Tag: Gaza

Life and death in the buffer zone

16 January 2011 | International Solidarity Movement, Vera Macht

Death comes quickly at a place like this. On sunny winter days, when the smell of the night’s rain is still in the air, as if it would have brought some hope for the raped, barren land of Gaza, overrun hundreds of times by Israeli tanks and bulldozers. The land between the foothills of the village of Bait Hanoun and the Israeli border, guarded by watchtowers, soldiers, snipers, helicopters and drones is a land in which death is a regular guest.

But despite all that, the 65-year-old Shaban Karmout probably had something like hope when he woke up on that winter morning. His house is in the 300 meter wide strip of land in the so-called buffer zone. He built his house 40 years ago, in 1971, when Gaza was already occupied by Israel, and yet he thought to have a future there for himself and his family. Shaban began to plant fruits, his land was full of palms and trees, lemon, orange, clementine and almond trees were growing there. He had a good life.

But in 2003, just at the time of the almond harvest, the Israeli bulldozers came in the middle of the night. It took them three hours to raze the work of 30 years to the ground. Since the Israeli attack in 2009, he could no longer live there, the buffer zone had become too dangerous, where his home was, which has now been declared a closed combat zone by Israel. He had since lived in a small rented concrete house in the middle of the refugee camp near Bait Hanoun, in Jabalia, cramped in a tiny apartment with his large family.

He went back to his land, every morning, and worked there until the evening. He and his family had to make a living from something, after all. And so this morning, in the morning of the 10th January 2011, he woke up with hope, around 4 o’clock, and left for his fields. Full of hope he was because he and his neighbors had recently received a new well, their old one had been destroyed by an Israeli tank incursion. The Italian NGO GVC had built the well, it was financed by the Italian government.

On that day he was visited by an employee of the organization, to see how his situation had improved. She had an interview with him, and he asked her to come into the house, as it would be not safe outside. As she left, he advised her to rather take a short cut, you never know. He told her that he himself still had to go into the garden once more to tie his donkey. The NGO worker had just reached the village of Bait Hanoun, as three shots fell. One hit Shaban in the neck, two others in the upper part of his body. He was dead on the spot.
“It’s like a nightmare,” the Italian said, stunned. “I will never see him again. From here to the morgue in two hours. ”

In the interview that he gave shortly before his death, he told me about the unbearable situation in which he had been living. “It felt as if someone had ripped out my heart,” he described the night in which he lost all his land under the blades of eight bulldozers. And he told how he and the farmers from the neighbor fields had risked planting yet again, you have to make a living from something after all, and had grown wheat. When it was ready to be harvested, it was burned down by the Israeli army. And he told how he and the farmers from the neighboring fields yet again had the courage to plant, the children have to eat something after all, and tried to grow wheat. When the workers went to the field to sow, they were fired upon by Israeli soldiers.

What he now makes his living from, he was asked. “I collect stones and wood, and I grow some crops in my garden,” he replied. Crops, for which he had recently gotten water, thanks to a donation of a well from the Italian government. Shaban therefore probably looked somewhat optimistically into the future, the well could have restored the income from his garden to him. This was his only income since it had become too dangerous for him to enter his fields. “At any time the Israeli bulldozers can come again to destroy my house, you never know what they do next,” he said. Whether he isn’t afraid to be there, the employee of the NGO asked him. “No, I don’t mind the shooting too much,” he replied. “Even if something happens to me, humans can only die once. And only God knows when I am going to die.”

His nephew, Mohammed Karmout, stood a bit apart from the morgue. “The Israelis know my uncle very well,” he says quietly. “He’s there every day, and the whole area is monitored by cameras and drones. They know he lives there.”
And so it is quite doubtful that only God alone knew that Shaban would die at that day, while he was tying his donkey, by three shots in his upper body.

Shaban Karmout is the third civilian being shot dead in the buffer zone in the last month. At Christmas, the Shepherd Salama Abu Hashish, 20 years old, died by a shot in the back while he was tending his sheep. Since the beginning of last year, about a hundred workers and farmers have been shot by Israeli snipers in the buffer zone, 13 of them died.

Israeli navy confiscates two boats of abducted fisherman

9 January 2011 | International Solidarity Movement, Gaza

In one week’s time, the Israeli Navy has twice abducted fishermen from Gazan waters; they were released the same day, but their boats remain confiscated.

Abduction of Baker fishermen on January 4th
On Tuesday morning, January 4th, Mohammed ‘Abdul Qader Baker (54), Ziad Mohammed Baker (25), Mohammed Mahmoud Baker (28) and Ra’ef Nabeel Baker (25) were out fishing at approximately 2.5 nautical miles off the coast of Gaza City when they were intercepted by an Israeli gunboat. At gunpoint they were forced to hold their hands up for over an hour, while the gunboat awaited reinforcement of two zodiacs coming from Ashdod. The men were told to undress and swim towards the zodiacs, where they were cuffed, blindfolded and transferred to the gunboat.

“I told them that I am sick and too old to throw myself into the sea with these kinds of temperatures. One of the soldiers on the zodiac replied that if I didn’t jump into the water he would blow my head and the boat”, says the 54 year old Mohamed Abed Qader Baker. Their hassaka, a basic fishing boat of approximately 6 meters, was taken to Ashkelon, while the fishermen were taken to Ashdod. One by one they were taken into a small interrogation room in the harbor, where an officer of the Shin Bet, the Israeli Internal Security Service, inquired about their connections with the Gazan government.

“They told me I was three sea miles and twenty meters from the coast, which is 20 meters beyond the limit the Israeli Navy imposed on us, but it is not true! I am always very careful, I have a GPS: I am sure that I was no further out than 2.5 miles”, states Mohamed firmly.
At the time of the interception, four other Palestinian fishing boats were in the near vicinity, but were not stopped. To Mohamed it is clear why:

“I had just installed a new engine, which coasted 5,500$. The Israeli soldiers are watching us every day: they know when we have new equipment on board. Probably my engine has already been sold to Ashkelon by now.”

Fishermen at Gaza’s port shared the suspicion that well equipped boats were more likely to be confiscated. It is a certainty that not one hassaka seized by the Israeli Navy has ever returned.

“One day we eat the fish, the other day we sell the catch. I’ve put myself in debt to buy that engine and now I don’t have any means to pay them off, nor to provide my family with. We are 25 people in one house; that is six people per room”, says Mohamed.
On September 24th 2010, the Baker family lost 20 year old Mohammed Mansour Baker; he was killed by bullets coming from an Israeli gunboat while he was fishing 2 sea miles off Sudaniya Beach.

Six Fishermen Abducted on December 28th
Early Thursday morning, December 28th 2010, six fishermen, Subeh ‘Abdul Salam al-Hissi, ‘Aadel ‘Abdul Karim Baker, Ramadan Isma’il al-Hissi, Fayez Ahmed al-Hissi and Ahmed Sha’ban al-Hissi returned back to Gaza the same day, but the family’s 19 meters fishing boat remains confiscated by Israel. Thirty families’ incomes, each counting six to seven members, are dependent on this boat.

At 6:30 am they left the port of Gaza with their wooden fishing boat heading towards the north of the Strip. Close to Beit Lahya, 1 to 1.5 miles off Gaza’s coastline, the boat was intercepted by two Israeli zodiacs, each containing approximately 20 soldiers. They boarded the boat, searched, cuffed and blindfolded the men, before obliging them to lay down on the wet surface of the ship. Fayez Ahmed al-Hissi (31) adds that he was hit on the head during the takeover of the ship. The eldest of the company, 59 year old Ahmed Sha’ban al-Hissi, was ordered to sail the boat into Ashdod’s harbor.

In Ashdod, soldiers instructed them to take the fishing net in, after which they were transferred to a docked Israeli gunboat. Plastic bags were put over the men’s heads making it hard for them to breathe, while they were shivering in their soaked clothes. One by one they were interrogated in a small room in the harbor, where the investigator showed a particular interest in Gaza’s harbor and the governmental support for fishermen who suffered damages during the last storm. The head officer, who introduced himself as Ghalid, claiming to be responsible for Al-Shati refugee camp, asked them to point out their houses on a detailed picture taken from the air and to give phone numbers of relatives and friends.

“I replied evasively to their questions, saying the pictures weren’t very clear and that I didn’t know any phone numbers by heart”, said Subeh ‘Abdul Salam al-Hissi (33).

The men could not grasp what they had done to end up there until Subeh’ asked: “Why are we here? Why did you take us from Gazan waters?” Ambiguously, the investigator returned the question by asking them whether they had not felt anything strange while sailing. Different media outlets quote an Israeli military spokesperson saying that the boat “dragged a suspicious object”. Earlier that morning, the men had responded to a call from fellow fishermen that had technical problems at sea. The boat was towed into Gaza’s marina after which the men headed towards northern Gaza, with a fishing net being the only thing the boat dragged.

“I hope we will get our boats back soon, maybe after a month”, says Ahmed Sha’ban al-Hissi hopefully. The wooden boat requires daily maintenance to protect it from water damage. “I asked them if someone could at least turn on the bilge pump each day to pump the water from the boat, but the officer simply stated that it was not his responsibility.”

“Since the siege, our income has come down from 700 dollars to less than 200 dollars a month per fisher. Israel refuses to allow fishing nets in, so we are dependent on the low quality nets from Egypt that come in through the tunnels. Spare parts for the boat are very scarce too. All that and the fishing area being depleted, results in a poor catch, while fish from Al Arish come in abundantly through the tunnels, obliging us to sell our fish at a low price”, says Ahmed Sha’ban al-Hissi.

“Now, I don’t know what to do. We are all waiting at home until our boat comes back.”

Legal background
Al Mazen Center for Human Rights states that between 1 May 2009 and 30 November 2010 the IOF carried out 53 attacks against fishermen: two men were killed, seven injured and 42 arrested, while 17 fishing boats were confiscated and one destroyed. These acts constitute flagrant violations of Israel’s obligations under international law as an occupying power. They violate the Fishermen’s rights to life, work, safety and bodily integrity. They also infringe upon the right not to be tortured and prevent them from maintaining an adequate standard of living.

The Oslo Accords allowed Gazan fishermen to fish in the Mediterranean sea up to 20 nautical miles away from Gaza’s shoreline, but since 1993 Israel has imposed successive restrictions on fishing, the limit for fishermen now stands at just 3 nautical miles since Israel imposed the siege on Gaza in 2007. This has severely reduced the quantity, quality and diversity of the catch. According to the International Committee of the Red Cross, nearly 90% of Gaza’s 4000 fishermen are now considered either poor (with a monthly income of between 100 and 190 US dollars) or very poor (earning less than 100 dollars a month), up from 50% in 2008.

Israel’s killing zone in Gaza

6 January 2011 | The Electronic Intifada, Max Ajl

Ahmed Qudaih was skinny, in blue Converse sneakers and a black leather jacket, his mustache oddly making him look younger, not older, than his 27 years. His voice was even, his face rigidly composed, like human stone, as we sat down with him in the martyr’s tent in Khozaa, a rural village slightly to the east of Khan Younis in the southern Gaza Strip. Young men moved up and down the rows of plastic seats with brass coffee pots and tiny ceramic cups and platters of dates. Ahmed agreed to speak briefly about how the Israeli military had just murdered his 19-year-old brother Hassan Qudaih in the village’s borderlands.

Ahmed said that a few hours before sunset on 28 December, Hassan had entered the area where two nights before, there had been a firefight between the Palestinian resistance and Israeli soldiers, who were accompanied by several Apache helicopters and tanks. During the melee, the soldiers killed Issa Abu Rok and Muhammad al-Najjar, fighters from the al-Quds Brigades, the armed wing of the Palestinian Islamic Jihad. They were also members of Hassan and Ahmed’s extended family. Hassan entered the area to look around, to search through it for anything that had been left behind after the bodies had been removed.

Ahmed said that a sniper sitting in a jeep abutting the border shot Hassan in the leg. Hassan treated himself, partially stanching the blood flowing from the wound. And then, according to Ahmed, “the [Israeli army] let him bleed slowly for the subsequent two hours, preventing any emergency vehicles, or his friends, from reaching him.”

His friends made repeated attempts to get close to Hassan, but were repelled by shots from the Israeli border patrol, and eventually incapacitated by a sort of “gas, which made them unconscious,” Ahmed said. Emergency vehicles from the Palestinian emergency services also repeatedly attempted to coordinate with the Israeli army to evacuate Hassan, but they were denied permission to do so, while Hassan continued to bleed, Ahmed explained.

After some time, Ahmed said, a beleaguered Hassan “took out his phone and tried to call for help.” Ahmed said it was at that point that the Israeli military “shelled him from a border-area tank, decapitating him.” Ahmed speculated that perhaps they tracked Hassan’s phone signal to the body. Hassan died instantly, his head apparently severed from his body.

Ahmed explained that “The area where they killed my brother is flat, free of any obstacles that could have blocked their view. The soldiers must have clearly seen that Hassan was a civilian, without any weapons, and shot anyway.”

A family photograph of Hassan Qudaih.
Ahmed showed us a picture of Hassan, as well as his shrapnel-damaged money case. He looked in the picture precisely like the young man he was, barely out of boyhood — frighteningly young — a stand-in for the stunningly young population of Gaza, more than 50 percent of which is under 18, and a wrenching reminder that war and siege on Gaza has meant war and siege on children.

Initial press reports, repeating information issued by the Israeli military spokespersons’ office, put Hassan amongst four other youth “planting explosives at the security fence.” However, subsequent investigations showed otherwise.

The Palestinian Centre for Human Rights reports that the five youth were roughly 300 meters from the fence, just on the edge of the “buffer zone” — the no-go area imposed by Israel covering a wide swath of land on the Gaza side of the boundary with Israel, in the east and north — when Israeli firing began. Relatives and neighbors agree: Hassan was unarmed and shot without provocation other than his presence in Israel’s unilaterally-declared “buffer zone.”

That buffer zone ruinously affects Gaza residents living in areas like Khozaa. Khozaa, and the whole rural area east of Khan Younis — which includes the towns and villages of Abasan al-Kabir, Abasan al-Saghira and al-Farrahin — have been the subject of numerous incursions, demolitions, shelling and shootings over the past several years, occurring with an increasing frequency in recent months. Homes with any exposure to the boundary with Israel are pocked with hundreds of bullet holes, and children are barred by their parents from playing in areas which are within the line-of-sight to the boundary after dusk.

Officially, the buffer zone is 300 meters wide, at least according to the leaflets the Israeli military dropped on all of Gaza’s hinterlands on 19 May 2009, showing a map of the Gaza Strip with clearly demarcated no-go areas. Unofficially, however, it extends as far as the bullets from Israeli snipers fly before they hit something.

According to a report put out by the UN’s Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), 29 percent of Gaza’s arable farmland is inaccessible due to the belt of forbidden or dangerous land, which extends from 0.5-1 kilometer on the eastern frontier and 1.8 to 2 kilometers on the northern frontier.

In the southern governorates, the imposition of the buffer zone has hit agricultural production hard. For example, in the Khan Younis area, the administrative area of which includes the smaller zones to its east, agriculture and fishing-related activities plummeted from 24 percent of all jobs in the second quarter of 2007 to 7.2 percent in the third quarter of 2009.

If not enforced by physically present soldiers armed with sniper rifles, it is enforced by women soldiers manning remote-controlled motion-sensing machine gun turrets. The landscape there is marked by ditches, peppered by broken clumps of barbed wire. It’s a tableau of exposed dirt and sliced-off irrigation tubes. It looks like the war zone that it frequently is.

And soldiers often fire at anything that enters the buffer zone. Indeed, repeated calls to the Israeli military spokespersons’ office to ask how they made the determination that Hassan was a “militant” either were met with unfulfilled promises to call back shortly, or the response that “we can’t reveal that information for security reasons.” Nor has the Israeli military issued a correction in response to the repeated queries.

And the assault continues apace. Abd Alazeer Yousef Abu Rijla, Hassan’s uncle and the owner of the land where the young man was killed, described how on 29 December Israeli armor-plated bulldozers entered their farmland in Khozaa and ripped up the remainder of the crops growing there. The total area destroyed comes to about four dunums, or roughly 4,000 square meters. “We cannot go there anymore, even though we are three families that depend on that area,” Abu Rijla said. Although he said that he needed to return to his land, the area was far too dangerous for the time being.

Fifty-nine Palestinians were killed in Gaza by the Israeli military last year, 24 of them civilians, most in the buffer zone. The number of wounded — 220 — has been ten times that, with approximately forty of them occurring since the beginning of November. The tempo of rockets fired from Gaza has increased in response to ongoing Israeli provocations and pummeling, as well as the need to resist the 42-month-long siege.

Meanwhile, the next war slides in and out of view, as Israeli politicians and generals openly discuss timing and strategy. General Gabi Ashkenazi said that the Israeli military “holds the Hamas terrorist organization solely responsible for any terrorist activity emanating from the Gaza Strip. We hope that the security situation in the south does not deteriorate, however the IDF [Israeli army] is preparing for any scenario” (“Ashkenazi: We’ll be ready if Gaza tensions escalate,” The Jerusalem Post, 27 December 2010).

Indeed, a cable released by WikiLeaks, dated 15 November 2009, confirms that planning for the next incursion began even while the Palestinians of Gaza were still sifting through the rubble of the winter 2008-09 invasion. Ashkenazi told a visiting American Congressional delegation that “I am preparing the Israeli army for a large-scale war,” likely against Hamas and Hizballah (“Israeli army chief was preparing for ‘a large scale war’,” Agence France Presse, 2 January 2011).

A few think this is just posturing, meant to tamp down rocket fire to a more tolerable level and more importantly, to incite massive and paralyzing fear amongst Gaza’s population. If so, perhaps it has worked: the resistance groups recently agreed to cease rocket fire for the time being, while most everyone I talk to in the streets worries that Israel will commemorate the biennial of the 2008-09 Gaza invasion by repeating it, while they grow tortuously frustrated by the stalled peace process.

“We are trapped here, and upset … there is nothing,” a meat seller in the middle class Gaza City neighborhood of Tel al-Hawa told me, before giving me a ride home. Meanwhile, the subdued roar of F-16s is audible nearly daily here and there in the Gaza Strip, while on the horizon grey Israeli warships hulk in the steel blue sea and Israeli drones buzz overhead in the washed-out sky — watching, waiting, preparing and gathering information for the next massacre from the north.

All images by Max Ajl.

Max Ajl is a doctoral student in development sociology at Cornell, and was an International Solidarity Movement volunteer in the Gaza Strip. He has written for many outlets, including the Guardian and the New Statesman, and blogs on Israel-Palestine at www.maxajl.com.

One Family in Gaza

6 January 2010 | Jen Marlowe

Just months after the Israeli assault that killed 1,390 Palestinians, I visited Gaza. Among dozens of painful stories I heard, one family stood out. I spent several days with Kamal and Wafaa Awajah, playing with their children, sleeping in the tent they were living in, and filming their story.

Wafaa described the execution of their son, Ibrahim. As she spoke, her children played on the rubble of their destroyed home. Kamal talked about struggling to help his kids heal from trauma.

What compelled me to tell the Awajah family’s story? I was moved not only by their tragedy but by the love for their children in Wafaa and Kamal’s every word.

Palestinians in Gaza are depicted either as violent terrorists or as helpless victims. The Awajah family challenges both portrayals. Through one family’s story, the larger tragedy of Gaza is exposed, and the courage and resilience of its people shines through.

One Family in Gaza from Jen Marlowe on Vimeo.

Civilian killed by Israeli military in Gaza

2 January 2010 | International Solidarity Movement, Gaza

Hassan Mohammed Qedeh, age 19
On Tuesday evening, December 28, 19-year-old Hassan Mohammed Qedeh was killed by the Israeli military in the village of Khoza’a, east of the southern Gaza city of Khan Younis. According to the Israeli forces, and subsequently repeated by various media outlets, he was a resistance fighter. However, witnesses in the area, as well as relatives, have confirmed that he had civilian status at the time when he was killed.

Sometime before sunset, Hassan had gone into the area of the border where an Apache had killed two of his relatives, Issa Abu Rok and Muhammad An-Najjar, two nights before, on December 26—both of them members of the armed resistance. According to his brother Ahmed Qedeh, Hassan ventured into the area to examine the place where his relatives had died. Ahmed says that a sniper sitting in a jeep alongside the border shot Hassan in the leg.

Ahmed added, “Hassan treated himself, while the IDF let him bleed slowly for the subsequent two hours, preventing any emergency vehicles, or his friends, from reaching him. Afterward, they shot munitions from a border-area tank, decapitating him.” He explained that “the area where they killed my brother is flat, free of any obstacles that could have blocked their view. The soldiers must have clearly seen that Hassan was a civilian, without any weapons, and shot anyway.”

According to Ahmed, five of Hassan’s friends repeatedly attempted to save Hassan, but came under heavy fire, and were unable to do so. Eventually they were shelled with a kind of gas bomb which caused them to faint.

According to United Nations figures, 59 Palestinians have been killed in Gaza by the IDF this year, 24 of them civilians. The number of wounded has been ten times that—220. And the count rises daily.

Hassan’s uncle, Abd Alazeer Yousef Abu Rjila’a, adds that the Israeli army came back to the crime site on the night of the 29th with a bulldozer that demolished 4 dunams of farming land. The man has not only lost three family members in a few days, but has lost his main source of income: most of his olive trees are uprooted and the water tank is destroyed. The man tried to reach his land twice on December 30th, but was forced to keep away as the army fired bullets at him to ward him off.

“Three families are dependent on me and that area: it’s our only source of income. I was already suffering, both psychologically and physically; I have high blood pressure and asthma, but now I can’t even reach my land, so how can I bring food to the table?” says Abd Alazeer Youssef Abu Rjila.