2nd May 2016 | International Solidarity Movement, Gaza team | Gaza, occupied Palestine
After more than six months risking their lives while ploughing, planting seeds and weeding their land, and after investing a large amount of money on seeds and on renting a tractor, the Qudaih family from the village of Khuzaa were finally ready to start harvesting their barley and the wheat two days ago.
We arrived at the fields, located around 100 metres from the fence, at 7am. Around 9am one jeep from the Israeli occupation forces stopped in front of the farmers and a group of soldiers emerged. After a few minutes they fired several shots in the air, then returned to the jeep and left.
A family member working on the land in Khuzaa
45 minutes later another jeep arrived. This time the soldiers fired shots on the ground next to the farmers and the ISM activists that were with them. The shots were near misses, just a few centimetres from their feet. As if this was not terrifying enough, next they fired shots close to the farmers’ and activists’ heads. At that moment most of the farmers started to run away from their fields terrified by the whistling sounds of the bullets flying around them: One Bedouin man that was picking herbs for his animals laid down on the ground hiding behind his donkey, while the soldiers fired shot more than five times just a few centimetres from him. The shooting didn’t even stop when everyone started to run away, preventing the farmers to secure their horse cart holding what little harvest they had collected until they were attacked.
The Qudaih family harvesting their barley on their land.
These families now have to choose between losing all the money invested as well as their main sustenance for the year, or continue trying to harvest the crops on their land – despite the risk of someone getting killed or disabled.
18th April 2016 | International Solidarity Movement, al-Khalil team | Gaza, occupied Palestine
Last Thursday 14th April marked four years since the disappearance of Vittorio Arrigoni in Gaza, under the Israeli blockade. According to subsequent statements and investigations carried out by Hamas, ISM activist Vittorio’s body was discovered the following day, having been kidnapped and executed by the previously unheard of “Brigade of the Gallant Companion of the Prophet Mohammed bin Muslima,” a Salafist splinter-group. His alleged murderers were eventually arrested and sentenced to life-imprisonment (reduced to fifteen years on appeal).
Vittorio wearing a kaffiyeh
Before his death Vittorio was a committed, passionate ISM activist who spent the best part of three years of his life in Gaza between 2008 and 2011, working in solidarity with the Palestinian people suffering from the Israeli blockade. He first went to Gaza as part of the Free Gaza flotilla that broke the blockade in August 2008. Vittorio worked in solidarity with farmers and fishermen, attended demonstrations and documented, for both ISM and other media outlets, the countless examples of Israeli human rights abuses that he witnessed. This was none more evident than in his work during Operation Cast Lead, in which hundreds of civilians were massacred.
Despite the difficulties he encountered in his work Vittorio was an incredibly positive, happy and optimistic person. He described the breaking of the blockade in 2008 as the happiest moment of his life, stating that, “it became clear, not only to the world but Palestinians also, that there are people who are willing to spend their lives to come and hug their brothers here in Gaza.”
Vittorio was a born activist whose grandfathers “fought and died struggling against occupation, a fascist Nazi one. For that reason presumably in my DNA, my blood, there are particles that push me to struggle for freedom and human rights.”
Gaza: Stay Human
Hundreds of Palestinians gathered in Gaza last week, where Vittorio is considered a Martyr to the cause of peaceful resistance, to commemorate the anniversary of Vittorio’s death- singing, dancing and showing a film dedicated to his life. Vittorio’s memory is still honoured in Gaza by the street and school that carry his name. A book of Vittorio’s daily dispatches to Italian media – “Gaza: Stay Human” – was first published in 2010 with an introduction by Ilan Pappe.
ISM continue in Vittorio’s spirit, to support and show solidarity to the Palestinian people in their peaceful, non-violent opposition to the blockade of Gaza and the occupation of the West Bank.
“We must remain human, even in the most difficult times … Because, despite everything, there must always be humanity within us. We have to bring it to others.”
4th Feburary 2016 | International Solidarity Movement, Gaza Team | Gaza, occupied Palestine
Yesterday there were several events in Gaza supporting the Palestinian political prisoner Mohamed AlQeeq, who is actually in the 72nd day of hunger strike and has lost his sight and hearing.
Palestinians protesting for the release of political prisoners
Moataz Dalul, spokesman for the prisoners, stressed that “Mohamed AlQeeq is not fighting just for him but for all the prisoners and the freedom of Palestine” and “we want the Palestinians inside the green line to support him and stand with him until his freedom”. He also demanded the human rights organizations inside and outside Palestine to “just say the truth… we don’t need your support, we just want you to tell the truth”.
After Tahsin AlAstal, official of the journalists union, claimed “we speak a lot with international associations and organizations for human rights, but we are quite certain that this is useless, as they don’t do anything. Everyday Mohamed is dying and the Red Cross and the high commissioner of the UN are silent. People in Palestine is understanding that all those NGO and associations don’t move a finger for them, so we question them, what’s their reason to be here?” “We don’t need the people to say that they are worried for Mohamed or to denounce with empty words, we just need real moves and our prisoners to be saved”.
Palestinians protesting for the release of political prisoners
PCHR and other human rights associations, on their side, denounced Mohamed situation “administrative detention is a crime, as it is force feeding, and Israel is using both of them with Mohamed and other palestinians in front of the eyes of all the world, but they choose to look to the other side. Mohamed united all the spectrum of the Palestinian people under the motto: freedom or martyrdom”.
30th December 2015 | International Solidarity Movement, Gaza Team | Gaza strip, occupied Palestine
Last Friday, 25th of December another youth, 22-year-old Hani Wahdan, was killed in Shijaia in Gaza. One week before, 20-year-old Mohamed El Agha was killed in El Faraheen in Gaza.
Demonstration in Gaza
Since the beginning of October Israeli snipers have killed unarmed demonstrators along Gaza’s fence almost every week, and injured hundreds with live fire.
Mohamed Abu Taima, 22 years old, is one of those injured by the Israeli snipers. He was shot in the leg minutes before the killing of Mohamed El Agha took place in the same area.
Demonstration in Gaza
In the European Hospital of Khan Younees, 19-year-old Abdel Kareem Kalwaji lies in a bed beside Mohamed’s. He was shot a week before Mohamed; unfortunately the explosive dum-dum bullets used by the occupation completely destroyed both bones in one of his legs and one bone in the other leg. He has already undergone two surgeries and doctors say that he’ll need a lot of rehabilitation in order to move around by himself again.
Mohamed Abu Taima in hospital.
When questioned regarding their reasons to demonstrate despite the high risk of getting shot, both answered that they do it for the liberation of Al Quds and Al Aqsa Mosque and in support of their brothers and sisters in the West Bank.
22nd October 2015 | International Solidarity Movement, Valeria Cortés | Gaza Strip, occupied Palestine
How much hopelessness, suffering, unpunished abuse, how much spilled blood can the human heart take before bursting?
“All I possess in the presence of the death is fury and pride”
Mahmoud Darwish
Ahmed Al Sarhi was executed in cold blood yesterday by an Israeli sniper, from the cowardly distance of the Zionist fence that encloses Gaza, turning it into a prison. This is just another story of this shameful concentration camp that, as if that was not enough, is also routinely bombarded by the Zionist war machine with total impunity.
The body of Ahmed Al Sarhi, killed by snipers of the Zionist occupation forces on October 20, 2015, Al Bureij, Gaza Strip (Photo credit: Ashraf Amra)
Including Ahmed, there has been a total of fifteen people killed by Israeli forces since October 9th, in the Gaza strip alone. This includes a three year old girl and her pregnant mother, who died as a result of the bombing of their family home. Throughout Palestine since the beginning of this month, fifty-two people have been killed, among them twelve children. The systematic killing of children by the occupation forces is not a mistake or collateral damage, figures confirm that Palestinian children are themain military target of Israel.
Children killed during the Zionist slaughter in Gaza 2014. Photo taken at Al Aqsa Martyrs Hospital, Deir Al Balah, central Gaza Strip.
But we cannot limit ourselves to stating names, figures, data without contextualizing what happens here in Palestine – at the root of this catastrophe, a vicious occupation of a colonial entity imposed by blood and fire on Palestinian territory, with the full support of the so-called Western Democracies. Palestinians are being killed on their own land, the land of their ancestors. They have not come to seek death, death has come to them under the guise of a “religious conflict,” but that is not true – this is plainly colonialism, theft, conquest and occupation, and for this the Zionist entity conducts a continuous and terrifying ethnic cleansing.
Among the first victims of this genocide is the truth, so it is our duty to prevent mass media outlets from turning Palestinians into “terrorists” who always “die” in an “ongoing terror attack.” To begin with, they are not terrorists, they are an occupied people exercising their legitimate right to defense with all the resources – very few resources – at their fingertips. They do not “die”, they are executed in cold blood by one of the most powerful armies in the world or by that other paramilitary entity, formed by fanatical settlers highly trained and armed to the teeth.
How much hopelessness, suffering, unpunished abuse, how much spilled blood can the human heart take before bursting? What terrible reasons can drive a young man to take a kitchen knife and be under the Zionist bullets attempting a futile defense, the last desperate act of rebellion for justice? A justice that has been denied to them from the day of their birth to the day of their death.
Those Palestinians, described by the media in a de-contextualized, biased, malicious way, as “neutralized terrorist” are mostly young people and teenagers. The dramatic reality that the media handle turns this into a grotesque spectacle where the executioner becomes the victim should not go unnoticed.
After the cold-blooded murder of these children, young martyrs, there are more crimes: their families are beaten, lynched, imprisoned, their homes demolished, their residence permits revoked, a whole series of infamous collective punishments – illegal and heinous – trying to silence a people pushed to the limits of their endurance.
In the Gaza Strip there are no kitchen knives as weapons of the juvenile despair. Here the occupation is not present face to face like in the West Bank, here it remains lurking behind cowardly attacks from the distance of warships, planes, helicopters and drones and by land surrounding Gaza with a fence full of turrets, tanks, rifles and all kind of military technology at the service of death.
Then young Gazans, many of them teenagers or children, who have already suffered in their own flesh three brutal massacres, stripped of all hope and future, march to the very limits of their imprisonment in a sacrificial ritual, to offer their defenseless chests to the bullets of the occupier, with no other weapon than a harmless stone, a flag, their rage and pride – it is all they have in the presence of death. Children, young martyrs of Gaza, march to the borders of this, their land, their prison, their grave, to offer their brief life as anonymous prisoner to put a dignified end to their agony.
Young man a few meters from the zionist fence. Picture in Gaza Strip, Palestine. September 2013.
It is our duty to not let them be murdered three times over, where yes – because that Zionist colony sadly known as “Israel” commits on them a triple crime – there is first the murder itself, secondly the impunity of the fact and third, equally or even more terribly, the slander of the victim, makingthe victim guilty of their own death.
If we cannot prevent the slaughter of the Palestinian people, at least we have to avoid that impunity and slander primed on these desperate boys in search for justice, or even more painfully, a quick escape to this long tragedy.
As you read these lines the Zionist occupation and international silence continue to send children to their death.
