October 8th, 2015 | International Solidarity Movement, Gaza team | Gaza Strip, occupied Palestine
Israeli Forces shot and killed a 23 year old on Friday, the 6th of October, in demonstrations east of Khan Younis in the southern part of the Gaza strip. The man was identified by The Ministry of Health in Gaza as Salameh Moussa Abu Jame and was the 75th Palestinian to be killed since the beginning of October. Five others were injured in the clashes, from a combination of tear-gas and live ammunition.
Furthermore, in demonstrations in Nahel Oz and Karni border crossing, both in the area of Shijaia, Israeli forces shot tear gas and live ammunition at the civilian demonstrators injuring 30.
Palestinian youths at the demonstration in the Shijaia area.
31st October 2015 | International Solidarity Movement, Gaza team | Gaza Strip, occupied Palestine
Images from clashes yesterday, October 30th in Nahel Oz (Shijaia), Occupied Gaza Strip. All photos credited to ISM, Gaza.
By the end of clashes yesterday, Minister of Health Dr. Qadra announced 46 people had been injured, including paramedics. Israeli forces met the demonstrators – who were armed only with stones – with teargas and live ammunition. A photographer is in critical condition having been shot in the chest and in further contravention of international law, an ambulance was shot at in Khan Younis, wounding a paramedic.
Confrontations between Israeli Forces and youth were recorded throughout the Gaza Strip, including in Bureij, Beit Hanoun and Khan Younis. Since October 9th, 17 people have been killed in Gaza and 831 wounded as the brutality of Israeli forces throughtout the occupied territories continues to escalate.
30th October 2015 | International Solidarity Movement, Gaza team | Khuzaa, Gaza Strip, occupied Palestine
Almost a year and a half after the Zionist massacre of Gaza ended, most families in Khuzaa are still waiting for international aid and materials for reconstruction.
A typical caravan in Khuzaa, built from precarious materials. Photo credit ISM
Many of these families are living with their relatives or renting another home. However, many others don’t have a place to go and don’t have the financial resources to pay rent, being left with no choice but to continue surviving in the caravans that were donated, when the aggression was over, as an interim measure.
Last winter several persons died in those caravans due to the cold weather and all of the families suffered from floods during the rainstorms.
After the strong rains of that week ISM Gaza visited some of the families. Tired of giving interviews that don’t bring any improvement to their situation, they explain how the last rains destroyed even more of their caravans.
Zuraya Mohamed Abu Reeda, refugee from Jaffa, finds herself surviving alone in one of them. Her sons live with their families in new wooden caravans that were donated by Qatar, but she prefers to stay here, as she says that her son’s caravans are already too overcrowded.
The last rains opened a hole in the roof of her caravan and flooded the entire kitchen.
The roof of Zuraya Mohammed Abu Reeda’s kitchen torn by the pressure of the rain. Photo credit ISM
In another caravan lives Fatima Abdel Aziz Qudaih, 70 years old, with her daughter.
The last rains completely destroyed the bathroom of her caravan, and as a result all the sewage waters flooded the caravan and its surroundings. The smell is very strong outside and inside the caravan.
The bathroom in Fatima Abdel Aziz Qudaih’s home with the floor broken from the pressure of the floods. Photo credit ISM
All the families that still survive in the caravans have lost all hope. They lost their homes, spent their savings, and more than a year after the aggression was over no one has offered them a solution.
A kitchen as seen inside one of the caravans were the people of Khuzaa continue to struggle. Photo credit ISM
23rd October 2015 | International Solidarity Movement, Gaza team | Gaza Strip, occupied Palestine
Images from clashes today in Nahel Oz (Shijaia), Occupied Gaza strip.
More than 20 Palestinians were injured in the Gaza strip today from a combination of live ammunition and teargas inhalation. Journalists and paramedics were targeted during the clashes, at least one seriously injured.
One Palestinian man, of unconfirmed identity, also passed away due to injuries sustained during clashes a week ago. The total number of injured in all of the Gaza Strip rose to 65 by the end of the day.
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.
