April 11th 2009 marked the 6th anniversary of the shooting of British ISM activist Tom Hurndall by Israeli occupation soldiers that lead to his death 9 months later. It wasn’t possible for ISM volunteers to enter the Gaza Strip for several years due to the clampdown of the Erez crossing, so this was the first time ISM activists managed to commemorate the anniversary in Gaza itself.
Last October, in the occasion of the release of a new television drama based on the killing in Gaza of Tom Hurndall (’The Shooting Of Thomas Hurndall’, Channel Four Television), Amnesty International has renewed its call for justice for Mr Hurndall’s family.
Tom Hurndall playing football in Amman refugee camp
Football match in Rafah, Gaza
Children gather at Tom Hurndall’s memorial
A memorial banner for Tom Hurndall
Gazan boy at Tom Hurndall’s memorial
A memorial banner for Tom Hurndall
Even before the recent onslaught, the human rights organization has described a situation where Israeli military forces kill civilians in Gaza with ‘near-total impunity’ – and while Mr Hurndall’s death has led to the conviction of one Israeli soldier on manslaughter charges, Amnesty insists that this was almost solely due to the determination of his family rather than the Israeli military authorities’ own efforts to see justice done.
Amnesty International UK Director Kate Allen said:
The shocking truth is that Israeli soldiers kill civilians in Gaza with near-total impunity, week in week out. Tom Hurndall’s family have fought hard to achieve justice over his tragic death but the general position is one where independent investigations of civilian killings almost never happen and where the process itself lacks independence and impartiality. Where, exceptionally, an individual Israeli soldier is held responsible for a civilian death or injury, typically no-one further up the command structure is ever held accountable.
Because of the daily Israeli attacks against civilians in Gaza Strip (despite the “ceasefire”) ISM activists had to continue their work even during that very special day. Since early in the morning some of the activists continued monitoring the Israeli Navy aggressions against Palestinian fishermen. Later ISM Gaza Strip held a meeting with farmers of Khoza’a village, to discuss about the Israeli attacks and the accompaniment by international activists. In the nearby village of Faraheen several ISM activists along with journalists visited also a handicapped Palestinian farmer woman who had broken her leg the previous day, while trying to escape from Israeli gunfire.
We think that continuing our work it was the best way to commemorate Tom’s sacrifice and what he would want. But of course we wanted to do something special. Because some of us have actually worked on the case of Tom just after his shooting and others it was then when we first heard about ISM and we were inspired by Tom and Rachel. So, after this long day, we organized, with the help of local sportsmen, a football match in Yibna refugee camp, the Rafah neighborhood were Tom was shot while trying to rescue Palestinian children from Israeli gunfire. Who knows, maybe some of these children were now watching the match, despite the rain. In any case it was amazing to see Palestinian children of …all ages, to be able to play in a place where 6 years ago they couldn’t reach without being shot. We felt that Tom’s (as well as Rachel’s) sacrifice had somehow contribute to that. And while watching the match the images of the Rafah players were mixed with that image of Tom playing football with a kid in a refugee camp in Amman…
“Its not very comfortable in there is it?” said the stony faced official, cigarette smoke forming a haze around his gleaming oval head.
“Its OK. We’re fine” I replied wearily, delirious after being awake for a straight period of 30 hours.
“You could be in there for days you know. For weeks. Indefinitely. “So, tell me, you are taking a plane tomorrow morning to the US?”
—–
It was our journey home that began with the standard packing frenzy: squeezing everything precious and dear and useful into two suitcases that would be our sustenance for the course of 3 months.
The trips to the outdoor recreation store- in preparation for what I anticipated to be a long and tortuous journey across Rafah Crossing to Gaza. The inspect repellent; the mosquito netting; the water purifier; the potty toppers for my kids and the dried fruit and granola bars and portion sized peanut butter cups. This time, I wanted to be ready, I thought to myself-just in case I got stuck at the Crossing. The Crossing. My presumptuousness is like a dull hit to the back of my head now.
In addition to all the packing of suitcases, we were also packing up our house- my husband was finishing up his residency at duke University and set to start a medical fellowship at Johns Hopkins in July. In the meantime, we were “closing shop”, putting our things in storage, selling the rest, and heading overseas: me to Gaza, he to Lebanon to visit his family.
Eventually I was too meet him there (assuming i could get into Gaza, and the, assuming I could get out). Yassine is a third-generation Palestinian refugee from the village of Waarit al-Siris in northern historic Palestine; he was born in a refugee camp in Lebanon and holds a Laizze Passe for Palestinian refugees. Israel denies him return to his own home- or even to the home of his spouse in Gaza. So when we go overseas, we often go our separate ways; we cannot live legally, as a unit, as a family, in our own homes.
I hold a Palestinian Authority passport. It replaced the “temporary two-year Jordanian passport for Gaza residents” that we held until the Oslo Accords and the creation of the Palestinian Authority in the mid ’90s, which itself replaced the Egyptian travel documents we held before that. A progression in a long line of stateless documentation.
It is a passport that allows no passage. A passport that denied me entry to my own home. This is its purpose: 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 identity.
—–
We finished packing as much as we could of the house, leaving the rest to Yassine who was to leave a week after us, and drove 4 hours to Washington to spend a few day sat my brother’s house before we took off.
First, we headed to the the Egyptian embassy.
Last year, my parents were visiting us from Gaza City when Rafah was sealed hermetically. They attempted to fly back to Egypt to wait for the border to open- but were now allowed to board the plane in Washington. “Palestinians cannot fly to Egypt now without a visa, new rules” the airline personnel explained, “and no visas can be issued until Rafah is open” added the Egyptian embassy official.
They were in a conundrum, aggravated by the fact that their US stay entry stamp had reach passed its six-month limit. Eventually, they got around the issue by obtaining an Egyptian tourist visa, made easier by their old age, which they used to wait in Egypt for one month until Rafah Crossing opened again.
I did not want to repeat their ordeal, so I called the embassy this time, which assured me the protocol had changed: now, it was only Palestinian men who were not allowed to fly to or enter Egypt. Women were, and would get their visa at the Egyptian port of destination. I was given a signed and dated letter (April 6, 2009) by the consul to take with me in case I encountered any problems:
“The Consular Section of the Embassy of the Arab Republic of Egypt hereby confirms that women, who are residents of the Gaza Strip, and who hold passports issued by the Palestinian Authority are required to get their visa to enter Egypt at Egyptian ports and NOT at the various Egyptian consulates in the United States on their way to the Gaza Strip for the purpose of reaching their destination (i.e. Gaza Strip)” it read.
With letter and bags in hand, we took off, worried only about the possibility of entering Gaza- the thought of being able to enter Egypt never crossing my mind.
2 long-haul flights and one 7 hour transit later, we made it. I knew the routine by heart. Upon our arrival, I was quick to hit the bank to buy the $15 visa stamps for Yousuf and Noor’s American passports and exchange some dollars into Egyptian pounds. I figured it would help pass the time while the lines got shorter.
I then went and filled out my entry cards-an officer came and filled them out with me seeing my hands were full, a daypack on my back, Noor strapped to my chest in a carrier, Yousuf in my hand…
we then submitted our passports, things seemed to be going smoothly. Just then the officer explained he needed to run something by his superior. “You have a Palestinian passport; Rafah crossing is closed…”
“I promise it will just be 5 minutes” he assured me. But that’s all i needed to hear. I knew I was in for a long wait. It was at this point I yanked out my laptop and began to tweet and blog about my experience (full progression of tweets here courtesy Hootsbuddy). At first I thought it would simply help pass the time; it developed into a way to pool resources together that could help me; and ended as a public awareness campaign.
—–
The faces were different each time. 3 or four different rooms and hallways to navigate down. They refused to give names and the answers they gave were always in the form of cryptic questions.
The first explained I would not be allowed entry into Egypt because Palestinians without permanent residency abroad are not allowed in; and besides- Rafah Crossing is closed he said (my response: so open it?). I was told I was to be deported to the UK first. “But I had no British visa” I explained. I was ordered to agree to get on the next flight. I refused-I didn’t come all this way to turn back.
I was escorted to the “extended transit terminal”. It was empty at first, save for a south Asian man in tightly buckled jeans and a small duffel bag that spent the good part of our time there there in a deep sleep. During the day the hall would fill up with locally deported passengers- from villages of cities across Egypt, and we would move our things to the upper waiting area.
Most of the time was spent in this waiting area with low level guards who knew nothing and could do nothing.
At different intervals a frustrated Yousuf, fully caped in his black Spiderman outfit and mask, would approach them angrily about “why they wouldn’t let him go see his seedo and tete?” and why “they put cockroaches on the floor”. When we first arrived, he asked if these were the “yahood”, his only experiences with extended closure, delay, and denial of entry being at the hands of the israeli soldiers and government. “No, but why don’t you ask them why they are are allowed through to sunbathe and we aren’t to our own homes?”
“Rabina kbeer” came the response. They were impotent. God is great.
There was very little time I was given access to anyone who had any authority. I seemed to be called in whenever the new person on duty arrived, when they were scheduled for their thrice daily interrogation and intimidation, their shooting and crying.
Officers came and went as shifts began and ended. But our status was always the same. Our “problem”, our case, our issue was always the same. We remained, sitting on our chairs, with our papers and documents in hand, waiting, and no one the better.
Always waiting. For this is what the Palestinian does: we wait. For an answer to be given, for a question to be asked; for a marriage proposal to be made, for a divorce to be finalized; for a border to open, for a permit to be issued; for a war to end; for a war to begin; for a child to be born; for one to die a martyr; for retirement or a new job; for exile to a better place and for return to the only place that knows us; for our prisoners to come home; for our home to no longer be prisons; for our children to be free; for freedom from a time when we no longer have to wait.
We waited for the next shift as we were instructed by those who made their own instructions. Funny how when you need to pass the time, the time does not pass.
“You need to speak with whose in charge-and their shift starts at 10 am”. So we pass the night and wait until 10. “Well by the time they really get started its more like noon”. So we wait till noon. “Well the real work isn’t until the evening”. And we wait until evening. Then the cycle starts again.
Every now and then the numberless phone would ring requesting me, and a somber voice would ask if I changed my mind. I insisted all I wanted to do was go home; that it was not that complicated.
“But Gaza is a special case, we all know that” I was told.
Special, as in expendable, not human, not entitled to rights special, I thought.
Unfamiliar faces that acted as though though I was a long-lost friend kept popping in and out to see me. As though I were an amnesiac in a penitentiary. They all kept asking the same cryptic question “so you are getting on a plane soon, right?”
First, a gentleman from the Palestinian representative’s office that someone else whose name I was meant to recognize sent. ” It’ll all be resolved within the hour” he promised confidently, before going on to tell me about his son who worked with Motorola in Florida;
“Helping Israeli drones do their job?”
“That’s right!” he beamed.
An hour came and went, and suddenly the issue was “irresolvable”, and I was “a journalist up to trouble”.
—–
Friends and family in Egypt, the US, and Gaza, worked around the clock with me, calling in any favors they had, anyone they knew, doing anything they could to get some answers and let me through. But the answer was always the same: Amn il Dawla (State Security and Intelligence) says no, and they are the ultimate authorities. No one goes past them.
Later a second Palestinian representative came to see me.
“So you are not going on that second flight are you?”
“What are you talking about? Why does everyone speak to me in question form?”
“Answer the question”
“No, I came here to go to Gaza, not to return to the US”
“Ok that’s all I needed to know; there is a convoy of injured Palestinian with security clearance heading to the border with some space; we are trying to get you on there with them; 15 minutes and it’ll all be resolved, we just need clearance, its all over” he assured me.
Yousuf smashed another cockroach.
—–
We were taken down a new hallway. A new room. A new face. The man behind the desk explained how he was losing sleep over my case, how I had the while airport working on it, ho he had a son Yousuf’s age; and then offered me an apple and a bottle of water and told me istaraya7i, to rest, a command I would hear again and again over the course of the 36 hours.
Is this man for real??? an apple and a bottle of water? I thought to myself, my eyes nearly popping out of my face.
“I don’t want your food. I don’t want to rest. I don’t want your sympathy. I JUST WANT TO GO HOME. To my country. To my parents. IS THAT TOO HARD TO UNDERSTAND?” I screamed, breaking my level-headed calm of the past 20 hours.
“Please don’t yell, just calm down, calm down, everyone outside will think I am treating you badly, c’mon, and besides its ‘ayb (disgraceful) not to accept the apple from me”.
“‘Ayb?? What’s ‘AYB is you denying my entry to my own home! And why should I be calm? This situation doesn’t call for calm; it makes no sense and neither should I!”
A distraught Noor furrowed her brows and then comforted me the only way she knew how: by patting me on the back with her little hands and giving me a hug. Yousuf began to cry.
“C’mon lady don’t have a breakdown in front of your kids please. You know I have a kid your son’s age and its breaking my heart to do this, to see him in these conditions, to put him in the conditions, so please take the plane.”
“So don’t see me in these conditions! There’s a simple solution you know. LET ME GO HOME. Its not asking a lot is it?”
“Hey now look lady” he said, stiffening suddenly into bad cop, his helpless grimace disappeared.
“Rules are rules, you need a visa to get in here like any other country, can you go to Jordan without a visa?’
“Don’t play the rules game with me. I HAD APPROVAL FROM YOUR EMBASSY, FROM YOUR CONSUL GENERAL, to cross into Egypt and go to Gaza; and besides how else am I supposed to get into Gaza???” I shouted, frantically waving the stamped and signed document in front of him as though it were a magic wand.
“So sue him. Amn il Dawla supercedes the foreign ministry’s orders, he must have outdated protocol.”
“The letter was dated April 6, that is 2 days ago, how outdated could it be?? Look- if I could parachute into Gaza I would, trust me. With all do respect to your country, I’m not here to sight-see. Do you have a parachute for me? If I could sail there I would do that too, but last I check Israel was ramming and turning those boats back. Do you have another suggestions?
“What is it you want lady- do you want to just live in the airport? is that it? Because we have no problems letting you live here, really. We can set up a shelter for you. And no one will ever ask about you or know you exist. In any case you don’t have permanent residency abroad so our government policies say we can’t let a Palestinian who does not have permanent residency abroad”
“I have a US Visa- its expired but my extension of status document is valid until the end of June. and besides- what kind of illogical law is that? you aren’t allowing me back home if I don’t have permanent residency abroad?”
“I don’t read English please translate..”
“You see it says here that my status is valid until June 30, 2009”
“Good, so then we CAN deport you back to the US” he said, picking up the phone and giving a quick order for the Palestinian convoy of injured Palestinians heading to the Crossing to go on without me, my only hope of returning home dissipating before my eyes at the hands of a barely literate manipulative enforcer.
“You just said if i have permanent residency abroad I can go home, now you say I can’t, which is it??”
“I’m sorry you are refusing to go on the plane. Take her away please.”
We were ushered back to the extended waiting area, back to our roach ridden premises that had become our home, along with a newly arrived Luxembourgian and French couple and their two children who had failed to produce their passports and were being sent back home. Here I was, about to be deported away from home, over prepared, with my documents and signed papers, from consulates and universities and governments; and they, used to traveling passport-free the EU, being sent back home because they had only an ID card.
—–
It wasn’t long before a new guard came to us, and request we follow him “to a more isolated room”. “It will be better for you- more private. All the African flights are arriving now with all their diseases, you don’t want to be here for that! It’ll get overcrowded and awful in here.”
Given the the well-wishes that preceded my last interrogation about the “uncomfortableness” I may endure, I somehow had a feeling where we were headed.
We were asked to bring all our luggage and escorted down a different hallway; this time we were asked to leave everything behind, and to give up our cameras, laptops, and mobile phones. We took our seats in the front of a tiny filthy room, where 17 other men (and one Indonesian woman was sleeping on the floor in the back, occasionally shouting out in the middle of her interrupted sleep) of varying nationalities were already waiting.
A brute man-, illiterate by his own admission, took charge of each of files, spontaneously blurting out vulgarities and ordering anyone who so much as whispered to shut the hell up or get sent to real prison; the room was referred to as “7abs”, or a cell; I can probably best describe it as the detention or holding room. a heady man with a protruding belly that seems at odds with his otherwise lanky body was the door guard.
Officer #1 divided up the room into regions: the 5 or so south Asians who were there for whatever reason-expired paperwork, illegal documentation- were referred to as “Pakistan” when their attention was needed; The snoozing, sleep-talking woman in the back was “Indonesia”; and the impeccably dressed Guinean businessman, fully decked in a sharp black suit and blue lined tie, was “Kenya” (despite his persistence please to the contrary). There was a group of Egyptian peasants with forged, fake, or wrongly filed Id cards and passports: a 54 year old man whose ID said he was born in 1990; another who left his ID in his village 5 hours away, and so on.
By this point, I had not slept in 27 hours, 40 if one were to count the plane ride. My patience and my energy were wearing thing. My children were filthy and tired and confused; Noor was crying. I tried to set her cot up, but a cell within a cell did not seem to her liking and she resisted, much as I did.
We took the opportunity to chat when officer #1 was away. “”So what did you do?” asked Kenya, the Guinean.
“I was born Palestinian” I replied. “Everyone in here is being deported back home for one reason or another right? I bet I am the only one being deported away from home; the only one denied entry to my home.”
Officer #1 returned, this time he asked me to come with him “with or without your kids”. I brought them along, not knowing what was next.
There was two steely-eyed men on either end of a relatively well-furnished room, once again inquiring about my “comfort” and ordering-in the form of a question- whether I was taking a flight that morning to the US.
Noor began making a fuss, bellowing at the top of her lungs and swatting anyone that approached her.
“She is stubborn. She takes after her mother I see” said the man.
Soon we were escorted back to the waiting area. I knew there was nothing more I could do. We waited for several more hours until my children exhausted themselves and fell asleep. I bathed them in the filthy bathroom sinks with freezing tap water and hand soap and arranged their quarters on the steel chairs of the waiting room, buzzing with what seemed like a thousand gnats. Thank God for the mosquito netting.
Eventually, dawn broke, and we were escorted by two guards to the ticket counter, our $2500 flights rerouted, and put on a plane back to Washington.
I noted on one of my tweets that I would be shocked if my children’s immune system survived this jolt. It didn’t.
My daughter vomited the whole flight to London as I slipped in and out of delirium, mumbling half Arabic half English phrases to the flustered but helpful Englishman sitting next to us. I thank him wherever he is for looking after us.
Whatever she had, Yousuf an eye caught in the coming days-along with an ear and throat infection.
Eventually, we reached Dulles Airport. I walked confidently to the booth when it was my turn.
What was I going to say? How do I explain this? The man took one look at my expired visa, and my departure stamps.
“How long have you been gone?”
“36 hours” I replied bluntly.
“Yes,I see that. Do you want to explain?”
“Sure. Egypt forbade me from returning to Gaza”.
“I don’t understand- they denied you entry to your own home?”
“I don’t either, and if I did, I wouldn’t be here.”
With that, I was given a a stamp and allowed back inside.
Now that we are warm; clothes; showered, rested and recovered from whatever awful virus we picked up in the bowels of Cairo airport, I keep thinking to myself: what more could I have done?
“The quintessential Palestinian experience,” historian Rashid Khalidi has written, “takes place at a border, an airport, a checkpoint: in short, at any one of those many modern barriers where identities are checked and verified.”
In this place, adds Robyn Creswell, “connection” turns out to be only another word for separation or quarantine: the loop of airports never ends, like Borges’s famous library. The cruelty of the Palestinian situation is that these purgatories are in no way extraordinary but rather the backdrop of daily existence.”
I don’t know if I met Tom Hurndall. He was one of a bunch of “human Tom Hurndallshields” who turned up in Baghdad just before the Anglo-American invasion in 2003, the kind of folk we professional reporters make fun of. Tree huggers, that kind of thing. Now I wish I had met him because – looking back over the history of that terrible war – Hurndall’s journals (soon to be published) show a remarkable man of remarkable principle. “I may not be a human shield,” he wrote at 10.26 on 17 March from his Amman hotel. “And I may not adhere to the beliefs of those I have travelled with, but the way Britain and America plan to take Iraq is unnecessary and puts soldiers’ lives above those of civilians. For that I hope that Bush and Blair stand trial for war crimes.”
Hurndall got it about right, didn’t he? It wasn’t so simple as war/no war, black and white, he wrote. “Things I’ve heard and seen over the last few weeks proves what I already knew; neither the Iraqi regime, nor the American or British, are clean. Maybe Saddam needs to go but … the air war that’s proposed is largely unnecessary and doesn’t discriminate between civilians and armed soldiers. Tens of thousands will die, maybe hundreds of thousands, just to save thousands of American soldiers having to fight honestly, hand to hand. It is wrong.” Oh, how many of my professional colleagues wrote like this on the eve of war? Not many.
We pooh-poohed the Hurndalls and their friends as groupies even when they did briefly enter the South Baghdad electricity station and met one engineer, Attiah Bakir, who had been horrifyingly wounded 11 years earlier when an American bomb blew a fragment of metal into his brain. “You can see now where it struck,” Hurndall wrote in an email from Baghdad, “caving in the central third of his forehead and removing the bone totally. Above the bridge of his broken nose, there is only a cavity with scarred skin covering the prominent gap…”
A picture of Attiah Bakir stares out of the book, a distinguished, brave man who refused to leave his place of work as the next war approached. He was silenced only when one of Hurndall’s friends made the mistake of asking what he thought of Saddam’s government. I cringed for the poor man. “Minders” were everywhere in those early days. Talking to any civilian was almost criminally foolish. Iraqis were forbidden from talking to foreigners. Hence all those bloody “minders” (many of whom, of course, ended up working for Baghdad journalists after Saddam’s overthrow).
Hurndall had a dispassionate eye. “Nowhere in the world have I ever seen so many stars as now in the western deserts of Iraq,” he wrote on 22 February. “How can somewhere so beautiful be so wrought with terror and war as it is soon to be?” In answer to the questions asked of them by the BBC, ITV, WBO, CNN, al-Jazeera and others, Hurndall had no single reply. “I don’t think there could be one, two or 100 responses,” he wrote. “To each of us our own, but not one of us wants to die.” Prophetic words for Tom to have written.
You can see him smiling selflessly in several snapshots. He went to cover the refugee complex at Al-Rowaishid and moved inexorably towards Gaza where he was confronted by the massive tragedy of the Palestinians. “I woke up at about eight in my bed in Jerusalem and lay in until 9.30,” he wrote. “We left at 10.00… Since then, I have been shot at, gassed, chased by soldiers, had sound grenades thrown within metres of me, been hit by falling debris…”
Hurndall was trying to save Palestinian homes and infrastructure but frequently came under Israeli fire and seemed to have lost his fear of death. “While approaching the area, they (the Israelis) continually fired one- to two-second bursts from what I could see was a Bradley fighting vehicle… It was strange that as we approached and the guns were firing, it sent shivers down my spine, but nothing more than that. We walked down the middle of the street, wearing bright orange, and one of us shouted through a loudspeaker, ‘We are International volunteers. Don’t shoot!’ That was followed by another volley of fire, though I can’t be sure where from…”
Tom Hurndall had stayed in Rafah. He was only 21 where – in his mother’s words – he lost his life through a single, selfless, human act. “Tom was shot in the head as he carried a single Palestinian child out of the range of an Israeli army sniper.” Mrs Hurndall asked me to write a preface to Tom’s book and this article is his preface, for a brave man who stood alone and showed more courage than most if us dreamed of. Forget tree huggers. Hurndall was one good man and true.
Every year we remember 16th March. We remember a kind, insightful, talented person committed to the plight of the Palestinian people, who genuinely had the courage of her convictions. Her name was Rachel Corrie. This year, the anniversary of her death comes in the wake of Israel’s massive assault on the Gaza Strip. We believe Rachel would want the world to remember the 1,400 Palestinians killed before she is remembered herself. Now, six long years after her death, the situation in Gaza is even more desperate than when Rachel bore witness to it. Six years on we still demand justice. We still demand that the international community hold the Israeli military and government responsible for the murder of Rachel and so many Palestinian civilians. We also demand that the US justice system holds responsible the Caterpillar company which continues to provide the Israeli Occupation Forces (IOF) with the military D-9 bulldozers, which killed not only Rachel but a number of Palestinians and have demolished thousands of Palestinian homes.
It wasn’t possible for ISM volunteers to enter the Gaza Strip for several years due to the clampdown of the Erez crossing, so today was the first time ISM activists managed to commemorate the anniversary in Gaza itself. Some of the activists who volunteered with ISM Rafah in 2003 were able to compare the situation then and now. Different facets of occupation are manifest in 2009 – the oppressive wall along the Rafah border with Egypt has been cut down but has been replaced by siege and blockade; the brutality endured by the residents of Rafah’s border areas has now touched every single person throughout the Gaza Strip. From 2002 to 2005 over 3,000 Palestinian homes were bulldozed in Rafah. Now, in just 22 days, thousands more were destroyed throughout the entire Gaza Strip. 100,000 Palestinians have been left homeless by air missile strikes and shelling with many families now living in tents on the rubble of their homes.
This is a highly poignant day for us, so to mark it in a positive and inspiring way, we joined five young Palestinian artists to create a mural on one of the few remaining sections of the Israeli wall on the Rafah-Egypt border strip. The same wall whose construction saw the creation of a buffer zone hundreds of metres deep, which gnawed away at vast swathes of residential neighbourhoods, including the one Rachel died trying to safeguard. The same wall from where fellow ISM activist, Tom Hurndall, was shot in the head by an Israeli soldier from a watchtower less than a month after Rachel was killed. The same wall that for years was intended to imprison Palestinian people. The same wall that was finally destroyed by the Palestinian people.
As the artists began painting the wall, enlivening it with colourful symbols of defiance, Israeli F-16 fighter jets were heard flying over Rafah. Despite Israel’s announcement of a “unilateral ceasefire” on 18th January, the Israeli Air Force continues to unilaterally bomb Rafah and other areas in the Gaza Strip almost daily.. Most of the international journalists have left and the international community considers the war as being over, but Palestinian civilians are still being killed and injured by Israeli attacks on a regular basis. Fortunately, today we weren’t bombed by Israeli aircraft. Maybe because we were protected by the “Palestinian Air Force”. Palestinian children from the Lifemakers Center along with kids from the nearby al-Barazil refugee camp responded to the Israeli military flying F-16s by flying kites! 14 kites were flown in memory of the 14 hundred Palestinians killed recently in Gaza. Another kite sent our love to Rachel.
This was also a symbolic action against the crippling Israeli-Egyptian blockade. Gaza has been under siege for nearly two years now and can aptly be described as the world’s largest open-air prison with over 1.5 million people locked in by land, sea and air. After the Free Gaza Movement voyages challenged the blockade by sea last year, followed by the Viva Palestina convoy challenging the siege by land last week, Palestinian children symbolically broke the control of Gazan airspace today.
A delegation from Code Pink also succeeded to gain entry recently and celebrated International Women’s Day with the courageous women of Gaza on 8th March. Rachel’s parents, Cindy and Craig Corrie joined them, commenting on their visit, “Despite the pain, we have once again felt privileged to enter briefly into the lives of Rachel’s Palestinian friends in Gaza. We are moved by their resilience and heartened by their song, dance, and laughter amidst the tears.”
Maybe the soaring kites were seen by some of the internationals protesting today on the Egyptian side of the Rafah crossing, against the Egyptian authorities’ denial to allow them access to Gaza. They included Jordanian parliamentarians and Greek engineers aiming to assist reconstruction efforts in Gaza. However, all of this is not enough. We must call again on the international community to mobilise against the genocidal siege on Gaza.
Tear down the Apartheid Wall
The Israeli Occupation Forces attempted to kill another American ISM activist, Tristan Anderson, three days ago in the stalwart West Bank village of Ni’lin. Tristan, our thoughts and prayers are with you. Just as today we stood at the destroyed wall of Rafah, commemorating the sacrifice of Rachel, one day we will stand together with Tristan at the destroyed wall of Ni’lin to commemorate the sacrifice of Ahmed Mousa (10), Yousef Amira (17), Arafat Rateb Khawaje (22) and Mohammed Khawaje (20), the four civilian martyrs of Ni’lin. Despite the murders of Rachel Corrie and Tom Hurndall, despite the attempted assassinations of Brian Avery and Tristan Anderson, despite the injuries, abductions, illegal deportations and denials of entry that we suffered, we are back. ISM is still here, and will continue to support Palestinian non-violent resistance.
Today, six years after the martyrdom of Rachel; three days after the shooting of Tristan; two months after the Palestinians ousted the IOF from the Gaza Strip; 42 years after the occupation of West Bank, East Jerusalem and the Gaza Strip; 61 years after the Naqba; we still say free Palestine! End the occupation! Peace with justice and dignity! We should remember Rachel and all that she stood for. Similarly we must never let the world forget all the innocent Palestinian souls who perished without mercy. Their fate is already slipping from the collective memory of the international community, fading from the headlines of a fickle corporate media. It is time this manufactured catastrophe ends so that Rachel’s death and the deaths of countless Palestinians were not in vain.
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.
collective punishment is illegal under international law. Nobody – certainly not a whole civilian population – should be punished for something they didn’t personally do.
as I’m sure you know, Gaza rocket firers could just as easily say their current attacks on Israel (Hamas qassam rockets have resulted in 28 Israeli deaths total between 2001 and Jan 9 2009, according to Wikipedia) are a response to Israeli attacks on Gaza. There have been almost daily attacks from Israel since their Jan 18 “ceasefire”, and the Palestinian Centre for Human Rights put the Palestinian death toll just from the Dec/Jan attacks at 1,285, saying women and children were more than 43% of this.
if we must look for a “first” violence, I personally believe it is the Israeli Occupation of the West Bank and Gaza by Israel. The Occupation in all its forms, including – in the West Bank: checkpoints (where people die while waiting to get to hospital) land theft by the building of illegal settlements (settlers routinely shoot at Palestinians) and the “land grab” Wall – and in Gaza, the crushing seige – kills as surely as any other kind of violence. Violence such as the regular Israeli military incursions into both areas of Palestine, whether officially defined as war, or not.
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.
Hassan and Halil: two of the 30 injured medics; 21 were killed
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.
