Tag: Gaza - Page 191 - International Solidarity Movement

Life among the ruins in Gaza

Amira Hass | Ha’aretz

15 May 2009

Wadi Gaza is an agricultural region southeast of Gaza City. The ruins of Hussein al Aaidy’s family home are immediately apparent. The houses (and several other heaps of ruins) are scattered among budding hills, lazing goats and fields that have been plowed but not sown. Up until nine years ago, these houses were surrounded by orchards and other fruit trees. Until the Israel Defense Forces bulldozers uprooted everything in order to safeguard the Israelis driving to the settlement of Netzarim.

The thousands of heaps of ruins in the Strip have now become part of the landscape. What attracts attention is when one pile of ruins or another disappears. The Gaza Public Works Bureau has already solicited bids for clearing away the ruins of several public buildings and several mosques. Building contractors have begun to evacuate the rubble, and tents have been set up on the site in order to serve the public and for prayers.

But these are the exceptions. There is no point in clearing away the ruins of the 4,000 buildings and homes that have been totally destroyed, so long as Israel does not permit building materials to be brought into the Strip.

The Gazan Ministry of Public Works also warns citizens not to clear away ruins through private initiative: It’s too dangerous. At least 50,000 people, members of 8,000 families whose homes have been destroyed, know that the temporary solution they have found is liable to become a long-term one.

“And that’s not a solution,” says Al Aaidy, whose family is now dispersed among several houses, far from the plot of land they bought years ago and cultivated with a great deal of love. His mother, Kamela, 80, refused to leave her land.

The expulsion from Be’er Sheva in 1948 was enough for her. Now she lives by herself in what used to be the family goat pen (the goats fled or were killed: One hen survived and is still alive and pecking in the soil of the goat pen). She stores some of her possessions in a rusty bus that they dragged to the site a long time ago. She heats up tea on a bonfire.

“You can see the ruins of the house, you can’t see the ruins in our soul,” says Hussein al Aaidy, a man in his 50s. He was a Fatah activist, a prisoner in Israel from the 1970s who was freed during the prisoner exchange deal in 1985. After his release, he worked at several jobs, so as to be able to build a house for his family.

The Al Aaidys thought that the ground invasion of Israel’s Gaza campaign would be like the previous ones: that the shelling and the shooting would be outside the house, and that they would be safe inside it. His brothers’ families, who live nearby in buildings with ceilings of asbestos and tin, joined him on Saturday, January 3, 2009, on the eve of the ground attack and when the bombing intensified.

“All of us, 30 people, were in one inner room, on the second floor,” said Kamela this past Sunday. “I was lying on a mattress, I wrapped my head in a mandil [a head kerchief] and a thick scarf. Because of the cold.”

At about 8 P.M., something pierced the air and the three stories of the concrete house: A shell? A missile from a helicopter or a drone? They didn’t know. Dust, fragments of concrete and shouting filled the room in which they were crowded. Kamela al Aaidy would later discover that her head kerchief was soaked with blood.

She had been wounded by shrapnel in her head; today, she still gets dizzy when she gets up and walks. They ran from the partially demolished house to one of the buildings in the yard – in the hope that the forces that were shelling would see them and understand that they were civilians. Six people were injured by shrapnel: Kamela, her sister-in-law and four children. They contacted friends and relatives to call for medical assistance. They discovered that the IDF was not allowing rescue teams access to them.

Haaretz accompanied the efforts of Physicians for Human Rights to have them rescued, and reported daily and in real time about the situation: They were almost without food, without medicine, little water, cold, shelling and firing all around. But only on Friday, January 9, almost seven days after they had been wounded – after exhausting negotiations on the part of PHR and phone conversations conducted by Hussein al Aaidy himself with soldiers or officers in the Coordination and Liaison Authority for the Gaza Strip – was the first evacuation allowed: four of the wounded and four escorts.

Healthy carried the wounded

They walked for about 1.5 kilometers, the healthy ones carrying the seriously injured on stretchers: The wounds of the children Ragheda and Nur, who were injured by shrapnel all over their bodies, were beginning to become infected; they began to lose consciousness. Before their evacuation, Hussein had cut into Ragheda’s flesh with a knife – two of his brothers held her as she screamed and cried – and sterilized the wound with salt water. The grandmother, Kamela, shakes her head as she tells us this, as though she wanted to chase away the memory.

The next day, Saturday morning, a week after they were shelled, the healthy ones and the two wounded women also left. They understood that it was dangerous to remain in the area, as “every moment we expected another shell to fall on us, to be wounded again, perhaps killed,” explains Hussein, almost apologizing for “abandoning” the house. Their departure was preceded by negotiations over the phone conducted by Al Aaidy, who speaks Hebrew, with an officer or soldier in the liaison office.

“They wanted us to take a six-kilometer detour: I refused,” he recalls. “They demanded that we go south, to the area of Netzarim. I refused. In the end, they agreed to let us go north, near the Karni Crossing. But there were conditions: That each of us would be a meter away from the next person. That we wouldn’t stop. That we wouldn’t put down the children, whom we adults were carrying on our backs. That we wouldn’t put down my mother, whom two of us carried together. They told me: If we can’t count the 22 people who left the house, anyone who sees you from a helicopter or a tank, will fire at you.”

One of the conditions was that they would carry a white flag, and that scared them most of all. “I was in all the wars and none of them was so difficult. In none of them did they kill people waving white flags, as they did this time,” explained Kamela. “And when we marched, I was already in despair, I wanted them to put me down. Leave me on the road and I’ll die, I told my sons.”

The exhausted convoy marched for about 700 meters, according to Hussein al Aaidy’s estimate, until they encountered a group of tanks. One soldier got out of the tank, aimed his rifle at the convoy and ordered them to stop. “That was lucky, that way we could rest a little, we put down the children and Mother,” recalls Al Aaidy with a little smile. The soldiers ordered him to approach. “There was a dog with the soldiers. They cocked their weapons. As though they wanted to scare us. I told the soldier: We’re leaving by prior arrangement, contact your commanders. And the soldier answered me: ‘I won’t contact anyone.’ We waited like that for 20 minutes. The way a person waits for death.” The three kilometers until they reached the ambulances took about an hour and a half to two hours – they no longer remember precisely.

And since then they can’t find a place for themselves, says Al Aaidy. When the attack stopped, they were astonished to discover that the IDF had blown up their house.

“From the school where we hid during the attack we wandered to relatives, from those relatives to other relatives, from them we dispersed among rented apartments. The children switched schools, they can’t concentrate on their studies and don’t show any interest, all their books and games and notebooks were buried, everyone is jittery, they quarrel, the children don’t want to be here, on the land next to the demolished house, they wake up at night from nightmares, shouting. And our case is relatively mild: There are no dead, as in other families.” Al Aaidy shows me an electronic board he found among the ruins, apparently from a missile that landed on the house.

“If all this science is designed to destroy, then maybe it would be better to go back to the Jahaliya,” he muses, referring to the pre-Islamic age of ignorance.

The IDF Spokesman responds: “From the moment of the attack, direct contact was established between the affected residents and the army, and an attempt was made to evacuate them from the Gaza Strip, so they could receive medical care in Israel.

“The residents were evacuated at the first opportunity at which they would not have been exposed to mortal danger from the fighting that was taking place in the area. In order to provide additional information about the attack, we would need precise location coordinates. As we were not provided with that information, we are unable to clarify the matter.”

Gaza 2009: the moment of truth

Haidar Eid | The Palestine Chronicle

8 May 2009

'Israel's fascist foreign minister is of the opinion that Gaza should've been nuked.'

Gaza has returned to its pre-massacre state of siege, confronted with the usual, conspiratorial, “international” indifference after 22 long days and dark nights, during which its brave people were left alone to face one of the strongest armies in the world — an army that has hundreds of nuclear warheads, thousands of trigger-happy soldiers armed with Merkava tanks, F-16s, Apache helicopters, naval gunships and phosphorous bombs. Gaza now does not make news. It’s people die slowly, its children malnourished, its water contaminated, its nights dark, and yet it is deprived even of a word of sympathy from the likes of Ban Ki Moon and the president of “Change; Yes We Can.”

Israel could not have carried out its genocidal war, preceded and followed by a medieval, hermetic siege, without a green light from the international community. During the massacre, one Israeli soldier commented: “That’s what is so nice, supposedly, about Gaza: You see a person on a road, walking along a path. He doesn’t have to be with a weapon, you don’t have to identify him with anything and you can just shoot him.”

When apartheid Israel decided to attack the northern part of the Gaza Strip in late February, early March of 2008, we were threatened with a greater shoah (Holocaust) by the deputy minister of war, then, Matan Vilnaii. Around 164 Palestinians, including 64 children were killed. What was the reaction of the international community? Absolutely nothing. In fact, the EU decided to reward the oppressor by issuing declarations of intentions to upgrade their trade agreements with Israel, which, needless to say, served as a green light for the current atrocities. On Sunday 18 January, Israel’s Prime Minister Olmert, a war criminal by all standards, expressed his pleasure to six European leaders, over their “extraordinary support for the state of Israel and their concern about its security”. In retrospect, the upgrading of relations between the EU and Israel in early December 2008 was a green light for the larger Gaza massacre of 2009. In spite of the war crimes committed by the IOF, and in spite of the obvious fascist make-up of the current government, the EU will continue to strengthen bilateral relations with Tel Aviv.

Within this context, the anti-apartheid freedom fighter Ronnie Kasrils says:

What [Hendrik] Verwoerd [the architect of apartheid] admired too was the impunity with which Israel exercised state violence and terror to get its way, without hindrance from its Western allies, increasingly key among them the USA. What Verwoerd and his ilk came to admire in Israel.., was the way the Western powers permitted an imperialist Israel to use its unbridled military with impunity in expanding its territory and holding back the rising tide of Arab nationalism in its neighborhood.

March 2008 was, then, a rehearsal for Gaza 2009. Israel knew that it could go on committing war crimes fully equipped with an international conspiracy of silence. The international community did not react in March 2008: why would it do otherwise in 2009? That was the Israeli logic, and so it remains. Mind you, Israel’s fascist foreign minister is of the opinion that Gaza should’ve been nuked. No wonder Adolf Hitler once said: “What luck for rulers that men do not think!”

For those who accuse us of subscribing to conspiracy theories, we have this reminder: in 2004 the Israeli Professor Arnon Soffer, Head of the IOF’s National Defense College, and an advisor to Ariel Sharon, spelled out the desired results of Israel’s unilateral disengagement from Gaza in an interview with the Jerusalem Post:

… when 1.5 million people live in a closed-off Gaza, it’s going to be a human catastrophe. Those people will become even bigger animals than they are today,… The pressure at the border will be awful. It’s going to be a terrible war. So, if we want to remain alive, we will have to kill and kill and kill. All day, every day…If we don’t kill, we will cease to exist…Unilateral separation doesn’t guarantee “peace” – it guarantees a Zionist-Jewish state with an overwhelming majority of Jews…

Then, there is the view bluntly expressed in 2002 by Israel’s then chief of staff, General Moshe Yaalon, and which I think sums up the objective of the hermetic medieval siege and the massacre:

The Palestinians must be made to understand in the deepest recesses of their consciousness that they are a defeated people.

Now, this is a total dehumanization of the Palestinians of Gaza. And West Bankers, here is the message for you: you’d better accept your fate as cockroaches, ready to be crushed willingly under the boot of a zealot Israeli soldier, or else.

The resemblance of Israel’s campaign of tribalistic racist hate both to that of apartheid SA and to Hitler’s murderous regime has recently been articulated by Comrade Kasrils:

Certainly we South Africans can identify the pathological cause, fuelling the hate, of Israel’s political-military elite and public in general. Neither is this difficult for anyone acquainted with colonial history to understand the way in which deliberately cultivated race hate inculcates a justification for the most atrocious and inhumane actions against even defenseless civilians – women, children, the elderly amongst them. In fact was this not the pathological racist ideology that fuelled Hitler’s war lust and implementation of the Holocaust?

In actual fact, if there is something to learn from Gaza 2009, it is that the world was absolutely wrong to think that Nazism was defeated in 1945. Nazism has won because it has finally managed to Nazify the consciousness of its own victims! Just think about the soldiers’ T-shirts episodes. The courageous Israeli journalist Gideon Levy has written that Israel today looks very much like Germany in 1933.

But now the urgent question is how to hold Israel accountable to international law and basic principles of human rights in order to forestall the imminent escalation? The most immediate and pressing questions within this context are: what the nature of international solidarity should be and how it can best support the Palestinian struggle for self-determination.

The South African apartheid regime came under repeated pressure from the international community and multilateral organizations such as the United Nations Security Council which passed countless resolutions against it because of its inhumane treatment of blacks. This gave much-needed succor to the oppressed, while we today are bereft of even this tiny comfort because the United States continues to use its veto to ensure that Israel escapes censure from the world body.

Grassroots opposition to a brutal apartheid finally forced the US and UK and other governments around the world to isolate apartheid South Africa. They would not have done so without the pressure exerted on them by their own people. Israel needs to be isolated in exactly the same way as apartheid South Africa. Today, there is a growing mass-based struggle inside Palestine, as well as other forms of struggle, exactly as there was inside apartheid South Africa. An intensified international solidarity movement with a common agenda can make the struggle for Palestine resonate in every country in the world, thus closing off the world to Israelis until they open the world to Palestinians. Our goal now, as civil society organizations, is to lift the deadly hermetic siege imposed on Gaza causing slow motion genocide; marching towards the six gates of the Gaza prison has been tried and must intensify. This is what many activists, Palestinian and international, are planning to do. Our BDS campaign modeled on the South African anti-apartheid global campaign is gaining momentum as a democratic movement based on the struggle for human rights and implementation of international law. Our struggle is NOT religious, nor ethnic, nor racial, but rather universalistic: one that guarantees the rehumanization of our people in the face of a genocidal machine run by what Moshe Dayan would have called “a mad dog.”

The Palestinians of Gaza have lost faith in the failed “peace process” and the two-state solution; hence, the desperate need for a new national program that can mobilize the masses; a program that is necessarily democratic in its nature; one that respects resistance in its different forms and, ultimately, guarantees peace with justice. The new, much-needed program, however, must make the necessary link between all Palestinian struggles: the occupation of Gaza and the West Bank, Israel’s ethnically-based discrimination and rights violations of more than one million Palestinian citizens, as well as the 1948 externally displaced refugees.

What we are constantly told, is either accept Israeli occupation in its ugliest form — i.e. the ongoing presence of the apartheid wall, colonies, checkpoints, zigzag roads, color-coded number plates, house demolitions and security coordination supervised by a retired American general — or have a hermetic medieval siege imposed on us, but still die with dignity.

But, the lesson we learn from Gaza 2009, exactly like Sharpville 1960, is to harness all effort to fight the outcome of the Oslo Accords, and to form a United Front on a platform of resistance and reforms. This cannot be achieved without realizing that ministries, premierships, and presidencies in Gaza and Ramallah are a façade not unlike those inauthentic structures in the South African Independent Homelands. In a short story by SA writer, Najbuolu Ndebel, a young black woman comments on the generous offer given by the racist white government: “That’s how it is planned. That we be given a little of everything, and so prize the little we have that we forget about FREEDOM.”

This is exactly what Steve Biko, the hero of anti-apartheid struggle–who paid his life for the freedom of all South Africans– meant when he said:

Not only have the whites been guilty of being on the offensive, but by some skilful manoeuvres, they have managed to control the responses of the blacks to the provocation. Not only have they kicked the black, but they have also told him how to react to the kick. For a long time the black has been listening with patience to the advice he has been receiving on how best to respond to the kick. With painful slowness he is now beginning to show signs that it is his right and duty to respond to the kick in the way he sees fit.

And we, Palestinians, have decided to respond to the Zionist kick in the way we see fit. In Ndebel’s story quoted earlier, a black intellectual makes it clear that “[he’d] rather be a hungry dog that runs freely in the streets , than a fat, chained dog burdened with itself and the weight of the chain.” These examples used again and again in the anti-Apartheid literature sum up the lessons we learn from Gaza 2009. In a word it is resilience.

Archbishop Desmund Tutu of South Africa said, in a much quoted wisdom: “If you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor.” And as I said in an earlier article, while IOF were bombing my neighborhood, the UN, EU, Arab League and the international community by and large have remained silent in the face of atrocities committed by Apartheid Israel. They are therefore on the side of Israel. Hundreds of dead corpses of children and women have failed to convince them to intervene.

We are, therefore, left with one option, an option that does not wait for the United Nations Security Council or Arab Summits: the option of people’s power, as we have been repeatedly saying. This remains the only power capable of counteracting the massive power imbalance in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

The horror of the racist apartheid regime in South Africa was challenged with a sustained campaign of boycott, divestment and sanctions initiated in 1958 and given new urgency in 1960 after the Sharpeville Massacre. This campaign led ultimately to the collapse of white rule in 1994 and the establishment of a multi-racial, democratic state.

Similarly, the Palestinian call for boycott, divestment and sanctions has been gathering momentum since 2005. Gaza 2009, like Sharpeville 1960, cannot be ignored: it demands a response from all who believe in a common humanity. Now is the time to boycott the apartheid Israeli state, to divest and to impose sanctions against it. This is the only way to ensure the creation of a secular, democratic state for all in historic Palestine regardless of race, sect and ethnicity. The Australian journalist John Pilger has this to say:

What happens in Gaza is the defining moment of our time, which either grants the impunity of war criminals the immunity of our silence, while we contort our own intellect and morality, or gives us the power to speak out.

Gaza 2009, with mass mobilization and international solidarity, is, therefore, becoming the guiding torch, not only for the Palestinian people, but also for the Arab world, towards a new Middle East, one that is, unlike Condoleezza Rice’s ME, characterized by democracy and freedom. This is the least our resistance to religious exclusivism, xenophobia, and tribalistic world view should lead to.

– Based on a speech delivered via video link at a panel on “Promoting a Culture of Resistance” at the 4th Bil’in International Conference on Grassroots Popular Resistance.

– Dr. Haidar Eid is Associate Professor in the Department of English Literature, Al-Aqsa University, Gaza Strip, Palestine. Dr. Eid is a founding member of the One Democratic State Group (ODSG) and a member of Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (PACBI). He contributed this article to PalestineChronicle.com.

Ban Ki-moon’s moral failure

Hasan Abu Nimah | Electronic Intifada

6 May 2009

UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon at a press conference in Gaza City outside the UN headquarters, still smoldering from the Israeli bombardment of the facility, 20 January 2009. (Wissam Nassar/MaanImages)

Late last week, according to the BBC Arabic news website, a report was submitted to the United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon about the scale of destruction Israel inflicted on UN installations in Gaza. This was also mentioned on a BBC news bulletin on 1 May, but I could find little trace of this story anywhere else.

The brief news item stated that the UN report contained secret information supplied by Israel about an incident in which more than 40 Palestinian civilians were massacred when Israeli shells fell “outside” a UN school where many Palestinians were taking shelter. The secretary-general is reportedly considering how much of the information he can release without revealing the information supplied by Israel, the news item said, adding that the UN report concluded that Hamas fighters were not inside UN buildings but close to them.

Commenting on the report, the BBC said that it was informed by a diplomatic source, that the United States has informed Ban’s office that the report should not be published in full due to the damage that that could cause to the Middle East peace talks; in other words (mine, in fact) to Israel.

The point here is neither to pass any premature judgment on an unpublished report — despite obvious inconsistencies regarding shelling “outside” a UN installation that was somehow severely damaged — nor to predict how much of the report the secretary-general will finally decide to publish.

(As this article was being prepared for publication, details about the UN inquiry team report were published. The inquiry, led by Ian Martin, former director of Amnesty International, accused Israel of failing to protect UN facilities and civilians, dismissed as “untrue” Israeli claims that Hamas fighters had been firing from UN facilities, held Israel responsible for all deaths and injuries in six out of nine incidents, and called for further investigation into possible war crimes. Ban has rejected calls to pursue the probe, but called on Israel to pay $11 million in reparations for the damage it caused to the UN.)

But nor can we forget the dark days just past when Israel was slaughtering the innocent people of Gaza and the world stood by, even blaming Hamas — which had scrupulously observed a negotiated ceasefire until Israel broke it — for bringing on the apocalypse.

As the dust from the Israeli bombing began to settle, Ban decided to visit Gaza. That raised hopes that the UN was finally determined to act with courage and responsibility. Gaza had been off limits to international figures because supposedly a politically contagious terrorist organization had taken control of the place and no one was supposed to risk contact with it, even if compelling humanitarian considerations required that.

Well, the secretary-general decided on 20 January to defy the norm and go to Gaza. But his courage only went so far. His highly-protected convoy took him straight to the still smoldering compound of the UN agency for Palestine refugees (UNRWA) whose warehouses of food and fuel were destroyed by Israeli attacks along with their contents. He must have noted that the massive destruction could not have resulted from “shelling outside” the installation. “I am just appalled,” he said, “Everyone is smelling this bombing still. It is still burning. It is an outrageous and totally unacceptable attack against the United Nations.” This flash of anger was limited however only to UN facilities. He spoke as if the rest of Gaza — where more than 7,000 people lay dead or injured, and thousands of homes, schools, mosques, universities, police stations and government buildings were destroyed — did not exist, or were not of UN concern.

Whisked around in his convoy, he did not bother to stop and talk to any of Israel’s victims — the families who had just dug the remains of their loved ones from the rubble or those with horrific injuries in Gaza’s overstretched hospitals. These are the very people, the Palestinian refugees, that the UN is in Gaza to help, but there was it seems no time for them.

Ban did say, however, that he had “condemned from the outbreak of this conflict the excessive use of force by the Israeli forces in Gaza,” and added “I view the rocket attacks into Israel as completely unacceptable.” He also said that he would dispatch a humanitarian needs assessment team led by the UN special coordinator.

What he was saying in effect is that he found Israel’s attack on Gaza perfectly acceptable, but he disagreed only with the tonnage of high explosives that should be dropped by Israeli planes. Indeed, he should specify exactly how many dead children, how many demolished houses, how many burn victims, how many destroyed mosques he would tolerate as not being “excessive.” Would half the number killed and half the damage inflicted be reasonably non-excessive, or perhaps one-third? It would be helpful for both sides to know so that the Israelis would limit their killing to the UN-specified quota, and the Gazans would know how many of their community to sacrifice for the sacred UN-sanctioned killing.

For Ban, then, Israeli bombing is good — although he would like perhaps to see a little bit less. But, in tune with his political masters, he considers Palestinians to have no right to any form of self-defense against the Israeli occupation, constant aggression and the Israeli, internationally-supported, deadly siege, with whatever means they have at their disposal.

In order to maintain the false sense of balance between aggressor and victim, Ban had to visit the Israeli settlement of Sderot. When he patiently inspected the scars left by Hamas rockets that killed a total of three Israelis, he stated, “the projectiles are indiscriminate weapons, and Hamas attacks are violations of basic humanitarian law.” This is the same Ban who did not once invoke the law with respect to Israel’s ongoing massive violations.

It’s also notable that the rockets fired by Palestinian resistance factions are not so much “indiscriminate” as unguided. There’s no reason to believe that if Palestinians had access to the American-supplied guidance systems Israel has that they would not target Israeli military bases (indeed they tried to do that although Israeli military censorship did not allow reporting of hits on its military installations). Israel’s bombing on the other hand, and as Ban did not note, is very discriminate — deliberately targeting civilian homes and facilities.

In Sderot, Ban also urged Israel to end its crippling blockade on Gaza, but not because the blockade is a flagrant violation of international law, the Geneva conventions, inhuman and wrong. He worried only that the blockade would strengthen Hamas; otherwise, like a measured dose of bombing, it would be perfectly fine.

Ban ought to have inspected the destruction in Gaza, and visited and spent time with Israel’s Palestinian victims before setting foot in any UN installation. But it seems he actually avoided that on purpose to send a signal that he was not showing sympathy to “terrorists” or the people accused of harboring them, in order to inoculate himself from criticism by Israel and its chorus of apologists. He certainly saw the example of the UN special rapporteur for human rights, Princeton professor emeritus and international law expert Richard Falk, who was expelled and vilified by Israel and the US administration for faithfully and truthfully carrying out his mandate.

This is but one of the many sad stories of how the UN top leadership has betrayed and failed its mission. The UN does not exist only to protect its personnel and installations. The UN flag alone ought to provide that kind of real protection — immunity which no state dares to violate without fear of the consequences. But Israel has repeatedly attacked UN facilities, schools, peacekeeping forces and personnel in Palestine and Lebanon knowing full well that it, not the UN, enjoys immunity for its actions. The next time Israel attacks a UN facility, part of the responsibility will lie with those who failed to act correctly this time around.

Hasan Abu Nimah is the former permanent representative of Jordan at the United Nations. This essay first appeared in The Jordan Times and is republished with the author’s permission.

Palestinians rebuild with mud

Eva Bartlett | Inter Press Service

7 May 2009

Nidal Eid builds his home with mud bricks

Jihad el-Shaar is pleased with his mud-brick house in the Moraj district of Gaza. The 80-square metre home is a basic one-storey, two-bedroom design, with a small kitchen, bathroom and sitting room, made mostly with mud and straw.

“My wife and our four daughters and I were living with family, but it was overcrowded, impossible. We knew we had to build a home of our own,” Shaar said. “We waited over two years for cement but because of the siege there is none available. What could we do, wait forever?”

So he decided to do it with mud.

Building earthen structures like bread ovens and small animal pens is a technique many Palestinians are familiar with, but extending the method to houses isn’t a notion that has taken hold in Gaza.

Jihad el-Shaar got the idea from his travels in Asia and the Middle East. “I travelled in Bangladesh, India, Yemen, Turkey…they all use some similar technique of building houses from earth. All you need is clay, sand and some straw.” These he mixed with water, and poured into brick moulds that were left in the sun to dry for three days. Good enough to build a fine house with.

While some Gaza residents speak of shame at the way life has ‘gone backwards’ with the siege – using cooking oil in cars, wood fires for cooking, and horse and donkey carts for transportation – Shaar is proud of his clay home.

“In the winter it is warm, and in the summer it will be cool. There’s no problem with leaking, and this type of house will last a lifetime,” he says. “And it was cheap to build. A house this size made of cement would cost around 16,000 dollars at least. This one, because it was made with simple, local materials cost just 3,000 dollars.”

Prior to Israel’s crippling siege on Gaza cement would have cost 20 shekels (about five dollars) a bag. Now, with cement among the many banned items, what does make it into Gaza through tunnels under the Egypt border costs ten times as much.

The 3,000 dollars Shaar spent was mostly on support metal and on the flakes of straw used in the mud bricks as a strengthening agent. The metal bits, formerly just over 1,000 shekels a tonne, are now quadrupled in price, which contribute to making an otherwise cheap building process still somewhat pricey.

Straw abounds, but due to the siege it is more often used as animal fodder, rendering it more precious and driving the price up. Clay and sand, found all over Gaza, must still be transported to the building site.

Compared to a cement home, the mud homes Shaar has designed and taught others to build are nonetheless the most practical and immediate solution.

Nidal Eid (35) has seven children and has been renting a home in the Rafah region since his house was bulldozed by the Israeli army four years ago. Larger than Shaar’s and still in its nascent form, Eid’s home will take another two weeks to complete, he estimates, and will cost roughly 4,000 dollars.

“It’s going to be fantastic,” Eid said, adding mud mortar and new bricks to the waist-high wall he has already completed. “We make about 1,000 bricks every three days.”

The work, he said, was shared between six people. “I couldn’t wait any longer for the siege to end. I have a family and we need a house, so I’m building this. Everything is difficult in Gaza, but we have to find ways to get by.”

A tour through Jihad el-Shaar’s home shows all sorts of creative touches to the simple structure. Inlaid shelves are custom-sized to hold gas lanterns, dishes, ornamental vases, books…an earth-brick bed eliminates the need for an additional bed frame. The 35cm thick walls keep the house surprisingly cool, and the wooden windows propped open by poles allow the breeze to pass through.

This sort of idea is catching on. Yousef Al-Mansi, minister for public works and housing says the ministry will build a school, a mosque, and a clinic out of recycled rubble from bombed buildings.

The Gaza crossings online database of the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) records that only two trucks carrying construction material have been allowed into Gaza since Jan. 19 this year. Israel’s assault on Gaza ended Jan. 18.

While 4.5 billion dollars in aid money for reconstruction has been pledged by international donors, to date Israel has not permitted the entry of materials into Gaza.

During its three-week assault Israel destroyed some 5,000 homes and 20,000 buildings.

“Since I’ve made my house, I’ve got many calls from people, especially in Rafah, who want to rebuild their houses using this technique,” says Shaar. “There are entire families living in tents. Why not build a home like this? Because of the siege, we’ve found other ways of living.”

International Human Rights Workers to accompany Palestinian farmers near buffer zone in Gaza Strip

For Immediate Release:

8am, Thursday 7 May 2009: Six International Human Rights Workers will be accompanying 12 Palestinian farmers Laytamaat area near Khoza’a, east of Khan Younis, in the south of the Gaza strip, as they harvest crops several hundred metres from the Green Line.

Farmers and international accompaniers were last fired upon in Beit Hanoun by Israeli forces on the 17th of April.

Several farmers have been shot by Israeli forces while farming their lands.

Mohammed al-Buraim is the fourth Palestinian farmer to be shot by Israeli forces in the ‘buffer zone’ in the last months. The three shootings prior to Mohammed’s were: on 18 January, Maher Abu-Rajileh (24) from Khoza’a village, was killed by Israeli soldiers while working on his land 400m from the Green Line; on 20 January, Israeli soldiers shot Waleed al-Astal (42) of Al Qarara (near Khan Younis) in his right foot; and on 27 January, Anwar al-Buraim was shot in the neck and killed.