|
Gaza situation
|
Sliman al-Shafi is the best TV reporter I know. If there is one person that does not hesitate to say the truth unvarnished about any subject that he covers it is Sliman.
I strongly suggest to anyone who want to understand the situation to read this:
bit of mercy
By Sliman al-Shafi
In the middle of Khan Yunis, opposite the vegetable stands in the municipal market, four youngsters aged 12 to 14 sat on the curbstone of the wet road. Beneath them, the sewage flowed freely, dirtying their toes, which stuck out of torn sandals and the hems of their ragged sweatpants. Their conversation focused on a single topic.
Ibrahim boasted of his advantage over his three friends: He had participated in nearly every funeral held in the city. He missed three of them because of quarrels with his older brother, but he vowed fervently not to miss the next one, even if his brother breaks his leg.
Salah regarded him scornfully and arrogantly informed his buddies that he himself goes to all the funerals, even those far from where he lives, and after they are over, he makes a point of meeting relatives of the shahids (martyrs) who have been killed by the Israel Defense Forces, embracing them and shaking their hands. For this, he hopes, the shahids will requite him when the day comes by helping him obtain a good place near them in paradise.
Attia, the third, is convinced that despite his two friends’ boasting, they will not achieve the same status that he will when he dies. He is certain that a great many people will come to his funeral, because he has seen to it in advance: Not only has he attended the funerals of all the shahids in Khan Yunis, but he has also accompanied his father to funerals in the surrounding villages: Absan, Beni Suhila and Al-Garara. He then visited the mourners’ homes, made inquiries about the victims, kissed the parents’ hands and did not neglect to say the appropriate words of consolation that his father had taught him. Attia puffed out his chest in pride as he related this, stressing that thanks to this, he will die a shahid and tell the shahids who went before him about their parents and about what occurred during the mourning period, and therefore they will be his friends and he will feel right at home.
The fourth, Said, who also looked like the youngest of the bunch, listened to their stories with a long face. He has attended only a small number of funerals, he said, only funerals of shahids who were killed in Israeli attacks, because his mother does not always allow him to go very far from home.
Everyone in Gaza wants to escape. No one wants to continue living there. And with no other exit, death – for the children, and also for others – is the only way to escape into a better life.
Gaza has been closed and cut off for more than seven years now – in effect, since the outbreak of the second intifada. Its 1.5 million residents feel as if they were hostages, with no hope of release from the continuing suffering and with no one trying to protect or even encourage them. Bombardments, casualties, destruction and bloodshed are their lot. Fear and distress are an inalienable part of their lives. They view themselves as though they were condemned to death. If their neighbor was killed today, then tomorrow or the next day it will be their turn to meet the angel of death. One inhabitant of the Jabalya refugee camp told me that even in his dreams, he does not allow himself to think about anything except the meeting with death.
And thus the thoughts of many Gaza residents are devoted not to ways to improve their quality of life – that, after all, is impossible – but rather to the moment when they will meet up with death. For death in the streets of Gaza is palpable, near at hand, lurking in every corner, in every alley, and there have even been those who went to sleep at night only to have their bodies extricated from the rubble the next morning.
An inhabitant of Rafah told me that he shuts himself into his home for most of the day and locks the door, putting himself under voluntary arrest. Anyone who walks in the street – coming home from work, shopping at the grocery store or heading to the beach – endangers his life, he said. Not that home is safe, he hastened to add. No place is safe in the Gaza Strip. No one here has immunity, and home can also turn into a deathtrap.
Najwa Sheikh lives in the Nuseirat refugee camp. She is married and the mother of two. Recently, she gathered her courage and sent a letter to Haaretz’s Letters to the Editor column (June 1, in Hebrew) in order to cry out, to tell the Israelis about her life in the shadow of air force attacks on her neighborhood. She has no faith in the leadership of Palestinian Authority Chairman Mahmoud Abbas and his prime minister, Ismail Haniyeh. As far as she is concerned, a leadership that abandons its citizenry does not deserve respect. Therefore, she wrote, she decided to go over their heads and tell her story to ordinary Israelis. Sheikh told me that she addressed her people’s enemy directly because only with this enemy is it possible to make peace, and perhaps her personal story will succeed in transforming the enemy into an interlocutor. She believes that citizens of Israel have influence over the decision-makers in their government.
Workers from Gaza, whose route to jobs in Israel is barred and who feel that the PA is ignoring them, have pursued a similar course. The workers invited me to come film them in the streets of the Jabalya refugee camp. They showed up en masse, as for a demonstration, in front of the Channel 2 television cameras and spoke in Hebrew even when I addressed them in Arabic, knowing that what they said would be broadcast to viewers in Israel. This, too, was an effort to go over the heads of their leaders – who, they say, are in deep crisis – in the hope of creating a direct dialogue with Israeli society.
The sense of hopelessness is also shared by extensive parts of Israeli society: in Sderot, in the western Negev and along the northern border. Noam Shalit, whose soldier son Gilad is being held prisoner by Hamas in Gaza, contacted me with a request that I mediate between him and his son’s abductors. With the help of sources in Gaza who are close to the abductors, this became possible: A spokesman on behalf of the abductors agreed to speak with the worried father by telephone in a conversation documented by Channel 2 News. Noam Shalit told me of his distress and sense of loss. He believed that through us, he could extend a hand to his son’s abductors, as no one else will do this in his stead. Perhaps, he thought, he would succeed in softening the kidnappers’ hearts and they would treat his son mercifully. And that is exactly what Mrs. Sheikh from Nuseirat is asking for: a bit of mercy.
http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/869241.html
by
Eyal Dor Ofer
at
Mon Jun 11 10:05:07 UTC 2007
(ed. Mar 12 2008)
Israel,
Israel
| Bookmark this
| Digg this
|
|
|
8 killed in Gaza infighting; battle reaches hospitals
http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/869585.html
By Avi Issacharoff, Haaretz Correspondent and News Agencies
Eight Palestinians – six Fatah men and two Hamas members – were killed Monday afternoon in the Gaza Strip, as clashes between the two sides reignited hours after an Egyptian-brokered cease-fire was implemented.
Gunmen from rival factions also waged battles inside two Gaza hospitals.
The Fatah intelligence officer, Luai al-Masri, died in a gunfight with Hamas in Gaza City, prompting members of his family to launch a revenge shooting spree. Two members of the Hamas Executive Force were shot dead in Beit Hanun during the revenge attack.
The fighting continued and moved into the hospital in Beit Hanun, where three people were killed and at least ten were wounded.
The dead were identified as a father and two sons from the al-Masri clan,
which has ties to the Fatah movement. Mohammed Odeh, a volunteer for the Red Crescent rescue service, said one of the dead had been shot at close range.
In a separate incident, two additional gunmen were killed on Nasser street in Gaza City. The two men belonged to the powerful Bakr clan, affiliated with Fatah.
Bakr gunmen then began firing mortars and rocket-propelled grenades at Shifa hospital, Gaza’s largest, drawing Hamas fire from inside the building, hospital officials said.
The clashes had reignited after the cease-fire with a gunbattle outside the parliament building in Gaza City, while the cabinet was meeting.
There were no casualties, but the meeting was halted when lawmakers decided to leave the building. Palestinian security officials said rival Hamas and Fatah forces were trading fire from neighboring high-rise buildings.
The cease-fire can after gunmen carried out a pre-dawn attack on the home of Palestinian Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh of Hamas, and also targeted the offices of the Hamas-run Culture Ministry.
Culture Minister Bassem Naim was inside the building at the time at the attack, said his sister, Huda. There were no injuries, she said, accusing Fatah of trying to kill her brother.
“It was the Fatah gangs. There was no justification. We were at work, and the ministry came under fire,” a ministry official, identified only as Ahmed, told Hamas’ Al-Aqsa radio station.
Fatah spokesman Maher Mekdad said the gunfire at the Culture Ministry erupted after Hamas snipers on the roof fired at a security convoy. “The security men returned fire,” he said.
The attacks came after two militants – first one from Fatah and later a Hamas member – were dragged onto the roofs of Gaza high-rises and thrown to their deaths.
There were no reports of casualties in the attack on Haniyeh’s house in the Shati refugee camp, adjacent to Gaza City. His office wouldn’t say whether he was inside, but his family said that his wife, children and grandchildren had been home.
It was the first time in a month of infighting that Haniyeh was an apparent target.
The two sides have been locked in a violent power struggle since Hamas defeated Fatah in January 2006 legislative elections, ending four decades of Fatah rule.
Sides call for calm
Shortly after the attack on Haniyeh’s home, Fatah and Hamas leaders called for calm – in large part to allow thousands of high school seniors to take their matriculation exams in peace.
“This is shameful for our people,” Palestinian Authority Chairman Mahmoud Abbas said during a trip to a school in the West Bank. “I call on everyone to stop this immediately, not only because of the examinations, but also for our people to live a normal life.”
About 24,000 high-school seniors in Gaza were beginning two weeks of final exams Monday, along with more than 40,000 others in the West Bank.
Daliya Naji, a 16-year-old student in Gaza City, said the fighting had kept her awake all night, and said she was having trouble concentrating.
“I am a good student, but I feel my brain is empty,” she said ahead of her exams. “I can’t think any more and I don’t know what to do.”
She said she hoped she would pass her exams in order to be accepted to a university in Egypt. “At least it will be my ticket out of Gaza,” she said.
|
The people of Gaza are crushed by all sides: Hamas, Fatah, PA, Israel, The west and are ignored by the Arab world.
Palestinians flee Gaza as infighting rages
By Charles Levinson
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2007/06/12/wgaza112.xml
Middle-class, well-educated, and hard-working, Ali Radwan is the sort of forward-thinking professional who was once the hope of a future Palestinian state.
A Palestinian family, their belongings crammed into a taxi, wait to be allowed through the Rafah border crossing to start a new life in Egypt
But with Gaza on the brink of civil war, Mr Radwan, and thousands like him are looking to flee.
“In Gaza nowadays there is no place for wise, educated people. They have no voice,” Mr Radwan said, as he prepared to leave yesterday.
In the streets around the offices of the management consultancy where he works in Gaza City, bursts of gun fire could be heard.
Rocket-propelled grenades crashed in the distance and the windows shook. A machinegun thudded off rounds in response.
Palestinian infighting, almost daily Israeli air strikes, and a steadily worsening economic situation triggered by an international aid boycott has made life unbearable for many Palestinians. Those who can are leaving.
European Union monitors at the Rafah border crossing from the Gaza Strip to Egypt say that more than 14,000 Palestinians have fled Gaza since Israel withdrew soldiers and settlers in 2005 and the rise to power of the Islamist Hamas five months later. In the past year alone, the average number of people leaving Gaza per day has doubled from 15 to 30.
The rising number of Palestinians seeking to emigrate has prompted Jerusalem’s Mufti, Mohammad Ahmed Hussein, to issue a fatwa prohibiting Palestinians from leaving Palestinian territories.
“Immigration from this blessed land is not permissible according to Islamic law,” said the religious edict. “People who live in this land should not leave it for the invaders and occupiers.”
Yesterday fighting raged on between Hamas and Fatah militants. Gunmen attacked a government building as a Palestinian cabinet meeting was starting and the home of Ismail Haniya, the prime minister, north of Gaza City also came under fire. By dusk, nine Palestinians had died in the latest round of factional violence and gun battles continued to rage along the beachfront north of President Mahmoud Abbas’s presidential compound in Gaza City. With each fresh bout of fighting, the cycle of killing and retaliation has grown more grisly. On Sunday, the violence took a grim turn.
Twenty-eight-year-old Mohammad al Suwerky, a supply runner for Mr Abbas’s elite presidential guards, was grabbed by Hamas gunmen and bundled up to the roof of an abandoned building. The militants bound Mr Suwerky’s feet with his belt, tied his hands behind his back and tossed him 18 stories to his death on the asphalt below.
|
Gaza fighting descends into new brutality
http://www.alertnet.org/thenews/newsdesk/L12641888.htm
By Nidal al-Mughrabi
GAZA, June 12 (Reuters) – For Gaza taxi driver Tamer Ammar, the internal fighting became all-out civil war when militants starting killing their rivals by throwing them off 15-storey buildings and mutilating their bodies.
“I think we are in Iraq, not in Gaza,” said Ammar, a 40-year-old father of six.
“Snipers on rooftops killing people. Bodies mutilated and dumped in the streets in very humiliating ways. Houses bombarded and civilians killed. What else does civil war means but this?”
A surge in factional fighting between ruling Hamas Islamists and President Mahmoud Abbas’s secular Fatah faction has killed at least 20 Palestinians in the last four days alone.
Well over 600 Palestinians have been killed in factional fighting since Hamas came to power in March 2006 after defeating Fatah in parliamentary elections, according to one prominent Palestinian human rights group.
Ceasefires have frequently been declared but never honoured for long.
Interspersed with drive-by shootings and rocket-propelled grenade attacks, both sides have shown extraordinary flashes of brutality in recent days.
A member of Abbas’s Force 17 security service was the first to be thrown off a 15-storey building. A few hours later, Hamas accused Fatah of throwing a Hamas supporter off another building.
Fatah supporters gunned down a Hamas cleric outside his mosque. In another extraordinary attack, a top Fatah militant with ties to President Mahmoud Abbas’s national security adviser, Mohammad Dahlan, was dragged out of his home and shot 40 times by Hamas gunmen, medics said.
Mohammad Ahmed-Hassan, a 35-year-old teacher, said “Gaza is finished”, calling the rash of killings “genocide”.
SEEKING SHELTER
Many of the 1.5 million residents of the Gaza Strip took shelter from the fighting by staying home. Thousands have sought to flee through neighbouring Egypt.
But for the vast majority of residents of the coastal strip, there is no way out.
At tense roadblocks across Gaza City, gunmen size up passing drivers, trying to pick out who is who by their clothes, family names, facial hair.
“Gunmen ask bearded people if they are Hamas and sometimes they take them away even if they deny it,” said one of Ammar’s passenger, who did not give his name.
At Hamas-manned checkpoints, gunmen demanded to see ID cards to identify who was a member of a Fatah-led security force before taking them away.
Hamas radio stations have taken to openly describing Abbas as a collaborator, comparing him to General Antoine Lahd, who once commanded Israel’s proxy army in south Lebanon.
A Fatah radio station accuses Hamas of following orders from Iran.
One Gaza doctor, who has examined the bodies of hundreds of Palestinians killed in fighting with Israel, said the level of cruelty in the factional fighting was “beyond our imagination”.
“Israeli missiles can dismember bodies… but such brutality cannot be between people who are supposed to be brothers in arms,” the doctor said.
Khaled Abdallah, a construction worker, said attacks by rival gunmen on the homes of Palestinian Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh of Hamas and Abbas could mark the point of no return.
“I do not think they will ever reconcile. It is like pouring sand on a fire. It does not die out. Once some wind takes away the sand, the flames rise up again,” he said.
|
...............a shocker,too remote here to really begin understand the gravity of the situation…........................in a word sad
|
My estimate, which I have been giving to all journalists I work with nearly 3 weeks ago, is that we are seeing the end of the Palestinian Authority as we know it.
I feel really bad for all my friends and the hundreds of thousands of normal people in Gaza – all are good people who just want to live their lives. Their leadership (from both sides) has totally failed them. Across the border Israeli civilians in Sderot are suffering as well – their leadership is not much better than on the other side of the Gaza fence.
|
|
Get notified when someone replies to this thread:
|
 via RSS
Recommended
|
 via email
You can unsubscribe later.
|
|
|
|
