Tag: Sharon Lock

The lentils did ok today

31 March 2009

Today we accompanied farmers in the Latamat area on the outskirts of Khoza’a. The last time we were out farming in Khoza’a the shooting was the closest I’d experienced, and from the video footage it looked like the Israelis were aiming to shoot my college J in the leg. Since later that same day Wafa was shot in the kneecap, and not too long before that farmer Mohammed was shot in the foot while we were with him, the ISM group had been taking stock of our role. We decided that Gaza ISM had to hold meetings with any farmers that wanted our accompaniment and be absolutely sure they understood that our presence protects them only mildly if in fact it protects them at all.

7am – an early start sometimes means less shooting

My personal feeling was that as long as they are clear on that, then if they still want us we should still go, but then I have to leave Gaza soon. In the Khoza’a meeting (this included showing our video footage of the Faraheen shooting of Mohammed and telling them about Tristan’s shooting and the past killings of ISMers) the farmers replied “Ok, maybe they shoot at us when you are with us, well we’re used to that because they shoot at us when you are not with us. So it’s normal. But if you are with us when it happens – at least you can tell the world about it.”

So we met the mostly women farmers at 7am (often women work the most dangerous areas in the hope the soldiers will shoot less) and walked to the fields which were about 4-500 metres from the border. Today’s crop was lentils. I have never seen a lentil plant before, and I certainly hope no-one has to shell the lentils individually cos that would really be some job.

The farmers told us they had been shot at the day before in this same field. Several of us had had bad dreams the night before, and I’d written a quick will with various keepsakes for Gaza friends. In the van, E and I exchanged computer passwords and emergency contact numbers. (Actually, I’ve noticed her looking speculatively at me sometimes, since I told her she gets my laptop if something happens to me here.) She also informed me that for her martyr poster if she died, she wanted a picture of her with a donkey. So it was with somewhat of a sense of doom we walked down the track among golden wheatfields. And when explosions started shaking the ground, we wondered if we should even keep going. We rang our friend J in Faraheen, since they seemed to be coming from his direction.

But he told us that actually what we could hear was a fight between Palestinian resistance, and Israeli occupation forces, in Maghazi camp (where Dr Halid – who is a nurse not a doctor – and his family live) which was a lot further north. So the lentil picking got underway and we tried to feel reassured by the fact that the F16s and Apaches flying overhead, and the distant roaring, were not directed at us. But I couldn’t help imagining what it must be like to be a resistance fighter on the ground facing those Apaches and F16s.

Anyway, it wasn’t long before two jeeps turned up at the border, and Israeli soldiers got out. We waited for the inevitable, and it came – a short burst of shooting only broadly in our general direction. The women working on the ground tensed up and waited. But that turned out to be it. The soldiers got back in the jeeps, and the jeeps drove off again. Some hours later, lots of lentils were picked, the sun was high, everyone was relaxed, and the morning was a success. You can see my colleage G’s Youtube footage of the brief shooting, which he has cheekily finished with a minute or two of me and E entertaining ourselves with some of the dubke dance steps we’ve learnt. You can also find a report of the day and archived articles and videos at the new blog Gaza ISMers have created to support the campaign to protect Gaza farmers, at http://farmingunderfire.blogspot.com/. Please tell your friends.

Later we heard that in Maghazi camp, two fighters were killed, 2 injured, and an Israeli soldier was injured and an Israeli jeep destroyed. I texted Dr Halid and asked how the little girls were. “My children are used to bombing now”, he replied resignedly. I can’t help but feel like the resistance fighters took the fire for us today. If Israel hadn’t been busy shooting at them, from past experience it seems a sure thing they would have stuck round to shoot at us, like they had at the same farmers in the same place the day before. I guess that’s why the resistance is called the resistance.

Later that afternoon, V and I were sitting smoking shisha, looking out at the sea, and gunfire got our attention again. Squinting, we spotted another Israeli gunship, tormenting another Palestinian fishing boat. The gunboat alternated tightly circling the fishing boat with drive-by shooting; we could see the spray as the bullets hit the water. It reminded me of nothing more than a cat playing with a mouse. This was still going on several hours later when we left.

Today, E heard that yesterday a woman she visited in Al Shifa hospital, Ghada, the 21 year old mum of two little girls, finally died in an Egyptian hospital of her horrendous white phosphorous burns. Before she was sent out to Egypt she gave her testimony to my friend M, one of the Al Quds Red Crescent workers, and it is posted here on the B’T Selem website. Please read it. It’s the least we can do.

Oh…and Israel dropped its internal investigation into possible war crimes by the Israeli army in the Dec/Jan attacks.

Speaking Truth to Power

Sharon Lock | Tales to Tell

We were back at Faraheen this morning accompanying farmers again, eying the jeeps driving along the Israeli border while our farmers removed the irrigation pipes from one of the fields we have visited regularly. Since Mohammed was shot in the leg, the farmer here has decided to give up on this field, its convenient well, and its half-grown parsley crop – 200,000 shekels worth – in case of further injury or death of harvesters. It was a quiet morning, thank goodness.

Giving up on irrigating parsley too dangerous to pick

Art from children at the Al Amal Centre, Khan Younis

Tristan is conscious and was breathing on his own until he caught pneumonia. He has a long way to go and it’s not known what will be ahead – for sure, more surgery, including on his damaged right eye.

A second time this week we spotted an Israeli gun boat traveling at 3 miles from the shoreline, all the way from near Deir al Balah to Gaza city (it kept pace with our shared taxi) as fishermen were out trying to get in a catch in, and inevitably the next day we heard that a fisherman had been shot; Deeb Al Ankaa who we understand to now be in Kamal Odwan hospital.

I met a great Manchester guy this week, Dr Sohail of Medical International Surgical Team (MIST) who has come here to do good work with peoples’ bones, for example working with amputees who have had limbs removed at a high point, to enable the otherwise impossible attachment of prosthetic limbs (if Israel lets the prosthetics through the border, which apparently is another problem of the siege…).

Thinking about bones, I immediately thought of Wafa. After wincing at the picture of her in hospital the day after soldiers shot out her kneecap, Dr Sohail said “I’m a kneecap man!” and told me a series of incomprehensible surgical things he might be able to do to give her back some movement. We rang her family today while standing in the Faraheen field (it’s a good time to get your phone-calling done) to say that Dr Sohail will see her in June if I go and take a photo of her medical records for him beforehand.

Dr Sohail spoke of the several limitations medical people are under here – mostly no access to the latest equipment – if any gets in, no access to training on how to use it – and of course very little of the ongoing training amongst their international peers that people doing tricky surgical things need to have.

In the last days there have been renewed calls for an International Criminal Court investigation into war crimes in Gaza, including for example “white flag killings” by Israeli soldiers. One of the big problems in the way is that during the attacks there were no forensic pathologists in Gaza trained to a level that would meet the requirements. (They are trying to send some people outside for training now, ready for the next time…) A second big problem is that when the International Criminal Court representatives tried to get in through Rafah to investigate the situation, Egypt refused to let them through, so they missed the February 8 deadline for submitting evidence.

And it was never going to be easy. Here is an example. One of the Al Quds Red Crescent medics talked about getting through to some of the surviving Samouni kids trapped with dead adults, on the first Red Cross/Red Crescent evacuation permitted by Israel. He said the kids (who they found in circumstances that left some of the medics who reached them, traumatised themselves) said the adults had been shot, and they had covered over the bodies themselves.

The medics knew it was important to try to take the adults’ bodies out, but the children were starving, dehydrated, and in a state of collapse. Since Israel had not permitted the medics to take ambulances, and several miles had to be covered, the medics found a donkey cart for the children. The Red Cross asked Israel to be allowed to take a donkey to pull the cart, but Israel said no.

My medic friend says: “We put the children on the donkey cart and pulled it ourselves, hurrying to get out before 4pm which was the deadline for the evacuation. And there was no room for the bodies. So a lot of time passed before those bodies could be retrieved, and while we have the verbal testimony of the children, we don’t have an early medical assessment of the adults bodies.”

I was called in to PressTV to give an interview today about what I witnessed myself, and it turned out this is because Israeli soldiers have themselves started to admit some of what went on, in the Israeli press today. This has been covered by the TimesOnline, and the International Middle East Media Centre. It includes an anonymous solider who ’says that he was told “we should kill everyone there (Gaza). Everyone there is a terrorist.”‘

The high cost of living

Sharon Lock | Tales to Tell

13 March 2009

Excerpt from ‘The high cost of living’

The price of fish…

Yesterday I went to the Kabariti family for Friday lunch, a fish barbeque. I took with me three of the “letters from the world” that were delivered by the Free Gaza boat last year. These letters were from a mother and her two daughters in California, so we decided to give them to the Kabariti girls and their mum, all of whom read English.

The girls and I sat in the sunny front window and they excitedly began to read their letters and compose messages to email in reply (no postal service is possible under siege.) A few minutes later I realised I could hear shooting. Their dad M always keeps binoculars beside the sea window, but I didn’t need them. Looking out, I could see two Israeli gunboats well on this side of the horizon, looping about and firing on Palestinian fishing boats. No more than three miles from the shore

Some of the little boats began to head back to the port, so I stomped off down the street to meet them, as the shooting continued, to see what I could find out. I spoke to Ahmed Abel Aziiz, who had just tied up his boat. He said the shooting had been going on half an hour and he was giving up for the day, but he thought that more than ten boats, some medium and some small like his, were still out there. Nobody was arrested or wounded yet. I stomped back to eat my lunch, pleased to see the Kabariti kids out in the garden after their weeks of hiding inside, but eyeing the parsley in the salad and the fish on my plate with part respect and part despair.

Later on I rang M and he said that fishermen Zaki Tarouch and Talal Tarouch, and Dahr Zayad and his son, had been arrested by the Israeli gunboats. He also said we are entering the three best months for fishing, the time the fishermen depend on to get them through the rest of the year.

We went to Al Wafa Rehabilitation hospital also yesterday, said hi to Abd, delivered the chess set your donations bought him, and announced we would be practising both chess and insertion of cannulas on him next visit. He looked perturbed. E introduced me to Abd’s fellow patient, Maher, who you can assist via our Donate page (shot fisherman Rafiq is there too) who is carrying on the Palestinian tradition of being determinedly cheerful after surviving his own war nightmare. Which in his case involved not only losing those close to him, but ten minutes in the morgue refrigerator…

The fishermen were released in the night, but their boats – their method of earning a living – have been kept by Israel. As we enter the three months Gaza fishermen depend on the most.

When a second home isn’t due to wealth

Sharon Lock | Tales To Tell

Excerpts from Sharon Lock’s blog

J and L's kids - still alive because they've abandoned their house

We were visiting hospital dietitian S’s family in Al Fukhary. They all fled their home during the attacks, except for S’s dad who stayed behind to confront the tanks. And literally did – S shows us where the tanks got to: the back garden. At this point, his dad went to the back door and looked the solider in the tank in the eye. The soldier in the tank looked back. And then he turned the tank around and left. I guess Abu S has one great stern look.

As we are leaving we pass several houses totally destroyed, in amongst houses still standing. Why these houses? Nobody knows. A kindergarten is also destroyed, and there is no logic in that either. We notice that all the road ways are planted with dense cactus, and speculate if they are deliberately planted to obstruct border-originating bullets. They look fierce enough to do it. At S’s family land, near the border, Israeli tanks have destroyed the roadside cactuses, so maybe the soldiers have the same theory about them as us.

Earlier in the afternoon we were with J and L and their six kids (the youngest is 3) in Al Faraheen. You’ll remember before I referred to the fact that they stay in a house in the middle of the village now, because their regular home at the edge, about 500m from the border, feels too dangerous. Before the attacks, J and his oldest son at least were sleeping at their farmhouse, now, no-one does.

Before the war when ISMers were visiting, the Israeli army seemed to be trying to enforce (by shooting) a 300m no-go zone on the Palestinian side of the border. At the time, J was saying he was afraid it would shortly turn into a 500m no-go zone. After the Dec/Jan attacks, when E rang the Canadian embassy to tell them she was with Palestinians being fired on while picking parsley, the Canadian officials said something along the lines of “well Israel says you are in the 1km no-go zone.” The what? And who made them the boss of the world? as we used to say as kids. And does this remind anyone of how the government in the novel 1984 rewrites “facts” regularly and then everyone colludes to say those were always the facts?

What I didn’t realize til today, is that J and L are paying $100 a month rent for the village house, out of their small farming income. In the hope some compensation money might be available from UNWRA, J asks us to take photos of the damage to their house and help them make contact with the appropriate authorities.

A few minutes later, at the farmhouse, J points out the “donkey radar” – consisting of a donkey in the field on the border side, nose pointing towards Israel – insisting that the donkey’s ears will go up if jeeps arrive. It is easy to tell J’s heart and soul are in farming and he loves his land. He practices crop rotation on the remaining 4 denems, close to the house, that it seems worth risking his life to access. In the past he shared 300 denems with his brothers and neighbours – 3 denems were olives, 6 were fruit trees, 50 were wheat, 50 were peas… Israel totally destroyed the fruit trees in previous incursions and since the rest of the land goes all the way up to the border, he has given up on it.

...but then even the remaining chickens were poisoned by phosphorous.

Before the army incursion in May 2008, he also had 3000 chickens, but the army killed 2,500 of them then, also destroying 30 pieces (each 1m X 2.5m) of shed roofing, breaking his tractor and his wheat picker (worth about $12,000), breaking the pump for his well, and shooting up his kitchen fridge, water tank, solar water heater, self-designed solar dryer, as well as the walls of the house.

The remaining 500 chickens died in January 09 after eating plants poisoned by phosphorous bombs, and another 30 pieces of shed roofing went the way of the first lot. J had to destroy a crop of radishes still in the field when he realised they’d been similarly poisoned. What this will do long term to his land, no-one knows. The family’s TV and computer were destroyed in the Dec/Jan attacks as well when shelling caused part of the roof to fall in on top of them.

A beautiful place

Sharon Lock | Tales to Tell

8 February 2009

9 year old K is on the right with the blue backpack on her chair

Before the strikes, the group 14 Friends of Palestine asked E and me to make contact with a little girl they sponsor via Atfaluna Society for Deaf Children. It’s taken a while for us to catch our breath and follow this up, but we got there today. We followed our usual pattern; meeting at Al Shifa hospital, grabbing a falafal sandwich, then striding off down the dusty streets ignoring all the beeping taxis that want to drive us (shared taxis are as close as Gaza gets to public transport.)

20 minutes later, I am startled by the wholeness of the Atfaluna building. Several of the buildings nearby are in small concrete pieces, but Atfaluna has grass, Atfaluna has windows. I doubt Israel avoided Atfaluna deliberately, since they bombed schools and hospitals, so Atfaluna also has good luck. Inside, we meet S, our initial contact, who has arranged for us for K’s social worker M to take us to visit her family. They live in Shayjaiee, in four rooms – K’s parents, and their 7 girls (born in a row), followed by 4 boys, the last one a smiley 5 months.

K’s mum S is a friendly woman, who tries mostly in vain to coax her girls, just home from school, to appear for us in anything other than shyly giggling glimpses, though we do eventually manage a photo with some of them. She manages to introduce us to two of the little boys with the lure of the arabic sweets we’d brought. We ask her how the Israeli strikes had affected them; she says they stayed in their home for the first ten days but the rocket attacks then became too close and frightening and they moved in with their downstairs neighbours, that being the only place they had to go.

The bread shortage has hit them hard, she says, describing bargaining for a bag of flour and being 20 shekels (about £3) short. A wave of guilt hits me; if only we had got to see them before the attacks, they would have had the equivalent of K’s dad’s salary for a month (he’s a cleaner) that we are bringing them today from 14 Friends of Palestine. S, apparently not giving this a moment’s thought herself, cheerfully says they did manage to get the flour after all in the end, and I remind myself the bread shortage continues, and the money is just as welcome now.

K’s home is very simple, they don’t have much, and when we ask S what the donation might go on, it’s clear they will carefully keep themselves in the basics for the children to be well and comfortable: mattresses, floor mats, food, clothes, gas maybe. J from 14 Friends of Palestine said we could use our discretion as to whether to buy the family things or hand over the donation itself, and it’s clear to us that the family will know better what they need than we will and use it wisely. Also at J’s suggestion, we’ve kept a little money back to buy some unnecessary things for the children that we think K’s parents might feel they shouldn’t buy with it themselves, so we’ll be back another day with the rest of the donation and maybe things like coloured pens, drawing books… we’ll see what’s available that looks like it will last a series of small hands.

E heads off to see if 18 year old Abd at Al Wafa is managing to imagine some sort of life for himself in a wheelchair yet. Back at Atfaluna, I am taken in to meet K, in amongst a class full of beaming kids. She leaps from her chair, glowing at finding herself the centre of attention. M signs to her that we come from Jane and 14 friends, and have met her family. She introduces herself to me with her sign name, a curving stroke of her finger from her forehead to her cheek, imitating the sweep of her dark curly hair. I am pleased to be able to return the sign name I was given once, the placing of an imaginary hat on my head (I like hats.) I meet also her sister S, also deaf, a calm 14 year old, smiling in her own more restrained class.

Then I am taken down to the kindergarten class, in a series of green carpeted rooms that imitate a lush outdoors that Gaza city children don’t see, except here where there are also gardens outside. They also bubble over with enthusiasm for a visitor, and I learn the Palestine sign for salaam aleikum. Surrounded by energetic and joyful small people, I realise what incredibly expressive faces and bodies deaf children can develop, with space and permission to move, from supportive teachers, many of whom are deaf themselves. Next I go to see some of the traditional craftwork the adults who work here produce.

This place is amazing. For the first time ever, I am seeing what Palestinians look like when they are surrounded by beauty: by art, by books and resources, by unbroken, unbombed, undamaged, working things. It makes me want to cry. (Currently a lot of random stuff makes me want to cry; I didn’t cry for any of those broken, bombed, damaged children in my ambulance and I guess that sadness is waiting somewhere deep.)

That makes me think of the modern sweeping design of the Jabalia Red Crescent building. I saw the Jabalia building before Israel fired shells at it, when it was new and whole like Atfaluna. It still works, only one room is burnt out. But now it looks like everything else in this place. Big shell holes, smaller bullet holes. Blackened patches.

300 children are studying at Atfaluna. 150 are on the waiting list. While it continues to stay in one piece, they will grow up with a vision that hearing Gaza children will simply have to imagine; what the world looks like when it isn’t all dust and crumbled concrete.