Say to her, “My dear, my dear,
It is not so dreadful here.”
Hadil Ghabin, 9 years old, was killed Monday night after an Israeli shell struck her family’s home. 13 other members of her family were injured, including her pregnant mother, several toddlers, and her 10-year-old brother Ahmed, who lost his eye sight.
One-year old Rawan comforts her other sister, Rana
Hadil’s mother was baking bread when the shells began to fall around them. She gathered her children and they huddled inside the house for safety.
According to her aunts, Hadil loved reading, writing stories, and playing “make-believe”. Her Aunt told me :”She would always gather all the neighbourhood children and tell them all sorts of wild stories” .
And why not, for sometimes imagination is the only refuge we have here, the only realm that cannot be invaded.
The Israeli Army asserted today that despite the civlian deaths, which resulted from narrowing their range of attack, the shelling will continue.
Overcome with emotion, Hadil’s mother collapsed when the body of her daughter, limp and expressionless, was brought to the house for a final farewell.
Hadil’s 10-year-old brother Ahmed lost his sight in the attack.
Neighbours tried to comfort the grieving family, as they wept alongside them and threw fragrant basil flowers on her lifeless body before the burial.
Even as Hadil was being carried away, shells continued to pound the area, leaving billows of white smoke in the distance and an acrid smell lingering in the air.
The Ghabin household. The mother was baking bread when the shelling began, and gathered her children together in the living room when their house was hit.
I’ve always loved Fridays in Gaza. In the mornings, save for the lone garbage collector futilely sweeping the abandoned streets and Municipality park, littered with plastic cups, watermelon seeds, and strangled straws from the night before, the hustle and bustle of the city comes to a standstill.
It is a serene if lethargic time, an escape from the sea of chaos, uncertainty and violence that grips our lives each waking day and night. For a few hours, things seem ordinary in a place where ordinary is an illusion. And it doesn’t seem like anything can disrupt those moments, as if some force is saying to the madness that envelopes us: “come back another hour!”
Slowly, the streets come to life again as evening takes hold. This is Yousuf’s favorite time. He likes to go out to the balcony, as we did yesterday, and “people watch”-just take in the incongruent and cacophonous sites and sounds of another Friday in Gaza.
In the park in front of us, children boisterously played football, women licked ice cream cones and chatted, and wedding motorcades ( “zaffit sayyarat”), which, no matter what the season or situation, you can always except to hear on Thursday and Friday evenings like clockwork-made their way to beachside hotels and lounges. They tirelessly honked their horns in sync with live wedding dabke music, blaring out from portable speakers or played by live for-hire bands seated in the back of rented pick-up trucks decorated with carnations.
Boys and relatives clamored for a standing space in the back of the trucks, dancing and clapping feverishly along with the music. Young children chase them down the street to join in the fun. If the wind is just right, the sky becomes a showcase of homemade kites, dancing and flirting with each other, challenging the physical bounds imposed upon this battered area’s residents, reaching to places they can only dream about, allowing them to navigate freedom, no matter how purposeless, for just a little bit.
In the distance, the ubiquitous double-thuds of artillery fire could be heard exploding a few kilometers away, increasing in number and intensity, it seemed, as the evening progressed, only to be drowned out ever-so-slightly by the cacophonous symphony of Friday blitheness, as if to say-“not today! Today, you will not steal our moment.”
The evening passes, the clock strikes midnight, and suddenly, the carriage tranforms into a pumpkin again. The magic dissipates. And 6 people are dead.
Just another Gaza Friday.
posted by Lailaumyousuf @ Saturday, April 08, 2006
The family of a British cameraman shot dead by an Israeli soldier claimed yesterday that both the Foreign Office and the Israeli authorities had obstructed their search for justice. James Miller, 34, was killed by a single shot while making a documentary in the Gaza strip about Palestinian children.
At an inquest opening yesterday in London, TV producer Daniel Edge told how he was with Mr Miller on May 2 2003, and described his desperate attempts to save the cameraman. The four-strong TV crew were on their final day of filming. Clutching a white flag with a torch shone on to it, they had approached the Israeli soldiers, calling out: “Hello, we’re British journalists.” Shots were fired, and Mr Miller fell, fatally wounded. Mr Edge told the inquest how he had begged the soldiers for help for his friend.
The jury of five women and five men heard that Mr Miller, reporter Saira Shah, and interpreter Abdul Rahman Abdullah were fired upon as they approached the soldiers on foot to ask to leave the dangerous area where they had been filming. They had spent 16 days in the Gaza Strip on a documentary for US network HBO about Palestinian children in the Rafah refugee camp. It had been the first visit to Palestine for Mr Miller, who came from Braunton in Devon.
On the night, the crew left their equipment in a nearby Palestinian house as the trio walked, in flak jackets and helmets, towards members of the Israeli Defence Force in their armoured personnel carrier, or APC. Mr Edge, from Badby, Northamptonshire, was standing yards away, on the house veranda. Mr Miller was shining a torch on to a white flag held by Mr Abdullah when the IDF opened fire. On the second shot, Mr Miller was hit in the front of his neck; fragments of bullet were later found embedded in his blue flak jacket.
In an emotional state giving evidence at St Pancras coroner’s court, Mr Edge said: “I heard Abdul shouting, it seemed he was crying in pain – I thought he had been shot in the arms or legs. I heard Saira shouting ‘He’s injured, he’s injured, please don’t shoot’. And then I heard Abdul shouting ‘He’s injured’. It was at that point I realised James had been shot, possibly badly injured, because he was silent.”
Following the death, the Miller family were determined any local postmortem should be attended by an independent expert, such as a Home Office pathologist. In written evidence one of Mr Miller’s sisters alleged the British ambassador, Sherrard Cowper-Coles, told her it would be a waste of money to have a British pathologist – even though the family wanted to ascertain the nature of the wound, and gather other forensic evidence. According to a contemporaneous note of the phone conversation made by Anne Waddington, a barrister, he was dismissive: “I asked what was his reluctance … He said it would be a waste of taxpayers’ money.”
Mrs Waddington, whose father-in-law is the former Tory home secretary David Waddington, told the inquest another British official, Piers Cazalet, also asked the family to drop the demand : “He told me it would be obstructive and cause a delay [if I protested].” She went on: “There was extreme pressure on us, and on Sophy [Mr Miller’s widow], within hours of her husband being killed, to agree to a postmortem without any independent observer.” Mrs Miller told the jury Israel had tried to “grind down” the family with delays and broken promises “in the hope that we wouldn’t go on”.
In court Mrs Miller named the soldier she believed killed her husband as a first lieutenant who fired from the APC 100 metres away from Mr Miller.
by Laila El-Haddad
Saeed Abu Salah is a patient man. Judging from all he has endured during the past four years at least. Abu Salah-40 years old with graying hair and eyes the color of chestnuts, and 20 children from separate two marriages-lives in Gaza’s northernmost region in the farming town of Beit Hanun-nearly as far north as you can go without being killed as so many have.
He is less than a kilometer away in fact from the border with Israel-and the fence and wall that bulldozers, active even as we spoke and visible in plain distance, were building.
Directly across from his house, at the end of an unpaved dirt path that used to lead to his 40 donom cattle ranch and citrus groves-now inaccessible and razed to the ground- is an Israeli lookout tower, resting atop a large mound of sand just across the border. It is equipped with a camera that monitors the family’s every move even as we speak, and a sniper, who every now and again fires “warning” shots at us.
“He doesn’t like you being here, as a journalist. Its normal-he shoots day and night, but particularly when visitors come” explained Abu Salah matter-of-factly, of the unseen sniper, whom he talks about with unenviable confidence and the seemingly intimate knowledge of a close acquintance.
Still, Abu Salah is unflinching in his determination to stay put, asserting that he will only allow Israeli troops to drive him out, which he says they have tried to do so many times before, “over his dead body”.
The UNDP estimated the damage done to his farm, which one employed over 30 Palestinians, at nearly half a million dollars. All he got in return was a zinc-sheeted shed, shielding little more than a wounded horse. “We just can’t afford to buy any more cattle. Or plant any more trees. Why should we? The Israelis will just destroy them again,” he says, staring at the forboding and ever-present tower in the distance. His family used to be self-sufficient, but since his farm was razed, he now has to rely on working for a local contractor once a week for money.
He greets me with tea and sweet, strong coffee as he displays his “museum of Israeli war artifacts”-a room full of 55kg tank shells that we can barely lift together, which he has decorated with artificial flowers; an arch, neatly trimmed with a line of Israeli bullet casings; and a photo album he keeps of all the damage done to his ranch-including his sniped cows, lying dead alongside each other, their intestines spilling out of their bloated stomachs.
“It’s as if they wanted to say, ‘this could be you’” he said, his young children peering through the iron-barred window in front of us, and the smallest, piercingly blue-eyed child giggling under his arms. “They used to be so afraid-the young ones still are. Now, they have gotten so used to it that if we don’t hear shelling, we think something is wrong. They are always firing at us, and when not firing, then shelling, and when not shelling, hovering over us with F-16s and drones, mocking us, provoking us, trying to show us that we are surrounded from all sides and that we have to eventually leave.”
There are no clinics where he lives. No grocery stores. Nothing is allowed. His wife is expecting anyday now, but Abu Salah is worried an ambulance may not be allowed in.
“Since Israeli forces declared the area-including my home, a buffer zone a few months ago, dozens of heavy shells fired by either Israeli tanks or warplanes have fallen in the area, wounding my 21-years old son Eid in his right arm, inflicting severe damage to my modest house and casting panic in my children’s’ hearts” explained Abu Salah, lifting his son’s wasted arm, left with little more than base muscle and stubs of fingers.
“I am not a Hamas supporter, but let me say that we’ve given enough concessions-and whole decade of concessions for free. The PLO decided to recognize Israel and what did recognition bring us? Have them recognize our rights first, our freedom to live, our right of return, then surely, we will recognize their rights.”
At night, Abu Salah and his family become prisoners in their own home, unable to move for free of being shot by the faceless sniper.
“This is our existence. This is our reality. This is our fate. And we will bear it out, but never another hijra (exile)-I will stay here till they bury me in my grave.”
by Venice Buhain Originally publsihed in The Olympian
OLYMPIA — For a few hours Sunday, the Olympia Eagles Ballroom was filled with friendly chatter, the enticing smells of Mediterranean food and the delicate handiwork of Palestinian embroidery.
But the main event at the fundraiser for the Olympia-Rafah Sister City Project was a presentation by two volunteers from the organization that aims to continue the connection between Olympia and the city where activist Rachel Corrie died.
Corrie, who lived in Olympia, died in 2003 after being run over by a bulldozer operated by the Israeli military as she protested the demolition of a home.
The Olympia-Rafah Sister City Project was formed shortly after Corrie’s death, said her friend and volunteer Rochelle Gause. Gause is one of three “delegates” who recently returned from Rafah as part of the sister city project.
Corrie’s parents, Craig and Cindy Corrie, also have traveled on behalf of the project.
Gause said Corrie had sent e-mails about possibly starting a sister city program with Rafah.
“It was one of her visions,” Gause said. “We’ve tried to carry that vision and develop it.”
The Olympia-Rafah Sister City Project, which became a recognized nonprofit organization last year, established a women’s center and a cultural center in Rafah, collects medical equipment, and has hosted educational presentations stateside about the volunteers’ experiences in Palestinian areas.
Gause and Serena Becker gave their first presentation after returning several weeks ago from an eventful trip around Gaza and the West Bank. The presentation covers the history of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the current conditions of life in the Palestinian areas.
Gause and Becker nearly were kidnapped in January, just before the
Palestinian elections, but their Palestinian friends interceded on their behalf, Becker said. Gause and Becker plan to take their slide show lecture on a tour.
The group sends several delegates for months at a time to live in Rafah, and its members hope to bring residents to visit Olympia.
The project already has started one of Corrie’s goals — to bring handcrafted scarves, vests, bracelets, pillows, purses and other goods from Rafah and to pay the artisans a fair wage, said event organizer Rana Shmait.
“It’s a fair livable wage, to the mutual benefit of the people in Rafah and Olympia,” she said.
Locally, the crafts are sold at Traditions Cafe, a store dedicated to fair trade. Having delegates in Rafah is one of the few ways for the goods to reach Olympia, Gause said.
Before her death, Corrie, who was well-known in the local peace activist community, had spoken to Traditions Cafe about selling Palestinian handicrafts there, said cafe manager Jody Tiller. The nonprofit group doesn’t make a lot of money off of the goods, she said.
“They want as much as possible to go toward the women as they can get,” Tiller said.
Though many of the people at Sunday’s fundraiser knew Corrie or were familiar with the group, some were happy to have the chance to learn about the group and its mission.
“I wanted to support the project, and I wanted to learn more about it,”
said Karen Nelson, owner of the Fertile Ground Guest House, which has donated rooms for guest speakers sponsored by the Rachel Corrie Foundation for Peace and Justice.
“I’m glad that there’s such a turnout, and that people in Olympia are becoming aware of what is happening in other areas.”
