20 November 2009 Farmer Mahmoud Mohammed Shawish Zaneen was shot in both his legs while planting wheat east of Beit Hanoun. (Eva Bartlett)
On 15 November at 8:30am, a number of young men went as usual to the land near Gaza’s northern border with Israel planning to catch birds. Amjad Hassanain, 27, was among the bird-catchers hunting near the border fence when Israeli soldiers began shooting.
The shots which missed the other bird-catchers hit Hassanain, grazing his shoulder. Cameraman Abdul Rahman Hussain, filming in the vicinity, reports having seen the group of bird-catches head north.
“We were near the former Israeli settlement of Doghit,” said Hussain, referring to the area northwest of Beit Lahiya in the northern Gaza Strip.
“I had gone to the border area to photograph a young bird-catcher. We were about 400 meters from the border fence, but when we heard the shooting, we moved back to around one kilometer.”
According to Hussain, the other men had to carry the wounded Hassanain one kilometer from the site of injury, then transferred him to a motorcycle and finally to a car.
“He was covered in blood, I couldn’t tell where he was hit,” said Hussain.
There to document the work of bird-catchers, Hussain was surprised by the shooting.
“They always go there to catch birds. They put their nets close to the fence in order to catch as many as possible.” Like the bird-catchers, Hussain believed the Israeli soldiers along the border were familiar enough with the bird catching activity that they wouldn’t shoot.
Two hours later, Mahmoud Mohammed Shawish Zaneen and seven other farmers took a break from their work plowing land east of Beit Hanoun.
“We had three tractors with us. We’d been working since 8am, planting wheat. At first we worked about 450 meters from the border fence, but later we were 700 meters away,” he explained.
The farmers had paused to drink tea when Israeli soldiers began shooting.
Zaneen added, “The tractors were stopped and we were sitting on them. There were about seven Israeli soldiers, on foot. They shot the other tractors and then shot mine. They didn’t give us any warning, just started shooting.”
The bullet which pierced Zaneen’s left calf continued into his right calf.
Since the end of last winter’s Israeli invasion of Gaza, at least nine Palestinians have been killed, and another more than 34 injured, by Israeli shooting and shelling in the border areas in Gaza’s north and east.
Eva Bartlett is a Canadian human rights advocate and freelancer who arrived in Gaza in November 2008 on the third Free Gaza Movement boat. She has been volunteering with the International Solidarity Movement and documenting Israel’s ongoing attacks on Palestinians in Gaza. During Israel’s recent assault on Gaza, she and other ISM volunteers accompanied ambulances and documenting the Israeli attacks on the Gaza Strip.
Marryam Haleem writing from Beit Hanoun, occupied Gaza Strip, Live from Palestine
“That was the happiest day of my life,” Ahmad explained, “I was freed that day.”
"The day I graduated from university was the best day of my life," says Ahmed from Beit Hanoun. (Marryam Haleem)
“Come on,” I laughed as we walked down the dusty Gaza street, the Mediterranean sun beating down hard on our faces. “It couldn’t have been that bad. I mean, we all dislike school to some degree, but it has its nice things too.”
His grave eyes looked wholly unconvinced. “The day I graduated from university was the best day of my life,” he firmly repeated. And then he added, more to himself than to me, “I wish I could erase all my memories of my time in school.”
Ahmad’s first day of school was in 1991 during the first Palestinian intifada. Then six years old and living in the northern Gaza town of Beit Hanoun, Ahmad was a good student who enjoyed school. He worked hard and was always the first in his year. After the Oslo accords were signed in 1993 and the Palestinian Authority was created, one could say that life in Gaza was approaching a degree of normalcy. And upon finishing middle school in 2000, as a reward for his scholastic achievement, Ahmad received the gift of a lifetime. He, along with 19 other students from Gaza, was selected by the Ministry of Education to join a Seeds of Peace summer camp in the US.
He had a wonderful time in America. What an adventure for the 14-year-old boy! He improved his English. He made new friends. He experienced a new and different world in the beautiful state of Maine — one that was open, free and full of opportunity. He returned to Gaza after this month-long excursion full of hope.
But the second intifada irrupted only two months after he returned home from the US, at the start of his first year of high school. Israel’s brutal attempt to crush the intifada was felt throughout the occupied West Bank and Gaza. “There was no space,” Ahmad explained, describing how the Israeli offensive affected every aspect of personal life for the Palestinian individual. Student life was only one such casualty.
It became dangerous to go to school. It became impossible to have a normal education. In his three years of high school, Ahmad’s school was shelled by Israeli tanks six times, twice while students were inside.
“Each day we would have demonstrations against the attacks in Gaza and the West Bank because we had so many martyrs … No school. Just demonstrations … You had to go and demonstrate against the horrible attacks against these children and kids everywhere.”
Still, despite all the madness, the students clung as much as they could to their vocation. They would loyally go to school, as much as circumstance allowed. But even this effort was frequently quashed. Too often the students would trek to school only to find it closed. They would ask the reasons for the closures. The answers became the soul-grating refrain of their lives.
Why?
Because Israeli tanks are getting close to the school and there is no school today.
Why?
Because people in our city have been martyred and there are demonstrations so there will be no school today.
Why?
Because the tanks have closed off Beit Hanoun and the teachers cannot come from outside. So we’ll have no school today.
It was in this environment that Ahmad and his classmates (the ones who were not killed) came to their third and final year of high school in 2003. It is during this final year that students take their tawjihi exam which determines their entire future studies and career.
“Tawjihi,” Ahmad aptly described, “is like a stage between life.”
Tawjihi year began normal enough — for a Palestinian in Gaza, that is. Normal attacks. Normal shootings. Normal curfews. But the last two months before the exams began the Israeli army laid siege on Beit Hanoun. No one could enter. No one could leave. Everyday there were attacks and explosions. Everyday there were injuries and martyrs.
“We didn’t study, actually,” said Ahmad, “Nothing. You cannot study [when] people are dying,” he explained.
Yet their exams were approaching. The first day of examination was 9 June 2003 — and the Israeli army was still in Beit Hanoun.
“What do we do?” said Ahmad. “We need to take our exams. So we decided to go to school even though the Israeli tanks were at the doors outside the school.”
So they went. Despite the fact that they hadn’t prepared at all due to the siege and the killings. Examinations went on for a month. Every day the students went. And every day the Israeli tanks were at the doors of the school.
It was the worst month, Ahmad said. All your time in high school you wait to prepare and do well on these final examinations, only, in the last moments, to be prevented from studying because your city is under attack.
The soldiers left after 67 days of siege. And then their exam results came in.
“I passed,” said Ahmad, “my average was 83.5. So very good.”
Yet, at the same time, he added, “You don’t know what is going on. You just go and study for a life you’ve been dreaming about. But then you find you can’t have it because of obstacles put up by enemies. And these are horrible obstacles. They’re not just any kind of obstacles that anyone could pass.
“It’s war everywhere. And people are dying everywhere. And you just don’t know. Maybe it’s your turn. I mean, we believe in God, and we know everyone is going to die. But when it goes on so continuously, every day there is attacks, you just keep worrying about it. So the feeling was, what should I be doing? Should I go fight and resist? Should I go study as a way to resist, as a better way of resistance? Should I just stay afraid, doing nothing, with my family?”
“I started to believe that maybe the power from my education in the future will be greater than the power of a stone against a tank. I asked myself a million times, if I should do the same [and take up throwing stones at the Israeli tanks like some of the Palestinian youth]. Even if it was a little thing.
“Some people say it’s stupid, a stone against a tank. But it’s their will and determination [that counts]. It comes from deep inside. That you are not afraid from anything, whatever it may be. You just want to fight, resist, for your rights. Even if it takes your life, takes everything; I believe that it’s my right and I have to do it.”
That is one way to resist. But Ahmad decided to resist through his education.
“I had to take care of my family. Reach what my parents wanted of me. They wanted us to be educated, get a good life, good jobs, have a good place in the community. They wanted us to help them and help people. So that was the final, or not the final, but a decision that I made.
“You are feeling many things, but you have to go on, to keep going. The only way is to just keep fighting, through your education, and your dreams, and your beliefs. That was the feeling.
“But I never felt like I have to give up. I didn’t find a way that told me, you just need to give up now. And every time a bad thing happened, or a disaster happened, it gave me more power to continue.
“Because this life became normal for us — an abnormal life for other people became the normal for us. So we had to figure out another way of life for us. It’s our reality. We had to face reality, however it was. So it helped us to figure out that life, in spite of all this.
“And all the challenges that we are facing, and all the power that is fighting and destroying everything here in Gaza, we still need to keep going. It’s not going to stop us. Because if we stop, it wont help us. [The Israelis] will keep going. Whether or not we stop, they will try to get what they want. So why give them more opportunities to get what they want? We need also to continue.”
He paused at the end of this grand soliloquy. “How difficult it was,” he said softly.
But the difficulty continued as he moved on to get his bachelor of arts in information technology at a university in Gaza.
“I faced troubles when I was in high school because of the intifada but they increased at university,” Ahmad explained. “Beit Hanoun is the most violent area in Gaza Strip because it is very close to the [Israeli] border so there were usually attacks. Every day we had events. People killed. People injured. Homes destroyed. Lands demolished. My father’s farm was bulldozed four or five times. Most of my relatives’ homes were targeted.
“Most of the semesters I couldn’t attend many lectures because of the usual attacks on my city. There were weekly attacks, sometimes daily attacks so I could not leave home; it was not safe to leave. And I’d also have to stay home when there were other attacks around the city, or around the university.”
Many times he wasn’t even able to attend final exams.
“I’d just keep studying throughout the semester and when it was exam time, attacks would happen in Beit Hanoun and friends and relatives were killed, [so I’d miss the exams]. I was supposed to graduate in 2008, but I graduated in 2009, one year late because of these attacks. Attacks which have never stopped. Even now. Especially in my city.”
Ahmad was finally set to graduate in December 2008, but once again larger events intervened.
“The end of December turned out to be the beginning of a war, not the beginning of final exams. It was a big, I don’t know how to describe it,” he said. “It was like, ‘here is a gift for graduation: You won’t graduate. Just keep waiting for death.'”
His month of exams was exchanged for a month of terror.
“It was 23 days,” he said, “but you can say 23 weeks. Twenty-three months. Twenty-three years. Twenty-three centuries. It never ends. You keep waiting, moment by moment. And you know nothing. You can only feel the darkness. There is no light, for any kind of hope, or safety, or human rights, or whatever. Just 23 days full of darkness. Full of horror. Full of victims. Massacres. Everything bad. I cannot find words to describe it.”
But those days did pass. And he found enough strength to pick himself up out of the rubble and finish the mission he began. He graduated, at last, this past spring. But not without sacrifice and loss that no one should ever have to endure.
“These five years in university, I said and will keep saying forever,” Ahmad concluded, “these five years were the most horrible years of my life. Even though they’re supposed to be the best years, the nice years. The time to go out and discover life. But it wasn’t discovering life. It was discovering disasters, actually, here in Gaza.”
Marryam Haleem is a senior at the University of Wisconsin studying philosophy and comparative literature and spent this summer in Gaza doing research for her senior thesis.
On Friday afternoon, 4 September 2009, the Israeli Occupation Forces (IOF) killed a 14-year-old child, Ghazi al-Za’anin, in Beit Hanoun town in the northern Gaza Strip. IOF troops shot the child from close range, while he was walking with his family. This child was the second to be killed by IOF in less than a week.
Palestinian Centre for Human Rights (PCHR) investigations, and eye-witness testimony, indicates that, at approximately 13:40 on Friday, 4 September 2009, Maher Ghazi al-Za’anin drove his four children, including Ghazi, 14, to their farm, 500 meters away from the border with Israel, in the northeast of Beit Hanoun town. Before arriving at the farm, al-Za’anin and his children stepped down from the car and approached their land on foot. On their way to the farm, they were surprised by an Israeli military jeep that stopped opposite to them. Al-Za’anin and his children were frightened, and ran away. IOF soldiers who were inside the jeep immediately opened fire. Ghazi was wounded by a bullet to the head and fell to the ground. The father carried the child to their car, whereupon IOF soldiers fired at the car, hitting it with two bullets. The father drove to Beit Hanoun Hospital and the child was transferred to al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza City as he was in a critical condition. Ghazi was admitted to the intensive care unit, where he was pronounced dead on the following morning, Saturday, 5 September 2009.
PCHR has recently documented many cases in which IOF positioned along the border opened fired at agricultural areas and houses. It is believed that these attacks are intended to deny Palestinian farmers access to their agricultural land, some of which lie within the so-called ‘buffer zone’.
PCHR strongly condemns the murder of a child by IOF, and:
1. Reiterates condemnation of this latest crime, which is part of a series of crimes committed by IOF in the Occupied Palestinian Territory (OPT).
2. Calls upon the international community to promptly and urgently take action in order to stop such crimes, and renews its call for the High Contracting Parties to the Fourth Geneva Convention to fulfill their obligations and provide protection to Palestinian civilians in the OPT.
On Friday 17th of April a group of Palestinian activists of the Beit Hanoun Local Initiative, international activists of ISM Gaza Strip and FGM and journalists went to accompany Palestinian farmers to harvest their crops in Beit Hanoun, close to the Green Line.
As soon as they begun to work, Israeli troops start to shoot from nearby military bases and vehicles. As the shooting was becoming more intense and close to the group of Palestinians and internationals, a Palestinian activist called the Palestinian office that coordinates with the Israeli occupation administration. He was told from the coordination, that the Israeli troops couldn’t see the group and that the Palestinians and internationals should move to a place where they could be seen better by the Israeli soldiers.
When some of the Palestinians and international activists (wearing fluorescent or Red Crescent vests) move to a place where they could be clearly seen, the Israeli soldiers observed them for a couple of minutes and then started to shoot again only a few meters from them.
Shooting at civilians is a severe violation of International Humanitarian Law which unfortunately is committed almost daily by the Israeli occupation forces, but the way the Israeli occupation administration this time set this trap maybe have no precedent.
Less than two months have passed since the end of Israel’s grisly war on Gaza. Not a house has been re-built (there is no cement; Israel continues to ban its entry into Gaza), thousands are displaced or sheltering in an overcrowded relative’s house or renting a scarcely-available apartment. The aid has stockpiled on the other side of crossings into Gaza, many trucks being sent back or expired. And the pain of loss, let alone of seeing family members -children, siblings, parents-burned by white phosphorous, being murdered or left to bleed to death is still unbearably fresh.
Yet Palestinians are trying to move on, again, while dealing with a siege which has only tightened post-destruction of Gaza. Last week Palestinian youths held a concert in the burnt-out theatre in one of the al Quds hospital buildings, attacked and seriously damaged by Israel during its war on Gaza [more than 14 hospitals and medical centres were bombed and damaged by Israeli army, 2 clinics were destroyed, 44 other damaged, and 23 emergency workers and medics were killed].
Land Day in Gaza
Palestinian child holds sign
Dabka in the ruins of Quds hospital
Gazan youth
Women in Gaza mark Land Day
Dabka in the fields
Quds Concert
Charred walls as a backdrop, piles of twisted metal, burnt rafters, and the ash of destroyed walls framing the stage, the next generation of Palestinian parents and leaders stood proud last Thursday, saying with their presence, as well as singing, “we will not go down”. The Michael Heart song written during Israel’s 3 weeks of attacks on Gaza caught the spirit of what Palestinians have been saying and living for decades, since the Zionists first began -even before Israel was created on the smoking ruins of Palestinian villages -their assassinations and acts of terrorism designed to frighten and drive out the existing Palestinian population.
On stage, a youth troupe of Dabke dancers held their own, did justice to the art that is Dabke. What was evident more than the skill of the musicians and dancers was Palestinians’ drive to live, to laugh, to show off and share their love of life. Just as with a concert organized by several youths last November to lift the spirits of Palestinians in Gaza living under a suffocating siege, the crowd clearly reveled in the opportunity for joy …after so much tragedy.
Land Day
In Gaza’s northern Beit Hanoun region, Palestinians, led by women, marched to land in the Israel-imposed “buffer zone” to tend the remaining trees and proclaim their right to the land. The area once flourished with olive, lemon, orange, guava and almond trees, in the years before Israeli invasions razed them to the ground, simultaneously razing history and life. Following Isreal’s latest bout of destruction upon Gaza, most sources cite 60,000-75,000 dunams (1 dunam is 1,000 square metres) of fertile, cultivable land as having been destroyed by Israeli tanks and bulldozers. In Gaza’s perimeter areas, the “buffer zone” annexes land to Israel, gobbling up rich soil which had served Gaza’s agricultural needs. As of the last attacks on Gaza, as much as 60 % of the agriculture industry has been destroyed by Israel, further rendering Gazans aid-dependent.
Yet, again despite the gravity of the bleak situation Palestinians are facing, all over Palestine, on Land Day their voices were loud in protest, in defiance, and in joy. Organized by Beit Hanoun’s Local Initiative, a group leading agricultural and social projects in the northern region, Land Day celebrants sang, danced Dabke, tended their trees, and celebrated being on their land. On any given normal day, most of the residents would hesitate to go to this border region area due to the Israeli soldiers’ shooting which routinely erupts dangerously close to anyone on the land.
