Tag: Eva Bartlett

Expanding illegal no-go zones leaves hundreds homeless

Eva Bartlett | In Gaza

30 January 2009

Buffer Zone in Beit Hanoun
Buffer Zone in Beit Hanoun

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.

Yousef Shrater

Eva Bartlett | In Gaza

29 January 2009

Yousef and his family
Yousef and his family

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).

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.

Ezbet Abed Rabbo area: Remnants of houses and soldiers’ presence

Eva Bartlett | In Gaza

January 28, 2009

Two of her boys worked to pull pieces of clothing, books, and anything reachable from under the toppled cupboard. Every item is sacred. She led me through her house, pointing out the many violations against their existence, every graffitied wall, each shattered window and glass and plate, slit flour bags –when the wheat is so precious –and the same revolting array of soldiers’ left-overs:spoiled packaged food, feces everywhere but the toilet, clothes used as toilet paper. The same stench.

“They broke everything, broke our lives. That was the boys room,” we continue through the wreckage. “Look, look here. See that?! Look at this!” This is to be the refrain as we step over destroyed belongings into destroyed rooms.

It isn’t only the destruction, defiling, vandalizing, waste… it’s also the interruption of life, a life already interrupted by the siege. She held out school books, torn, ruined, and asked how her children were supposed to study: when they have no books, no power, had to flee their home, are living in constant fear of another bombardment of missiles (from the world’s 4th most powerful and most abundantly-equipped military).

Some of the graffiti reads:

“We don’t hate Arabs, but will kill every Hamas.”

and

“IDF was here! We know you are here. We won’t kill you, you will live in fear and run all your lives!”

For people in families like hers, the surviving members, this psychological terror is real. For those who have been killed already, the “we won’t kill you,” is a lie. Ask the surviving fathers, mothers, siblings, children.

From the rooftop, we see neighbouring houses inflicted with the wrath of the Israeli military machine. And great swathes of land which once held homes and trees, now naked, stubbled with pillar fragments at painful angles, rubble, stumps, and tank tracks.

“Here, here, come look over here, over here.”

“That was all our land: clementines, lemons, olives…”

“That’s my brother’s house over there, its all broken…”

The drones were still overhead, the words too urgent, too many, too fast, too dizzying.

Down to ground zero and on to more newly wrecked houses and lives. Past a water pump which served at least 10 houses in the area, hit by missiles, ruined.

Passing more shells of houses, I meet Yasser abu Ali, co-owner of a paint and tools supply shop bombed to the ground by 2 F-16 missiles. Seventeen people were immediately dependent on the revenue from the business, not accounting for indirect dependents (suppliers, buyers). As abu Ali tells of he and his brothers’ $200,000 loss, it comes out that he is a cousin of Dr. Ezz-El-Din Abu El-Eish, the doctor whose 3 daughters and neice were killed by Israeli shelling on his house in Jabaliya. Everyone has their own story, and stories overlap, tragedies overlap and compound.

At Samir Abed Rabbo’s, the tour begins as with the others: everything is broken and upside down, there are Israeli soldiers’ leavings (food, playing cards, feces…) and graffiti: “Join the Israeli army today!” and other slogans from the patriotic invading and occupying forces.

The house is more holes than walls, from multiple tank shells to automatic gunfire shots from the tanks. Seeing so many intentionally & deviously-ruined houses dulls the concept of damage. But strangely some things stand out as odd or notable amidst the whole-scale destruction. Entrails of ceilings and support beams hang in threads. A chair sits gutted.

And there are the sniper holes. I look out the hole facing Salah el Din street, the Dawwar Zimmo crossroads, and I realize that it was from one of these very holes that Hassan would have been shot, thankfully not killed (unlike the 13 other emergency medical workers), thankfully we also weren’t shot dead. These sniper holes litter house walls in homes all over Jabaliya, Attatra, Zaitoun…Gaza.

The baby’s bedroom, not saved from the attacks. A wall of cheerful cartoons and cute baby posters contrasts the ugliness of the gaping shelling wounds, reminding that nothing is sacred to an army that will shoot children point-blank [i will tell of this in a later post].

The rotting donkey out back explains the stink, a stench different than that of the army’s usual odor.

Leaving Samir Abed Rabbo’s ruins, I see a newly-homeless family making tea over a fire, behind the rubble of their former home.

Saed Azzat Abed Rabbo stands under a missile hole in his bedroom ceiling, explaining that on the first day of the land invasion, he and family had been in the house when a missile struck it. They frantically evacuated to a school in Jabaliya, Feluja, and only learned of their house’s post-occupation demise upon returning after the Israeli soldiers left.

It is like the others: ravaged, left with soldiers’ waste and wine bottles–Hebrew writing on the label (wine isn’t available here anyway, so there’s no question who drank the wine) –rooftop water tank blown apart, and rooftop views affording more sights of neighbourhood destruction and of the lemon trees that once stood near Saed Abed Rabbo’s home.

I left Abed Rabbo that day, weaving amongst taxis, motorbikes, trucks, and carts packed with belongings, people who had no home to stay in, who’d only come to retrieve what they could from their former lives. I’d seen more than I felt I could internalize or reproduce for others, but knew I’d go back for more stories because I knew there are more. More than I can possibly hear or pass on.

It’s a ceasefire…just not on the beach, not in your home

Eva Bartlett | In Gaza

Ahmed Hassanin, 7, shot in the head outside his home by Israeli soldiers from Gaza’s eastern border on January 22nd.
Ahmed Hassanin, 7, shot in the head outside his home by Israeli soldiers from Gaza’s eastern border on January 22nd.

On the 5th morning after Israel declared a ‘ceasefire’, Israeli gunboats began shelling, as they had on several mornings since halting the 22 day air and land bombardment of Gaza. The shelling, which began just after 7:30 am off Gaza city’s coast, injured at least 6, including one boy with shrapnel in his head.

Yasser Abed, 15, came out from his home in Gaza’s Beach camp, on the coast, to see where the shelling was occurring. A shard of shrapnel lodged in his forehead.

Nisreen al Quqa, 11, was out earlier, before the navy began to fire towards Palestinian fishermen. She and her brother were walking on the beach when the firing started. A piece of shrapnel lodged in her right calf muscle.

Other injuries included a 14 year old male who was hit in the thigh by one of the shrapnel fragments, a 35 year old male also with a shrapnel injury, and a 4 year old girl with a head wound from flying shrapnel.

To the east of Gaza city, in the Sheyjaiee district close to the eastern border, also on the same day, 7 year old Ahmed Hassanian was outside his house with friends around 9:45 am. He lies now in critical condition in Shifa hospital’s ICU, a bullet still lodged in his brain and with such brain hemorrhaging and damage that he is expected to die shortly.

Mu’awiyah Hassanain, the director of Ambulance and Emergency Services, reports shelling in the northwestern coastal area of As Sudaniya on the same morning, saying five fishermen were injured in the attacks.

Israeli warplanes, on the first day of the ceasefire, flew extremely low and loudly over areas of Gaza, leaving residents expecting the worst. Drones capable of photographing and of dropping lethal, targeted missiles, continued to circle in Gaza’s skies for the first 3 days after the tanks retreated and the air-bombing ceased. At 8:30 am, one of these drones dropped 2 missiles in the Amal area east of Beit Hanoun, wounding a woman and an 11 year old child, who later died of her injuries.

The Palestinian Centre for Human Rights (PCHR) reports further violations of the cease-fire.

At 10:40, Israeli troops killed Maher abu Rjaila, 23, shooting him in the chest as he walked on his land east of Khan Younis city.

Two days later, at 1:00pm, Israeli soldiers fired on residents of Al Qarara, near Khan Younis, shooting Waleed al-Astal, 42, in his right foot.

Israel’s assault on Gaza has killed at least 1,330, with as many as 200 more bodies expected to be recovered from under the rubble of the over 5,000 destroyed houses and 20,000 buildings.

Dr. Fawzi Nablusi, director of Shifa’s ICU, said that of the cases in Shifa’s ICU, 90% were civilian, of these 50% were women and children. One of those civilians injured the day before Israel’s ceasefire was Mohammed Jarboua. Also from the Beach camp, the 21 year old is clinically brain dead, surviving only on mechanical life-support, after being shot in the head by Israeli naval forces.

The Director of Shifa hospital, Dr. Hassan Khalaf, and Mu’awiyah Hassanain confirmed that since the ceasefire began on January 18, three more Palestinians have been killed, and 15 more injured, 10 of those injured on January 22nd.

These ceasefire violations are not a new precedent, as during the 6 month ceasefire which began on June 19th, Israeli forces routinely targeted and fired upon fishermen and farmers along Gaza’s eastern and northern borders, injuring 62, according to Palestinian sources. During this period, 22 Palestinians were also killed, many of them members of resistance groups, and 38 fishermen and farmers were abducted. The truce period saw border crossings mainly closed, completely sealed them from November 4, 2008 with only the briefest of openings.

As the dust settles and noxious chemical fires continue to smolder, Gazans focus on their immediate needs: housing, food, and in many cases locating lost family members still under the rubble.

The root of the problem continues: the nearly 2 year old siege on Gaza, not relaxed under the 6 month ceasefire as agreed, and which had already decimated Gaza’s health and sanitation infrastructures, and had shattered the economy. From the ruins of Gaza, any signs of an end to the siege are far beyond the broken horizon.

First views of Attattra, northwestern Gaza

Eva Bartlett | In Gaza

On January 18, the first day that Israel stopped most of the bombing all over Gaza (navy shelling continues to this moment), after

No choice but to leave with all belongings
No choice but to leave with all belongings

learning that my friend’s father was alive in eastern Jabaliya, I went on to Attatra, the northwest region, which had been cut off since Israeli troops invaded. As expected, the destruction was great, the death toll high and still unknown. People streamed in both directions: going to see how their homes had fared or leaving from the wreckage and bringing as many surviving possessions as possible.

“This is our main road,” Yusef said dryly, gesturing at the undulating pavement and sand that served the towns in this region. “There should be houses here. Now there is nothing,” he added, seemingly more to himself than to me.

I’d noticed the road right off: torn through the centre, ripped up by a bulldozer’s claw or a tank’s tools, a theme that re-surfaced on various main streets. There were the horse or donkey carts, piled as high as possible with mattresses, blankets, clothing, and furniture, trying to maneuver on these newly-rutted, overcrowded streets, or around earth plowed into peaks.

I’d met my friend Yusef at the main crossroad. He’d come from Gaza city much earlier, to confirm that his own house was devastated: “There is nothing left. They gutted it. I took two pairs of pants, that’s all,” he said. “I was expecting it. There’s no house the Israeli soldiers didn’t enter, damage or destroy. We couldn’t get here to see it until today,” he had told me, Israeli troops’ fire and shelling preventing all from entering, wounded from leaving, ambulances from arriving. This point must be mentioned again and again.

We came to Anis, another Ramattan media employee, standing in front of his destroyed home. “It was hit in the first days of the land invasion,” he said. “F-16. We had evacuated, thank God. When the shelling started, I was crying. I just wanted to get my kids out of here,” he confessed. “Anyway, thank God none were killed. My mother, father, and children, we’re all okay,” he said.

“But nothing is left,” he added. “Walla ishi,”–nothing at all.

I looked down the road and