International Solidarity Movement volunteers Eva Bartlett and Ewa Jasiewicz were featured on Russia Today for their activism and reporting from Gaza.
Humanitarian workers and rights activists in Gaza are helping locals put their lives back together after the three-week-long Israeli offensive. Many aid workers were in the region during the fighting and came under fire along with residents.
Congress of South African Trade Unions
In a historic development for South Africa, South African dock workers have announced their determination not to offload a ship from Israel that is scheduled to dock in Durban on Sunday, 8 February 2009. This follows the decision by COSATU to strengthen the campaign in South Africa for boycotts, divestment and sanctions against Apartheid Israel.
The pledge by SATAWU members in Durban reflects the commitment by South African workers to refuse to support oppression and exploitation across the globe. Last year, Durban dock workers had refused to offload a shipment of arms that had arrived from China and was destined for Zimbabwe to prop up the Mugabe regime and to intensify the repression against the Zimbabwean people. Now, says SATAWU’s General Secretary Randall Howard, the union’s members are committing themselves to not handling Israeli goods.
SATAWU’s action on Sunday will be part of a proud history of worker resistance against apartheid. In 1963, just four years after the Anti-Apartheid Movement was formed, Danish dock workers refused to offload a ship with South African goods. When the ship docked in Sweden, Swedish workers followed suit. Dock workers in Liverpool and, later, in the San Francisco Bay Area also refused to offload South African goods. South Africans, and the South African working class in particular, will remain forever grateful to those workers who determinedly opposed apartheid and decided that they would support the anti-apartheid struggle with their actions.
Last week, Western Australian members of the Maritime Union of Australia resolved to support the campaign for boycotts, divestment and sanctions against Israel, and have called for a boycott of all Israeli vessels and all vessels bearing goods arriving from or going to Israel.
This is the legacy and the tradition that South African dock workers have inherited, and it is a legacy they are determined to honour, by ensuring that South African ports of entry will not be used as transit points for goods bound for or emanating from certain dictatorial and oppressive states such as Zimbabwe, Swaziland and Israel.
COSATU, the Palestine Solidarity Committee, the Young Communist League and a range of other organisations salute the principled position taken by these workers. We also take this opportunity to salute the millions of workers all over the world who have openly condemned and taken decisive steps to isolate apartheid Israel, a step that should send shockwaves to its arrogant patrons in the United States who foot the bill for Israel’s killing machine. We call on other workers and unions to follow suit and to do all that is necessary to ensure that they boycott all goods to and from Israel until Palestine is free.
We also welcome statements by various South African Jews of conscience who have dissociated themselves from the genocide in Gaza. We call on all South Africans to ensure that none of our family members are allowed to join the Israeli Occupation Forces’ killing machine.
In celebration of the actions of SATAWU members with regard to the ship from Israel, and in pursuance of the campaign for boycotts, divestment and sanctions against Israel, and our call on the South African government to sever diplomatic and trade relations with Israel, this coalition of organisations has declared a week of action beginning on Friday, 6 February 2009. The actions will be organised under the theme: FREE PALESTINE! ISOLATE APARTHEID ISRAEL!
Eva Bartlett | In Gaza
2 February 2009
Abdul Rahman Ghraben’s mother carried in a yellow plastic bag. “This is his pant leg, and tiny pieces of him,” she said, holding the knotted bag at the handles. Her husband had been explaining how fourteen year old Abed was killed on January 11.
“The Israeli forces had been bombing hard so we’d evacuated the house, gone to Fakoura (UN school which had been bombed with white phosphorous). The first 3 days at the school we had only the clothes we were wearing, no blankets, no food. At night in Fakoura it was so cold and windy, so when we heard on the radio that there would be a cease-fire between 8 am and 11 am, Abed asked if he could return home to grab a jacket. We all went with him,” Abu Abed explained, now holding the yellow bag.
“When we were in the house, the Israeli army starting bombing in the area,” said Umm Abed. “We were very frightened, we had thought the cease-fire meant we could return home safely. We quickly took whatever clothes and food we could and left the house. I thought Abed was ahead of us. At the school friends told us Abed hadn’t come back. They also said that a drone had fired a missile at our area. People were saying the missile had hit a child and shattered him to pieces. We didn’t know it was Abed.”
Umm Abed stopped her recollection to take out the contents of the yellow supermarket bag. “We searched for Abed for 2 days. People were telling us ‘your son was killed’ but we couldn’t find his body, we couldn’t believe it had been Abed.”
“Finally,” Abu Abed continued, pulling the tattered pant leg out of the bag, “we found this and knew Abed had been killed. It’s all that was left of him. Since then, since we’ve returned home we find more pieces of him.” The father pulled out a tuft of hair, a dried piece of some internal part of Abed, an inch long piece of sharp shrapnel from the drone’s missile. “Daily we find small bits of him, all over the area. He was blown to bits,” his father says. Although the strike happened 3 weeks ago, the family’s pain is no less fresh.
“Why are they doing this to our children? What did my son do? Did he launch rockets? Where is their humanity when they kill a child like this? He was a child, he had the right to live like any other child,” asked Abu Abed, voicing the questions that parents of over 400 children in Gaza are asking of the Israeli army and Israeli authorities making the decisions to bombard Gaza.
In a bullet hole in the wall beside Umm Abed, a decorative flower had been stuck, the hole too large for the plastic stem. Efforts fall short to cover the ugly rampage of the soldiers inside a house which has been torn apart much as their lives have been torn apart. The Ghraben’s house is in the Hayid Amal neighbourhood of Attatra, in the Beit Lahia region. Like the surrounding houses, it is puckered with scars of Israeli army firing, and bears evidence of the Israeli army’s invasion and rampage through it. A bedroom door is torn off its hinges, clothes shredded by automatic gunfire, damage throughout the house. Abu Yusef, an uncle and neighbour, had the day before shown his house: more extensive trashing had been done, but the family was back living in it, drafts and all.
Abu Abed made a parting plea to those outside Gaza: “We are asking the international community to cut their relationship with Israel, because Israel is killing children. During just 10 minutes in my neighbourhood alone Israeli soldiers killed 10 children,” he said as an example to the wider massacre of children, and adult civilians, which happened during the 3 weeks of war on Gaza. “We are still not safe. We still expect an Israeli bulldozer or tank could enter and bulldoze our homes at any time, because they have before. There are still F-16s which fly over our house, and we never know when the next bomb will be dropped.”
Sharon Lock | Tales to Tell
I’m told the bursts of noise that are currently shaking the net cafe a little are probably F16 sonic booms and not rockets, so that’s nice! Last night’s attacks involved seven rockets on the tunnel/border area of Rafah and a strike on an empty police station in Gaza city.
The military said Sunday’s attacks were the beginning of a new wave of raids over Gaza, but did not elaborate… Ehud Olmert, Israel’s out-going prime minister, said that the military would respond to attacks in a “severe and disproportionate” fashion after at least 10 rockets and mortar shells hit southern Israel on Sunday… The al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, the military wing of the Fatah faction led by Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian president, told Al Jazeera that it carried out the attacks.” – Al Jazeera
Israel of course bills their attacks as a “response” to rockets. (Note it’s not Hamas rockets this time; the armed resistance in Gaza is cross political, Hamas does not actually control it all.) There are several issues with Israel’s line, which I know many of my readers have already figured out.
I have just come from Al Shifa hospital, where we were helping with the paperwork of four children with attack injuries such as internal bleeding, or kidney transplant requirements, who we hope are going to be sent out to France for treatment. Amira (who I told you about before) who lost all her family, is one of them, she has both internal injuries and similar bolts in her crushed leg as Basher in the Nadeem family. She can still find a smile except when dealing with the pain of injections. Two women with injured babies, one with phosphorous burns over half his body and I think the other also with burns, share her room, and Amira’s aunt and the other women visitors have formed the usual atmosphere of community, with shared food and support for each other.
A few days ago EJ and I went to visit Hassan in Khan Younis, you’ll remember he was the one who E and A filmed being shot by a sniper. You can also see a picture of him at work in Jabalia here. World Health Organisation figures are that 21 medical workers were killed in the recent attacks and 30 were wounded. Deliberate targeting by Israel of medical workers, and their refusal to allow the wounded to be collected, are both breaches of the Geneva Convention. After Hassan met us, we stopped off to visit the Khan Younis Red Crescent base – I’d not been there before – and of course had to stop for tea and a chat. The Khan Younis Red Crescent hosted British Journalist James Miller for ten days, the year he was shot by Israel. We met Halil Al Subba, who had his own war wounds from going on a call to Khoza’a during a white phosphorous strike there. This in itself was extremely courageous as Israel had declared it a closed military zone and was giving no permission for the wounded to be collected or anyone to be evacuated.
All he remembers is getting out of the driving seat into thick smoke; he passed out instantly as the masks the medics had were no use at all on the phosphorous. His colleagues got him back to the hospital. He was unconscious for 3 hours, but appeared recovered enough to be sent home after some basic treatment. However when he found he had pain that felt like a knife in his chest, he went back to the hospital where chest xrays showed severe internal burns to his lungs.
A Greek medical delegation said they have never seen anything like his injuries, and other medical people have speculated the phosphorous is mixed with other unidentified chemicals also. One of the current problems is doctors can’t clearly know how to treat injuries when they don’t clearly know the causes. Halil has had antibiotics. But no-one knows what long term effects he may expect. When he found out I work with ISM, he told me that he was one of the medics who brought in Rachel Corrie after she was run over by an Israeli bulldozer in 2003.
We were fed a wonderful lunch at Hassan’s family home, meeting his lovely wife, children Fawzi, Annan (his little girl who is named after Kofi Annan) and baby Ali, and his extended family. We also got to see the stove Hassan invented, which he was self-deprecatingly telling us about on the Jabalia ambulance shift when I first met him. Not that I really understand, but it involves a old fridge fuel tank in which he can compress the air using a bike pump, turning the fuel from a liquid into a gas, which then burns much more efficiently for cooking use. Me and EJ were extremely impressed. We don’t have any cooking gas at home either, but we just complain about it!
ISM folks have been asked down to Al Faraheen tomorrow, to help a farmer with his harvest. Farmers in this border area are shot at regularly by Israel and one was killed the other day. So we will press release our international presence and hope to give them a slightly safer day. On Wednesday I want to go visit Wadi Salqa, where villagers face constant shooting from Israel and half of them are too frightened to sleep in their homes at night.
Eva Bartlett | In Gaza
1 February 2009
In Tuam, Attatra, on day one of Israel’s declared, and immediately-violated, ‘cease-fire’ an old woman stood beside the wreckage of her 2 room cement block home. The tracks of the bulldozer which felled her home were still deeply rutted, painfully visible.
The house next her to her pile of rubble was still standing, but gutted by fire. Mohammed Abu Khusah had 19 people depending on the house whose kitchen, along with all of the bottom floor rooms, was burnt out. Upstairs, too. Six rooms upstairs completely black-stained and ravaged by fire, five downstairs.
Clothes taken out of cupboards and drawers, strewn everywhere. Sniper holes: 2 in front room, 2 in back room, 2 in a room looking onto a wide open area below. Hebrew writing, message unknown but intent suspicious, on many of the walls.
On the other side of the old woman’s rubble, another pile of blocks which had been three 3 level homes, housing 18, 10, and 6 people each.
Behind those ruins, down a slight rise of rubble, Khitam Abdel Majid sat in the dirt, shawls draped around her, surrounded by the men of her family and by twisted metal support beams. She told me that their 3 story house was bulldozed on the 15th day, along with everyone inside. Pointing at a corner room with cloth draped over the gaping hole, she explained her family was sleeping in the room. “It’s cold in there, freezing all night.”
A hand-written sign poking out of the heaps of concrete and house entrails denotes Wael el Khaldi’s former house. His house sits amidst yet another wasteland of destroyed homes. Atop the rubble, a wheelchair belonging to a 23 year old member of el Khaldi’s family sits squashed. One of the Red Crescent medics holds the crushed prosthetic legs belonging to the same amputee.
The Red Crescent teams are scouring the ruins, taking stock of blown out windows. Facing the massive destruction and 10s of destroyed houses in this northwestern area of Gaza alone, counting shattered windows seems trite, irrelevant. But the RC is doing what it can to immediately alleviate the suffering of Palestinians who can at least still stay in their homes, internal damage and desecration aside. It is winter, and the nights are cold. A window covering makes the difference between completely frigid nights and moderately tolerable nights (without electricity or gas, no means of heating except with blankets, if these have not been burned or tarnished).
Accompanying the RC team, I see a number of houses in a short time. No time for in depth testimony taking, just a surface view and understanding of each family’s tragedy.
Mohammed Ali laments the loss of the trees lining his family’s house (trees, as ever, are an important theme in Palestinians’ narrative: life, continuity, providing nourishment). “It took 12 years to cultivate these trees. We had oranges, lemons, olives, dates…” And a nice tiled patio, too, all razed with the swat of a gargantuan military bulldozer.
The next door neighbour’s front wall is missing, bulldozed. His porch swing sits inside the open room, the support beams buckling and cupboards bare for all to see.
“Henna kan fi bab. Mish maujoud,” the owner tells me. [There was a door here. It’s gone. (so is the wall, obviously)].
While the roads are only dirt lanes, the houses are spacious in this neighbourhood, and well-spaced apart. The lift would be good here, near the sea, were it not for numerous factors: the siege, the wanton destruction… We stop at a lovely olive and light green washed stucco house, again lined with trees (papaya, lemon, orange, date) and tastefully landscaped. Above the smiling faces which greet us and try to sit us down for tea, a gaping hole much larger than the original window. Bullet holes less-tastefully puncture the finish.
A villa, a seeming mansion, sits off the road, top floor window blackened from the chemical fires which raged inside. Professor Mohammed Okasha stands in his ruined kitchen, a vast kitchen arranged western-style, as is most of the house. “All of our clothes were burned. All of them. Everything,” he laments the losses in his house.
We move through the house, the walls are a uniform dripping-soot-black, and he explains:
“Every year, I went to Britain, photocopied books by Israeli authors which had been translated from Hebrew into English. Avi Schlaim, Benny Morris, Ilan Pappe…”
Many houses later, less time, I’m only able to jot down notes, impressions.Many houses later, less time, I’m only able to jot down notes, impressions.
– 5 rooms damaged; missile, tank, and bulldozer. 25 people in the house, soft eyes. Background music is firing from Israeli gunboats off the coast. Importance of something as simple as plastic sheeting.
