Rafah Notes

Death by Degrees

2006-03-24T08:15:00.000-05:00

photo: Mohammed Omer
Amneh Abdelal and her son waited in line for hours at the Al Kholi Bakery in Gaza City.

Mohammed's report on the food shortages in Gaza also appears in Norwegian in Morgenbladet today.

Death by Degrees
by Mohammed Omer
reporting from the Gaza Strip, Occupied Palestine

It was a sunny spring day in Deir Al Balah, a town in northern Gaza, a lovely day to be outdoors, but Yakoub Rabah, driving his donkey cart down the street, was distracted, troubled, and not in the mood for conversation. He stopped the cart frequently, gathering any bit of scrap lumber or fallen tree branches he could find into his cart.

Asked why he was gathering wood, he said, "The Israelis keep closing the border at Karni," as if that were all the explanation any fellow Gazan could possibly need. But, he was reminded, the border was open today. "Yes," said Rabah, "but for how long? Over the weekend there was no bread, and it opened Monday—but only for half an hour. Then they said it would be open today, and maybe it is, but even if some food gets into Gaza, the Israelis can close it again whenever they want. Right now, my family is running low on cooking gas for the stove. The price on propane cylinders has been rising steadily. Any day now, we'll run out and I'm afraid we won't be able to find any more. Propane has to come through Karni too—everything does! If we have firewood, we can still cook."

Of course, Mr. Rabah agreed that food to cook was in dangerously short supply, and he feared the coming days would only be worse. "I know they say some flour is coming into Gaza, but will it be enough? My family ran out of flour and we stopped baking bread some time ago. We switched to rice and macaroni, but they've become very expensive and hard to find. So now my wife and seven family members are rationing—we use only a tiny bit of sugar in tea now. We're stretching the tea we have to make it last. Our challenge now is whether we survive this or give up and die."

The same rationing Mr. Rabah was practicing in his home has been adopted by bakery owners throughout Gaza. Last weekend, bakeries were using the last of their emergency stocks of flour as people lined up for hours. One small woman asked persistently for "Five shekels worth of bread, please! Five shekels worth! Please!" but there was more resignation than urgency in her voice. She was being jostled in a long line of would-be customers, most of them men, at the Al Kholi Bakery in Gaza City. Amneh Abdelal, a housewife of 37 from the beach refugee camp, braved the crowds herself with her youngest child, a toddler just starting to walk, since her husband, crippled in the Intifada, is housebound.

"I used the last of our flour yesterday," she explained. "None of the grocers have any flour at all, so I've been here in line for hours now." But whether she would be one of the fortunate few to get any bread before the bakery was forced to close was an open question.

In a press conference Tuesday, UNRWA's director of operations for Gaza, John Ging, warned that the opening of the Karni Commercial crossing Monday and Tuesday had done little to relieve the severe food shortages. On Monday, the crossing was shut down after half an hour as Israeli authorities cited a "security threat." Mr. Ging said that on Tuesday, he visited the crossing, and although twenty trucks of flour indeed entered Gaza from Israel, Karni was only operating at 10% capacity, and Israel had specified that this opening was only "temporary." Since the start of 2006, the crossing, which is the only import/export hub into the Gaza Strip, has been closed nearly 50 days. Throughout Gaza, flour mills and bakeries normally keep an emergency inventory of 30 to 60 days' supply on hand, but for weeks, have been forced to use that stock. With the emergency supplies exhausted last weekend, the World Food Program and UNRWA's normal food distribution program, on which 735,000 Gazan refugees depend, has come to a complete halt. The limited deliveries of flour have done little to ease the situation. Many restaurants and bakeries have closed, while the few that are open ration the amount each customer can buy, hoping to serve as many as possible before closing again.

Exports have ground to a standstill during the prolonged closures, and Gaza's agricultural sector has been especially hard-hit as farmers have watched their trucks loaded with strawberries, vegetables and cut flowers, slated for export to markets in Europe, rot in the sun as they waited, sometimes for days, at the closed Karni Commercial Crossing. The loss to the Gaza economy has been estimated at between US$500,000 and $600,000 per day.

Gaza's health care system has also been crippled by the border closures, as vital drugs, infant formula, and medical supplies remain stuck in Israel. Hospitals and clinics throughout Gaza normally keep emergency supplies, but those are running dangerously low. Anesthetic drugs are so scarce that all elective surgery has been canceled. Supplies of chemotherapy drugs, antibiotics, and kidney dialysis solutions are near to exhausted, creating life-threatening emergencies for those patients. "We have no idea how to deal with patients," said one doctor at Gaza City's Al Shifa hospital. "We see dozens of them every day, and can do nothing for them because we have no supplies. Right now, I am a surgeon who cannot do surgery."

The international community has begun to pressure Israel to relieve the impending humanitarian disaster in Gaza. In a surprising but welcome move, the American Ambassador to Tel Aviv hosted a Sunday evening meeting at his home for representatives of Israel, Palestine, the EU and the UN, and the temporary opening of Karni was the result. Israel is pressing to move import/export operations to the much smaller Kerem Shalom crossing in south Gaza, while the Palestinians are working toward a permanent re-opening of Karni.

While international law says an occupying power is responsible for the welfare of the civilian population in occupied territories, Jerusalem-based Israeli-Arab Druze lawyer, Usama Halabi, explained that some might argue that Israel's withdrawal of ground troops from Gaza last September relieved them of that responsibility. "However," said Mr. Halabi, "Israel controls the airspace, the seacoast, and all imports and exports, so they are still an occupying power and responsible for the food shortages. In my opinion, closing the border is simply a way for the Olmert government to put pressure on the newly-elected Hamas government, to try to ensure their failure before they even officially take power. But starving over a million civilians can never be the right way to solve political differences."

It is not an exaggeration to speak of impending starvation among a population where 40% of the children are already malnourished. When asked if the Israeli government is truly willing to let the elderly, the ill, the pregnant women and the children of Gaza literally die of starvation, Mr. Halabi replied, "I don't think this policy will get wide support from Israeli citizens, but I think the government itself is perfectly willing to see Palestinians starve."

Mr. Halabi's opinion is widely echoed among Gaza's citizens. Abu Kamal, a man of 51 from Jebalya said, "Israel always boasts that it's the only democracy in the Middle East. Well, we had a fair and completely democratic election in January, and by democratically choosing Hamas, starvation is our reward. That's how much the Israeli government respects democracy!"

The Tel Aviv government has been insisting this extended border closure and the resulting impending famine in Gaza is purely due to security concerns. "There is no security problem here," said Hassan El Wali, a security official on the Palestinian side of Karni. "The Israelis told us that the crossing point would be open for several days but we are not really sure about that," Wali said, and accused the Israelis of dreaming up security problems as a tool against the Palestinians. On Tuesday, an Israeli official confirmed to the Associated Press that the Karni closure was in part to send a message to Hamas, although he also said the security threats were real. He insisted on anonymity because he was not authorized to speak to the media.

The Rafah border crossing between Egypt and Gaza, presently set up only for travelers and their personal effects and run by Palestine, Egypt and EU monitors, offers a bit of hope for the future. Egypt has offered to send trucks of flour into Gaza at once, but are still waiting on the Egyptian side for clearance to cross. A delegation of Rafah children demonstrated at the Rafah Terminal with signs asking the EU to pressure Israel to reopen the Karni crossing permanently. The European observers received the children and their official letter to the European Union. The demonstration took place around mid-day and as the EU monitors were served their lunch, they chose to forego their meal and give their box lunches to the Rafah children as a gesture of solidarity and good will.

International law speaks of the illegality of "collective punishment," but it is easy to lose sight of the individual children, grandparents, and pregnant women, the mothers, fathers, and babies behind the verbiage, the statistics, and graphs. Language quickly becomes inadequate. How exactly do we parse out the nuances of starvation? Should we call it a "crisis" now when hungry people are lining up outside bakeries throughout Gaza? Should we save the term "disaster" for the day when Gazans die of starvation? These fine points of reporting probably matter little to Mrs. Abdelal and hundreds of thousands like her who, if not Saturday night, then last Sunday, had to explain to her little boy why he had to go to bed hungry.

The Dangerous Game

2006-03-11T10:04:00.000-05:00

This appeared in Norwegian in Morgenbladet yesterday. Mohammed's article on impending food shortages in Gaza was already at the printer when the Israeli authorities permitted a one-way opening of the Karni crossing for part of March 9 and 10 to allow trucks of food into Gaza. Gazan farmers trying to export their crops still got no relief, and the Israeli announcement of a total closure for the Purim holiday means food imports will once again be interrupted. With Gaza's stocks of basic staples close to depleted, two-days of normal imports followed by more closures means the Israeli government is still playing a dangerous game with the welfare of Gaza's civilians.

The Dangerous Game
by Mohammed Omer
reporting from the Gaza Strip, Occupied Palestine

Karni Crossing, in the pre-dawn chill, is a ghostly landscape of hundreds of trucks lined up in the hope that the Israeli inspectors just might open the border today. Majed Al Hissi, has been here over a full day and breaks up the monotony by pacing around his truck full of fresh, boxed strawberries, his season's harvest. Around him in line, other farmers are driving trucks full of vegetables, fruit, and fresh flowers. Or, in any event, they were fresh when they joined the line over 24 hours ago.

"Why won't they let us export our crops?" Al Hissi asks. "Another full day in the sun and these strawberries won't be salable. The other farmers in line here have the same problem—produce can't wait forever to get to market. I'm afraid all of Gaza's farmers will lose a whole season's income."

Small farmers have always been inured to the vagaries of nature—months of work can be wiped out by a sudden storm right before harvest. It's harder to be philosophical when the disaster is imposed by the Israeli occupation. Gaza's strawberry farmers have always found an eager market in Europe, but this year they are watching their crops rot while they wait for Gaza's main commercial crossing to be re-opened. In years past, the market gardens of the Israeli settlements earned the Israeli farmers millions in exports. Now, Palestinian economic officials say Gaza's entire agricultural industry is on the verge of collapse. Just in 2006, Gazan farmers and exporters have lost US$68 million (EU57 million.)

A US-brokered deal last November specified that the crossing would be kept open unless there was an "immediate" security threat. But the Israeli Army's prolonged closure of the Karni Crossing is one of Israel's punishments of the Palestinian people for electing a Hamas-dominated Parliament late in January. The Israeli government immediately declared a number of sanctions on the Palestinian Authority, and closed the commercial crossing for "security reasons." Karni was closed for 3 weeks between January 15 and February 5, and then again on February 21after a mysterious explosion in the area. It has remained closed ever since, with Israeli stating "continued security alerts" as the reason.

The Karni crossing is also the main entry point for Gaza's imports of food, medicine, and other staples. The shortages are becoming severe, with prices of sugar and flour now 40% above normal. The UN announced that inventories of wheat, sugar and cooking oil were dangerously low now and could be depleted in a matter of days.

Stocks of wheat flour for bread, Gaza's main staple, are close to exhausted now, and most of the Gaza Strip will experience food shortages unless truckloads of wheat are let in. In Gaza City, Hamdi Al Kholi, owner of Al Kholi Sons Bakery, says he and his seven employees will soon be forced to close their doors. Normally, they turn out thousands of loaves of bread every month, "But when the flour I have is gone, production stops," he said. "Right now, there's no flour to be found anywhere, and if the Karni Crossing remains closed, I won't be able to satisfy the demands of my customers. Bread is the most important and basic food for Palestinians. Years back, we once ran out of wheat for a month and hungry people were lining the streets waiting for bread. I'm hoping we don't see anything so desperate again."

In Deir Al Balah, the Palestinian Flour Mills Company normally supplies about half the total flour production in the Gaza Strip. General Manager Mustafa Shurab explained that their usual daily production is some 250 tons of wheat flour, which supplies 200 to 300 small bakeries. "We're out of wheat now," he explained, then brought out a substantial document. "This is a contract between our company, the UN, and the World Food Program. Over the next four months, we're supposed to deliver 20 thousand tons of flour, which will be distributed as a major part of their food aid program. The way things are now, if Karni remains closed, we'll have to default. There's no possibility to get wheat through other channels—imports get to Gaza through Karni, or not at all. I'll have to close and lay off all 42 employees."

Not only will this be ruinous for his own company, but, says Shurab, "Peace will never come by starving people! Economically, things were actually better when the Israeli settlers were here—the government in Tel Aviv wasn't about to let them go without basic supplies. Now, it seems they just don't care if Palestinians starve. I am hoping fair-minded people in the US and Europe can see this as clearly as we do, and will pressure Israeli to re-open the crossing."

Ordinary Gazans are under as much pressure as food manufacturers. Jalal Nakhla, owner of a supermarket in Gaza City, said his shelves are now empty of many brands of milk, cheese, sugar and flour. While we chatted, one of his customers, Ramzi Saleh, 31, an employee of the Palestinian Authority, bought a single shekel's worth of tea. "It's a small amount," he said, "but we're no longer getting our salaries on time." Israel, who collects taxes and customs duties for the West Bank and Gaza, has been withholding those revenues from the Palestinian Authority—another collective punishment for the election results. Mr. Nakhla shook his head sadly as Saleh left. "Usually he buys tea by the kilo—most people do. With a shekel's worth, he can brew maybe two small pots. Of course, if Karni remains closed, soon there won't be any tea for anyone to buy."

Abu Samer, a 43-year-old schoolteacher from Rafah, echoed the sentiments of many people throughout the Gaza Strip. "Listen," he said, "Israel is playing a very dangerous game now. When you cut off the food supply for over a million people, you leave them no options. People who normally hate violence and never wanted any part of armed resistance will not just watch their children starve. Faced with that kind of certain death, people will prefer to die fighting for their families. There is nothing 'moderate' about starvation, and the Palestinian response won't be moderate either. I don't think Israel understands how strong a reaction food shortages will provoke, but for us, it's as simple as life and death."

Every day that Israel insists on keeping Gaza's basic food and medicine imports choked off, is a day closer to a revolution of the hungry. A revolution of people with nothing left to lose might have disastrous consequences for Palestine, Israel, and even neighboring countries.

Ismail Haniyeh: From Refugee Camp to Prime Minister's Office

2006-03-03T07:19:00.000-05:00

Mohammed's article appears today in Norwegian in Morgenbladet.

Ismail Haniyeh: From Refugee Camp to Prime Minister's Office
by Mohammed Omer
reporting from Gaza City, Occupied Palestine

"Politics," said Shakespeare in The Tempest, "makes strange bedfellows," and few alliances are stranger or more unexpected than those within the present Palestinian government. Last month's elections saw the ruling Fateh Party solidly defeated by the Hamas "change and reform" slate, leaving Palestinian President Abbas of Fateh heading a Hamas-dominated Parliament. Having long branded the Hamas movement as terrorists, Israel and the West are issuing almost predictable threats about refusing to work with a Hamas-led Palestinian Authority. But stranger still, however, is the situation within occupied Palestine where former political prisoners and pariahs now occupy the halls of power with the same men who not so long ago were their jailers. When Hamas's armed wing was mounting military resistance, the Fatah security services, in an effort to appease Israel, frequently arrested and tortured some of the same men who will now lead the Palestinian Legislative Council.

The new Hamas Prime Minister, Ismail Haniyeh, is little known in the West, but has earned huge respect among the people of his native Gaza. While the Fateh leadership rarely moves through Gaza without an armed escort, Haniyeh and other Hamas leaders routinely walk alone through all of Gaza's towns and refugee camps. "Hamas is not corrupt," said Gaza City university student Amal Faud, 23. "I have full confidence in Ismail Haniyeh and the other Hamas leaders." While the Western press has focused on Hamas's Islamist roots and expressed concern they will impose a Taliban-style regime on Palestine, such sentiments are rare among the citizens of Gaza. Al Surani, a secular lawyer from Gaza City, explained that Ismail Haniyeh "listens more than he speaks. He understands the peoples' concerns, and when he does speak, he is tactful and coherent."

Haniyeh's political opponents might take issue with the new Prime Minister's tact. At last Friday's prayers in his neighborhood mosque, Haniyeh announced he was refusing the customary salary of US$4000 a month offered him by the Palestinian Authority. No, he said, he would take only US$1500 a month, the amount he actually needed to support his family. He pointed out that his party had won the election on their pledge to reform the Palestinian Authority where, for instance, a certain PA bureaucrat earned US$200,000 annually. A PA spokesman, Al Taeeb Abdelraheem, immediately issued a press release saying, "Such statements by the new Prime Minister are not appropriate to his office."

Haniyeh, however, seems determined to show Fatah—and the world—a new standard of appropriate behavior. Born in 1963 to a refugee family originally from Al Jouar village, he grew up in Beach Camp, one of the poorest refugee camps in Gaza City. Like the other camp children, he studied in UNRWA schools , then went on to graduate from Islamic University in Gaza City in the Arabic Language department. As an undergraduate, he became active in the Islamic Block, the student wing of the Muslim Brotherhood that would later become Hamas. During his student days, 1983-86, he was often at odds with the Fatah-led student groups. After completing his master's degree, he joined the university faculty, and later became an administrator at Islamic University. He preferred to keep a low profile politically, but was nonetheless jailed four times, and was finally exiled with 400 other Hamas and Islamic Jihad members in December, 1992.

He returned to Gaza and his university post in 1994, and was marked as a terrorist by the Israeli Army. In fact, he worked closely with Hamas's spiritual leader, Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, serving as the wheelchair-bound cleric's office manager and confidential aide. As the second Intifada continued, the Israelis stepped up their program of extra-judicial assassinations, targeting public Hamas figures like Dr. Rantisi and the Sheikh. Haniyeh assumed a public role in the Hamas movement only after the murder of Sheikh Yassin on 21 March, 2004 when the Israelis bombed the elderly man's car as he returned from morning prayers.

In the next two years, Haniyeh became a forceful public speaker, a superb listener—and now, Palestine's Prime Minister. "But Ismail Haniyeh hasn't changed," insists Abu Fadi Al Hasani, a 50-year-old neighbor in the Beach Camp. "He still prays every day in the mosque where we all pray. He respects all the people. Anyone—a child, an elderly person—can talk with him and he will listen." Indeed, Haniyeh and his family of 13 children have never moved from their home in Beach Camp. "I know," said Al Hasani, "he was offered a much bigger, better house outside the camp. And I know he said, 'I'm not going to leave my people, my neighborhood, for something that doesn't belong to me!'"

Despite his blunt style, Haniyeh has a history of opening dialogue with the Fateh factions. His self-deprecating humor also sets him apart from many Palestinian politicians. Back in December, 2003, Sheikh Yassin, Haniyeh, and other Hamas members narrowly escaped an Israeli assassination attempt when the Israeli Air Forced bombed a house where they had been meeting. At a Hamas rally soon after, he explained that when he heard the Israeli helicopters approaching, he ran clumsily down a metal staircase, put his leg through an opening and was momentarily stuck. When they'd all gotten safely away and he told the Sheikh of his mishap, the elderly, crippled imam told him, "Oh, you should have called me! I would have rescued you!"

Although the new Prime Minister has just assumed his office, President Abbas, Israel, and the international community have barraged the new Hamas leadership with a list of conditions—they will recognize and deal with a Hamas-led government only if the new leaders recognize Israel, honor existing agreements made with Israel by the PLO, and renounce violence.

Asked his opinion of these conditions, Haniyeh's response has been consistent and clear: " We are surprised that such conditions are imposed on us. Why don't they direct such conditions and questions to Israel? Has Israel respected their agreements? Israel has bypassed practically all agreements. We say: Let Israel recognize the legitimate rights of the Palestinians first and then we will have a position regarding this. Which Israel should we recognize? The Israel of 1917; the Israel of 1936; the Israel of 1948; the Israel of 1956; or the Israel of 1967? Which borders and which Israel? Israel has to recognize first the Palestinian state and its borders. At least then we will know what we are talking about."

Asked in a phone interview if his government would honor the existing Oslo Accords, Haniyeh replied,
"The Oslo agreements said that a Palestinian state would be established by 1999. Where is this Palestinian state? Has Oslo given the right to Israel to reoccupy the West Bank, to build the wall and expand the settlements, and to Judaize Jerusalem and make it totally Jewish? Has Israel been given the right to disrupt the work on the port and airport in Gaza? Has Oslo given them the right to besiege Gaza and to stop all tax refunds to the Palestinian Authority?"

Of course, there are more questions than answers—questions Israel and the international community do not seem eager to address. Haniyeh won his office on his unblemished reputation and a promise of reform and transparency, but he faces heavy internal and external challenges. Externally, Israel, the US and the EU are threatening an economic siege on Palestine, cutting off development programs and humanitarian aid. Internally, the challenges are almost as severe, as some of his Fatah opponents, whatever their public rhetoric, hope a spectacular Hamas failure will bring a call for new elections and their return to power If Haniyeh, however, can chart an honest, pragmatic course of partnership with the international community, working toward a peaceful solution that preserves Palestinian rights, it will very likely quell much of the political in-fighting. But one of the most pressing and immediate problems is Israel's ongoing military attacks on Gaza and the West Bank. Indeed, Prime Minister Haniyeh faces an ongoing threat he cannot readily neutralize, namely that from the Israeli helicopters and F16s. Israel has announced it will continue its program of extra-judicial assassinations and just a few days ago, Avi Dichter, former head of the Israeli Shin Bet security service, announced the Palestinian Prime Minister is still subject to arrest. So Ismail Haniyeh, democratically elected Parliamentarian, and Palestine's new prime minister, is threatened by Israeli bombs as much as the humblest citizen.

Armed with a Mouse

2006-02-25T11:30:00.000-05:00

Mohammed's report on internet activism originally appeared in the Norwegian weekly Morgenbladet yesterday.

Armed with a Mouse
by Mohammed Omer
reporting from Gaza City, Occupied Palestine

In the furor over the insulting images of the Prophet Mohammed originally printed in a Danish newspaper and reproduced by many Western publications to demonstrate free expression and a free press, the Western media has been quick to lump all Islamic and Arabic protests together—whether peaceful or violent, thoughtful or mindless--in places where history and circumstances are wildly different. Whether the scene is occupied Afghanistan, or the impoverished immigrant housing projects of France, or in the complex society of Pakistan, to the West it is all "the Islamic world." The most inflammatory placards, the most violent and tragic incidents, are splashed on the front pages and lead the TV news while more careful, nuanced commentary is buried in the back pages or gets, at most, a sentence at the end of the TV anchor's report.
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In such a climate, it is hardly surprising that non-violent but highly effective internet activism has barely been mentioned. Instead of noisy street demonstrations, burning flags, and stones hurled through embassy windows, the weapon of choice is the keyboard, the mouse and the economic boycott for these new activists of the Islamic world,.

The most recent campaign of cyber-activists in Palestine, Egypt and other Arab countries, targeted a mysterious anti-Arab, anti-Palestinian video, apparently meant to be a TV commercial, that was widely distributed on the internet. It was, said the Western advertising trade press, an example of "viral marketing," where a TV ad too offensive for mainstream release is leaked to the internet by parties unknown. The manufacturer whose product is involved then has the unhappy task of trying to prove he didn't create the video.

In this case, the target was the German auto manufacturer Volkswagen, and the video, according to one commentator, "was apparently designed to offend as many human beings as possible." The short video shows a Volkwagen Polo pulling up outside a lovely sidewalk café as a young white woman pushing a baby carriage stolls by. Inside the car, there's a closeup of a stereotypical young Arab, wearing a military-style khaki jacket with a Palestinian kuffyiah around his neck. He cradles something that could be a bomb and pushes a mechanism as the view cuts to the exterior. A fireball fills the car, which remains intact despite the explosion, and the "commercial" ends with the declaration that the Volkswagen Polo is "small but tough."

In just a few seconds, the anonymous video-maker branded all Palestinian resistance as terrorism against innocent civilians, and trivialized every aspect of the tragic history of the Palestinian/Israeli conflict. It was bad enough when the video appeared on small websites and was spread through email, but when the massive internet portal and search engine Google.com ran it under the headline "German Engineering against Arab Technology," the immensely powerful Google organization was compounding the offense.

Iman Badawi of Cairo was one of the internet activists who then swung into action. She and other activists had already created a number of Arabic-language websites to gather signatures on petitions protesting Denmark's inflammatory stance. "Of course, the Volkswagen ad was extremely provocative," she explained. "But when Google decided to feature it under such an offensive headline—as if all technology in the Arab world was limited to bomb-making—we sent an email in English to Google's advertising department explaining why we were compelled to protest. I said that as Arabs, we always respected their transparency and inclusive policies promoting a diversity of viewpoints. And although I find the video personally offensive, I would not take action against Google if they had not promoted such an intrinsically offensive headline. The email ended with a request they remove the link within 24 hours. We assured them we would also initiate appropriate protests and boycotts against Volkswagen Polo."

In fact, Volkwagen disavowed any part in the creation or release of the video and declared they would take legal action against those responsible. Google, however, chose to stonewall for three weeks. The Google link was still online; the headline was untouched, and Badwi got only a noncommital reply from Google that it would review the situation in terms of its policies.

"Of course," Badwi explained, "we were also working on boycott campaigns against Danish products. I had asked they remove the link in 24 hours. After 24 days, when nothing changed, I wrote and thanked them for not responding. I told them we would now email all our thousands of website visitors about Google's intransigence, and urge them to boycott Google and consider pulling any sponsored links." To demonstrate this was no empty threat, she attached to the message some of the petitions with tens of thousands of signatures of those pledging to boycott Danish products.

This time, Google's advertising department responded immediately with an apology and assured her the ad and headline indeed contravened Google's policies. "We have deleted it completely from our website," they assured her.

For years now, there have been many Arabic-language websites discussing current events and issues, but the effective use of economic boycotts in the Arab world is relatively new. Internet activists launched a boycott threat against "Ezi Mozo," an Egyptian juice manufacturer whose TV ads on many mid-East channels featured closeups of young women dancing, seductively whispering the product's name and making provocative gestures. The internet activists assured the general director of the company that if such blatantly un-Islamic advertising continued, they would add Ezi Mozo to the list of American and Israeli products already being boycotted. They received an immediate apology and the offensive commercials disappeared.

This new activism is a volunteer, slenderly-funded, but extremely effective use of the power of the internet. In Gaza City, Raja'a Assalia, a university student, spends his spare time and cash in a small internet café organizing boycotts. "I work with a number of groups," he said, "and the internet is an excellent way to make people aware of many issues. Of course, there's the ongoing boycott of Israeli products—we've been working on that for years—but we're also targeting certain Arabic products that degrade Arab and Islamic women. For instance there are Arab-language music videos featuring women who are practically naked. Obviously, we should boycott those record companies till they recover their sanity! We should make it clear many of us won't support products that offend basic standards of decency. We don't believe exploiting women is an acceptable sales technique."

Assalia has multiple windows open on his monitor, reading the latest news from boycott organizers in Saudi Arabia, Syria, Egypt, and Yemen, to name a few. Assalia confirmed no donor or organized group is funding his work. He is simply one of hundreds of volunteers personally known to him in Palestine and abroad who, for the price of an hour in an internet café, can join the effort. With the advent of free and low-cost blogging software, a few minutes, a few typed words, and a few mouse clicks can launch anyone into the border-less world of internet activism.

Choreographed Chaos

2006-01-31T08:14:00.000-05:00

photo: Mohammed Omer
Masked gunmen from several Fatah-linked armed factions protested noisily in Gaza City against the insult offered to Islam by cartoons published in a Danish magazine.

Mohammed Omer filed this special report with Morgenbladet (a Norwegian weekly)a few hours ago.

Choreographed Chaos?
By Mohammed Omer
reporting from Gaza City, Occupied Palestine

Norwegian nationals, heeding s strong request from their government, left the Gaza Strip under the protection of the Palestinian security forces on Monday, 30 January. Over the weekend, the Al Aqsa Martyrs' Brigade, the armed wing of the defeated Fatah party, distributed a leaflet in Gaza City demanding that all Norwegians, Swedes, and Danes leave Gaza within 48 hours, pending an apology from the governments of Denmark and Norway for cartoons insulting the Prophet Mohammed published late in 2005.

The offending cartoons, caricaturing the Prophet as a terrorist, first appeared in Denmark's Jylland Posten and were later republished in one Norwegian magazine. The Danish paper, in the wake of the resulting furor throughout the Islamic world, published an "apology" that made matters worse, saying that they had not meant to insult anyone. Since all visual portrayals of the Prophet Mohammed are strictly forbidden to Muslims, and the disrespect in the images was flagrant, the Danish newspaper's statement, coupled with their government's defense of free expression, only inflamed the situation.

A Fatah spokesman, Abu Qusai, explained his position by saying: "We respect other religions and cultures. It's a must that they should respect ours as well." Asked if their insistence that Danish and Norwegian nationals leave Gaza might have an adverse effect on Palestine, both internally and internationally, he replied, "We don't want these Danes and Norwegians to be harmed. We understand they personally had no part in the insult to the Prophet. But we do hope they'll press their governments to apologize to the Islamic world. Actually, we welcome foreigners as our guests, but basic respect for religion is a red line that no one should cross."

The Al Yasser Brigades, another militant faction linked to the defeated Fatah, demonstrated against the Nordic countries over the weekend, while the Popular Resistance Committee, a third armed militant group, staged a second demonstration in which people trampled the Danish flag and burned Danish and Norwegian flags. "The Danish government doesn’t want to apologize to Muslims for what they did to them," one of the demonstrators said. "We belong to Fatah. We defend our religion. So we ban Danes and Norwegians from entering the Gaza Strip until the Danish government apologizes."

The militant groups, however, constitute about 5000 men among the 1.3 million citizens of Gaza. Ordinary Palestinians expressed quite different views from the fiery rhetoric of the Fatah-linked militants. "When Fatah asks Danes and Norwegians to leave Gaza, that doesn’t mean that all Danes and Norwegians are bad. We understand that. We know the insult to the Prophet was the work of only a few," said one Gaza resident, Umm Wael Salam, 45.

The landslide victory of the Islamist movement Hamas in last week's parliamentary elections is not without its ironies. While one might expect the overtly Islamist Hamas members to be the first to take to the streets to demonstrate against an insult to the Prophet, instead the new ruling party distributed a somber, even statesmanlike, press release demanding that the issue could not and should not be resolved by violence against foreigners. Their statement insisted the resolution had to be a diplomatic one via a formal apology. It is, in fact, the militant wings of the defeated secular Fatah party that are creating disorder over the humiliation offered to Islam. Astute observers are wondering if the real humiliation of interest to Fatah is not disrespect to the Prophet, but the embarrassment Hamas may suffer in the international community if it cannot control the unruly militants. So far, though, the demonstrations against the Nordic oountries have been loud, but brief, with no harm done to any Danish or Norwegian citizens.

The Carnival of Destiny--Palestine Goes to the Polls

2006-01-29T09:47:00.000-05:00

photo:Mohammed Omer
Voters' fingers were dipped in indelible ink to prevent double-voting. Everyone, even those dismayed by Hamas's unexpected landslide victory in the January 25 Parliamentary elections, agreed the election had been honest, orderly, transparent and free of fraud.

Mohammed Omer's election-day report of the final week of campaigning was published in Norwegian in Morgenbladet on Friday, 27 January. Morgenbladet stretched its normal deadlines almost to the breaking point, but Hamas's caution in declaring victory meant Mohammed had to file his copy pre-Thursday night's official speeches

The Carnival of Destiny: Palestine Goes to the Polls
by Mohammed Omer
Reporting from the Gaza Strip, Occupied Palestine

The scene was played out with only small variations through January in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank: the establishment party, Fatah, would race into town in a convoy of limousines with a police escort, sirens blaring. Crowds would gather for a campaign rally, complete with The Candidate's stump speech, before his bodyguards hustled him back to his limo to roar on to the next stop. In case anyone failed to get the message, sound trucks blaring campaign songs and slogans trundled through the streets, often late into the evening. Children found it amusing, while their elders enjoyed or resented their captive-audience status.

The less affluent, but highly disciplined and organized Hamas candidates, were as loud at their rallies, but sent out fewer sound trucks. Branded a "terrorist" group by Israel, the United States, and the EU, the Hamas candidates have run as independents on the Change and Reform slate. Although the resistance group's official charter calls for continuing armed struggle against Israel, they have scrupulously avoided armed attacks since February and their candidates for Parliament have concentrated on local issues, promising a corruption-free government, an end to cronyism, more jobs and civil order.

As campaigning drew to a close this week, polls showed Hamas making impressive gains. Local, Israeli, and international election-watchers predicted a too-close-to-call cliffhanger. The Change and Reform slate might become a strong enough presence in Parliament to demand power-sharing with Fatah. And there were several secularist slates who might win 10% to 15% of the vote. Some expressed fears that a strong showing for Hamas would bring about a "Taliban-style" theocracy, yet Hussam Al Tawil, 40, a Greek Orthodox Christian from Gaza, is running on the Hamas slate. "I'm proud of and loyal to my Christianity," he said, "but these are political issues, and my Church doesn't mind my running with Hamas. I certainly don't have a "Christian speech" and a "Muslim speech"—we are all Palestinians, and we must exercise our right to democracy together and choose the best people." While a few Hamas candidates promise a Quran-governed state, most have said nothing about lifestyle issues like mandatory veils for all women, preferring to concentrate on jobs, civil order and clean government. And all analysts expected a victorious Hamas to seek Cabinet-level posts dealing with domestic matters like Education, Health, and Welfare, letting the Fatah old-guard handle direct negotiations with Israel.

Regardless, Fatah wasn't gaining the lead it sought. So in the waning days of the campaign, Fatah said Hamas would refuse to negotiate with Israel for Palestinians to work in the cross-border "industrial zones." Then, citizens in Gaza and the West Bank saw the edifying sight of the suddenly-humble Candidate walking on his own two imported-leather-shod feet down the narrow alleys of poor neighborhoods. No Mercedes with red government plates, no bodyguards, no police escorts. Just The Candidate, reborn as a man of the people, nodding to one and all, talking with ordinary citizens who normally couldn't hope for a moment of his time. In Rafah, The Candidate passed bullet-riddled homes before reaching his destination, a haircutter's shop, the well-known gathering-place for young men. Smiling, nodding, paying the normal price—no special privileges for The Candidate!--he sat down to have his hair trimmed and give his campaign speech.

photo: Mohammed Omer
The militant factions scrupulously kept their promise of a violence-free election. The same people who had threated violence a week before checked their guns and voted peacefully.

His audience started peppering him with tough, specific questions. Voters 18-25 make up about 30% of the electorate and most of them have been passionately following the campaigns. "Change now!" has been the theme of their demands—as The Candidate learned to his sorrow. He tried to keep his smile intact as he discovered platitudes and slogans were accomplishing nothing with this audience. Their support would be crucial if he hoped to win.

On the other side of Rafah, another Candidate visited the divan—an extended-family gathering place—of one of Gaza's most powerful clans. Again, he came alone, the humble guest, there to persuade the entire family to vote for him. He began to recite his usual campaign promises when a young man interrupted him. Perhaps he was 20, or a bit older, but his black baseball cap and casual dress set him apart from the traditionally-clad elders.

"None of you Fatah men will help us," he declared. "I tried to see you a year ago. I needed your help in solving a simple problem. But I never spoke to you—you were always too busy."

The Candidate started to stammer a reply while his elderly hosts smiled gently. The young man wasn't finished. "The last time I visited your office, your staff told me never to come back. When I phoned, they told me not to call again. So there you are, just a mid-level government manager, but too busy to help a citizen. Of course, you have a nice office, and a staff to get rid of ordinary people. Now, if you become a member of Parliament, you really will be important! You'll have even more office workers to throw me out. So why should I believe you'll help me?"

The Candidate flushed with anger, but said not a word. He stood, bowed his thanks to his hosts, and left. A few feet from the divan's entrance, a bodyguard opened the Mercedes door for him and his driver whisked him away—to that comfortable office, no doubt.

During these last-ditch campaign efforts, the Palestinian police, all 60,000 of them, voted early so they would be free on election day to guard the polling stations. Palestinian citizens who took intensive training to be official election observers voted early as well. The actual voting went smoothly, with 20,000 police guarding the polling places. Voter turnout was enormous, nearly 78% of registered voters. As many voters explained, this was the first Parliamentary election in a decade, and the first ever offering voters a real choice. Hamas and Fatah activists stood silently at the required distance from the polls, showing a sea of flags, green for Hamas and yellow for Fatah. Incidents were few, minor, and quickly resolved. Police in Khan Younis fired in the air as over-eager voters jostled to reach the polling place. In East Jerusalem, two extreme-right Israeli politicians attempted to force their way into a voting station, but 75 police blocked their way. The same armed militants who threatened violence last week checked their rifles with police and voted peacefully.

The shooting didn't start until after the polls closed when Fatah supporters, and even the Palestinian police started firing in the air to celebrate—prematurely—a Fatah victory. Based on several exit polls, Fatah was estimated to have won 63 of 132 Parliamentary seats, or 43%; Hamas had 58 seats, or nearly 40%, while the smaller parties were estimated to have some 11 seats. Hamas, however, refused to claim victory until the official results were announced. President Mahmoud Abbas, whose office was not in question, said a Hamas presence in Parliament meant peace negotiations with Israel would be endorsed by a broad spectrum of Palestinian society while US President Bush restated his refusal to deal with Hamas.

Despite the rhetoric from all parties, when the official results are finally announced, the one thing certain is that Palestine will finally have a multi-party legislature. No matter who is sharing power with whom, and no matter what domestic reforms may be enacted, the war-and-peace issues with Israel will be the unavoidable backdrop.

The Shout Behind the Veil

2006-01-26T01:11:00.000-05:00

Mohammed Omer

VEILED BUT VISIBLE Arwa Umran, 19, wears a traditional full veil at a Hamas campaign rally, but has no hesitation about stating her political opinions.

Norwegian People's Aid commissioned Mohammed to report in-depth on young peoples' involvement in the Palestinian Parliamentary elections. His article below was posted 24 Jan as the lead article on their website. (http://www.npaid.org)

The Shout Behind the Veil
by Mohammed Omer
reporting from the Gaza Strip, Occupied Palestine

"Occupation's bad enough—stop the chaos!"
"Palestinian youth say: stop the violence!"
"Youth demands change now!"

Finally there is something more numerous than bullet holes on the walls of Palestine: political posters. Candidates, slogans, party logos, plus a surprising number of this sudden crop of posters in the Gaza Strip which have been made and put up by student organizations and youth groups. Young people aged 18-25 are 30% of the population in Gaza, the West Bank and East Jerusalem, and are determined to make their voices matter in the 25 January Parliamentary elections. While some posters endorse a specific party, they all have a common theme of "Change—NOW."

Young people in Palestine have faced endless frustration from the paternalistic "old guard" of the Palestinian Authority and its ruling Fatah Party. On many occasions, youth groups petitioned the PNA to allow candidates aged 18-25 to run for the Legislative Council, and were turned down with infuriating diplomacy. "Now, now, children," was the unspoken message, "we know better."

Typical of this unhappy scenario was "Our Voice," a Sharek Youth Forum event in Gaza City funded by Norwegian People's Aid. One of the PNA elders attending was Abdel Aziz Shaheen, a former member of the Legislative Council. When he took questions from the floor, a young man declared, "It's time for some of the older generation of legislators to step aside and make room for our generation in Parliament." Shaheen interrupted him: "That's against the law! Our election law is clear that candidates must be at least 30 years old. And that is actually very progressive. In all the other Arabic states, candidates for office must be at least 40!"

Nonetheless, the election law is also clear that those 18 and over can register to vote. And there are no age limits on campaign volunteers. So in the last two days, the Gaza Strip has been humming with the energy of youth workshops, training sessions, and seminars, all aimed toward training "get out the vote" workers. Indeed, Palestinian young people form the majority of door-to-door "get out the vote" volunteers, some affiliated with non-partisan groups, others working for specific slates of candidates. Fairly equal numbers of young men and women are involved in the effort, the women workers usually adding a full face veil to the usual headscarf to avoid any possible accusations of impropriety.

It is not in the least surprising that young women are fully involved in campaigning. After all, in the past five years of the Intifada, they suffered every bit as much as the young men at the Israeli checkpoints; they were kept from their homes, their schools, their jobs as often as any man. Due to the recent rash of civil disorder in the Gaza Strip, a recent poll showed young voters have an overwhelming interest in local elections. The pollsters cite two reasons: the young people are desperate for positive change, and are unafraid of new situations, including new political parties and brand-new activities like being campaign volunteers.

Some young people will also serve as official election observers. Forty members of the Sharek Youth Forum in Gaza City, aged 18-25, have reported to the Palestinian Centre for Human Rights for intensive training to serve as election observers on January 25.

Moheeb Sharek 24, the director of Sharek Youth Forum in Gaza City, pointed out that this was still only a civil and volunteer role. "They can't be candidates," he said. "The youngest person running is a Hamas candidate 29 years old on the Change and Reform slate. And there's one independent candidate who is 35. So our generation will not actually be in Parliament, despite all our appeals for a change in the election laws."

But the importance of the civil and volunteer role cannot be underestimated. Ali Al Nims, 23, the Public Information Officer for the Central Election Commission in Gaza, pointed out that candidates may succeed or fail based on the youth vote. In the last presidential elections, voters aged 18-25 numbered 153,877 in the West Bank and Gaza, 63, 245 women and 90,632 young men. For this week's elections, however, registered voters 18-25 in the West Bank and Gaza are 216,680. Those 50,000-plus new young voters are certainly planning to turn out at the polls this week.

Iman Hamdi, a student from Al Azhar University in Gaza City said, "It's time for all of us students to give our votes to those who deserve them. We have to let the country know we're here, and are determined to have a say in our future." Asked if she's planning to vote, she said, "Of course! I have to! But I haven't made my mind up. I'm hoping to see some debates between opposing parties, so I can better judge their programs."

Arwa Umran, a woman of 19, is campaigning for the Hamas slate. "Thank God I can finally vote," she said. "I will be voting for the Change and Reform Hamas list. They're not about to give away Palestinian rights. There's certainly no way I'd vote for the old system. They negotiated for years with the Israelis and achieved nothing. Their only gift to the people of Palestine was corruption." Her face was veiled, but the voice behind it was brave and decisive.

Of course, some Palestinian young people have given in to the massive frustrations of life under Occupation and are cynical, if not downright apathetic, about the upcoming elections. But this week, a veritable army of their contemporaries will be knocking on their doors, sending text to their mobile phones, and bringing them a very different message: that their vote counts, and every vote will be counted. For years, the youth of Palestine have proven over and over that they are talented, energetic, idealistic and motivated—and so far, the powers-that-be have failed to respond to all that positive energy. On January 25, however, the young voters of Palestine are hoping to change all that and start building a better future for their homeland.

Hi-Tech Hamas

2006-01-21T09:25:00.000-05:00

ON THE AIR: Fathi Hamad, a Hamas candidate in the upcoming Parliamentary elections, delivers a campaign speech during a test broadcast of Al Aqsa TV, Hamas's new television station.

Mohammed's article on Al Aqsa TV appeared in Norwegian yesterday in Morgenbladet.

"What's happening? Do you see anything? Anything?" Talal Abdelawwad, 54, was shouting from the roof of his home in one of Rafah's refugee camps.

His wife stuck her head out the window to reply. "Nothing clear—try moving it the other way!"

"It" was an antenna for which Abdelawwad had spent US$15 in the hopes of pulling in a clear signal from the new Al Aqsa TV station broadcasting from Gaza City. Hamas, the Palestinian welfare and resistance group, launched limited broadcasting in Gaza on January 8, the first step in establishing a TV network modeled on the Lebanon-based Hizb Allah satellite network. The Al Aqsa station launched its first trial broadcasts just weeks before Palestinians will vote in Parliamentary elections on 25 January, in which Hamas is fielding a large slate of candidates and poses a serious challenge to the ruling Fatah party. The sooner the fledgling TV station completes its technical shakedown cruise and broadcasts a full schedule, the more help it will give the Hamas campaign efforts.

"The transmission tests for Al-Aqsa Television in Gaza began today," said a Hamas official on January 8th, and will offer a limited schedule for up to three months before its official launch. The Palestinian Authority, backed by the ruling Fatah Party, granted a broadcast license to Al Aqsa Television, the first private television station in Gaza. For over a year now, Hamas has run Al Aqsa Voice, one of 10 private radio stations in Gaza. The Palestinian Authority has also enabled Hamas to produce a range of print media and websites.

Right now, the Al Aqsa TV test broadcasts can only be seen in the Gaza Strip. Hamas hopes to upgrade its facilities to broadcast to the West Bank before long, and hopes to produce world-class news coverage, unlike the stodgy "talking heads" so prevalent in much state-sponsored Arab TV. Hamas has also expanded its print media, and their weekly Al Risalah newspaper is now publishing twice-weekly. Naturally, with the election campaign in full swing, Al Risalah has been heavily promoting the Hamas candidates.

Ultimately, they hope for a level of sopistication comparable to Hizb Allah's Al Manar TV, with reporters throughout the Middle East, including Israel, the West Bank and Gaza, covering breaking news on location. When Hizb Allah attacks Israeli targets, Al Manar often broadcasts images of the strike.

Right now, though, Al Aqsa TV trial broadcasts are only an hour a day, 10 to 11 am, mainly speeches by Hamas candidates, news bulletins, memorials to Hamas martyrs like Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, assassinated by Israel in 2004, plus readings from the Koran and patriotic songs.

While Al Aqsa TV will be something new for the citizens of Gaza, the message will be much the same as that on their radio station, Al Aqsa Voice. Its effectiveness can be measured by the fact that the Israeli Army bombed Al Aqsa Voice's broadcast facility. Certainly, Hamas's radio broadcasts have given the Gazan street a new vocabulary. Israeli Defense Minister Mofaz is routinely described as the "terrorism minister," while Ariel Sharon is always identified as a "war criminal," two descriptives other Palestinian media have occasionally adopted Hamas has financed its media operations solely through donations from individual supporters and Islamic organizations, both inside and outside Palestine.

Moheib Nawati, a political analyst based in Gaza City, commented: "Under the democratic principle of freedom of expression, every political party is entitled to have whatever media it wishes to present and promote its programs and viewpoints."

Fathi Hamad, the director of the board of Al Aqsa TV, as well as a candidate in the January parliamentary elections said, "Every free country has a range of media outlets which express unique viewpoints. It's only fitting that the Islamic movement, Hamas, should have a TV station where we can explain our hopes, our Islamic culture, and counter-act the widespread and incorrect stereotyping of struggle and resistance as terrorism. Ultimately, we hope Al Aqsa TV will be a bridge between Hamas and the entire world, so we can have our own voice in the international media. That will be our second phase, after we broadcast throughout Gaza and the West Bank. We know much of the international media have described us as destructive trouble-makers and terrorists, but resistance against occupation is our right under international law. We anticipate that our brothers abroad will have our satellite network broadcasting worldwide sometime in the first half of 2006."

But first things first: after considerable tinkering, the Abdelawwad family in Rafah did see part of the trial broadcast. A modest start, perhaps, for Al Aqsa TV's large ambitions, but then, as the old proverb goes, the longest journey starts with a single step.

The Calculus of Chaos

2006-01-14T23:10:00.000-05:00

Hamas leaders make their anti-civil-disorder position clear at a campaign rally.

Mohammed's latest article was published in Morgenbladet (in Norwegian) yesterday. Here is the original English:

A masked gunman was setting up a roadblock along Salah Al Deen Street, Gaza's main north-south highway. One of his comrades, voice muffled by his mask, leaned close to whisper: "Why here? Why make problems for ordinary people? Shouldn't we be blockading some Ministry in Gaza City?"

"We've done that," said the other. "Now we have to get the citizens to understand we've been begging for jobs and been ignored over and over."

To the motorists trapped far back in the growing traffic jam, it must have seemed like a time-warp back to the bad old days when the Israeli Army closed roads for any, or no, apparent reason. But now their adversaries were fellow Palestinians.

ASSESSING THE DAMAGE after masked gunmen bombed UNRWA's Gaza City Beach Club, a long-established gathering-place for UNRWA staff and foreign visitors. The Beach Club contained a cafeteria, restaurant, and a bar where alcohol was sold, which may have been why the building was attacked.

Road blocks, abductions, taking over government offices and public buildings, even private wars that descend into public chaos—this has become everyday life in the Gaza Strip. To the distress of Palestine's friends, and very likely to the delight of her enemies, a relative handful of the armed, desperate, and frustrated have created a public-relations nightmare for Gaza. The high officials of the Palestinian Authority, while issuing predictable condemnations, have been woefully short on any useful action. While the armed demonstrations and building takeovers sound dramatic, and always have the potential to turn tragic, the Palestinian security services have no more interest in starting a shooting war with fellow Palestinians than do the armed militants. When all goes well, the militants fire in the air. The police arrive and fire in the air. Demands are stated. Promises are more or less made. Everyone fires in the air some more. Then, honor satisfied on both sides, everyone goes home—and nothing has changed for anyone. But at least no one has been hurt.

In some ways, the inter-family vendettas are more disturbing, with two especially bad ones growing into major violence in the last month. In Beit Hanoun in North Gaza, a feud between the Al Kafarneh and Al Masri families escalated into a full-scale shooting war, with the fighting families imposing curfews on their neighbors, setting up checkpoints and free-fire zones. One wonders, of course, what terrible crime, or alleged crime, started this conflict that to date has killed and injured scores—surely they're fighting over an alleged murder, rape, or massive theft?

In fact, all this bloodshed began when a donkey-cart driver of one-family scratched a car belonging to someone from the other clan. In Khan Younis in southern Gaza, two other families have gone to war for equally murky reasons—the only thing clear is the amount of collateral damage to uninvolved citizens, as bystanders get caught in the cross-fire. It is, however, a sign of the huge frustrations Gazans are living with—the powerful armed families have seen no action whatsoever from the Palestinian Authority in restoring the lands they lost to the now-empty Israeli settlements. One has to wonder if they would be so eager to wage war over a dented car, if they could actually reclaim and start rebuilding their ruined farms and groves.

Kidnappings of foreigners, mainly journalists and NGO workers, have mushroomed in the last few months, with 18 incidents to date. Without exception, the foreign victims have been released unharmed, and told the press they had been treated well by their captors. In almost every instance, the masked militants were asking for jobs within the Palestinian Authority. Perhaps the most dramatic case was the New Year's Eve kidnapping of 24 year old Kate Burton and her parents, all citizens of the UK. Burton had been living in the Gaza Strip for a year as a volunteer with the Al Mazen Center for Human Rights. Her parents came to Palestine for the Christmas holidays and toured Bethlehem and other pilgrimage sites in the West Bank. Wanting to show her parents her home in Gaza, Burton and her parents flew to Egypt and entered Gaza through the Rafah Crossing—and were abducted by armed militants soon afterward and held for two days. The irony, of course, is that those victimized by the abductions—NGO workers and international journalists—are the very people working to help the Palestinians, or at least report the truth of daily life in Gaza to the international community. Worse, in the heat of each kidnapping crisis, the Palestinian Authority usually promises jobs to the militants and never, ever keeps those promises.

One of the 20 militants from the Al Aqsa Brigade who invaded a government building in Khan Younis agreed to speak only if he could remain anonymous. Asked what he was protesting, or against whom, he replied, "We're protesting against every government official throwing up roadblocks to our getting employment. We spent years sacrificing and risking our lives for a better future for Palestine. Now we want jobs and the Palestine Authority ignores us."

Asked if there wasn't some better way to state grievances and stage protests, he replied, "Some get their demands through pure favoritism and good connections. We don't have any special connections, so power and pressure seem the only means open to us," he explained.

Abu Nabil Abdel Razeq, a social reformer who heard this exchange, commented, "It's dangerous that the chaos is so out of control, and it's shameful because it harms not only the government targets but normal citizens. We cannot accept this, even though there is justice in the militants' demands."

The Burton kidnapping, plus border clashes between rogue militants and Egyptian police, brought new protests from Gaza's citizens and other militant factions. A coalition of six militant groups, including Fateh, Islamic Jihad, Hamas, and the Popular Front, issued a statement condemning the kidnappings, building seizures and other violence as "not serving the Palestinian national interest."

Some international media have, quite simplistically and incorrectly, stated that the Israeli occupying army imposed civil law and its withdrawal is the cause of the present internal problems. To the contrary, the Israeli Army did all in its power to destroy Gaza's civil institutions, especially the Gaza police and the Palestinian Authority, and since the withdrawal have maintained their stranglehold on the Gaza economy.

Of course, the Palestinian Authority has committed non-violent "crimes of omission" by promising jobs to the militants time and again, and failing, time and again, to keep those promises. The militants, with their dangerous, if rarely lethal theatrics, seem the obvious villains, while the high government officials do little more than watch. But the incontrovertible fact is that many in the Palestinian Authority are collecting high salaries and living extremely comfortable lives while many other Gaza citizens cannot find food to feed their children. But when the militants fire in the air and occupy a public building, they are of course, in the eyes of the world, the "terrorists" while the Palestinian Authority is blameless—all of which, sad to say, makes it that much easier for the Sharon government to solemnly declare "they have no partner for peace."

A Few Grams of Chicken

2005-12-24T17:23:00.000-05:00

Mohammed's article on the UN's multi-agency report on poverty in the West Bank and Gaza was published in Norwegian in Morgenbladet in their pre-holiday double issue yesterday.

One o'clock, two o'clock on a cold winter night in Rafah, and the young man is huddled on the doorstep of a shack. The night gets colder; it's now three a.m., and he is still sitting outdoors. Is he an amateur astronomer? Or a self-appointed watchman to warn of Israeli spy drones?

No, Hani Al Najjar, 23, is awake in the small hours because his 19-year-old brother Mahmoud has the "early shift" in the bed they share. Actually, European readers wouldn't call the thin mattress on the floor a "bed," but western-style beds are an impossible luxury for most families in Gaza. When Mahmoud leaves for school, Hani will get some sleep indoors. "There's no room for both of us to lie down inside," he explains. The "house" for their family of eight was originally built long ago to shelter goats, but the Al Najjar family was grateful to rent it after their house was bulldozed by the Israeli Army during an incursion in 2003.

In the same ramshackle neighborhood, Amnah Audeh, a 53-year-old housewife, says she has one simple, but perhaps impossible goal. "The dream of my family is to taste beef or chicken. We have never had the money to buy meat, or any really good meal. We simply can't afford it," she said sadly. Open a refrigerator in any refugee camp home: most often you will find bottles of water and little else. The lack of potable tap water means everyone in Gaza must purchase bottled water, or risk serious disease. Of course, that means less money for a nutritious diet.

Gaza, despite one border crossing now operating to Egypt under joint Egyptian and Palestinian control, is still the biggest world's prison. Poverty in Gaza is steadily worsening as the Israeli military continues its stranglehold on all crossing points for cargo. Materials to rebuild cannot enter; Gazan goods cannot reach market; Gazans cannot seek employment across the border. The same is true for the Palestinians trapped behind the closed borders in the West Bank, and in many cases, cut off from their land, jobs, and schools by the illegal apartheid wall.

Right now, more than three-quarters of the 1.3 million Palestinians in Gaza live below the poverty line, the United Nations announced last week. In the five years since the start of the Intifada, unemployment throughout Palestine has risen from 10 percent to over 30 percent. The UN report, compiled by all its agencies working in the region, said that 64 percent of the entire population were surviving on less than 2.20 US dollars a day, and half of them fit the UN definition of "extreme poverty cases" with less than 1.6 US dollars. In Gaza, 78 percent live below the poverty level.

Filippo Grandi, Deputy head of the UN agency for Palestinian refugees, UNRWA, said, "The situation has been exacerbated by the Israeli Army's constant closures in the occupied West Bank and in Gaza, even though the last troops were withdrawn from Gaza in September."

Ironically, despite the extreme poverty, Palestine is rich in talent. Literacy rates, especially among younger Palestinians, are high, and many poor families make enormous sacrifices to send their children to Gaza's universities. On graduation, however, the young men and women discover they cannot put their skills to work in a salaried job. As Nigel Parry, head of the World Bank mission to the Palestinian territories recently pointed out, the local economy is in such disarray that even the Palestinian Authority can no longer pay its civil servants and government employees.

Palestinian cabinet minister Hind Khuri said that international assistance was vital. "The situation is so bad that the government cannot possibly solve it on its own," she said. "In previous years, we received billions of dollars in financial aid, but due to the continuing occupation, the humanitarian situation is constantly worsening, and I cannot realistically foresee improvement without international aid." The Palestinian Authority had made significant progress in infrastructure and health care before the Intifada, but the Israeli Army's systematic destruction of water and sewer systems during the last five years wiped out virtually all the gains. Rates of illness and malnutrition have risen, as doctors and hospitals in Palestine try to do more and more with fewer resources.

In a phone interview, Nigel Roberts placed the blame for Palestine's desperate poverty and stagnant economy squarely on the Israeli restrictions, closures, and continuing occupation. When there is no movement of people, no flow of goods and services, there can be no viable economy.

"Stagnant" seems almost too mild a word for Gaza's moribund economy. But as long as the powerful forces in the First World refuse to apply serious pressure on Israel to ease its stranglehold on Palestine, Mrs. Audeh, and hundreds of thousands of other mothers in Gaza, will dream in vain of serving a few grams of chicken to their children.

Foreign Teachers Released, Were "Treated Well"

2005-12-21T08:01:00.000-05:00

The Guardian reported a few minutes ago that the two foreign teachers abducted earlier today were released shortly after their kidnappers, the PLFP (a small militant faction) faxed a release to the Associated Press claiming responsibility and demanding the release of their leader from prison. Below is the URL of the entire story.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/worldlatest/story/0,1280,-5494634,00.html

The story gave no details on the teachers' condition. However, the PNA condemned the abduction and their school in Gaza City demanded their release, stating the Dutch headmaster and his Australian deputy were serving in a srictly educational capacity. The Palesinian Seurity Services had mounted a search for the kidnapped teachers, but it would seem from the wording of the Guardian story that their abductors released them.

UPDATE: The URL below is a transcript of an Australian interview with the Australian deputy headmaster of the American International School after his release. He says his captors seemed dismayed when they realized they had NOT kidnapped Americans, but said he and the school's headmaster had been treated well and were never threatened with harm.

http://www.abc.net.au/am/content/2005/s1536209.htm

Two foreign teachers kidnapped in Gaza

2005-12-21T04:37:00.000-05:00

Mohammed just emailed that friends at an NGO asked him to see what he could learn about the abduction of two teachers at a Gaza private school. Masked gunmen kidnapped an Australian and a Dutch citizen on their way to the school for the last session before the holiday break. Reuters got a story on the wire within the last hour and the link is below.

http://www.abc.net.au/news/newsitems/200512/s1536058.htm

I'll post anything further Mohammed is able to learn. Hopefully, this will play out like past militant kidnappings, with the hostages released unharmed in a matter of hours. No word as yet on the demands: in the past, the kidnappers have been agitating for jobs from the Palstinian Authority.

Updates, Apologies, Greetings and Resolutions

2005-12-17T08:40:00.000-05:00

Sincere apologies for the long lag in updating RafahNotes. Mohammed had to travel overseas twice for conferences; I had to travel for my day job as well, and while he met his ongoing commitments to Morgenbladet, getting updates posted here just didn't make it to my "to do" list. Indeed, I have an unexpected reprieve of a few hours from my job only because a colleague is laid low with the flu and has been delayed getting a project to me. I've backdated all the catch-up posts for future ease in finding them in the archive.

Special thanks to those of you who emailed to be sure I was OK, and a "shukran gidan" to Nina for her updates on Mohammed's Rafah Today site. (http://www.rafahtoday.org) It's a bit early for New Year's resolutions--and I'm leery of promising frequent updates since the first half of 2006 will find me embroiled in moving home and office both. But I will try not to let RafahNotes lie fallow so long again.

In any case, whether you are celebrating Christmas, Hanukkah, Solstice (or simply some time off!)bright blessings to you all.

Destroying to Create

2005-12-17T08:23:00.000-05:00

Mohammed had a short layover in Egypt while he travelled back to Gaza after attending an international conference. He was able to interview a number of Egyptians about the problems surrounding their recent Parliamentary elections. The resulting article appeared in Norwegian in Morganbladet on 16 December.

"Democracy is dying, no, democracy has died in our
Egypt," said Abdel Hadi Hujazi.

Hujazi, an Egyptian election observer, was summing up
the violence and corruption he had seen first-hand in
his official capacity during last week's second round
of Egypt's parliamentary elections. "It's a big lie
when our officials appear on the media and announce
the elections are proceeding democratically. That's
far from the reality I saw at North Sinai polling
stations," he said. "The Egyptian government brought
in busloads of street fighters to instigate conflicts
at the polls where there was known support for Muslim
Brotherhood candidates. Some of the fighters were
actually security police in civilian clothes; they
attacked people waiting to vote while their colleagues
in uniform watched and did nothing. Our suspicions of
this completely illegal activity were confirmed when
Omer Abdel Rahaman, a security police officer
disguised in civilian clothes, was injured in the
fighting and had to be hospitalized. In my 46 years,
I have never seen anything so blatantly corrupt."

President Hosni Mubarak's ruling National Democratic
Party was stunned when the first round of
parliamentary elections resulted in 88 of 444 seats
going to Islamist Muslim Brotherhood candidates. The
Brotherhood exists in a legal gray area, originally
having been banned as an terrorist organization. In
an attempt to become a legitimate political party, the
Muslim Brotherhood formally renounced ties to violence
but the party remains under an official ban. That did
not, however, prevent Muslim Brotherhood candidates
entering the lists as independents and with their
"Islam is the answer" slogan, winning five times more
seats than their showing in the 2000
elections—shocking the ruling NDP party into a
violent response.

In an effort to be sure the Brotherhood's gains stayed
minimal, the NDP did its utmost to disrupt the
elections in areas where support for the opposition
candidates was strong. All through Egypt, citizens
trying to vote found themselves under attack by tear
gas, truncheons, and bullets and could only respond
with stone-throwing in scenes reminiscent of
Palestine's intifada. But here, the stone-throwers
were not heedless adolescents but mature adults trying
to exercise their constitutionally-protected right to
vote. The northern town of Damietta saw some of the
worst violence where two men were shot dead and dozens
wounded, according to medical sources. Another man
died of a heart attack after inhaling tear gas used
against protestors in the governorate of Sharqiya .
In all, since the first round of elections on November
9, six civilians have been killed, and many more
injured.

"The police attacked us again, they don't want to let
us vote," said Abdelsattar Al Mallah, who was injured
in the violence in his home town when he tried to
vote. In Al Zagazig hospital, a greengrocer Ayman
Abdel Hadi complained that police broke his leg with
a club before dragging him to a police station where
he had to wait two hours before being moved to the
hospital. "They systematically blocked the polling
stations where the Brothers achieved good scores in
the first round last week," he said.

The Egyptian Organization for Human Rights backed up
their accounts in their official report that 355
polling stations had been closed. "Only NDP supporters
have been allowed to enter polling stations using
their party IDs," they said. During the first round
of elections, some resourceful voters evaded
harassment by using ladders to climb the walls
surrounding the polling places. Stunned by the Muslim
Brotherhood's gains, police squads confiscated ladders
throughout towns and villages where the opposition
party had scored majorities, as well as detaining
some 1300 known and suspected Moslem Brotherhood
supporters. Their tactics were effective—the
Brotherhood gained no new seats in the second
round—and the party complained the results had been
rigged.

The US State Department expressed concern about the
obviously flawed voting, saying it sent "the wrong
signal about Egypt's commitment to democracy and
freedom. . ." Washington , however, was scolded by
international rights groups for their relatively mild
protest of flagrant abuses. The Brotherhood's surprise
results have boosted the movement's case for
legalization as a party, an option that has so far
been rejected by both Cairo and Washington.

The US is once again caught between its rhetoric—its
loud and incessant demands for democracy in the
Mid-East—and the reality that honest elections in the
region often result in strong support for Islamist
parties that oppose US policies. During the run-up to
the US invasion of Iraq, the Bush administration was
stunned when the parliament of its ally, Turkey, voted
not once but twice to curtail US military use of
Turkish territory as a staging area for the invasion.
Palestine's elections, vetted by international
observers as fair and honest, resulted in notable
gains for the political wing of the militant Hamas
party. Iraq's US-backed provisional government
reflects US worries that a truly free election might
result in a government that would demand an immediate
end to Western occupation. "We had to destroy the
village to save it," became the infamous slogan of US
policy during the VietNam war. Perhaps that warped
thinking has now evolved into destroying democracy in
order to create it to the Middle East.

Spare Parts

2005-12-05T08:03:00.000-05:00

The senseless deaths of children is a painfully frequent theme in accounts of life in Palestine, and few incidents have stirred more controversy than one Jenin family's decision in the wake of their son's murder. Mohammed's report on the range of opinions in Gaza was published by Morganbladet on 2 December 2005.

"Israeli children will never have peace as long as
Palestinian children don't," said Abdelmajeed Al Nems,
14, current head of the Children's Parliament, during
a press conference in Rafah last week. The Children's
Parliament, one of the oldest organizations for young
people in Gaza, is a forum for children and teens to
debate current affairs. Al Nems called the press
conference after the Parliament voted to protest a
Jenin family's decision to donate their only son's
organs to sick Israeli children after an Israeli
soldier shot him in the head on November 3.

"We love peace," Al Nems declared, "and we dream of a
small nation of our own, a place where we can fulfill
the simple dream to live as children live in the free
world. But we do not want to reward our killers by
donating the organs of murdered children. We don't
want anyone to kill us!"

The Children's Parliament press conference was just
the latest round of the huge debate surrounding the
death of 12-year-old Ahmed Ismael Al Khateeb, shot in
the street outside his home in Jenin on the first day
of Eid. The three-day Eid holiday, roughly comparable
to Christmas in its feasting and gift-giving, ends the
fasting month of Ramadan. Traditionally, parents buy
new clothes for their children and on the first day of
Eid, give their children a gift of cash. After
prayers in the mosque, children show off their new
outfits and head for the shops to buy toys and lots of
sweets. Ahmed had returned from morning prayers with
his father and had just left the house with some of
the neighborhood children. Suddenly, convoys of
Israeli soldiers approached from several directions,
raiding the neighborhood to arrest an alleged
militant. The children scattered but Ahmed was shot
down. He sustained irreparable brain injury and
after three days in a coma, was declared clinically
dead. His parents decided to donate his organs in
transplant operations that saved five Israeli
children, plus a 58-year-old kidney transplant
patient. All recipients are recovering well,
including a Druze child and a young Israeli Arab girl
who had waited five years for a heart transplant.

Initially, the Israeli army said Ahmed had been
brandishing a realistic toy rifle, leading the
soldiers to mistake him for a militant. This initial
statement was proven false when it was discovered his
pockets held the entire cash gift from his parents—he
had never reached the shop, never bought anything,
never mind a toy rifle. The children who witnessed
the shooting said the soldiers shot him in the pelvis
and when he attempted to stand, shot him in the head.

Reached by phone at his Jenin home, Ahmed's father,
44-year-old Ismael Al Khateeb, said, "I feel proud to
have made this humanitarian gesture, even though I
know the Israeli army is committing more and more
crimes against us. I hope this initiative will
demonstrate dramatically that we want peace, and help
move peace-making from talk and slogans into actual
implementation. We Palestinians want to live in
peace and freedom, without the constant fear our
children will be killed."

Al Khateeb's decision, and his hoped-for message of
peace to the world, has stirred a storm of controversy
in Palestine. Even weeks after the fact, the topic is
still debated by everyone from school children to the
elderly. Amani Abdullah, 22, a university student,
said, "I think it's not fair that his father donated
his organs to Israelis once he realized the Israelis
murdered his son in cold blood. They should not be
rewarded for their crime," she said. "The organs
should have gone to more deserving recipients." Of
course, feasible transplants are governed by time,
distance and tissue matching. Even more ironically,
due to Israeli restrictions, Palestinian doctors are
rarely able to travel abroad for the specialized
training needed to perform transplant surgery. And
Palestinians needing organ transplants must go through
the labyrinth of Israeli red-tape to receive treatment
outside their homeland.

Amal Salem, a 33-year-old teacher, agreed with the Al
Khateeb family's decision on even more practical
grounds. "Once the lamb has been slaughtered," she
said, "it does him no further harm to use the skin.
Nothing could change the fact of their child's death.
It was all right to donate the boy's organs to Israeli
children. That child's body sent a message from
Palestine to the whole world, and said, 'We
Palestinian children stand for generosity, compassion
and life. We are true Muslims, and do not call for
terror and killing.' Of course," she added, "this is
a message written in terrible pain, and may God help
his parents to handle it." Many Palestinians share
Amal Salem's viewpoint that humanitarian aid can and
should transcend national and political conflicts.

Abdel Al Nems, of the Children's Parliament, feels the
Al Khateeb family's generosity is counter-productive.
"There is no safety for us and our friends," he said.
"Palestinians are being shelled and attacked.
Donating Ahmed's organs will never do any good for the
children of Palestine. It makes it seem as if our
lives are cheap. We love peace, but we refuse to be a
source of spare parts for the children of the soldiers
and settlers who kill us! The occupying forces were
not ashamed to honor the Al Khateeb family, but then
they exonerated the Israeli soldier who killed Eman Al
Hums when she was already wounded and immobilized."

Al Nems was referring to the shooting death of a
13-year-old school girl in Rafah in October 2004 and
the verdict in the criminal trial of "Captain R."
While the court criticized the bungled and possibly
falsified Israeli army investigation, it also cleared
the Captain of all serious charges, a verdict that
prompted widespread outrage in Palestine, and protests
even in Israel. The Israeli Soldiers Breaking Silence
Committee issued a statement condemning the verdict
which said in part: "We are all responsible and
accused of this crime because we allowed the oversight
procedures of the army to collapse before our eyes."
Coming less than a fortnight after the death of Ahmed
Al Khateeb, the verdict freeing Eman Al Hums' killer
on, essentially, technicalities, only inflamed the
debate over the Al Khateeb family's actions. Was
their generosity a well-intentioned but wrong-headed
move that tells the occupier they can kill Palestinian
children with impunity? Or is their returning good
for evil a message that will bring Palestine closer to
a lasting and just peace? The only thing sure is that
the debate will continue, and the answers will be slow
to arrive.

Playing the Game Professionally

2005-11-19T07:22:00.000-05:00

Mohammed's article was originally published in Morgenbladet 18 November 2005

The gunfire has gone on for hours on the streets of a refugee camp. Six Israeli soldiers face a handful of Palestinian militants. They are taking cover in a narrow alley. The militants throw a grenade into the knot of soldiers. The explosion is deafening, but the Israeli soldiers keep firing.

"Wait, wait, wait," yells a masked militant, "that was a direct hit—you're dead!"

"Not this time," the Israeli captain shouts back. "It landed five meters short of our position."

"Six meters!" his lieutenant corrects him.

"It did NOT!" screams the militant.

The captain's younger sister, watching from a nearby doorway, starts laughing while the militants hold a strategy conference. Two of the resistance fighters have to leave to study for the next day's math quiz.

Welcome to Palestine's most popular children's game. Sometimes the kids call it "Army versus Militants," or "Jews and Arabs," or "settlers and villagers"—there are a variety of names but the pattern is always the same—hours-long mock battles with amazingly realistic sound effects. After five years of watching real warfare played out in their own neighborhoods, most children throughout the Gaza Strip have become experts at imitating the whine of sniper bullets, automatic-weapons fire, grenade explosions, missile strikes. Young boys in the villages and refugee camps always played war games occasionally, but during the Intifada the bloodless battles have become wildly popular.

Roles are not rigid. The boy who is a cruel Occupation soldier one day, bullying and harassing Palestinians at an imagined checkpoint, can switch next day to playing a resistance fighter, bravely doing his best to inflict damage on the Israeli army, despite their superior weaponry.

Sometimes the realism is uncanny. "Boina, boina—stop, stop!" Nadder Hassan, 13, was screaming at an "enemy" Palestinian. He continued "interrogating" the boy playing a militant prisoner with an excellent command of Hebrew idioms—which the other game-player understood easily. After all, these boys had heard all these words and phrases used by real Occupation forces during incursions into their neighborhoods.

Khalil Abed, 13, from the opposing team of resistance fighters, quickly ran out of ammunition and was "captured." Soon, the "Israelis" ordered to him to undress and lie on the ground where he was blindfolded. Other real-life situations sometimes enter the game: ambulance drivers pleading to pass a checkpoint to save the life of a critically-ill patient; civilians telling the soldiers in vain of their lost relatives, lost land—the children pride themselves on the degree of verisimilitude they achieve, but often adults who overhear the play-acting find it unbearable to listen. It is far too accurate a replica of what they have suffered under the Occupation. They are horrorstruck that these youngsters can imitate the sounds of weapons so perfectly, not to mention the best and worst behavior of all parties to the Arab-Israeli conflict.

Still, the many variations of "Jews and Arabs" is unquestionably the most popular children's street game throughout Palestine. Suliman, a 13-year-old from Rafah's Al Shabura camp, was playing the part of an Israeli soldier in one of the narrow alleys—barely a meter wide—between tiny houses. "Of course it's my favorite game!" he said, then broke off abruptly to hit the ground—the "militants" were throwing stones. He was "shooting" the enemy with a realistic plastic rifle and only continued the interview when his four "enemies" were officially dead. Just why had he chosen to buy the toy rifle? "Because I saw one just like it every day—it's the model the Israeli soldiers always carry."

By why, he was asked, this game of all possible games? "Look at the children my age in other Arab countries—they have playgrounds, parks, swings, seesaws, sports fields—they have all kinds of entertainments. But for me, there's nothing like that. No playground, no place to play soccer. The gun and the war game we invent is the only thing available."

"But remember," Mahmoud, who might be a year or two older, interjects, "we play this game professionally because we lived through the Israeli war. I can differentiate between the sounds of tanks, bombs, or mortars, I can imitate an M16 or any other weapon the Israelis use."

During lulls in the game's action, the players chatted. When asked if they considered other games more interesting, all agreed readily. "Of course!" one said immediately. "Where there are computer games, parks, soccer fields, playgrounds for us—all of them would be better than this 'Jews and Arabs' game. But when there's nothing else, then 'Jews and Arabs' is our favorite."

Dr. Fadel Abu Hien , a psychology professor at Gaza City's Al Aqsa University, suggested there were deeper reasons for the popularity of war games. "It's a way to have some feeling of power in a real-life situation where they are powerless. Almost all children in Palestine have seen people killed, injured, have been exposed to the increased Israeli aggression of rocket attacks, shelling, sniper fire. That inevitably encourages mock-violent games. If a boy can 'fire' the same weapon as the occupier, if he can imitate the sound of a mortar or rocket which he sees as the Israeli source of power, then he 'owns' that power too and feels more in control. It's also a way to vent anger and act out a symbolic revenge. Children's play always reflects both their environment and their own emotions.

"Intuitively," he continued, "the children playing these games are trying to strike a balance between fear and horror, and a wish to strike back. That's why most players take on a variety of parts at different times. It's understandable they strive for highly realistic play-acting. The bomb and rocket attacks usually occur at night, and most of these games are played at night too."

Of course, the biggest winners in this popular children's game are not the boys playing soldier, but the corporations who stamp "Israel" and "made in China" on the toy bombs and guns for sale in every market in Gaza. The Israeli customs authorities who control every import have no problem promptly clearing case after case of realistic toy weaponry while shipments of food and medicine can be tied up in red tape for weeks. If the Sharon government is seeking "a partner for peace," why are they helping Gaza's children learn the arts of war?

Poisoned Honey

2005-11-07T07:37:00.000-05:00

Mohammed's latest, which appeared in Morgenbladet on 5 November.

Despite the so-called disengagement, the Israeli war against Palestine has moved into a new phase. In addition to targeted killings of Palestinian militant leaders in the West Bank and Gaza, the Israeli Army is tormenting the entire population in Gaza with sound concussion grenades. The F16s circle, followed by explosions so loud that if one is detonated from a plane over Beit Hamoun in north Gaza, it can be heard all the way down in south Gaza. This is a new hardship for Gazans, one the Israelis would not use while Israeli families slept in the illegal settlements. Certainly, the settlers must not suffer nightmares and broken windows. Now that the settlements are empty, though, the Israeli army is apparently quite willing to send Palestinian children to the hospital with hysteria and other stress-induced illnesses.

Along with these attacks, the same F-16s have dropped leaflets throughout North Gaza urging citizens to "ensure their safety" by collaborating with the Israeli Security Services and giving the names and whereabouts of resistance fighters planning to fire homemade mortars across the border into Israel. This is not the first time the occupying forces have urged Palestinians to become informers, but it is especially bitter this year as another Eid celebration will be marred by national as well as personal losses. Last year, during what is meant to be the most festive time of the year, Palestinians were mourning the death of Yassir Arafat. Now, they watch in horror as many leaders of the Islamic Jihad die in missile strikes and other "extrajudicial assassinations," as the occupation forces call them. In the most recent killing in north Gaza, Islamic Jihad leader Shadi Muhannah's car was bombed as he returned from evening prayers. The street was crowded, since Friday prayers are especially well-attended during the holy month of Ramadan, and six bystanders, including four boys under 18, were killed.

To add an extra note of irony, the Israeli Security Services, so concerned for the innocent civilians of Gaza, list a mobile phone number in their leaflets, urging them "not to hesitate" to inform on armed militants. "For your safety," they add, "keep away from areas where mortars are being fired. . . . Everyone can help protect himself and his children from the harm caused by resistance fighters who intend to fire homemade rockets. Don't be reluctant. . ." the leaflet continues before giving the phone number. Almost as an afterthought, the unsigned text ends, "For your personal safety, call from a location where no one knows you." In the West Bank town of Tulkarem, the Israeli soldiers who invaded the area also handed out similar leaflets. In Gaza, Islamic Jihad quickly issued its own broadsheet warning people against turning informer, since throughout the Intifada, the Palestinian Authority has been quick to arrest, and frequently execute, any collaborators they discovered.

Continuing the psychological warfare, thousands of cell phone users in the northern West Bank and the Gaza Strip heard two recorded messages. One said: "The Israeli Defense Force is working to protect you by getting the terrorists out of your midst." The other: "The Israeli Defense Force cautions you against harming its security. For your own safety, do not offer shelter to the terrorists among you." The Palestinian Minister of Communications Sabri Saidam said that the Palestinian Telecommunications Network played no part whatsoever in disseminating these messages. He accused Bazek, an Israeli company, of allowing the Israeli authorities to penetrate the Palestinian phone network.

Tawfiq Abu Khussa, spokesman of the Palestinian Ministry of the Interior and National Security, said about the leaflet drop, "Basically, this tactic indicates a failed policy. This is not the first time they've used it. It didn't work in the past, it won't work now—it will never help the Israeli Army. What would help would be to stop the occupation, stop the arrests, the killings, the incursions. There are attacks because the fighters are resisting the occupation. End the occupation and the resistance will end. The attacks will stop when the citizens see real hope for peace and security through the political process, through re-starting the peace talks. They will never see hope, and never know security while Israel is attacking us."

Citizens in Gaza echoed Abu Khussa's sentiments. Without exception, they were unimpressed by the Israeli Army's professed concern for their safety. A typical response was that of Umm-Ibrahim Hamad, 46, a housewife and mother from northern Gaza. "Why should we call the same army that is killing us?" she asked. "What do they think we are?"

A reasonable question. The Israelis' paper leaflets stating their "concern" count for little against the missiles launched against a car traveling down a crowded Gaza street, killing and injuring those simply walking by. With its leaflets and phone messages, the Israeli army is trying to offer honey, but the people of Palestine know it is poisoned, and prefer to go hungry.

"We Are Not Simply Martyrs!"

2005-10-30T07:09:00.000-05:00

Mohammed spoke with Gaza's youngest imam last week. The interview was published in Morgenbladet (in Norwegian) on 28 October.

"May I speak with Mr. Amjad please?"

I was telephoning to arrange an interview and discovered Gaza's most popular celebrity answers his own phone. "Mr. Amjad?" I repeated.

" Sheikh Amjad, please," he corrected me.

Amjad Abu Sido can properly be called an honorary Sheikh at the age of thirteen, a rare, but not unheard-of achievement in the Islamic world. In a culture where reciting the Holy Quran is not just a devotional act but an art form, many children start learning the sacred texts by heart at an early age. A few with unusual diligence and a gift for oratory memorize all 114 suras (chapters) by their early teens and are often called "Sheikh."

Impressive as that may be, young Sheikh Amjad has far exceeded that achievement and stunned a congregation of hundreds in a Gaza City mosque last week when he preached the principal sermon at Friday midday prayers. The slender boy, barely five feet tall, appeared in an imam's long white tunic and turban in the pulpit normally reserved for the most senior preachers and mesmerized an overflow crowd. Letting a thirteen-year-old have the central place at Friday prayers during the holy month of Ramadan is an extraordinary honor, but perhaps an inevitable result of Abu Sido's yearlong rise to fame.

It all began when Sheikh Amjad, a pupil in a private religious school, read a short essay he had written in front of his class. His teachers were so impressed with his mastery of classical Arabic and his delivery, that they arranged for him to give a short talk at the local mosque. Other invitations quickly followed, and soon there were many from all over Gaza who traveled to hear him wherever he preached. Last week, if it seemed incongruous when the revered imam, Sheikh Abu Fathi Lafi 67, called for praying Azzan at Al Julani mosque in Gaza City, then yielded the pulpit to a boy who still speaks with a child's voice, there was no lack of maturity in the young Sheikh's words. In impeccably crafted Arabic, he urged the worshippers to seek justice and solidarity within Palestinian society, while warning them against hypocrisy.

Afterward, Raed Said, one of the worshippers, said, "I found his thoughts and his presentation very moving. We should all be proud to have such a splendid young imam. Frankly, I think he's much better than some very experienced and famous preachers!" Nidal Issa, an official of the Ministry of Religious Affairs in Gaza said his ministry decided to allow Sheikh Amjad to preach on Fridays because "he is a sound boy, an excellent speaker, and a strong personality." Abu Sido has a full calendar of speaking engagements in Gaza for months ahead.

Abu Sido himself, however, wears his fame lightly. "It makes me happy when people come to the mosque to hear me, or any preacher." And he is quick to explain that his role model is the late Sheikh Abdel Hamid Keshek, a famous Egyptian imam, whose sermons and lectures, preserved on tape, he has studied exhaustively. "I'm deeply inspired by him, a knight of the pen and the platform. It's no secret that I'm always trying to imitate his mannerisms," he says. "I admire his courage in carrying the truth, his patience, his deep kindness. And his delivery is so strong, people are moved even by hearing him on tape, years after his death." Sheikh Amjad, however, back up impressive stage presence with his own scholarship. He has obviously thought deeply on Islamic issues, and has memorized most of the Holy Noble Quran, plus the hadith, the sayings of the Prophet Mohammed. "But any talents I may have," he says, "are gifts from God."

Sheikh Amjad comes from a poor family in the western part of Gaza City, the son of a taxi driver. His parents divorced years ago and his father has remarried. "My father can help us only a very little," he explains. "He has his own financial difficulties." Lately, the Ministry of Religious Affairs have been giving him a stipend of US$110 every few months, which the Sheikh shares with his mother to cover their household expenses.

It is a surprisingly humble setting for someone who is fast becoming a magnet for international media attention. The European press, even the Israeli newspapers, have written about him, although he considers the latter a mixed blessing. "The Jerusalem Post said I'm a Hamas member—I am not," he said sternly. "Another Israeli paper called me a member of Islamic Jihad—I am not. I am independent of politics and factions, and I intend to stay that way." .

While the Sheikh never preaches about politics, the Occupation and all its ramifications touch his life as much as any Palestinian's. One of his dreams, the Sheikh admits, is for the Ministry of Religious Affairs to get him a permit to travel to Jerusalem and preach at Islam's third holiest site, the Al Aqsa Mosque. And, he said, he hopes for the release of Palestinian political prisoners and the end of the Occupation. Someday, he added, he hopes to finish his theological studies in South Arabia.

More immediately, he says, it would be wonderful if he could afford an internet connection—a dream completely at odds with his family's very slender income. But surely, a thirteen-year-old, even a thirteen-year-old Sheikh, can be allowed an impractical dream. "After all," he laughs, "I'm still a child!"

Ironically, Sheikh Amjad may have a better chance of fulfilling a more serious ambition: He would like to meet with Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas. "I want to tell him," he says, "that among our young people are many potential sheikhs, young geniuses. All of them should have encouragement and the opportunity to develop their talents. The children of Palestine are not simply martyrs!"

More Onions than Honey

2005-10-23T06:29:00.000-04:00

This article by Mohammed appeared in Morgenbladet (in Norwegian)21 Oct 2005

"One day honey, one day onion," so goes a famous udanese proverb. A succinct summary of the uncertainties of life, it means that there can be days
filed with the honey of health, joy, and peace, but a day later, the raw-onion bitterness of adversity can afflict anyone. For most people in the Occupied Gaza
Strip, the "onions" of poverty and danger have become everyday fare that the recent unilateral Israeli disengagement has done little to improve.

In a life marked by obstacles circumvented and tragic losses overcome, 39-year-old Ayman Ghannam and his
family lost their youngest child, 8-month-old Mojahed,
just two weeks ago. In a roundabout way, the baby's
death was yet another grim legacy of decades of
Occupation. Like thousands of family men in Gaza,
Ghannam lost his livelihood—a once-thriving cell-phone
business—in the wholesale destruction of Gaza's
economy that accompanied the Intifada. Ghannam, his
wife Halima, and their children joined the 60% of
Palestinian families who live below the poverty line,
sliding painfully from difficulty to deprivation to
outright destitution. Last year, however, Ghannam was
able to borrow US$3700 and rented a small snack-shop
plus living quarters inside the compound of an UNRWA
elementary school for girls. Working together,
Ghannam and his wife could support their family. The
single room attached to the shop was crowded for a
family of seven, but a vast improvement over
homelessness.

True, everything was a bit rundown, but during the
last five years of crisis, UNRWA has been increasingly
underfunded, even as the need for their relief work
has grown exponentially. Ghannam's big worry was the
heavy, ill-fitting window that covered the sales
counter. Some mornings, it was so badly stuck that it
took his wife ten minutes to maneuver it up and open
for business. And they worked all day with a wary eye
on the ill-hung window—what if it slammed down on one
of the little girls waiting to be served? Several
times, Ghannam brought his concerns to UNRWA
headquarters: couldn't this safety hazard be
remedied? Sometimes he got no response; other times
he got vague assurances that "it would be looked
into."

"I want to smash something inside myself"

The bureaucracy moved too slowly to prevent tragedy.
Two weeks ago, Ghannam was at the market while Halima
got their four older children off to school, then took
8-month-old Mojahed with her into the shop and started
her daily struggle with the window. She let the baby
crawl on the floor –well out of the way, she
thought—but when the heavy window crashed to the
ground, little Mojahed was right under it. The edge
inflicted a massive head injury, crushing his skull
and causing severe bleeding.

In the market, Ghannam heard his wife's screams, but
only one word was clear—"The baby!" He raced back to
their shop, but the ambulance had already left.
Ghannam followed to the hospital, where he learned his
son was dead. Halima Ghannam explains what happened
that terrible morning, first with numb shock. But
soon, she has to take off her glasses to wipe away
tears. 'The pain," she weeps, "sometimes I want to
smash something inside myself. I cannot face myself—I
feel guilty of my son's blood."

Ghannam tries in vain to comfort his wife. "We
learned from people at the school this window has been
a problem for years," he explained. "Now, even when
our child has been killed, it still hasn't been
fixed—will they wait for another child to get killed
or maimed?"

"Happy in spite of everything"

Mojahed's needless death is the most bitter blow
Ghannam has suffered in his 39 years, but far from his
first brush with adversity. Orphaned in his early
teens, he got a permit to commute daily to Israel to
work as an agricultural laborer. He had always hoped
to go to university, but, he says with a wry chuckle,
"when my parents died, money for tuition was as far
out of my reach as the moon." Still, he worked,
saved, eventually married and had a family. A happy
life in many ways, he insists. Despite his injuries
when he was shot by the Israeli Army in 1989 during
his normal commute. The bullets that hit his right
hand and leg were plastic, but the damage was
permanent and plagues him to this day.

The injury ended his work as a day-laborer, but "I
insisted on moving forward in life," he says. He
contacted an Israeli telecommunications firm and
arranged with them to open the first mobile-phone
retail outlet in the Gaza Strip. Eventually,
"Talkman" was drawing customers from all over Gaza to
its Salah-ah-Deen Street shop in Rafah, and was soon a
Gaza Strip institution. Ghannam and his wife
prospered, and celebrated the birth of their first
child, Aya'a, in 1995, and the three more that soon
followed.

Affluence, however, is no protection against an
occupying army, as Ghannam discovered when his
younger brother, a university student, was arrested by
the Israelis early in 2000. The young man's "crime"
was carrying a camera, and Ghannam spent tens of
thousands of shekels on his lengthy, but finally
successful, legal defense. Soon after his brother's
release, the al Aqsa Intifada erupted, and
Salah-ah-Deen Street was suddenly named the "death
street." Hundreds of businesses, small facories, and
shops in the area were shelled daily, and even the
most loyal customers weren't about to risk their lives
to visit Ayman Ghannam's shop. Indeed, before long,
it was too dangerous for Ghannam himself to open his
store. Bit by painful bit, he sank into what he
calls the "mud of debts," and one of Gaza's most
famous businessmen was scrambling to find food for his
wife and children. He never dodged his creditors, but
all he could tell them was "I have no money." His
landlord went unpaid for six months before evicting
them, but eventually the Ghannam's were homeless. "If
I were alone," said Ghannam, "I could have handled
sleeping in the street. But I had to give my wife and
children something better."

Denied for security reasons. . .

And he did find that "something better," he thought,
in the UNRWA snack-shop—the chance to start over that
instead, took his youngest child's life. Although he
has moments when he is overwhelmed by grief, he and
Halima have four other children who deserve a decent
future. "They're the only blessings in my life,"
Ayman says, and their father seems determined to make
sure they have the education that he was denied. All
are doing well in school, and Aya'a, 10, and her
younger brother Osama are at the top of their
respective classes. While Ghannam is still trying to
get UNRWA to make the snack-shop safe, just last
Tuesday he tried to travel into Israel to file his
application for a permit to seek work in Israel. He
was denied entry by the Israeli Army "for security
reasons." Even if this resourceful man eventually
finds new employment, he and his family, and hundreds
of thousands just like them, will still be imprisoned
behind Gaza's red line of poverty, and living every
day with the losses inflicted by the Occupation.

In the Days of Dark Circles

2005-09-27T22:40:00.000-04:00

"The children are frightened. No one can sleep."

Mohammed and I spoke for less than a minute today, but there was a note in his voice, bone-weary but too on-edge to sleep, I had come to expect during the Intifada, that constant wariness of people determined to preserve normalcy with a tough stoicism laced with humor. The nights are broken with bombs, the days are weary, lived in fear of the next night.

We rang off quickly, but his Rafah neighbor's words haunted me: "The children are frightened. No one can sleep."

Dark circles. Bloody nights, broken sleep, dreams, hopes, loves, lives, and during the day, dark circles under everyone's eyes. The days of dark circles are with us again.

We had been talking just a few weeks ago about dark circles. He had visited our friends in Rafah and emailed me a family portrait, plus an amazing drawing for me, a piece of Arabic calligraphy saying, Mohammed told me, "I love you, my mother Erika!"
Well, that's the Arabic way--once someone considers you a loyal friend, you find yourself "adopted"--a "second mother" or sister, daughter, brother, grandparent. So for a few years now, I have grown accustomed to a new raft of sisters, brothers, sons, and daughters. There's a cousin or two in there who always say hi to Ya Ma Erika. And the cousin's mom. And probably a few others I can't remember at the moment. Mohammed was delighted when I called to thank him for packing up and mailing off these gifts. But, I told him, the best part of the family portrait taken in June was there were no dark circles.

"Dark circles?" He was puzzled.

Sure, I explained. Dark circles. He'd been sending me family pictures several times a year for two years now. The children are gorgeous, the adults have wonderful faces, full of strength and character. The mother is classically beautiful; the grandparents are distinguished. Over two years, the children have gotten taller. They're well-nourished, healthy. And everybody, in every picture, always has dark circles around beautiful, intelligent, open, hopeful, wise dark eyes. Because nobody in Rafah ever gets an unbroken night's sleep. Dark circles. Dark fears. Dark times.

But, I went on, the most thrilling thing about this picture, taken in June, is that no one has dark circles. The children are amazing; the girls almost young women, the boys almost young men; they did wonderfully well in school, but there has been a cease-fire since February; no Apaches over Rafah; people can sleep. No dark circles.

Mohammed laughs. Yes, yes, you are clever to notice this, he says. This was last week and Mohammed is uncharacteristically lighthearted, on that amazing Friday when so many in Rafah slipped through the wall on shopping expeditions to Egypt. He was even happier when I told him I was laboring mightily over some Arabic calligrahy of my own--with a dictionary and a long-sufering Palestinian-American friend, I was making a drawing that said--in Arabic, "Habibi be hedbak, ya abinti"--"I love you, my daughter"--Insha'allah, I would mail him the drawing, some photos and some gifts in good time for Ramadan. Mohammed was delighted--he could deliver the package and take new pictures for me. The perfect time to say Ramadan Mubarak.

But this time there will be dark circles. "The children are frightened. No one can sleep." The Apaches rape the night; the bombs shatter the silence of the holy month; the days of dark circles have fallen over Palestine again.

Dark circles. Dark times. Dark deeds. But no darkness can last forever.

Pray heaven the dawn comes soon.

"The children are frightened. No one can sleep."

The Dream Deferred--or Destroyed?

2005-09-27T21:51:00.000-04:00

The wreckage of the assassinated Hamas leader's car still flames in the background while bystanders try to gather the charred body parts. At least 20 bystanders were wounded, while eyewitnesses at a safer distance saw the American-made Apache helicopter fire a missile at the car.

AP: Wednesday, 28 September , 2005, 04:44
Jerusalem: Israel pressed ahead with its offensive against Palestinian militants, unleashing a barrage of missiles against targets throughout Gaza City early Wednesday, knocking out power and plunging the city into darkness. No injuries were immediately reported.
Missiles from Israeli aircraft landed in at least three locations, including the impoverished Tufah neighborhood and the Bureij refugee camp, just south of the city. One airstrike hit a two-story building used by the ruling Fatah party. The offices provide tutoring lessons to school children, and cash and food assistance to families in Tufah.
Defense Minister Shaul Mofaz said the army would attack militants relentlessly to force them to stop firing rockets at Israeli towns.

Mohammed sent this report shortly before the above AP alert appeared on the internet.

Apaches. Explosions. Denunciations. Broken bodies. Blood. Shrieks. Again. This is what Israel's "disengagement" means—Gaza's men, women, and children are locked up in the world's largest prison camp while the Israeli Army slaughters them. Americans call it "shooting fish in a barrel." America's Ambassador to Israel "understands Israel's position," and adds: "Israel has a right to defend itself." Now attacking civilians is defense.

No electricity through of Gaza City, explosions in the distance, media reports of aerial attacks throughout the Gaza Strip. Time to work the phones. A friend in Khan Younis says he can hear explosions. Not sure where. Loud. He's waiting to hear ambulances-- nothing yet. Sharon promises more retaliation.

Last Friday. The last Israeli soldiers roll out—celebration! True joy! Israeli Army kills several Hamas militants. The world press applauds Sharon's peacemaking. Hamas fires off 35 Kassam rockets across the border in retaliation. Hit nothing. Hours later, the Israelis destroy a Hamas truck filled with live Qassam rockets at a rally in Jebalya. 20 killed. 80 maimed. Sharon smiles for the press, Hamas produces American-made bomb fragments. Palestinian President Abbas denounces the cease-fire violations. Sharon instructs Abbas to "crack down" on militants. Abbas tells him to expletive-deleted off (not in quite those words.) UN Monitor John Dugard reports to the UN Human Rights Commission: "This focus of attention on Gaza has allowed Israel to continue with the construction of the wall in Palestinian territory, the expansion of settlements and the de-Palestinization of Jerusalem with virtually no criticism." Israel's UN Ambassador calls it "Israel-bashing."

Saturday: Hamas declares complete ceasefire—too late to prevent the Israeli bombing of a Hamas-run elementary school—20 children wounded, including a 40-day-old infant. The media reports Israel fired 3 missiles at Khan Younis..

Sunday 5am: Half of Gaza City jolted awake by the explosion as Hamas's Mohammed Sheik Khalil and his assistant are murdered by an Apache-fired missile. 20 or more bystanders wounded. On the coast road near Gaza City, flames turn the sky blood-red as bystanders try to gather scattered body parts for the ambulances. Israel claims responsibility. Sharon storms out of a Likud meeting, diverts attention with the assassination to rally his base. Sharon builds settlements with one hand in the West Bank while slaughtering civilians with the other.

Last week, medical patients were lined up to cross into Egypt before the borders were sealed. Fatma Al Almi, 42, said that day: "We were thinking the Israeli withdrawal would end the bloodshed and black days, but it's just a new stage of Sharon's war plans."

Reports of shelling every night now in Rafah. Nabil, 24, from Yebna Camp says: "It's horrible, sad, what's happening. The Apaches shelling Rafah Camp constantly. All our windows broken. The children are frightened. No one can sleep."

"The situation is horrible. Twenty killed in Jebalya today." My colleague has seen plenty of conflict in the last five years, there is panic in his voice over a mobile-phone connection. "They're shelling now—can you hear it? I'm not sure where they're hitting." He holds his phone so the directional mike can pick up the ambient noise—though the whup-whup of approaching Apaches, the thud of explosions, the roar of Israeli F-16s, are sounds engraved on every Palestinian's memory.

Welcome to disengagement, Sharon style. How many lives, broken bodies, hopes, dreams, yearnings have to die this time before decent people outside demand peace and justice for Palestine? Is our dream going to be destroyed, or just deferred? Israel is waging war on the civilian population of Gaza. The UN calls it "collective punishment." International law calls it illegal. Palestinians call it everyday life.

Mohammed Omer

I phoned Mohammed when I saw the above AP bulletin to be sure he was still OK. So far, so good, he said. Same for his family and all my friends in Rafah. Everyone is tired and frightened. We kept the call short to conserve his mobile-phone battery—no electricity in Gaza City; no way to recharge. No computers either. He said he was going to try to reach his family in Rafah, then try to sleep. I said I'd check in tomorrow morning. I forgot to ask if the windows in his office are broken. I'll post an update after we speak tomorrow.

Abu Holi by Day I

2005-09-10T23:34:00.000-04:00

photo: Mohammed Omer
Travelers stuck at the Abu Holi checkpoint on Thursday find whatever escape they can from the blazing sun.

photo: Mohammed Omer
These men take advantage of the shade under and in the shadow of the truck.

Abu Holi by Day II

2005-09-10T15:25:00.000-04:00

photo: Mohammed Omer
These little girls and their mother try to relax and sleep beside the road at the checkpoint. One child uses their striped carry-all as a pillow.

photo: Mohammed Omer
These men take advantage of the shadow cast by the truck as they wait. . .and wait. . . at Abu Holi.

Two Rafah Children Injured; 20-year-old Killed in Rafah Thursday

2005-09-10T11:44:00.000-04:00

Mohammed just emailed that he spent several hours waiting fruitlessly at the Abu Holi checkpoint last night, hoping to get to his family in Rafah, but finally realized it was a wasted effort and went back to his office (and email) in Gaza City. "It's horrible here," he wrote.

He learned on the phone from his family that one their close neighbors, Basheer Soufi, 20, was killed on Thursday, while in an unrelated incident on the Salah-ah-Deen road, two children were injured by gunshots while playing.

The link below from the International Middle East Media Center gives more details.

http://www.imemc.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=13768&Itemid=1

Mohammed emailed that contrary to the Israeli account, his family told him Soufi was putting a Palestinian flag on the roof of the family home (3 doors down from Mohammed's family) when he was shot and killed. Mohammed ended his short note with: "I'm very sad to see all these things happening to us. I don’t know what to say more... but God rest him in peace."

Boring technical note: The software is sloooooowwwww now (as every Blogger in N. America is posting, I guess... got error messages when I tried to respond to some comments just now...) Mohammed also sent pictures from his stay last night at Abu Holi, which I'll get posted late tonight (when things always go faster and smoother

Possible Assassination in Gaza City

2005-09-05T17:19:00.000-04:00

A house was destroyed by an explosion in Gaza City (the Shajiya neighborhood) tonight. Mohammed just telephoned me from Gaza City a little after 4pm Eastern US time (1am Tuesday in Gaza) with more information from as close as he can get to the scene of the explosion.

We had to repeat ourselves several times while our connection faded in and out. Finally, we got a clear line long enough for Mohammed to tell me that some residents are telling him about Apache helicopters. "The Israelis will try to deny that," he said. "Frankly, it is not certain how exactly the people inside and possibly some neighbors were killed." He did know that the house belonged to Umm-Mohammed Farahat, and yes, they were outspoken supporters of Hamas. Her youngest son at 17 was the youngest to join the armed wing of Hamas and died in an attack on the now-empty Atsmona settlement in August 2002—somehow eluding all the security and killing 11 Israeli soldiers and wounding 17 before being killed by return fire. [CORRECTION: a reader pointed out, correctly as far as I can determine, that the 2002 attack took place in March. See "comments" below for details.] Her oldest son, a Qassam bomb-maker, was assassinated by the Israelis years ago. Another son was captured in an attempted bombing in 1993 and is still in an Israeli prison. The Israeli army has attacked their house before, severely wounding another of her sons.

Ironically, Mohammed spoke to Umm-Mohammed Farahat by phone just a few weeks ago, but set the article aside.

That week Morgenbladet insisted they could only print a short piece, 700, preferably 600, words. Just how, Mohammed asked me in an email, could a writer explore this woman's militant attitudes and ask the really tough questions and boil it all down to 700 words? AND maintain fairness and objectivity? "I don't think you would like this woman," he said, as we discussed the problem by email, but, of course, knew very well journalists don't limit themselves to talking to people whose views mirror their own. Probably the only way to be a good journalist in this situation was to talk to her a number of times, really dig into her history, ask ALL the questions that might make her angry, and write up neither a hatchet-job nor a puff-piece but the most accurate, in-depth portrait possible—which would inevitably be longer than 700 words. Of course, any chance to take that work out of the "hold" file and do something longer has vanished forever now.

Meantime, Mohammed said he was told 5 people were killed and the scene is a madhouse of ambulances, while a number of nearby houses are on fire. The AP has already gotten out a story, excerpt below and URL of the entire piece:

GAZA CITY, Gaza Strip (AP) - An explosion destroyed a house after nightfall Monday in Gaza City, killing four people and injuring at least 30, residents and officials said. Three nearby buildings were reported on fire. Residents said the wrecked home in the Shajaiyeh neighborhood near the border with Israel belonged to a well-known family of supporters of the Islamic militant group Hamas, but the Israeli military denied having anything to do with the blast. During more than four years of Palestinian-Israeli violence, Israel often attacked suspected militants in the neighborhood, but such raids have been rare since a truce took effect in February. Bombs being constructed by extremists have sometimes exploded prematurely. Palestinian Interior Ministry spokesman Tawfiq Abu Khoussa said security officers were investigating.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/worldlatest/story/0,1280,-5257603,00.html

If Mohammed can get close enough to get some pictures, he will, but he'll be up most of the night and probably won't get back to his email to send them till tomorrow.

Final Weeks of Abu Holi Checkpoint

2005-09-02T03:15:00.000-04:00

photo: Mohammed Omer
Taken without a flash during the long, long night waiting for the Abu Holi checkpoint to open. In these last weeks of the Israeli Army presence in Gaza, the situation is as tense as it has ever been, and a camera flash could easily draw sniper fire from the soldiers manning the checkpoint.

Mohammed spent long hours waiting at Abu Holi checkpoint last weekend to travel from Gaza City to see his family in Rafah, and return. Here's his report (published today in Norwegian in Morgenbladet)

One Last Chance to Torment the Occupied
It was half an hour past midnight; the sky was pitch-black, but the concrete-walled roadways leading to the Abu Holi checkpoint were bumper-to-bumper with cars and taxis holding thousands of passengers. For nearly five years of the Intifada, this checkpoint would be closed whenever the Israeli settlers wanted to use the nearby "settlers only" road. Or as a punitive measure. Or—as the Israeli Army always put it—for "security reasons." Now, though, the settlers had all been evacuated. Soon, the Israeli Army is going to leave Gaza—but the checkpoint still had been closed all day. And hundreds of vehicles lined up in the hope that sometime during the night, the checkpoint would open.

Some of the travelers got what sleep they could inside their cars; some in crowded taxis stretched out on the road beneath the rear bumpers, while others made the ground their mattress and the sky their blanket. Then the light-signal changed—the Israeli soldiers were opening the checkpoint. One man who'd been waiting all day to deal with business in Gaza City could only sigh "Finally!" Another more energetic driver yelled, "When will this shit disengagement actually end? When will they leave us?" while a man stretched out near him slept on, oblivious.

Many of Gaza's citizens have spent as much time in the last five years sitting at checkpoints with taxi drivers as they have in their own homes or workplaces. That night my own taxi was fairly far back in the line; we wouldn't be moving for a while. One driver told me, "For five years we've been patient, given a lot but gotten little in return. All of us drivers were determined to do our jobs, even when we acted as ambulances, or lost more money than we made. We saw it all, all the suffering of this occupation. I'm afraid it's been engraved on the minds of the children even more than on us adults." Another driver, Samir Al Kurd, said he hoped for the day when he could drive from Rafah in south Gaza straight through to Jenin in the West Bank—no obstacles, no checkpoints. Then, he said, disengagement would be "real, not just a lot of political talk."

Ala Hanuka, a member of the Gaza Taxi Owners' Association, said the drivers by law have kept their fares reasonable, even as the price of gasoline skyrocketed and spare parts became harder and harder to find. Many vehicles were damaged trying to navigate roads ripped up by Israeli bulldozers. Still, the drivers have all tried to stay on the road to serve the people and offer their own small defiance of the Occupation.

Through the whole disengagement,the Abu Holi checkpoint was closed all day, every day, and occasionally opened for half an hour or so in the dead of night. This created a nightmare for university students, NGO workers, government workers and most especially for medical patients needing treatment at Gaza City's hospitals. Arej, like many other students at Al Azhar University, was forced to rent an apartment in Gaza City with several other young women. On Friday, she waited all night in a taxi at Abu Holi to get to her family in Rafah for the weekend. It was dangerous because while the Israeli soldiers manning the checkpoint often seem to ignore the waiting cars, sometimes they open fire on them—usually for no reason anyone can determine. Now, she was waiting again, to get back to Gaza City in time for the next week's classes. Her family, she says, is already sacrificing to pay her tuition. Add to it the cost of living away from home and the situation is an economic nightmare.

Arej was luckier than Umm-Ahmed Salaman who was holding her sick five-year-old. The little boy was actually supposed to be resting in a Gaza City hospital, not trying to sleep in a sweltering taxi. Life-saving surgery is scheduled for him at 9am—not even 8 hours away—but there is no guarantee the checkpoint will stay open long enough for her taxi to make it through. "I'm fed up complaining," she said, "I try to complain only to God. But my child urgently needs surgery our doctors can't do. We've been waiting since last fall for a foreign specialist to get to Gaza, and now when we finally have the chance, we may not be able to get to the hospital. Eventually, my son will die without this surgery." She had been talking quietly, but her grief broke through. "God help us!" she half-sobbed, half-screamed.

Entering a checkpoint is like finding yourself trapped in an Absurdist farce that could turn deadly at any moment. There is no shelter, you are worn out, hungry, thirsty, trying to offer a kind word to the exhausted old man or the mother with a crying child, but too often feeling useless to yourself as well as to the people around you. Around the time self-pity mixes with frustration, you notice an ambulance far back in the line and shudder—patients have died waiting in those ambulances. Arranging any kind of schedule becomes a humorless joke if either party has to make it through a checkpoint to reach the meeting place. Worst of all now is that just when the Israeli Army might relax its strictures—they are, we are told, supposed to be leaving these checkpoints in mere weeks—the situation is more tense than ever. Those faceless soldiers with their stranglehold on all our normal activities, can provoke us, control us, humiliate us and even kill us for revenge or even for amusement. Very possibly, many of the Israeli troops wish to be gone as much as we Palestinians will be glad to see them go. But a few, we fear, relish this last chance to torment us.

Celebration and Misgivings: Gazans Watch Settlements Emptied

2005-08-29T02:00:00.000-04:00

Residents of the Kfar Darom settlement and their outside supporters demonstrate against their impending evacuation

Israeli troops kept the roads closed throughout Gaza

Mohammed compiled this report on the settler evacuation and its immediate aftermath from northern Gaza supplemented by a number of phone interviews. [more pictures at http://www.rafahtoday.org]

"I’m happy that I won't see settlers after today"

"I'm happy that I won't see settlers after today," exclaimed Nehad Basher. The fourteen-year-old stood on the roof of his family's four-story house in Deir Al Balah City, and from that vantage point he could see a long line of trucks and moving vans entering and leaving the soon-to-be-emptied Israeli settlement of Kfar Darom.

On Monday, August 15, the Israeli Army formally served eviction notices on the roughly 8500 Israeli settlers living in the Gaza Strip. By the time this article is published, the 48-hour grace period for voluntary departures will have expired and, starting just after midnight on August 17, the Israeli authorities will evacuate the remaining settlers by force if necessary.

While many of the settlers, especially secular Jews, have already left or are simply awaiting the arrival of moving vans, roughly half the settlers, many of them ultra-Orthodox Jews convinced it is their religious duty to stay, are completely opposed to the Gaza withdrawal (supported by a majority of Israeli citizens) and have vowed to leave only if carried out bodily. Complicating the situation are an estimated 5000 anti-disengagement supporters, who have been quietly slipping into the Gaza settlements over the last few weeks to swell the ranks of the anti-disengagement protesters. Although the borders of Gaza were officially sealed over the weekend to keep anti-disengagement forces out, many of the 50,000 hand picked, specially trained Israeli police and army personnel are guarding the borders to enforce the closure. The authorities serving eviction notices were, in some settlements, met by human chains of protesters and scuffles and some arrests ensued.

The Orange Flag of Defiance

Now, as Nehad Basher and his father watch from their rooftop, the anti-disengagement "command center" in Kfar Darom seems to be a tent, topped by an orange flag, roughly in the center of town. Many of the red-tile-roofed houses also fly the orange flag, the color adopted by the anti-withdrawal faction.

I spoke on the phone to Ruti Liberman, spokeswoman of a large anti-disengagement group, Motset Yesha. She remembered our conversation last week, indeed, recognized my voice, and was glad to give an update from Neve Dakalim, the largest Israeli settlement, hours before evacuation orders would be enforced. Many of the residents, she said, simply will not leave. "One of my neighbors is watering the lawn outside her house. She isn't going anywhere voluntarily," she explained. Just how smoothly the forced removals will work out remains to be seen.

Still, given the relative size of the opposed forces, it seems clear that in a matter of weeks, at most, Kfar Darom will be emptied.. Yahya Basher, Nehad's father, can't hide his happiness. "It's finally over—all the torture we endured at the hands of those settlers. The day they all leave has to be a festival for me!" Over the years, his house has been shot at, tear gas canisters have landed inside; his wife and children have been beaten while in their own orange and olive groves. His face grew grave as he explained how three years ago, his family's 27 donums of planted land were confiscated outright by the Israeli Army to "improve the security" of the Kfar Darom settlement. Unlike the settlers who will receive substantial financial compensation, Palestinians whose land was expropriated or houses destroyed received nothing. Now, when the Israeli withdrawal is completed, the Basher family are hoping to reclaim and replant their land.

In the same Deir Al Balah neighborhood, not far from the Basher home, an older woman wearing a married woman's white mendeel (headscarf) looked through a broken window in a wall so riddled with bullet-holes that portions actually resemble a sieve. It's hard to find a good translation for the joyful, piercing shrilling Palestinian women sometimes utter, a kind of victory cry nonetheless edged with angry lament. Umm-Mohammed was born in Askelan, in what is now Israel. Her words, perhaps, sound vengeful: "I cannot stop shrilling when I see those settlers being removed by the Israeli army, suffering as they have made us suffer." The words are harsh—but the bullet-holes, literally too many to count, in the wall of her house that faces Kfar Darom tell their own story. Like so many Palestinian civilian homes close to Israeli settlements, the walls are virtual moonscapes of bullet fire, testimony to the polar opposite of a "good neighbor policy." Sometimes Palestinian militants shot first, many times, the residents could figure out no reason at all for the hail of Israeli bullets. Sometimes the bullets came from the armed settlers, sometimes from the Israeli soldiers in sniper towers. Now, for the first time in years, Umm-Mohammed can look through the window of her own house in relative safety.

Planting the Palestinian Flag

The Israeli Army was worried that the withdrawal would be marked by Palestinian attacks, but so far, Hamas and the other militant factions have kept their word to take no hostile action against the departing settlers. Throughout Gaza, however, the children of many neighborhoods near the settlements have been well-nigh unstoppable, dashing over the broiling sand, often barefoot, to plant the Palestinian flag as close as possible to settlement walls. Palestinian Authority soldiers have formed rough perimeters to keep the children at a safe distance, but none of the exuberant children have been hurt.

A New Era?

The Western mainstream media have been hailing the Gaza disengagement as a first step to restarting the stalled peace process, but many Gaza residents are less than completely optimistic. As Baker Abdulraheem from Khan Younis in southern Gaza explained, "What exactly will we get out of this disengagement when the Israelis will control the borders, the airspace, the seacoast, when they will be right outside the borders ready to re-invade whenever they please?" Certainly, despite heavy pressure from the international community, many vital questions of border control are still unanswered. "Of course," Abdulraheem continued, "it isn't a bad thing—if the checkpoints are gone and we can move around Gaza freely; if the farmers get their land back; if the people living near the settlements no longer have to live in fear—of course that's not bad. But does it make us a sovereign nation? A free country—with the Israelis controlling all the borders?"

Guns abandoned—or poised and ready?

Will Gaza finally know peace? Some of the militants, in light of the many truce violations since February, and the ongoing violence in the West Bank, are less than optimistic.

The Sharon government has been unending in its demands that Palestinian President Abbas "crack down on terrorists," while he has preferred, in the main, to negotiate and include the militant factions in the political process. In a recent speech at a celebration at the Gaza City harbor, Abbas declared there should be no separate militant factions: "All Palestinians should be under one Palestinian flag. . . One Authority, one legal force in the Palestinian territories." However, Mahmoud Al Zahar, a Hamas political spokesman, said that while the Israeli occupation continues, whether in Gaza or the West Bank, armed resistance must remain an option. "Asking us to disband the Al Qassam Brigade [the militant wing of Hamas] is a crime," he told reporters at a Gaza City celebration on 12 August. "That force should remain armed and ready to protect Palestinians."

Although the Western mainstream press has been talking of "historic breakthroughs," few Palestinians believe Ariel Sharon has undergone a complete transformation and suddenly become their champion. Disengagement was a unilateral Israeli decision, and the specific details of the withdrawal from Gaza were as difficult for the Palestinian authorities to ascertain as for the settlers. Whether this is really a step toward a lasting, just peace, or another brutally frustrating dead end for ordinary citizens on both sides of the Green Line, only time will tell.

After the Evacuation I

2005-08-29T01:32:00.000-04:00

photos: Mohammed Omer
Palestinian children show the flag and get as close as possible to an empty settlement, while others play in demolished settlement greenhouses. This is the first time in five years they could set foot on their families' farmland which had been appropriated by the settlers.
more pictures at http://www.rafahtoday.org

After the Evacuation II

2005-08-29T01:02:00.000-04:00

photo: Mohammed Omer
The empty settlements are still "closed zones" but thanks to a zoom lens, the Israeli bulldozers at work demolishing houses at Morag can be seen clearly
more photos at http://www.rafahtoday.org

Disengagement Riddled with Uncertainty

2005-08-15T21:55:00.000-04:00

photo: Mohammed Omer

Jedallah Al Haut explains how he bought the machinery from the clothing factory where he used to work in the Gush Katif settlement. He plans to establish his own business in Gaza once the Israeli withdrawal is completed.

Last week, Mohammed did telephone interviews with several Israeli settlers. His article below appeared in Morgenbladet (a Norwegian weekly) on 12 August.

Confusion, misdirection, propaganda, misinformation and outright lying are the hallmarks of life for everyone in the Gaza Strip these days. From the 1.4 million native Palestinians in Gaza through the Israeli soldiers and some 8500 Israeli settlers, from heads of state to the humblest citizen, nobody seems sure exactly how the planned "disengagement" of Israeli forces and the evacuation of the illegal Israeli settlements will play out. Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon and his closest advisors, who probably know the most, are saying little, while public reaction ranges from the mainstream Western media hailing the plan as a "breakthrough for peace" while extremist rabbis publicly call down death and destruction on Sharon and his government.

The one thing that seems to be certain is that Sharon has staked his political future on removing all the Israeli settlers from Gaza, and from four small settlements in the northern West Bank. Such vague plans that have been announced so far involve an orderly and voluntary removal, but Sharon has left little doubt that the Gaza settlements will be emptied, by force if necessary.

The settlers themselves fall into two main groups: roughly half are secular or moderately-observant Jews who were attracted to the Gaza and West Bank settlements by strong financial incentives—low housing costs, tax advantages, free land, business opportunities. The other half of the settlers, however, follow an ultra-Orthodox theology that, they claim, insists they must physically occupy "eretz Israel"—"greater Israel"—and displace all the non-Jewish inhabitants. Their presence in the settlements is God's will, their inescapable religious duty. While their motives are religious, the Israeli government—whatever its leanings any given year—has supported them for political reasons.

The fervor—some would call it fanaticism—of the religious settlers has forced many of their secular neighbors into an awkward double game. Those who announced publicly they would be happy to leave Gaza if given adequate compensation and financial assistance in starting over have been denounced as traitors or worse by the ultra-Orthodox. Many received death threats, were harassed or even beaten. As a result, many secular settlers have secretly approached the Disengagement Management requesting compensation and voluntary evacuation, while in public, to preserve their safety, offering lip-service to the hard-liners. Making matters worse, the Sharon government has been painfully slow in announcing re-settlement plans, and the promised compensation has yet to be paid.

In the West Bank, the Apartheid Wall, denounced as illegal by the International Court, has separated Palestinian towns, villages and cities from each other and from their farms and groves, but the route of the Wall has also left some 70 Israeli settlements, some only isolated outposts, on the Palestinian side. There as in Gaza, some of the secular settlers—who moved to the settlements for financial reasons—would be happy to relocate if offered a good financial deal, but in the highly-charged atmosphere, feel it is much too dangerous to say so publicly.

The religious settlers, led by many outspoken rabbis in and out of the settlements, are opposing the disengagement with everything from media-savvy civil disobedience, to threats of violence, and even medieval curses. For them, the end—doing God's will by staying in the settlements—justifies almost any means, for their enemies are not just Israel's enemies but God's.

Many observant modern Jews had never heard of the Pulsa d'Nora ceremony (the "Scourge of Fire"), let alone seen it, when footage of the medieval rite recently surfaced on Israeli TV. Rooted in Kabalistic lore and ceremonial magic, the ritual calls down the most elaborate and dire curses on its target. A description sounds like a piece of horror fiction: twenty black-robed rabbis enter an underground cave in the middle of the night, light black candles, and keep repeating after the leader the name of the one to be cursed—most recently, "Ariel Sharon." In solemn prayers, the rabbis called upon the Destroying Angel to kill Sharon. Further, if by chance the rabbis misjudged the situation and their intended victim, Sharon, does not deserve death, then, they stipulate, may the Destroying Angel kill the twenty rabbis.

The extremist rabbis make no secret of the fact that the Pulsa d'Nora ritual was done against the late Israeli Prime Minister Itzak Rabin and, they insist, it succeeded brilliantly. In fact, a fanatic young Israeli student, Yeghal Amer, assassinated Rabin, but according to the rabbis, it was really the Destroying Angel at work.

Most Palestinians in Gaza can cite less arcane sources for their hardships. With the disengagement slated to begin mid-August, the checkpoint closures have been frequent. At the closed Abu Holi checkpoint in mid-Gaza, Jedallah Al Huat, 28, explained that he used to work at the Gush Katif settlement. There, starting at age 16, he was employed as a tailor for Israeli settler Toni Bukra, 38. When the impending disengagement was announced, Bukra offered to sell the furnishings of his clothing factory to Al Huat. They settled on a price of 300,000 shekels (roughly US$7000) for the machines, factory equipment, fabric inventory and finished clothing, which Al Huat brought to his home in Gaza where he hopes to establish his own business post-disengagement.

Over the years, Al Huat got to know his employer and explained, "The settlers in Gush Katif have had a comfortable life. More than that, they've grown rich here. The first time I ever met Toni, he was riding an old black bicycle. Now he drives a 2005 model Suzuki. Toni was in a very shaky financial situation before he came to Gaza—I doubt you could call it middle-class. But he's done very well in Gush Katif," Al Huat explained. "And when he leaves, he'll get lots of money for his house, his clothing factory, and for his 13 donums of greenhouses."

A number of sources said Bukra has signed up for voluntary evacuation and compensation, but Bukra himself denied this in a phone interview. So, then, he was being forced to leave Gaza? "I'll have no choice," he replied. "When the army asks me to evacuate, I will move, and I will find a good place to live."

Bukra's pragmatic approach is light-years away from the prevailing sentiments at the nearby Neve Dakalim settlement. There, not just the IOF forces guarding the Israeli enclave, but many of the settlers are armed, and frequently open fire at the civilian neighborhoods of Khan Younis. In January of this year, 15 year old Ahmed Abu Mustapha was walking down the street when he was shot dead by a sniper in the settlement.

One of the Neve Dakalim residents, Rakhel Suashten, 64, started life as an American citizen. She still speaks English with a strong American accent, and has kept her American citizenship as well. She first became a settler in 1968, and moved to Neve Dakalim in 1997. "This is not a disengagement," she declared. "I am going to be thrown out of my own house here in Gaza, forcibly removed from my neighbors and my home. I have not packed my bags. We are all praying it will not happen."

But has she—just in case the worst does happen—signed the papers to get financial compensation? "Of course I didn't sign!" she almost shouted. "I don't want tainted money." Verbally, the elderly woman is as militant as her armed neighbors. "The Palestinians are the ones who should be thrown out," she insisted "That's part of our Bible—don't you know that?" she asked.

Roughly half the settlers share Mrs. Suashten's hard-line position, and they have support from within Israel as well. The Palestinians in Gaza are bracing themselves for a total closure of all the Gaza checkpoints and border crossings during the evacuation, partly to prevent the extremist settlers from bringing in supporters. The Israeli army has already had to stop thousands of anti-disengagement protesters from entering Gaza.

One of the most vocal and visible anti-disengagement groups is Motset Yesha, funded, according to their spokeswoman, Ruti Liberman, by the Israeli government. Improbable as that claim sounds, the anti-disengagement forces are unquestionably well-organized, well-funded, and highly-motivated. Dabi Rosen, spokeswoman of the Gush Katif Regional Council, is never far from her cell phone these days. "I'm on my way back to Gaza from a setter's demonstration against the Prime Minister," she said in a phone interview. Ms. Rosen has often stated her outright hatred of Palestinians. Told that this reporter was writing for Morgenbladet, she interrupted to say, "Oh, we have many good friends and supporters in Norway working against the disengagement." Although I gave her my name, I am still not sure whether she simply wasn't listening, or perhaps thought ethnic Norwegians are often named "Mohammed."

Why, I asked, did Sharon want to evacuate the Gaza settlements? "Sharon has personal problem with corruption," she answered, "but we settlers are the ones paying the highest price. Of course," she added, "the Palestinians will starve when we leave. We have been employing them in our settlements, but once we're gone, this will be nothing but a jail for them."

"Have you ever looked at a map of the world?" I asked her.

"I have one with me," she replied.

"Then how," I asked, "did it happen that Israel is sitting in the middle of 22 Arab nations here in the Middle East?"

"The word 'Palestinian' doesn't exist," she shouted. "There are no Palestinians! All this land was given to us by God! And if you refer me to the world map, I refer you to the Scriptures!"

I resisted the temptation to ask that if Palestinians did not exist, to whom, then, was she speaking? Instead, I asked her opinion of Sharon—if, as she'd often stated, Sharon was doing a grave disservice to Israel and the Jews, then who was Sharon serving in his war against the Palestinians?

I didn't get to finish the question when Rosen shouted, "War against Palestinians? What do you mean? It's the Palestinians who are killing Israeli citizens."

"Ah, then are you telling me that those helicopters we see on TV shelling Palestinian schools and firing on Palestinian civilians, and those bulldozers destroying Palestinian houses—are you telling me those helicopters and bulldozers are Palestinian?"

"The Palestinians should thank us for employing them in our land, instead of fighting against us!" Rosen insisted. "It seems that you don’t know our history, you know nothing of the truth. Please go study our history and you'll see we are the owners of this land." Despite her extreme religious views, Ms. Rosen hasn't completely ignored more mundane considerations. Before we finished our conversation, she pointed out the amount of money being offered the settlers "is not enough to buy a flat in the North of Israel!"

One wonders how the media and the politicians, in and out of Israel, will react to TV footage of women and children being dragged from their homes, or of the Israeli army grappling with Israeli protesters. Repeat anything often enough, convincingly enough—whether one is calling Palestinians "terrorists," or the disengagement plan an abomination in the sight of God—and some people will believe it. Certainly, the extremist settlers and their supporters are stating their case in the strongest possible terms. After even brief talks with a few of them, the dilemma of the secular settlers becomes clearer. People like Jadi Rosen, many of them armed to the teeth, are living next door or down the street. When and how will those willing to evacuate declare themselves? Will they defy their neighbors and the extremist rabbis? What provision—if any—has the Israeli Army made to protect them from their militant neighbors? Is Sharon—as many analysts fear—trying to engineer an evacuation so difficult, so traumatic, so expensive, that the Europeans and Americans will accept his land-grab in the West Bank? These are all vitally important questions for every living soul in Gaza, but so far, no one has answers.

Hope Turns to Horror

2005-08-10T18:47:00.000-04:00

Umm-Mohammed, mother of 21-year-old Mohammed Hamdan Qeshta, is overcome by grief. Her son, due to be married today, was killed yesterday afternoon by Israeli gunfire. He was walking down the street near his home in Rafah.

Doctors at Abu Yousuf Al Najjar Hospital in Rafah try in vain to save Qeshta.

Mohammed just emailed this report:

Mrs. Qeshta and her whole large family were busy preparing for the wedding of her 21-year-old son to take place today. Instead, the unarmed young man was shot in the head and shoulder by Israeli bullets Tuesday afternoon as he walked down the street near his home. The head injury was fatal, and according to Dr. Musa, director of Rafah's Al Najjar Hospital, Qeshta was dead on arrival.

Normally, Palestinian weddings are wonderfully festive events, but for the Qeshta family, joy was turned to grief by Israeli gunfire. Instead of a wedding celebration, the family had a funeral and are receiving those who would have been their wedding guests as mourners instead.

Over the weekend, Nidal al Qadi, 25, was standing near his home in another Rafah neighborhood when he was injured by gunfire from the Israeli Army. In both cases, witnesses could cite no reason for the shooting.

Even though the Israeli "disengagement" from Gaza is only days away, Rafah's civilian neighborhoods have been targeted for seemingly random shooting and shelling from the Army watchtowers near the border and around the settlements, as well as from circling Apaches and from some of the more militant settlers. On Monday, the Israeli government sent letters to all the residents of the Gaza settlements saying their presence would become illegal as of 15 August and the Army would evacuate them, by force if need be, starting on the 17th. Some of the extremist settlers have insisted it is their religious duty to resist evacuation at all costs. Many Palestinian civilians fear being caught in the crossfire as some settlers and soldiers both seemed determined to inflict maximum damage during these final pre-disengagement days. While many—possibly most—of the Israeli soldiers and settlers want a smooth, non-violent removal, as the Qeshtas learned yesterday, it takes only one bullet fired by one individual to destroy the hope and joy of two families.

The Rafah Crossing to Egypt has been open but Palestinians between the ages of 16 to 35 are not allowed to cross. This will create special problems for many university students slated to study outside Palestine, not to mention business people, and medical patients. Normal activities for all Palestinians in Gaza have become unusually difficult as all the internal military checkpoints have been limiting their opening hours to very brief periods every day. No one knows exactly what problems the actual disengagement will bring, but everyone in Gaza fears things may soon get worse.

Child Injured in Rafah

2005-07-28T11:01:00.000-04:00

Nada Abu Khalil Siam, 4, in hospital after being seriously injured last night during the IOF shelling of Rafah. She was in her home when she was shot in the head.

Mohammed just emailed this:

Again, there has been heavy shelling of civilian neighborhoods in Rafah and a continuing buildup of Israeli army forces despite the Israeli disengagement plan scheduled to start next month. Wednesday night, there was shelling all night long in many areas of Rafah targeting civilian homes, and helicopters circling continuously. The same was true in nearby Khan Yunis.

Nada Khalil Siam 4 years old, was at home, in her own room late last night when she was shot in the head. Eyewitnesses said during the lengthy shelling, her mother was holding her to offer some comfort. She was in her mother's arms when she was shot.

She was rushed to al Najjar Hospital in Rafah where it was determined her injury was severe. She was transferred to the larger, better-equipped European Hospital in Khan Younis where she remains in serious condition.

Another civilian, Hanaa Hijazi, 21, was also wounded last night during the Israeli shelling.

Violence Flares again in Gaza

2005-07-24T15:22:00.000-04:00

This off the wires from WAFA (Palestinian News Agency)

GAZA, July 24, 2005, (WAFA)-Israeli Occupation Forces (IOF) wounded on Monday [sic--the time-stamp in the web item was 5pm Gaza time] a citizen in the Gaza Strip (GS) city of Rafah, sources said.
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Medical sources at Abu-Yossef al-Najjar hospital, said that Mohamed Kshta, 14, was wounded with a bullet in his left hand.

Eyewitnesses told WAFA that Israeli soldiers stationed at Rafah border brutally opened heavy machine gun fire at citizens and houses, wounding a citizen and causing a state of panic among others, mostly children and women.

Another report said Mohammed Keshta, had been wounded in the left shoulder. Whichever is the case, it sounds as if he'll recover--hopefully, with the full use of his hand--or shoulder. Also from WAFA, this report of two deaths in Khan Younis:

GAZA, July 24, 2005, (WAFA)- Medical sources that the Israeli Occupation Forces (IOF) killed today at pre-down 2 citizens in the Gaza Strip city of Khanyounis.
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Medics at al- Shifa Hospital told WAFA that Tareq Suleiman Yassin 20, of Al-Zaytoon area and Yehya Abu Taha 21, of Rafah were shot and killed on the spot.
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In the meantime, IOF closed early morning its military "Abu Holi" checkpoint located in central Gaza Strip, security sources said.
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The sources told WAFA that this closure would cut the Gaza Strip into two alienated parts, and would bar hundreds of thousands of Gazans from access to their workplaces and hosptals.
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Witnesses told WAFA that hundreds of thousands of Palestinians are unable to move between the southern and northern areas of the Strip and cannot reach their destinations.
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IOF is repeatedly closing Abu Holi military roadblock which links North Gaza with its South.

Here is a much fuller report from the International Press Center (Palestinian):

Palestinian Factions Jointly Attack Israeli Settlements in South Gaza Strip

GAZA,Palestine. July 24, 2005.(IPC+Agencies)--- Israeli military sources reported today morning that an attack was conducted overnight in Salah Al-Din road on the Israeli two illegal settlements Ghosh Qatif and Kosofim.

Few Israeli settlers were killed and wounded in the attack. The sources added

In a joint statement, Al-Quds brigades, the military wing of the Islamic Jihad Movement, and Shohada Al-Aqsa brigades, associated with Fatah Movement, and Al-Naser Salah Al-Din brigades, the military wing of the Popular Resistance Committees claimed responsibility for the attack.

In a press conference held today morning in Khanyounis the three Palestinian factions claiming responsibility affirmed such an operation comes as a normal retaliation to the Israeli recent assassination of Palestinian militants in the West bank and Gaza Strip.

The factions added, they will not stand crossed-handed watching the Israeli daily aggressions and violations of the concluded truce, these include the detention operations, the assassinations, and the murder of children, the confiscation of Palestinian-owned lands, and the siege imposed on them.

They also threatened the Israeli Occupation Forces (IOF) that if they do any wanton action against the Palestinian militants or civilians, they will ruthlessly and fiercely respond to all the Israeli crimes and violations.

Al-Quds brigades and Shohada Al-Aqsa brigades identified the two Palestinian militants who conducted the joint attack yesterday at night; Yehya Abu Taha, 21, from Rafah city and Tareq Yasin, 22 from Gaza city.

The Israeli sources have not yet reported the exact number of the killed and wounded in the attack.

Following the attack, the IOF blocked Salah Al-Din road that connects north Gaza Strip with its south denying thousands of Palestinian citizens access to their workplaces, Palestinian security sources reported.

The IOF also heavily and randomly shelled the Palestinian homes in western Khanyounis causing gross damages. No injuries were reported.

A recently issued report on the Israeli violations of the ceasefire agreed upon by the Israeli and the Palestinian sides in Sharm Al-Sheikh summit 8/2/2005 detected about 310 Israeli violations of cease fire understanding. The violations include shelling of densely populated residential areas, frequent incursions into the Palestinian cities and villages, closure of roads, confiscations of Palestinian-own lands and assassination of Palestinian militants.

Finally, this from the Jerusalem Post:

Palestinian Authority Chairman Mahmoud Abbas condemned the killing of an Israeli couple in Gush Katif on Saturday night, saying such attacks provided Israel with an excuse to launch retaliatory attacks on Palestinians, including targeted killings.

"This operation is in violation of the hudna [temporary truce] and period of calm agreed upon in Cairo between all the Palestinian factions earlier this year," Abbas told reporters.

He said the timing of the attack – on the eve of Israel's withdrawal from the Gaza Strip – did not serve the interests of the Palestinians. "These attacks threaten our national security and undermine our credibility in the international arena," he added. "The Palestinian Authority will do its utmost to prevent such damaging attacks."

Despite Abbas's condemnation, the PA-controlled media hailed the two attackers as "martyrs," pointing out that were "resistance fighters" involved in a military operation.

The two are Jihad Abu Taha, 21, of Rafah, and Tarek Salim Yassin, 22, of the Zeitoun neighborhood in Gaza City. Both Islamic Jihad and Fatah claimed responsibility for the deadly attack.

Khaled al Batsh, a senior Islamic Jihad leader in the Gaza Strip, explained that the attack was in the framework of efforts to "correct the path of the Palestinian resistance by directing our weapons only toward the Zionist enemy." He was referring to last week's armed clashes between Hamas gunmen and PA security forces in various parts of the Gaza Strip.

Batsh said the attack also came in response to the killing of Fatah and Hamas members by the IDF over the past few weeks and the stabbing to death of a 13-year-old Palestinian boy near Nablus.

The boy, Yazan Musa, was murdered by his cousin in what was described as an inter-clan feud in the village of Karyut.

His family initially claimed that he had been murdered by Jewish settlers, but later admitted that the boy was murdered by his own cousin.

Batsh dismissed Abbas's argument that Saturday night's attack was in violation of the truce. "This operation cannot be regarded as a breach of the truce," he said. "The resistance will respond to Israeli violations whenever the opportunity arouses."

He added: "The tahdiya [calm] is not sacred. The Tel Aviv government is not abiding by the Cairo agreement and is continuing to kill and demolish and build the racist separation wall. We cannot sit on the side and watch them shed Palestinian blood."

_________________________

The Orwellian double-speak is predictable but discouraging. Truce violations by either side are always "responses"--while the hard fact remains that the violence, no matter what anyone chooses to call it, helps no one.

Nights of Fire: New Violence Sweeps Gaza

2005-07-19T13:47:00.000-04:00

photo: Mohammed Omer
Hamas and Fateh leaders at a recent press conference

This just in from Mohammed who returned to Rafah from a working trip in Norway to be "welcomed" by a missile attack on his neighborhood. He and his family got through the night without injury, but the day before, at the Abu Holi checkpoint, 14-year-old Raghed el-Masri, was killed by an IOF sniper.

Nights of Fire, Uneasy Days

The whine of bullets, the unearthly shrieks of missiles streaking through the air, the sky painted red with garish fire unknown in nature, the sharp odor of cordite, dust, heat—every sense was assaulted at once and the gears of a mind jolted from jet-lagged sleep locked, froze, refused to comprehend. The media routinely call these events "clashes" but the word doesn't begin to do justice to the din, the confusion, the strange feeling of alert numbness.

Tuesday night's firefight in our neighborhood was typical of the new violence sweeping through Gaza. It was a double conflict of sorts. For over a week, various militant factions had been firing Qassam rockets at Gaza's illegal Israeli settlements in retaliation for Israel's resumption of targeted assassinations of militants from Hamas and other factions.

Since the Bader camp, a new neighborhood of UNRWA-built houses, is just across a fortified road from the Rafeh Yam settlement, it was inevitable that as the fragile truce unraveled over the last two weeks, sooner or later, Palestinian militants would decide to use the neighborhood as a launch site. So when the Hamas fighters arrived, residents shouted, begged, pleaded till they moved off to the nearby sand dunes, but their two mortars still drew an inferno of missiles from Rafeh Yam onto the neighborhood.

But then, even the smallest children in Rafah know that the Israeli war machine doesn't need logical reasons to destroy a house, a street, an entire neighborhood. If pressed, they may cite tunnels, or militant activity, or the ever useful "security reasons," but basically, the IOF destroys whatever it wants, whenever it wants. Over the last ten days, horror and chaos has swamped Palestine again.

Teenager Killed at Checkpoint

Yesterday a Palestinian teenager, Raghed el-Abed el-Masri, was shot dead by an Israeli soldier in the sniper tower guarding the Abu Holi checkpoint. Initially, the Israeli Army said they had fired "warning shots in the air," but not at the cars, when Palestinian traffic attempted to cross without permission. However, Dr. Ibrahim Masadar, director of the Shuhada al-Aqsa Hospital, said Raghed had been shot in the back, the live bullet exiting through his heart and chest. The Occupation forces spokesman conceded that Palestinian Civilian Authorities had complained that the 14-year-old had been killed, as well as several others injured in the same incident, and said they were "still investigating."

The Israeli authorities have also reinstated a travel ban on Palestinian men and boys between the ages of 16 and 35 from leaving Gaza through the Rafah crossing, Gaza’s only route to the outside world. In north Gaza, the Erez Crossing into Israel has been sealed as well, preventing some 7000 Palestinian workers who have permits to travel to their jobs in the industrial zone, from getting to work. All of these restrictions are considered "collective punishment" and are forbidden by international law.

Tuesday, in and around Jebalia, there were further clashes between Palestinian security forces and militants, with 13 wounded. Predictably, perhaps, each side blamed the other, while in nearby Gaza City, Abbas and the militants seemed to be reaching agreement. In any case, both sides withdrew their armed fighters from the street, realizing, many hoped, that a Palestinian civil war would help no one but the Israeli hard-liners. And while the powerful discuss, debate, talk with the press, and jockey for power, the men, women, and children of Gaza brace themselves for a long and frightening summer.

Threats of Ground Assault

2005-07-17T14:31:00.000-04:00

It is already July 18th out in Australia where the Monday morning papers are carrying wire service reports from AFP. On Sunday, Israel launched fresh air strikes and shot down two Hamas militants, one as he left his home in khan Younis (just up the road from Rafah.) Abbas is promising to stop the Qassam rocket attacks "at all cost," while Sharon is threatening a ground assault "within hours." Interestingly, according to this news story the head of Shin Beth is urging Abbas be given 24 hours to calm the situation.

full story archived.

TWO militants were shot dead by Israeli troops today, as Israel carried out a fresh air strike and threatened a major ground offensive in the Gaza Strip unless Palestinians halted rocket attacks.

Escalating unrest, which has killed 12 Palestinians and six Israelis in five days, has flung a spluttering truce into crisis and is to bring US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice to the region at the end of the week to press for calm.

Prime Minister Ariel Sharon said Israel's defence establishment had been given a free hand to stop all rocket attacks.

"I met defence officials and I repeated to them that there was no restriction on operations to stop attacks on (Israeli) towns," he said.

"We will absolutely not tolerate the continuation of attacks against our towns, be they inside the Gaza Strip or on the border."

Sharon reiterated that Palestinian attacks will not hinder the pullout from the Gaza Strip set to begin next month.

Said Saeam, 32, a wanted local leader in Hamas's armed wing that claimed continuous anti-Israeli rocket attacks today, was shot dead as he left home in the Gaza town of Khan Yunis, the Israeli army and Palestinian sources said.

Another Palestinian gunman was killed by Israeli troops as he tried to infiltrate the isolated Jewish settlement of Netzarim, the army said.

Three Hamas militants fled with their lives after an Israeli drone slammed a rocket into a car in the northern Gaza town of Beit Lahia, a Hamas bastion and frequent launchpad for rocket attacks, witnesses and security sources said.

"If the Palestinian Authority does not stop the attacks, we will have to take action in its place," Defence Minister Shaul Mofaz was quoted as saying.

The military has assassinated at least eight Hamas militants since Friday - the first targeted killings in seven months.

Israel's army has deployed thousands of extra soldiers and armoured vehicles on top of those massed across the border with the Gaza Strip.

Deputy Defence Minister Zeev Boim threatened a major land offensive in Gaza "within the next few hours" unless militants stopped rocket attacks.

"We are heading towards a big-scale operation. The troops are ready and the operational plans drawn up," Boim told public radio.

But the head of Israel's domestic security agency recommended Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas be given a day's grace to restore calm before troops rolled across the border, public radio reported.

"Mahmoud Abbas should be given a chance. We should wait 24 hours before taking a decision," Yuval Diskin, the head of Shin Beth, was quoted as saying by public radio.

Six Israeli settlers were wounded, two seriously, in a mortar attack on Neve Dekalim, an army spokesman said. Hamas claimed the attack. A follow-up rocket attack later wounded another two settlers.

Abbas, who has condemned the rocket assaults, held talks with Egypt's deputy intelligence chief, Mustafa al-Buheiri, who rushed to Gaza on a mission to help rescue the teetering truce.

The Egyptians later began follow-up talks with representatives of Hamas.

Palestinian chief negotiator Saeb Erakat "strongly condemned" Israel's resumption of targeted killings and warned that continued killings would "completely destroy the truce".

He warned that any ground offensive would be "a big disaster" and "will destroy all chances to make the withdrawal peaceful and organised".

A Hamas spokesman said Israel's return to targeted killings would unleash hell and warned the truce would collapse if the bloodshed continued.

"We say to the Zionist enemy, he has opened the gates of hell," Mushir al-Masri said.

"If the enemy continues his aggression and killings against our people, the truce is headed towards collapse."

Last Night in Gaza City

2005-07-17T13:30:00.000-04:00

This from Laila El-Haddad's excellent blog (see permanent link to Raising Yousuf in the list at right)--the view from her kitchen window in Gaza City last night:

Lawlessness at Midnight

A quick post on the situation before I head to bed: Its a bit crazy here, Fateh people, from what I can tell shabab with nothing better to do, are out on the main city streets in a show of force banging their rifles every which way.

I'm crawling into bed and suddenly I hear the all-too-familiar darts of bullets spraying into the air. I look out the kitchen window (note to self: never look out glass window when Fateh men are firing haphazourdly) and see several hundred Fateh men marching down the street, chanting "kata'ib", in reference to the Fateh-linked Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigades.

Ok, now the rundown: No idea why: 1) they chose midnight to do this; 2) why they are endangering innocent bystanders lives with their emotions run wild (though perhaps hey may argue that is why they chose midnight...) 3) why the police, under the auspices of the Ministery of the Interior, is not doing anything abou this, but all-too-anxious to shoot at Hamas folks.

Just today, a spokesperson for the Ministry assured me that "no one is above the law", which they would enforce equally, without discrimination or hesitation. My take on it is that there are simply WAY too many unlicensed weapons on Gaza's streets. I mean, anyone whose no necessarily anyone can get a hold of a gun, which are often used to settle personal vendettas. There's something rather unsettling about a lot of fed-up, stressed out people, locked in a 350sq mile open-air prison with a bunch of guns in their hands. Let's not even talk about road rage. And by the way, all of these real psycho-social implications of the occupation, according to a Gaza psychiatrist I interviewed last year.

Horror Again in Gaza

2005-07-15T19:44:00.000-04:00

Gaza City civilians gather around the wreckage left after the Israeli Army resumed "extrajudicial assassinations" this afternoon. The charred mass in the foreground is all that was left of a Volkswagen carrying four Hamas members that was destroyed by at least two rockets fired by Israeli Army Apache gunships. Six pedestrians were also injured in the attack.

Mohammed just sent this update:

Horror Again in Gaza

After a few months of cautious hope, blood, fire, and fear has become the norm again in Gaza. Back to counting the dead, counting the injured, phoning the medics to try to learn the names of the casualties. For the Palestinian civilians, it is back to sleepless nights trying to judge how close the shooting and bombing is, or trying to sleep at closed Israeli checkpoints.

Where did it start this time? Should we go back to the suicide bombing this week in Netanya? The Israeli Army has been routinely arresting members of militant factions and staging incursions into areas under Palestinian control despite the supposed cease-fire. The young militant who carried out the Netanya bombing said he was "responding" to the Israeli crimes in the West Bank. Of course, IOF activity only increased after the Netanya attack on the 12th, while in Gaza, the militant factions increased their Qassam launches in—yes, that word again—"response."

Thursday night, an Israeli woman, Dana Glakowitz, 22 who lived in a town near the Gaza border, was killed by a Qassam strike as she sat on the porch of her home. The Palestinian Interior Minister declared a state of emergency and ordered the PA police to stop the militants from firing on Israeli settlements and towns hear the border. The IOF immediately closed the checkpoints, dividing Gaza into three sealed sections and shortly after midnight launched four rocket strikes on Gaza within an hour. Three were in northern Gaza, one on a cemetery in Khan Younis that the Israeli military claims is being used as a launch site by the militants. In Gaza City the headquarters of an Islamic charity was destroyed—the IOF claimed it was "pro-Hamas."

There were heavy clashes all night between PA police and masked militants, with cars carrying Hamas members attacked and, in retaliation, militant attacks on police stations and police cars. Tragically, in the Zeytoun neighborhood of Gaza City, two bystanders, a teenager and a child, were killed during a firefight between militants and the PA police.

With the dawn, the police-militant conflict largely ceased, but civilians were burning tires in an effort to blind the Israeli unmanned surveillance drones. In mid-afternoon, the Israeli helicopters resumed extrajudicial assassinations by rocket attacks an hour apart on two cars carrying Hamas members—one near Nablus, and one in Gaza City. In the Gaza City airstrike around 4pm, four Hamas members were killed, their white Volkswagen reduced to barely-recognizable rubble, and six pedestrians were also injured. Eyewitnesses said body parts and shredded flesh of the four passengers were scattered over a wide area.

Witnesses report Israeli troops and tanks are massing at the sealed borders.

News from Rafah, Tragic and Joyful Both

2005-07-13T02:34:00.000-04:00

photo: Mohammed Omer
Emotions run high among Rafah's scondary school graduates as they await the Tawjihi exam results.

Another long report from Mohammed focusing on a single, highly eventful day. Roadside bombs, a suicide attack in Netanya—but in spite of the horror, some good news—no, actually, some wonderful news in the Tawjihi results.

12 July
Early this morning, two Israeli soldiers were wounded, one critically, when a roadside bomb exploded and hit an Israeli military jeep near the Matahen checkpoint, south of Deir El Balah. The jeep was patrolling near the Netzer Hazani settlement in south Gaza. No militant faction or group has claimed responsibility.

The Israeli occupation forces immediately closed the Salahedin Road, the main north-south artery through Gaza, and closed the Abu Holi and Matahen checkpoints, causing huge traffic jams. Eyewitnesses also report one citizen arrested in Khan Younis.

In a separate incident north of Khan Younis, four militants and two civilians were wounded near the Al Amal neighborhood while trying to fire homemade rockets at the Israeli Gani Tal settlement. This makeshift ordnance contains organic material and chemical fertilizer and becomes unstable in very hot weather, making premature detonation more likely. The Palestinian Interior Ministry once more urged all the militant groups to respect the truce.

A final act of violence—which may have profound effects on all of Gaza--took place in the Israeli seaside resort town of Netanya where an 18-year-old suicide bomber from the West Bank detonated his explosives on a busy street corner outside a shopping mall, killing two young women along with himself and wounding as many as 50 people. Some media reports say the Islamic Jihad faction is claiming responsibility; others say nobody has claimed responsibility for the attack. Palestinian President Abbas was quick to condemn the suicide attack. Reuters reported the bomber was Ahmed Abu Khalil, 18, from Tulkarm in the West Bank, and said in his video statement: "We reiterate our commitment to calm, but we have to retaliate for Israeli violations." Of course, if the Israeli army answers with overwhelming force, almost certainly they will say they "have to" retaliate. Throughout Gaza, people are bracing for the almost inevitable border closures and the resulting hardships.

Rafah leads Tawjihi exam results.

There were shouts of joy as mothers passed out sweets, car horns honked, tears of happiness were shed throughout Rafah as the Tawjihi exam results brought the amazing news that besieged Rafah had the highest exam scores in all of Gaza. The Tawjihi exams—an ordeal, milestone, and rite of passage-- are taken by all graduating secondary school students and a passing grade is necessary to go on to university. Despite the incursions and frequent shelling, Rafah students had the highest scores in both the Art and Science sections, taking the top nine places. Many of the high-scoring students come from the devastated neighborhoods on the Gaza/Egypt border. Ghada Shabana, from the Shafa Amar School for Girls, had the highest mark in the Art Stream, 98.2, while Safa Alghoul of the Al Aqdasia School for Girls scored highest in Science with 99.5.

Preparing for the Tawjihi exams often involves the whole family, as radios and TVs are silenced for weeks on end and all the family members do their utmost to give the studying seniors the peace and quiet they need. Even when there is an attack nearby, most students refuse to let it disrupt their work. If the power is cut, they continue by candlelight. If the shelling is too close for it to be safe to show a light, they shutter the windows and, if necessary, learn to ignore stifling heat. For so many parents, students, and teachers in Rafah, preserving normalcy, refusing to let the Occupation invade even our minds and studies, is our own rejection of oppression, our own victory over injustice.

more pictures, plus archive at
http://rafah.virtualactivism.net/news/todaymain.htm

What Does She Dream?

2005-07-09T01:44:00.000-04:00

photo by Mohammed Omer

Exhausted beyond tears, six-year-old Olfat al Qadi makes her bed on the rubble of her home in Rafah's Hay al Salam neighborhood. Her pillow and a flower were all she could find in the ruins.

When the Israeli incursion roared through the Hay al Salam neighborhood back in December 2003, this little girl refused to leave her home. Somehow, she made it out of the rubble alive while the rest of the family ran from the tanks. With no idea where her parents might be, she found her pillow and a flower and fell asleep. Hay al Salam literally means "neighborhood of peace" but happens to be close to the Gaza/Egypt border. Sometimes by tens and scores, sometimes by just a house or two, the Occupation Forces have reduced most of Hay al Salam to a destroyed no-man's-land, the infamous Philadelphi Corridor. First the tanks and bulldozers, often backed by Apache gunships, destroy the houses. When the families come back to try to salvage belongings, often the patrolling tanks fire on them. Eventually, the bulldozers return and bury the rubble, hiding any sign that there had once been a thriving neighborhood there. Homes, businesses, gardens, trees, everything gone as the occupying army creates its "security zone" out of ruined lives.

Rafah's Pre-Disengagement Problems

2005-07-05T15:22:00.000-04:00

A long catch-up report from Mohammed covering a number of topics, including the verdict in the Tom Hurndall case. Throughout Southern Gaza, residents are prepared for problems during the evacuation of the Israeli settlements.

On 3 July, a number of Israeli bulldozers and tanks invaded the western part of Rafah Refugee Camp, and left only after heavy shooting. Essam Al Abed, 21, was taken to Abu Yousuf Al Najjar hospital where doctors reported he had two bullet wounds in his left leg.

In the Tal Al Sultan neighborhood, also in western Rafah, twenty well-equipped Israeli soldiers, backed by armored vehicles, came from the nearby Israeli settlements and tried to enter the neighborhood. Gunfire was exchanged with militants.

In the Al Mawasi camp, which is cut off from the sea and from the rest of Gaza by Israeli settlements, settlers, backed up by anti-disengagement supporters from Israeli and overseas, tried to occupy houses in Al Mawasi and burn the Palestinians' fishing boats. The Israeli army separated the scuffling groups, but according to witnesses and the press, beat the Palestinians while dealing fairly gently with the settlers.

That same weekend, some forty militants from the al Aqsa Martyrs' Brigade, the armed wing of the ruling Fatah party, took over the Palestine Legislative Council office building in Rafah. Although they were masked and carried rifles, their four-hour "occupation" was non-violent. The action was a protest against the authorities' foot-dragging on fulfilling its promise to find jobs for the militants.

Late in June, a Bedouin soldier serving in the Israeli Army was convicted of manslaughter in the death of photographer and peace activist Tom Hurndall in Rafah two years ago, and received a 20-year prison sentence.. Hurndall's father, a British attorney, conducted his own investigation of events in Rafah and had the backing of the British government in pushing for a serious investigation. After the verdict, he told reporters that the case had underlined a culture of impunity for Israeli soldiers operating in Gaza. "We are concerned that there is a policy which seems to be prevalent in Gaza among the Israeli soldiers and army that they feel able to shoot civilians really without any accountability whatsoever. So there are two issues here: one, the apparent tacit policy that seems to be in place that the Palestinian civilians are fair game; and that there is no accountability."

The Israeli human rights group Btselem said that innocent Palestinian victims were much less likely to receive justice, saying that Israeli forces had killed at least 1,722 Palestinians not involved in hostilities but in only two cases were soldiers convicted of causing the death of a Palestinian.

Rafah residents, particularly those in areas near the Israeli settlements, are braced for difficulties during the coming evacuation, as at least some of the settlers seem bent on offering violent resistance. Shooting from the settlements toward Palestinian civilians is a common occurrence. No one is sure if the Israeli army will seal off Gaza to prevent the settlers from gathering reinforcements, but border closures always mean shortages and hardship for everyone in Gaza.

Protest at Pal. Legislative Council Bldg

2005-07-02T07:27:00.000-04:00

Xinhua, the Chinese news agency, is often first to get a story on the wire. That seems to be the case with the item below. Sounds like the protest was (is?) non-violent, although it sounds as if nothing has been resolved yet. And they're seeking not mayhem but jobs Updates as we can find them. Mohammed is out of Rafah right now, but his take from the local residents will probably arrive in due course.

GAZA, July 2 (Xinhuanet) -- Members of the al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades seized the building of the Palestinian Legislative Council (PLC) in the southern Gaza Strip town of Rafah on Saturday, Palestinian witnesses said.

About 40 gunmen wearing black and holding rifles suddenly showed up and entered the building which houses office of PLC Speaker Rawhi Fattouh and other Rafah legislatures, said the witnesses.

The gunmen of the ruling Fatah movement's armed wing seized the building in protest against the ignoring of their demands for rights.

One of the gunmen told reporters that the action was aimed at sending a clear message to all the PLC members that they should work on finding job opportunities for those who have sacrificed for their own people and cause.

He said his group would never stop actions of protests against the PLC and the Palestinian National Authority (PNA) until "our legal demands become true and until we get all our legitimate rights to live a good life in the future."

The gunmen urged the PLC and the Palestinian security apparatuses to offer them jobs and merge them into the PNA security and civil institutions.

Flying Higher than the Warplanes: the Kites of Gaza

2005-06-28T01:01:00.000-04:00

photo: Mohammed Omer

An article Mohammed did for Morgenbladet (where it appears in Norwegian.) As you'll see, living under occupation changes even the simplest things:

These days around the summer solstice, the sun rises over the Negev a few minutes earlier every day, brightening the cloudless sky. Before it finishes its long arc to set over the Mediterranean, hidden from Rafah's refugee camps by barbed wire, walls, settlements and Israeli sniper towers, the noon heat will bake the sky almost white. Throughout the day, Apache gunships occasionally hover, unmanned drones come by now and then, but there are new squadrons of manmade objects in the sky as well—sometimes one or two, sometimes dozens of colorful kites soaring above the tents, the rubble, the tiny houses and narrow streets of the camps. Seen from a distance, they are diving, swooping, soaring shapes of brilliant red, blue, green, and white. You have to get closer to hear the delighted laughter of the children flying them, closer still to see their smiles.

Like children everywhere, the kite-flyers are fascinated by birds, planes, cartoon characters like Superman and Batman—anything and everything that flies. Palestinian children have seen skies full of American-made Apache warships for years, but most of the children now flying kites in Rafah are too young to remember clearly that short time before the Intifada when Palestine's national airline, with its tiny fleet of jets, was the pride and hope of the nation. Gaza International Airport is just a few miles east of Rafah, its runways destroyed by the Israeli Occupation Army, but its terminal crew still reports to work daily and maintains the building as best they can. With all the plans for Israeli disengagement from Gaza this summer, repairing and re-opening the Gaza International Airport is a key item in Palestinan-Israeli negotiations about post-disengagement Gaza.

While the politicians do what politicians do best—namely, talk, and talk some more—Rafah's children have mastered flight that requires no salaries for pilots, air hostesses, or ground crews, no jet fuel, planes, or airports. With paper, string, a bit of glue and lots of ingenuity, their kites soar aloft every summer day in Rafah. Instead of carrying passengers and cargo, these flimsy constructions are still strong enough to carry the dreams, questions, hopes, and demands of the children who send them into the sky.

"My kite carries a message," 13-year-old Hussni Hamad explained. "My dream is that the Israeli Apache pilots will see the question written plainly on it, namely, 'Why are you shelling us?'" Almost every Palestinian could ask that question, as it is rare for a day to go by even now without at least one person in Gaza being killed or injured by Israeli aerial attack. Even now, during a supposed cease-fire, shelling is a near-daily occurrence.

A few meters away from Hussni, Imad was hot and exhausted, but determined to finish his kite that day. The frame was made of dried ditch reeds; the paper covering it was designed with the colors of the Palestinian flag, black, green, white, and red. But this kite is far more than a pleasant toy for Imad, for in the center he has pasted a photograph of a young man. When asked who it is, Imad pauses, seems to go deep inside himself before explaining the man in the photo is his beloved older brother, dead nearly two years now, murdered by the Israeli Occupation forces in the winter of 2003. He has a dream, he says shyly. A simple one. Maybe he can make his kite, the marvelous kite honoring his brother, fly higher than the Israeli warplanes and Apaches. "I feel freedom; I feel like I'm flying through my kite," he says. "Though someday," he adds, "I hope to travel by airplane."

Imad probably doesn't realize that people have been flying kites at least 3000 years, or that in sending his dead brother's photo soaring into the heavens, he is creating his own version of symbols found in many cultures. In Chinese folklore, colorful kites symbolize the souls of honored ancestors rising to eternity. Very likely, the more enterprising Rafah kite-makers who turn out an extra or two to sell to the other kids, also don't realize that in many countries, elaborate kites have been prized and valuable art works for centuries.

The children of Gaza have also used their kites to send messages to one another. Last autumn, when the villages of Beit Hanoun and Beit Lahiya were under prolonged siege, children in nearby areas flew kites daily to show their solitaridy with their neighbors under attack. Their hope was that when people looked up, they would see not just drones and gunships, but those bright kites saying, "We know what's happening. We care. We support you. Don't give up hope."

Growing up under Occupation has made the physical world tiny for the children of Gaza. There are the beautiful beaches they cannot visit, the warm nights when it's too dangerous to venture out, the sniper towers that make it dangerous to play, the friends and relatives in the next village they cannot visit. But the extent of their resilience is limitless, as they send their vivid messages of hope, their demand for peace, soaring into the sky day after brilliant summer day.

Operation Rainbow, One Year Later

2005-06-09T22:13:00.000-04:00

Mohammed revisited some of the Rafah residents still trying to recover from the deadly incursion of May 2004.
His article was published in Morgenbladet (a Norwegian weekly) and online in the Vermont Guardian. Here it is in full:

The Israelis called it "Operation Rainbow" and insisted the name was generated at random by a computer. To the men, women, and children of Rafah who endured the slaughter, it was a bitter footnote to a week of horror. In Greek mythology, the rainbow was a bridge between earth and Olympus, between men and gods. In the Old Testament, after sending a flood that destroyed the world, God set a rainbow in the sky as a sign of peace and renewal. But in May of 2004, the shells and bombs in the night sky over Rafah brought only death. "Operation Rainbow" is an appropriate name in only one way: a year later, the images are still vivid, their evidence of Israeli terrorism against a civilian population undimmed.

After nearly three years of Intifada, the residents of Rafah were familiar enough with incursions—the Apaches overhead, the tanks and the shelling, followed by the bulldozers that would destroy homes, infrastructure, lives. Operation Rainbow, like all the others, was undertaken "for security reasons," ostensibly to find and destroy alleged smuggling tunnels running from Rafah under the border into Egypt. But last May, the Israeli Army began its onslaught far from the border in Tal Al Sultan and El Barazil in the northern part of Rafah, tearing up streets completely, destroying electric, water, and sewer lines, flattening whole blocks of houses, even bulldozing Rafah's small zoo. Israeli snipers commandeered taller houses and took up position on the rooftops, shooting anything and anyone who moved, even killing two teenagers whose "hostile activity" was taking down laundry from a clothesline and feeding pet doves. All the while, the shells from the Apache helicopters turned their victims into scattered body parts. As the week wore on, people ran out of food, water and medicine, ambulances were pinned down by Israeli fire and could not reach the injured, the morgue in Al Najjar hospital was overflowing and a commercial refrigerator that usually stored vegetables was pressed into service to hold corpses when no one could venture outdoors to bury their dead.

The ceaseless din of explosions and gunfire couldn't drown out the human chorus of despair—children crying for a piece of bread, for a cup of milk, for a drop of water, the laments of parents who had nothing to give them, the wails of the newly widowed and orphaned, the screams of the dying and dismembered. But sometimes there was only stunned, disbelieving silence, as friends and relatives tried to identify their loved ones from scattered body parts—a leg, an arm, a piece of a torso—that was all the ambulance drivers could gather. A year later, the pictures from that time—mere pixels on a computer screen, after all—are still sickening. For the first time, I was writing warnings and apologies for the overwhelming gore of my photos. But the images are still easier to bear than the flesh and blood reality of standing next to a hospital gurney full of bits and pieces of what were recently living people.

The international outcry seemed slow and muted. Before Operation Rainbow ended, 60 Palestinians had been killed, hundreds injured, many of them permanently maimed, hundreds of houses destroyed and thousands made homeless. On May 16, the Israeli Apaches shelled a peaceful demonstration of hundreds of unarmed men and boys, killing several and injuring scores. They were asking for food and water, asking the international community to intervene. The Israeli Army tried to say the Palestinians fired first, but dozens of journalists—many of whom came under fire themselves—had photos and videos to prove the demonstrators were unarmed. At that point, even the Bush administration, usually a reliable yea-sayer to all of Sharon's policies, couldn't avoid voicing an official protest. Slowly, the Israeli Army withdrew, though a few days later as Peter Hansen, then commissioner of UNRWA, toured one of the destroyed neighborhoods, Israeli snipers killed a three-year-old girl just a block away from the United Nations party.

A year later, Abu Sophi Adjarewaan, 53, spends much of every day at the mound of rubble that was once his home. Normally, this patriarch of a large extended family is a fish-seller in the outdoor market, but the few local fisherman who can still work can rarely get their catch past the Israeli checkpoints now. Nothing has been remotely normal for Abu Sophi and his family since their home was destroyed in Operation Rainbow. Every day for a year now, the old man sits on a small black sofa outside what was once, he will tell you, a sprawling family compound. Even after a year, even after his married children and their children salvaged what they could, Abu Sophi seems in shock, unable to make sense of the unthinkable. He inherited the house from his parents, he will tell you, and like many family homes, it grew as his sons married and had children, as hoarded shekels became an extra room here, perhaps an extra storey there. This was the house where Abu Sophi was born; it held everything he ever accomplished in life; it was to have been his legacy to his children.

Now, with money, work, and hope in short supply—indeed, 80% of the families in Rafah are below the poverty line even by the modest local standards—Abu Sophi sits in the rubble every day. His little granddaughter, perhaps 3, stands at his knee, four or five of her friends listen intently as he says, "We should be back here. We will be back rebuilding here some day. The Occupation will end. There should be an end to this injustice." His voice, usually quiet, rises on the last words. But this hopeful moment quickly dissolves into questions without answers. "I hope, I hope, I hope," he goes on in a whisper, "I can find someone who will ask the Israeli Prime Minister, 'Sharon, why did you destroy my house? How did it make your country better, or safer, or happier to destroy our lives?'" Tears are streaming down his wrinkled face into his white beard as he asks, "Why, Sharon, why?"

Like everyone in Rafah, I have my own unanswered questions. Some, of course, look to the future: Can a just peace be negotiated? Will the cease-fire hold despite all provocation? But in Rafah, one never escapes the past, so I often ask: Who is truly responsible for Operation Rainbow, for Abu Sophi's despair? Was it just the Israeli bulldozer drivers, the Apache pilots, the snipers, the generals who gave the orders, the Israeli politicians who set policies, and the international leaders who condone them with their silence? Does responsibility extend to everyone whose taxes support Sharon and his government? To the commercial media in the West who day after day ignore the reality of the Occupation or bury it in the back pages? And why, I wonder even more often, are good people so indifferent, so comfortable, so complacent, as the bodies and souls of the innocent are ground into the dust as surely as the demolished houses? The same decent people who would never, could never, dismember a living child with their own hands, are still somehow too busy to write a letter, sign a petition, march in a protest. Don't they understand that silence kills as surely as bombs and bullets?

RafahNews -Death and Disappointment

2005-05-26T21:49:00.000-04:00

The latest from Mohammed is discouraging:

Ahmed Robin Barhoom, 24, was shot by an Israeli Army sniper close to the place in Yebna Camp near the border where Thomas Hurndall, the British photojournalist, was shot by an Israeli sniper while trying to bring two small children out of the line of fire back in May of 2003.

Details were initially sketchy, but Ahmed's neighbors couldn't believe this young man had come under Israeli fire. There was enough shooting that the ambulances couldn't reach him for a long time. The Israeli press, predictably, is calling Barhoom a militant. There are also reports of Palestinians wounded in clashes in Khan Younis and firings of rockets at Gush Katif, with heavy fire returned by the Israeli army. The Palestinian Cabinet issued an official protest of this violation of the truce by Israel and urged the militant factions to withhold retaliation. Spokesmen for Hamas and other militant groups urged their members to maintain the cease-fire despite the Israeli violations.

This same week, the famous Brazilian soccer player Ronaldo visited Ramallah in the West Bank and Tel Aviv on a mission to promote peace and sports. His plans to visit Gaza as well were aborted by the Israeli military closure. Few realize what a passion soccer is in Palestine—it requires nothing more than a soccer ball, a little open ground. A Rafah 12-year-old, Hamad al Nairib, wrote to the sports star urging him to visit the children of Rafah "where all the people love you."

Some might call Hamad lucky; he was present at the peaceful demonstration in Rafah a year ago which the Israelis shelled. A number of Hamad's friends were killed that day; he himself lost his left leg. Hamad had been a fervent soccer player with dreams of becoming "the Ronaldo of Palestine." Maybe it isn't fair to expect a brilliant athlete also to be a diplomat, politician, and PR expert—we'll never know how much or little of an effort Ronaldo made to persuade the Israeli army to let him into Gaza. But Hamad and his friends were disappointed yet again.

photos at http://www.rafahtoday.org

Rafah News--Two Children Injured

2005-05-23T21:36:00.000-04:00

At early dawn today, the Israeli occupation forces manning a military checkpoint in Tal Al Sultan area, in the western part of Rafah, opened fire at random towards the residents' houses in the area. There seemed to the residents to be no reason for the shooting.

Later that day, two children in the Al Z'arba area in the southern part of Rafah, were injured when an object left on the street by Israeli soldiers exploded. Doctors at Abu Yousef Al Najjar Hospital said Ahmed Zaid Zuraob and Mohammed Ibraheem Zurob each had several shrapnel wounds in various parts of their bodies.

Introducing Mohammed

2005-05-20T23:49:00.000-04:00

A lifelong resident of Rafah, and a photojournalist who learned his craft literally under fire. Three years ago, he started documenting daily events in his home town, as well as guiding and translating for foreign journalists visiting the Gaza Strip. His reports eventually became the Rafah Today website.

Somehow, despite the Occupation, he has continued his university studies as well. You can check his older reports on the Rafah Today site. You can also browse his extensive photo archives there. http://www.rafahtoday.org.

To better spread the word on Rafah, his news reports and longer articles are posted here as well.

Rafah--attempting an overview

2005-05-20T23:41:00.000-04:00

Depending on your perspective, Rafah is a hotbed of terrorists, a poverty-stricken patch of urban sprawl on the border of the Gaza Strip and Egypt, the frequent target of a cruel occupying army, or maybe just some strange-sounding place you've never heard of.

In fact, until the current intifada erupted in 2001, "old Rafah," an inhabited city since before the Roman Empire, and its much more recent crowded refugee camps, was home to some 140,000 men, women, and children, and a busy collection of thriving neighborhoods, shops, small, medium, and large houses. On the outskirts, farms and olive groves were side by side with residential neighborhoods. In the last four years, there have been drastic changes, few of them good.

But I had never heard of Rafah four years ago. On September 11, 2001, I watched the smoke billow from the World Trade Center about a mile from my home and went shopping--despite the eye-stinging smoke--because I knew food deliveries and really, all public tranport and vehicular traffic was going to be a mess for a while.One stop took me to a convenience store run by a nice 40-ish guy with an accent. I knew he was a naturalized citizen; we talked politics occasionally, and I found myself explaining the Electoral College to him during the election cliffhanger of 2000. He might have been Hispanic, but, really, who knew? Who cared?

That awful day, I heard another customer asking him if his family was safe. Safe? They were somewhere in Brooklyn--why wouldn`t they be safe? Well, it turned out my storekeeper friend and his family are Palestinian Americans.

As the months passed, I realized hand-wringing and viewing-with-alarm and occasional vague nice thoughts wouldn`t cut it anymore. Not when Arab-Americans and Muslim-Americans were getting a very rough time; not when conflict erupted in the West Bank and Gaza by October and steadily worsened.By the turn of the year, I`d found the Arab-American Institute and eventually, through them, several charities helping Palestinian children. Pretty soon, I was sponsoring a little girl--figured that was easy and practical: send a small check monthly, get a translated letter once in a blue moon, decide you`d done your bit for beleaguered humanity. I picked her out almost on a whim from the organization`s website--she`d been waiting for a sponsor for months. Oh, yes, she was from Rafah--which at that point I couldn`t have found on a map.

All these logical calculations were soon blown to shreds by reality, and by the charity's remarkable college student liaison in Rafah, Mohammed. Reports and letters from "my" little girl, and her whole family, were frequent. Mohammed proved to be a faithful e-mailer. An English major, writing to an editorial consultant--we discovered we had plenty to discuss. I thought I`d help a victim. Instead, I discovered friends.

So while I've never been closer to Rafah than my keyboard, or the telephone, I've been privileged to get a unique picture--idiosyncratic, perhaps, but authentic--of daily life in this besieged Palestinian town. The mainstream media tends to rely on fast labels and easy soundbites, but I'd like you to get to know some of the men, women, and children of this place--partly in the middle of nowhere, partly in the spotlight, caught in the cross-hairs--and in spite of everything, beautiful.