Journey to Gaza

Statehood requires more than status update

2011-09-17T12:41:00.001+02:00

Will this be the new state of Palestine?

Just days away from what is arguably Palestine’s most momentous day, the declaration of statehood, the Palestinian street feels at a loss.

This is supposedly what Palestinians have been literally dying for since their systematic ethnic cleansing and the start of the brutal Israeli occupation spanning over decades. But talking to ordinary Palestinians, I have yet to meet one who believes the way the Palestine Liberation Organisation is pushing forward the statehood bid at the United Nations will improve life on the ground.

“Look at us – our souk is dead, our streets and houses taken over by settlers, to move out I need a permit to show at the Israeli checkpoints, which I never get,” a baker in Hebron’s old city said. “What kind of state will this be if our lives will remain ruled by the Israeli occupation?”

His sentiment is echoed in varying tones across the West Bank, East Jerusalem and Gaza – from cynical shrugs to downright anger at feeling totally excluded, especially in the blockaded enclave ruled by Hamas.

Despite this momentous event, the PLO has done a terrible job at informing, let alone consulting, the people it is meant to represent. For months, Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas was lost in testing the grounds in diplomatic circles, checking how far he could go in calling America’s bluff while forgetting that this was about the millions of people living under occupation or as refugees abroad.

Some of the Palestinians’ most crucial questions, on the eve of the UN Security Council vote, remain without clear answers, with even conflicting legal opinions and no leadership that, at such a crucial moment, is so terribly needed. Reports from international agencies have multiplied in the past days, but nobody is talking to the Palestinians. What happens to the refugees’ right of return? How will the Palestinian state function under occupation? What will the state of Palestine look like? What about Gaza?

The idea of declaring statehood while effectively having two governments ruling the territory in question is a recipe for a failed state. Despite the signed reconciliation agreement between Fatah and Hamas last April, the two parties have kept behaving like two separate governments, ignoring the overwhelming calls from the street and civil society to form a unity government. That Abbas forged ahead with the statehood bid without involving Hamas leaves him with even less legitimacy than he already had. Hamas cannot oppose statehood, but it did criticise the unilateral move that seems to have taken nobody’s concerns into account. It is now waiting for the day after the vote to be proven right.

On the other hand, watching Israel’s frantic diplomatic race against the PLO’s initiative and its clear threats against this “unilateral” move has a tinge of historical justice. Israel can never be taken seriously when it tells Palestinians that they are breaching past agreements and commitments to bilateral negotiations for peace, when the world now knows – thanks to the leaked Palestine Papers earlier this year – the details of Israel’s intransigence even when Palestinian negotiators were willing to sell their souls for some peace agreement.

Israel is terrified of the legal prospects that would come out of all this, but it shouldn’t. Legally, every settler and soldier present in the new state of Palestine would be an act of war, subject to the International Criminal Court, but Israel has gotten away with so many human rights and international law violations for the last six decades that very few Palestinians see this as relevant to their cause. Only two days ago, the UK bended its laws of universal jurisdiction to make prosecution of war criminals even harder than it already was, giving Tzipi Livni and Ehud Olmert’s regime all the reassurances that they can travel freely to London despite showering indiscriminately the 1.6 million population of Gaza with white phosphorus.

One good thing that comes out of this is America’s embarrassing situation, just when it preaches democracy and liberty in the wake of the Arab Spring and after years of channelling funds to the PA for supposed state building. Never mind the politicisation of that aid that has entrenched the divisions between the West Bank and Gaza, the stubborn refusal to engage with Hamas when they were democratically elected, never mind the millions of dollars of “humanitarian aid” that went to train and equip Abbas’s forces to do the policing for Israel: By vetoing the vote for statehood at the UN, the US administration will be putting its priorities “on the record” and Abbas, for once, would be calling America’s bluff. What happens next is the big question.

Blaming Gaza, Israel bombs the enclave

2011-08-20T18:33:00.001+02:00

The Gaza sky is once again host to Israeli fighter jets, helicopters, drones, missiles and rockets. Even before the exact toll of Israeli victims in the Eilat attack on Thursday was known, Israeli Defence Minister Ehud Barak was quick to point his finger at Gaza, vowing a harsh response.

“Soon enough they will blame Gaza for global warming,” a colleague told me exasperatedly.

Very few here believe Gaza had anything to do with the daring attacks that killed eight Israelis in the Red Sea holiday town. Until now, no evidence has been presented implicating Gaza. Hamas denied involvement immediately, and the Popular Resistance Committees – whose top military commander and other fighters were killed in targeted airstrikes later – applauded the operation but also said they did not commit it.

Yet the blaming of Gaza was prompt and unequivocal even though everything pointed at the rapidly deteriorating context of the Sinai Peninsula since the fall of Mubarak’s regime. In stating that the attacks – which all came from the Egyptian border – originated in Gaza and would be responded to in Gaza, Barak swayed Israeli and international public opinion away from the troublesome desert to the easy target that is Gaza, paving the way for a weekend of deadly airstrikes.

In the ensuing bombardment of Gaza that is now in its third day, 14 Palestinians were killed and 44 wounded, including women, children and elderly people. That is besides the five Egyptian border police killed by Israeli forces on Egyptian soil as they allegedly pursued the Eilat fighters.

Among the civilian areas targeted in Gaza there was a carwash facility, a detergents factory and a concrete factory. By Friday night, Hamas’s armed wing could no longer stay idle, declaring an end to the ceasefire and calling on all Palestinian militants to retaliate at Israel. Interestingly, the Hamas political wing was warning against an escalation at the same time the Izz Al Deen Al Qassam Brigades were calling an end to the truce, exposing Hamas’s internal dilemma.

In calling off the ceasefire, Hamas has played along and provided Israel with a further pretext to increase the escalation further, just when Netanyahu was plagued by massive internal protests. Those sushi-eating protestors clamouring for “social justice” have now all packed up their tents and went back to their army uniforms. This is also happening just weeks away from the pending bid at the United Nations to recognise the Palestinian state – an event which Israel has been staunchly opposing in the most violent of terms.

The Israeli media is sticking to the establishment’s narrative. By reporting only about the rockets fired towards Israel it raises expectations for more bloodshed on Palestinian soil, and obliterating any analysis of the real story unfolding in the Sinai. It is there, in that vast Egyptian desert, that groups have five times exploded the gas pipeline from Egypt to Israel this year.

Only last week, Egyptian forces entered the demilitarised zone – with Israel’s permission – to sweep the area of saboteurs and radicals that started coming out of the woodwork since the fall of Mubarak’s regime. At least two were killed and several were injured as a result of the operation.

Seen in this context, the Eilat battle takes a different possible explanation, a sort of predictable retaliation by the rogue elements ruling the Sinai under the new regime. According to several sources, Israel requested permission to respond on Egyptian soil within 7km around Taba but Egypt refused, despite US insistence. Israel launched its airstrikes anyway, killing the Egyptian security officers.

In blaming Gaza, the Israeli government has found a convenient way of sweeping its internal mess under the carpet, but it is also ignoring the stark new realities staring it in the eye since the beginning of the Arab spring. Even as the unnecessary civilian deaths in Gaza keep increasing, it is only a matter of time until Israel will be forced to face the full impact of the rapidly changing landscape around it, where its neighbours are not as forgiving as the friendly former dictators.

Gaza wakes up to the scent of freedom

2011-05-07T14:12:00.000+02:00

When Gaza celebrates, it is usually to champion others’ victories. Most often it’s football: Barcelona or Real Madrid drawing the crowds and the car cades, Egypt at the World Cup, and outside the football grounds, Egypt on the day it got rid of Mubarak.

Not last Wednesday. As Palestinians awaited in front of TV screens, ears stuck to radios, to see and hear the news they wanted to hear from Cairo, Gaza’s streets were full of expectation, waiting for the moment to burst. After so many ups and downs, highs and lows, dashed hopes and shattered expectations, Palestinians were to witness the closing of the unity deal between Hamas and Fatah and all of the Palestinian factions.

The scenes on TV were moving: Seeing Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas in the same room with exiled Hamas leader Khaled Meshal for the first time in four years; hearing Abbas speaking clearly about putting the division behind to confront the real problems ahead, united.

What followed on the streets of Gaza is hard to understand unless you have witnessed daily harassment, arrests, beatings, slander and accusations of “collaborating with the Palestinian Authority” by none other than your Palestinian brothers – only of a different faction.

For the last four years, Hamas has been suppressing all forms of political and civil expression that had any hint of not towing its own line. Anything related to Fatah had no chance of even making it to the public. Journalists, NGOs, authors and independent youth have been caught in the quagmire that polarised Palestinian society so devastatingly.

In the West Bank, Abbas’s forces have been similarly arresting, torturing, killing and suppressing anything that had to do with Hamas, only that the PA had the American and European funding to torture people more sweetly.

The division between Hamas and Fatah goes way beyond the immediate political and civil freedoms – that is only the tip of the iceberg but perhaps also the most visible one. That is why last Wednesday night, seeing Gaza City flooded with Fatah’s yellow flags side by side with Hamas’s green flags, and even more Palestinian colours, was a touching moment for anyone who has been here in the last four years.

Of course it would have been nicer if people came out with the Palestinian national flag, but one also has to understand the significance of the moment of freedom for every individual to come out with any flag he or she liked. At the end of the day, Palestinian unity is a victory for democracy, the same democracy other Arab brothers are dying for as we speak.

To think that less than two months ago Palestinian youth in Gaza were being beaten up and arrested by Hamas forces for merely calling for Palestinian reconciliation, that walking around with the traditional kufiyeh was interpreted by Hamas people as support for Fatah, that waving a Fatah flag in Gaza was as taboo as giving the Nazi salute in Israel.

Beyond the big words, the Palestinian division has all but crippled society, over and above the Israeli occupation and the blockade of Gaza. Ultimately, it is the very product of the Israeli occupation and blockade which Palestinian leaders were entrapped into by the international community, starting off with the geographic isolation of Gaza to the political boycott of democratically-elected Hamas and the collective punishment of 1.5 million people.

What the division has meant for ordinary Palestinians trapped in Gaza ranges from finding no essential medicines at the government clinics because the Ramallah government did not coordinate with the Gaza one; to having no electricity because the two government can’t agree on a solution to pay old bills just when the blockade plunges the enclave into total darkness.

It has meant that only those very close to the Ramallah government could have the privilege to travel to the West Bank (same country, by the way) – all the rest had to wait in Gaza for Israel’s “security clearance” which rules you out just because you are from Gaza.

It has meant that thousands of professionals, highly trained and skilled people employed with the government – from helicopter pilots to gynaecologists to teachers and diplomats – have been told to stay at home or go on strike while receiving their US and EU-funded salaries, others were downgraded to make space for less competent friends of the government. The result is a total mess of politicised international aid and money down the drain, not to mention the chronic depression all of this has brought to the Palestinian household.

For entire years, these people have stared at the walls of their houses in a complete state of depression while their wives took over control of the family. The more enterprising ones – and there are many – found other things to do. A gynaecologist I know has been doing private practice while receiving the PA salary. He knows it’s wrong, Hamas have been trying to stop double salaries, but that is the situation that the European and American governments have been financing to keep in place: total dependence on humanitarian aid, fragmentation, no economic development for Gaza, keeping Palestinians fed but jobless.

It is perhaps the Gazans, more than the other Palestinians, the ones who can appreciate most this moment of reconciliation. Questions abound, of course. Will it last? Will the security forces really work together? Will Hamas really go for another election?

There are also the anxious Gazans who are now under a lot of stress wondering how they will be re-integrated into the government. The husband of a colleague of mine is a lawyer who hasn’t reported to work since four years ago, after the bloody battles that routed Fatah out of Gaza. He cannot sleep at night and behaving very strangely, my colleague tells me.

The psychological effects of the division will take long to heal, but for the moment, judging by the first steps since last Wednesday, Gaza already feels freer, waving a flag is no longer an act of defiance but looking more like normality. With self-declared statehood set for September, Palestinian leaders need to keep focused with the bigger picture in mind before screwing it all up. But from Gaza, for the moment, if things keep going on at this pace, it looks as if they can only get better.

Now here’s a real rocket to make Israel shake

2011-04-30T12:48:00.002+02:00

“I won’t be celebrating until I see it happening,” a colleague told me looking me in the eye as he drove me home, ignoring the Gaza City traffic in front of us. “We’ve done it before, we had barely finished celebrating, when Hamas and Fatah started killing each other.”

I feel we all need something to believe in, though I do not blame my Palestinian friends’ caution, and downright cynicism. More than six decades of ethnic cleansing, occupation, dashed hopes and deadly infighting are bound to leave their toll on a nation that is still struggling for statehood. Who am I to expect them to be optimistic when time and again they have been let down, by the world and by their leaders?

But when last Wednesday, news of the Fatah-Hamas agreement started coming out, even some of my most cynical Palestinian friends were stunned. A bolt out of the blue, without any hint of fanfare and pomposity, and with no advance invitation to the party, Hamas and Fatah declared they had agreed. Just like that. After four of the bloodiest years in Palestine’s internal history.

Of course the devil is in the detail – we have yet to see all the commas and dashes and brackets in the final document and how they will be put into practice. We have yet to see how the security apparatus will be managed on the ground, how the militias will be kept under check and how the families still aggrieved by the bloodbath in Gaza when Hamas ousted Fatah forces will be pacified.

But here’s the first detail that struck me: This announcement had no prelude, unlike the hundreds of others when Palestinians were told by their leaders dining in Cairo that they were just a corner away from reconciliation, and everyone would go back home with nothing but more bitterness and divisions.

The respected Ha’aretz columnist Akiva Eldar said on Al Jazeera this was the worst timing possible for Palestinians, as Netanyahu was addressing the US Congress and getting Americans panicking about Abbas sitting with “the terrorists”.

I could not disagree more. With the September plan for Palestinians to declare an independent state, things could not be worse than having a Palestinian state without Gaza. The context to this announcement is much wider than Bibi licking his wounds at his lapdog superpower’s lawn. It comes at a time of newfound Arab dignity, an awakening of the masses that keeps only getting bigger, the assertion of modern Arab identities in one region-wide revolution for freedom that is changing everything.

With Syria’s Bashar al Asad in deeply troubled waters as the revolution there keeps spreading, the exiled Hamas leadership can no longer take its status for granted. The treasure trove of Hamas’s most militant elements is running out, forcing Khaled Meshal to return to the path of sensibility and pragmatism. It is a cautionary tale to all the war mongers and sanctions-huggers that have been ostracising Hamas, Syria and Iran for the last decade – real change comes from the people, from the streets.

The streets of Gaza and Ramallah have also been flooded with the people. The youth have taken on the Arab revolutionary spirit to call for an end to the division. In Gaza, they were brutally repressed by the Hamas forces since 15 March, but none of the youth have given up on their commitment to see change.

Calling America’s bluff
Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas has been calling on America’s bluff over the last month. The day after the announcement last week, he said, in English, to international journalists, in the serenest way possible: “Hamas are part of us. I cannot keep them out. Just like Netanyahu is our partner for negotiations.”

In reality, Abbas and all the Palestinians know Israel is no partner for peace. Even when Palestinian negotiators offered everything on a silver plate to their counterparts, Israel shunned peace while it expanded its illegal settlements, bombed civilians in Gaza and enforced some of the most racist laws ever against the people it was meant to be “seeking peace” with.

The Arab awakening, from a Palestinian perspective, means acknowledging that Israel’s and the world’s opinion is irrelevant to shape their future according to their own aspirations. It’s the common denominator linking ordinary Palestinians to the Tunisians, the Egyptians, the Libyans, the Syrians and the Yemenis who realised change can only be brought about by them. In Palestine, however, Abbas is not the regime that has to fall down, but the figure called on by his citizens to be a leader and forge real reconciliation. The more Netanyahu urges him to “choose between peace with Israel or government with Hamas”, the more obvious his choice becomes, because there isn’t any. Israel has made the first impossible and the second inevitable.

Hamas’s charter – anti-Zionist and rhetorically problematic as it is for the moral crusaders – has been proved out of date through Hamas’s own behaviour on Israel’s doorstep. In total control of the Gaza Strip, Hamas has policed its borders, controlled cease fire agreements and clamped down on the extremists more or less in the same way Netanyahu has to deal with Lieberman and the loony settlers.

It has been a steep learning for the Islamist movement that found itself overwhelmingly voted into power five years ago, against its own expectations. The more ostracised it was by the world community, the more it had to learn by experience, making some serious blunders along the way. From resistance to government is more of a radical move than the mere changing of sides from opposition to the government benches in a normal parliament. Four years of official blockade and many more before of demonisation and all sorts of obstacles, the Hamas movement has stood up to the test of survival. It now collects taxes and duty on items imported through the tunnels; it employs unarmed traffic police in impeccable new uniforms in the main junctions; its social services ministry runs an internet registration service for people wishing to exit through Rafah; and it has started registering taxis and issuing special drivers’ permits. In short, despite the rusty kalashnikovs in the background and the occasional rocket launch into nothingness, Hamas is behaving like a government – even when it clamps down on civil liberties.

To question whether Hamas can be in a Palestinian unity government would not only disregard all of that, but it would be yet another nail in the coffin of the world community’s relevance. The point is, whether the US and the EU will accept Hamas in government or not, the Palestinians will forge ahead. It is their revolution.

It is the Palestinians themselves who are the real teachers of resilience. Close the borders, they will dig tunnels. Cut off the fuel, they will run cars on cooking oil. Marginalise them, and they will build the strongest bridges to the world of ordinary human people, fed up with the world community’s double standards and Israel’s impunity.

If the American Congress decides yet again to cut off all funding to the Palestinian Authority, effectively stopping all salaried government employees, security forces and major infrastructural works, it is not unity that will be compromised. Abbas seems eager to get it right this time, and the people will not hold that against him; they will start the Third Intifada.

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To kill a brother

2011-04-16T15:52:00.001+02:00

Gaza outraged at Italian brother’s murder

Gaza woke up shell-shocked on Friday when 36-year-old Italian activist and writer, Vittorio Arrigoni, was found murdered hours after he was kidnapped by a radical Salafist group.

The brutal assassination of a man loved by many Palestinians as one of their own shocked the blockaded enclave. Not only because no foreigner had been kidnapped since 2007, and no abducted foreigners were ever killed before on Palestinian territory, but especially because Vittorio exceptionally embodied the commitment to the Palestinian cause through peaceful resistance.

Since he reached the coastal strip on board the Free Gaza boat in August 2008, Arrigoni has been living and working with farmers, fishermen, rubble workers and young people as a volunteer with the International Solidarity Movement.

His charismatic presence – always wearing black, a captain’s hat and carrying a pipe with “Al Muqawama” (the resistance) tattooed in incisive Arabic script on his muscular arms – was a reference point to locals and foreigners alike living under the Israeli siege. Whether discussing tactics and strategies with comrades, dancing late at night with friends or facing the full might of Israel’s military power with farmers on their land or at sea, Vittorio was the man who would unquestioningly stand side by side with his Palestinian brothers.

Besides writing regular reports and blogging from Gaza, Vittorio wrote a book of his first hand testimony of the Israeli 22-day assault on the strip called ‘Operation Cast Lead’. At that time, Vittorio volunteered with ambulances to rescue thousands of civilians who were targeted by the Israeli military with indiscriminate bombing and use of white phosphorus that killed 1,400 Palestinians.

Vittorio would bravely board the ambulances as they zig-zagged through the bombs falling down all over Gaza, witnessing all sorts of casualties and even targeting of paramedics he worked with.

His graphic diary entries of those days, dispatched to newspapers and through his own blog, always ended with his trademark call that ended up becoming the title of his book, touching on the common denominator that transcends race, religion, politics and culture: “Let’s stay human”.

Human, fearless and free perhaps best describe Vittorio, the son of anti-Fascist Italian partisans with a committed love to life, Gaza and the sea. The very qualities he shared with the Palestinians he lived with in Gaza, who greeted him at the harbour two and a half years ago, and every morning ever since.

This is not Afghanistan

When on Thursday evening, rumours of his kidnapping started trickling in, the initial reaction was that this was either a sick joke or some misunderstanding. Hamas would not comment on his abduction even after a group calling itself “The Brigade of the Gallant Companion of the Prophet Mohammed bin Muslima” posted a video clip on youtube threatening to kill Vittorio unless Hamas released Salafist prisoners by 5pm Friday.

Vittorio looked in bad shape in that video clip. His face looks bruised – suggesting he was either beaten or else he tried resisting his abductors when they assaulted him. In any case, I told my journalist friend with whom I was trying to figure out what was going on, this could all be the clichéd theatrics which Islamist kidnappers are so fond of – put your hostage in a humiliating position in front of a camera, show he’s shaken, up the stakes, etc etc.

Every Palestinian I spoke to was sure he would be released unharmed by Friday. “This is not Iraq or Afghanistan,” was the line we all wanted to believe. We’ve all seen this before, although nobody dared touch a foreigner since BBC journalist Alan Johnston was kidnapped, and released after four months, in 2007.

“Look, what these guys did is crazy,” Sami, a journalist friend told me late Thursday night. “Kidnapping a foreigner after Johnston is a no-go area. You’d be inviting total war with Hamas. Hamas is not going to tolerate any messing around. These must have been Hamas defectors who joined the Salafists and want to highly embarrass the movement. To kidnap a foreigner is crazy – they would only do it because they were close to Hamas and are seriously pissed off at what they believe is the movement’s sell-out on the resistance and Islam.”

That seemed pretty rational at the time. These guys crossed a red line, but it wouldn’t take long until Hamas will force them back to their place. They would release Vittorio and then make a show out of these rebels. Like they did in Rafah in the summer of 2009 when the sheikh of the Jihadi-Salafist group Jund Ansar Allah declared, in an explosives-laden mosque, that Gaza was an Islamic caliphate, effectively challenging Hamas’s rule on the territory. Hamas responded with a bloody raid that ended up in a full-blown battle with more than 20 killed.

The only other little tremors happened last year when some fringe elements among the militants targeted an International Red Cross convoy with an improvised explosive device, resulting in minor damage to the jeeps and a short period of panic among the international agencies operating in the Gaza Strip.

Nevertheless, it was always clearly understood that foreigners were mere instruments at the Jihadi-Salafis’ disposal that could only be used sparingly and lightly. Their final target was Hamas.

While since it has taken full control of the strip Hamas has always clamped down heavily on the Jihadi-Salaifsts with its Kalashnikovs and hand grenades, the movement has also been trying to appease the hard-liners – including some of its own – by adopting sometimes bizarre laws in the name of Islam, tradition and morality, and some embarrassing U-turns. Deep down, Hamas classifies the Jihadi-Salafist presence in Gaza as its biggest existential threat – way above Israel and Fatah. It knows that, given the radicals’ stubbornness and uncompromising stand, it can never reach political agreement with elements who are not interested in a political solution. Jihad is their only agenda, against Israel, the Jews and the infidels – Al Qaeda style but lacking the global attention and sophistication. In fact, much as they are literally dying to be endorsed by Al Qaeda, they remain too parochial for the global Jihadist cause, and too amateurish in their tactics. Gaza’s Jihadi-Salafists are to Al Qaeda the equivalent of the drop-out seminarian posing as chaplain on an uninhabited island.

The Israeli establishment knows this too – particularly the military and intelligence – and has only recently started acknowledging Hamas’s genuine efforts at clamping down on the Jihadi-Salafist threat. In the wake of the latest escalation last week, the army’ top southern command officer said publicly that Hamas was split between the political moderates who wanted to restore calm, and its militant commanders who are bent on resuming attacks.

"The diplomatic leadership wants to stop the fire, while the military commanders seek to send out attacks and stir things up,” GOC Southern Command Tal Russo said.

Israel has traditionally blamed Hamas as one bloc for all the woes, and has repeatedly assassinated political leaders who were known to be pragmatic and somewhat flexible. In distinguishing between the currents that are for a truce against those that aren't it will be hard for them to justify the killing of political figures, and might pave the way for some working relationship between Hamas and Israel.

Vittorio’s last march

The question as to why Vittorio was targeted could be possibly answered in the fact that, unlike the hundreds of foreigners working in Gaza with humanitarian agencies, he moved and walked freely alone at all times without any security arrangements. While abroad this might sound risky given Gaza’s wild image, international agencies in Gaza themselves acknowledge that internal security was never an issue bar for the exceptional week when some individuals bomb a cafeteria or scratch a Red Cross land rover.

According to testimonies relayed to me second-hand by reliable sources, Vittorio’s last known location was Wednesday night at the Dugmush Gym in Tel Al Hawa, where he used to work out regularly.

At around 10.30pm, he was meant to meet friends at the Gallery Cafe, nearby – Vittorio’s favourite hangout with friends and comrades. He would have walked in the dark-lit dirt roads, or in complete darkness if it was blackout night depending on the power plant’s rationalisation of fuel schedule.

He never turned up for the meeting. From then onwards, his mobile was switched off.

In their video clip, the abductors said they were giving Hamas a 30-hour deadline starting from 11am on Thursday.

Italians were meanwhile contacted by their embassy and advised to leave Gaza.

Still, the conviction that Vittorio would be released unharmed carried over till the early hours of Friday, until that fateful phone call to journalists from the internal affairs ministry at 3am. It was urgent. A press conference.

Full statement by the (Hamas) Ministry of Interior Affairs and National Security – Friday 15 April 2010, 3am, on the abduction of Vittorio Arrigoni

Since the first news of the abduction of the Italian solidarity activist Vittorio Arrigoni, the security apparatus acted quickly toward conducting a full search and investigation. They identified and arrested one of the criminals, who admitted to being involved in the kidnapping. This individual informed the police about the hideout of the abducted solidarity activist. Police moved in a wise and quick manner toward the place and found that Mr. Arrigoni had been killed.

According to the forensic report, he had been killed hours before the police raid on the location. In light of this situation, the Ministry affirms the following:

First: The Palestinian Government sends its condolences to the family of the innocent Italian martyr, to the Italian Government, and to all the Italian people. We grieve for the loss of such an honorable man, who stood steadfast and in solidarity with the Palestinian people, braving the conditions imposed upon the besieged Strip and the violent campaign waged by the Apartheid Entity.

Second: The Palestinian Government condemns in the strongest terms the heinous crime carried out by the criminals and confirms that it will hunt down the remaining members of the gang so that justice can be served and the violators punished. The actions taken by these criminals do not reflect Palestinian values, customs and traditions, or religion

Third: The Ministry emphasizes that this crime does not reflect the true state of security and order in the Gaza Strip. This hideous crime also does not imply a retreat from security and safety. The Government is keen to promote stability, security and safety, as this incident is the first of its kind in years. Security and safety will always remain stable and firm.

Fourth: The initial findings of the investigation indicate that the intention of the kidnappers was to murder in the first place, and that it was carried out shortly after the abduction.

Fifth: The motives behind this outrageous crime demonstrate and indicate that some hands and minds are still plotting against the Palestinian people in Gaza, and want to undermine the security and steadfastness of the Palestinians and their supporters; and, to spread a state of terror and intimidation among the worldwide solidarity movement with the Gaza Strip.

The Apartheid Zionist Entity is looking at ways to hinder and prevent the upcoming freedom flotilla from reaching the Gaza Strip, particularly after the great momentum gained from the solidarity activists such as Mr. Arrigoni aiming to loosen and end the unjust and criminal siege imposed on Gaza. The Ministry of Interior Affairs and National Security and all Palestinians highly appreciate the efforts of all foreign friends. We assure the internationals living in and those heading to Gaza that it is safe for all and will always be their second home. It is together that the Palestinians and the solidarity activists worldwide will carve from the mountains of despair, a stone of hope so that justice may be preserved and injustice overturned.

We are all Vittorio

The incredulity and the outrage was immediately clear on the streets of Gaza City on Friday, when after midday prayers, a symbolic funeral march paraded across the city centre to the Square of the Unknown Soldier. Young people, farmers, fishermen and many of Arrigoni’s friends marched together denouncing the brutal murder in the most categorical of terms, followed by condemnations from all Palestinian factions.

“Terrorism belongs to no religion,” they chanted, urging the murderers to get out of the woodwork and face Palestinians’ popular outrage.

“We are all Vittorio,” they said. “From Gaza to Jenin, Victor’s a son of Palestine.”

A night vigil, more marches on Saturday, the end of the traditional three-day mourning on Sunday, a visit to his flat overlooking the breezy Mediterranean Sea that he loved – Vittorio will be sorely missed as a great friend to all Palestinians.

On Friday, Vittorio’s closest Palestinian friends were in tears, apologetic to foreigners, feeling almost guilty that one who loved Gaza so openly could suffer such a tragic fate in their midst.

That someone dared touched him while in Gaza is incredible enough for his hundreds of immediate friends here. That he was beaten and killed even before their own deadline just condemns his killers in the court of public opinion to a unilateral guilty verdict with the harshest possible sentence. Other Salafist groups have already disowned the arrested suspects, claiming what they did went against Islam

Gaza – where rumours shape daily reality and old mukhtars mediate in bloody family disputes – remains the land of the old adage of “an eye for an eye”. When the entire strip is mourning its beloved adopted son, murdered barbarically, no mukhtar would bother intervening on behalf of the suspects.

The challenge, at this point, is to keep Vittorio’s spirit alive. To stay human.

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‘This one was playing football, that one’s headless...’

2011-04-09T20:49:00.001+02:00

Israeli escalation against Gaza

Death looms ominously once again over the blockaded Gaza Strip, and innocent blood is once again falling down like rain. The sound of Israeli drones buzzing high above 24 hours a day set the scene the tremors every 30 minutes or so.

Since Palestinian militants struck an Israeli school bus on Thursday afternoon, injuring critically a child and the driver, the spectre of another war on Gaza became frighteningly real again, just over two years since Israel’s aggression that left 1,400 Palestinians dead.

The morgues are back in business – in just two days, at least 18 Palestinians have been killed, 10 of them civilians – women, elderly and children, and more than 50 injured.

The numbers alone are shocking and rising by the minute – the deadliest escalation since Israel’s last war on Gaza. Until early Saturday afternoon we have witnessed the launching of 56 home-made rockets into Israel, another 17 longer-range Grad missiles and two type 107mm rockets and 66 mortars. Israel responded with 36 air-to-ground missiles, 57 mortars and tank shells and repeated naval fire.

But it is the clanking sound of Al Shifa Hospital morgue’s iron door, on Friday around midnight, that brought me to my senses.

“We’ve got two martyrs,” the watchman told me. “Why did you come so late? We had another two earlier from Beach Camp. These two are from Shajaiya.”

Civilians?

“A 12-year-old and a 22-year-old student,” he tells me as he opens the first compartment. The corpse is completely rapped around a shroud full of blood. As the watchman moves forward to uncover him, he makes a sign to me to tell me he is headless.

Hell no, I scream. Leave him covered. I take a shot. Just one. His name is Bilel Al Areir, he was walking down the street when the F-16 dropped the missile.

“And this one was playing football in the same street,” the watchman tells me, opening the next cold steel container.

His chest and face scarred by the deadly shrapnel, Mahmoud Al Jerou was, until Friday night, the latest civilian victim of Israel’s military assault. Before him, a mother and her daughter, an elderly man and more than half of the total of Palestinians killed were the new “martyrs” in the long Palestinian tragic address book.

These are not victims of human error or collateral damage. Israel’s highly sophisticated weaponry make its killings religiously accurate, whether they’re targeting a militant on a motorbike, an operative in Sudan or an underground fuel pipe in Rafah.

Just as it is inconceivable to think of the Sammouni family massacre two years ago – when an entire extended family was made to gather into one house in Zeitoun only to be shelled soon after leaving 29 dead – as a mistake, irrespective of whether or not the judge appointed by the UN to investigate this war crime and others has had a change of heart.

What Goldstone did this week was to legitimise Israel in responding in whatever way it felt fit, guaranteeing its long-standing impunity. Because while the Palestinian militants targeting Israel with their rockets are undoubtedly committing war crimes, those pulling the trigger from the remote-controlled drones have been told it’s OK to bomb children to pieces.

“I’m not afraid to die, I’m just worried for my children,” Mohammed Khdeir, a gardener selling plants in Gaza City, told me today. “Whenever they hear the drones and the fighter jets they just panic. I don’t know what to do to protect them.”

Hamas has meanwhile called for a ceasefire, convening all factions and asking for restraint. But the Islamist movement’s own military wing, the Al Qassam Brigades, was lobbing more of its rockets towards Israel, saying it could not let its enemy’s assault go unpunished. Netanyahu replied Israel would “step up” its attacks.

“Have they ever stepped down their attacks,” my grocer, a refugee from Beersheba where some of the rockets tend to land nowadays, told me. “Have we ever stopped dying in vain since we’ve been chucked out of our land?”

As the escalation enters its fourth day, desperation, cynicism and the terrifying feeling that ordinary civilians have nowhere to hide are slowly sinking in. Cast Lead II is in the making.

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In Gaza it’s calm on Saturday but feels like no end in sight

2011-03-26T13:34:00.002+01:00

It’s been an eventful week here. The sheer number of rockets and mortars launched by Palestinian militants last Sunday put Gaza back in the headlines, but the real headline grabber was the bomb that exploded outside the central bus station in West Jerusalem on Wednesday. The first one of its kind in ages. A 60-year-old woman was killed. A British one.

Israel was quick to enforce a gag order on all investigations and proceedings linked to this case. That means none of the Israeli media can report any of the truth – or conjecture – that is presented in court when the suspect is prosecuted. Isn’t that suspicious? How come they didn’t jump on this act of terrorism in the heart of Israel? Shouldn’t the entire West Bank and East Jerusalem be under total curfew with tanks parked outside their houses and Apaches hunting down the terrorists?

And why did Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas and prime minister Salam Fayyad almost beg for forgiveness – followed by Obama’s condemnation (no condemnation of the killing of four innocent Gazans playing football that same day, just condolences to their families) when Israel doesn’t even want us to know who the suspect is?

The only conceivable probability right now is that the attacker was not Palestinian after all. None of the Palestinian factions, brigades, parties, and fronts, popular or otherwise, claimed responsibility, and that’s something. Sometimes we get press releases from four different brigades saying they fired the same rocket. A bomb in Jerusalem would be probably televised live on Al Aqsa TV- the Hamas mouthpiece on satellite – if only they could do it. The truth is, they don’t want to.

Hamas not only disowned the attack, but it has also been calling on all factions to stop rocket fire, calling on Israel for a hudna – truce. How do you reconcile that with Hamas’s own Izz Al Deen AL Qassam brigades claimed responsibility for shooting at least 30 mortars (Israeli media said 50!) in one day last Sunday? Two Israelis were reportedly injured together with some damage to buildings. Israel replied with an entire week air raids, incursions, and deadly fire that killed innocent civilians. On 22 March, the Israeli army fired high-precision Keshet mortar shells at the Shajaiya neighbourhood, east of Gaza City. Those shells killed four Palestinian civilians, three of them from the same family, including two children.

The Hamas militant wing claiming responsibility is in itself a rare event, as the movement in government has been keen on policing the buffer zone to avoid a repeat of Operation Cast Lead. This has, over the last two years, led to disenfranchisement by hardline militants who are known to have defected to Salafi-Jihadist groups who accuse Hamas of selling out to the occupation, being un-Islamic and corrupt just like the Palestinian Authority and Fatah.

In fact, since the end of the aggression against Gaza, the Hamas movement has repeatedly convened all the factions in the enclave to ensure an unofficial cease-fire, with prime minister Ismayil Haniye appealing publicly to all brigades to refrain from their rocket and mortar launching operations at the buffer zone. The most to come out against this - through their declarations and actual reported operations - have been the armed Popular Resistance Committee and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), whose military brigades have claimed responsibility for several attacks, sometimes on the same day in which Hamas would have declared its instructions to the factions. Israel always responds that Hamas remains responsible for all attacks coming out of Gaza and normally launches its own air raids on tunnels, empty areas and vacated government buildings. In contrast, the previous Wednesday 16 March, Israel had responded to a Qassam rocket falling near Sderot with the bombing of a Hamas training camp in Netzarim, killing two Palestinians.

Sunday's barrage of mortars and, more importantly, the Hamas militant group's claim of responsibility, preceded by Israel's Netzarim training camp bombing, opened a bracket in the unstated rules between Hamas and Israel. Prior to this, however, there was a sporadic escalation of rocket attacks and Israeli attacks on farmers and fishermen at the bufferzone and at sea starting last December. While 2010 is classified by Israeli intelligence with just 28 total injuries on the Israeli side out of 8,000 conflict-related injuries since the 2000 Al Aqsa Intifada was launched. Palestinian casualties nevertheless soared as Israel stepped up its attacks, leading to speculation about whether or not another Israel was about to wage another war on Gaza, including public statements in this regard by the Israeli establishment.

According to the Israeli military, prior to the 19 March attack, over 30 Grad missiles, Qassam rockets and mortar shells landed in Israeli territory. Grad missiles and a mortar shell landed in southern Israel on 31 January, damaging a vehicle and causing four people "to be treated for shock". The first two months also witnessed more than 12 explosive attacks along the buffer zone and a total of 83 attacks.

The question as to why Al Qassam brigades launched the barrage of mortars into Israel last Sunday is perplexing given that prior to the attack, Hamas had given every indication it had no intention of upsetting the status quo with Israel despite enormous Salafi-Jihadist pressures. It must be seen in the context of the ongoing grassroots calls for unity, taken up a notch by President Mahmoud Abbas when he declared the previous Tuesday that he was ready to come to Gaza "tomorrow" for reconciliation and unity among the factions after he was invited to Gaza by Hamas prime minister Haniye. They might have been calling each others’ bluff, but Al Qassam were not amused.

Al Qassam being directly answerable to and funded by the Syrian exiled leadership of Hamas, one possibility is that the militants and hardliners did not approve of Haniye's invitation to Abbas, exposing once again the currents and counter-currents between the Gaza-based political circles and the hardline Al Qassam elements under the patronage of Khaled Meshal in Damascus. Palestinian nationl unity and reconciliation for these elements has always been viewed highly problematic as they are the ones who stand most to lose if Hamas had to give up total control of the Gaza Strip, mainly because of fears of reprisals of executions carried out in the 2007 coup.

At the same time, the Hamas government has shown to be incapable of dealing with peaceful demonstrations from students for unity launched on 15 March and has been suppressing them brutally ever since. An unprecedented mortar attack on Israel could serve to deflect attention and make Abbas's trip to Gaza unfeasible. Israel would be more than willing to make unity harder than it already is as it has already taken a strong stand against it, telling Abbas he could not push for peace while forming a government of terrorists.

On Thursday night, F-16s bombarded buildings in Gaza City, rocking the entire Gaza Strip. A couple of injuries reported, but turns out it was only on empty, abandoned buildings, one of them – Safeena Building – built by the US to house the Palestinian Authority’s then secret services in Gaza.

Neither Israel nor Hamas want a war, but the real one who can afford to be the brinksman right now is Israel. In killing civilians, it told Hamas it can also raise its drum beating by a notch. Most of the rockets fired since the Al Qassam barrage have been amateurish home-made rockets, with some of them exploding prematurely or falling in Gaza itself. Very depressing stuff – nothing compared to the Grad rockets fired by the Hamas guys. Only problem is, if one of these stray rockets kills and Israeli, or wipe out an Israeli family, then we’re in for trouble. Netanyahu will have to respond to public anger while avoiding another Goldstone report and all that bad publiclity.

Israel and Hamas are like two lovers. They need each other just like the Church needs Satan, McCarthy needed Communism and George Bush needed Bin Laden. And it’s a long love story full of drama, backstabbing, flings and love affairs, the raw material for an epic tragedy.

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Where is the film?

2011-03-19T16:02:00.010+01:00

Hamas violent crackdown on pro-unity Gaza youth and journalists
19 March 2011, 3pm

How can you ever respect a Hamas police officer who tries to “open” your digital camera in the hope that he will find “the film”?

Forget for a second the shameless beating of secondary school girls I had just witnessed from my balcony.

Forget that they broke into my house carrying sticks and guns, manhandled my landlady, her son and daughter.

Forget also, for a second, that a journalist friend of mine was stabbed in her back by a police officer four days ago while walking back home from the Al Kateeba demonstrations – dispersed violently by Hamas mobs and police with sticks and live machine gun fire in the sky.

But when the uniformed thug leading his eight or so juniors presented himself rudely at my door this afternoon, it was just a scene out of Blackadder. Or Mr Bean. With guns.

Just minutes before, at around 11.30am, I was clicking with my camera from my balcony on the 14th floor as around 100 secondary school girls were chanting against the division, for Palestinian unity, just opposite my flat. These brave girls had just finished school (there are not enough classes for Gaza’s children so students attend schools in two shifts). The demonstrations were expected to start at noon, but the free, independent Gaza youth are impatient. Standing in one of the corners in Omar Al Mukhtar Street – Gaza City’s major boulevard leading to Al Jundi Square – they start chanting. And chanting. Other students start arriving. I keep clicking.

My landlady – a strong, secular Marxist who has argued and had fist fights with some of the most heavily armed Israeli commandos in her family home in Beit Hanoun – is excited. Her daughter – wearing the same school uniform as the girls opposite – is dying to go down, but tells me she’ll wait for some more people to gather.

Policemen are still at a distance in the main square, until we hear police car sirens. Trouble is on the way. A white van rams straight into the group of girls. I’m still clicking, can’t confirm if anyone was hit. Apparently not. Police officers storm out of the van – some carrying AK47s, others wooden sticks. Another van comes from the opposite direction. The girls flee, and with them a crowd that was on its way. Police chase the students, beating whoever is in front of them. More police vans turn up, chasing everyone from the main street.

Then, an officer on the street spots me. He points towards me with his baton as his peers raise their heads towards me. I’m fucked. Might as well keep clicking. They rush to one of the vans and head off somewhere. My landlady tells me to go into my flat and store my pictures somewhere safe. Wise advice. Her son is guarding the main door to our floor. I dash to my flat and frantically copy everything on every possible disk available. Until, as expected, they arrived. Later I would learn that at the same time other security officers were storming into news agencies’ offices here, breaking equipment and arresting staff from NHK, AP, Al Arabiya and Mayadeen, among others.

I’m still upstairs in my flat when they knock on the main door. My landlady and her son and some other friends open. I can hear the commotion. All my photos are saved. I put the card back in one of the cameras and go to meet my visitors.

“Are you the one taking photos,” the leader, armed with a revolver in his holster, tells me trying to grab my camera.

Yes.

“Why are you taking photos?”

Why not?

“Why are you taking photos from up here?”

Let me come with you in your cars to photograph you on the beat.

“Where is your film?”

It’s digital.

“Where is your film?”

Leave my camera.

“Open the camera.”

You can’t open a digital camera.

“So where’s the film?”

There is no film. I can show you the pictures.

“Show me the pictures.”

I can’t show you the pictures if you break my camera.

“What’s your name?”

You tell me your name. You’re in my house. Who are you?

“What’s your name?”

Write me down your name. (Landlady brings paper and pen. The idiot is trying to open the digital camera to rip out the ‘film’).

Since when is it illegal to take photos?

“Where’s the film?”

There is no film. It’s digital. Show me the law stating photography is forbidden.

“Where is the film?”

Which law states that photography is forbidden?

“Open the camera”

You’re worse than the Israelis.

“What’s your name?”

Write me down yours. Where are you going with my camera? You can’t leave without giving me a receipt. Write down your name and state that you confiscated my camera.

(He is calling someone from his mobile, then grabs pen and writes down a note stating that my camera was confiscated, but does not sign it).

Why are you afraid of telling me your name?

What’s your name?

Write down your name.

My landlady is meanwhile arguing with the rest of the thugs.

“What’s your problem?” she keeps telling them. “Why are you in my house? Since when can’t we photograph you doing your job? Since when can’t I take pictures from my balcony? Didn’t you like being photographed in Rantissi’s time (Hamas leader killed by Israel when the movement was not in government)? Do you think that I, as Palestinian, like seeing these pictures? You’re the shame of our country and our cause. ”

The commotion drags on a bit more, until the only one of them who is not wearing a uniform tries to restore some calm, respectfully, for a change.

“It’s OK,” he said. “You’ll have your camera back. Stay calm.”

What do you mean stay calm, I ask him.

“Write down my name. It’s Ihab Al Baz. You can come and pick it up from the police station in half an hour.”

And they left. With my camera.

When tested, Hamas have shown they are not any different from the Mubaraks, Ben Alis, Gaddafis and Ali Abdallah Salehs of this side of the world. They just don’t have the tanks, the fighter jets and the tear gas.

And they’ve learnt all their lessons from the occupier, just in a more primitive style.

At a press conference given by Hamas spokesmen Sami Abu Zuhri and Fawzi Barhoum later, a journalist asked: “Abu Zuhri how do you explain the attack on the Reuters news agency’s offices happening as we speak? How do you explain it?”

Abu Zuhri was speechless, so Barhoum butted in. “Al Salam Aleikum”. Bye.

Latest: Meanwhile between 30 and 50 mortars have been fired from Gaza into Israel – the highest ever mortar fire from here since the war two years ago. In an equally unprecedented move, Hamas’s military wing Izz Al Deen Al Qassam claimed it had fired 30 of the mortars. Israel has already sent fighter jets bombing parts of Gaza, many more are expected after dusk.

Demonstrators at Al Kateeba (written in a rush)

2011-03-15T19:30:00.000+01:00

In the morning people gathered at Square of the Unknown Soldier in Gaza City, main square and boulevard. Thousands were there... then a crowd of Hamas people turned up - they had already set up a stage with loudspeakers so they were 'in charge'. So youth movement decided to leave the place and go to Kateeba Square, the traditional grounds where mass rallies have been held. Thousands left for Kateeba - marching peacefully and setting up tents there.

I climbed on a vantage point - an abandoned building overlooking the entire square, until Hamas police turned up telling everyone to leave. Nothing violent yet - just made to leave... demos continued on the ground, peacefully, lots of young people chanting and dancing for unity. Met some friends who looked shocked but barely spoke - one was in tears and told me she was beaten and asked to cover her hair by Hamas. Another one couldn't walk and was being helped to a clinic - though I didn't witness the violence itself.

Back home, friends called me telling me police had intervened, fired warning shots in the air. Told them I was on my way back but they strongly urged me not to - all cameras were confiscated, journalists arrested and activists beaten up. My friend Adham said "Al Kateeba is on fire" ... thuoght he was being metaphorical but then another one called to say Hamas had set the tents on fire...

Earlier footage I shot from Al Kateeba:

Gaza impatient for 15 March!

2011-03-15T10:30:00.003+01:00

A month ago they came out to party for the Egyptians. Tonight is their night.
Gaza City, Square of the Unknown Soldier, 14 March 2011, 9pm onwards... more to come soon...

15 March: Sanaa Al Nahhal from Rafah, occupied Palestine, living in Malta

2011-03-14T23:34:00.000+01:00

Sanaa Al Nahhal from Rafah, occupied Palestine, living in Malta, sends her message in support of fellow Palestinians' call for national unity and reconciliation

15 March: Lina Al Nahhal, 20 from Rafah living in Malta

2011-03-14T23:29:00.000+01:00

Lina Al Nahhal, 20 from Rafah, living in Malta where she is reading for a degree in European Studies, sends her message of support for Palestinian unity

From the frontline: Palestinians from West Bank and Gaza demand unity (AUDIO)

2011-03-14T19:29:00.003+01:00

Voices from the frontline: Listen to the young Palestinians on the frontline of the 15 March protests, putting forward their views on why they are calling for unity, and why the international community has to listen

15 March: Nasseem, 29 from Gaza, occupied Palestine (AUDIO)

2011-03-13T23:25:00.001+01:00

Nasseem, 29-year-old finance officer from Gaza City, occupied Palestine, speaks of his hopes national unity that would pave the way for a free and democratic Palestine

15 March: Ahed Abu Sharekh, 27 from Jabalya refugee camp, Gaza Strip, occupied Palestine (AUDIO)

2011-03-13T22:47:00.000+01:00

Ahed Abu Sharekh, 27 from Jabalya refugee camp, speaks on the importance of Palestinian unity ahead of the 15 March protests

15 March: Enaam Abu Nida from Jabalya refugee camp, Gaza Strip, occupied Palestine (VIDEO)

2011-03-13T22:13:00.001+01:00

Enaam Abu Nida, mother and food security worker from Jabalya refugee camp in the Gaza Strip, occupied Palestine, tells us why Palestinians will be protesting for national unity and reconciliation on 15 March

15 March: Samaah Ahmed, 30 from Gaza, occupied Palestine (VIDEO)

2011-03-12T19:19:00.000+01:00

Watch Samaah Ahmed, 30, human rights activist from Gaza City, occupied Palestine, calling on the international community to support Palestinian unity

15 March: Bassam, 24, rapper from Gaza City, occupied Palestine (AUDIO)

2011-03-11T20:30:00.002+01:00

Bassam, 24, rapper with Darg Team, from Gaza City, occupied Palestine, tells us why he will join the 15 March protests calling for Palestinian unity, and why the world should support them

15 March: Noor Harizeen, 21, Gaza City, occupied Palestine (VIDEO)

2011-03-11T20:06:00.003+01:00

Noor Harizeen, 21, English student at Al Azhar University, from Gaza City, occupied Palestine, tells us why she will be joining protestors on 15 March calling for Palestinian unity, and why the world should support them

15 March: Musheera Jamaal, Gaza, occupied Palestine (VIDEO)

2011-03-11T19:55:00.004+01:00

Musheera Jamaal, 26, human rights activist from Gaza City, occupied Palestine, tells us why she will join protestors on 15 March calling for Palestinian unity, and why the world should support

Beware the Ides of March

2011-03-11T19:44:00.004+01:00

This Tuesday, 15 March, Palestinian youth will only wave the Palestinian flag

I’m at a meeting with a Palestinian rapper, an English student and a human rights activist in their twenties. I asked to meet them so that I could record their voices as they speak about Tuesday 15 March, the day they will be protesting in Gaza with other Palestinians in the West Bank, calling on Fatah and Hamas to end the crippling division.

The issue is sensitive – a similar call for demonstrations a month ago was disrupted before it even started, and Hamas have been harassing the 15 March organisers over the last weeks. But after a long pre-emptive introduction telling them they didn’t have to use their real names if they feared retribution from the Gaza government, Musheera Jamaal, the 26-year-old activist, asks me to set up the video camera.

“I want to be filmed,” she said resolutely.

Her friend Noor Harizeen, 21, took the cue. “Me too. Use our names and faces.”

Bassam, the 24-year-old member of the popular hip-hop band Darg Team, is immediately thinking of what he wants to tell the world, also in his name.

Only a month ago, Palestinians were but whispering in secret about the planned demonstration, with nobody giving a straight answer whether they were participating or not. Mubarak was still clinging on to power, Libya had not yet started its revolution, and the protests here in Gaza were doomed as anti-Hamas demonstrations the moment a Fatah spokesman in Ramallah urged the youth living under blockade to get rid of the Islamist movement. On the day Mubarak was forced out by the neighbouring Egyptians, the Palestinian revolution remained confined to Facebook.

This Tuesday it is bound to be different. Over the last days, more and more young people referred openly to the planned demonstrations. Many more have committed themselves to organising the event and bring their own friends, breaking out of the polarising Fatah-Hamas divide that conditions everything in Palestinian politics.

“Palestinians are dying to do something, to get out on the streets, get something going,” a young doctor who spent seven years studying in the Ukraine told me early last week. “We’ve seen the Egyptians and the Tunisians doing the unthinkable, the Libyans are now following, and we have to do something that gets us out of our mould.”

As they witness the entire Arab world ablaze with the revolutionary fervour that is radically changing the region, the sense of envy at being stolen the limelight must be hitting every self-respecting Palestinian, whose nation has been living under 62 years of occupation and ethnic cleansing.

Palestinians are the most fearless Arabs. Democracy is within them – they speak their mind openly and they talk politics just like they eat their daily bread. For six decades, Israel has occupied their land but not their minds. It must have something to do with the fact that neither Fatah nor Hamas could ever be the kind of regimes we are witnessing falling one after the other right now. And also because occupation and repression, everywhere and inevitably, always fuel resistance.

Palestinians know well enough that Israel is the regime that is oppressing them. The divide, as crippling as the blockade of Gaza itself, is the outcome of decades of occupation and segregation of Gaza which precedes the official blockade declared four years ago by almost 20 years. When Palestinians turned up on themselves in the 2007 civil war, killing each other in the streets of Gaza, Israel’s racist, divide and rule policies against Palestinians were bearing its rotten fruit.

Now, inspired by their Arab brothers around them, networking and organising themselves from Facebook and Twitter to secretive to public meetings, Palestinian youth want to call for an end to the divisions and force Hamas and Fatah to stop paying lip service. The two movements say they want unity but have spent the last four years doing anything in their power to make unity impossible.

“We’re coming down (into the streets) to end the division,” says one of the stickers printed by the 15 March organisers. “Palestine is bigger than all of us”

Last Monday, around 100 students at Al Azhar University in Gaza City gathered for a conference on unity ended up taking to the streets, in the city’s main roads, calling for an end to the division. Impressively, the spontaneous demonstration was allowed to go on by Hamas, with no serious arrests reported later.

International community must support unity

Ending the division would expose the double standards of the American and European governments fomenting it in the first place by insisting on boycotting Hamas, persisting with branding it as a terrorist organisation after welcoming it to contest the elections. In the meantime, the US and EU have no qualms arming and funding the Palestinian Authority with security forces subservient to the occupation and used to arrest, harass and torture Palestinian dissidents. The politicisation of humanitarian aid channelled into Palestine is as immoral as supporting the blood-thirsty tyrants being overthrown in the region.

In the last week, the Palestinian prime minister in Ramallah, Salam Fayyad – who contested elections as an independent – called on Hamas to join his cabinet in a unity government. Hamas refused, and Fatah were not amused with Fayyad’s call, urging President Mahmoud Abbas to remove him from prime minister and install one of them instead.

The first signals from US and European diplomats are already that they would boycott a unity government once again. That is why it is only the Palestinian people – independently of the parties and factions – who can force change in their country in the same way the Egyptians and Tunisians are pushing through with their demands.

Hamas is an essential piece of the Palestinian political and social landscape. Irrespective of whether the Islamist movement is treated as a terrorist organisation or not, it is here to stay. The last four years of blockade and marginalisation have consolidated its grasp of the Gaza Strip, running all the institutions that matter like every administration does, only much less accountably given the international boycott.

Reconciliation is essential for Palestinians’ struggle for freedom. It would be another slap in the face to the international community’s hypocrisy and double standards. As Gaddafi awaits his international criminal court trial – if he gets out of Libya alive – Benyamin Netanyahu, Ehud Olmert, Tzipi Livni and the names of countless Israeli generals would also, one day, have to be engraved on the files of the war crimes tribunal.

If there ever was a time to launch the third Intifada, this would be it.

Libya awakens

2011-03-04T14:15:00.001+01:00

Some 80 kilometres outside of Tripoli, a vast mishmash of mountains, valleys and cliffs in the middle of nowhere hide a freak of nature very few know about. So little is known about it, that since my Libyan friends took me to see it eight years ago I have only recounted the story to a handful of people with whom I don’t risk my reputation.

So here is my Libyan secret, now that everything in Libya is being turned upside down: In the valley of Al Riyayna, the forces of gravity do not work. Literally. I saw it with my own eyes – a car, turned off, left on free gear at the bottom of the slope, going suddenly upwards, on its own; an empty can of Coke rolling upwards; water poured on the tarmac defying the laws of gravity.

“This goes to prove everything in Libya is upside down,” I had told my friends, otherwise speechless, admitting I had just witnessed the unbelievable.

I am sure there is some scientific explanation to this bizarre geographic phenomenon, but my secretive research about this particular region proved futile. Not even one page turns up on Google. If only it was in the United States, it would be one big amusement park, a prime tourist attraction, Freakland. This was Libya.

Smashing the Green wall of silence

My Libyan friends in Tripoli would not talk to me in front of others about politics. Gaddafi was not even mentionable – some spy mic might be registering our conversation. You could smell and touch the fear. The little deep discussions I had with them about the regime would happen in my hotel room, door locked, one-on-one, whispering our questions and answers. Even the angriest would admit defeatedly that we were crossing a red line, and that little could be done to change things.

“This is our system, if we don’t like it, we can leave,” they would say at the end of their conversation, almost apologetically. “That’s our reality, and I guess that’s everyone else’s.”

Indeed many of them left, many of them have studied and settled abroad, some of them sent by Gaddafi himself on some state scholarship and never to return. But many others wanted to stay, despite the oppression, because despite everything they loved their country. Libya is not Gaddafi, they kept repeating, even though his iron grip has crippled the country for 42 years

Colonel Muammar Gaddafi, the man who still deludes himself with his self-given title of Leader of the Revolution and sports all sorts of medals on his chest – including the Maltese highest national honour, Gieh ir-Repubblika – has been so far one of the greatest survivors of history.

Since his coup with a revolutionary command council of army officers in 1969 in which they ousted King Idris, Gaddafi has managed to reshape Libya in his own warped idea of nationhood through terror and grandiose lunacy. From the anti-colonialist who earned initial respect from his peers in the region for embodying the Third World’s struggle against the legacies of former empires, the Libyan leader moved on to become the unpredictable maverick to a downright monster ready to kill his own people without a moment’s hesitation.

When prisoners at Abu Sleem protested, he killed them all, 1,200 of them. When students revolted, he hanged them on campus. When Libya was indicted on the Lockerbie bombing, he kept bluffing despite Libya’s innocence, till he pitted his nation into a nine-year embargo. When he saw Saddam Hussein hounded out of his palace and hanged at the gallows, he became best friends with George Bush and Tony Blair.

His spectacular rehabilitation in December 2003, when he reportedly renounced weapons of mass destruction, was in reality only skin deep; an interval in his freak show. At the time, the engineering department at Al Fateh University did not even have electricity to run its laboratories – and this in the premium oil-producing country. American multinationals, and European ones, were quick to befriend the man once dubbed as the “mad dog of the Middle East” by former US President Ronald Reagan.

Many Libyans were sceptical Gaddafi even had weapons of mass destruction in the first place, except for chemical weapons that require no spectacular expertise to produce. Not even Saddam Hussein had the WMDs after all, so what could one expect of an ageing, decaying regime armed with rusty soviet weapons? So superficial was his much-lauded rehabilitation, that his unpredictable, maverick style remained constant, be it insisting on erecting his ridiculous tent in New York or blackmailing Europe with flooding it with immigrants.

All along, the world has refused to see Gaddafi at his bloodiest, his looniest. On the land of oil, Libyans were tortured, executed and others just “disappeared” for the simple reason that they were critical of the regime. Individuals, defectors, activists, journalists and organisations like Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International have been ringing the alarm for decades, but nobody listened.

Yes, I told you so

When then Maltese President Eddie Fenech Adami visited Gaddafi in July 2008, I had asked him whether the Libyan leader’s ambitions to develop nuclear energy with Russian and French investment was discussed at all in the tent in Bab Al Aziziya. At the time, three French reactors we leaking radioactive material, so Malta’s national interest was clearly at stake if Tripoli started experimenting with nuclear.

“We didn’t think it was a question to go into at this point in time,” Fenech Adami replied in his typical dismissive manner.

Even less tactfully, then Maltese health minister John Dalli and now European Commissioner, who also had business interests and consultancies in the Jamahiriya, had chastised me in front of all the other journalists at the press conference at the Maltese embassy.

“You keep writing the same old stupidities,” he told me. To him, questioning Gaddafi and his motives was just useless chatter that would only undermine Malta’s efforts to keep good business relations with Libya. So blinded and off the mark was the Maltese government’s reading of the situation, that only a couple of weeks ago Prime Minister Lawrence Gonzi was hugging the tyrant in what was a genius of timing – making you wonder whether the foreign ministry is run by Gaddafi’s camels.

Now, cornered by his own people, Gaddafi is threatening to explode Libya’s oil wells. Thank God he hasn’t had the time and the expertise to develop nuclear reactors.

As the Libyans, inspired by their Tunisian and Egyptian neighbours, defy decades-old assumptions, the latest pictures coming out of Libya make us all witnesses to a widespread massacre. The regime keeps losing one general after the other – the Libyan delegations to the UN and to the Arab League have defected, as have the two heroic pilots who landed in Malta. The Libyan deputy ambassador to the UN called Gaddafi’s measures, “a genocide”.

From the looks of it, Gaddafi will stay on until he is killed or forcibly removed. And it will be a great irony of sorts, that the self-styled revolutionary leader of the masses would have been ousted by the angriest revolutionaries in Libya’s history.

Gaza parties on as Egypt buries its last mummy

2011-02-12T21:50:00.000+01:00

Scenes of unfettered jubilation spread like wildfire across the entire Arab world on yeserday night into the day's early hours as millions of Egyptians were told in less than 30 seconds that the tyrant who crushed them for 30 years was out. Forever.

The resilient protestors in Tahrir Square and across the great Egyptian nation proved to themselves, to the Arabs, and to the world, that they could accomplish the unthinkable in a revolution of dignity and newfound, genuine Arab pride.

In unseating the decadent dictator, the Egyptians have restored the confidence needed among the millions of oppressed Arabs living under brutal dictatorships to claim their rights, without any outside intervention, a genuine action for freedom and democracy.

Coming in the wake of the Tunisian president’s downfall, the Egyptian revolution’s slogans are right now being chanted by Arabs all over the Middle East – in celebration of their brothers’ victory but also in the hope of toppling their own disgraced leaders.

In Gaza, Friday night witnessed the biggest street party ever in the city’s main avenue since it was blockaded by Israel and Mubarak’s regime. All kinds of vehicles – from tuktuks smuggled through the tunnels to donkeys and even ambulances – carcaded through the main streets bursting with people from all walks of life and of all ages waving the Egyptian flag to the deafening honking, celebratory gunfire and improvised fireworks.

“I have never felt as happy as today, for our Egyptian brothers, for ourselves, for all the Arabs,” an elderly man driving a battered car and throwing toffee to the people from his window told me before pressing the gas pedal to continue his partying. “Take a nice photo of me. Down with Mubarak, down with the system, down with all of them!”

Rewind by six hours.

Friday afternoon. Cairo is still burning, the tyrant is still on his throne. Friday prayers just finished and it’s just the time in Gaza City when the young people of the blockaded strip are meant to start their own demonstration, pro-democracy, against the political divisions of Fatah and Hamas, for national unity and freedom. Like their brothers in Egypt and Tunisia, the action is advertised on Facebook.

A few lonely youth appear in the Square of the Unknown Soldier, but there are more plainclothes policemen doing the rounds on motorbikes and shady vans, stopping the occasional “revolutionary” and taking them away. A young friend tells me he is on his way – I tell him to take care – but from the looks of it, it’s like every potential demonstrator is waiting for the crowd to appear out of nowhere, just to step in along the way.

Friday afternoon has never looked so busy in the Rimal district, when families are usually eating their generous dishes, including the maqlouba, which literally means upside down. In Egypt, that’s how everything is looking right now, and one can smell the promise in the air, carried with that of the jasmine and the olives, of change about to happen across the entire region.

But it’s not protestors reclaiming the streets that are making Gaza City’s main thoroughfare look busy, it’s the unmarked police cars and motorcycles. On the roof opposite mine, a pair of bearded police are overlooking the boulevard named after the great Libyan rebel leader Omar Al Mukhtar, killed by the Italian colonisers.

All of a sudden, torrential rain. If there was any proof God was on Hamas’s side, this was it. The Islamist movement ruling the coastal enclave was in a tricky situation. It couldn’t but rejoice for their founding movement’s newfound freedom from their nemesis – the Muslim Brotherhood was finally rid of its persecutor, Hasni Mubarak, and this can only be good news. Founded as an offshoot of the Egypt branch of the Muslim Brotherhood in 1988, Hamas is craving to have such an influential ally next door that could open the gates of Rafah and turn the tide for the impoverished strip, which is now in its fourth year of the Israeli-imposed blockade.

At the same time, it didn’t want Gaza’s younger population, which makes up half of the 1.5 million crammed on this tiny strip the size of Malta, to get any funny ideas about freedom and challenging the regime. It’s already bad enough that there are some rappers and youth organisations spreading their manifestos anonymously on facebook and making headlines in mainstream international media.

“No action, I’m afraid,” my landlady – herself a former student activist in the Left-wing Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) in its heyday – told me disappointedly. The common entry to our flats – by the way – hosts an enormous red niche with the legendary image of Che Guevara. “In any case what’s Gaza next to Egypt? I’m going back in front of my TV. That bastard is still clinging to his seat.”

Like many others, she had no delusions it would go otherwise over here. The demonstration was doomed before it started because some Fatah wise guy in Ramallah came out publicly encouraging young people to challenge Hamas, doing exactly the opposite of what the smart Egyptian opposition did a few kilometres away. Until today, it is the political and Islamist factions that rule most of civil society in the entire occupied Palestinian territory, but there’s nothing that says it has to remain so.

The current bipolar divide between Fatah and Hamas is entrenched everywhere; so far preventing any effective agent of change like there was in Egypt and Tunisia, a genuinely popular revolt that eradicates the old guard – although in both countries that is going to be a long work in progress.

At the risk of sounding parochial I would say the Maltese can understand the situation perfectly because they live it, in far less dramatic circumstances, in the form of the division between the PN and the MLP, which reduces everything to idiotic simplicity and triviality. That’s why a revolution is not happening in Gaza and the West Bank right now.

But Egypt and Tunisia are a humbling lesson to all the foreign Middle East experts, parachuting journalists and orientalists making a business by gazing at “the Arabs”, none of whom except the exceptional handful could see this happening, not now, not ever. Egypt and Tunisia are proof that the improbable is possible, the unthinkable doable. That even the most brutal, organised and disciplined regimes can be brought down like a collapsing pyramid in a desert of rebellion. Isn’t Egypt, after all, the land of rising Pharaohs falling spectacularly? So spectacularly they were obsessed, in their absolute denial, with preserving their bodies so obsessively, in erecting their pointed phalluses guarded by gigantic sphinxes.

That’s how Mubarak fell, Friday evening. I wrote last Sunday that the longer he clung to power, the more humiliating his downfall would be. A week was already too long; by the end of his last speech on Thursday night, Egyptians from all walks of life were holding their shoes at Mubarak’s image televised in Tahrir Square. On Friday, it took less than 30 seconds for his spy chief who to announce that the fort had given in. Hosni Mubarak is gone. That is it.

No it wasn’t, because that’s when the Gazans took to the streets in childlike glee, a jubilant explosion of young and old on all sorts of vehicles – from donkey-driven carts to tuktuks made in China and smuggled through the tunnels, in a sea of Egyptian and Palestinian flags. My landlady’s 19-year-old son, ordinarily graceful and soft-spoken, was on the balcony brandishing a freaking Kalashnikov, shooting towards the sky (thankfully). From the 15th floor, the street below looked like one long luminous serpent snaking through the dimly lit boulevard – because it has to be said that the electricity was down but the generators were somehow making up for it.

Grabbing my camera, wearing the track suit I ordinarily sleep in, I join the crazy crowd outdoors. An old man with a lovely beard, what must have been his grandson sitting on his lap, drove by in his battered car throwing toffee to the crowd jumping in the middle of the road.

“Isqat isqat ya Mubarak,” he was shouting from the bottom of his entrails with a naughty child’s grin. “Down down with Mubarak.” His grandson looked equally amused.

“The people want the system to fall,” one young guy with the Egyptian flag painted on his cheeks started chanting. “Down down with the system.” Others were playing the drums, gigantic speakers beating on museum-piece vans, megaphones competing in a cacophony of happiness. Pure, genuine, brotherly happiness.

In their midst, Hamas flags, Hamas police, the Al Qassam Brigades and all the militants from the various Gaza factions. Islamic Jihad had a respectable presence, too. Some were shouting “Down down with Abbas,” but a few brave youngsters also had the courage to tell them to shut up and stop being blinded by their partisan pettiness. OWho wants Abbas, or Hamas for that matter, to collapse when the enemy is Israel? Who would benefit from that? Even so, hundreds were chanting “down with the system” – probably for the first time ever not bothering specifying whether they meant “the occupation” or its collaborators.

If everything is possible, this is not the time for cynicism. We have plenty of time for that. Now is the time to smell the orgasmic scent of freedom.

And before taking yet more vertiginous steps in this revolutionary tidal wave, it would be well to remember my landlady’s idol's words of wisdom way back in 1973. It was George Habash, the founder of the left-wing Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), who had said that there can be no liberation of Palestine until there is the liberation of Arab countries from the regimes imposed by the West and Israel. The liberation of Palestine, he said, can only happen through the Arab capitals.

And the Israeli establishment, always mindful of the future and with its Biblical strategy and security machine in full gear 24 hours a day since it was founded in 1948, knows how true Habash’s words are. Only that there is little it can do now as it, together with the entire world, is being over taken by events. At most, it can grieve for its friendly tyrant deposed in the shark-friendly waters of Sharm al-Sheikh. It’s time for Israel to rethink the meaning of “shalom”.

Shukran ya mesr...

2011-02-11T21:39:00.000+01:00

Thank you Egypt.

Thank you Bou Azizi.

Thank you all the martyrs of democracy.

Egypt’s revolution shakes the world

2011-02-05T18:14:00.003+01:00

Amid all the reigning chaos and unpredictability in Egypt and the region right now, one thing is sure: the Egyptian people’s revolution will bring deep, long-lasting changes not only in the region but in the entire Middle East foreign policy.

Beyond the immediate shockwaves and unpredictable twists to this unfolding story, the Egyptians are effectively doing a favour far beyond their country and region. It vindicates all the individuals, journalists, activists, organisations like Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International, that have been on the frontline of the growing new global civil society speaking truth to power. From Noam Chomsky to Julian Assange to Mohammed Bou Azizi, from Wikileaks to Facebook and Twitter and back to the streets, this is globalisation at its best, where citizenship is also globalised, out of the reach of the cynical expediency of the dominant political world order.

Foreign policy has been overtaken by events, even for the world’s one remaining superpower. Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton have been forced by the Egyptian baker, the unemployed graduate, and the downtrodden mother gathered in Tahrir Square to change their position hour after hour, as Mubarak and his appointed vice-president give in more and more. The popular movement keeps growing, demanding a stop to the diplomatic hypocrisy that has been shaping the Western powers’ foreign policy. People in the streets are speaking truth to power, overthrowing some of the most oppressive dictators who until a couple of weeks ago were dining and dealing with our governments. The taboos are slowly but steadily being lifted. When Obama gave his momentous speech in Cairo, few believed he would have to back up his words two years later as the very Egyptian dictator who hosted him was being overthrown.

Western power have not only flirted with Mubarak and his ilk – they pushed him to endorse the so-called war on terror, giving him the “legitimate” platform to crush all opposition through torture, summary executions and forced transfer of totally innocent people to American prisons – Guantanamo being the most notorious. These are the same European and American terror laws, by the way, that are still punishing 1.5 million Palestinians trapped living under the Gaza blockade under the pretext of isolating Hamas. All of this was done under the simplistic notion that it’s better to have a secure dictatorship than an Islamist government – as if radical Islamism was the only alternative, besides ignoring how much radical Islam is fuelled by the West’s foreign policy in the first place.

The stubborn dictator refuses to get out of his ivory tower, but the more he stays, the more concessions he will have to make and the more powerless he becomes, risking getting out of the presidential palace in the form of a ghost. One can expect the fear-mongering American right-wing to spring on the opportunity to highlight its apocalyptic claims of Egypt falling under the vilified Muslim Brotherhood, but that would be turning cause and effect upside down – besides being a lie, given that the Islamist movement has long renounced violence and wants to pass Islamic laws only through the democratic process. The longer the stubborn dictator clinches to his seat of power, the more he destabilises the region.

And the region is feeling the immediate shockwaves – every Arab dictator is now shitting in his pants. Israel, which claims it is “the only democracy in the Middle East”, has been frantically calling on the West to defend the ageing tyrant. It has good reason to fear, as its most powerful and friendliest neighbour is being toppled by his people. Mubarak’s peace agreement with Israel is also in the balance – not because Egypt would attack it but because it does not represent the Egyptians’ opinions towards the occupier of Palestine. Once again, anger and frustrations buried for decades are bound to come out in an explosive way unless Mubarak steps down immediately.

The damage to Egypt’s economy grows day by day, but even in this case, it is only Mubarak who is responsible. In just one week, he brought Egypt’s exports down by 6, the tourism industry to a complete halt. The longer he stays, the worse it will get.

The ongoing crisis in Egypt is leaving its toll on the Gaza Strip as the Rafah border crossing – the only one through which Gazans are allowed to travel – has been closed indefinitely. The border witnessed fierce battles when Bedouins in the Sinai attacked the terminal, with border police fleeing the scene, leaving thousands of Gazans stranded in Egypt and abroad. Increased numbers of Gaza government border guards were posted along the Philadelphi Corridor following the Egyptians’ desertion. In a switch of sorts, Gaza border police are now feeding the few hungry Egyptian border guards that remain, sending food through the tunnels.

Tunnel trade – 80% of goods in Gaza are delivered through the dangerous tunnels due to the blockade – is also suffering as transport in Egypt has been largely stalled. This has led to price increases that were quickly felt on the Gaza market, particularly the price of cement, steel and fuel – all of which are banned by Israel from entering the Gaza Strip and are therefore smuggled through the tunnels. Gaza government police were seen checking petrol stations to make sure that owners were not taking advantage of the situation by raising prices after rumors of fuel shortages and hoarding spread throughout the coastal enclave. Eight out of a total of 12 major fuel transfer pipelines under the Gaza-Egypt border were reported to have shut down as the expected consignments of fuel failed to reach the tunnels.

The Gaza power plant – which has shifted all of its fuel procurement from Israel to Egypt over the last three weeks – is estimated to have enough fuel in store for another two to four weeks. But aid agencies are concerned that a protracted crisis in Egypt could lead to a severe impact on the blockaded enclave, affecting hospitals, homes that rely on fuel to run generators, and water and sanitation infrastructure, above and beyond the daily power cuts which Gazans already experience.

For some Gazans who have seen democratically elected Hamas being punished and boycotted by the West, which is an accomplice in the closure of Gaza, the prospects of the Muslim Brotherhood being in a future Egyptian government reminds them of the double standards in the dominant foreign policy.

“Look at what happened to us,” a concerned colleague told me as she went through all the hardships the Palestinians were forced to endure after Western powers decided that their democratic decision was wrong.

The truth is Egypt is not Gaza. Nobody can boycott or blockade this Arab reference point of 80 million people – at most it can be turned into another Iran, but nobody except Iran has an interest in that happening, not even the protestors in Tahrir Square. And the longer Mubarak stays, it is not only him who will be forced to give more concessions and come out of this more humiliated, but his entire entourage of strange bedfellows.

In solidarity, and some envy, Gaza watches the Arab revolution

2011-01-29T21:48:00.001+01:00

The landlady caught me walking up the stairs to my flat yesterday evening. In the semi-darkness, I couldn't tell if she was grinning or grimacing.

“Listen, do yourself a favour and stay in Gaza for now,” she told me grabbing my arm. “It’s the safest place on earth.”

We both burst out laughing at the infectious, typical Gazan black humour, while I picked up the latest incredible headlines from Cairo coming through her television. The Egyptian ruling party’s headquarters were in flames, soldiers were embracing protestors, rich and poor people were in downtown Cairo, Alexandria, Suez and Rafah virulently spewing their guts out.

“For the first time in my life I’m calling my relatives in Egypt, Algeria, Lebanon and Syria to check everything is alright with them, instead of them calling me,” she said.

As the dramatic events unfold in Egypt, Tunisia, Algeria, Jordan, Lebanon and Yemen - in varying degrees from factional demonstrations to popular revolutions – the story of the Middle East is being completely rewritten.

Ever since Mohammed Bou Azizi set himself alight after dousing himself with petrol in the Tunisian city of Sidi Bou Zid on 17 December, the Arab street has been blazing with the rage and the pride so brutally suppressed for decades. Before Bouazizi, the Egyptians were humiliated once again in their forsaken president’s democratic pantomime called elections. The heroic act of one man and all his followers of the Jasmine Revolution showed all the other Arabs that the unthinkable was possible. Blogs, Twitter and Facebook are proving to be the younger generation’s new public sphere where the oppressive force of the regimes is reduced to nothingness. The irony of the Muburak regime’s decision to cut off internet and mobile phone service couldn’t be clearer: It inadvertently invited Egyptians to get off their computers and take to the streets in a bid to understand what was happening.

While Tunisia was the trigger that inflamed the Arab world, the consequences are bound to differ in every country. A Muslim Brotherhood spokesman on Al Arabiya went out of his way to speak of one popular national opposition made of the Egyptian people, without any leader, as opposed to Lebanon’s factional demonstrations. In Cairo and in Tunis, the masses are demanding bread, freedom and dignity – which is completely different from the political chaos reigning in Beirut. Nevertheless, the Egyptians and Tunisians have set their new standard of expectations by speaking truth to power in a snap moment of enlightenment, as events evolved in lightning speed over the last week.

If the Mubarak regime collapses, the dynamics of the Middle East are bound to change radically. Every Arab dictator would be forewarned that his fate is doomed. For the foreign powers that have been flirting with and arming these dictators for the last decades, it will be a rude awakening and a veritable lesson in democracy, in the Arabs’ own language. For Israel, it’s an open Pandora’s box that will inevitably force it back to the foreign policy and security drawing board as the future becomes a big question mark. The first scene of change is already in Rafah, at the border between Gaza and Egypt, where security forces have fled their outposts as Bedouins and protestors went on the rampage. In yet another twist of irony, it is now Hamas security who are somehow guarding the border.

The former head of the UN nuclear watchdog, Mohammed El Baradei, seems to have lost his chance to take the lead and is increasingly seen as an opportunist after retreating back to Vienna following last year’s hype. Who will fill a post-Mubarak leadership vacuum, and how, remains to be seen though there will be little the West could do if the masses keep the momentum to bring the changes they aspire to. It will take days before the big questions are answered and the tear gas subsides, but if the Tunisian revolution is anything to go by, not one Islamist banner has been chanted.

Revolution on paper
Just as the week started, what actually promised to be the real explosive event to shake the Middle East turned out to be little more than a distraction rapidly overtaken by events. Al Jazeera leaked the largest ever archive of secret documents with details of negotiations between the Palestinian Authority and the Israeli government. For an entire week, the Qatari network devoted all of its news channels to the Palestine Papers in what is the journalistic scoop of WikiLeaks proportions. Meticulously scripted, produced, and branded, the Palestine Papers was much more than the typical star investigation that exposes people in power for what they are. It was a campaign that left a bitter taste with many ordinary Palestinians wary of Al Jazeera’s bias towards Hamas and Iran. In Gaza, predictably, Hamas rallied the masses in protest against Abbas and his infamous entourage, but in Ramallah the crowds were hailing the president in front of TV cameras.

“The revelations told us nothing new,” was the reaction of dozens of Palestinians I talked to as one embarrassing leak after the other was being broadcast. The belief that the PA is Israel’s best collaborator, manned by a corrupt and power-hungry leadership, is widespread even among the staunchest of Fatah allies. What was really shocking about the leaks were the details that reveal the humiliation and complete sell-out that the Palestinian negotiators were willing to go through, to get nothing in return. If anything, they confirmed definitively that whenever Israel says there is no peace partner in the Middle East, it is effectively talking about itself.

With Palestinian negotiator Saeb Erekat referring to Jerusalem with its Hebrew name offering Israelis “the biggest Yerushalaiym in history” and Ahmed Qurei drooling over Livny, telling her he would vote for her – there is little else that can be said about them to ruin their reputation forever. But their reputation was never good in the first place, the PA is already in tatters, the peace process has been long thrown out of the window, and while Abbas’s men have the chance to flirt with the occupier, Hamas is not missing an opportunity to emulate the occupation’s torture methods with its political opponents in the Gaza Strip. The Gaza-West Bank divide is now so entrenched that it is pervasive across the board, from civil society to the politicisation of international aid that keeps boycotting the once-democratically elected Islamist movement and arming Abbas’s security forces.

The Palestinian streets will not witness the Arab rage we have seen elsewhere over the weekend, although every Arab is now glued to the screens following the news in an unstoppable adrenalin ruch. Bbut as the past days have shown, it is only a matter of time for things to change beyond expectations. Away from the enraged masses, a tiny group of Gazan youth was busy writing its own explosive manifesto in the last month that is now evolving into a reality of its own on the internet and international media.

“Fuck Hamas. Fuck Israel. Fuck Fatah. Fuck UN. Fuck UNWRA. Fuck USA! We, the youth in Gaza, are so fed up with Israel, Hamas, the occupation, the violations of human rights and the indifference of the international community!” the manifesto translated into a dozen languages and published by newspapers and magazines around the world states.

“ENOUGH! Enough pain, enough tears, enough suffering, enough control, limitations, unjust justifications, terror, torture, excuses, bombings, sleepless nights, dead civilians, black memories, bleak future, heart-aching present, disturbed politics, fanatic politicians, religious bullshit, enough incarceration! WE SAY STOP! This is not the future we want! We want to be free. We want to be able to live a normal life. We want peace. Is that too much to ask?”

For now, the Gazan youth group is bound to remain anonymous, but their brothers in Egypt and Tunisia are out on the streets, in broad daylight, broadcast to the world on satellite TV, chanting the very same slogans.

One year in Hamastan

2010-09-19T14:08:00.000+02:00

A look back at my first year in Gaza, the blockaded coastal enclave dubbed by Israel a an 'enemy entity'

Days before I first made it into Gaza a year ago, Palestinian friends living in Ramallah were trying their best to persuade me to stay away from the coastal enclave under the control of Hamas.

“Gaza? Are you crazy? What do you want to do in Gaza?” they would tell me, as if they were talking about some faraway God-forsaken country. “There’s only Hamas and bearded men and no beer.”

I thought it was a shame that they, Palestinians just like the 1.5 million people living in the Gaza Strip, were the most vociferous in trying to dissuade me from going there. Now I can understand why.

On the one hand Ramallah is “the capital of Palestinian escapism”, as the BBC correspondent living there once put it. On the other, the Gaza Strip has earned the reputation of the trouble maker, the nest of radicals and, since the Hamas takeover in 2007, the enclave of extremists.

It was Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas who, in a hysterical moment of anger just after his unforgiveable faux pas of attempting to postpone the UN debate on possible war crimes in Gaza, called it “the emirate of darkness,” forsaking his own people.

Gaza was the spark that started the first Intifada in 1987, the birth place of Hamas a year later, Arafat’s and the Palestinian Authority’s new home after years in exile in 1994, and the scene of the bloody civil war between Hamas and Fatah three years ago.

For Israel, Gaza has served as the testing ground of Israeli military gadgets and policy engineering. Over the years, Israel’s policies have turned Gaza into one big laboratory with 1.5 million test cases. Among the experiments: total occupation to protect a few thousand Jewish settlers, unilateral disengagement of Israeli troops and total closure.

For three years, Gaza has been receiving food, fuel and imports not according to demand but according to some obscure calculations made by the Israeli occupation’s masterminds.

“The idea is to put the Palestinians on a diet but not to make them die of hunger,” an Israeli government advisor had explained at the beginning of the blockade.

My grocer

Welcome to Gaza
The owner of the corner shop grocery where I do my shopping always informs me that an item I ask for is out of stock by telling me “welcome to Gaza”.

The Israeli blockade has made the Gaza market so unpredictable that you just cannot ask for items by brand. One day there is Turkish lemon juice imported from the tunnels – the label battered by the sand in the underground trip – the next it’s a new juice produced in Gaza, until a wave of Israeli products flood the market.

When I arrived a year ago, the only cigarettes available were Egyptian L&M; their awful taste reminding you instantly of their cancerous nature. My stash of Gauloise disappeared in a week. I learnt only too late to keep them hidden, and by that time everyone knew I had some good non-Egyptian cigarettes. In about a month, new brands started appearing on the market, at cheaper prices. The tunnel traders were diversifying their imports.

Over a year I have seen items appearing and disappearing on the market within days, their prices as unstable as the peace process. Olive oil, the traditional ingredient in every Palestinian household, has become so expensive because of Israel’s destruction of olive trees that most Gazans have had to start living without it for the first time in their life. Fish, once Gaza’s staple diet, has become a luxury few can afford, as Israel imposes a 3 nautical mile limit on the few fishermen that remain.

‘We just want to live’
I first entered Gaza through the Rafah border, eight months after Israel’s 22-day aggression called Operation Cast Lead that left 1,400 people dead and thousands of houses destroyed.

I recall passing through the Rafah gate, hearing the cold iron clank as it was locked behind us, giving the first impression of entering a massive prison.

Back then, Gaza was still under the rubble of Israel’s merciless war. Young Palestinians looked at me walking down the streets as if I was an alien, asking me all sorts of awkward questions.

“What’s your age? What’s your religion? What are you doing here? Are you married?”

Complete strangers shot questions at me like gunfire in my first couple of weeks – the blockade had totally cut off an entire generation from the rest of the world, even from the West Bank.

Palestinian rap, now forced underground

On my first night in Gaza City I came face to face with Gaza’s stark contradictions. Hundreds of young people wearing fashionable clothes sipping lemon juice and smoking shisha gathered in the outdoor Gallery café, while a Palestinian rap band ran its gig alongside Dabka (Palestine’s traditional dance) and hip-hop dancers. As the show was going on, Hamas people in suits were harassing the organizers, accusing them of turning a public place into a “whorehouse”. Months later, the owner of Gallery café was arrested and beaten up, and the rappers remain banned from performing in public.

Hamas – once democratically elected to govern Palestine – is nowadays decried by many Gazans as “the second occupation”. From its charitable work with the poor, it is now the governing authority imposing heavy taxes, new fines and prohibitive licenses, while brutally suppressing civil liberties and individual freedoms.

Most of the foreign journalists visiting Gaza for a couple of days – only a handful are based here – report about the latest ban on women’s freedoms, such as the ban on shisha smoking in public places or the bizarre law prohibiting women from riding motorbikes. Hamas’s weird policies make the news, helping shape Gaza’s notoriety as the enclave of peculiarity. But it is the ordinary people’s desire to live that is most often left unreported. Normality rarely sells in the news industry.

Like the story of my friend in his late thirties from Jabalya. He used to work in Israel, had Jewish girlfriends and speaks perfect Hebrew. He longs for a pint of beer, a night at some nightclub, driving through the Tel Aviv coast.

For eight straight months I experienced – to a certain degree – what it meant to be a Palestinian in Gaza; being unable to plan your departure, totally dependent on the unpredictable opening of borders and invisible higher powers that decide your fate. But it was upon leaving Gaza, not upon entering, that I got my real culture shock. I remembered Ramallah and its bars and nightclubs, of what it means to be able to travel without restrictions, of waking up and having water and electricity. It’s amazing how easily the abnormal becomes normal in a few months.

A 22-year-old colleague of mine managed to travel on holiday to Malaysia through the Egyptian Rafah crossing after years trapped here. Listening to him upon his return, it felt as if listening to a prisoner granted a week of prison leave. Only that he committed no crime.

Walk down Omar Al Mukhtar street in central Gaza City, and you find the skimpiest women’s clothes you can imagine in the shop windows, even though you’d never see them worn in the streets. On Thursday evenings – the start of the weekend – thousands of men prepare themselves for some steamy nights with their wives, buying prescription pills for sexual enhancement from all sorts of dealers. Walk down the beach and you see families, young people and children enjoying the sand and the sea.

This is the real Palestinian resilience. It’s not the resistance, nor the rockets fired by the few and fiery rhetoric of the leaders, but the simple wish to live, “like everyone else”, despite the trauma and the hardships. Given a chance, the people of Gaza would be living like those in Ramallah, or like Israelis in Tel Aviv. Deprived of that chance for much longer, it is only a matter of time until it will turn into a wish to die.

Land mined road to peace

2010-09-11T13:45:00.004+02:00

The overwhelming feeling among many ordinary Palestinians is that going for talks is a terrible mistake

As the peace talks between Israel and Palestinians launched at the Whitehouse enter their second week, the loneliness of the long walk ahead for Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas must be feeling unbearable.

While the camera flashes and photogenic handshakes subside and the Israeli and Palestinian leaders return to their constituencies, they are essentially returning to a war zone, and Abbas is on the losing side.

The extent of the opposition the Palestinian President is facing among his own people is unprecedented. Not one political faction – never mind the militant groups – supports Abbas, who appears as cut off and marginalised as Yasser Arafat was in his last days at the Presidential compound in Ramallah. Only that this time the Isarelis are extending the hand of peace as the poisoned chalice.

The overwhelming feeling among many ordinary Palestinians is that going for talks is a terrible mistake, as they remember the track record of abysmal failures after every peace proposal in which Israel came out stronger and Palestinians became more oppressed.

Abbas has no political capital to rally agreement among his own people. Since the Goldstone blunder last year, when he sought to postpone the UN debate on Israel’s war on Gaza, it has been one steady downfall for the weak Palestinian leader. Unless Obama forces Netanyahu to give something tangible and impressive to Abbas in these first weeks, the Palestinian leader’s survival will depend solely on the brute repression of internal dissent, using his US-funded and trained security forces as he has been doing in the last days on the streets of the West Bank.

Here's what settlement freeze means

The settlements freeze is a joke. Drive around the West Bank and you see all sorts of construction works going on in these illegal colonies, together with all the evictions and demolitions of Palestinians’ houses, further ghettoisation of villages through the construction of the illegal separation wall and the ensuing land grab.

Even in this Orwellian version of doublespeak, Israel refuses to commit itself to renew the settlements freeze which expires at the end of this month. The only clear preconditions so far are those imposed by Netanyahu: No air space and no army for a future Palestinian state, no right of return for millions of refugees, no timeline for withdrawing occupation forces from the Palestinian territories, and recognising Israel as a Jewish state, which would further compromise the fragile status of Palestinians with Israeli citizenship, including Christians and Muslims.

For these talks, “Palestine” is presenting itself utterly divided, the schism between Gaza and the West Bank as pronounced as never before. It is in fact the first time that a Palestinian leader is participating in peace talks without having any control whatsoever on the coastal enclave. The more Netanyahu calls him “a partner for peace”, the more cynical it sounds and the weaker Abbas appears.

How peace can be reached without the involvement of Hamas is beyond logic. Beyond the enclave, the participation of regional powers, namely Syria, Iran and Lebanon’s Hizballah are equally essential to the equation of peace in the region.

Equally illogical is Abbas’s participation when nothing in his house is in order, while Israel promises nothing except preconditions for Palestinians. Abbas is representing nobody at the moment and has no mandate to strike any deal with Netanyahu. His term expired last January, as has the legislative council’s (the Palestinian parliament) and the Palestinian Authority’s. None of the Palestinian institutions have the legitimacy of representation in the ongoing constitutional mess. Not even Hamas for that matter, the Islamist movement elected in the 2006 elections and boycotted soon after by Israel and the world in the most tragic of the US and EU foreign policy that sparked the divisive quagmire in Palestine.

That Obama and everyone else pushing for these talks is overlooking this unconstitutional state of affairs is not surprising – the Palestinian democratic landscape has been irreparably demolished since Hamas were punished for playing by the democratic rules. So undermined is the Palestinian governing and political capacity that the middle aged generation of ordinary people in Gaza speak the unthinkable: that they lived better under direct Israeli administration.

“Things can’t get any worse,” a Gazan friend told me resignedly as he explained his apathy towards the talks. The tragedy is that for decades, Palestinians have been saying precisely those words, and they have been proved awfully wrong every time.

How to incite violence

2010-08-28T15:11:00.002+02:00

Abdullah (centre) mourning Bassem in Bil'in last year

Last Tuesday, one of the Palestinian leaders of the weekly protests against the Israeli wall in the West Bank village of Bil’in was convicted in an Israeli military court and accused with organising illegal demonstrations against what is in itself an illegal separation fence robbing villagers up to 60% of their land.

Abdullah Abu Rahma makes no bones about his leadership in the beleaguered village surrounded by barbed wire, settlements, checkpoints and fences.

He is always on the frontline every Friday, after noon prayers, facing the full might of the Israeli military that greets the unarmed villagers with tear gas, bullets and stun grenades. I have seen him marching on in the fields towards armed soldiers, his hands held up, under a shower of acrid gas and gunfire.

The gentle and soft-spoken leader of the Bil’in Committee Against the Wall, together with the rest of his fellow villagers, are not new to harassment from the Israeli occupation. Night time incursions and arrests have become a daily feature in this farming village. A relative of Abdullah’s was shot in his leg as he was handcuffed and blindfolded in the hands of an Israeli battalion commander two years ago. Filmed by a young Palestinian girl from behind a window, the incident caused an uproar as it was doing the rounds on TV and the internet.

Then last year, a cousin of Abdullah’s, 31-year-old Bassem Abu Rahma, was killed by a tear gas canister shot in his chest by an Israeli soldier, as he was peacefully protesting against what on his side of the fence is called the “apartheid wall”.

His death had jolted Bil’in, as Bassem was a very loved, peaceful figure among young and old and beyond the village of less than 2,000 people. Known fondly as “the Elephant”, Abdullah had told me on the day of his funeral how he noticed Bassem’s cat sitting on his grave, and how on the morning when he would die he fed a bird he kept in a cage and freed it soon afterwards, before heading towards the mosque to prepare for the demonstration. The elephant who freed a bird, I thought.

Bassem’s death was also caught on tape in April last year. He is seen urging Israelis not to shoot as a foreigner was hit in her leg shortly before he is killed. He did not have a stone in his hands when the tear gas canister fired by an Israeli soldier hit him fatally in his chest.

Despite the tragedy felt by the whole community, Abdullah and Bassem’s relatives had insisted that nonviolence remained the only effective resistance against the occupation.

“It’s more effective than anything else, and that’s why the Israelis want to kill us,” Abdullah had told me, while the village was still in mourning. “They’re terrified, they want to stop us at all costs, because they are seeing other villages following our nonviolent path, and Israelis and international activists are joining us.”

Over the last years, Bil’in has inspired other Palestinian villages, even those in Gaza bordering with Israel, to hold their own demonstrations against the Israeli land grab.

The villagers’ creative and nonviolent demonstrations have given a new face to Palestinian resistance – from impersonating the anti-imperialist Avatar characters to shooting footballs towards Israeli soldiers during the World Cup. Of course not all Palestinians agree this is the best form of resistance – some say it still doesn’t change the realities of the occupation, and detractors say it is not peaceful at all as young Palestinians end up throwing stones at the soldiers. But if that is violence, what word would be appropriate to describe the Israeli clampdown on these unarmed demonstrators?

“We want to continue our strategy of nonviolent action,” Abdullah had told me after Bassem’s death. “If someone from here had to fire a machine gun towards the wall, then the Israelis would have every pretext to come with planes and tanks and bomb all the village. And they would tell the entire world ‘they shot at us’ and Europeans would say ‘the Israelis want to defend themselves, they have a right to kill Palestinians because they’re armed with guns’. But that’s not the case here. We have told all our people we are not against Israelis, we are not against Jews, we are not even against the soldiers. We are against the occupation. We need our land to live in peace, we need it for our children.”

The International Court of Justice had ruled the fence and accompanying land grab to be “contrary to international law” as far back as July 2004, while an Israeli Supreme Court ruled two years ago in a case filed by Bil’in’s mayor that there were not enough “security-military reasons to retain the current route that passes on Bil’in’s land”. In a separate, paradoxical Israeli Supreme Court ruling in 2007, the settlement of Mattiyahu East built on Bil’in’s land was legalised retroactively.

No wonder Abdullah had no trust in the Israeli courts when it was announced last year that Bassem’s killing would be investigated.

“What can you expect from the occupiers’ court?” he had told me as we chatted on the rooftop of the local mosque while mourners came to visit Bassem’s family.

The military court ruled earlier this year that Bassem’s case did not warrant to be investigated. The fence is still there, the land stolen from the villagers is called “a closed military zone” giving Israeli forces a pretext to shoot at anyone approaching the area.

Abdullah is now in a military prison awaiting Israeli justice. Whatever the sentence, Israel will have managed, once again, to prove that it speaks only the language of violence, just because it can.

Solitary confinement

2010-07-17T17:59:00.001+02:00

Israel announced that it will ‘ease the blockade’ of Gaza, but hundreds of detained Palestinians’ relatives remain banned from visiting their loved ones, just like the 1.5 million Gazans imprisoned in the coastal enclave

Hunched in a corner of the front yard of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) office in Gaza City, 84-year-old Um Fares Ahmed Baroud holds a framed photo of her son amid dozens of other mothers and relatives who gather here every Monday.

Behind the cracked glass pane, the discolouring picture of her 47-year-old son Fares Ahmed, taken years ago when she could still visit him in the Israeli jail where he is serving a life sentence since 1988.

Blinded by old age, Um Fares wakes up early every Monday to make the trip from her impoverished house in Shati Camp to the ICRC office for the weekly prisoners’ relatives demonstration demanding their right to visit their loved ones.

For the last 10 years, Um Fares has been banned by Israel from visiting her son, together with hundreds of others.

“He is only allowed one phone call a year in Eid (the Muslim holy feast), so I only get to hear his voice for three minutes a year. Isn’t that a sin?” the frail mother said with tears in her eyes. “It’s bad enough that I can’t visit him, but if only I could hear his voice, a couple of words… He’s the only thing I think of at home, as all his brothers live abroad and I’m on my own.”

In the last four years of blockade of Gaza, all Palestinians living in the strip have been completely forbidden from visiting and calling their imprisoned relatives. Israeli authorities suspended indefinitely the ICRC-run Family Visits Programme as part of the blockade, and despite the rhetoric from Netanyahu’s right-wing government claiming it was “easing the siege” a month ago, relatives remain cruelly divided with no chance of movement, not to mention the entire Gaza population that is imprisoned in the strip, banned from moving to the West Bank or travelling abroad.

More than 11,000 prisoners are held captive in Israeli jails. According to the ICRC, around 1,000 of them are from Gaza, while around 280 are in administrative detention, which is arrest without trial.

Palestinians, on the other hand, have only one Israeli arrested. Gilad Shalit was captured by Palestinian fighters during active military duty on the Gaza border in June 2006. Now under the Hamas government’s responsibility, his warders refuse to have the ICRC visit him on security grounds, but a video tape showing he was alive was released last October in exchange for the release of 20 female Palestinian prisoners.

ICRC head of media relations and communications, Iyad Nasr, said that since Israel imposed the blockade of Gaza, all the Gazan families have been banned from visiting their relatives in Israeli prisons.

“Every Monday we get prisoners’ relatives and welcome them in our building, and our delegates listen to their concerns, because they have nobody to refer to,” Nasr said. “Some of them are 80-year-old mothers who haven’t seen their children in years, and it’s a very cruel and unjustified situation. Israel has a right to defend its security concerns, but it could take all the security provisions it needs to take and allow such visits. One such mother I knew passed away two weeks ago after not seeing her son in seven years.

“In keeping the detainees outside the occupied territories, Israel is violating Article 49 (of the Fourth Geneva Convention) which prohibits the deportation of individuals from occupied territories,” Nasr added. “We keep raising the question of resuming the family visits programme with Israel, as it is a crucial programme for prisoners’ relatives who are distressed without any contact with their beloved ones.”

Last December, relatives of Gaza prisoners went to the Israeli high court seeking an end to the ban on prison visits, but the Israeli court rejected the lawsuit filed by Israeli and Palestinian human rights organisations, claiming that such visits were “not a humanitarian need”.

The Palestinian Centre for Human Rights (PCHR) says prisoners in Israeli jails “continue to be denied their basic rights, besides being used as political bargaining chips in flagrant violation of international human rights and humanitarian law”.

PCHR reports that Palestinian prisoners in Israeli jails continuously suffer from ill treatment and poor detention conditions, medical negligence and denial of healthcare, torture and consistent denial of visitors’ rights.

“As political focus in recent days remains on changes to the movement of goods, it is critical to remember the broader policy of the siege on Gaza, which includes restrictions on freedom of movement and the isolation of Gaza from the West Bank, and the human element of the siege, apart from the growing humanitarian crisis on the ground,” said Sharon Rose Goldberg, spokesperson for Hamoked, and Israeli human rights organisation. “Although the flow of goods may have been eased, Gaza’s population of 1.5 million is still held captive, and the human face of the siege may be lost in the political rhetoric.”

Since the beginning of the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip in 1967, more than 700,000 men, women and children have been detained in Israel, representing 20% of Palestinians living in the occupied territories. Around 200 of them died in Israeli jails, with human rights organisations accusing Israel of killing some of them deliberately or because of medical negligence.

In the same period, 4,000 children were imprisoned, with some 300 of them still in detention and many of them subjected to torture and ill-treatment. The 30 Israeli prisons include detention centres in the desert, where prisoners are held in tents in the searing summer heat and bitter winter cold. Around 400 women have been jailed since the 1987 Intifada, with some of them having given birth in prison.

Three years of blockade, 1.5 million trapped

2010-07-09T22:29:00.000+02:00

Easing the siege will keep turning Gazans into beggars

2010-07-03T17:50:00.001+02:00

In his dimly lit shop in Gaza City’s popular market, Khaled Nasan is shuffling through the new batch of second hand clothes just arrived from Israel.

He is tired. The previous night he spent it washing every item: jeans, shirts, trousers, blouses, football gears, and ironing them meticulously. But it is a chance that comes only once in a while, that of getting a consignment to fill his little clothes shop. Israel only allows a limited number of containers of such clothes every month, so Khaled has to team up with other clothes sellers to bring in containers according to a schedule fixed by Israeli authorities.

Khaled’s story is a case of bitter irony. Six years ago he used to employ 200 people in his sewing factory, getting materials, designs and orders from Israeli agents and exporting the finished products. Nowadays he sits waiting for second hand clothes from Israel to sell them to Palestinians who are, like him, trapped in Gaza.

The only sewing machine inside his shop nowadays is used to repair old clothes and for some alterations his customers might need. But having no electricity right now he cannot even use it.

“Until 2004 we used to send up to 400 clothing items to Israel everyday – from trousers to shirts and underwear,” he tells me. “Now we depend on the second hand clothes the Israelis send us. I used to make NIS1,000 a day. Nowadays I just open the shop so that by the end of the day I might make enough money to eat with my wife and four children, and pay the university fees of two of them.”

With the Israeli blockade of Gaza, Khaled has been turned from an employer of a couple of hundreds of Palestinians into a corner shop owner dependent on food aid distributed by UNRWA.

“Thank God for that, because without that help what would we do?” he says.

With exports from Gaza and imports of raw materials brutally banned by Israel, more than 3,500 factories have closed down in the last four years.

Israel’s decision to ‘ease the siege’ as announced a couple of weeks ago will ease nothing of Khaled’s financial woes as he is bound in chains to the low scale business until Gaza is allowed again to export its products.

So far, the only effect on the ground has been the importation of Israeli dairy products and ketchup at lower prices than the items brought through the tunnels. But that’s a far cry from what the Israeli hype and propaganda make outsiders believe in the wake of the flotilla massacre.

To this day, Israel is still imposing an obscure list of allowed items into Gaza, despite promises to the Middle East Quartet to change the list into a much smaller one of items that are banned instead.

The outrage and frustration in Gaza could be felt palpably when Middle East Quartet representative Tony Blair ‘met’ Palestinians through a video conference from Jerusalem two days after Israel declared it would ‘ease the siege’.

Gazans from across the board – from businessmen to humanitarian workers, from lawyers to students – slammed Blair and grilled him with their questions from a hall inside Roots Restaurant on 22 June, as news that ketchup and mayonnaise were the first items to enter Gaza.

“The de-development of Gaza has taken us 40 years back,” said Issam Younis, director general of Al Mezan Centre for Human Rights. “The question about the blockade is not just about movement of trucks at the crossings. It violates international law, it is illegal. It is not about what is permitted to enter and what’s prohibited, but about what Gaza needs. It is unacceptable to have two entities – the West Bank and Gaza. … We have no guarantee that Israel will not go back on its decision to have a list of banned items [instead of allowed items]. I can’t see why after years of unpredictability Israel will change its behaviour.”

A businessman and board member of the Gaza Businessmen Association voiced his aspiration to get Gaza’s economy back on its feet and open it up to Middle Eastern markets when he told Blair that getting more varieties of food satisfied nobody.

“Today we’re getting about 92 trucks [of imports] per day; in 2005 we used to get 700. In fact we need around 900 trucks of material per day. Israel is not banning items for Hamas but for Palestinians,” said Ali Abu Shamla. “We need an independent authority to be established for Gaza’s reconstruction… we need a safe passage between the West Bank and Gaza, and we need to start looking at Gaza as the free trade zone of the future for all the Middle East.”

A newly graduated young woman called Yasmine Al Khoudary gave Blair what was perhaps the bleakest outlook on Gaza after more than three years of siege.

“The new generation of Gazans is lost,” she told him. “Their situation has deteriorated to such an extent that no movement of trucks and opening of crossings is going to repair the damage. A lost generation means that prospects for peace have been destroyed.”
Another university student, Hiba Timari, said: “We lack freedom before food, ketchup, mayonnaise or anything else.”

Blair ended up on the defensive, saying he could only keep working on the practical little things that would pave the way for greater things, but few Palestinians emerged optimistic from the meeting.

Even if the so-called easing of the siege had to be judged solely on Israel’s promise to allow more items into Gaza, the figures belie the rhetoric. In June – the month of Israel’s decision, a total of 331 trucks of materials were allowed into Gaza through the Karni crossing. That is half the amount of trucks that entered in May, a month before Israel said it would ease the siege.

The only entries through Karni crossing after the Israeli cabinet decision have been UNRWA trucks of gravel and cement, 19 trucks of wheat and chickpeas, and 25 trucks of animal feed. No cement and wood is being allowed through for commercial use so far, nor are any exports allowed – the last export from Gaza was one truck of flowers in April.

Fishermen will also remain out of their jobs as the 3 nautical mile limit does not seem likely to be lifted.

“Unless we can export our produce and import the raw materials we need, we will remain jobless and dependent on humanitarian aid,” said Mohammed Abu Al Fouz, a former factory worker in Israel, unemployed since 2004.

Zammit: ‘Israel has to stop targeting civilians’

2010-06-27T23:08:00.006+02:00

Bianca Zammit has “welcomed” the Israeli foreign minister’s apology but said she expected Israel to take all the measures necessary to ensure that no more civilians are targeted.

The 28-year-old Maltese national was shot in her leg last April by Israeli soldiers while she was accompanying Palestinian farmers on their fields in Gaza bordering with Israel.

On Friday, Israel’s foreign minister Avigdor Lieberman read out an apology for the incident while he was on a visit in Malta, saying he was “sorry” and that it was “always a terrible event when civilians are injured”.

His comments stood in stark contrast to previous statements by Israeli ambassador to Malta Gideon Meir who had claimed Zammit was “used” by terrorists and that the International Solidarity Movement she belongs to was helping Hamas and Islamic Jihad in planting bombs to injure Israeli soldiers.

“I welcome his statement and I hope to see the outcome of the investigation in the near future,” Zammit said yesterday from Gaza in reply to Lieberman’s comment. “He mentioned that he is sorry every time that civilians are injured so I hope that he will be taking the necessary measures to ensure that no more civilians are targeted.”

Zammit added that in contrast to Lieberman’s statement, Palestinian civilians are being continuously targeted by the Israeli military.

“Only two days after I was injured a Palestinian was shot at the same nonviolent demonstrations and he died in hospital. In these last two months there have been reports coming in every two or three days of fishermen and farmers being injured as they work. So civilians are being injured and they are being shot at with live ammunition every day.”

Gazan farmers are being shot at within 300 metres from the Israeli border while fishermen are allowed less than 3 nautical miles at sea under treat of gunfire, Zammit added.

“This is an illegal Israeli imposition,” she said.

Even in the flotilla tragedy, nine foreign civilian activists were killed by Israeli commandos last month triggering international outrage.

“The people here were shocked and they weren’t expecting that Israel would do to foreigners what it does to them on a daily basis,” Zammit said. “It’s clear that this was a humanitarian convoy aiming to bring very much needed machines, wheelchairs to Gaza because the borders are closed and because Israel is impeding their entry into Gaza.”

Since the flotilla massacre, Israel has announced it would “ease the siege” but Zammit says this is having no effect on Palestinians as long as they cannot export their produce, resume their jobs and travel out of Gaza.

“What Israel means by ‘easing the siege’ is that in the last week they have allowed the entry of chocolates, sweets, toys for children and mayonnaise,” she said. “In reality there is a humanitarian crisis happening here because 80% of people do not have money coming in and they depend totally on the UN for food aid. Many people do not have a job, so even if chocolate may be coming in from Israel they may not have the money to buy it.

“To start easing this humanitarian crisis caused directly by the siege we have to look at exports from Gaza. Gaza is a very rich land in terms of resources. It was famous for exporting strawberries and roses, and many factories used to operate here. In the last three years of siege they have been destroyed. If we want to ease the siege we need exports, Israel has to allow raw materials and construction material to come in, and for the economy to restart.”

Gaza flotilla bloodshed: After the shock, the outrage

2010-06-01T23:14:00.001+02:00

Few Palestinians believed the Free Gaza flotilla would reach the port of Gaza when it set sail towards the besieged strip carrying 10,000 tons of humanitarian aid and 700 passengers.

Even officials in the Government Committee to Break the Siege – an outreach Hamas foreign ministry branch that for months had been coaching civil servants and volunteers in the art of protocol, diplomacy and logistics ahead of the flotilla’s arrival – were, deep down, resigned that Israel’s military might could stop any ship on the high seas.

Ordinary Palestinians were sceptic the aid would ever be distributed by Hamas on humanitarian grounds – still bitter at the way the aid brought by maverick British MP George Galloway last January “vanished” the moment the cameras were switched off.

Nevertheless, hundreds of Palestinians turned up at the harbour on Sunday in a symbolic greeting of the Gaza-bound flotilla, with dozens of boats sailing out within the meagre 3 nautical miles allowed by Israel before getting shot – a daily scene on the Gazan sea which has cost the lives and livelihood of hundreds of fishermen.

Beyond the Hamas government’s enthusiasm, Palestinians could see the clear solidarity of people from all over the world committed against the blockade, committing also governments and politicians to the movement.

But when on early Monday morning, news that passengers on board the Turkish-flagged Mavi Marmara had been killed by Israeli commandos started trickling in, Gazans were in utter disbelief, followed by outrage.

“I’m Palestinian, I would expect them to shoot me and claim they thought I had a Kalashnikov, but these were Europeans and foreigners, they had left Turkish ports and were cleared to be free of weapons,” 20-year-old Mahdi told me. “I can’t believe they killed them like that.”

Mahdi works in a printing press that publishes the Hamas daily newspaper Falasteen. He sees names of Palestinian ‘martyrs’ – as people killed by Israeli attacks are referred to – everyday on the front page. Many are killed in the tunnels in Israeli air raids; others are killed working their fields on the border and in daily incursions. But no other front page in the world would carry a word about them.

This time it was different. While everyone expected Israel to live up to its word to stop the flotilla, many somehow ignored the far-right Israeli foreign minister Avigdor Lieberman’s accurate warning that Israel would stop it “at all costs”, and the reason was that the majority of passengers were non-Palestinian and therefore less likely to be killed.

This also explains why, when Maltese national Bianca Zammit was shot last month by Israeli soldiers during a peaceful demonstration at the border, an almost daily event happening on the Gaza border, the incident suddenly received international coverage: she was the first foreigner to be targeted by the Israelis at the demonstrations.

And just like the Israeli propaganda machine attempted to tarnish Zammit and her organisation (the International SOlidarity Movement) by linking them to fanatic Islamist terrorists, the Turkish humanitarian organisation steering the Mavi Marmara was linked to global jihad and Al Qaeda – no less.

From early Monday, the Israeli government was already saying that “pistols” and “other weapons” had been used against the Israeli commandos assaulting the passengers on board the Mavi Marmara in international waters, and that “shots were fired” by the passengers.

“The demonstrators had clearly prepared their weapons in advance for this specific purpose,” a statement by the Israeli military said.

Hours later, footage taken by the Israeli military itself proved the weapons were marble balls, stones and iron rods.

The outright worldwide condemnation in the immediate aftermath of last Monday’s tragedy was overwhelming, the shock palpable, not least in Gaza. On Tuesday, Gazans went on a national strike in mourning for the foreign victims, and thousands demonstrated in the streets against the lethal Israeli assault.

As the shock subsides, many Gazans are starting to feel that “Israel revealed its true face” to the world, as a grocery shop owner put it to me this morning. The entire tragedy would have been spared had there not been the blockade of Gaza in the first place – there would be no need for humanitarian aid, nor a need to organise flotillas.

Used to fiery rhetoric but no action, Palestinians do not expect much to change despite the outrage, although the full extent of the implications has yet to manifest itself. Turkey’s leadership might change the political tide on the international chess board, and grassroots activism may be putting governments on edge as they are held accountable. Until then, Gazans’ hopes of the blockade being lifted remain in short supply.

“We Arabs mourn for three days, and that’s it,” a pharmacist said, convinced that Israel will eventually also get away with the Mavi Marmara tragedy, and that Arab countries will be the last to object.

Whether that will yet again turn out to be true will largely depend on how much of Turkish President Tayip Erdogan’s tidal wave of outrage at Israel will flood the Arab streets to the point of leaving some of Israel’s and America’s cosiest Arab allies with no other option but to become, for once, accountable to their people.

Meanwhile, more nameless Gazans are still being killed. Yesterday, two were shot dead by Israeli soldiers in Khan Younis during a ground operation, and three were killed by Israeli artillery shelling in the northern village of Beit Lahiya. Palestinian militiants launched two homemade rockets that landed in Gaza.

Waiting for the flotilla

2010-05-30T03:14:00.001+02:00

On the high seas of the Mediterranean, away from the coast of Cyprus, a flotilla made of eight vessels is approaching the Gaza Strip in the largest attempt ever to break the three-year blockade imposed by Israel.

Other vessels have made it to Gaza by sea in previous voyages, and others still were stopped and detained by Israeli authorities, but this is the first time an attempt to break the siege is going beyond the symbolic.

With four cargo ships in the flotilla, the Free Gaza Movement is shipping around 10,000 tons of humanitarian aid to Gaza, including cement, medical supplies, paper and prefabricated houses. It is also ferrying over 600 passengers from around the world, including MPs, Nobel Peace laureates, a former US ambassador, journalists, activists and Palestinians who were banned from returning to their homeland.

Awaiting them out at sea, Israeli warships are on full alert to prevent them from reaching the coast of Gaza, and to detain all the passengers. A counter-flotilla made of Israeli citizens has also set sail to oppose the humanitarian cargo. A makeshift detention camp has been set up in the Israeli port of Ashdod from where the arrested passengers would then face deportation or Israeli trials.

Scenes of Israeli commandos and naval warships engaged in a showdown on the high seas – dubbed Operation Sky Winds by the Israeli military – to stop humanitarian aid would dent further Israel’s image to the world. As the Israeli government reiterates it would intercept the cargo “at any cost” and the Free Gaza flotilla insists it will forge ahead, a confrontation seems inevitable.

Meanwhile fishing boats await in the port of Gaza City as thousands of Gazans are expected to greet the vessels should they manage to evade the Israelis on Sunday morning.

It would be an emotional scene, seeing the massive cargo and passenger boats reaching the lonely Gaza harbour, where only a handful of fishing boats can be seen nowadays berthing to the backdrop of the Israeli navy shooting at anything approaching the imposed 3 nautical mile limit from shore.

The aid the flotilla is attempting to bring over, particularly cement and prefabricated houses, are sorely needed as most of the reconstruction after the last war on Gaza in January 2009 remains impossible because of Israel’s ban on construction material.

Some Gazans are however not enthusiastic about the arrival of more aid – still bitter at the experience of the distribution of the humanitarian cargo brought into Gaza by British MP George Galloway last January.

“We saw nothing of all the things they brought,” said Mahmoud, a refugee living in Jabalya Camp. “Where are the cars? Where are the heaters? They were all taken by Hamas. That is what’s going to happen again tomorrow.”

Still, upon seeing the coverage the flotilla was finally getting on international news channels, Mahmoud himself realised the value of breaking the siege through the sea. It will make the blockade seem useless, the Israelis will be shown as the aggressors who, despite the disengagement from Gaza, are still occupying the narrow stretch of land. It has also pushed politicians from around the world, as well as governments, into talking about the blockade, taking a stand against it and in some notable cases even endorsing the flotilla.

At the same time, Israel felt compelled to embark on a public relations campaign claiming there is no humanitarian crisis in Gaza and that the flotilla was “just a provocation”. In a video clip shown by the Israeli military to make the point that Gazans are living in luxury, the poshy Roots Restaurant is shown offering lavish food in a high class setting. Surprisingly, the Israeli PR machine found nothing wrong in the footage showing Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas dining there with Fatah strongman Muhammed Dahlan. Abbas and Dahlan have been both kicked out of Gaza years ago. The footage was shot in 2005, two years before Israel blockaded Gaza.

Nowadays Roots Restaurant remains one of the pushier restaurants in Gaza City, but with 80% of Palestinians here living in poverty and dependent on humanitarian aid, few are those who afford its beef stroganoff with meat smuggled through the tunnels.

Israel also seems confused about the message it wants to convey. On the one hand it says the Free Gaza flotilla is useless because Gaza has no humanitarian crisis, on the other it boasts of sending over humanitarian aid itself – confirming there is a humanitarian need.

The European Union’s foreign minister Catherine Ashton yesterday said the EU was “gravely concerned by the humanitarian situation in Gaza”. Stopping short of giving a blanket endorsement to the flotilla, Lady Ashton added: “The continued policy of closure is unacceptable and politically counterproductive. We would like to reiterate the EU's call for an immediate, sustained and unconditional opening of crossings for the flow of humanitarian aid, commercial goods and persons to and from Gaza.”

The question is: Why does Gaza need aid in the first place? If there was no destruction, there would be no need for reconstruction. If there was no blockade, there would be no need for special medical referrals and special permits to go abroad. If there was no occupation, Israel would have no need to count inflatable toys, spices and ice cream machines entering Gaza except as normal exports if Palestinian businessmen decided to import them. And if there was a Palestinian state the Israeli embassy would stick to talking about Israel and leaving Palestinian data to its neighbouring country.

Used by the terrorists? Not quite. Bianca Zammit explodes the myth

2010-05-01T23:47:00.001+02:00

It’s dark, people barely visible are talking in candle light, there is no electricity. The glimmering candle allows the glimpse of a kufiya, the Palestinian flag, Arabic coffee on the table. Someone knocks on the door. Another one of them joins the circle. The place: a dark flat on the first floor of an old building in the main road of Gaza City, the nest of Gaza’s branch of the International Solidarity Movement, the residence of Bianca Zammit and five other foreign activists.

Surrounding the 28-year-old Maltese human rights volunteer are members of this international cell – from Italy, UK, US, Montenegro, and Canada – and lots of Palestinians visiting her after two days in hospital. An Israeli sniper’s bullet pierced through her thigh during a demonstration at the border in Al Meghazi on Saturday 24 April.

ISM members and Palestinians alike keep pouring in at the apartment, cramped in a room that gets smaller as it gets more crowded with people and flowers. In the middle of coffee table, a generous dish of maftool (couscous) with chicken restoring the energy to the activists after another day dodging Israeli soldiers’ bullets and shooting back with cameras. Earlier on the same day, 19-year-old Ahmad Suleiman Salem Dib was killed at a demonstration in Nahal Oz when an Israeli soldier shot him in his leg.

It is not just the live Israeli bullets that are being shot at them lately. Since Zammit – the first international activist to be injured in the Gaza buffer zone demonstrations – made world headlines, the ISM has come under renewed attack from the Israeli establishment and the Zionist right wing, with fuel added for good measure by the Israeli Ambassador to Malta, Gideon Meir.

The ambassador told Net TV last Tuesday that Zammit was “used” by Palestinian militants and accused the ISM of putting foreigners in harm’s way at the border so that Hamas and Islamic Jihad “could plant bombs and injure Israeli soldiers”.

“I have no idea how this Maltese woman ended up near the buffer zone,” Meir said. “She was probably asked to go there by the ISM or Hamas members.”

In the same breath, he described Zammit’s incident as “unfortunate”. Yesterday he reiterated his claims to MaltaToday, adding that the Israeli government has started a formal investigation into the shooting.

In a strongly-worded letter sent to the Israeli government the day after the incident, the Maltese foreign ministry demanded an investigation into the “totally unwarranted attack”

“The Embassy of Malta (in Tel Aviv) expects that a thorough investigation be carried out on this deplorable incident that could have led to far more serious consequences,” a foreign ministry statement said.

Meir has already set the tone for the investigation: “One must understand that the shooting took place in a ‘conflict zone’,” he said. “The issue of agricultural land is irrelevant because the area is a conflict zone. Peaceful or not, the demonstration was not held in the city centre where it is legitimate to demonstrate against the Israeli government, and ISM is an anti-Israeli organisation. ISM has an anti-Israeli policy in whatever it does and says.”

This is not the first time the ISM finds itself under ideological fire – indeed the attack comes within a wider campaign to discredit all international, Palestinian and even Israeli human rights organisations in Israel that are being criminalised for being “anti-patriotic”, with key activists arrested or deported summarily. Nor is ISM shy of being at the forefront of Palestinian resistance, under threat of gunfire but vehemently pacific.

The demonstrations organised by ISM and local organisations on the Gaza buffer zone with Israel are inspired by the non-violent protests held every Friday in Na’alin and Bil’in in the West Bank, where the ISM is also active with Palestinians, Israeli and foreign activists.

“We are a threat to the Israeli occupation because whenever there are foreigners documenting violations they are exposed to the world,” Zammit said. “That’s mainly our mandate: to be present alongside Palestinians who are fighting their cause. This is not our conflict, we are there to try and deter violations and to document them when they happen.”

Despite Meir’s claim that the ISM is linked to Hamas and Islamic Jihad, journalists in Gaza say the opposite is true, as the publicity the non-violent demonstrations are getting is irking the Hamas higher echelons that are vying to be seen as the sole resistance.

Also, being linked to Hamas and Islamic Jihad at once is next to impossible, as the two Islamist movements do not see eye to eye, particularly about the resistance strategy.

“The ISM has no links to armed Palestinian factions,” Neta Golan, herself an Israeli Jew and co-founder of ISM, said. “Palestinian popular demonstrations, such as these non-violent protests in Gaza, are open to anyone unarmed. The claim that the ISM receives orders from armed groups is a figment of the ambassador’s imagination, and we challenge him to produce evidence,” Golan said.

The so-called “closed military zones” are in effect areas unilaterally declared so by Israel on Palestinian land, mostly agricultural, having no grounds in international law.

Golan says the Israeli-declared no-go areas are also a way of suppressing nonviolent resistance by force.

“Whenever there is a peaceful Palestinian demonstration, it becomes a ‘closed military zone’,” she said. “In the West Bank in February, two villages, Bil'in and Na'lin, were declared ‘closed military zones’ for six continuous months in an attempt to suppress popular non-violent resistance by the villagers.”

Israel argues that the buffer zone is frequented by militants shooting rockets or attacking Israeli soldiers patrolling the border – but the demonstrations in which Zammit was participating are in support of unarmed farmers carrying Palestinian flags.

Adding insult to injury
Bianca Zammit feels insulted by the ambassador’s “patronising and deceitful attitude” towards her.

“Him saying I was an innocent victim of ISM just leaves me lost for words,” she said. “I’ve been thinking of coming to Palestine for years, and I have equally worked as a human rights activist. To imply I was manipulated for political ends is downright insulting. We work with local committees, farmers, women’s groups and student organisations to document and publicise human rights violations.”

Golan called Meir’s claim that “the ISM does not inform its members that the areas where they're protesting are closed military zones” a “total fabrication”.

“ISM works on a consensus basis and individual volunteers make their own decisions about which actions they want to take part in, and are free to do so as long as they fall within our three core principles: non-violence, local Palestinian leadership and collective action,” the ISM co-founder said.

Zammit confirmed ISM enrols members only after lengthy information sessions in which they are briefed about the practical and political issues surrounding the Middle East conflict, and that none of the members wilfully put their lives at risk.

“None of us wants to die, we’re not suicidal,” Zammit said. “You can be of no help if you are injured or dead. All our decisions are based on consensus, and every individual can opt out from any event or activity.”

As to funding, ISM relies on individual donations from countries where it has local fundraisers. Volunteers pay their own flights and expenses, while ISM covers accommodation, transport and legal assistance when required.

“The ISM does not receive any funding from any state, government or association,” Golan said. “We rely on donations from average people all over the world that support peace and the Palestinian struggle for freedom.”

Maltese activist injured by Israeli forces

2010-04-24T20:16:00.004+02:00

Maltese national Bianca Zammit was injured by Israeli forces today when they shot her with live ammunition during a peaceful rally in Gaza in solidarity with Palestinian farmers.

The 28-year-old human rights activist was accompanying Palestinians on agricultural land in Al Maghazi at around 12pm in the 300-metre area from the buffer zone with Israel, designated by the latter as a “no-go area”.

Zammit was hit in her left thigh as she was filming the activity, between 80 and 100 metres away from Israeli soldiers. She was rushed to Al Aqsa Hospital in Deir Al Balah where she was found to be suffering from light injuries and no fractures.

“I was lucky because the bullet went through my skin without hitting me in the bones,” Zammit said from a hospital bed shortly after a medical intervention.

Two others, both Palestinian, were injured by the gun fire. Hind Al Akra, a 22-year-old woman, was in critical condition after she was hit in her stomach. Eighteen-year-old Nidal Al Naql was hit in his right thigh.

Zammit said that about 30 minutes after the demonstration started, Israeli soldiers opened fire on the protestors.

“We were walking towards the fence surrounding Gaza when Israeli soldiers opened fire at us,” Zammit said. “People sought cover but I kept filming. When the protestors stood up again to keep walking ahead, they shot again and hit three of us.

“All the Palestinians do in these demonstrations is to get as close as possible to the fence and plant the Palestinian flag. We posed no threat whatsoever.”

Zammit was released from Al Aqsa Hospital shortly after surgery, but was later taken to Al Awda Hospital in Jabalya for further observation after bleeding resumed. Doctors said they were keeping her under observation for 24 hours.

“I can still walk and will be going back to the protests soon,” she said yesterday evening, as friends crowded her room in hospital.

A spokesman for Foreign Minister Tonio Borg said the Maltese government will be presenting an official complaint to the Israeli government. No official statement was released by the ministry by late Saturday night.

The Maltese Ambassador in Israel, Abraham Borg, said he will be demanding explanations from the Israeli government and that he was monitoring the case.

The Israeli military said it fired "warning shots" at a group of Palestinians gathering "very close to the security fence" in central Gaza. A spokesman said Israeli forces had identified "hitting three of the Palestinians".

"The area adjacent to the security fence is a combat zone used by terrorist organizations to execute attacks against Israel," the Israeli army said, adding that it would "not allow anyone to be present in it, since it is considered a threat to the residents of Israel and to Israeli security forces".

The Maltese embassy in Egypt and the Maltese representative to the Palestinian Authority were also alerted about the case and were following it from Cairo and Ramallah.

Zammit said the most important message to all the people who wanted justice for Palestinians was to keep lobbying for the boycott, divestments and sanctions of Israeli companies and institutions that kept turning a blind eye to the occupation.

“Boycotts can be effective in getting Israelis to realise that not all is alright, and they have to range from academic to commercial and artistic boycotts of everything Israeli, while supporting Palestinian products made in Palestine,” Zammit said.

An activist with the International Solidarity Movement – a group of volunteers working with Palestinian grassroots organisations against the Israeli occupation – Zammit has been living in Gaza since May last year, after three months living and working in the West Bank.

In the last months, she has been participating in daily protests around Gaza’s buffer zone with Israel, where farmers are banned from working their land under threat of Israeli gunfire. Many farmers have abandoned their fertile fields as daily incursions and gunfire makes their work extremely dangerous. Up to 20 per cent of the Gaza Strip’s arable land is inaccessible to Palestinian farmers because it is caught in the no-go area.

“We join farmers and form a human shield to protect them while they work their land,” Zammit explained. “All the time, we tell soldiers through our megaphones that we are peaceful people who are there in solidarity with the farmers. They know we are nonviolent, they see our hands up in the air all the time, but they still shoot at us.”

Many other Palestinians, especially children, are also shot at as they collect rubble and steel from the border regions to recycle it for construction, as the blockade imposed by Israel forbids construction material from entering the strip.

In an interview with MaltaToday last year from the West Bank before leaving for Gaza, Zammit said: “You can read a lot about what’s happening here, but you have to come to witness what the occupation means. It’s extremely difficult to understand what the everyday reality is unless you witness it firsthand. I used to think I understood the reality here, but then I realised my understanding was only intellectual, not on a human level.”

She added: “There is no middle road. You’re either against injustice or else you’re accepting it.”

Stuck at the border

2010-04-17T17:12:00.002+02:00

Looking back, I should have realised from the very start that the day did not bode well.

Just as I was having what I thought would be my last shower in Gaza before leaving for holidays on Tuesday morning, the electricity and water went off, leaving me covered with soap. The only way to get rid of it was to use a water bottle, with cold water.

At the office, my colleagues were all bidding me farewell as if it was the last time we would see each other. I kept telling them it was only for three weeks, but deep down you never know. Something could happen upon my return at the border, some official might not like me or think my country is part of the axis of evil and turn me back without appeal. That’s what borders are for.

“So you’re leaving through the Rafah border?” they kept asking me, intrigued at the fact that a foreigner is going through the Palestinian route.

“I’m going to the Rafah border,” I replied – which is another thing altogether – always distrustful of borders and the creatures manning them.

Having entered the Gaza Strip through the Egyptian crossing last September after months of waiting, the only way out is through the same border in Rafah. The Israeli border in Erez is only open to those who came in through Israel with special permits – a handful of foreign aid workers, journalists of Israel’s choosing, some diplomats and a few Palestinian patients in need of special treatment out of Gaza.

In the seven months I have been living in Gaza, I had realised the Rafah border logic, if there ever was one. For foreigners, it is next to impossible to come through to Gaza, but once they are in, getting out is a piece of cake: A call to the embassy, the embassy informs Egyptian authorities and you’re out on the day of your choosing. I have seen countless foreigners doing precisely that.

For Palestinians of Gaza it is the other way round – getting in is ‘normal’ procedure (forgetting for a second the long queues and ghastly treatment by Egyptian border guards) but getting out of Gaza is just a dream.
The layers of bureaucracy, corruption and favouritism holding them trapped inside Gaza are just endless. They need to get on the Hams ‘list’ of people who are assigned a bus to the border. They have to wait until the border is officially open for three days whenever Egypt decides to open the gates, more or less every two months. They need confirmation from the Egyptian security services that they would be allowed into Egypt, and rushed to the Cairo airport just in case they even think of staying an extra day in their neighbouring country. And they need a solid reason for getting out of this prison – ideally an amputation or some serious disease about to kill them; a scholarship abroad may or may not work; holidays do not count.

For the really desperate, the tunnels may be an alternative, but besides risking their life, they would also need to bribe Egyptian border guards to get their passports stamped so that they are not arrested and deported once in Egyptian territory. I am told this can be done for around $1,000 – you send the passport through the tunnels, get it stamped and returned, then crawl through the underground network and pray the Israelis won’t bomb the area and that the tunnel does not collapse and bury you inside.

Last Tuesday, however, what I thought was my expert grasp of the Rafah border logic turned out to be out of date. A Hamas police officer greeted me politely and, speaking fluent English, told me there is a problem.

“The Egyptians did not forward us your name,” he said looking sympathetically concerned. “Even if we allow you to pass, they will send you back and make a whole scene with us. It has happened already.”

I told him my embassy had informed Egyptian authorities about my intentions, that I had a flight booked to Malta for Thursday, and that countless other foreigners had passed through before me in this way.

“If it were up to me, I would take you with my own car to the other side,” he said.

Unlike countless other border officials I have met in my life, there was no hint of sarcasm in the Hamas officers dealing with me – quite the opposite. They guard a border that is totally controlled by Egypt and Israel, totally empty until Mubarak’s regime decides to open the gates and then thousands of Gazans present themselves in their attempt to get out.

I frantically called the Maltese embassy in Cairo, which had forwarded my documents and an official letter to the Egyptians two weeks ahead of the date of my intended departure. The ambassador had warned me there was no reply yet to our request, but I had mentally downplayed the issue given the dozens of foreigners who had left before me in the same way.

As time passed and phone calls became more frequent, it became clear the ‘Rafah logic’ no longer applied.

While the Maltese embassy was chasing one Egyptian official after the other, a colleague of mine in Cairo was similarly trying to get my name ‘forwarded’ to the border list of privileged travellers.

The problem is that despite the relations between diplomats and the Egyptian foreign ministry, it is the unapproachable security services who decide who can travel and when. Embassies can only forward particulars to the Egyptian foreign ministry, which then sends the documents to the security services and refer back to the ministry.

“The Egyptian security services are more powerful than all of the Egyptian ministers put together,” one former diplomat had told me.

As the hours passed by, I sat with Kamal, my good Bedouin friend and colleague who waited patiently with me and kept me in good spirits, as we smoked shisha at the ‘Border Cafeteria’ outside the deserted Rafah crossing. I was still hoping that a phone call would give me the green light to cross over to the other side, but I couldn’t stop wondering what had led to the change in procedure. After even more hours waiting and more phone calls, the Hamas border guards were kind enough to take my mobile number and promised to call me if they received any news from their Egyptian counterparts, prompting us to head back to Gaza City, about 30 minutes away from Rafah by car.

The next day was practically a repeat of phone calls and waiting, until late in the evening, the ambassador called to tell me the security services’ final reply: No foreigners are allowed to cross Rafah until the border is officially open. Just like the Gazans.

The unofficial explanation is that since an Egyptian border guard was killed by gun fire during demonstrations at the Rafah border last January, Egypt has hardened its stand with Hamas and virtually cut all ties, adding foreigners to the collective punishment. It was never convincingly established that he was killed by Palestinians, but the Egyptian media spinned the whole incident against Hamas and Palestinians to unprecedented heights.

Also, the fact that Hamas did not sign the reconciliation agreement with Fatah brokered by Egypt after months of meetings in Cairo seems to have pissed off Mubarak’s regime, but Hamas says some points were added unilaterally and needed clarification before committing itself.

Others told me that with Mubarak reportedly on his death bed, the Egyptian security services have taken over all the state apparatus to ensure a smooth succession of the regime.

I decided to focus on the practicalities of my predicament rather than getting overly depressed – cancelling my flight, trying to get a refund, informing my girlfriend and family, unpacking my luggage, rescheduling my off days, and informing my Gazan friends that I’m still here after all. That’s what Palestinians wanting to travel have to do all the time.

The dates of the next border opening are unknown – they are only announced about three days in advance – though if the past is anything to go by, it might happen sometime next week. I know that together with me there are thousands of other Gazans eagerly awaiting the news, and I’m still privileged to have an ambassador to refer to, a foreign passport that means something, and a home I can eventually return to without applying for permits. I am also lucky to be surrounded by great Palestinian friends who despite being trapped here for the last four years keep showering me with compassion, which just humbles me and reminds me I have nothing to complain about.

Don't say 'cheese' in Gaza

2010-04-12T23:52:00.000+02:00

Scores of flies are scavenging bucketfuls of cheese and milk strewn amid disfigured iron beams in the dust and the pungent smell of sourness.

The afternoon sun is quickly turning the latest fresh produce of the Dalloul family’s cheese factory into a repulsive dairy disaster, but the scene of destruction obscures the details for the distraught onlookers.

It is the second time in a year that the Israeli air force has destroyed the factory in the Al Sabra neighbourhood of Gaza City, but last nights’ raid came without warning.

During the Israeli offensive on Gaza in January 2009 dubbed as Operation Cast Lead, the Dalloul cheese factory was bombed shortly after a telephone call warning the family and neighbours to leave the area.

“In the war the Israelis had a policy of calling in advance to warn us they were about to attack, so we had the chance to escape,” says Motasem Dalloul, factory owner and father of seven children who lives next to the destroyed factory. “But last night we were all asleep. The bomb shook the house, my children were in shock and my wife collapsed.”

On the night between Thursday 1 and Friday 2 April, Israeli aircrafts bombed the factory and 13 other targets across the Gaza Strip, injuring three children.

The Israeli government had said it would respond to recent violence at the buffer with Israel where two soldiers and three Palestinian militants were killed, and previous rocket fire that hit Ashkelon killing a Thai worker.

While the Israeli government claims that it targeted Hamas infrastructure, Motasem, who speaks fluent English and also works as a freelance journalist, said the factory only produced dairy products.

“Do you think I would be producing weapons next to my house?” he says. “We also have a blacksmiths’ workshop away from here that was never targeted. I believe our factory has been targeted, together with other factories, because they want to destroy our economy. Our work undermines the siege. Israel wants to stop some commodities and food from being produced in Gaza so that we become dependent on outside supplies. That’s why I believe we were targeted.”

Until the war when it was first targeted, the factory was producing up to 2 tonnes of dairy products daily. It took the Dalloul family six months to open a new factory producing merely 400kg of cheese and yoghurt a day whose distribution was limited to Gaza City.

The business was just recovering from the thousands of dollars in losses sustained in the war, forcing the family to seek loans and use its entire savings to rebuild.

“Our factory had been open since 1996,” Motasem said. “It took us six months and thousands of dollars of loans and savings to rebuild after it was destroyed last year, and we could only provide cheese for Gaza City. Now we are bankrupt.”

Motasem’s claim that Israel is purposely destroying Gaza’s economic infrastructure was clearly stated by the United Nations fact-finding mission’s inquiry headed by Judge Richard Goldstone in the wake of Cast Lead, calling it a war crime.

Among the cases investigated by the UN mission there was the destruction of the Al Bader flour mill – the only operating mill in Gaza – that was hit by air strikes on 9 January 2009.

“The Mission finds that its destruction had no military justification” the Goldstone report says about the mill that employed 85 people. “The nature of the strikes, in particular the precise targeting of crucial machinery, suggests that the intention was to disable the factory in terms of its productive capacity. ... The Mission also finds that the destruction of the mill was carried out for the purposes of denying sustenance to the civilian population, which is a violation of customary international law”.

A similar case of destruction by the Israeli military investigated in the Goldstone inquiry happened in Zeytoun, where Sameeh Sawafiri’s chicken farm was completely destroyed by Israeli tanks and bulldozers during the same operation Cast Lead. A total of 30,000 chickens were flattened alive in their cages as Sameeh’s family fled the area. After months rebuilding and assembling cages from recycled iron, Sameeh is now somehow back in business with one-third the amount of chickens that he had a year ago, and a lot of debts.
“International aid agencies used to buy eggs from my farm to distribute to poor families, but after the war I was turned into a beggar asking for help,” he says.

In both cases investigated by the UN mission as well as in the case of last week, Israel’s targets were well-established businesses set up for more than a decade and reduced to rubble in the 22-day assault. Similar examples abound: the Sarayo biscuits factory in Shijaiya was completely wiped out in Cast Lead, leaving 50 people without a job and its watchman dead. The Gaza juice factory was severely damaged, with workers having to affix labels and seal bottle caps by hand after the machinery was destroyed, as was the factory’s cold store.

“Unlawful and wanton destruction which is not justified by military necessity amounts to a war crime,” the Goldstone report states.

Economist Omar Shaban, who is also director of independent Palestinian think tank PalThink, says the net effect of such strikes is to keep Gaza’s economy unsustainable.

“We need to distinguish between the daily economic activity, which is nowadays much better, and Gaza’s production and industrial activity which is destroyed,” he says.

While new shops are opening, smuggling tunnels thriving, Israel is allowing more goods to enter Gaza, there have been some job creation programmes and people are spending more money, the coastal enclave’s economy remains subjected to a crippling blockade that keeps 1.5 million people in a man-made humanitarian situation dependent on foreign aid.
Out of 3,900 factories, 3,500 have been closed over the last three years, causing 75,000 job losses in the private sector.

“We are witnessing activation of economic activity only at the service level, but the productive, industrial and even agriculture and fishing sectors are at a standstill,” Shaban says. “There is no sustainability and there are no exports. We can only speak of slight economic improvements alleviating daily hardships.”

Fruit that used to be grown in Gaza and fish that was once Palestinians’ staple food now being imported from Egypt through the tunnels are testimony to the almost destroyed agriculture and fishing industries – both under continuous threat of direct Israeli destruction. For years now fishermen have been allowed to travel only up to three nautical miles as Israeli gunboats await them on the horizon, while farmers on the buffer zone have had to abandon entire fields where they are greeted with Israeli gunfire and tanks.

World Food Programme figures for the month after Cast Lead show that the sea blockade has reduced fish catches by more than 72 per cent compared to the same month in 2008. Out of around 10,000 fishermen in 2000, today less than 3,500 remain.

“The targeting of the cheese factory is just another example of unjust Israeli actions claiming they are targeting terrorist or Hamas infrastructure. It exposes Israel’s hidden agenda,” Shaban said.

At the decimated factory in Al Sabra, Motasem is occupied with clearing the rubble and restoring electricity to his house after the connection was also destroyed in the bombing. He is keen on starting again, although he doesn’t know yet how.

“We have to restart from scratch,” Motasem Dalloul says. “We have no other option. I can’t leave my brothers without a job, we need to work. It will take us a long time to restart, but that’s the only way we have.”

Guns n' teddy bears

2010-04-03T08:47:00.001+02:00

Ensherah Zakkout, a Gazan psychologist, is on her way to a home visit in Beit Lahiya, but from the outset this is clearly not an ordinary visit.

To begin with, there is no home. It was flattened last January by Israeli bulldozers, with Kamal Awaja, his wife and five children inside.
Ten-year-old Subhi was huddled with his father and younger brother Ibrahim when on 4 January 2009 the first bomb hit the house in the dead of night, at the start of the first land attack.

Kamal told his sons not be afraid if he fainted, and that was when a piece of shrapnel ripped through Ibrahim’s abdomen and wounded Subhi in his head. As they regained their senses under the rubble, Subhi realised his nine-year-old brother was dying.

“He kissed Ibrahim on his forehead while he lay dying,” his mother, Wafa, says. “Subhi saw death with his eyes.”

After the bombardment, bulldozers started flattening the houses to make way for the incursion. Kamal told his family to pretend they were dead as the soldiers passed by them.

“Israelis thought we were all dead, but once they passed we could not go anywhere,” Kamal said. The village in northern Gaza bordering with Israel was under intense attack until the troops made it into central Gaza, making it impossible for the wounded to go to hospital. “We had to remain next to Ibrahim’s dead body for four days.”

Since the day of his brother’s death, his parents say Subhi has changed completely. Formerly a high achiever at school, he can now barely stand five minutes with a book. The dwindling grades are accompanied by alarming cases of aggression towards other school children and teachers. In the tent where his family is now living, he repeatedly beats his sisters for no apparent reason, destroying their toys and spending most of his time alone or playing violent video games at an internet cafe nearby.

On the day of the psychologist’s visit, Subhi’s father was preparing to accompany his son at school where a disciplinary board was to decide what to do with him after, yet again, he beat up another boy.

“We have lost all control on him,” his mother, in her eighth month of pregnancy, says. “He terrifies his siblings all the time. He used to be first in class but now he is always out looking for trouble.”

“Subhi feels he is totally unprotected; the war taught him that not even home was safe and that his father was powerless,” says Zakkout, the psychologist and herself the mother of a child killed by Israeli soldiers three years ago. “The trauma Subhi suffered, if we’re unsuccessful with therapy, can lead to anywhere – from becoming anti-social and criminal to fanatic religious behaviour. His is the normal reaction to abnormal circumstances.”

A lost generation
The ‘normal reaction’ which mental health professionals and child workers fear in Gaza is the path to radicalisation. Subhi’s family has never engaged in militancy – his father is a Palestinian Authority clerk who was stopped working in Gaza by Hamas. Yet the threat that young children – even from moderate families – might be lured into a militant, extremist lifestyle is real, surrounded as they are by images glorifying ‘martyrs’ and Islamist rhetoric.

“All Gaza’s children are at risk,” said GCMHP senior psychologist Hasan Zeyada. “They are learning that the only way to tackle every obstacle in life is through violence and aggression. They feel helpless and powerless, that parents can’t protect them. That leads them to identify with the fighter or even the Israeli soldier representing absolute power, like God.”

Living under total siege as opposed to Palestinian children in the West Bank, their only contact with foreigners is the sight of Israeli soldiers destroying their homes and killing their relatives. According to the UN agency chief helping Palestinian refugees (UNRWA) John Ging, a whole generation of children – who make up half of Gaza’s 1.5 million population – risks being lost forever.

“If you have no reason to live, you will seek a glorious death,” he said. “It’s worse now than it ever was before. A whole generation of Palestinians will have never got out of the besieged strip, never interacted with foreigners or even met Israelis except as enemy soldiers intent on killing and destruction. Their violent behaviour and disrespect to their parents is symptomatic of the desperation they are growing up in.”

A study published by the Gaza Community Mental Health Programme after the Israeli aggression shows his concerns are well-founded. Just under 50% of children aged 6-17, who were exposed to the last war that lasted 23 days and claimed the lives of around 1,400 Palestinians, think “often” or “almost always” of seeking revenge on whoever is responsible for the death of close people.

“A six-year-old asked me why God created the Jews,” Zeyada says. “They do not even differentiate between Jews and Israelis.”

Even if the responses are to be expected, the figures remain alarming and show that Subhi is far from alone in the Gaza Strip. Over 60% of Gazan children showed severe to very severe post-traumatic stress disorder according to the same study.

In the last war, 50% of children lost a close relative or friend, 54% witnessed assassination of people by rockets. Over 90% heard the shelling of their area by Israeli artillery and the sonic sounds of jetfighters, and an equal amount witnessed shelling on the ground and saw mutilated bodies on TV.

A particular case highlighted in the UN investigation into Gaza war crimes headed by South African judge Richard Goldstone speaks of a mother whose children aged 3 to 16 had witnessed the killing of their father in their own house. As Israeli soldiers forcefully questioned her and vandalised the house, the children asked their mother whether they would be killed as well.

“Their mother felt the only comfort she could give them was to tell them to say the Shehada, the prayer recited in the face of death,” the report says.

As many as 69% of children were forced to flee their home during the war, and a staggering 99% said they did not feel safe at home and felt neither the family nor anyone else could protect them.

But talking of post-traumatic stress can be misleading as the younger generation is “living an ongoing trauma” according to Hasan Zeyada. Even before the war, the crippling siege and fierce factional divisions were already leaving their toll on children.

“The siege, internal divisions and the war create an overwhelming feeling of helplessness,” Dr Zeyada said. “All the people feel they cannot do anything to stop the violations. It’s a very painful emotion.”

That sense of helplessness and lack of protection explains children’s widespread use of toy guns whenever they play, Zeyada says.

While adult men used to the culture of being family leaders get more withdrawn in the face of helplessness, women are left making important family decisions on their own, says Heba Zayyam an officer working at the UN development fund for women.

This is also forcing young girls to abandon dreams of furthering their studies and developing.

“I studied at the University of Jordan 10 years ago,” Zayyam said. “Now sending girls to study abroad is frowned upon. There is a whole new generation who never left Gaza, who don’t know what a cinema looks like, and who don’t know how the world looks like out there.”

Children, UNRWA’s John Ging says, are being punished for a crime they did not commit.

“Israel designated Gaza as a hostile entity after Hamas won the election, so it’s a self-fulfilling prophecy that breeds violent hostility,” Ging said. “Half of the Gazan population is made of kids; they didn’t vote for anybody. We’re in a self-reinforcing cycle of rhetoric and violence.”

Political fragmentation – which took a violent head in the 2007 civil war when Fatah troops loyal to President Mahmoud Abbas were ousted from Gaza by Hamas – permeates as early as the primary school years, with five-year-olds wearing green or yellow tops in support Hamas or Fatah. Children are also victims of physical punishment, in schools and in families – an issue which Dr Zeyada calls “one of the main problems of Gaza’s social reality”.

The same Goldstone report which accuses both Israel and Hamas of committing war crimes speaks of “indoctrination programmes allegedly introduced by the Gaza authorities, and of a process of ideological and political polarization”. Such programmes “have a high potential for imposing models of education at odds with human rights values and with a culture of peace and tolerance”.

Meanwhile according to UNICEF, 280 schools damaged by the war still cannot be rehabilitated due to the ongoing blockade. UNRWA itself hosts 200,000 children in its schools across Gaza, but it can’t get the raw materials to rebuild schools, to furnish classes with desks and distribute text books – all items that are banned by Israel.

Striving for normality
At the Qattan Centre for the Child in Gaza City, Director Reem Abu Jaber leafs through dozens of drawings by children after the war. The recurrent images are disturbing, coming as they are from children under 15. Tanks, missiles, helicopters, phosphorus falling from the sky, bombs and corpses fill the pages, but there are also glimpses of flowers and the sun shining over houses.

The centre runs a free, impressive state of the art library and organises free lessons in creative writing, literacy, web design, film making, critical thinking and empowerment classes for parents.

“You don’t need a stamp or a passport to read a book,” Abu Jaber says “A book can take you somewhere else, and that’s what our children need right now.”

The centre is a veritable oasis of learning and entertainment for thousands of children under 15, and the Qattan Foundation running it is lucky to be a registered charity in the UK enabling it to receive funding from abroad. All the other Gazan organisations have been otherwise cut off since the Hamas takeover.

Yet even for the Qattan Centre, replacing books and buying paper for children is proving extremely difficult, having to wait long months until orders are somehow smuggled in by travellers coming through the Erez crossing from Israel or the Rafah border with Egypt. Tiles lining the colourful halls and classes that are broken have to be replaced with what is available.

“We were very lucky the building was not hit in the war,” Abu Jaber says.

The success of Qattan’s oversubscribed classes is also a cause of concern for Abu Jaber, concerned that there are no outlets catering for children over 15.
“After that, you just have Fatah and Hamas,” she said.

It is also the age from when young people are becoming increasingly addicted to Tramadol, the powerful painkiller with a narcotic effect leaving its users sedated for hours. Despite the Hamas government’s belated crackdown on the drug’s abuse, mental health professionals have seen an alarming rise since the war. Tunnel workers, most of them children, are believed to be on a constant supply to forget about their lethal surroundings.

US Actress and children’s rights activist Mia Farrow spoke about children’s widespread trauma but also highlighted glimmers of resilience during her visit to Gaza last October as UNICEF Goodwill Ambassador.

“A teacher said that when they hear a loud noise they look at the sky and scream and run and some will cry,” said Farrow, who also related stories of children whose houses were bombed around them, whose relatives were killed, and one who was placed by Israeli soldiers with her family in a hole and worried they would be buried alive. “A little girl said I don’t know what will happen next, and yet I was told by a group of children I want to be a doctor, I want to be a teacher. The children were full of hope and determination.”

Back in the Awajas’ tent in Beit Lahiya, Kamal the father has tears in his eyes as he speaks about his dead son Ibrahim. The psychologist tries consoling him, but it is time to head to school with Subhi to face the disciplinary board.

According to figures released by Defence for Children International, Ibrahim is one of 352 children killed during Operation Cast Lead, as the Israeli offensive was known. And that’s far from the high price that a whole generation of children is having to pay.

1,000 days of solitude

2010-03-20T18:52:00.001+01:00

For the last 1,000 days and nights, Gaza has been totally blockaded in what has been repeatedly described as the world’s largest prison.

Since June 2007, following the Hamas takeover of Gaza, the coastal strip has been thrown in a downward spiral as Israel, and the world, kept the gates locked for the 1.5 million Palestinians.

Numbers may leave us indifferent, but they provide a good measurement for comparisons.

In 1,000 days one can get a degree, make a round trip to Mars, or walk from Cape Town to Jerusalem. In the last 1,000 days, a Palestinian in Gaza could not cross to Jerusalem, nor go anywhere else outside the strip.

In 1,000 days, a tree bears its first fruit, as long as it’s not in Beit Hanoun or Rafah – the farming villages decimated by air strikes and incursions in which thousands of trees are uprooted.

In 1,000 days, a child learns to form a sentence, and it does not usually include the words ‘blood’, ‘death’, ‘soldiers’, and ‘martyr’.

For 1,000 days – and much more – Palestinians have said “tomorrow will be better”, and they still say it today. But for Gazans it has been getting progressively worse since the Oslo Agreement was signed in 1994. It got even worse after the 2000 intifada, reached rock bottom with the 2007 blockade, and endured hell in the 2009 war that left 1,400 dead and total destruction.

Thousands of Palestinians who used to have construction jobs in Israel ended up in poverty, with unemployment today reaching a shocking 60 per cent and 80 per cent dependent on humanitarian aid. Out of 3,900 factories, 3,500 have been closed since the blockade, causing 75,000 job losses in the private sector. Of the 24,000 Gazans working in Israel 10 years ago, today there are zero.

It is a totally man-made humanitarian crisis that allows no development but actually turns the clock back for the people trapped here, where donkey carts are a substitute for fuel-strapped cars and kerosene lamps light up houses in daily blackouts. Many families use firewood to cook as cooking gas is scarce because of Israel’s decisions on the transfer of fuel and gas meeting less than 50 per cent of demand of the entire strip.

Figures from Birzeit University in Ramallah shed light on the deteriorating situation over the last decade. Even before the blockade, it is clear there was a policy of isolation of Gaza – where education is highly valued despite the humanitarian situation. In 2000, a total of 350 students from Gaza at the Birzeit campus were deported. By 2005 there were only 35 Gaza students at Birzeit. In a 2006 ruling, the Israeli High Court forbade Palestinians from accessing Bethlehem University, accepting the argument used by the Israeli state that once they were given permits to leave they would ahve become “information carriers”.

The ban applies also to Gaza residents accepted to study at Israeli academic instutions, but there is no hope of studying abroad since the Rafah crossing has also been closed almost completely since June 2007. At the time, 722 Palestinian unversity students studying abroad were trapped in Gaza, together with another 2,000 enrolled in foreign schools. According to Right to Education Campaign, they are part of the 7,500 Gazans who need permission to continue their work, education or medical treatment out of Gaza. This is leading to hundreds of students granted scholarships abroad – including Fulbright scholarships in the US, to lose them.

This collective punishment applies to all aspects of life, and death. It has meant that in 1,000 days, every other day a Gazan died because of no access to health care – 500 according to Palestinian Campaign to Break the Siege on Gaza – as the poor health system could not treat them. Palestinian patients die while waiting for degrading Israel permits to travel for specialised treatment. Out of 1,103 applications submitted for travel to Israel last December, 21per cent had their applications denied or delayed, forcing them to miss their hospital appointments and restart the referral process according to the World Health Organisation.

The blockade is accompanied by the counterproductive boycott and isolation of Hamas – the de facto government that was democratically-elected in the last Palestinian elections.
Why is Hamas boycotted? And what are the results to show this is a good policy? Why do the European Union and the US follow blindly Israel’s designation of Hamas as a terrorist entity? And what are the results to justify it?

The results on the ground are total division of the West Bank and Gaza, the scuttling of the Palestinian democratic process and institutions, the creation of a laboratory-case humanitarian situation, and the strengthening of Hamas in its total control of the Gaza Strip as a de facto government ruling the territory. The vacuum created by the blockade has spurred the Hamas takeover of the institutions that matter.

At the same time, polls show Hamas losing popularity, its Qassam Military Brigades is accusing the political wing of failing to maintain security amid a recent rise in violence, and there is a reported defection of disenchanted activists to the radical Salafist groups. The blockade of Gaza and political boycott of Hamas leaves the movement with no results to show – except rising poverty and injustice – hence the internal disgruntlement leading to further radicalisation. The situation is pitting Hamas against the external enemy and a new internal threat that is much more radical, uncompromising and uninterested in the political process, precisely because Hamas’s willingness to participate in the political process has only yielded punitive results for the entire strip.

If these are the desired results of the blockade and the boycott, then they have to be stated.

Politically, the long-term result of the blockade is that the ‘final status’ issues – refugees and Jerusalem – remain postponed indefinitely. Who talks about the refugees when Gazans can’t find cooking gas to buy?

The new EU foreign policy chief’s visit to Gaza last Thursday sends a signal of hope – being the one of a handful of high-level European politicians to enter the strip. Yet without the action to end the blockade and the Hamas boycott, it will be useless for her to talk of the crippling disunity between the West Bank and Gaza while creating false hopes. How can one foster unity when the EU speaks only to one side, the Palestinian Authority?

On the same day of her visit, a rocket fired by an obscure Islamist group killed a Thai worker in Ashkelon, triggering two successive nights of Israeli air raids on Gaza wounding at least 14 people. At the same time, the US Treasury was imposing new sanctions against Gaza, this time against the Islamic National Bank and Al Aqsa Television, for their ties to the Hamas movement.

After 1,000 days, the world is still enforcing the isolation of Gaza, and Palestinians are still managing to survive.

Heart of darkness

2010-02-20T17:57:00.010+01:00

Wasfi Al Nider sits motionless on a couch with his legs stretched looking at a small screen. Whenever it goes blank, it is the sign of yet another power cut hitting Gaza. But unlike the frustrations of thousands of others working on computers or watching TV, the screen the 63-year-old is looking at is connected to his blood and a kidney dialysis machine.
“Whenever there is a blackout, I’m in Allah’s hands,” Wasfi says. “The machine just stops, blood stops circulating, I just cry. Then we have to wait until the generator starts.”

Over the last two months, blackouts have increased so much in Gaza that Wasfi and the 200 other kidney dialysis patients frequenting Al Shifa Hospital three times a week for four-hour rounds of treatment have been witnessing their screens going blank almost every time.

The frequent blackouts have rendered many of the hospital’s emergency battery backups useless,

“Many of our battery backups need repairing, and getting spare parts is a big problem; we’ve been waiting for a year for some of the items,” says Dr Mohammed Shatat, the director of the kidney dialysis department, who besides the nightmare of stocking medical supplies for his patients under the Israeli blockade has to think of coping with the daily blackouts. At the same hospital, his colleagues at the cardiac and surgery departments work with the same trepidation of facing a blackout during critical moments of their work.

The steep increase in blackouts since the EU stopped funding fuel for the Gaza Power Plant has plunged the entire coastal strip in total darkness for up to 12 hours a day, disrupting the daily lives of Palestinians beyond the hardships imposed by the Israeli blockade.

While most of the shops and offices in Gaza were already equipped with generators, many Palestinians are now buying portable generators imported through the tunnels for their homes, fuelled by cheap diesel coming through the same underground lifelines.

The owner of a store selling generators in Gaza City says sales have increased by 70% in the last month. With 1Kw machines selling at around NIS470 (92 Euros), one can generate enough energy with one litre of fuel to switch on the lights, a television set and recharge the mobile for three hours.

Abu Sami is looking at the different brands available, all made in China, before making his investment.

“Electricity is a big problem right now and I’m fed up of living in darkness,” he says. “My children have to study at home, they would like to play with the computer or watch TV, yet most of our evenings are spent with candles and gas lamps. Now that even gas is scarce, I’ve decided to buy a generator.”

The shop owner employs no marketing trickery to lure customers: He speaks openly about the inferior quality of the Chinese products. The model Abu Sami is eyeing does not give enough power to switch on the fridge, heaters or washing machine, but at least the nights can have the semblance of normality if one ignores the roaring sounds coming out of the generator.

This cheap energy alternative is not without its downsides. A repair shop nearby which has just been converted from a grocery store a month ago is full of faulty generators, most of them less than a month old, while others arrive damaged from the tunnels.

“I switched on mine twice since I bought it,” says Abu Raed, a taxi driver who just brought his generator to be repaired. “They’re too cheap and frail to keep up with all the blackouts we’re getting.”

For others living in poverty, generators are still too expensive to buy.

“In one month I make about NIS100 and have 18 family members to sustain, how can I afford a NIS470 generator besides the fuel and maintenance?” says 26-year-old Ibrahim, a bachelor still living with his family and the only one to have a job. “We have to make do with a kerosene lamp. With no gas available, we cook on firewood in the back yard and huddle in one room whenever it’s cold.”

The generator at a rundown computer games cafe proves irresistible for young boys without generators at home.

“I always come here to play when there is a power cut and I can do nothing at home,” says Mu’min Al Sinn, 15. “In the last three weeks, I have been coming every day.”

It is not just the poor who cannot afford generators. Jaad has a tyre repair garage but he is forced to stop working every time there is a blackout, as the machinery to inflate and repair flat tyres requires too much energy, requiring expensive generators and consuming big amounts of fuel.

“This has been the worst month of work, not counting the war a year ago,” he says about the daily blackouts forcing him to just stand still among the piling tyres at his garage.

A doorstep away, a blacksmith is busy getting a welding job done in the brief interval when electricity is available.

“I would need a very powerful generator to be able to use my machinery, costing me over NIS5,000,” says Abd al Rahman Al Shurafa, for whom idle time is costing him up to 50% of his monthly income.

Keeping his fish fresh is Ihab Abu Hasira’s biggest headache at Muneer fish restaurant.

“During blackouts we pack our freezers with ice although even that is not always available,” he says. “The worst is when we come in the morning and find there has been a blackout all night long, risking losing thousands of dollars worth of fish.”

At the Shanti Express laundry and dry clean, an industrial generator keeps the services going although even here, the problems persist. Massive washing machines have to restart the washing programme from scratch whenever there is a blackout, wasting much more water, time and energy.

“We can’t always switch on the generator because we share it with the entire building block and it doesn’t depend on us,” says Ayman Al Shanti. “We miss lots of deadlines because of the electricity problems, most of our work gets disrupted, and whenever we have a faulty machine it takes time to get spare parts, but the people understand the situation.”

The Israeli blockade had already made Shanti’s business face an uphill climb. One barrel of dry cleaning material from Israel used to cost him NIS1,800. Nowadays it costs him NIS5,000 per gallon – or one-tenth of the amount he used to get – to import supplies from the tunnels.

“We’ve been in this mess for the last four years, and it only keeps getting worse,” Al Shanti says. Despite the increasing costs, he resists raising prices set some six years ago. “All of us are living in this situation and the people don’t afford more expenses.”

Even at the high class Al Deira Hotel – a little gem in the midst of Gaza overlooking the Mediterranean and whose only visitors in the last four years have been journalists and foreign aid workers – electricity is a nightmare.

“We have to guarantee service, but it’s not easy to generate power with all these blackouts,” says Deputy General Manager Tamer Barakat, who says the hotel is now spending around US$3,000 a month on fuel for the generator. “Our generator is meant to give a couple of hours of uninterrupted power for all our 22 rooms, the cold store, laundry and restaurant, but when you end up using it every day it becomes a problem. Thankfully most of our clients understand the problem, this is Gaza. It’s mostly the journalists who complain most whenever there is no internet available and they need to file a story against a tight deadline.”

For Mohammed Hzeb, a young electrician who repairs home appliances, this is one of the best times in his business, as the number of fridges and washing machines for repairs in his shop testify.

“The sudden blackouts do a lot of damage to these appliances,” he says. “The last month has been the busiest.”

The opposite is true for Al Saqqa home appliances warehouse – a huge, modern shop in Gaza City selling state of the art TVs, fridges, heaters and washing machines that is virtually empty.

“People get discouraged from buying new appliances when they don’t even have the electricity to run them,” says Said, a salesman who says the shop is passing through one of its worst periods in the last 20 years with around a 50% drop in customers.

“It’s bad enough that for the last three years we have had to get everything from the tunnels, with up to 20% of new appliances arriving damaged,” he says as he shows brand new fridges with their doors knocked in. He says the total costs of every item smuggled through the tunnels rises by 100%.

The blackouts are surely no excuse for the faithful to miss their prayers. Sheikh Abu Rashed keeps a generator always on standby at the Al Khatiba mosque whenever he is about to call the faithful for prayers five times a day through the speakers on the minaret, while other muezzins have connected hand-held megaphones to make ensure their calls make it through the sandy streets of Gaza.

The widespread use of generators is also claiming the lives of Palestinians through fires and carbon monoxide poisoning in cases where generators are left inside. A total of 15 people died and 27 were injured since January in generator-related accidents at home, according to Director of Emergency Services Muawiya Hassanein. Last year, generator fires and carbon monoxide poisoning claimed the lives of 75 people.

Last year, even before the Gaza energy crisis started, it was Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas who described the Hamas-ruled coastal strip as “the emirate of darkness”. Today, few Gazans argue with that, as the migraine-inducing sounds of generators overwhelm the strip inhabited by 1.5 million Palestinians.

“I can barely sleep with the sound of generators at night,” said Mahmoud, a refugee from Jabalia Camp. “You can smell fuel wherever you go in Gaza. We’re inhaling all sorts of shit.”

The loneliness of the Gaza power plant technician

2010-02-06T14:57:00.001+01:00

Bassam Shalfoh has an unenviable job. Unlike his counterparts in other parts of the world working as power plant maintenance technicians who rush to repair faulty lines and restore electrical power to the people, his job is to do the opposite.

Wearing a pair of rubber gloves and a hard hat, he does the rounds across Gaza in a van, going from pylon to pylon according to schedule to cut off entire neighbourhoods for stretches of eight hours a day.

With limited supplies of fuel reaching Gaza, the power plant has to operate on one turbine instead of four, forcing it to switch off entire parts of the coastal strip to keep other parts going. Bassam and his colleagues from the Gaza Electricity Distribution Corporation (GEDCO) have to do it manually, climbing pylons and cutting them off from the grid.

“It’s a thankless job,” the 27-year-old technician tells me as we stop in central Gaza City to cut off part of it for the next eight hours. As soon as he gets out of the van, a motorist offends him in what turns out to be a daily occurrence for poor Bassam and his colleagues.

“You see? We get insulted with our mothers and sisters and all sorts of abuse,” he says. “At least this part of Gaza City is educated and high class but elsewhere it’s much worse.”
The frustration is understandable, although misdirected. While Gaza is gripped by the cold winter spell, Bassam and his colleagues are the only ones to be seen plunging the strip into darkness every day.

He tells me they had incidents where people would just climb the pylons to switch on their area again – at great risk of electrocution – forcing him to go back to switch if off again and to lock the switch box with chains and padlocks.

Israel allows the transfer of only 2.2 million litres of industrial diesel every week for Gaza’s power plant, allowing it to use only two out of its four available turbines and leaving up to 28% of demand uncovered with 32 hours of weekly electricity cuts spread over Gaza.

The problem got much worse since the European Union stopped funding the weekly supply of fuel to the Gaza power plant at the end of last year. Fuel supplies covered by the Palestinian Authority have remained irregular, leaving the power plant operating on one turbine. Only yesterday, the power plant warned it was about to shut off completely as its fuel supply was running out.

At the moment, the plant cannot meet up to 40% of electricity demand, forcing it to cut off power for up to 56 hours weekly, with each area getting eight-hour cuts every day.
Even if applied fairly, the cuts do not discriminate according to need, affecting essential services such as hospitals.

“We don’t have dedicated lines to hospitals and schools, so when we cut off an area everyone is affected,” Jamal El Derdisawi, a spokesman for GEDCO says.

In the current situation, the market of portable generators imported from the tunnels has flourished as households equip themselves to provide their own share of energy. Fuel for these generators also comes through the tunnels – an option that is not available for the power plant given the official nature of the PA’s contractual agreements. Yet the power of these generators is too weak to provide for heating in the current freezing temperatures, or even to keep fridges going. In houses, people mainly use it for lighting, charging mobile phones and watching TV.

The widespread use of generators in households has also proved tragic in the last weeks. At the end of January, three children died of carbon monoxide poisoning in their sleep and two others were hospitalised after a generator was left running outside their bedroom. Faulty generators have also caused deadly fires in homes, most of which have amounts of fuel stored unsafely. The most recent fire claimed the life of a wheelchair-bound person and left two young people seriously injured.

Unless the Ramallah-based Finance Ministry buys and transfers the fuel to GEDCO, the situation is bound go get worse. Around 70% of users have not paid their bills since 2000 in what is estimated to amount to around $2.7 billion in due bills. The Gaza-based Palestinian Centre for Human rights criticised the EU’s aid method for encouraging “thousands of civilians not to pay their power bills”. On its part, the PA found it more expedient to give a 5% salary increase to its employees than to put Gaza’s energy needs on its priorities.

“It’s a difficult land,” Bassam says, as he climbs down another pylon. He has been doing this job for the last five years, and now it seems to be only getting worse. “Our abnormal situation has become everyday life.”

Gazan patients dying waiting for travel permits

2010-01-23T21:03:00.000+01:00

Fidaa Talal Hijjy, 18, was diagnosed with Hodgkin’s disease in 2007. At first she was treated at Gaza’s Shifa Hospital, but with her health deteriorating, doctors told her she needed a bone marrow transplant – a procedure which is not available in the Gaza Strip.

Referred to Tel HaShomer Hospital in Israel on 20 August last year, Fidaa obtained an appointment for 23 September for a life-saving transplant, but the Israeli authorities did not respond to her application to cross into Israel, resulting in her missing the appointment.

As her health deteriorated further, she was given a new appointment for 20 October and submitted a new application to Israeli authorities be able to enter Israel, but yet again the Israeli authorities did not respond. Her last appointment was set on 9 November, but Israelis only responded three days later. By then Fidaa had died.

“The day of the funeral we got a call from the Palestinian liaison office saying the Israelis agreed that we should make a fourth appointment,” Amal Hijjy, a relative of Fidaa, said. “I said there’s no need to make another appointment because the girl died yesterday.”

Fidaa is only one of hundreds of Gazans who are refused permission to travel to Israel or other third countries every month for life-saving medical treatment. Last year, 27 Palestinian patients died while waiting for Israeli permits.

Specialised operations such as Fidaa’s, complex heart surgery and treatment for certain types of cancer are not available in Gaza, and patients are referred for treatment outside, but Israeli authorities repeatedly deny or delay exit permits.

According to the World Health Organisation, out of 1,103 applications submitted for travel to Israel last December, 21% had their applications denied or delayed, forcing them to miss their hospital appointments and restart the referral process.

“If that happened in my country, in the UK, in Europe, in Israel, if an individual who needed urgent treatment was unable to get out because of a bureaucratic obstacle, it would be a scandal,” said the head of the World Health Organisation for the Palestinian
Territories, Tony Laurance. “Here it happens to 300 or 400 people every month.”
He warned that while Gaza had a sophisticated health care system, this could not be sustained in isolation from the international community.

The Israeli closure of Gaza since Hamas seized power in mid 2007 and last year’s military offensive have led to a rapidly deteriorating health system. With limited supplies of drugs allowed into Gaza, there are often shortages of medicinals, while essential medical equipment such as x-ray machines, electronic devices and spare parts are next to impossible to bring in.

Even the ban on building materials is affecting essential health facilities – the new surgical wing in Gaza’s main Shifa hospital remains unfinished since 2006, while 15 of Gaza’s 27 hospitals and 43 of 110 primary health care facilities that were damaged in the last war cannot be rebuilt. Meanwhile the blockade has kept doctors and nurses from pursuing advanced training.

Last Wednesday, the United Nations and over 80 international development agencies expressed their deep concern about the deteriorating situation in Gaza, calling yet again on Israel to lift the crippling blockade.

“We are deeply concerned about the current health system in Gaza and in particular its capacity and ability to deliver proper standards of health care to the people of Gaza,” UN Humanitarian Coordinator Max Gaylard said. “This adverse situation is not like Haiti. Haiti has been destroyed by an earthquake. The circumstances here are entirely man-made and can be fixed accordingly.”

Gaza under attack

2010-01-09T10:47:00.002+01:00

Israeli war planes on Thursday night struck different areas of Gaza in the north, middle and south, leaving three Palestinian tunnel workers dead. The raids were carried out following a new round of rockets launched by militants from the Gaza Strip, with one of them reaching the south of Ashkelon.

Even before the air raids, on Thursday morning, many Gazans were in a state of panic as thousands of leaflets dropped from Israeli fighter jets warned Palestinians not to get within 300 metres of the buffer zone with Israel.

The same leaflets, written in Arabic and including a map, exhort Palestinians to rise up against tunnel smugglers and provides an email and telephone number where they could snitch on them.

“Terrorists, tunnel owners, and the smugglers of military equipment know for certain that the continuation of terrorist attacks, the smuggling of military equipment, and the digging of tunnels will be targeted by the IDF [Israel Defense Forces], but they continue to work in your residential areas and seek refuge among you,” the flier said. “The digging [of] tunnels under your houses and the smuggling of military equipment into Gaza constitutes a threat to your lives, the lives of your children, and family, and your property ... Do not stay idle and let the terrorists use you. They will not stand beside you when harm is done to you and your property. ... Take responsibility for your future.”

Few, if any Gazans take the calls by the Israeli army to tell on their compatriots seriously, but the warnings reminded many of the same experience during the war on Gaza a year ago, when they were warned to evacuate their neighbourhoods while nowhere was spared the air strikes and ground offensive. Entire families were shot at precisely as they were evacuating their buildings – upon orders from Israeli forces – carrying white flags.

Fears of a new military attack on Gaza are widespread among Palestinians, although Israel is unlikely to repeat a ground offensive which would be too risky to justify after Operation Cast Lead. Yet the new wave of rockets launched from Gaza and the immediate heavy air response – including strikes on Gaza City – were preceded by a training exercise by the Israeli military which was reportedly in preparation for a new assault on Gaza.

Israel says its Iron Dome missile defense system, meant to intercept Qassam, Grad and Katyusha rockets fired from the Gaza Strip, is ready to be installed. At the same time, Hamas itself says it wants to stop rockets from being fired into Israel, but resistance movements are still getting their way – especially the Palestinian Resistance Committees and the leftist Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine.

Hamas is caught in a dilemma. It cannot afford another bloody assault on Gaza which would liquidate any popularity it might have at the moment, but at the same time it cannot alienate its grassroots by doing what it accuses the Palestinian Authority of doing – weeding out the resistance. The alienation of Hamas’s own grassroots is a real problem when some of the rank and file are believed to be defecting to hard-line salafist groups that condemn Hamas for not being truly Islamic.

Another front has been developing at a shocking pace over the last days – Egypt. Since the Egyptian government was caught building an iron wall in Rafah, aimed at stopping tunnel smuggling, events at the border have escalated and may be indicative of more trouble yet to come for Gaza.

Initial reactions and demonstrations launched by Hamas at the border were peaceful, but when international attention was arriving in the form of around 1,400 activists for the Gaza Freedom March, the Egyptian government would have none of it.

The demonstrators got the coverage they wanted, and Egypt felt embarrassed as, for once, it got centre stage as an accomplice in the occupation of Palestinians. In the end it allowed only 100 protestors to cross into Gaza for the freedom march meant to remember the one year anniversary since the Israeli assault, leaving Hamas to take over all the civil society demonstration within Gaza, but the damage to Egypt’s image was complete as it got accused of perpetuating the siege of Gaza.

As things were still all heated up, British MP George Galloway arrived with his Viva Palestina convoy in the Egyptian port town of El Arish. Events there unfolded dramatically, with police and activists clashing violently as Galloway was ordered to divert a good part of the convoy through Israel, which he refused.

“It is completely unconscionable that 25 per cent of our convoy should go to Israel and never arrive in Gaza. Because nothing that ever goes to Israel, ever arrives in Gaza,” the maverick British legislator said.

In the clashes, one Egyptian soldier was killed by a Palestinian in a cross-border shoot-out. Galloway was eventually allowed to enter Gaza for 48 hours with his convoy on Wednesday. He was deported from Egypt soon after he got out of Gaza on Friday morning and banned from ever returning.

Hamas is meanwhile further embarrassing Egypt in rejecting its reconciliation efforts with Fatah. Cairo must be losing its patience, and cutting down the smuggling route seems to be its first offensive on Gaza. Still, many Gazans believe Egypt is indeed generous with them and that Mubarak’s regime needs to take care of its own internal security.

“If they wanted to cut smuggling, they could blow up all the tunnels in one day,” is the common response to the question about Egypt’s intentions.

Meanwhile ordinary people in Gaza speak of a ‘double occupation’. Besides the Israeli one, they are now under Hamas, which just like Fatah in the West Bank, arrest their opponents, torture dissidents and ban political events held by Fatah, such as the anniversary of Fatah’s anniversary on 1 January.

As things stand, Hamas stands to lose a lot in the forthcoming scenarios. It lacks legitimacy, which it craves for, and its mandate in government will expire by the end of this month. At the same time, its security forces, Izz Ad Din Al Qassam Brigades and exiled political leadership stand to lose everything if they had to agree to a power-sharing agreement with Fatah.

With the Shalit deal put yet again on the backburner and the new round of rocket launches, all the border crossings with Israel have been closed, leaving the tunnels as the only umbilical cord feeding the 1.5 million residents of the Gaza Strip. If that is cut off too, the unthinkable may happen.

One year after the war, Gaza struggling to survive

2009-12-26T17:39:00.001+01:00

A stone’s throw away from the Israeli border in Shajaiya, a group of young men are rummaging among the steel and concrete that remains of the Sarayo Biscuits Factory.

Hasan Ahmed Al Awadi, who worked here as a watchman, now sits looking at the rubble. He is using part of the former offices to raise some poultry.

“I can’t give you biscuits but I have some chickens,” he tells me smiling.

A year ago, Israeli tanks and fighter planes reduced the factory to rubble, leaving 50 workers jobless and Hasan’s colleague dead.

Further down the road, Al Wafa Hospital has just managed to get a consignment of cement and glass smuggled from the tunnels to be able to repair the extensive damage to the new state of the art four-storey building for rehabilitation and the elderly.

“We had a totally new building that was meant to be inaugurated in January 2009,” says the head of rehabilitation, Dr Kamees Al Issi. “The Israelis inaugurated it for us. Not one window pane was left intact.”

Facing the hospital is the Gaza juice factory. The cold store was totally burnt down and most of the equipment destroyed. The factory now employs half of the 100 workers it had before the war, and they are manually capping and labelling bottles through new equipment they managed to get through the tunnels.

In Zeitoun, Sameh Sawafiri had a poultry farm of 30,000 chickens providing most of Gaza’s supply of eggs. Israeli soldiers flattened them all in their cages. Now he has managed to reopen with one-third of the chickens had a year ago, and a lot of debts.

The owners of El Bader Flour Mill in Beit Lahiya were not so lucky. Israeli planes targeted the central nerve of the mill, leaving it totally out of action.

“Since the war we had to stop completely,” says Hamdan Hamada who still pays 25 of the 85 workers in the hope they will be able to resume work soon. “We need iron, cement and equipment, but Israel is not allowing us to get anything. We are waiting for a political decision from Israel to get the material to reconstruct our flourmill. So far we only got promises.”

A year since the war on Gaza, most of the coastal strip is still at a standstill, waiting for a political decision from Israel, and for pressure from the rest of the world, for the blockade to be lifted. Billions of dollars pledged for reconstruction remain out of reach, making reconstruction and recovery impossible.

Driving through the streets of Gaza, the rubble is still everywhere, with many of the bombed buildings still standing like skeletons, memorials of destruction. In some parts, the rubble has started being cleared in the last weeks, but Israel’s and Egypt’s ban on construction material makes it impossible to rebuild the 3,535 homes that were totally destroyed last January.

Mohammed Zaid Hader’s family from Izbet Abed Rabbo is one of around 1,000 still living in tents. It is their second winter facing the cold and the rain. Left totally impoverished since his four-storey house was destroyed, he has become one of the 80% of Gazans dependent on humanitarian aid.

Beyond reconstruction, thousands of lives have been destroyed with the death and suffering of relatives, friends and neighbours.

Nawer Thabet from Juhor Ad Dik lost her mother and only sister when their house was shelled. One year on, she is still in trauma, recounting, in tears, how she is unable to go back to the house where her mother always welcomed her.

“I remember this tragedy everyday, I can’t get it out of my mind. I still can’t go back to our house in Johr Al Deek, I can’t face it,” she says.

Everyone says they were used to attacks from the Israeli army, but this was something else altogether. The attacks were coming from everywhere, leaving nowhere to escape as people were forbidden to leave the Gaza Strip to seek refuge far from the conflict zone. “Nowhere is safe” could not ring truer than during what the Israelis called ‘Operation Cast Lead’.

Children are perhaps paying the highest price. The war taught them that not even their homes were safe, and not even their parents could protect them.

Ahmed Hdeir, father of six from Beit Lahiya, told his children the war was just a computer game.

“But when they hit our house I couldn’t keep up that story,” he says. They still suffer from nightmares and he takes them to psychologists for counselling every week.

In the last Eid at the end of November, thousands of children were playing in the streets with toy guns. Gazan psychiatrists are concerned about the widespread trauma and further radicalisation they are inevitably faced with. When everything is lost, the only glorious way seems that of the martyr.

While the bombs were falling all over Gaza, Abdul Salam from Beit Lahiya spent his time sleeping, even when his neighbourhood was fiercely bombarded.

“Everyone was exposed, so there’s no place to hide, nowhere to go,” he says “You can do nothing. You wait for a bomb to fall from the sky, to destroy your house. You just have to empty your mind, relax, and whatever happens, let it happen. I would sleep all day long. Even my wife was surprised. She used to ask me ‘Don’t you hear the bombs and the shooting?’ But what can I do?”

Gazans are known for their resilience and creative ways of getting by against all odds, but they are paying a very high price. Even before the war, the blockade was collectively punishing an entire population, leaving scars that will take decades to heal.

Young people are dying to get out, to travel and see the world, but they know they cannot plan a trip abroad. In fact, they can plan nothing at all. In Gaza, everything is inshallah (God-willing).

A whole generation of children has never been out of Gaza. Unlike their parents, most of whom used to work in Israel and have Jewish friends, the only Israelis they have seen were armed soldiers keen on destroying their houses and killing their relatives.

Now, the Egyptian government is reportedly erecting yet another wall in Rafah – an iron barrier meant to stop tunnel smuggling. Tunnels are the only lifeline left for Gazans, and in their creative resourcefulness they might also find way around this latest obstacle. The question is, for how long will they be forced to live like this?

A lonely Christmas in Gaza

2009-12-19T17:47:00.000+01:00

In Bethlehem, a Christian carpenter sells little nativity cribs with Mary and Joseph carved behind the Israeli wall and the three wise men caught on the other side of the wall, unable to cross over to visit Jesus.

Whoever visits Bethlehem knows perfectly how the Israeli separation wall surrounds Jesus’s birthplace today, cutting it off from nearby communities and restricting Palestinians’ movements.

Twenty-two year old Berlanty Azzam, a Palestinian Christian, will this year be added to the thousands of Palestinians denied entry into Bethlehem, after she was expelled from the West Bank last October.

Azzam, from Gaza, had been studying for a business degree at Bethlehem University for the last four years. Just two months away from her graduation, she went on a short trip to Ramallah for a job interview. On her way back, she was arrested, handcuffed and blindfolded at an Israeli checkpoint, and deported to Gaza.

Her crime, according to an Israeli court that upheld her deportation, was to have lived in the West Bank illegally. Even though she is Palestinian, Gazans are not allowed to live there.

The ban on travel for all Gazans becomes even harder for the 3,000 Christians during Christmas. Separated from Bethlehem by a few kilometres, Jesus’s birthplace has never seemed so distant for them.

For the last three years, since Hamas took over Gaza, all men from Gaza aged under 35 were completely banned from travelling for Christmas. Last year, only 150 were allowed to travel. This year, there has been no news of any permits for Gazans yet.

It’s a hard Christmas this year – Christmas day is just two days before the first anniversary of the 22-day attack by Israeli forces on Gaza. Some of those who were in Bethlehem last year ended up caught out during the war.

“They went to Bethlehem for a few days and ended up caught there for a month; some of them run out of money,” Kamel Ayyad, a public relations officer at the Archbishop’s office by the 1,600 year-old Church of St Porphyry in Gaza City, said. “Some of them came back to find their houses damaged.”

The Christians of Gaza may be the least heard of all Palestinians. Numbering just 3,000, with the overwhelming majority of them belonging to the Orthodox rite (who celebrate Christmas on 7 January), their numbers keep dwindling as they tend to be typically middle class families in search of better opportunities. In 2006, 71 fled to the West Bank after a Christian was killed. Ayyad believes up to 40% of Christians would leave if the border had to open.

Mousa Al Bayouk, 17, from the Christian quarter in Gaza City, is studying to enter university. At his age, it will take him another two decades before he will get a permit to visit Bethlehem. He is not afraid of another war.

“We’re used to the war, what do you want me to be afraid of?”

But he would like to leave Gaza for a future abroad.

“I would like to study abroad, in Greece, to become a mechanical engineer. I wouldn’t want to return,” he says. He then adds, almost apologetically: “If the situation was good I wouldn’t want to leave.”
Shadi Suheil Abu Daoud, a teacher of history at the Christian Latin Patriarch school in Gaza, does not believe Christians will leave Gaza and the West Bank.

“We have always been here, we are Arabs, Palestinians, part of this nation,” he says. “Christians have been part of the Palestinian national movement,” he says, referring among others to the famous leftist founder of the PFLP, George Habash.

“I don’t like it when Palestinians leave our land. This is our country, we have to build our future,” he adds.
At the Christian school where he teaches, only 30 out of 382 children are Christian. Yet the school is also testament to the overall mutual respect that exists between Christians and Muslims in Gaza.

“Here you can find our church just next to a mosque,” Ayyad, who says his best friends are Muslims, says. “We welcome each other in our homes, we eat together. That’s how it has always been. We are all Palestinians, we are all suffering.”

The occasional incidents between the two communities are largely isolated attacks by extremist Islamist groups, or Salafists, which are at odds even with Hamas.

“Some Salafists try to create problems, because they know neither Christianity nor Islam,” Ayyad said.
Reflecting other Christians’ views, Shadi says Hamas brought order and security to the Gaza Strip.
“We feel protected,” he said. “The only problems we had were with some terrorists coming through the tunnels from Egypt who wanted to turn everyone into a Muslim. Their inspiration is Bin Laden and they are a problem even for Hamas here.”

Meanwhile, as pilgrims from around the world flock to Bethlehem and the rest of the Holy Land for Christmas and all year round, Christians in Gaza feel they are forgotten by their brethren.

“People go to visit Bethlehem, Jerusalem, Nazareth, but they hardly think of us,” Ayyad said. “All we want from them is to pray for us. We are in Jesus’s land and we are suffering, today.”

“We ask the foreign tourists and pilgrims to demand an end to the occupation, and to pray for us,” Shadi said.

‘We built Israel and all we got was destruction’

2009-12-06T17:58:00.003+01:00

Almost a year since his three-storey house in northern Gaza was destroyed, Mohammed Zaid Hader is still living in a tent in the shadow of what remains of his former house, and his outlook is only bound to get grimmer.

It will be the second cold winter that he will have to face with his wife and eight daughters, because like the rest of the owners of more than 3,500 homes that were totally destroyed in Israel’s last offensive, he cannot get the material to rebuild it. For Mohammed and his family, the two-year blockade on Gaza has made daily life miserable, leaving them vulnerable and desperate for the most basic necessities.

As I approach his tent in we pass through makeshift canals dug desperately in the sand on the night when Gaza got its first torrential rain of this winter.

“We were totally flooded, we couldn’t keep up with the water. I kept digging to divert as much water as I could, but it was impossible, he says as he braces himself for worse yet to come.

The sense of hopelessness here, where an entire neighbourhood made up of hundreds of houses was razed to the ground last January, is as overwhelming as the scale of destruction.

For Mohammed, the irony could not be more poignant. As a former builder who used to work in Israel, he worked with Israeli employers on construction sites to build their own properties.

“We built Israel with our Jewish friends, and look at what they did to our houses,” he said. “Why did they have to bomb our houses like this?”

Israel’s two-year blockade since Hamas took over control of Gaza means that none of the essential reconstruction material can come into the strip – from cement and tiles to plastic pipes and glass. Demand in Gaza for window glass alone would cover 30 football fields with glass.

Mohammed is now unemployed. Like thousands of others, he was stopped from working in Israel in response to the 2000 Intifada. This year, he worked for a few months in a smuggling tunnel until it collapsed, leaving him injured and fearing for his life

He told me it took him four years to build his house. The little financial help he received after it was destroyed disappeared quickly to pay old debts. Now he is penniless even if there was material available to rebuild it. Across Gaza more than a hundred other families face the same situation, living in tents that were too hot in summer and are now unfit for the cold winter weather.

As we speak, bulldozers are removing most of the rubble, although Mohammed is still using the remains of his house to shelter a water tank and some poultry. He does not know where he will put them once the area is cleared.

Amid the rubble, Mohammed has collected dozens of tiles that he salvaged and that once used to pave the floors of his house. They may be priceless in Gaza given the total blockade, but he has no house to put them in and no idea when he will have.

Waiting for Shalit ... and a thousand other prisoners

2009-11-28T15:49:00.001+01:00

Known for their black humour, Palestinians in Gaza joke openly about Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit, who has been in captivity in the besieged strip since June 2006.

Young and old quip they have seen the Israeli sergeant directing traffic at a Gaza junction as a Hamas policeman.

“He’s in my basement,” a young graduate from Gaza City said, recounting how Israelis regularly bombard Gaza with SMSes and leaflets dropped from fighter planes with messages urging Palestinians to give any information about Shalit’s whereabouts for a US$ 2 million reward.

Another one told me that if Hamas were smart they would marry him to a Gazan woman, or maybe to four.

“That way he will have children and we would have much more captives to bargain with,” he said.

Palestinians themselves recognise the absurdity of the situation. Since Shalit was captured in an audacious cross-border raid more than three years ago, he has become a world celebrity, known in the four corners of the world as the young Israeli who was “kidnapped” by Islamist fighters.

Never mind that he was actually captured during a military operation, but the fact that there are thousands of faceless and nameless Palestinian prisoners in Israeli jails shows just how unbalanced the whole equation between Israel and Palestinians is.

The last week has seen a total frenzy of conflicting reports about the negotiations between Israel and Hamas that would lead to Shalit’s swap with 1,000 Palestinian prisoners.

Many Gazans speak of the period “before Shalit” and “after Shalit”, to contrast the times before and after the blockade imposed by Israel on Gaza. Many people resent the abduction, blaming it for the hardships that ensued, crippling their daily lives.

Mahmoud Abu Hamza, 47 from Jabalya refugee camp, contrasts “the miserable life today” with the time when he worked as a construction worker in Israel, although in reality he and many other Gazans were stopped from working there after the 2000 intifada, years before Hamas took over.

Yet Abu Hamza and many others who do not see eye to eye with Hamas look forward to the prospect of getting 1,000 Palestinians freed from Israeli jails, just as last October the Islamist movement won a great victory through the release of 20 Palestinian women from prison for a mere three minutes of video footage of the same Shalit. Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza were reminded that Hamas’s approach – that of the armed struggle – in contrast with that of Mahmoud Abbas, was ultimately yielding results.

Indeed, if the swap does happen – with the latest reports suggesting it might happen on Monday – Hamas will come out as the victorious force to be reckoned with. In spite of the blockade and international boycott of this movement labelled as terrorist by the US and the EU, Israel will give the ultimate testimonial that Hamas have to be on the negotiating table, not out in the cold, where they actually got stronger.

Gazans hope the release of Shalit will also bring about the lifting of the crippling blockade – although nothing is given – but by all accounts Hamas will score the greatest points on the Arab street.

The agreement will also have wide political repercussions for Palestinians, especially if jailed Fatah official Marwan Barghouti – currently serving five life sentences for masterminding attacks in Israel – is released.

Many hail Barghouti as the next Palestinian leader, although senior Fatah officials are not particularly fond of him. Nevertheless, Mahmoud Abbas’s decision not to stand for re-election next year will make it much easier for him. Barghouti’s warm relationship with Hamas may also help to thaw relations between the Islamist rulers of Gaza and Fatah.

In any case, Fatah, Israel and the rest of the world will have to come to terms with the fact that despite years of blockade, wars and assassinations of its leaders, the Islamists are not only here to stay, but they are scoring points with their own people.

Gaza facing gas crisis

2009-11-21T14:22:00.000+01:00

“In two days’ time, I won’t have any bread to sell,” Abed the baker tells me grimly as he hands me over my dozen pitta breads. “There is no gas at all.”

Like other bakeries before it in the last few days, Al Hasouna Bakery will have to close down if cooking gas remains out of reach in the besieged Gaza Strip.

Restaurants, hospitals and families are already feeling the shortage, most of them having run out of reserves just as the weather got colder. Many fear that while food will be available, families will not be able to cook it for the Muslim holy feast of Eid Al Adha at the end of the month.

The problem started about a month ago when Israeli authorities decided to change the crossing through which they transfer gas and fuel into Gaza.

While the Nahal Oz fuel terminal is tailor-made for gas and fuel transfer, taking 30 minutes to send fuel from one truck to the other side, the Kerem Shalom crossing takes up to three hours to get the same amount transferred.

The latter is situated in the middle of the desert, an hour away from Gaza’s gas depots as opposed to the 20-minute drive to reach Nahal Oz, and has no storage facilities. This means that while fuel in Nahal Oz can be transferred into the six existing containers holding 60,000 litres each, in Kerem Shalom the transfer has to go directly into Palestinian trucks in tricky manoeuvres requiring timely coordination. Israeli authorities justify the use of Kerem Shalom on security grounds.

“Kerem Shalom is not equipped to transfer the amount of gas needed daily in the Gaza Strip,” the head of the Gaza union of gas station owners, Mahmoud Al Shawwa, said. Last Monday, 30 gas stations were closed after only 49 tons of cooking gas entered Gaza, that is 2% of the weekly need.

Over the last two months, gas entering Gaza fell down from 2,500 tons in September to 1,600 in October and a meagre 400 tons until mid November.

According to Al Shawwa, the 1.5 million population of Gaza needs 4,500 tons of gas per month in summer, and 6,000 tons in winter.

The situation is similar to November and December last year, when a serious shortage of cooking gas caused bakeries to shut down in the run up to the Israeli assault on Gaza.

Now, the little gas that makes it through is being kept for bakeries and hospitals, although Abed’s bakery still didn’t get its share last week and hospitals anticipate running out of gas in the next few days. A falafel shop owner using his last gas canister says he will soon have to resort to diesel, which is pumped inside canisters to produce vapour like in the old times.

“Diesel is terrible, it turns my kitchen black, but what can we do?” said Abu Bashir. “We are left with no other option.” The solution however is not available to bakers, whose equipment is made to run on gas.

Some families who have the luxury of a garden or backyard have already shifted to cooking on firewood, like in the old times. Problem is, everything in Gaza is like ‘in the old times’, thanks to the Israeli blockade. Instead of gas-guzzling vans, people in Gaza use donkeys; in the absence of concrete, people are building with mud.

At my flat I keep a kerosene lamp in the living room, not as a rustic decoration, but because I have to light it almost every night during power cuts.

Shqaqi still mobilises thousands in Gaza

2009-10-31T23:42:00.001+01:00

From the roof of an abandoned five-storey building behind the massive stage, the view of thousands of Islamic Jihad supporters – around 40,000 – gathered in Khatiba Square in central Gaza City after Friday prayers was impressive.

Fourteen years since the assassination of their founding leader, Fathi Shqaqi, in Malta, this marginal yet fiery Islamist movement is still mobilising the masses in one way or another, vowing revenge on Israel and its annihilation while steadfastly refusing to engage in Palestinian elections and any negotiations for peace.

On the ground, young men covered from their heads in white sheets – the so-called martyrs-in-waiting who would be sent for the next suicide missions – marched over the Israeli flag while hundreds of others wore mock suicide bombers’ vests and carried plastic rockets, and others still burnt the Israeli and American flags.

A masked gunman standing on top of the building, clearly happy to be photographed, posed with his Kalashnikov for the picture.

“Where are you from?” he asked me.

In all my life, that question never seemed as risky as today. Many Palestinians have a vague idea of Malta as a peaceful and lovely island, but for any Jihadist, it is the place where Shqaqi became a “martyr”.

The faceless militant made the connection immediately, but luckily he also seemed convinced Malta was just a victim of what many believe to have been an Israeli Secret Service (Mossad) operation carried clandestinely on its shores.

The bearded doctor from Gaza born to a refugee family had founded the movement in 1979, inspired by the Islamic revolution in Iran. He was previously active in the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood but left disappointed because of the movement’s belief back then that the Islamic world had to be unified to liberate Palestine.

Opposing secular Arab governments and declaring a holy war on Israel, Shqaqi is believed to be the first Palestinian to justify suicide attacks as part of an armed guerrilla struggle against Israel – distinguishing between prohibited suicide and martyrdom.

Arrested twice by Israel in the 1980s for subversive activities and subsequently deported to Lebanon and then to Syria, Shqaqi secured funding and solidified alliances outside the Palestinian territories with radical Shi’ite movements in Iran, Lebanon’s Hizballah and Damascus, which remain to this day.

In 1994, just a year before he was gunned down in Tas-Sliema, he was a key player in a coalition of factions rejecting Palestinian President Yasser Arafat’s signing of the Oslo Accords and the ensuing peace deal with Israel, embarking on a series of suicide attacks on Israeli military and civilian targets. Months before his assassination, Shqaqi’s organisation claimed responsibility for a suicide attack on a bus stop near Tel Aviv that killed more than 20 people.

On 26 October 1995, Shqaqi arrived in Malta by ferry from Libya using a fake Libyan passport in the name of Ibrahim Ali Shawesh, after reportedly meeting Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi.

Hours after landing, a man accompanied by a driver on a foreign-registered motorcycle – both wearing helmets – stopped him outside the Diplomat Hotel, where Shqaqi had booked a room, and shot him several times from point blank range in front of shocked onlookers and traffic. The hit man and the driver are believed to have escaped from Malta shortly afterwards on a speed boat.

The assassination sparked furious protests outside the Maltese embassy in Tripoli and a dramatic downturn in relations with Libya, which for some months suspended the ferry service with Malta – at the time its only link with the rest of the world.

Carried out under former Police Commissioner George Grech, the murder was never solved. The Maltese government never named anyone, nor did Israel ever comment on the case, but then foreign minister Guido de Marco had said “we would not accept any settling of scores in our country.”

For years after Shqaqi’s assassination, the Palestinian Islamic Jihad carried out several other terrorist attacks with its leadership based in Damascus. The US government lists it as a foreign terrorist organisation committed to suicide bombings against the state of Israel.

Despite their seemingly similar goals, Islamic Jihad is nowadays at loggerheads with Hamas, which currently rules the Gaza Strip. Unlike Hamas, which is far bigger and runs schools, hospitals and social services, Islamic Jihad has no social or political programme and is close to the Shi’ite Iranian regime and Lebanon’s Hizballah movement.

The movement still uses the same fiery rhetoric as its founding father’s, although in the last years it has been unable to carry out attacks in Israel. Yet Friday’s rally showed Shqaqi’s movement is still alive and its intentions remain as militant as when it was founded.

“Death to Israel,” the masses chanted in reply to one of the leaders’ calls from the podium. “Muhammad’s army will be back to wipe off the Jewish state.”

Art under blockade

2009-10-24T18:24:00.002+02:00

Dozens of people are flocking to a modest house recently converted into an art studio by a handful of young artists from Gaza. The streets in central Gaza City are dark after the latest power cut, but generators serve to light up the exhibition space, making it possible to see the works of art.

The lights also expose the poor quality of some of the photo prints.

"It's impossible to find good printers in the Gaza Strip," says artist Bassel Al Maqoussi, who had to make do with inferior prints of his works to be able to exhibit them here. "There is no professional equipment to print high quality photos, so we have to manage with what we can."

Under blockade, even art here suffers from the same problems faced by every other sector. Paint and raw material is scarce, of low quality and very expensive.

"We depend on material coming through the tunnels from Egypt," says another artist, Sharif Sarhan. "Sometimes we have to ask anyone coming from Israel or Jerusalem or Ramallah to bring us material with them. I have some friends working with UNRWA, but not everyone is so lucky. No artist here can live on art, so we all have to have another job. There are no materials here, and no good places to hold exhibitions; maybe three spaces in all of Gaza."

Even the de facto Hamas government of Gaza does not help much. The Islamist movement is, at best, indifferent to anything that is not immediately religious or political within its own agenda.

"I have no work or cooperation with the ministry of culture, no contact," says Sarhan, who has participated in numerous exhibitions abroad in the past. "We don’t really have problems with them. Government is not interested in art. Maybe they organise different activities falling under culture, but not art. We’re not on the same wavelength... maybe even seeing women coming for this exhibition won’t please them."

The occasion for tonight's event is meant to mark the opening of an exhibition called 'Tribute to Jerusalem'. Yet in the besieged and impoverished Gaza Strip, an art exhibition is also a statement that the people here are alive and daring to dream.

Organised by Windows from Gaza, a collective of Gazan artists working to promote contemporary modern art, the exhibition pays homage to the holy city that is completely forbidden to Gazans and the vast majority of Palestinians.

Sarhan last visited Jerusalem 16 years ago. What he misses most are the little, ordinary details of life in Jerusalem. Like having tea with friends on a pavement, walking in the labyrinthine cobbled streets, or buying a souvenir.

“We can’t move out of here, definitely not to go to Jerusalem,” Sarhan says. “Our idea behind the exhibition is to say ‘hello, I’m here’ to Jerusalem. It’s our way to tell Jerusalem that it’s still in our hearts, that we’re thinking of it all the time.”

Al Maqoussi last visited Jerusalem in 2007, before the civil war between Fatah and Hamas and the ensuing blockade. But even on that occasion, he could only see the Old City from the outside.

“I was with my friends at the gates of Jerusalem, at Damascus Gate, and we were prevented from entering by Israeli police, specifically because we are from Gaza,” he says. “I couldn’t even take a photo of the Old City. We could only see Jerusalem from outside the fortress walls.”

Another artist from Gaza exhibiting her works is Maha Daya, whose colourful landscapes with domed buildings and arched doorways give one a glimpse of her dream of Jerusalem. Her last visit to Jerusalem was in 1996, and she is well aware of the ongoing changes happening under Israeli occupation.

"If I had to go there again I’m sure I’d find that a lot has changed. It’s not just the landscape and the buildings, but also the people – there are much fewer Palestinians living there now.”

A peace prize without peace

2009-10-19T01:32:00.000+02:00

When Barack Obama was declared the Nobel peace prize winner last week, perhaps nobody could take the news as a joke more than the Palestinians. After decades of hearing words and promises about a peace that never materialised, Palestinians watched the US president getting the world's most prestigious peace award without having accomplished anything to deserve it.

Palestinians have already seen another Nobel Peace Prize awarded to Middle Eastern players with no ensuing peace, but at least when Yasser Arafat, Shimon Perez and Yitzhak Rabin received the prize jointly in 1994, Israel and Palestinians had just signed the Oslo Accords – a source of much criticism from Palestinian intellectuals but also inspiring much needed hope at the time.

Obama got his Nobel just as his grip on the situation in the Middle East was slipping spectacularly, not to mention the hopelessness in Iraq and Afghanistan. Israel refuses to commit to a settlement freeze while the Palestinian President, Mahmoud Abbas, has been left on his own to fight hopelessly for his survival.

Just as the Nobel prize was being announced, the US administration was pushing Abbas into a corner by forcing him to abandon the UN human rights report on the Gaza war, a move that exposed him to intense rage among his own people and forced him into a full U-turn in a couple of days.

The UN report, which is based on a fact-finding mission headed by the South African Jewish judge Richard Goldstone, documents cases upon cases of war crimes and possible crimes against humanity committed by Israel last January. It also accuses Hamas of war crimes for the thousands of rockets it launched into Israel and calls for International Criminal Court proceedings against individuals on both sides unless Israel and Hamas investigate the accusations thoroughly.

In pressing Abbas not to endorse the Goldstone report, the US administration put him in an impossible position without giving him anything in return. His own people were calling him a traitor, and in Gaza some Palestinians were throwing their shoes at photos of their president during Hamas rallies. In an ironic twist, Hamas has fully endorsed the Goldstone report even if it means that its own fighters might be summoned at The Hague as war criminals. Eventually, Abbas pushed forward the report at the UN Human Rights Council, but the damage was irreversible.

The US administration's stand against the UN report echoes Israel's rhetoric that there can be no peace process as long as Israeli army generals and officers can be charged as war criminals. But failure to pursue justice and accountability for Israel's disproportionate offensive that left up to 1,400 Palestinians dead and thousands of houses demolished will also keep peace as elusive as ever.

Goldstone – respected by human rights movements but much reviled by Israel – accepts Israel's premise for attacking Gaza, but denounces the type and extent of force used by Israel to "defend itself". In other words, Goldstone accepts that one is entitled to attack his neighbour in self-defence, but that does not give one a right to destroy the entire neighbourhood.

In opposing the UN report, Obama, together with all the countries that voted against it, is not only denying Palestinians' right for justice, but he is also weakening Abbas to the point of leaving him utterly powerless, both internally and as a party for peace. Added to that, the Obama administration is also undermining Egypt's attempts at reconciling Hamas and Fatah – itself a Herculean task – by stating that it would not recognise national unity that would pave the way for general and presidential elections, except on its own terms.

A Fatah memo leaked last week spoke of Palestinians' hopes in Obama having "evaporated". Some may think that is premature, just nine months since Obama took office. Hopefully it's as premature as his prize.

Hamas’s PR coup

2009-10-12T19:43:00.003+02:00

Hamas is not new to coups, but on 2 October the Islamist Movement staged a bloodless one when for less than three minutes of footage of the captured Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit it got 20 female prisoners released from Israeli jails.

Not only was the footage acceptable for Israelis, which found in it all the signals they needed of Shalit’s good health and lucidity, but it scored highest marks on the Arab street as Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza were reminded that Hamas’s approach – that of the armed struggle – in contrast with that of Mahmoud Abbas, was ultimately yielding results.

It was not just a great PR victory for the de facto government in Gaza, but it did it with a sense of magnanimity too. Only two out of the released 20 prisoners were from Gaza, and Hamas was the least represented among the former detainees. By all accounts, Hamas came out with flying colours as busloads of people swarmed in Gaza and Ramallah to greet their “sisters” while Shalit’s footage was being handed over to Israel.

“These are all our sisters, this is all good,” said Mahmoud Abu Hamza, 47, from Jabalia camp who works as a caretaker in a Gaza City motel and who does not normally see eye to eye with Hamas. “Hopefully this will lead to an agreement on Shalit and to the lifting of the siege.”

Known for their black humour, Gazans have turned the Shalit ordeal into a joke, with the young and old quipping they have seen the Israeli corporal directing traffic at a Gaza junction as a Hamas policemen.

“He’s in my basement,” said Majed Abusalama, a young graduate from Gaza City, recounting how Israelis regularly bombard Gaza with SMSes and leaflets dropped from fighter planes with messages urging Palestinians to give any information about Shalit’s whereabouts for a US$ 2 million reward.

Abu Hamza’s generation speaks of the period “before Shalit” and “after Shalit”, to contrast the times before and after the blockade imposed by Israel on Gaza. Many people resent the abduction, blaming it for the hardships that ensued, crippling their daily lives.

Abu Hamza contrasts “the miserable life today” with the time when he worked as a construction worker in Israel, although in reality he and many other Gazans were stopped from working there after the 2000 intifada, years before Hamas took over.

Hamas’s popularity was dealt a further blow after Israel’s 22-day war on Gaza last winter, when an estimated 1,400 Palestinians were killed and thousands of houses were destroyed in Operation Cast Lead.

“After the war people said there is no resistance,” said Sami Ajrami, an independent political analyst from Gaza.

Today, an estimated 85 per cent of Gazans survive on humanitarian aid. The UN agency helping Palestinian refugees (UNRWA) says abject poverty has tripled this year to 300,000, that is one in five residents out of the estimated 1.5 million in Gaza. UNRWA’s head in Gaza John Ging links poverty directly to the border blockade, calling it a “man-made disaster” and “a predictable consequence”.

A survey carried out in Gaza and the West Bank last April by Birzeit University found Fatah’s popularity rising, with 31 percent of respondents saying they would vote for it against 17 percent favouring Hamas. Significantly, Fatah enjoyed more support in the Gaza Strip than in the West Bank.

But the deal Hamas just struck with Israel, with the mediation of German and Egyptian interlocutors, gave it a great boost of credibility among the people living in the besieged strip.

“The Shalit deal is great for Hamas’s popularity because it shows that there is, effectively, a connection between resistance and political reward,” Ajrami said. “It is an investment because Palestinian elections will arrive after reconciliation between Fatah and Hamas.”

On the day of the prisoners’ release, images of a beaming Ismael Haniye – the deposed Hamas prime minister in Gaza – hit the TV screens and the next day’s front pages.

“We will keep our promise to liberate all the male and female Palestinian prisoners,” he said.

Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas and Fatah members could only watch in embarrassing silence as the news unfolded. A Fatah official admitted to Israeli newspaper Haaretz that “the only way to bring the release of prisoners is through force. We have already learned that negotiations with you Israelis do not bring results” – a clear sign of exasperation at Fatah's exclusive resort to largely unfruitful negotiations with Israel and abandonment of armed resistance.

“All Israel wanted was to see that Shalit was OK and to make Hamas feel responsible for his life. Hamas proved that, and in so doing it showed it was in total control of the situation,” Ajrami said.

The deal proved once and for all that Shalit, as is the security situation inside Gaza, is under Hamas’s total control, through its Izzadin Al Qassam military wing. It dispelled any questions there may have been that Hamas was held hostage by any faction, particularly the armed Jaish al Islam (Army of Islam) which was involved in Shalit's capture in the cross-border raid.

Headed by Mumtaz Daghmash, Jaish Al Islam and the Daghmash clan had held Hamas hostage through its series of kidnappings of foreigners, the most famous among them being BBC correspondent Alan Johnston. But ever since Hamas secured Johnston’s release after four months in captivity in July 2007, it has cracked down on all the warring factions, killing most of the Daghmesh clan militants and establishing its own version of law and order across the strip.

“Mumtaz is out of the picture. He’s been out of it since the end of 2007. Jaish is finished,” Ajrami said.

The fact that Hamas fulfilled the Shalit video deal’s requirements sent a signal that it was in control within the strip, as opposed to Abbas’s disintegrating political capital in the West Bank.

Abbas in freefall

Just as Hamas was still savouring its moment, Abbas headed straight into a minefield when news broke out he had deferred to next March the endorsement of Richard Goldstone’s report on the UN Human Rights Council, shortly after he was visited by the US Consul-General.

While Hamas was initially hostile to the Goldstone report (named after the head of the UN Fact Finding Mission which besides accusing Israel of committing possible war crimes in the 22-day assault also blames the militant movement for firing rockets) the leadership was quick to turn Goldstone into a gold mine as Abbas came under fire from all sides. If Shalit was Hamas’s winning card in the last week, Abbas gave it another victory with the unlikely name of Goldstone – a South African Jewish judge with a daughter living in Israel.

By requesting the postponement of the Goldstone report discussion, Abbas sealed his reputation as a “traitor” to his own people – a charge never fired from as many quarters at the beleaguered president at once.

Mahmoud Zahar, the number one Hamas political leader in Gaza, went as far as saying Abbas should be “stripped of his Palestinian citizenship” for this “act of treason” during an emergency meeting of the Gaza Strip’s legislative council last Monday.

But beyond Hamas and the usual opponents, the extent of Abbas’s crisis could be glimpsed from the range of harsh critics from within his own constituency and independent organisations.

The PA’s minister for the economy, Bassem Khoury, reportedly resigned in protest from the Cabinet (he gave a ‘no comment’ when asked after official Palestinian agencies reported the news). Speaking on condition of anonymity, other Fatah members have called for Abbas's resignation.

Reputable human rights organisations teamed up to issue an unequivocal condemnation against the Palestinian Authority leadership.

“This deferral denies the Palestinian peoples’ right to an effective judicial remedy and the equal protection of the law,” a statement signed by 16 Palestinian NGOs said. “It represents the triumph of politics over human rights. It is an insult to all victims and a rejection of their rights.”

The media war against Abbas in Gaza and the West Bank was relentless.

“Right now there is a media war against the Palestinian National Authority,” Ajrami notes. “They can see Abbas getting weaker day after day. He had no justification to throw the Goldstone report out of the window.”

Overwhelmed by accusations from all fronts, including a wave of mass demonstrations in the West Bank and Gaza, Abbas on Monday launched an “investigation” into “the circumstances” that led to the postponement of the Goldstone report’s endorsement.

In reality, the circumstances were all too transparent. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu made it clear that any endorsement of the Goldstone report would stall any hopes of resuming the peace process, with the Obama administration paraphrasing the veiled threat into stating that peace talks, not finger-pointing, was the priority. The pressure, or “intense diplomacy”, was too much for Abbas. While the US administration denies exerting pressure, Obama administration spokesman Ian Kelly on Monday said: “I think that we recognized that we had serious concerns with the recommendations and some of the allegations (in the Goldstone report). … We appreciate the seriousness with which the Palestinians approach this very, very difficult issue, and we respect this decision to defer discussion of the report to a later date” to remain focused on re-establishing the peace process.

Soon after that round of praise from the US administration, in what could only be described as a U-turn, Abbas’s right hand man and chief negotiator, Saeb Erekat, announced Tuesday that the Palestinian president was “seriously considering” taking the Goldstone report directly to the UN Security Council and admitted the original decision was a mistake. The news was immediately followed up by Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi through his request to the United Nations Security council to discuss the findings of the report, but the damage for Abbas was irreversible.

By Wednesday, posters of Abbas with his face crossed out amid images of victims of the Gaza war were posted all over Gaza, as Hamas was calling on people to throw their shoes at photos of their president. The caption to the posters read: “Destined for the garbage of history, Mahmoud Abbas”.

“Abbas is paying a high price for his decision on the Goldstone report,” Ajrami said. “He is now trying to cover up for his blunder, but nothing short of a big and quick response from Israel and the Obama administration will get him out of this, in the form of starting peace negotiations and Israel’s recognition of 1968 borders for a Palestinian state. But Israel will remain keen on undermining Abbas.”

Proof of that, Ajrami says, is the timing of another sinister and serious charge that Abbas is blackmailed by Israel – an allegation first touted by Hamas media attributing it to unnamed “sources in Washington”, then picked up by the Israeli press claiming that Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman had video or audio evidence exposing the Fatah leadership of complicity in the war on Gaza.

According to the version reported by Israeli daily Yediot Ahronot and in turn picked up and distributed by Hamas media, Lieberman is in possession of tapes in which Tayeb Abd Al Rahim – secretary general of the Palestinian presidency – can be heard in a telephone call with the Israeli Army Chief of Staff during the assault on Gaza, allegedly imploring him to strike at refugee camps.

“This is the time to enter refugee camps in Jabalia and on the beach,” Abd Al Rahim allegedly says in the phone call. “The fall of the two camps will lead to the end of the authority of the Islamic movement in Gaza and force them to raise the white flag.”

According to unnamed sources upon which both the Israeli newspaper and the Hamas media agree, the Army Chief of Staff, Gabi Ahskenazi, replied that “such a step would lead to the demise of a lot of civilian casualties”, to which Ab Al Rahim allegedly replied: “They elected Hamas ... they chose their own destiny, not us”.

Even if that may sound far-fetched, the damage is done and it serves only to consolidate Abbas’s image as “Israel’s best collaborator”, and not just among Palestinian hardliners.

Abbas’s close cooperation with Israeli forces under the leadership of US Lt. General Keith Dayton brings smirks on the faces of many Palestinians. While they acknowledge that the PA’s security forces – funded, trained and armed by the US – have imposed law and order in the West Bank, they also decry what they call “doing the dirty work for the occupation” – a phrase coined by Hamas that is gaining currency in the Palestinian street in the face of arrests, torture and killing of armed militias and fighters who refuse to surrender their arms.

“Ultimately the PA forces in the West Bank are subservient to the higher forces of the occupiers,” said a Palestinian involved in the US training programme for the forces loyal to Abbas. “In exchange, Israel is relaxing on some outposts and minor checkpoints, but whenever the Israeli army launches a raid in the West Bank, it merely informs Palestinian security forces, with the latter standing by the side.”

Just a few days before Abbas’s decision that shocked all Palestinians, Israeli newspapers were reporting of Israel’s request to drop the war crimes suit in exchange for a mobile telephony frequency that would enable a second operator, Wataniya, under heavy investment from the PA, to launch its mobile phone service in the West Bank and Gaza.

“That was not the reason for dropping endorsement to the Goldstone report, but it just made Abbas appear more ridiculous,” Ajrami said.

Reconciliation on paper

The blow to Abbas’s image also comes just days ahead of the date set by Cairo for a final agreement on national reconciliation between Fatah, Hamas and the rest of the factions.

In the ongoing war of words, Hamas is threatening to delay the agreement meeting on 26 October, citing “Abbas’s act of betrayal” in deferring the endorsement of the Goldstone report.

“The people won't have mercy on us if we reconcile with those who failed to protect the nation’s rights,” said Senior Hamas leader Salah Bardawil at a session of the Gaza parliament.

In spite of the incitement, many believe Hamas will still attend the grandiose ceremony being prepared by Egypt for the signing of the official agreement after months of discords. A Hamas insider said the movement will argue its problem is with Abbas, not with Fatah, in justifying its decision.

“Hamas has taken the decision to go to Cairo,” he said. “They will sign it.”

The agreement will pave the way for the formation of an interim unity government until new elections are held, possibly by next March. In turn, Hamas – considered a terrorist movement by the US and the EU – will expect an easing of the blockade that has crippled the entire Gaza Strip.

“Hamas wants to avoid the elections, but it is also aware that at present it has no recognition whatsoever, not from the international community and not even from the Arab countries,” Ajrami said. “So they are trapped and that’s why they will sign the Egypt paper, in the hope of relaxing some of the pressures on Gaza. I doubt the agreement will be implemented, but they will sign it.”

Despite its expected signature on paper, Hamas opposes two main points written on the Cairo paper: letting Abbas’s forces take back control of Gaza, and letting Abbas himself rule the Gaza Strip by stopping the Haniye government.

“They will do anything to prevent that,” Ajrami said.

Should Hamas renege on its agreement and Abbas push forward with his forces, Gaza could easily see a repeat of the 2007 bloody civil war when Hamas routed forces loyal to Abbas and seized the strip.

A third intifada?

As if that were not enough, tensions are also escalating dramatically between Muslims and Israel in Jerusalem. Controlled by Israel since the annexation of Jerusalem in the 1967 Six-Day War, the old city remains a flash-point between the two sides. For Muslims, it is home to Al Aqsa Mosque – considered the third holiest site in Islam – and Al Haram Al Sharif – the Noble Sanctuary. For Jews, it is home to Temple Mount and the Western Wall.

At the end of September 2000 it was the stage for the second Intifada, also known as the Al Aqsa Intifada, when Ariel Sharon set foot inside Temple Mount sparking the bloody uprisings lasting years and that left an estimated 5,500 Palestinians and 1,000 Israelis killed.

The last weeks’ clashes, coinciding to the day with the ninth anniversary of that unholy visit, lifted the lid on the buried tensions that remain. Dozens have been injured in the riots that saw Palestinians clashing with thousands of police deployed in the city, amid exhortations that Israel was planning to “take over Jerusalem and Judaize it.”

During a mass rally organised by Hamas and televised live on its TV station, Al Aqsa channel, one of the Hamas leaders in Gaza called for the resumption of suicide bombings in Israel in response to the clashes.

“I long to see bus ceilings blowing up in the sky,” Mohammad Abu Askar said in his speech, calling on Abbas to free prisoners from Palestinian jails and allow them “to continue bombing buses and restaurants” in Israel.

But it is not just the hardline Islamists who are calling for an uprising. Talk of “the third Intifada” in the offing also came from Fatah and all the other Palestinian factions. Erekat charged Israel with “lighting matches in the hope of sparking a fire, deliberately escalating tensions in occupied East Jerusalem”. Yet Fatah and the Palestinian National Authority are also suffering a deadly blow as they prove they are unable to follow their words with action. Some believe they are not even interested.

“There will not be a third intifada,” Ajrami said. “People in the West Bank are tired and exasperated after years of struggle that led only to worsening conditions. But also because the PNA won’t allow it as it would destroy everything with Obama. No intifada will happen now because even the other Palestinian factions are not interested in a third intifada. They won’t follow words with action. Israel is interested in the third intifada, because it only stands to gain from anything that would stall peace talks.”

Yet the spontaneous nature of the previous intifadas should prompt observers to also look at the peripheries. In the last days, as the secular Palestinian leadership in Ramallah watched helplessly, a charismatic sheikh who heads the northern branch of the Islamist Movement in Israel has been mobilizing opposition in the city. On Tuesday, Israeli police arrested Sheikh Ra’ed Salah after he had called for Muslims to go to Haram Al Sharif to protest and prevent right-wing Jewish groups from entering the site. Although he was released after four hours, a Jerusalem judge banned him from entering the city for a month, but his influence in the street is bound to keep cutting across political movements and mobilizing thousands.

Meanwhile in Gaza, ordinary Palestinians fear that Israel may launch another war on the strip following a recent upswing in rocket fire towards Sderot and the Western Negev. The rockets left no victims, but Israel has already responded with intensive shelling in Jabalia and along the coast. At least seven tunnel workers were killed by Israeli bombings last week in Rafah, and three Islamic Jihad militants believed to be preparing a rocket attack were killed in a targeted attack from an Israeli helicopter.

“Our only hope is that there is a change in the political situation,” said Said Wahid from Zeitoun, father of six-month-old baby Nancy killed in the war after inhaling large amounts of white phosphorus when Israeli troops shelled the border village. “I don’t even want to think of the possibility of another war. We would have nowhere to go.”

Over the last months, Hamas has been reining in on factions shooting Qassam rockets towards Israel after a career launching such assaults itself, but some fringe Salafist movements have still managed to shoot their home-made rockets.

“Hamas is against the rockets but it also wants to show that resistance is good for the people, and that they are still the militant resistance,” Ajrami said. Netanyahu, he believes, will do anything to stall any movement towards the next step demanded by the US – a settlement freeze and negotiations about Jerusalem. “That may also include new military strikes soon on Gaza”.

Be it the third intifada or a new war on Gaza, what is sure is that both sides have their finger on the trigger.

(Published on Russian Newsweek, № 42 (261), 12 - 18 October 2009)

Sanaa's unfinished house

2009-10-10T11:53:00.001+02:00

Opening the door to her house, Sanaa El Nahhal warns me there is still a lot of work to be done before it can be called a home. The dust on the unfinished floor, the glassless windows and the bare cement make it immediately clear that the house is still under construction. But in reality it isn’t.

“It would take a few more months’ work to finish, but we can’t find the material to continue,” Sanaa tells me as we walk through room after room left incomplete for years.

Like thousands of other unfinished houses in the Gaza Strip, Sanaa’s was caught in the period when Hamas took over control of the territory in 2007. The ensuing blockade by Israel and Egypt meant that all construction material, including cement, tiles and even glass panes, were banned from entering the strip.

Israel cites “security” reasons to justify the siege in place since the Islamist movement took control of the Gaza Strip.

Yet the siege has made the lives of 1.5 million Palestinians living here miserable, 85 per cent of whom survive on humanitarian aid, and with the number of abject poor tripling since Israel’s war on Gaza last January. Indeed, after the war, the number of houses in need of reconstruction increased by thousands, but none of the works could start as the crippling blockade remains in place.

Sanaa, who has been living in Malta for the last 20 years, was planning to build her own family house in Rafah a few years ago, where the rest of the El Nahhal extended family lives.

Even her brother, Samir, who was in Malta after the war, has an unfinished house nearby, waiting for the moment when tiles, cement and paint are back on the market.

“Right now it’s very hard to find anything, or else it’s very expensive,” he said. He was lucky enough to have finished the ground floor, where he lives with his wife, son and two daughters, but the stairs lead to empty, unfinished rooms.

Their father’s fields on the border with Egypt lie abandoned, an olive grove surviving on its own.

“We used to grow fruit and vegetables and sell them in Israel, and they would even be exported as products of Israel at a high price,” Samir says. “But now we can’t get them out of the strip.”

The price their produce would fetch today in Gaza has gone down to one-tenth of what it was a few years ago, forcing them to abandon agriculture completely.

“My father still comes here to look at the trees and to water them, but there is no work to be done,” Samir said. “I told him if it were up to me, I would have already sold the land, but he insists this is family land and that we have to hold on to it.”

In a nearby field, Sanaa’s cousin Khaled El Nahhal is still growing some tomatoes and marrows, although most of his fields are empty. He also laments the fall in work and shows me damaged greenhouses that cannot be repaired.

Sanaa is now waiting for the Rafah border to open to be able to return to Malta after visiting her family.

“We have been planning to come back here and resettle in Gaza,” she says about her husband and two children living in Malta as we walk away from the area. “But not now.”

Two weeks in Gaza

2009-10-03T02:30:00.004+02:00

Walking down the main street of Gaza City this week, I realised how quickly I had adapted to the overwhelming destruction as the new setting for everyday life.

Two weeks since my arrival here, I have begun to appreciate that this is the backdrop to which Palestinians, young and old, in the besieged Gaza Strip have learned to somehow get on with life.

In a place where street names change according to who is giving you directions, the only reliable way to get to your location is to ask for landmarks. Parliament, for example, is the landmark everyone refers to for central Gaza City.

However, there now remains only the skeleton of the once imposing Parliament building after it was bombed by Israeli forces last January. Al Jundi Square – the Square of the Unknown Soldier – just in front of the Parliament, still has the pedestal of the former monument, but there is no soldier above it. Yet ask any taxi driver to drive you to Al Jundi and that is where he will take you.

Nine months since the 22-day assault, none of the reconstruction has started as construction material and equipment remains banned from entering the strip.

That is why you find modern blocks of apartments without windows, others only half-finished, and others belonging to luckier owners who repair tiles and windows with different styles and colours according to what is available.

Generators outside shops and offices are part of the street furniture. The electricity goes out so frequently that mobile generators are just left outside on the pavements to keep business moving. Sometimes you only realise there is no electricity because of the sound of generators.

All desktop computers in offices are equipped with UPS (battery back-ups) just so their users don’t have to restart between every blackout and the starting of the generators.

Watching TV is also a different experience. As spy drones and surveillance planes fly above Gaza’s air space, satellite signals get scrambled giving you pixellated pictures or leaving you without sound for a long stretch of time. No TV movie can be enjoyed in Gaza without these exasperating surprises, which also become normal after a few days.

Gaza is one of the oldest cities in the world, yet there is little evidence today of the different civilisations that have passed through it. Indeed, Gaza is a place of extremes. Resistant to almost every occupier that tried to seize it, the many wars and battles have repeatedly leveled Gaza’s buildings, which then had to be rebuilt from scratch.

People may greet you with open arms, some just happy to have a foreigner to speak to, some glad to have someone to practice their English with, others amused that a non-Arab speaks their language. Like Hamada, the total stranger I stopped in the street to ask where I could buy a top-up card for my mobile. He took me by the hand and accompanied me to the shop, made sure I got the card I wanted, noted down my number and called me later just to check my mobile was working and to say hello.

But people may also greet you with suspicion verging on paranoia. I catch a lot of people staring at me, asking each other who I am and what I am doing in their city as they assume I don’t understand them.

The total blockade has meant that only a handful of foreigners make it into the Gaza Strip, mostly UN workers. In contrast with older generations who used to work in Israel, a whole generation of children is growing up having never met a foreigner, further strengthening the siege mentality. The only Israelis they have seen in their lives are soldiers keen on destroying their homes and killing their parents.

Billboards everywhere rarely show adverts, but the absolute majority of them show pictures of Palestinian “martyrs” carrying machine guns or RPGs; the only role models left for a society that seems to have nothing left to lose. Children beneath them play with their toy guns, mimicking their heroes.

Only last Thursday, the United Nations agency helping Palestinian refugees revealed that the number of Gazans living in “abject poverty” had tripled to 300,000 this year, or one in five residents. The agency’s chief, John Ging, did not mince his words: it was a “man-made crisis”, he said.

But he depicted the extent of the crisis best during a meeting with foreign activists a few days earlier. “If you have no reason to live, you will seek a glorious death,” he said.

That too may risk becoming all too normal in Gaza.

Inside Gaza's tunnels

2009-09-27T00:11:00.001+02:00

We are driven through a maze of dimly-lit tents in the dead of night on a bumpy dirt road in Rafah, south of Gaza.

The trip came unexpectedly while accompanied by Ahmed, a top Hamas official and former Qassam Brigades militant after a visit to his boss close to the area.

“Would you like to see the tunnels?” he asked casually as we were driving.

It was, of course, an offer that could not be refused. While everybody knows where the tunnels are here on the border with Egypt, getting inside them is something else altogether.

Bombed regularly by Israel – which argues they are used to smuggle in weapons – the tunnels under Hamas control are the only lifeline for Gazans living in the besieged strip through which all the goods, food and even cars cut into pieces are smuggled for the 1.5 million people caught here.

Egyptian operators at the other end are violently hunted down by the bordering regime, and thousands of Palestinians working inside them risk their lives daily as the tunnels cave in from the bombings and the unstable ground.

As it would soon turn out, being accompanied by a Hamas guy respected in the strip made all the difference to get inside one of the around 2,000 tunnels dug here.

As the van driver and Ahmed accosted workers in one of the tents, an intense negotiation with the owners proved negative – they would not let us in.

We drive further down the road and zig-zag through some other tents until we stop at what looks like a dead end. This time the workers seem more open to the suggestion. Ahmed returns to the van.

“Come, we can go in,” he said. “And it’s OK to take pictures.”

A handful of workers greet us inside the tent. A brand new motorbike smuggled from Egypt is parked at the entrance. To the left lies a mattress where a watchman stays when the tunnel is unused. At the end of the tent, an electric motor is connected to a pulley with a long steel cable on top of a platform of sandbags with a hole in the ground around two-metres wide, just enough for a person to pass through. An intercom phone links the workers operating the pulley with those inside the pit and a generator lies nearby in case of a power cut.

A narrow wooden swing tied to the cable hangs over the hole. The motor is switched on so that the swing is lowered enough for me to sit on it on the side of the platform. Once on it, it is slightly raised again and I am suddenly swinging over a 20-metre deep pit. Upon my signal, I start being slowly winched down, sometimes hitting the sides of the pit until I finally reach the bottom. Even though later I see myself smiling in the photos, my temper keeps swinging between nervousness and the adventurous.

Down inside, I have to crouch to start walking into the tunnel lit by light bulbs. For the first few metres, wooden planks cover the fragile top and sides of the tunnel but as it gets narrower, I can touch the earth which brushes off the wall and which so often buries tunnel workers underneath it.

Plastic pipes along the way are intended to deliver milk and oxygen in cases of collapse, but they are not very reassuring.

Metres above me is the fiercely controlled “no-man’s land” – a corridor of land patrolled by Israeli forces which cuts off the Gaza Strip from the rest of the world.

A dozen or so blue plastic tanks on the floor with their top sides cut open are connected to another cable at the entry into the tunnel. They are used to ferry the goods from the other side. Indeed, all of the Coca Cola cans in Gaza bear the scratches left after being dragged around 800 metres from Egypt.

The air is damp and I am sweating profusely. The tunnel gets even narrower and more claustrophobic as I am forced to crawl on my knees to keep on going until I decide to turn back.

Back on the swing, I shout to the men above to start winching me up again, until I’m back on the ground, I can breathe the fresh air and it feels much safer. The workers kindly offer us tea and we chat for a while as machine gun bursts can be heard from the other side of the border – probably Egyptian forces chasing the tunnel workers’ colleagues.

As we sip our last drop of tea, Ahmed sums it all up in one sentence.

“We work with death to be able to live.”