Tag: Gaza

Joy and shame at Rafah

International Movement to Open the Rafah Border

16 July 2009

Yesterday, July 15, should have been a day of rejoicing here at Rafah Gate because the Viva Palestina convoy had finally been authorized to enter Gaza, but it turned into a nightmare for the many Palestinian families held up on the Egyptian side. Finally, at 10 pm we were smiling again when we saw Jenny Linnel and Nathalie Abu Chakra, two members of ISM-Gaza come through the Gate. The Egyptians had been denying them entry because they had arrived in Gaza on board the ships of the Free Gaza movement.

For those who don’t know the Rafah Gate, the frontier between Egypt and Gaza is situated in the middle of nowhere– 2 kilometers from Rafah. There is no hotel; the Egyptian police have closed the town to foreigners and have installed dozens of checkpoints—I would say one every 50 meters! And you can’t tell me it’s to stop contraband headed to Gaza because all the pathways leading to the tunnels are wide open.

Large numbers of Palestinian families denied entry for weeks on end–or longer—are forced to live in hotels in El Arish, a seaside resort 40 kilometers from the border. Because it’s high season, the hotels have hiked up their rates, so it costs these families a fortune. And that’s without the taxi fares. The price of a taxi between El Arish and Rafah is anywhere from 35 to more than 100 Egyptian pounds, and if you want to avoid the checkpoints, it can run to close to 300 pounds.

Among these families are Palestinians living abroad who have come to visit their families, to attend weddings; others are returning from hospital stays in Egypt or abroad; there are also young people who have finished their studies etc….Everyone has his or her own story.

Elated at news of the arrival of the Viva Palestina convoy, many of these families, exhausted and in debt, came today to try their luck at Rafah, hoping that the Egyptian police would be more lenient and that they might be able to get some help from members of the convoy.

But that was, unfortunately, not the case: for these families the day turned into a nightmare. They had arrived early in order not to miss the convoy, so they waited all day in the scorching sun. The first members of the convoy began to arrive around 2 pm in buses under heavy security.

Then the horror began: at this very moment, the Egyptian riot police set upon the Palestinian families them and began forcibly evacuating them. People were shouting, screaming, weeping—and the cops kept on beating them savagely.

We tried to slip into Rafah Gate in the midst of the confusion. We even succeeded, but were then dragged back out.

The scene we were witnessing was once again so shocking that Iman, furious, was shouting insults at Mubarak and his minions.

Laila got into one of the buses and called for the help of the members of the convoy, but they replied that there was nothing they could do. “We want to get into Gaza and we don’t want any trouble.”

A man in the bus called out, “I’m a Palestinian.” And one Palestinian woman, stuck in Egypt for many days couldn’t help saying to him, “Oh, fine, you’re a Palestinian from America and I’m a Palestinian from Gaza. You can get in and I am not even allowed to return to my home in Gaza.” By then the Egyptian police had arrived and they pulled Leila and this woman out of the bus.

No contact between Palestinians and foreigners. That has been the order of the day every day since we pitched our tents here at Rafah.

We can understand the attitude of the members of this impressive convoy, with its buses, refrigerator trucks and vans. It has been so difficult for them to get this far with half of their humanitarian aid(the other half was confiscated in Alexandria) that it was hard for them to jeopardize delivery of the remaining supplies by attempting to help the people they were watching being beaten up before their very eyes. They would have been heavily penalized—they would have been refused entry into Gaza.

How can one comprehend Egyptian policy? How can one understand these Egyptian policemen who viciously beat the Palestinians and treat them like sub-humans, like enemies? Why prevent the Palestinians from returning to their own homes? Who gives the orders? Why not tell them what procedures they need to follow? And, by the way, is there one? We have asked these questions countless times, and each time we got a different answer. The only thing we are sure of is that the Egyptian authorities are pathologically corrupt, that they collaborate willingly with the Zionist entity and that they lie to their police force and army units to make sure they keep mistreating the Palestinians.

We are going to wait for the return of the Viva Palestina convoy and we hope they will not be satisfied with 24 hours in Gaza, because the border is still closed, especially for Palestinians.

PS : A good news : Kefiah Ib Mousa Hamed, the Palestinian woman with kidney problems we found lying on the ground in front of Rafah gate some days ago came back and was the only one to be allowed to enter into Gaza.

Free Gaza–and Palestine

Huwaida Arraf | The Nation

17 July 2009

Last month I led a group of twenty-one human rights workers on a boat from Cyprus to challenge Israel’s naval blockade of the Gaza Strip. We carried toys, medicine, olive tree saplings, toolkits, a fifty-kilo bag of cement and school supplies on our small converted ferry boat.

At 2 AM on June 30, almost eighteen hours into the 230-mile journey, a colleague awakened me. The Israeli Navy was calling our boat on the VHF radio. “You are navigating towards a blockaded area. You are hereby ordered to change your course. If you do not, we will be forced to use all necessary force to stop you.”

Nervous after a previous boat of ours was dangerously rammed at sea in December by the Israeli military, I replied, “Israeli Navy, this is Arion (the registered name of our ship). We are twenty-one unarmed civilians carrying aid for the Palestinian people of Gaza. Any blockade on Gaza is unlawful as you are the occupying force in the territory and are therefore responsible for the well-being of the civilian population there. As our boat, its cargo, and the twenty-one civilians on board do not constitute any kind of threat to Israel or its armed forces, you are obliged to allow us entry. We are proceeding to Gaza. Do not use force against us.”

Shortly thereafter our navigational systems were disabled for nearly four hours as the warnings continued. In their “final” warning to us, the Israeli Navy threatened to open fire. “Israeli Navy, we are unarmed civilians; do not use force against us. Do not shoot.” We did not stop.

We were boarded by force. Before we were separated, I saw Navy forces grabbing my husband, Adam, a filmmaker who has made documentaries from Palestine to Darfur, about the neck. Later, I learned that outside of my view, these government-sanctioned pirates pummeled Adam in order to wrest his videocamera from his grasp.

Though I know it could not have been easy for him, Adam did not fight back. He was a multi-sport athlete in high school, threw out Manny Ramirez stealing second and is one of those rare individuals who bring a football player’s intensity to peace work. But like the rest of us, Adam insists on using nonviolent means to resist Israel’s military occupation. And though in his widely hailed Cairo speech President Obama made an implicit call for nonviolence as the means to challenge the Israeli occupation, the Obama administration made no public statement on our behalf — nor did it do so three months ago, when my dear friend Bassem Abu Rahme was killed while nonviolently protesting Israeli expansionism in the West Bank that threatens to destroy his village of Bil’in.

Perhaps we were politically inept. Had we sailed toward Iran to offer assistance to civilian protesters there, we would have been a cause celebre if the Iranian government had arrested us. Iran, however, for all its troubles, is not now under foreign occupation as Palestine is. Yet as I watched the demonstrations in Iran, I could not miss the similarities to Palestine’s nonviolent resistance to Israeli occupation. I cannot count the times I have marched peacefully, waving a flag and demanding freedom for my people — with only my voice and my presence as my weapons. And sadly, the number of friends I have lost — killed by Israeli forces as, like Neda Agha-Soltan in Iran, they nonviolently demonstrated for freedom — is becoming too great a pain in my heart.

My colleagues and I invested time and energy in this difficult journey and put our lives at risk because for too long the international community has been complicit in Israel’s crimes against the Palestinian people. For too long, diplomats and world leaders have paid lip service to Palestinian human rights. For too long, the Palestinian people have been told to wait — wait in the checkpoint line, wait on the peace process, wait to have your rights recognized, wait for freedom.

Students I met on a recent successful voyage to Gaza certainly did not want to wait to be slowly suffocated and drained of their dreams. So desperate were they to escape their confinement in Gaza to obtain higher education abroad that they asked us to drop them in international waters and they would swim the rest of the way to Cyprus. This was youthful madness, but indicative of how trapped people in Gaza are today.

I was born in the blanket of freedom of the United States. My parents immigrated here, knowing that I could not be free in my homeland. But today I use my freedom to struggle as a Palestinian for my friends and relatives who endure the yokes of occupation, oppression, discrimination, exile, internment and apartheid.

Most Palestinians in the occupied territories have not lived a day free of Israel’s occupation, and Palestinian citizens of Israel continue to live as a discriminated-against minority. Just the other day, Israel’s housing minister, Ariel Atias, declared, “We can all be bleeding hearts, but I think it is unsuitable [for Jews and Palestinians] to live together [in Israel].

This is the Israel the United States funds with billions each year. Under the leadership of President Obama–or any American president, for that matter–support for this sort of raw bigotry makes no sense and is antithetical to our most cherished principles. Yet when Israeli leaders utter such contemptible language it is ignored. When Israeli soldiers fire lethal weapons at unarmed, peaceful protesters it is too often ignored. When Israeli naval boats become pirate ships — boarding a vessel that poses them no threat, arresting and beating American citizens–it is ignored.

It is ignored and Israel continues to enjoy the patronage of the United States and to present itself as a moral beacon for the world. But my generation finds racist language like that of Atias’–and the actions that result from such outdated thinking–abhorrent.

We find it unacceptable that Palestinians continue to be asked to wait, to improve our self-government and to be patient as we build ourselves toward the same rights that people elsewhere take for granted. With the fourth Palestinian generation born into refugee camps, with a new generation in Gaza being raised poorer and more desperate than the last, with my land being carved and sliced and walled for the exclusive benefit of one ethno-religious group, I say we cannot wait.

The question facing the world now must no longer be about where to squeeze a Palestinian state. The only relevant question is how to advance the immediate freedom of ten million Palestinians. There can be no more waiting, no more prevaricating, no more negotiations on that simple, beautiful human concept–freedom.

We will be free. President Obama can expedite the process by putting pressure on Israel, or he can sideline himself and the process for the next eight years. Sooner or later, however, Israel’s subjugation of us will be overturned. The current situation is untenable. Whether we live in two states or one state with equal rights for all–as in South Africa and, indeed, the United States–we will achieve our freedom. What South Africa was to students in the 1980s, Palestine is fast becoming to younger generations increasingly repulsed by the entrenchment of Israel’s dual system of law, domination of another people and ongoing confinement of 1.5 million Palestinians to a tiny parcel of land in Gaza.

So, yes, this was only one tiny humanitarian boat to Gaza. But Israel’s heavy-handed action shows how much is at stake and how shaky Israel’s grip over another people becomes when the world’s citizens speak out and take action–even as governments fall short.

Malnutrition begins to bite

Eva Bartlett | Inter Press Service

15 July 2009

“There are some people who buy frozen meat, because it’s much cheaper: 20 shekels (five dollars) per kilo versus 60 shekels for fresh beef.”

According to the 45-year-old father of ten, while business is in general terrible, the better days are early in the month, when those with salaried jobs often receive their pay.

“On average, I might make 200 shekels a day in the first five days of the new month. Before the siege, it was 450 shekels a day. I do have some more regular customers. But they have no money. They keep a tab, and pay when they can.”

Like many Palestinians, Jerjowi used to work in Israel. “When Israel closed the borders, I had no work. So I opened a butcher shop.”

On a normal day, Jerjowi says he only earns at best 100 shekels, not enough to cover the rent of his shop – 4,000 dollars a year – nor that of his family’s homes. “My three sons are all married. Together, our house rents are 200 shekels per month. We’re not earning that money. And there are daily expenses, like electricity and water.”

With unemployment rates at 50 percent in Gaza, and 80 percent of Gazan Palestinians dependent on food aid hand-outs, it’s no wonder that Jerjowi’s business isn’t booming.

But the problem lies not only with Gaza’s siege-shattered economy and the great poverty this has created; it is also the scarcity of beef.

After the three weeks of the Israeli air, land and sea bombardment which killed over 1,400 people, Gaza’s agricultural sector is devastated, and that includes the beef farmers. The United Nations Development Project reports that 17 percent of Gaza’s livestock and nearly ten percent of the poultry were killed during the war. And even before the Israeli attacks, in November 2008 Gaza’s Ministry of Agriculture was already warning of a “real food disaster” due to the siege on animal feed and livestock, directly affecting the well-being of what livestock did exist in Gaza.

Gazan Palestinians have tried to make up for the deficit of cattle by bringing calves and sheep through the tunnels from Egypt. Yet, the prices are high, above the budgets of most.

On Jun. 19, for the first time since Oct. 31 2008, Israel allowed livestock into Gaza: 15 trucks. This number falls far below not only the nutritional needs of Gaza’s residents, but also the capacity of the border crossing to receive trucks.

In 2008 and 2007, according to the Office for Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) the monthly total of livestock trucks entering Gaza varied from 20 to 207, keeping with the trend of severely restricting Gaza’s livestock imports under the Israeli-led siege.

Prior to Jun. 19, the only cattle shipment overland into Gaza was on Oct. 31 2008, with a monthly total 78 trucks…to last nearly nine months. The Coordinator of the Israeli Government Activities in the Territories (COGAT) previously suggested an amount of 300 cows weekly as the minimum for the nutrition of Gaza’s 1.5 million people.

According to the UN and various non-governmental organisations, the trickle of goods entering Gaza now is just a quarter of that prior to the siege, the majority of which is limited to basic food aid items. The aid-dependent families have moved from a balanced diet to one consisting mainly of sugar and carbohydrates, lacking in vitamins and proteins.

The World Health Organisation (WHO) cites an increase in growth-stunting malnourishment, now at over 10 percent of children, attributed to a chronic lack of protein, iron, and essential vitamins. The WHO further warns of increasing anaemia rates: 65 percent among children below 12 months of age, and 35 percent among pregnant women.

The United Nations Children’s Fund (Unicef), the World Health Organisation (WHO), and Gaza’s Ard Al-Insan centre for nutrition, among various bodies, note the link between malnutrition and a deficiency of protein and vegetables in the diet.

An International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) June 2009 report notes that the effects of a restricted diet also include “difficulty in fighting off infections, fatigue and a reduced capacity to learn.” The ICRC warns of the long-term ramifications on Gaza’s malnourished children.

In June 2009, 38 NGOs, including Oxfam, Care World Vision, and UN bodies, called for an end to the siege, citing the need for normalised trade with Gaza. The ICRC June report likewise called for resumption of imports and exports, but warned that the situation has deteriorated to an extent that Gaza will need years to recover.

For Yousef al Jerjowi, who has scaled down his opening hours due to the lack of customers, the siege couldn’t end soon enough. Jerjowi’s three sons work in his shop, saving him 40 shekels daily wages for an employee. “If my sons didn’t work here, I’d have to close the shop.”

‘Who will hold us accountable?’

Natalie Abou Shakra | Electronic Intifada

15 July 2009

I will never forget the image of the elderly woman whose son was dying in a hospital in Egypt. She only wanted to be with him. Crying, her hand touching the glass window of the office of the Egyptian intelligence services, she pleaded, “Please, please. I beg you, show mercy, let me go in.” Another woman sat by the State Security office, looking up at an officer blocking her path. “You promised to let me in,” she said with her soft, tired and drained voice. “Please let me in” she repeated calmly with her tired voice, then she looked at me with wide, tearful, sad eyes.

I came to Gaza a week before Israel’s winter invasion began. After seven months, I spent two days at Rafah crossing with the Egyptian authorities refusing to allow me to return to Lebanon, despite having all the necessary coordination documents, approval and permission from the Egyptian Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

The Egyptian authorities made people wait in the arrival hall at the Rafah crossing, sitting on filthy floors where names for either the entry to Egypt or to return to Gaza were called by the voices of aggressive Egyptian police officers, or state security or intelligence personnel. After hours of waiting, two officers headed towards us: “you are being returned to Gaza.” “No!” we would reply, “We have coordination documents!” But, the officers and intelligence personnel grew angrier and threw the papers in our faces humiliatingly: “This means nothing! Move on! Hurry!”

After being asked numerous times “what were you doing in Palestine for seven months,” I answered the intelligence officer simply, “what you didn’t do.” Another officer asked, “How did you come to Gaza?” “By the boats” I replied, referring to the Free Gaza Movement ship that brought me. “So, now you know why you … can’t leave,” he answered back.

It was a simple message to the Free Gaza Movement and anyone hoping to break the siege: they and the Palestinians will be punished. Yet, it must be done, something must be said, this injustice cannot be allowed to stand in silence, whatever the price. And there is a huge price to pay — that of not being able to go back.

As I was explaining the situation to someone on the phone, a sick, elderly Palestinian man fell to the ground unconscious. I approached as a state security officer began dragging the elderly man across the floor. I was intercepted by Said, the intelligence officer, who pointed his finger at me and said in a cruel and wicked tone, “I will make sure you will never get out of here.” I countered, quoting the Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish, “all that you have done to our people is registered in notebooks.” He replied in a vindictive tone, “Really? Who will hold us accountable?”

I watched as my International Solidarity Movement (ISM) colleague Jenny was dragged across the floor by security officers screaming, “Get off of me! Get off of me!” I watched her disappear behind a wall as I clung to a window and the officers came for me. I looked at each of the men in the eye, knowing I had to humanize them to humanize myself. I asked them, “You have a daughter my age? I am 21.” There was no reply. I tried again, “Would you accept your daughter being treated this way? I am your daughter, and your daughter and your daughter.” I was pulled away by my wrists and dragged along the dirty floor, and the man dragging me said, “You are lucky my shoe is not in your mouth.”

At Rafah, I saw a voiceless Palestinian man in a wheelchair being pulled and shaken. I watched women begging on their knees, children and the elderly sitting on dirty floors. And all us were dragged by the Egyptian security officers and thrown out.

At Rafah I also saw laughter and love. A little girl on a bus asked her mother, “Can we gather a shekel from each to give to the Egyptians to pass through?” I watched as people shared bread and water, share laughter as well as pain and tears. Yes, we laughed. Laughter and love under the bombs, to laugh and love under racism, degradation, humiliation, by monsters clad in the uniforms of a brotherly Arab state.

Coming from Lebanon to Gaza initially seemed surreal. Larnaca, Cyprus was the checkpoint, and the sea was the road to Palestine. In the beginning, breaking the siege was all that came to mind. It was almost three years to the medieval, hermetic siege that the apartheid state of Israel had imposed on Gaza’s million and a half residents. All I thought of then was: Israel, the occupation, the monster. But, the monster, as I later became aware, was not one but many, who were all devouring the souls of Palestinians in Gaza. The official Arab regimes were sharing the crimes that Israel was committing. These regimes, especially Egypt, are not complicit — their participation is direct, clear, observable, noticeable, felt and lived directly, and therefore has transcended complicity into direct participation.

In Gaza, I have lived the “quintessential Palestinian experience.” I have lived a nakba, a man-made disaster, a disease of hatred, racism to the bone. In Gaza, I have lived under occupation, a brutal, savage blockade. The epitome of the Palestinian experience comes in what historian Rashid Khalidi says is lived “at a border, an airport, a checkpoint … at any one of those modern barriers where identities are checked and verified.” It is what the eminent Palestinian novelist Ghassan Kanafani described in Men in the Sun. It is Laila El-Haddad’s description of how she and her children lived suspended, humiliated, and stranded in a Cairo airport waiting and wanting to return home to Gaza.

It is the experience of every Palestinian. I became a Gazan — I am now a refugee, a prisoner. I am now, as El-Haddad explained, holding a passport “that allows no passage. A passport that denied me entry … to mark me, brand me, so that I am easily identified and cast aside without questions; it is convenient for those giving the orders. It is a system for the collective identification of those with no identification.”

I came to stand with the suffering, besieged Palestinians in the Gaza Strip. I came to learn from their resistance, in all its forms, and to fight hand in hand with local activists in acts of non-violent civil resistance. After all, I came from a supposed “resisting Lebanon” and therefore, resistance was no stranger to me. I came to Gaza to confront the occupation and know it through a window other than that of the biased petrol-dollar media of our times. And I did.

I learned that the Arab regimes were Israel’s best friends in the region, not out of love of the colonizer, but out of the intense hatred they hold for the Palestinians and their own people. Oh, Palestinians, you are on your own! Where has the cause of Jerusalem gone? It was certainly not in the eyes, hearts and minds of those intelligence agents and members of the security services based at the Rafah crossing, one of Gaza prison’s gates. All I could find there was hate.

The psychological and physical torture Palestinians are subjected to at the Rafah crossing is a clear message from the Egyptian authorities. It is intended to frighten and punish the Palestinian people and all those who stand in solidarity with them. The Egyptian authorities at the crossing violated our basic human rights, a daily reality for Palestinians. The degrading and the humiliating manner in which we were treated also violated our rights as women.

During my time in Gaza, as in July 2006 in Lebanon, I endured a hellish assault and massacre designed to break a people but which once again only revealed the criminality of the apartheid regime and the complicity of the international community. Gaza is our South Africa, our Guernica. The Palestinian people exceed their unworthy leadership, and if there is a victory it is that of the people who endured, who drank tea above the rubble of their destroyed homes, who still stand up high, steadfastly against their uprooted olive trees, against occupation, betrayal, complicit silence, and neglect.

Natalie Abou Shakra is an activist from Lebanon and is affiliated with the International Solidarity Movement and Free Gaza Movement. She defied Israeli orders for Lebanese citizens not to go to Gaza and was able to get in with the Free Gaza movement’s SS Dignity on the 20 December, 2008.

Viva Palestine convoy updates

14 July 2009

2 pm
the final negotiations are still underway at the moment; it looks like we may have an extension of the stay beyond 24 hours (all those protests in the US have paid off); all of our aid is permitted to enter, but not the vehicles (unless there’s a miraculous breakthrough in the next hour or so) save for a few ambulances. Many of us were forced to spend precious time (about 5 hours) at the US embassy this morning signing affidavits; this is the text of the affidavit:

“I have read and understand the travel warming issued by US Dept. of State relating to travel to the Gaza Strip;
I assume the risk for myself and I understand the Embassy does not recommend my travel to the Gaza Strip;
I also understand that the Embassy cannot provide me with consular services in the Gaza Strip”
our tax dollars at work!!
Viva Palestina!!

4pm
It looks like we will only have 24 hours after all; the Egyptian authorities have been very obstinate. We will hopefully enter Gaza tomorrow morning (best case scenario) or Thursday morning. All the supplies will come with us, but not the vehicles (except for two ambulances). There are three young French men from Paris with us.
Happy Bastille Day!
Viva Palestina! liberté, fraternité, égalité!!

Our friends at the Rafah border are waiting them.
See also a video made with pics tahen at the Rafah border since 1 month: