Nahad Rajab Mohamed Al-Hesy in his home (Photo: Radhika Sainath, Notes from Behind the Blockade) – Click here for more images
The Israeli navy violently seized two Palestinian trawlers in Gazan waters yesterday, shooting one fisherman in the arm, and ultimately forcing at least ten men to Ashod, Israel, where they were interrogated for several hours. Israel released all of the fishermen at 2 a.m. this morning.
Twenty-eight year old Nehad Mohamed Rajab Al-Hesy reported that his boat, along with six others, were fishing in the same area at about 11:30 a.m. Tuesday morning when he suddenly saw five Israeli naval ships—three large and two small—approach his boat, along with that of Omar al Habil. According to Al-Hesy, both men had sued Israel for destroying their boats in the past.
“The Israelis told four boats to go back to Gaza. All six boats tried to pull up their nets, but they prevented us. The Israelis started to shoot at us a lot and I got shot in the arm. The bullet entered and went out of my arm,” he added holding out his left arm wrapped in white gauze and bandages.
The Israeli navy then asked who was in charge of the boat and Al-Hesy answered that the boat was his. Next, the Israeli navy commanded him to take off his clothes, jump into the sea and swim until he reached the Israeli naval boats, then asked the three others—Mohamed Rajab Mohamed Al-Hesy, 18, Jarrimal Jehad Rajab Al-Hesy, 22 and Mohamed Jehad Rajab Al-Hesy, 19—to do the same.
“It was a terrible thing. It was a scary thing,” said 22-year-old Jarrmal. “Now we are all sick from the cold water they forced us to swim in.”
Once on the ship, Al-Hesy was blindfolded and Israeli forces tied his arms behind his back and forced him to sit in a painful position for several hours. “My back, shoulders and my arm that was shot were hurting a lot,” he said, “but I was thinking about my boat which my family depends on for income.”
In Ashod, Israeli forces began questioning Al-Hesy at 5 p.m.
“Why did you break the 3 mile limit?” an Israeli soldier asked him.
“During Oslo, we were allowed to reach 20 miles so why do you prevent us from going past 3 miles? These 3 miles not enough,” Al-Hesy responded.
“I’m not the Israeli army,” the soldier responded, according to Al-Hesy. “But there is something wrong with you. Why don’t you fishermen gather and ask the United Nations and go to the human rights centers so you can go more than 3 miles?”
The soldier subsequently changed the subject of the interrogation, asking Al-Hesy the names of the policemen working at the port. When the interrogation finished, Al-Hesy was told that he would be sent back to Gaza, but he refused to go without his boat.
He explained how in 2003, the Israeli navy took his boat along with about $10,000 worth of equipment. He told the soldier “All my family depends on this boat. We can’t live without this boat. If I don’t go back I can eat and drink here. If I go back without my boat I will not eat.”
When Al-Hesy saw the other fishermen he told them he wouldn’t go back to Gaza without his boat. The other fishermen agreed to do the same and refused to get on the bus to the Eretz border crossing. Israeli forces eventually forced all the fishermen on the bus.
Al-Hesy and the other men were eventually released at 2 a.m., but his trawler, along with that of Omar al Habil, remains in Israeli custody. Al-Hesy has been fishing since he was 13 and makes about 20 shekels a day, or $5.70. He recalls making 1000 shekels ($285) when Israel permitted fishing up to 20 miles. In addition to sustaining a bullet wound to the army, Al-Hesy also had scabs around his right ankle from the ankle cuffs.
His lawsuit stems from an incident in 2007 when the Israeli navy destroyed another boat of his. That case is still ongoing.
“We fishermen never do anything bad. We don’t send rockets from our boats, we don’t touch any of them, but they kill fishermen, arrest fishermen; they took so many boats.”
30 November 2011 | International Solidarity Movement, Gaza
Photo: Rosa Schiano - Click here for more images
Today, Tuesday, November 29, 2011 is the International Day of Solidarity with the Palestinian People. This day commemorates the racist and colonialist proposal of the United Nations to partition Palestine in 1947. All over the world, people stood in solidarity with the Palestinian struggle today. In Beit Hanoun, today, like every Tuesday for the last three years, the popular struggle raised its voice against the occupation. Against the no go zone which surrounds Gaza, which makes the refugees of 1948 and 1967 who live in Beit Hanoun refugees once again, the no go zone which throws them off their land and destroys their houses and orchards. Against the siege on Gaza which is designed to destroy them, their hopes, their dreams, their economy, their future. Under the unceasing gaze of observation balloons and drones, in the shadow of a giant concrete wall studded with gun towers which seem to come out of a futuristic horror film but which is in fact is the present and is no movie, it is Gaza. Against the occupation which can only remind the world of George Orwell’s prediction of what the future would look like, “a boot stamping on a human face, forever”.
We gathered in the shadows of the ruins of the Beit Hanoun Agricultural College, not 100 meters away from the graves of the Beit Hanoun Massacre of 2006. The Beit Hanoun Local Initiative, the International Solidarity Movement, and Palestinians from around Gaza gathered to march into the no go zone. We were buoyed by the knowledge that around the world today people were raising their voices in support of Palestine, in support of peace, justice and freedom. The megaphone crackled to life, “We Will Not Go Down” by Michael Heart. In a sea of flags from around the world, Palestine, Ireland, Italy, India, Malaysia and many others, we began our march towards the no go zone.
We enter the no go zone and begin to release balloons with Palestinian flags attached to them. The balloons will float over the walls that surround Gaza, they will take our message farther than our megaphone and our voices can. Perhaps they will be caught in the branches of an orange tree planted by the fathers or grandfathers of the men gathered here, on the land that they were expelled from. There is no risk that they will be caught in the branches of orange trees before they cross the wall, all of those trees have been bulldozed by Israel when it created the no go zone, the zone of death which surrounds Gaza. In the short story “Men in the Sun” by Ghassan Kanafini some Palestinian laborers die in a water tank while waiting to cross a border. The driver of the truck is left lamenting, “Why didn’t they say anything” as they died. We are not silent, even if are voices are lost in the space of the dead zone which Israel created around Gaza, these balloons will carry our message to the outside. Let no one say that they did not know, that we did not say anything while Gaza is strangled to death.
Sabur Zaaneen from the Local Initiative spoke to the crowd. He called upon the people of the world “to isolate Israel internationally and to exert pressure in all its forms until the end of the occupation of Palestine.” Radhika Sainath from the International Solidarity Movement also spoke, “Today the entire free world is against the settlements, the wall and the Israeli occupation. We will continue our work in Palestine with Palestinian activistsuntil we succeed in bringing freedom and justice to Palestine.” Their voices were echoed by the chanting of the crowd, against the occupation, voiced demanding peace, justice and freedom, voicing pledgingsteadfastness in the struggle to the end the occupation.
Despite Israel’s blockade on building materials entering the Gaza Strip, local entrepreneurs have come up with a way to turn destruction into reconstruction by recycling rubble into construction material.
He who builds his house here puts his sweat and blood into it, laying stone after stone. When it becomes rubble, it is devastating and personal for him... (Photo: Ruqaya Izzidien) - Click here for more images
The bedroom of Nasser Abu Said features two-meter holes punched by Israeli rockets and his front door is splattered with deep gashes from the nail-bomb which clawed his garden apart and killed his wife. The staircase is half-collapsed, there is no roof and involuntary windows have cropped up all over the house, each one marking the entry of one of the nine bombs that hit his home, meters away from the eastern border with Israel in the Jahr el Deek neighborhood. This is what a shelled house looks like in Gaza.
The Gaza Strip experiences frequent airstrikes which have targeted every form of infrastructure over the last few months, leaving destroyed farmland, factories and houses in their wake.
Israel forbids Palestinians in Gaza from importing building materials, obstructing their ongoing attempts to repair damage caused during the 2008-2009 war. Add to this continuing destruction caused by regular, if unpredictable, bombings that rain down on Gaza and it becomes seemingly impossible for Palestinians to reconstruct buildings destroyed by Israel since the siege came into effect in 2007.
However, a stroll through central Gaza City makes it clear that Palestinians living in the coastal enclave have resorted to ingenious and defiant methods in order to keep Gaza’s homes and businesses running. It is known as ‘rubble recycling.’
The area east of Gaza City is littered with stone-crushing factories that are identifiable from the huge clouds of dust that hang over them. These factories buy rubble from bombed out buildings, crush it down into pebbles and refashion them into new bricks, allowing Gaza to be rebuilt, in spite of the ban on construction materials.
Younis Aboul Foud was one of the first entrepreneurs to found a stone-crushing plant, or kassarat in Gaza. He began crushing rubble 25 years ago, “We even used to import stone and crush it into all sorts of bricks, but now importing such materials is banned by Israel. Today, recycling rubble into building blocks is our only option; there is no alternative and no other construction materials are available to us.
Three weeks into November, the Israeli authorities allowed a rare shipment of construction materials into Gaza, but the recipients were hand-picked private organizations or businesses. Although Israel permitted an average of 800 trucks into Gaza over the last three months, this is around 16 percent of the construction material that crossed into Gaza between 2005-2007, before ‘Operation Cast Lead’ and the need to reconstruct the 18,000 homes that were damaged or destroyed in the offensive.
The few building materials that enter Gaza are only permitted for use by recognized international agencies, while regular citizens have no access to the 800 trucks that enter and no opportunity to reconstruct damage caused by repeated bombings. Even civilians who qualify for assistance from the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA), say they are told that their home is not ‘damaged enough’ or wait months or years for their houses to be rebuilt.
23-year-old Khalil Elzaneen began rebuilding his home in the north of the Gaza Strip one year ago using bricks he bought from the kassarat stone-crushing plants. “There are no stones in the country to construct bricks, so they have to be made out of rubble. The borders were completely closed and until today there aren’t building materials in Gaza. Even the cement had to come in through tunnels.”
Elzaneen and his family could no longer live in their old home, which suffered day-to-day wear and tear, exacerbated by frequent bombings that weaken the structure of many of Gaza’s older buildings. “You can’t stop people from acquiring the materials they need to live, however hard you might try.”
Ban on Construction Materials
Israel maintains that the blockade of the Gaza Strip is necessary for state security and that construction materials are prohibited because militants could use the cement and stones to build hideouts.
Khalil Elzaneen disputes this, “Every restriction they impose on us is to do with ‘terrorists.’ I really don’t think that this is what the construction materials are used for; Israel is simply punishing an entire population. Look around you, you can see that we don’t use the bricks to build hideouts for terrorists; we use them for constructing homes and civilian buildings.”
Kassarat factories have created an exclusive and highly-coveted amount of building materials in Gaza. As with any other market, these fall into the hands of the most affluent amongst the community. Along with factory-owners, businesspeople and NGO-workers, political parties and armed groups are able to raise funds when a building they own is destroyed. As a result, the ban on construction materials – and the blockade in general – affects most the poorest residents of Gaza, who cannot pay the escalated price of up to US$10 per cement block.
From the Ashes
Some see other advantages to rubble recycling that have a deeper message than simply making a living, “Israel doesn’t want us to rebuild, that is why it is important that we do,” explained Aboul Foud. He sees his means of earning a living as an act of defiance against Israel, using their airstrikes to bring new life to bombed bricks. “In spite of their attacks and the blockade, we will keep recycling rubble and making life from nothing, making life from rubble.”
Khalil Elzaneen explained, “Even if I am told not to rebuild, I will still continue to do whatever it takes to survive and that, to me, is a form of resistance.”
But recycling rubble is far from idyllic. Fahd Daghmoush runs a rubble-crushing plant east of Gaza, which employs young men to break down the larger pieces of rubble so that they are digestible for his machinery. His employees work surrounded by powdered rubble and dust. “You can see that it is very dangerous to be crushing these stones,” he explained, “it is going to affect our health in the future and maybe even shorten our lives.”
Daghmoush entered into the business of recycling rubble out of compulsion, “If I could do absolutely any other job, I would; I don’t want a job that damages my health. I used to be a construction worker, but these days there is no work and I’m too old for that anyway. Hopefully by manufacturing bricks from rubble, I am creating jobs for the younger people who struggle
as I do.”
There is also a depressive cycle associated with refashioning building materials from rubble, the bricks are simply in rotation, like a currency. In order to have new bricks for your own house you have to wait for someone’s home to be bombed.
Fahd Daghmoush explained, “He who builds his house here puts his sweat and blood into it, laying stone after stone. When it becomes rubble, it is devastating and personal for him. People here put everything they own into building their homes. But life has to continue and we have to bounce back.”
But using the resources available to you is not optional in Gaza, Younis Aboul Foul explains. “We use all of our resourcefulness against this siege to challenge those responsible. Gaza is resilient – every way which we pick ourselves up is miraculous. Everyone has a right to live, and that’s all we want to do, whatever it takes,” he says.
The majority of recycled rubble is used to create the standard half-meter blocks that overwhelm the Gaza Strip, particularly in the refugee camps that are identifiable by their gray, piled cube signature. But a small amount of granite is reused for decoration and calcium carbonate is powdered down to provide Gaza with talcum powder, make-up and whitewash.
Palestinians in Gaza have defied the ban on construction materials since the siege began; turning what was once a blooming trade into a necessary business required in order to rebuild the territory. It is a bittersweet industry, but in besieged Gaza, nothing can afford to go to waste.
24 November 2011 | International Solidarity Movement, Gaza
Video of our international human rights observation boat outrunning the Israeli navy as it attempts to fire a watercannon on Palestinian fishing boats under 3 miles out to sea.
Publicly, Israel ‘allows’ fishermen in Gaza 3 miles in which to make a living. Today, as happens on most days they attacked 5 fishing boats at around 2.5 miles out, pursuing them until we were well under 2 miles away from the Gaza shore. For once, this regular occurrence was caught on camera.
For the first time in our boat’s history, we managed to escape.
This is what happened last time I was in this position.
