Cartografia crítica de la ciudad dividida de Rafah en la frontera de Egipto y Gaza, donde un sistema clandestino de tuneles constituye una parte de la linea de la vida para 1,5 millones de palestinos sometidos a un bloqueo y asedio brutal.
GAZA CITY, Gaza Strip—I live alone in my office. My wife and two young children moved in with her father after our apartment was shattered. The neighborhood mosque, where I have prayed since I was a child, had its roof blown off. All the government buildings on my beat have been obliterated.
After days of Israeli shelling, the city and life I have known no longer exist.
Gaza City, with some 400,000 people, stopped supplying water when the fuel ran out for the power station driving the pumps. We listen to battery-run radios for news, even though the outside world watches what's happening to us on television. The Hadi grocery where we once shopped is closed. Food is scarce all ov... [Extend]
When Israel withdrew from the Sinai Peninsula in 1982, the city of Rafah was suddenly split, between Egypt and Gaza, by an immense metal and concrete wall. Families found themselves divided by a high-security international border, though their houses often lay less than 100m apart.
Before long, influential families moved their business underground, through dozens of secret tunnels burrowed below the Israeli border fence.
Everything moves through Rafah’s tunnels: from cigarettes and drugs to cash and people. It is a vast enterprise, and pays five times an average annual Gaza salary in one month. It is a family business, passed on from father to son and alw... [Extend]
(41min/Palestine/Dir:Abdalsalam M.A Shehada/Prod:Ramatan Studies Company) "Hearing is not like seeing and seeing is different from living the experience," reflects Shehada's mother about life in Rafah. And for a week in May 2004, that experience worsened as Israeli forces pushed forward with "Operation Rainbow," killing 45 Palestinians, 38 of them civilians including nine children. "The only thing we can do is pray to God."
This overwhelmingly distraught sentiment runs throughout Shehada's newest documentary Rainbow (2004), which examines first hand the devastating effects of the events of May 13-May 20th. However, this film is not a documentary in the traditional sense -- from the perspective of an outsider looking in. Rainbow is as ... [Extend]
Rafah, a landscape scarred by Israel's war. Even in the darkness, we could see the piles of rubble: one had been the police station, destroyed in the heavy bombing on the first day of Israel's offensive, killing 22 Hamas policemen; another pile accounted for the houses that had been destroyed around Muntasa, a favoured children's play area and park which the Israelis say militants had used for firing rockets – residents deny the claim. The park is no more, a field of smashed masonry and concrete.
Rafah, the southernmost city of Gaza, probably suffered more than any other from the eight long years of conflict before the start of Operation Cast Lead but even on the short journey here from the Egyptian border, some of the new devastation visited on the area and... [Extend]
Mustafa Barghouti* cuts down the myths Israel spins in the media to justify its most recent campaign of slaughter.
The Israeli campaign of "death from above" began around 11am on Saturday morning and continues as I write these words.
The bloodiest single day in Palestine since the war of 1967 is far from over following Israel's promise that this is "only the beginning" of their campaign of state terror. Approximately 400 people have been murdered thus far, but the body count continues to rise at a dramatic pace as more mutilated bodies are pulled from the rubble, prior victims succumb to their wounds, and new casualties are created by the minute.
What is occurring is nothing short of a war crime, yet the Israeli public relations mac... [Extend]
Seis personas han muerto esta madrugada durante un bombardeo aéreo contra Rafá, en el sur de la Franja, donde la aviación atacó la vivienda de un líder de Hamás, Anas Shabana, un parque, el único centro médico para niños que sigue operativo y algunos túneles. Además, un avión atacó una casa en Ash Shaboura, en la zona de Rafá, donde murieron cinco personas. Otro bombardeo casuó una sexta víctima mortal en el sur. Asimismo, una mujer, Fatima Balusha, falleció después de que una bomba impactara contra una mezquita próxima a su casa en Jabalia, en el norte de la Franja de Gaza. [Extend]
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