initiative of Beit Hanoun, an organization which works with farmers in the buffer zone to resist the Israeli occupation through nonviolence.  “The Israeli army, they don’t distinguish between foreigners or Palestinians,” he added, pointing to the fluorescent yellow vests and megaphone we had brought along.

Then why are we here, I wondered. Surely not for our physical prowess in picking olives. But I understood that he was making sure were fully appraised of the situation. The task may seem mundane, but here there is always a risk.

We drove out to the edge of Beit Hanoun, where the trees suddenly stopped and nothing but barren land lay between us and the border.  It was a sunny day in Gaza, and if you squinted your eyes and looked really carefully, in the distance, army towers could be seen, and beyond them, the town of Sderot in Israel.  Surely, there could be no danger from the Israelis back here, I thought, we are much farther back than the designated 300 meters.

Turns out I was right and I was wrong.

Mohamed AshureShimbari and his family had already begun picking olives by the time we arrived, on a small plot of land next to a cement block house. Every time the Israelis invaded Gaza, they locked the family in a room, and used their house as a base.  And though we were indeed, 800 meters from the border, the area was far from safe.

We began picking olives, and the elderly farmer who owned the land seemed exhausted, not from picking olives, but from living life in Gaza.  J too, though in his mi-50s and younger, had had that look as well. After his family had lost everything in 1948 and fled to Gaza, J had managed to by farmland after working in Israel for over twenty years, as an electrician, a restaurant worker — “everything” — only to see it taken yet again.

In this area of Beit Hanoun where we were picking what was now the barren buffer zone, ten years ago been filled with orchards of lemon, orange, grapefruit and olive trees.  There were also greenhouses of tomato, eggplant and cantaloupe.  Saber pointed all around, explaining what was where and how there was no clean water.  I couldn’t imagine it.  It was like pointing to the Sahara desert and saying, “ imagine these sand dunes are jungle.”

We picked for a couple of hours, occasionally breaking for tea, when someone called out “jeepat.”  Jeeps.  Israeli army jeeps were patrolling the border.  Then came a tank.  A few people stopped picking, to peer at the tank.

“What’s it doing?” I asked.

“Showing they are strong,” one of the young Beit Hanoun volunteers answered.

The army was relatively far away, but apparently, one never knows if the Israeli army will shoot at you. Since Operation Cast lead in 2009, the U.N. estimates that Israeli tank and gunfire killed five Palestinian civilians, three of whom were children and injured twenty in areas near the buffer zone.

After we stripped the trees of their olives, we dumped them into large, 40 kilo bags and then head back into town.  The day passed without incident, as it should have, but it was no honeymoon.

There is no east: Olive harvest in Gaza

15 October 2011 | International Solidarity Movement, Gaza

Gaza doesn’t have very much farmland left.  The expanding no go zone imposed by Israeli bullets and bulldozers constantly erode the amount of land left for Palestinians to farm in Gaza.  Mohamed Ashure Shimbari lives on the edge of the no-go zone.  If you look east from his land you see the no go zone, what Israel euphemistically refers to as “the buffer zone.”  Little grows there.  Israeli bulldozers regularly come to kill anything which has managed to find a life there.  You can see the destroyed well which once provided water for the orchards that used to cover the no-go zone.  Now, there is no water, and no life, only a zone of death. Israel claims that the buffer zone is “only” 300 meters wide, but Mohamed’s land is about 800 meters from the border, and still he is afraid. The Israelis often shoot into this area, especially at night. The olive harvest has begun in Gaza.  The Beit Hanoun Local Initiative and the International Solidarity Movement went to Mohamed’s land to help him harvest his olives today.  The trees are pregnant with fruit, green and black olives line the branches.  Mohamed’s family depends on these olives to live. We join Mohamed and his sons in the morning, the weather is beautiful and the trees are picturesque.  We spread plastic under the trees and begin to pick.  Thankfully, it is quiet.  The Israeli’s are not shooting today.  We work quickly, stripping the branches of olives, climbing up on ladders or into the branches of the trees to get at the higher olives.  Unreachable olives are smacked with a stick to knock them off the tree.  Any olives that fail to fall onto the plastic sheeting are carefully picked up; these olives are too precious to waste.  The olives are transferred into bushel sacks.  Tomorrow, they will be processed, either cured for eating or crushed for oil. As the sun climbs higher into the sky and the work becomes hotter we break for tea.  We decide to walk over and visit Mohamed’s neighbors, a Bedouin family.  We meet their young son Abed who has just come home from school.  He walks five kilometers to school every morning, and he walks home at night, he does this with his sister and his brother.  Abed is 10 years old.  He is a shy kid; he wants to be a dentist when he grows up.  He doesn’t seem to think that peace will ever come to his family, that they will ever live a life without worrying about the shooting from the Israeli’s at night.  He lives a life of three directions, north, south, and west. There is no east really, you can’t walk that way, you would be killed.  His family is forced to truck water from Beit Hanoun, the well that they used to depend on for water has been destroyed by the Israeli’s.  His mother comes out; she tells us that she prays for peace, for a life with water and without fear of the bullets. We return to work the olives.  Tree by tree, up and down the rows, we move gathering olives.  Mohamed tells us about his life.  When the Israeli’s invade Gaza his home is one of the first places they came to.  Not because they are afraid that he has guns, but because they want to use his house.  He and his family are locked in one room while the soldiers use his house as a base for their attacks on Beit Hanoun.  During Cast Lead his family was locked in the room for 23 days while the IDF carried out their slaughter on Gaza. Throughout the world, the olive is a symbol of peace, but in Palestine it is also a symbol of people’s ties to the land.  The no-go zone east of Beit Hanoun is constantly expanding. Every year or two the Israeli bulldozers come and destroy even more land.  Mohamed’s house is now on the edge of the no-go zone.  Maybe next year his house will be destroyed, the olive trees which we are picking from will be uprooted. Yet maybe his house will be spared, after all, if it is destroyed where will the soldiers sleep when they invade Gaza?

Gaza: Planting the symbol of Palestinian livelihood

12 October 2011 | International Solidarity Movement, Gaza

The zone of death, what Israel calls the buffer zone, to the north of Beit Hanoun isn’t shrinking but is a little less dead.  For the last three years, the only life that has managed to survive here was a few scraggly plants that somehow manage to survive the IOF’s regular bulldozing of the land.  These plants have been joined every Tuesday by a devoted group of activists from the Local Initiative of Beit Hanoun and the International Solidarity Movement.  Israel had managed to wipe out all traces of what used to be here, houses, sprawling orchards, fields of vegetables, and grazing sheep. For two weeks the Beit Hanoun Local Initiative decided to leave behind something more than Palestinian flags when they went into the buffer zone.  They left behind a grove of olive trees.

We gathered this Tuesday, the 11th of October, to tend to this grove, the only reminder of what used to be here, before Israel destroyed everything.  There were about 20 of us, one van, and one tuk tuk to carry water.  We set out for the zone of death at eleven A.M.  Usually, we march down the road into the zone of death, but today, we were carrying water for the trees, we rode.  As always, the tension increases as you get nearer the zone of death.  You never know when the soldiers will shoot.  The IOF threaten to shoot anyway within 300 meters of the border, but they aren’t very good at measuring distance, the soldiers shoot people up to a kilometer away.

We reached the edge of the dead zone, passed out giant green jugs of water, and started forward to tend to our trees.  It isn’t an easy walk, carrying a heavy jug of water over ground that has bulldozed too many times to count.  It is made easier though with the knowledge that we are going to only grove of olive trees that exists in the buffer zone, the twenty olive trees that we have planted over the previous two weeks.  The olive tree has always been an important symbol in Palestine, it is not just the universal symbol of peace, but it is also a symbol of the tie to the land that the people here feel.  This is their land, they will not abandon it.  The ethnic cleansing of the Nakba and Naqsa will not be repeated.  We pour the water on trees. Every tree gets some water.  Sadly, one of the trees appears to be dying.  We give it extra water.

We finish watering the olive trees.  We admire our work, what we have accomplished.  We have returned life to the buffer zone, not just for the short time when we are here for the demonstration, now there is a 24 hour presence here.  The next time Israel decides to bulldoze the zone of death the driver will not be able to tell himself that he is bulldozing nothing, that this was a land without a people.  He will know he is bulldozing someone’s olive grove; his bulldozer is crushing peace.  Before we left Sabur Zaaneen from the Beit Hanoun Local Initiative spoke for us all, “The popular resistance is stronger than the occupation; we will continue the struggle until the occupation ends.”

We will continue the struggle until Palestinian olive orchards can grow on all the land of Palestine.