Tag: Cast Lead - Page 33 - International Solidarity Movement

Urgent call to all social movements

Open Gaza Borders!

We reiterate the need for a call from Palestinian community based organisations and the over 130 grassroots NGOs in the Palestinian NGO Network for an immediate opening of all border crossings currently controlled by Israel and Egypt.

Gaza is in the grip of a man-made humanitarian crisis. Thousands of tons of food, medical and emergency shelter aid including blankets and mattresses, donated by countries including the United States and aid organisations, is being denied entry through crossings by both the Israeli and Egyptian governments.

The United Nations has stated that 900,000 Gazans are now dependent on food aid following Israel‘s 22-day assault on the tiny coastal territory. Only 100 aid trucks are being allowed into Gaza each day – 30 less than were being brought in last year and substantially less than before Israel’s operation ‘Cast Lead’: an attack that has left over 1,300 Palestinians dead, the vast majority of them civilians massacred in their streets and homes. With over 5,000 injured and 100,000 homeless, admittance of aid is crucial at this time.

This is a fraction of the estimated 500-600 trucks deemed necessary to sustain the population of Gaza according to the United Nations. According to UNRWA, food trucks are delivering enough food to feed just 30,000 people per day.

Hundreds of medical patients, the injured from this war and Israel’s previous invasions, are being prohibited from leaving Gaza for indispensable medical treatment. Over 268 people have died of preventable and treatable conditions after being denied access to treatment since the beginning of the ongoing siege two years ago.

Israel and Egypt have designated February 5th as the final day for all foreign nationals to leave Gaza through the southern Rafah border. Egypt has said it will close the Rafah border indefinitely. Despite a statement from the Egyptian Ministry of Health that humanitarian cases will be allowed through, many patients have already been turned back, before the closing of the border. Hundreds of patients and some of those wounded from ‘Cast Lead,’ are still waiting for permission to exit Gaza through Rafah for medical treatment.

The Gazan community is concerned that Israel will be stepping up its’ economic, political, cultural and militarised stranglehold on Gaza in the upcoming weeks.

Post Israeli elections, Gazans fear the Israeli government will conduct extra judicial killings and continue their deadly strikes on Palestinian governmental figures, targeting of social and economic infrastructure and indiscriminate killings of civilians in the process. Actions that have proven to not only end lives but successfully cripple Palestinian development including reconstruction of homes destroyed by Israeli bombings and bulldozing during and before Operation ‘Cast Lead’.

Thousands of internally displaced people face an uncertain future residing in flimsy canvas tents reminiscent of the mass dispossession through the ethnic cleansing of 1948 when the state of Israel was first established on Palestinian land.

A de-facto land grab and re-colonisation of Gaza is underway, with the demolition of hundreds of homes and destruction of farms in the Israeli defined ‘buffer zone’ areas of Rafah, Eastern (Shijaye) and Northern (Beit Hanoun) areas of Gaza. Killings, shelling and shootings of farmers and residents in border areas are continuing.

The ‘buffer zone’ has been expanded to cut into Palestinian lands by one kilometre. Israeli occupation forces have shot at residents that have attempted to retrieve their belongings from the bombed and bulldozed remnants of their homes along the border of Beit Hanoun. The army also continues to fire at farmers planting their fields in village areas such as al Faraheen near Khan Younis.

The Palestinian Ministry of Agriculture says Israeli occupation forces have destroyed 60% of Gaza’s agricultural land during this winter’s war.

Effective international direct action and an escalation of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanction campaign is necessary to resist the intensification of the collective punishment, imprisonment and ongoing war on the people of Palestine.

The situation is worsening: the stranglehold on the people of Gaza is tightening, humanitarian relief is being deliberately choked, trauma is deepening, people are being humiliated on a daily basis and development is not just blocked but in the process of being actively reversed.

We call on social movements, particularly No Borders networks, and people of conscience to target Israeli and Egyptian embassies, institutions, and corporations. Particularly in the coming days of intensified border closure, we must work to pressure both governments to abide by international law and open Gaza for the free movement of aid, goods and people.

End the collective punishment of the Gazan people, open the borders.

Aid workers and journalists risk life in Gaza

International Solidarity Movement volunteers Eva Bartlett and Ewa Jasiewicz were featured on Russia Today for their activism and reporting from Gaza.

Humanitarian workers and rights activists in Gaza are helping locals put their lives back together after the three-week-long Israeli offensive. Many aid workers were in the region during the fighting and came under fire along with residents.

South African dock workers union decides not to offload Israeli ship

Congress of South African Trade Unions

In a historic development for South Africa, South African dock workers have announced their determination not to offload a ship from Israel that is scheduled to dock in Durban on Sunday, 8 February 2009. This follows the decision by COSATU to strengthen the campaign in South Africa for boycotts, divestment and sanctions against Apartheid Israel.

The pledge by SATAWU members in Durban reflects the commitment by South African workers to refuse to support oppression and exploitation across the globe. Last year, Durban dock workers had refused to offload a shipment of arms that had arrived from China and was destined for Zimbabwe to prop up the Mugabe regime and to intensify the repression against the Zimbabwean people. Now, says SATAWU’s General Secretary Randall Howard, the union’s members are committing themselves to not handling Israeli goods.

SATAWU’s action on Sunday will be part of a proud history of worker resistance against apartheid. In 1963, just four years after the Anti-Apartheid Movement was formed, Danish dock workers refused to offload a ship with South African goods. When the ship docked in Sweden, Swedish workers followed suit. Dock workers in Liverpool and, later, in the San Francisco Bay Area also refused to offload South African goods. South Africans, and the South African working class in particular, will remain forever grateful to those workers who determinedly opposed apartheid and decided that they would support the anti-apartheid struggle with their actions.

Last week, Western Australian members of the Maritime Union of Australia resolved to support the campaign for boycotts, divestment and sanctions against Israel, and have called for a boycott of all Israeli vessels and all vessels bearing goods arriving from or going to Israel.

This is the legacy and the tradition that South African dock workers have inherited, and it is a legacy they are determined to honour, by ensuring that South African ports of entry will not be used as transit points for goods bound for or emanating from certain dictatorial and oppressive states such as Zimbabwe, Swaziland and Israel.

COSATU, the Palestine Solidarity Committee, the Young Communist League and a range of other organisations salute the principled position taken by these workers. We also take this opportunity to salute the millions of workers all over the world who have openly condemned and taken decisive steps to isolate apartheid Israel, a step that should send shockwaves to its arrogant patrons in the United States who foot the bill for Israel’s killing machine. We call on other workers and unions to follow suit and to do all that is necessary to ensure that they boycott all goods to and from Israel until Palestine is free.

We also welcome statements by various South African Jews of conscience who have dissociated themselves from the genocide in Gaza. We call on all South Africans to ensure that none of our family members are allowed to join the Israeli Occupation Forces’ killing machine.

In celebration of the actions of SATAWU members with regard to the ship from Israel, and in pursuance of the campaign for boycotts, divestment and sanctions against Israel, and our call on the South African government to sever diplomatic and trade relations with Israel, this coalition of organisations has declared a week of action beginning on Friday, 6 February 2009. The actions will be organised under the theme: FREE PALESTINE! ISOLATE APARTHEID ISRAEL!

All we’ve got left of him

Eva Bartlett | In Gaza

2 February 2009

Abdul Rahman Ghraben’s mother carried in a yellow plastic bag. “This is his pant leg, and tiny pieces of him,” she said, holding the knotted bag at the handles. Her husband had been explaining how fourteen year old Abed was killed on January 11.

“The Israeli forces had been bombing hard so we’d evacuated the house, gone to Fakoura (UN school which had been bombed with white phosphorous). The first 3 days at the school we had only the clothes we were wearing, no blankets, no food. At night in Fakoura it was so cold and windy, so when we heard on the radio that there would be a cease-fire between 8 am and 11 am, Abed asked if he could return home to grab a jacket. We all went with him,” Abu Abed explained, now holding the yellow bag.

“When we were in the house, the Israeli army starting bombing in the area,” said Umm Abed. “We were very frightened, we had thought the cease-fire meant we could return home safely. We quickly took whatever clothes and food we could and left the house. I thought Abed was ahead of us. At the school friends told us Abed hadn’t come back. They also said that a drone had fired a missile at our area. People were saying the missile had hit a child and shattered him to pieces. We didn’t know it was Abed.”

Umm Abed stopped her recollection to take out the contents of the yellow supermarket bag. “We searched for Abed for 2 days. People were telling us ‘your son was killed’ but we couldn’t find his body, we couldn’t believe it had been Abed.”

“Finally,” Abu Abed continued, pulling the tattered pant leg out of the bag, “we found this and knew Abed had been killed. It’s all that was left of him. Since then, since we’ve returned home we find more pieces of him.” The father pulled out a tuft of hair, a dried piece of some internal part of Abed, an inch long piece of sharp shrapnel from the drone’s missile. “Daily we find small bits of him, all over the area. He was blown to bits,” his father says. Although the strike happened 3 weeks ago, the family’s pain is no less fresh.

“Why are they doing this to our children? What did my son do? Did he launch rockets? Where is their humanity when they kill a child like this? He was a child, he had the right to live like any other child,” asked Abu Abed, voicing the questions that parents of over 400 children in Gaza are asking of the Israeli army and Israeli authorities making the decisions to bombard Gaza.

In a bullet hole in the wall beside Umm Abed, a decorative flower had been stuck, the hole too large for the plastic stem. Efforts fall short to cover the ugly rampage of the soldiers inside a house which has been torn apart much as their lives have been torn apart. The Ghraben’s house is in the Hayid Amal neighbourhood of Attatra, in the Beit Lahia region. Like the surrounding houses, it is puckered with scars of Israeli army firing, and bears evidence of the Israeli army’s invasion and rampage through it. A bedroom door is torn off its hinges, clothes shredded by automatic gunfire, damage throughout the house. Abu Yusef, an uncle and neighbour, had the day before shown his house: more extensive trashing had been done, but the family was back living in it, drafts and all.

Abu Abed made a parting plea to those outside Gaza: “We are asking the international community to cut their relationship with Israel, because Israel is killing children. During just 10 minutes in my neighbourhood alone Israeli soldiers killed 10 children,” he said as an example to the wider massacre of children, and adult civilians, which happened during the 3 weeks of war on Gaza. “We are still not safe. We still expect an Israeli bulldozer or tank could enter and bulldoze our homes at any time, because they have before. There are still F-16s which fly over our house, and we never know when the next bomb will be dropped.”

Tuam Attatra

Eva Bartlett | In Gaza

1 February 2009

Palestinian man surveys the damage to his home.

In Tuam, Attatra, on day one of Israel’s declared, and immediately-violated, ‘cease-fire’ an old woman stood beside the wreckage of her 2 room cement block home. The tracks of the bulldozer which felled her home were still deeply rutted, painfully visible.

The house next her to her pile of rubble was still standing, but gutted by fire. Mohammed Abu Khusah had 19 people depending on the house whose kitchen, along with all of the bottom floor rooms, was burnt out. Upstairs, too. Six rooms upstairs completely black-stained and ravaged by fire, five downstairs.

Clothes taken out of cupboards and drawers, strewn everywhere. Sniper holes: 2 in front room, 2 in back room, 2 in a room looking onto a wide open area below. Hebrew writing, message unknown but intent suspicious, on many of the walls.

On the other side of the old woman’s rubble, another pile of blocks which had been three 3 level homes, housing 18, 10, and 6 people each.

Behind those ruins, down a slight rise of rubble, Khitam Abdel Majid sat in the dirt, shawls draped around her, surrounded by the men of her family and by twisted metal support beams. She told me that their 3 story house was bulldozed on the 15th day, along with everyone inside. Pointing at a corner room with cloth draped over the gaping hole, she explained her family was sleeping in the room. “It’s cold in there, freezing all night.”

A hand-written sign poking out of the heaps of concrete and house entrails denotes Wael el Khaldi’s former house. His house sits amidst yet another wasteland of destroyed homes. Atop the rubble, a wheelchair belonging to a 23 year old member of el Khaldi’s family sits squashed. One of the Red Crescent medics holds the crushed prosthetic legs belonging to the same amputee.

The Red Crescent teams are scouring the ruins, taking stock of blown out windows. Facing the massive destruction and 10s of destroyed houses in this northwestern area of Gaza alone, counting shattered windows seems trite, irrelevant. But the RC is doing what it can to immediately alleviate the suffering of Palestinians who can at least still stay in their homes, internal damage and desecration aside. It is winter, and the nights are cold. A window covering makes the difference between completely frigid nights and moderately tolerable nights (without electricity or gas, no means of heating except with blankets, if these have not been burned or tarnished).

Accompanying the RC team, I see a number of houses in a short time. No time for in depth testimony taking, just a surface view and understanding of each family’s tragedy.

Mohammed Ali laments the loss of the trees lining his family’s house (trees, as ever, are an important theme in Palestinians’ narrative: life, continuity, providing nourishment). “It took 12 years to cultivate these trees. We had oranges, lemons, olives, dates…” And a nice tiled patio, too, all razed with the swat of a gargantuan military bulldozer.

The next door neighbour’s front wall is missing, bulldozed. His porch swing sits inside the open room, the support beams buckling and cupboards bare for all to see.

“Henna kan fi bab. Mish maujoud,” the owner tells me. [There was a door here. It’s gone. (so is the wall, obviously)].

While the roads are only dirt lanes, the houses are spacious in this neighbourhood, and well-spaced apart. The lift would be good here, near the sea, were it not for numerous factors: the siege, the wanton destruction… We stop at a lovely olive and light green washed stucco house, again lined with trees (papaya, lemon, orange, date) and tastefully landscaped. Above the smiling faces which greet us and try to sit us down for tea, a gaping hole much larger than the original window. Bullet holes less-tastefully puncture the finish.

A villa, a seeming mansion, sits off the road, top floor window blackened from the chemical fires which raged inside. Professor Mohammed Okasha stands in his ruined kitchen, a vast kitchen arranged western-style, as is most of the house. “All of our clothes were burned. All of them. Everything,” he laments the losses in his house.

We move through the house, the walls are a uniform dripping-soot-black, and he explains:

“Every year, I went to Britain, photocopied books by Israeli authors which had been translated from Hebrew into English. Avi Schlaim, Benny Morris, Ilan Pappe…”

Many houses later, less time, I’m only able to jot down notes, impressions.Many houses later, less time, I’m only able to jot down notes, impressions.

– 5 rooms damaged; missile, tank, and bulldozer. 25 people in the house, soft eyes. Background music is firing from Israeli gunboats off the coast. Importance of something as simple as plastic sheeting.