Israeli armed forces opened fire on a group of Human Rights Workers (HRWs) and civilians in the Beit Hannoun area of the Gaza Strip on Thursday 29th January. International HRWs were accompanying residents of Beit Hannoun, in the far north of the Gaza Strip, to their homes, in order to salvage belongings from the rubble, after the homes were bulldozed by Israeli forces during the Israeli war on Gaza.
One Palestinian family, the Tarrabin family, were anxious to try to retrieve important items, such as identity cards; cash; and clothes, that Israeli soldiers prevented them from taking with them when they were evicted moments before their home was destroyed. Residents had been further prevented from returning to their homes, which lie in close proximity to the Green Line, by Israeli military firing upon them whenever they attempted to enter the area. Families were advised by soldiers, upon being evicted from their homes, that the area had been declared a “Closed Military Zone”.
The group, joined by a Malaysian film crew, was able to successfully enter the prohibited area, and salvage a number of personal items and documents – however the vast majority of possessions were buried beneath mounds of rubble and dirt. “We would need to bring in a bulldozer to find anything else”, remarked one resident.
As the group prepared to leave the destroyed house, however, Israeli soldiers, who had been patrolling behind the Green Line throughout the endeavour, opened fire, shooting a number of rounds. Fortunately, none were injured, though HRWs report hearing the bullets whistle past their heads.
Despite the obvious attempt at intimidation, Manwar Tarrabin was relieved to have the opportunity to return to her house and collect the belongings that were found, as she and her five family members were evicted from their home with just the clothes on their backs – soldiers refusing to allow them to take any belongings with them. She and her 22 year old daughter were forced to stand by, watching helplessly, as two Israeli military bulldozers demolished her home and everything in it, on 17th January – just one day before Israel declared its supposed ceasefire.
HRWs then continued on to another house nearby, with the Abu Jereme family, whose corrugated iron house was not demolished, but from which they were evicted on 27th December, the first day of Israel’s offensive on Gaza, when Israeli “Special Forces” occupied their home. Freije Abu Jeremi pointed out what had been their barn-house, containing 20 sheep; as well as chickens and rabbits. “The soldiers shot all the sheep in the legs”, she recalled, “before they demolished the shed”. This intentional killing of livestock, took place throughout the Gaza Strip during the Israeli Operation “Cast Lead”. Whilst dismissed by many Palestinian residents as the actions of deranged individuals, the emerging pattern is one of economic oppression – of the intentional destruction of Palestinian livelihoods.
Approximately 80 houses were demolished in the “buffer zone” area to the north and east of Beit Hannoun – in the lands that abut the Green Line – rendering at least 400 residents homeless. 20 homes were demolished in Sikka street alone, which leads up to the Erez border crossing.
Whilst before Israel’s war on Gaza, the Israeli-enforced “buffer-zone” on the Palestinian side of the Green Line extended 300m from the electrified fence. Now it is extremely dangerous to enter lands that are 1.5 kilometres from the Green Line.
This situation not only affects residents in the north, but is played out in all border areas of the Gaza Strip. In every region that borders the Green Line, residents are reporting similar incidents – that, despite the public declaration of a cease-fire, Israeli forces continue to fire on Palestinians on a daily basis, with two farmers killed since the ceasefire supposedly came into effect. Such violations not only make a mockery of any notion of a ceasefire, but also work to effectively annex Palestinian land, by rendering it uninhabitable. Indeed, combined with the demolition of houses in these areas, such actions are indications of a clear policy of ethnic cleansing.
Demonstrators picketed outside the offices of the BBC in Gaza city on Thursday 29th January, to protest against the news agency’s refusal to air the Disasters Emergency Committee’s (DEC) Gaza appeal.
Approximately 30 demonstrators filled the footpath in front of the office building, in order to put pressure on the BBC to air the appeal immediately. The demonstration co-incided with a call for a boycott of the BBC, supported by 15 Gaza-based Palestinian groups, including the One Democratic State group and the University Lecturers and Teachers Association.
Protestors rejected the claim made by the BBC that airing the appeal would compromise the impartiality of the agency – citing numerous examples of DEC appeals for emergency assistance in conflict-zones that have been aired by the station without question. Speakers accused the BBC of maintaining racist double-standards when it comes to issues regarding Palestine.
Demonstrators were particularly angered that the state-sponsored news agency could make such a claim, after the BBC was the only agency to embed its journalists with the invading Israeli military. Placards were held accusing the BBC of complicity with war crimes – referring to the Israeli military’s use of illegal weapons, such as white phosphorus; and their targeting of civilians.
Anger was also directed at the nature of the reports aired by the BBC during this period, which uncritically showed Israeli soldiers invading Palestinian civilian homes; juxtaposed with footage of Israeli residents of Sderot rejoicing at the sight of bombs dropping on the civilian populace of Gaza.
Speakers claimed that to maintain an “impartial” perspective, the BBC would necessarily need to represent the intense suffering of the Palestinian civilians, who comprise 90% of all Palestinian casualties of the Israeli war on Gaza. Instead, they said, the BBC’s actions constitute a clear bias towards Israel.
The Gaza protest complemented a wave of protests in the UK against the BBC including occupations of BBC headquarters in Scotland and London, former Energy Minister and Labour MP Tony Benn persistently reading out the DEC appeal on Radio 4’s popular ‘Today’ program, ignoring all questions posed to him, hundreds of license fee payers refusing to pay the BBC, and a rising tide of complaints and boycotts.
Imagine being grateful for the chance to return to your demolished home and sift through the rubble, to try to retrieve personal belongings, ID cards and papers, still-useable clothes and pots…
Imagine your house had been bulldozed, you’d been given 5 minutes to leave it, not been allowed to collect any of those cherished possessions, you’d not had the foresight to gather all the most important documents and memorabilia and keep them by the door anticipating such an event, you’d been commanded to run away run to the nearest city or you’d be killed, you’d watched from a distance as the military dozer ate your house, and you’d been too terrified (with reason) of being shot at if you tried to later return and collect belongings …so terrified you didn’t.
That was Manwa and Sharifa, mother and daughter, living in a house just a hundred metres from Gaza’s eastern border.
Stately Manwa, short and broad and strong and smiling. A month and a half ago when we met she’d grinned, grinned, in welcome and in her customary nature. She’d already lost much of her land to Israel’s “buffer zone” the 300m (in other areas more than half a kilometer) band of land along Gaza’s borders with Israel. This ‘buffer zone’ is one of Israel’s many contrived [‘for security’] land-grabs, as is the Separation Wall [‘security barrier’] eating the West Bank, the closed military zones throughout the West Bank, the Jewish-only roads dissecting the West Bank, and Israel’s latest: the extended ‘buffer zone’ now declared a ‘closed military zone’ from the eastern border out 1 km. Manwa’s is but one of many households who’ve been forced off their land –in Gaza!! in Gaza!!! NOT in Israel. This is Palestinian land, it must be highlighted. Palestinian land, it must be screamed –after Israel’s military assault on Gaza (the one that has killed over 1400 now…).
At 2:30 pm January 17, 4 massive Israeli tanks and 1 towering military bulldozer accompanied a smaller military bulldozer and invading, occupying Israeli soldiers as they blazed towards Manwa’s, yelling through a megaphone, ordering them to get out of the house. Sharifa, 22, left first. Soldiers asked her if there were any men inside the house, to which she replied ‘no’. Manwa came next, also with hands in the air. The question was repeated, soldiers not believing the women could stay by themselves, telling the women as much.
It was 3 weeks after Israel’s Gaza-wide air-strikes began, and the fact that Manwa and Sharifa had stuck it out alone in that isolated area is incredible.
“They told me our house was now in a closed military zone,” Manwas said. “They said it was a ‘decision from the top’ and that we had to leave immediately and walk towards Gaza,” she said. “I refused, and tried to negotiate with them for time to gather our belongings. They refused.”
Manwa was a safe distance away, watching, when the Israeli soldiers bulldozed her house at 5 pm that day.
This was one day before Israel declared a ceasefire (which Israeli soldiers promptly broke, in instances throughout Gaza) and the area was in the northeastern corner of the Strip. There would have been absolutely no possibility of resistance fighters being present, thus no ‘reason’ to demolish the houses (as Israeli war mongers attempt to justify their collective punishment –demolishing, bombing, setting fire to with chemical weapons, Palestinians’ houses and buildings if it is suspected that there may have been resistance in or near the buildings, or if one’s family has a member in the resistance, or if it is suspected that there may be a member of resistance in the family, or if one has the same name as a member of the resistance…).
Yet, strangely, illegally, Israeli war authorities were able to declare Palestinian land in Gaza a closed military zone and, thus, render the land vacate, and an estimated 400 people homeless (modest estimate based on 80 families with an average of 5 people per family) in the Beit Hanoun ‘buffer zone’ areas alone.
At 1:40 pm, a delegation of about 15 international and Palestinian solidarity activists joined Manwa, Sharifa, and Manwa’s son Said, for the walk along the track 1.5 km out where the closed military zone began. Manwa had asked us to come. She wanted to go home, even briefly, to try to find her papers and anything precious.
We walk past a plot of rubble which a week ago had been 3 houses. Mohammed lived in one of them, with 5 other family members, and like Manwa was given just minutes to vacate.
The flat fields around us once held olive, lemon and palm trees, Saber tells us. About 750 dunums (1 dunum=1000 square metres). “People from all over Gaza had jobs here. It is one of the best regions for agriculture in Gaza,” Saber goes on. He doesn’t need to spell out that all of the trees had been bulldozed, like the houses, over the years since 2003. We know, are aware of Israel’s policy of razing Palestinian land.
We pass a house shell, with a yellow Fatah flag still flying, and are told that a mother from the Khadera family was killed in the shelling. Luckily her daughters survived.
Another house in ruins on the left side of the track. “There were goats and sheep in one area of the bottom level of this house,” we are told. “The Israeli soldiers bulldozed it with the goats and sheep inside.” An old man sits next to his former home, concentrating on the fire that is boiling his tea water.
Down the track a little further we are directed to where the Wahadan family house was. “They destroyed the house, the water well and its pump too,” Saber tells us.
Proud Manwa narrates as we walk. “I was so scared when I saw the tanks. My heart dropped to my feet,” she tells us. She goes over the day of demolitions again, in detail, reliving it and making sure we understand that (and how) she’s lost her home.
We pass an F-16 crater, the kind you see all over, and then take a slight detour off the path, to go visit a shanty town of tin houses. This is part of Manwa’s extended family, and they want to show us how even though the houses are over 50 metres from the missile crater, the impact of the missile sent shards of shrapnel slicing through the corrugated metal walls of their shack-home. “The children are having serious psychological problems now,” Saber relates, telling us that the kids, around 2 or 3 years old, are traumatized by the explosion, the deadly fragments of missile which pierced their home.
When we are nearly at Manwa’s house we briefly discuss the importance of such accompaniments. Gives people hope that they can return to their homes, if only briefly for now. Challenges the illegality of Israel arbitrarily imposing and extending no-go zones at whim on Palestinian land.
We reach the house and I recall my first visit, when I’d been charmed not only by Manwa, Sharifa and Said, but also by the neat, tidy, homey house, had thought that it was the perfect hill-rise location with the possibility to grow the grains and vegetables one needed, graze one’s sheep. It is a pancake of angles and debris now. It is too tangled and the slabs too large to move without a bulldozer. We can only surface-sift, and are unable to reach the closet which Said points out lies under an unmovable slab of concrete. Manwa nonetheless smiles her gratitude at us for being here.
About 100 metres beyond, the electrified fence, and beyond the patrol road which carries the jeeps that buzz back and forth. Some jeeps buzz by and we eye them, wary. Yesterday, in Faraheen, east of Khan Younis, an impoverished agricultural worker was shot dead as he worked the land near the ‘buffer zone’ down south. He was apparently the only bread-winner in the family and had held off doing any farm work in that area for some time now, worried about being shot. Poverty breeds necessity, and in Gaza that means risking death at the guns of Israeli soldiers when farming or fishing (or at home or at school or at mosques or in cars or…).
I kick aside a rusted stove pipe, pluck out some notebooks with writing which could be valuable in some way to the family, shake the concrete dust off of some dresses and clothing items, find a tin box with necklaces and mementos. It all goes into a plastic bag I’ve found in the ruins. I step over the room with the animal feed, some of the sacks still partially filled with grains, and head to the corner where the closet is said to be. This is the most eastern corner, closest to the border. We all watch the border area as we sift, hoping to find ID cards and anything useful.
But eventually we are defeated, cannot reach beneath the heavy top layer. We must leave, and leave behind Manwa’s identity.
She smiles still.
As we walk away, 2 crisp cracks of gunfire, and a whizz. ‘Warning shots,’ though close enough to hear that whizz. A minute later, 2 more.
We’re luckier than the Khan Younis youth of Tuesday.
A young farm-worker, Arwan al Ibrim was murdered by Israeli military forces at approximately 9:45 am on Tuesday 27th January, in the village of Al Farahin, east of Khan Younis.
27 year old Arwan was working picking parsley and spinach in the village agricultural lands, approximately 700 m from the Green Line, when Israeli jeeps opened fire with machine guns from behind the Green Line – shooting more than 30 bullets in quick succession, eyewitnesses report. Many of the seven farmers working in the area scattered, taking shelter from the shower of bullets. Arwan, however, was shot in the neck, dying instantly.
Arwan had only recently returned to his job as an agricultural worker, after 6 months, as the area was considered to be too dangerous following the large-scale Israeli army invasion that took place there on 1st May 2008, and then the recent Israeli war on Gaza. Even though the area is still considered extremely dangerous, Arwan decided to return to work there in order to help buy medicine for his elderly, paralysed father. He was being paid just 20 shekels (approximately $6) a day to work there.
His mother laments that she and his father had begged him to stay home for breakfast, but Arwan refused, saying there was a lot of work to do, and that he wanted to get started before the Israeli army arrived and started shooting. Just two hours later, the family found out from the television that Arwan had been killed.
Later on the same day, in the city of Khan Younis itself, a young man riding a motorcycle was critically injured when he was fired upon from an Israeli drone. Hayan As Ser was taken to Nasser hospital where his condition reportedly remains critical.
These attacks came after one Israeli soldier was killed and three more injured when their jeep drove across a buried explosive near the Green Line, reportedly planted by Palestinian resistance fighters. However, despite claiming to have implemented a ceasefire from 2am on Sunday 18th January, Israeli forces have continued to shoot at civilians in villages close to the Green Line, including Al Farahin, on a daily basis.
In the nearby village of Khaza’a, Maher Abu Arjila, a 22 year old farmer was killed by Israeli soldiers shooting from behind the Green Line on 18th January, just hours after the ceasefire was supposed to come into effect. Another resident, Nabil an Najar, was injured when rubble fell on top of him as a result of soldiers shooting the building he was standing under.
On the evening of Sunday 25th January, Subhe Kdah, was also injured as Israeli soldiers shot into the village; and on Monday 26th January, residents report soldiers firing in the area of the United Nations school.
On the other side of the Gaza strip, Palestinian fishermen are also reportedly coming under fire on a daily basis, with one fishing boat captain, Ala al Habil, hospitalized with a gunshot wound to his lower leg, when he was shot at by an Israeli navy boat on the evening of Monday 26th. Another fishing-boat captain, Iyad al Hissi, was shot at repeatedly whilst in the wheel-house of a fishing boat that was less than one nautical mile from Gaza shore on Tuesday 27th. Witnesses say he managed to escape from the wheel-house without injury. In both cases, fishermen report that the Israeli navy boats were shooting to kill the captains.
While gunfire on Palestinian fishing boats was a daily occurance throughout the last so-called Israeli ceasefire, human rights workers who were accompanying fishermen during that period suggest that the situation now is even worse. “During the last ceasefire, the fishermen were getting shot at every day, but now it’s happening much closer to shore – within 1 or 2 miles of the shore”, remarked one international human rights worker.
These recent violations come in addition to the shelling of Gaza’s port area that continued for five days after the announcement of the ceasefire – which resulted in a number of casualties; as well as the shooting of 7 year old Ahmed Hassanian in the head; and the bombing of Amal area, east of Beit Hannoun,- killing one, wounding another – making a mockery of any claims to an Israeli cessation of fire.
“Where is the ceasefire?” Arwan’s elderly mother demanded angrily. “They said there was a ceasefire, but there is nothing!”
Remarkably, the staircase in Yousef Shrater’s bombed and burned house is still intact, as are the 14 people that make up the 3 families who were living in the house. Shrater, a father of four, walks over broken cement blocks and tangles of support rods and up stairs laden with more chunks of rubble, Israeli soldiers’ food leavings, and others remnants of a bombed, then occupied, house.
In the second story front room the original window is flanked by gaping holes ripped into the wall by the tank missiles which targeted his house. “They were over there,” Shrater says, pointing just hundreds of metres away at Jebal Kashef, the hilltop overlooking the northern area of Ezbet Abed Rabbo.
In the adjacent room, Shrater points further east to where more tanks had come from and stationed. “We were in this room when they began shelling, my wife, children, and I. We ran to the back room for safety, hoping it would be some protection.”
The back room is another haze of rubble and bits from explosions. The tanks had surrounded the entire Abed Rabbo area and no sooner did the family take shelter in the back room when a new shell tore into the house, fired from tanks to the south of the house. “It hit only a metre away from the window,” he points out, and leaning out the window and looking up, the hole left from the tank shell is just one metre above. “If it had come into the room, we’d be dead.”
Shrater explains how the Israeli soldiers forcibly entered the house and ordered the family members out, separating men and women and locking them in a neighbouring house with others from the area. His father and mother, living in a small shack of a house nearby, were soon to join them. The soldiers then occupied the house for the duration of the land invasion, as Israeli soldiers did throughout the Abed Rabbo area, as they did throughout all of Gaza. And as with other houses in occupied areas, residents who returned to houses still standing found a disaster of rubbish, vandalism, destruction, human waste, and many stolen valuables, including mobile phones, gold jewelry, US dollars and Jordanian dinars (JOD), and in some cases even furniture and televisions, used and discarded in camps the soldiers set up outside in occupied areas. Shrater says the soldiers stole about US$1,000 and another 2,000 JOD (~US$,828 ) in gold necklaces.
Back in the east-facing corner room, Shrater steps around a 1.5 m by 1.5 m depression in the floor where tiles have been dug up and the sandy layer of foundation beneath has been harvested. “They made sandbags by the window, to use as sniper positions.” The bags are still there, stuffed with clothing and sand. “They used my kids clothes for their sniper bags,” Shrater complains. “The clothes they didn’t put in sandbags they threw into the toilet,” he adds.
The whole house has sniper positions. Sniper holes adorn each of the two west-facing rooms overlooking the Dawwar Zimmo crossroads, where bodies were later found sniped-dead and unreachable by family members or emergency medical teams (including the Red Crescent medics who were shot at, one hit in the thigh, when trying to reach a body on January 7).
Israeli soldiers’ sketches left behind in Shrater’s house
[in red at the top left corner] Mommy where are you?
Shrater’s elderly father, held in captivity and denied medicine, food, and water for 4 days.
Shrater’s elderly father, held in captivity and denied medicine, food, and water for 4 days.
Yousef and his family
From the roof we see more clearly the surrounding area where tanks were positioned, the countless demolished and damaged houses and buildings, and bits of shrapnel from the tank missiles. Shrater’s father, 70, is on the roof, and begins to tell of his experience being abducted from his house and locked up with his wife and others for 4 days. “They came to our house there,” pointing to the low-level home which housed he, his wife, and their sheep and goats. “The Israeli soldiers came to our door, yelled at us to come out, and shot around our feet. My wife was terrified. They took all of our money, then handcuffed us. Before they blindfolded us, they let our goats and sheep out of their pens and shot them. They shot 8 dead in front of us.”
The elderly Shrater and his wife were then blindfolded and taken to another house where for the next 4 days Israeli soldiers denied him his inhaler for his asthma and his wife her diabetes medications. Food and water were out of the question, and Yousef Shrater’s father says their requests for such were met with soldiers’ retorts ‘No, no food. Give me Hamas, I’ll give you food.’
The older man leads us downstairs and behind Yousef Shrater’s house to his small home where a still-terrified Miriam sits, eyes permanently wide with alarm. “We saw terrible things, terrible things. I saw dead bodies on the street,” she says, rocking back and forth in agony. Hajj Shrater agrees: “In 63 years, never seen anything like this,” he says. The denied insulin and syringe lie ground into the earth near their door, along with various tablets. Twenty metres away, the remains of the animal feed shed also mingle with rocks and rubble, razed in the rampage.
The house between Yousef Shrater’s and his parents has also been damage. The asbestos roofing lies in hefty chunks on the floors of the bedrooms and kitchen, save for where it hangs precariously in the underlying waterproofing plastic sheeting, along with the heavy concrete blocks used to weigh the tiles down . The kitchen is black with soot from what must have been another white phosphorous fire, and empty shells lie in the burnt wreckage of the fire. Two metal doors from the F-16-bombed factory across the street from Shrater’s house are lying near the kitchen, having blasted clear across the street and over the roof of Shrater’s house.
Mahmoud Shrater, Yousef’s brother and also inhabitant of the main house, is at the house, clearing some of the rubble, sifting. “We need tents to live here now,” he says, standing in the shell of what was their home.
Thursday 29th January. International HRWs were accompanying residents of Beit Hannoun, in the far north of the Gaza Strip, to their homes, in order to salvage belongings from the rubble, after the homes were bulldozed by Israeli forces during the Israeli war on Gaza.
HRWs then continued on to another house nearby, with the Abu Jereme family, whose corrugated iron house was not demolished, but from which they were evicted on 27th December, the first day of Israel’s offensive on Gaza, when Israeli “Special Forces” occupied their home. Freije Abu Jeremi pointed out what had been their barn-house, containing 20 sheep; as well as chickens and rabbits. “The soldiers shot all the sheep in the legs”, she recalled, “before they demolished the shed”. This intentional killing of livestock, took place throughout the Gaza Strip during the Israeli Operation “Cast Lead”. Whilst dismissed by many Palestinian residents as the actions of deranged individuals, the emerging pattern is one of economic oppression – of the intentional destruction of Palestinian livelihoods.
This situation not only affects residents in the north, but is played out in all border areas of the Gaza Strip. In every region that borders the Green Line, residents are reporting similar incidents – that, despite the public declaration of a cease-fire, Israeli forces continue to fire on Palestinians on a daily basis, with two farmers killed since the ceasefire supposedly came into effect. Such violations not only make a mockery of any notion of a ceasefire, but also work to effectively annex Palestinian land, by rendering it uninhabitable. Indeed, combined with the demolition of houses in these areas, such actions are indications of a clear policy of ethnic cleansing.
