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The Situation in the Occupied Territories

GAZA TIMELINE General Israeli attack on Jenin and Ramallah March-May 2002 The Gaza Ghetto

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General

Khan Younis, Gaza. It is still. The camp waits, as if holding its breath. And then, out of the dry furnace air, a disembodied voice crackles over a loudspeaker.

'Come on, dogs,' the voice booms in Arabic. 'Where are all the dogs of Khan Younis? Come! Come!'

I stand up. I walk outside the hut. The invective continues to spew: 'Son of a bitch!' 'Son of a Whore!…'

The boys dart in small packs up the sloping dunes to the electric fence that separates the camp from the Jewish settlement. They lob rocks toward two armored jeeps parked on top of the dune and mounted with loudspeakers. Three ambulances line the road below the dunes in anticipation of what is to come.

A percussion grenade explodes. The boys, most no more than ten or eleven years old, scatter, running clumsily across the heavy sand. They descend out of sight behind a sandbank in front of me. There are no sounds of gunfire. The soldiers shoot with silencers. The bullets from the M-16 rifles tumble end over end through the children's slight bodies. Later, in the hospital, I will see the destruction: the stomachs ripped out, the gaping holes in limbs and torsos.

Yesterday at this spot the Israelis shot eight young men, six of whom were under the age of eighteen. One was twelve. This afternoon they kill an eleven-year-old boy, Ali Murad, and seriously wound four more, three of whom are under eighteen. Children have been shot in other conflicts I have covered – death squads gunned them down in El Salvador and Guatemala, mothers with infants were lined up and massacred in Algeria, and Serb snipers put children in their sights and watched them crumple onto the pavement in Sarajevo – but I have never before watched soldiers entice children like mice into a trap and murder them for sport.

– A Gaza Diary: Scenes from the Palestinian uprising by Chris Hedges, October 2001.

… American friends of Israel can live comfortably in denial, believing that although the occupation may be misguided, ultimately Israel is good and innocent, it is only protecting its security, the whole conflict is the Palestinians' fault. But when you are in Palestine, when you see hundred-year-old olive groves bulldozed to make way for the wall, when you see entire city blocks bulldozed and cleared of homes where thousands once lived, when you actually watch a home being demolished, when you see huge Israeli colonies and small outposts on every hilltop, when you see markets closed because the wall has separated commerce from its customers, when you see destruction all around, denial is no longer possible. You must conclude that there is a deliberate scheme here. You must acknowledge the unthinkable, that Israel has been built from the beginning on the ruins of another nation, that Israel has all but destroyed another people in order to have a Jewish-majority state, that Israel is not moral as its friends claim, not a light unto the nations.

– "Finally It Broke My Heart": Random Impressions from Palestine by Kathleen and Bill Christison, 24 September 2004.

The Israeli general who commanded the destruction of the only Jewish settlement in the Sinai before it was returned to Egypt recently offered Ariel Sharon advice on how to carry out his pledge to remove settlers from the Gaza strip. "Evicting someone from the home they've lived in for 20 years isn't a simple matter," wrote Brigadier General Obed Tira. "To remove a family from its home is embarrassing and difficult, and that is why the removal needs to be done with a lot of love and a lot of wisdom." The soldiers who arrived outside the home of Ghalia Abu Radwan, her octogenarian parents, blind siblings and assortment of children in Khan Yunis in the middle of the night showed no love, and, if they were embarrassed, there was no way to know it because they were hidden behind the armour of their bulldozers and tanks. As the loudspeakers on the tanks ordered the families out, and bursts of gunfire sharpened the terror, Mrs Abu Radwan shepherded her blind brother and sister to safety.

– 'When we came back they had destroyed all the houses' by Chris McGreal, 18 October 2004.

It's been over a year now since Israel began erecting a physical barrier between its Jewish and Palestinian population centers. Palestinians call it the "apartheid wall." Israelis call it in Hebrew the "separation fence" – Apartheid means separation.

Along most of its length, the barrier consists of a fence with electronic sensors, razor wire filled trenches, a trace detection road and a patrol road. The barrier is a massive, 60-100ft wide, sand color wound that cuts through the olive groves in the surrounding hills. On olive trees a thousand feet away, the olives are covered with a thick layer of dust.

The barrier is an assault on the landscape. There is an obscenity to it that is hard to convey in words. It is a monumental defacement of the land, an iconoclastic expression of self-absorption and loathing. Looking at it hurts the eyes.

Most Israelis believe the barrier is situated on the Green Line. But Sharon's government adapted the barrier to the age-old goals of Zionism – taking ever more land while getting rid of the local inhabitants. The path of the barrier sends deep fingers inside Palestinian areas, trying to include not only as many settlements as possible, but also as much land that still belongs to Palestinians as possible, while leaving often as little as the built areas of the villages on the other side. The barrier cuts through the cultivated fields and separates villages from their livelihood and water sources. It is the same old story of dispossession repeating itself.

Already, much land has been confiscated from Palestinians and hundreds of trees have been uprooted to make way for the barrier. The lands west of the barrier have not been confiscated, but access to them has been made so difficult that cultivation is unprofitable, and in some areas impossible. Farmers are at times prevented from getting to the fields, at times beaten and harassed, at times allowed on foot, without access to their mechanized tools. There is no end to the creativity of the Israeli security apparatus.

If farmers fail to cultivate their land, Israel is likely to use Ottoman laws to declare the land "public." This confiscation method has been used often in the past. Knowing that, farmers continue to farm their unprofitable fields on the other side of the barrier. Some have moved to sleeping in the fields.

But in Mas'ha, the building of the barrier is reaching unimaginable heights of absurdity and racism. The barrier is supposed to pass between Mas'ha and the illegal Elkana settlement. But the fence of Elkana is only a few feet away from the last house in Mas'ha, which belongs to Hani Mohammad Abdullah Amer and his family. In order not to inconvenience the settlement, the planners had the barrier pass to the east of Hani's house, separating it from the village, in fact imprisoning Hani and his family between the settlement's fence and the barrier. The army told Hani that he would be allowed to pass back and forth to the village two or three times a day, but that he will be forbidden from having visitors in his house.

This is the shape of the "peace" Israel is imagining between itself and a Palestinian "state"; a peace in which Israeli soldiers decide whether a Palestinian homeowner can have visitors in his house.

The world view that makes such outrage possible was summed up succinctly by the supervisor of the private security firm that accompanies the construction of the barrier. In one of their many verbal fights, Hani doesn't shy from giving his tormentors a piece of his mind – the supervisor told Hani, "you belong in the past."

– "You belong in the past" by Gabriel Ash, 12 August 2003.

Further Reading - General

Israeli attack on Jenin and Ramallah March-May 2002

By what inhuman calculus did Israel's army, using dozens of tanks and armored personnel carriers, along with hundreds of missile strikes from US-supplied Apache helicopter gunships, besiege Jenin's refugee camp for over a week, a one-square-kilometer patch of shacks housing 15,000 refugees and a few dozen men armed with automatic rifles and no missiles or tanks, and call it a response to terrorist violence and a threat to Israel's survival?

There are reported to be hundreds buried in the rubble, which Israeli bulldozers began heaping over the camp's ruins after the fighting ended. Are Palestinian civilian men, women and children no more than rats or cockroaches that can be attacked and killed in the thousands without so much as a word of compassion or in their defense?

And what about the capture of thousands of men who have been taken off by Israeli soldiers, the destitution and homelessness of so many ordinary people trying to survive in the ruins created by Israeli bulldozers all over the West Bank, the siege that has now gone on for months and months, the cutting off of electricity and water in Palestinian towns, the long days of total curfew, the shortage of food and medicine, the wounded who have bled to death, the systematic attacks on ambulances and aid workers that even the mild-mannered Kofi Annan has decried as outrageous? Those actions will not be pushed so easily into the memory hole. Its friends must ask Israel how its suicidal policies can possibly gain it peace, acceptance and security.

– What Israel Has Done by Edward Said, 06 May 2002.

The thought was as unshakable as the stench wafting from the ruins. Was this really about counterterrorism? Was it revenge? Or was it an episode – the nastiest so far – in a long war by Ariel Sharon, the staunch opponent of the Oslo accords, to establish Israel's presence in the West Bank as permanent, and force the Palestinians into final submission?

A neighbourhood had been reduced to a moonscape, pulverised under the tracks of bulldozers and tanks. A maze of cinder-block houses, home to about 800 Palestinian families, had disappeared. What was left – the piles of broken concrete and scattered belongings – reeked.

The rubble in Jenin reeked, literally, of rotting human corpses, buried underneath. But it also gave off the whiff of wrongdoing, of an army and a government that had lost its bearings. "This is horrifying beyond belief," said the United Nations' Middle East envoy, Terje Roed-Larsen, as he gazed at the scene. He called it a "blot that will forever live on the history of the state of Israel" – a remark for which he was to be vilified by Israelis. Even the painstakingly careful United States envoy, William Burns, was unusually outspoken as he trudged across the ruins. "It's obvious that what happened in Jenin refugee camp has caused enormous suffering for thousands of innocent Palestinian civilians," he said.

The Israeli army insists that its devastating invasion of the refugee camp in Jenin earlier this month was intended to root out the infrastructure of the Palestinian militias, particularly the authors of an increasingly vicious series of suicide attacks on Israelis. It now says the dead were mostly fighters. And, as always – although its daily behaviour in the occupied territories contradicts this claim – it insists that it did everything possible to protect civilians.

– What really happened when Israeli forces went into Jenin? by Justin Huggler and Phil Reeves, 25 April 2002.

On the evening of Wednesday, May 1, when the siege on Arafat's headquarters was lifted and the armored vehicles and the tanks had rumbled out, the executives and officials of the ministry who had rushed to the site [the Ministry of Culture] did not expect to find the building the way they had left it.

Employees of the local radio and television station, Amwaj, also hastened to the scene, as did the employees of the local television channel, Istiqlal, which take up three stories of the building.

But what awaited them was beyond all their fears, and also shocked representatives and cultural attaches of foreign consulates, who toured the site the next day.

In other offices, all the high-tech and electronic equipment had been wrecked or had vanished - computers, photocopiers, cameras, scanners, hard disks, editing equipment worth thousands of dollars, television sets. The broadcast antenna on top of the building was destroyed.

Telephone sets vanished. A collection of Palestinian art objects (mostly hand embroideries) disappeared. Perhaps it was buried under the piles of documents and furniture, perhaps it had been spirited away. Furniture was dragged from place to place, broken by soldiers, piled up. Gas stoves for heating were overturned and thrown on heaps of scattered papers, discarded books, broken diskettes and discs and smashed windowpanes.

In the department for the encouragement of children's art, the soldiers had dirtied all the walls with gouache paints they found there and destroyed the children's paintings that hung there.

In every room of the various departments literature, film, culture for children and youth books, discs, pamphlets and documents were piled up, soiled with urine and excrement.

There are two toilets on every floor, but the soldiers urinated and defecated everywhere else in the building, in several rooms of which they had lived for about a month. They did their business on the floors, in emptied flowerpots, even in drawers they had pulled out of desks.

They defecated into plastic bags, and these were scattered in several places. Some of them had burst. Someone even managed to defecate into a photocopier.

– Someone even managed to defecate into the photocopier by Amira Hass, 05 June 2002.

Further Reading - Israeli attack on Jenin and Ramallah March-May 2002

The Gaza Ghetto

When we invaded the Ghetto for the first time, the Jews and the Polish bandits succeeded in repelling the participating units, including tanks and armored cars, by a well-prepared concentration of fire. When I ordered a second attack, about 0800 hours, I distributed the units, separated from each other by indicated lines, and charged them with combing out the whole of the Ghetto, each unit for a certain part. Although firing commenced again, we now succeeded in combing out the blocks according to plan. The enemy was forced to retire from the roofs and elevated bases to the basements, dug-outs, and sewers.

In order to prevent their escaping into the sewers, the sewerage system was dammed up below the Ghetto and filled with water, but the Jews frustrated this plan to a great extent by blowing up the turning off valves. Late the first day we encountered rather heavy resistance, but it was quickly broken by a special raiding party. In the course of further operations we succeeded in expelling the Jews from their prepared resistance bases, sniper holes, and the like, and in occupying during the 20 and 21 April the greater part of the so-called remainder of the Ghetto to such a degree that the resistance continued within these blocks could no longer be called considerable.

– The Warsaw Ghetto Is No More by SS Brigadefuhrer Jurgen Stroop, 13 May 1943.

Nevertheless, politics should not be the greatest international concern. For over in Gaza, one appalling act must now eclipse all thoughts of "road maps" or "mutual gestures": on Wednesday, Israeli war planes repeatedly bombed and utterly demolished Gaza's only power plant. About 700,000 of Gaza's 1.3 million people now have no electricity, and word is that power cannot be restored for six months.

It is not the immediate human conditions created by this strike that are monumental. Those conditions are, of course, bad enough. No lights, no refrigerators, no fans through the suffocating Gaza summer heat. No going outside for air, due to ongoing bombing and Israel's impending military assault. In the hot darkness, massive explosions shake the cities, close and far, while repeated sonic booms are doubtless wreaking the havoc they have wrought before: smashing windows, sending children screaming into the arms of terrified adults, old people collapsing with heart failure, pregnant women collapsing with spontaneous abortions. Mass terror, despair, desperate hoarding of food and water. And no radios, television, cell phones, or laptops (for the few who have them), and so no way to get news of how long this nightmare might go on.

But this time, the situation is worse than that. As food in the refrigerators spoils, the only remaining food is grains. Most people cook with gas, but with the borders sealed, soon there will be no gas. When family-kitchen propane tanks run out, there will be no cooking. No cooked lentils or beans, no humus, no bread the staples Palestinian foods, the only food for the poor. (And there is no firewood or coal in dry, overcrowded Gaza.)

And yet, even all this misery is overshadowed by a grimmer fact: no water. Gaza's public water supply is pumped by electricity. The taps, too, are dry. No sewage system. And again, word is that the electricity is out for at least six months.

The Gaza aquifer is already contaminated with sea water and sewage, due to over-pumping (partly by those now-abandoned Israeli settlements) and the grossly inadequate sewage system. To be drinkable, well water is purified through machinery run by electricity. Otherwise, the brackish water must at least be boiled before it can be consumed, but this requires electricity or gas. And people will soon have neither.

Drinking unpurified water means sickness, even cholera. If cholera breaks out, it will spread like wildfire in a population so densely packed and lacking fuel or water for sanitation. And the hospitals and clinics aren't functioning, either, because there is no electricity.

Finally, people can't leave. None of the neighboring countries have resources to absorb a million desperate and impoverished refugees: logistically and politically, the flood would entirely destabilize Egypt, for example. But Palestinians in Gaza can't seek sanctuary with their relatives in the West Bank, either, because they can't get out of Gaza to get there. They can't even go over the border into Egypt and around through Jordan, because Israel will no longer allow people with Gaza identification cards to enter the West Bank. In any case, a cordon of Palestinian police are blocking people from trying to scramble over the Egyptian border – and war refugees have tried, through a hole blown open by militants, clutching packages and children.

In short, over a million civilians are now trapped, hunkered in their homes listening to Israeli shells, while facing the awful prospect, within days or weeks, of having to give toxic water to their children that may consign them to quick but agonizing deaths.

– Israel's Appalling Bombing in Gaza: Starving in the Dark by Virginia Tilley, 30 June 2006.

Further Reading - The Gaza Ghetto