Tag: Beit Hanoun

Israel drops missile on North Gaza neighborhood, no one cares

Radhika Sainath | International Solidarity Movement, Gaza

Israeli missile strikes Beit Hanoun – Click here for more images

The Israeli Air Force fired a missile into a Beit Hanoun residential neighborhood in north Gaza early Sunday morning. The missile landed in a grove surrounded by homes, creating a crater the size of a tennis court and destroying over forty orange and olive trees. Chunks of shrapnel and oranges lay scattered about the grove

Local children and area residents interviewed appeared to be in shock. Ayman Ismail Hamad explained that “[a]t 3 a.m. we heard a huge boom. It was so scary for the children and women here and they started to shout and cry – such a scary thing for them. When we looked out to see what happened we found everything there totally destroyed … and the windows from the houses in this area – totally nothing. The [Israeli] F-16 didn’t leave anything behind.”

The owner of the farmland, Sufyan Musa Muhammad, reported losing approximately 40 orange and olive trees, not including the uprooted trees at the periphery of the crater, valued at approximately $200 a tree. “It’s not just the price,” he added, gazing sadly at the upturned alien landscape. “It’s that there’s no more fruit.”  According to Muhammad, no journalists had approached him regarding the Israeli missile attack, which went unreported.

Thirteen-year-old Amer Ayman Hamad, whose house is about 50 meters away from the impacted area said, “There was boom … I didn’t scream, I just woke up … it was during the night we didn’t hear any plane except for the sound of the drones … after that I went to the bathroom.”

Israel has not claimed responsibility for the attack which terrorized local residents. No one was injured. Palestinians in the area believe that Israel used an F-16 to bomb the residential neighborhood due to the size of the crater and the thickness of the shrapnel.

When asked if he believed Israel should compensate him for his loss Muhammad replied, “I don’t want money from the Israelis. Whatever they do to us we are steadfast and strong and we won’t leave our land.”

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.