20 November 2009 Farmer Mahmoud Mohammed Shawish Zaneen was shot in both his legs while planting wheat east of Beit Hanoun. (Eva Bartlett)
On 15 November at 8:30am, a number of young men went as usual to the land near Gaza’s northern border with Israel planning to catch birds. Amjad Hassanain, 27, was among the bird-catchers hunting near the border fence when Israeli soldiers began shooting.
The shots which missed the other bird-catchers hit Hassanain, grazing his shoulder. Cameraman Abdul Rahman Hussain, filming in the vicinity, reports having seen the group of bird-catches head north.
“We were near the former Israeli settlement of Doghit,” said Hussain, referring to the area northwest of Beit Lahiya in the northern Gaza Strip.
“I had gone to the border area to photograph a young bird-catcher. We were about 400 meters from the border fence, but when we heard the shooting, we moved back to around one kilometer.”
According to Hussain, the other men had to carry the wounded Hassanain one kilometer from the site of injury, then transferred him to a motorcycle and finally to a car.
“He was covered in blood, I couldn’t tell where he was hit,” said Hussain.
There to document the work of bird-catchers, Hussain was surprised by the shooting.
“They always go there to catch birds. They put their nets close to the fence in order to catch as many as possible.” Like the bird-catchers, Hussain believed the Israeli soldiers along the border were familiar enough with the bird catching activity that they wouldn’t shoot.
Two hours later, Mahmoud Mohammed Shawish Zaneen and seven other farmers took a break from their work plowing land east of Beit Hanoun.
“We had three tractors with us. We’d been working since 8am, planting wheat. At first we worked about 450 meters from the border fence, but later we were 700 meters away,” he explained.
The farmers had paused to drink tea when Israeli soldiers began shooting.
Zaneen added, “The tractors were stopped and we were sitting on them. There were about seven Israeli soldiers, on foot. They shot the other tractors and then shot mine. They didn’t give us any warning, just started shooting.”
The bullet which pierced Zaneen’s left calf continued into his right calf.
Since the end of last winter’s Israeli invasion of Gaza, at least nine Palestinians have been killed, and another more than 34 injured, by Israeli shooting and shelling in the border areas in Gaza’s north and east.
Eva Bartlett is a Canadian human rights advocate and freelancer who arrived in Gaza in November 2008 on the third Free Gaza Movement boat. She has been volunteering with the International Solidarity Movement and documenting Israel’s ongoing attacks on Palestinians in Gaza. During Israel’s recent assault on Gaza, she and other ISM volunteers accompanied ambulances and documenting the Israeli attacks on the Gaza Strip.
Tents setup have been set up for families whose homes were destroyed by the Israeli assault on Gaza nearly one year ago. (Hatem Omar/MaanImages)
EZBT ABBED RABBO, occupied Gaza Strip (IPS) – Tens of thousands of Palestinians in Gaza living in tents and damaged homes face a wet, cold and miserable winter as Israel’s blockade of the coastal territory continues to prevent the importation of building and reconstruction material.
During the last few weeks Gazans were given a brief reprieve from the oncoming winter as an unseasonal snap of warmish, sunny weather held off winter rain and plummeting temperatures.
But, during a tour of northern Gaza last week, the UN Humanitarian Coordinator for the occupied Palestinian territory, Maxwell Gaylard, and the Association of International Development Agencies (AIDA) called on Israel to open its border crossings immediately to avert a further deterioration in the humanitarian situation on the ground.
“With winter rains and cold weather now imminent, the people of Gaza are even more desperately in need of construction materials such as cement, roofing tiles and glass to build and repair homes destroyed and damaged during the Israeli military offensive of 2008/2009,” said Gaylard.
During Israel’s intensive bombing campaign in December/January Gaza’s infrastructure was heavily targeted leading to the destruction and damage of thousands of homes.
“Gaza urgently requires 268,000 square meters of glass for windows and 67,000 square meters of glass for solar water heaters or enough glass to cover more than 30 football pitches. More than 500 children are still living in tents,” Mike Bailey from Oxfam told IPS.
Damage caused to Gaza’s water, sanitation and electricity systems, exacerbated by Israel’s crippling blockade which forbids the import of most essential spare parts and fuel, has further limited the ability of aid agencies to supply essential services.
The lack of concrete water storage tanks means that fresh water can only enter water pipes when there is electricity to power water pumps. Backup generators — which rely on fuel — are needed to ensure power cuts do not lead to water shortages and pollution of water.
“The humanitarian situation is going to deteriorate if something doesn’t give,” Gaylard told IPS during a tour of the Ezbt Abbed Rabbo area of the northern Gaza Strip.
“We are reaching out to the international community. We are appealing to the member countries of the UN on a regular basis about this continuing crisis … We are holding discussions with the UN General Assembly and the UN Security Council. One would hope that the message would be getting out after the Goldstone report,” said Gaylard.
“We are continuing talks with the Israeli government but pressure must be brought to bear on those responsible for keeping the border crossings closed,” Gaylard told IPS.
Fifty meters away from where the media gathered to hear the UN coordinator address the escalating humanitarian crisis, dozens of Gazan families were living the crisis first-hand.
Muhammad Zaid’s five-story home — which took four years to build and was home to 16 persons, the youngest a one-year-old — was flattened during 15 days of intensive Israeli shelling at the beginning of the year, forcing the family to flee.
For the first five months after the war Zaid and his family lived under the caved-in bottom floor of the building. For the last five months the Zaids have lived in a tent supplied by the UN Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA), the UN agency responsible for Palestine refugees.
Despite the recent unusually warm and dry weather, the heavens opened up for one night last week and rainwater flooded their tent as the family desperately tried to salvage belongings.
“We were awake the whole night scooping water out and trying to dig a small ditch around the tent to prevent more water flooding in but it didn’t help. The children were terrified and screaming. It was so cold,” Zaid told IPS.
However, when the winter rains begin to flood his tent on a regular basis in the near future Zaid, who is unemployed and in huge debt, will face the additional problems of having only intermittent electricity, and no running water.
“I have spent over 3,000 dollars of borrowed money for a new refrigerator and stove and some other basic appliances but we have no heater and the electricity keeps cutting,” said Zaid.
Several kilometers away, near the border with Israel, mother of eight Taghreed Abu Amrayn, showed IPS her new “home,” a tent attached to the remains of her former three-story house, as she jiggled 20-month old Safedin on her hip.
“I’m not sure how we will cope with winter as heating and electricity are a big problem and the children are always getting sick. I think the phosphorous bombs that were dropped nearby may have affected them.”
“Apart from the health issues we still live in fear on a daily basis as Israel continues to bomb these areas,” Amrayn told IPS.
Nearby the Abu Amrayns, Rifat Bakri, 28, and Wissam Amoud, 27, were using improvisation to try and overcome the absence of construction material. They had “rebuilt” their former garage and mechanical workshop with cardboard boxes.
“We couldn’t just sit around, we needed to get back to work. These boxes have provided a provisional garage for the short-term but when it rains in winter they will become water-logged and I’m not sure what we will do then,” Bakri told IPS.
“This abysmal situation can’t continue. People are desperate. Enough is enough. It is time for the blockade to be ended and for humanity to return to Gaza,” Bailey told IPS.
Marryam Haleem writing from Beit Hanoun, occupied Gaza Strip, Live from Palestine
“That was the happiest day of my life,” Ahmad explained, “I was freed that day.”
"The day I graduated from university was the best day of my life," says Ahmed from Beit Hanoun. (Marryam Haleem)
“Come on,” I laughed as we walked down the dusty Gaza street, the Mediterranean sun beating down hard on our faces. “It couldn’t have been that bad. I mean, we all dislike school to some degree, but it has its nice things too.”
His grave eyes looked wholly unconvinced. “The day I graduated from university was the best day of my life,” he firmly repeated. And then he added, more to himself than to me, “I wish I could erase all my memories of my time in school.”
Ahmad’s first day of school was in 1991 during the first Palestinian intifada. Then six years old and living in the northern Gaza town of Beit Hanoun, Ahmad was a good student who enjoyed school. He worked hard and was always the first in his year. After the Oslo accords were signed in 1993 and the Palestinian Authority was created, one could say that life in Gaza was approaching a degree of normalcy. And upon finishing middle school in 2000, as a reward for his scholastic achievement, Ahmad received the gift of a lifetime. He, along with 19 other students from Gaza, was selected by the Ministry of Education to join a Seeds of Peace summer camp in the US.
He had a wonderful time in America. What an adventure for the 14-year-old boy! He improved his English. He made new friends. He experienced a new and different world in the beautiful state of Maine — one that was open, free and full of opportunity. He returned to Gaza after this month-long excursion full of hope.
But the second intifada irrupted only two months after he returned home from the US, at the start of his first year of high school. Israel’s brutal attempt to crush the intifada was felt throughout the occupied West Bank and Gaza. “There was no space,” Ahmad explained, describing how the Israeli offensive affected every aspect of personal life for the Palestinian individual. Student life was only one such casualty.
It became dangerous to go to school. It became impossible to have a normal education. In his three years of high school, Ahmad’s school was shelled by Israeli tanks six times, twice while students were inside.
“Each day we would have demonstrations against the attacks in Gaza and the West Bank because we had so many martyrs … No school. Just demonstrations … You had to go and demonstrate against the horrible attacks against these children and kids everywhere.”
Still, despite all the madness, the students clung as much as they could to their vocation. They would loyally go to school, as much as circumstance allowed. But even this effort was frequently quashed. Too often the students would trek to school only to find it closed. They would ask the reasons for the closures. The answers became the soul-grating refrain of their lives.
Why?
Because Israeli tanks are getting close to the school and there is no school today.
Why?
Because people in our city have been martyred and there are demonstrations so there will be no school today.
Why?
Because the tanks have closed off Beit Hanoun and the teachers cannot come from outside. So we’ll have no school today.
It was in this environment that Ahmad and his classmates (the ones who were not killed) came to their third and final year of high school in 2003. It is during this final year that students take their tawjihi exam which determines their entire future studies and career.
“Tawjihi,” Ahmad aptly described, “is like a stage between life.”
Tawjihi year began normal enough — for a Palestinian in Gaza, that is. Normal attacks. Normal shootings. Normal curfews. But the last two months before the exams began the Israeli army laid siege on Beit Hanoun. No one could enter. No one could leave. Everyday there were attacks and explosions. Everyday there were injuries and martyrs.
“We didn’t study, actually,” said Ahmad, “Nothing. You cannot study [when] people are dying,” he explained.
Yet their exams were approaching. The first day of examination was 9 June 2003 — and the Israeli army was still in Beit Hanoun.
“What do we do?” said Ahmad. “We need to take our exams. So we decided to go to school even though the Israeli tanks were at the doors outside the school.”
So they went. Despite the fact that they hadn’t prepared at all due to the siege and the killings. Examinations went on for a month. Every day the students went. And every day the Israeli tanks were at the doors of the school.
It was the worst month, Ahmad said. All your time in high school you wait to prepare and do well on these final examinations, only, in the last moments, to be prevented from studying because your city is under attack.
The soldiers left after 67 days of siege. And then their exam results came in.
“I passed,” said Ahmad, “my average was 83.5. So very good.”
Yet, at the same time, he added, “You don’t know what is going on. You just go and study for a life you’ve been dreaming about. But then you find you can’t have it because of obstacles put up by enemies. And these are horrible obstacles. They’re not just any kind of obstacles that anyone could pass.
“It’s war everywhere. And people are dying everywhere. And you just don’t know. Maybe it’s your turn. I mean, we believe in God, and we know everyone is going to die. But when it goes on so continuously, every day there is attacks, you just keep worrying about it. So the feeling was, what should I be doing? Should I go fight and resist? Should I go study as a way to resist, as a better way of resistance? Should I just stay afraid, doing nothing, with my family?”
“I started to believe that maybe the power from my education in the future will be greater than the power of a stone against a tank. I asked myself a million times, if I should do the same [and take up throwing stones at the Israeli tanks like some of the Palestinian youth]. Even if it was a little thing.
“Some people say it’s stupid, a stone against a tank. But it’s their will and determination [that counts]. It comes from deep inside. That you are not afraid from anything, whatever it may be. You just want to fight, resist, for your rights. Even if it takes your life, takes everything; I believe that it’s my right and I have to do it.”
That is one way to resist. But Ahmad decided to resist through his education.
“I had to take care of my family. Reach what my parents wanted of me. They wanted us to be educated, get a good life, good jobs, have a good place in the community. They wanted us to help them and help people. So that was the final, or not the final, but a decision that I made.
“You are feeling many things, but you have to go on, to keep going. The only way is to just keep fighting, through your education, and your dreams, and your beliefs. That was the feeling.
“But I never felt like I have to give up. I didn’t find a way that told me, you just need to give up now. And every time a bad thing happened, or a disaster happened, it gave me more power to continue.
“Because this life became normal for us — an abnormal life for other people became the normal for us. So we had to figure out another way of life for us. It’s our reality. We had to face reality, however it was. So it helped us to figure out that life, in spite of all this.
“And all the challenges that we are facing, and all the power that is fighting and destroying everything here in Gaza, we still need to keep going. It’s not going to stop us. Because if we stop, it wont help us. [The Israelis] will keep going. Whether or not we stop, they will try to get what they want. So why give them more opportunities to get what they want? We need also to continue.”
He paused at the end of this grand soliloquy. “How difficult it was,” he said softly.
But the difficulty continued as he moved on to get his bachelor of arts in information technology at a university in Gaza.
“I faced troubles when I was in high school because of the intifada but they increased at university,” Ahmad explained. “Beit Hanoun is the most violent area in Gaza Strip because it is very close to the [Israeli] border so there were usually attacks. Every day we had events. People killed. People injured. Homes destroyed. Lands demolished. My father’s farm was bulldozed four or five times. Most of my relatives’ homes were targeted.
“Most of the semesters I couldn’t attend many lectures because of the usual attacks on my city. There were weekly attacks, sometimes daily attacks so I could not leave home; it was not safe to leave. And I’d also have to stay home when there were other attacks around the city, or around the university.”
Many times he wasn’t even able to attend final exams.
“I’d just keep studying throughout the semester and when it was exam time, attacks would happen in Beit Hanoun and friends and relatives were killed, [so I’d miss the exams]. I was supposed to graduate in 2008, but I graduated in 2009, one year late because of these attacks. Attacks which have never stopped. Even now. Especially in my city.”
Ahmad was finally set to graduate in December 2008, but once again larger events intervened.
“The end of December turned out to be the beginning of a war, not the beginning of final exams. It was a big, I don’t know how to describe it,” he said. “It was like, ‘here is a gift for graduation: You won’t graduate. Just keep waiting for death.'”
His month of exams was exchanged for a month of terror.
“It was 23 days,” he said, “but you can say 23 weeks. Twenty-three months. Twenty-three years. Twenty-three centuries. It never ends. You keep waiting, moment by moment. And you know nothing. You can only feel the darkness. There is no light, for any kind of hope, or safety, or human rights, or whatever. Just 23 days full of darkness. Full of horror. Full of victims. Massacres. Everything bad. I cannot find words to describe it.”
But those days did pass. And he found enough strength to pick himself up out of the rubble and finish the mission he began. He graduated, at last, this past spring. But not without sacrifice and loss that no one should ever have to endure.
“These five years in university, I said and will keep saying forever,” Ahmad concluded, “these five years were the most horrible years of my life. Even though they’re supposed to be the best years, the nice years. The time to go out and discover life. But it wasn’t discovering life. It was discovering disasters, actually, here in Gaza.”
Marryam Haleem is a senior at the University of Wisconsin studying philosophy and comparative literature and spent this summer in Gaza doing research for her senior thesis.
Barack and Michelle Obama dine with Edward and Mariam Said at a 1998 Arab community event in Chicago
Dear Mr President,
You will probably not read this letter due to your busy schedule and the huge number of messages you receive from presidents, kings, princes, sheiks, and prime ministers. Who is a Palestinian academic from Gaza, after all, to have the guts and write an open letter to the president of the United States of America?
What has triggered this letter is a picture of your excellency sitting with the late Palestinian intellectual Edward Said. That, of course, happened before 2004, i.e. before you underwent a process of metamorphosis which I personally think is unprecedented in history. Seeing you with Edward Said, I must say, surprised me. Said, a true public intellectual must have said something to you about the suffering of the Palestinian people. In the picture, you and your wife seem to be listening attentively, and admiringly, to him. But the point remains; did you really understand his eloquent, passionate defense of the rights of the indigenous inhabitants of Palestine? Judging from your recent policy shifts, I very much doubt it. It is precisely the incongruity between the photograph and these policy shifts that has prompted this letter.
Mr President,
The whole world celebrated your election as the first African-American president of the US. I did not. Neither did the inhabitants of the concentration camp where I live. Your sympathetic visit to Sderot—an Israeli town which was the Palestinian village of Najd until 1948 when its people were ethnically cleansed—three years after your first visit to a Kibbutz in northern Israel in support of its residents, and after your pledge to be committed to the security of the State of Israel and its “right” to retain unified Jerusalem as the capital city of the Jewish people—to give but few examples—were all clear indications of where your heart lies.
Another reason for the writing of this letter is shock at the indifference and arrogance with which Secretary of State Hillary Clinton dismissed Palestinian concerns about Israel’s illegal Jewish-only settlements in the West Bank. Only a few weeks ago you made the admirable statement that all Jewish settlement must halt, and you made it clear that this included expansion of existing settlements as well as the construction of new settlements. However, when Netanyahu let it be known that he had no intention of stopping settlements, you missed an historic opportunity to draw a line: no more billions and no more weapons for Israel unless and until this condition is met. Now Clinton has the Herculean task of pretending that your position on Jewish settlements has not changed, although it is clear you have chosen not to use the very real power at your disposal to bring Israeli policy into line.
About six months after your election, you gave a speech in Cairo, addressed to the Arab and Islamic worlds; which some people found impressive. I found it impressive in form, but not in substance because your actions have not matched your rhetoric. Why did I not buy the new language of the new American administration? Because while you were giving your speech, we were burying my neighbor, a terminally ill patient, who needed treatment in a hospital abroad, since, thanks to the siege imposed by your own administration and Israel on the Gaza Strip, the facilities that would have saved his life are not available in Gaza. Like more than 400 terminally ill people in Gaza, my neighbor lost his life. In spite of the fine Arabic words of peace, “salaam aleikum,” you made it crystal clear that the point of reference in any negotiations in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is Israel’s security. By doing that, Mr President, you are effectively marginalizing the whole issue of Palestine, and unfortunately setting the stage for renewed Israeli assaults against a starving Gaza, an entity that has, thanks to your “unbreakable” ties with Israel, been transformed into the largest concentration camp on earth.
Your failure to support the Goldstone report, your indifference, not to say your contribution, to Palestinian suffering and the process of “politicide” against the Palestinian people of Gaza is, to say the least, unfathomable, coming from a man who listened so earnestly to Edward Said. Your advisors must have told you about the cutting off of medicine, food and fuel to the concentration camp where I live. Patients in need of dialysis and other urgent medical treatment are dying every single day. A majority of our children, many the same age as your two beautiful daughters, are badly undernourished.
You must have skimmed through the executive summary of the Goldstone report detailing the horror inflicted on 1.5 million civilians for 22 days, horror caused by F16s, Apache helicopters, and phosphorus bombs made in American factories. Hundreds of children were burnt to death by phosphorus bombs; pregnant women were brutally targeted in what Israeli soldiers boasted of on their T-Shirts: “One bullet, Two kills.” And yet, not a single word of sympathy, Mr President! Edward Said had this to say upon his first visit to Gaza: “It’s the most terrifying place I’ve ever been in… it’s a horrifyingly sad place because of the desperation and misery of the way people live. I was unprepared for camps that are much worse than anything I saw in South Africa.” This was back in 1993, Mr President, before conditions dramatically deteriorated. Gaza has now become, as the leading Israeli human rights organization B’tselem describes it, “the largest prison on Earth.”
Mr Obama,
Unlike your predecessor, you seem to be a smart man. You must have realized that a two-state solution has been rendered impossible by Israeli colonization of the West Bank, by the war on Gaza, by the construction of the apartheid wall, by the expansion of so-called Greater Jerusalem, and by the increase in the number of Jewish settlers in the West Bank. You must have realized also that there are six million refugees, most of whom live in miserable conditions waiting for courageous, visionary leaders committed to true democracy, human rights and international law to implement UN resolution 194. And yet, you and your secretary of state, like every US president since 1967, have decided to support Israel in creating conditions that made the two-state solution impossible, impractical and unjust.
Were you a supporter of the bantustan system in South Africa under the apartheid system? Are you opposed to equal rights and the transformation of Israel/Palestine into a state for all its citizens? The two-state solution means the bantustanization of Palestine, a solution you, to our knowledge, never supported for South Africa. Are you, Mr President, opposed to civic democracy, which is the demand of most Palestinian civil society and grassroots organizations? This is what your role models, Martin Luther King Jr and Steve Biko, died for. Was Nelson Mandela wrong to spend 27 years of his life in pursuit of justice by demanding equality for the indigenous people of South Africa? Do you realize that what you are supporting in the Middle East is a racist solution par excellence? A solution based on ethnic nationalism. Your secretary of state and envoy to the Middle East, unashamedly, stood with beaming smiles next to Israeli Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman, who not only defends openly the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians, but also calls for a new genocide in Gaza. Do you realize, Mr President, that this Hitlerite fascist might become Israel’s next prime minister, thanks to your administration’s complacency and support?
Our only immediate demand is that your administration ensures that Israel fulfills its obligations in terms of international law. Is that too much to ask?
Mr President Barack Hussein Obama,
We, the Palestinian people, are fed up!
Sincerely,
Professor Haidar Eid
Gaza, Palestine
The author is an independent political commentator and professor in the Department of English Literature at Al-Aqsa University in Gaza.
Long denied cement, a sparse few are able to improvise with over-expensive, tunnel-delivered Egyptian cement. The others simply bury under the sand. Most of these sand-graves in Jabaliya’s Faluja cemetary are from the Israeli massacre of Gaza nearly a year ago. The same inadequate graves can be found in cemetaries across Gaza.
In the Gaza War cemetary, roughly 360 graves were damaged in the Israeli massacre, according to the cemetary groundsman, Ibrahim Jeradeh. He says the majority of the damage was from shelling in the areas around the cemetary, as it lies withine 2km of the eastern border between Gaza Palestine and Israel.
Yet, these graves, mainly of British and Commonwealth soldiers who died in the 1st and 2nd world wars, are well-kept and have the funding, and wasta (sway with authorities) needed to have cement allotted to their repair.
The graveyards of Christian and Muslim Palestinians have no such pull, meaning they abound with sandy pits as photographed. Further, a number of cemetaries sustained considerable damage from intentional Israeli bulldozing and shelling of the graveyards.
Walking through the Faluja cemetary, vivid memories of the day after overcome me. The day after the Fakoura school attack, when the bodies, tiny and eldery, were carried on sheets of aluminum, planks of scrap wood, blown off doors…to the overcrowded graveyard in Beit Lahia, that day also overcrowded with mourners. Collective grief hung in the air. These images will never be erased from my memory. Like the elderly father scraping at sand and earth with his bare hands, burying one of his children. Like the many tiny graves marked simply by cement blocks, stones, or plants. Like the teen, sitting on a sand mound, mourning, his jacket covered with LOVE. The irony. So much love here, but so many tragedies.
