Sun, 25 Jan 2009 01:15:29 historic facts
By IBRAHIM BARZAK Associated Press Writer

via Lina Attalah

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 over town.

Three days after Israel began its airstrikes against Hamas militants on Dec. 27, my apartment building was shaken by bombs aimed at a nearby Hamas-run government compound.

My brother took a picture of the room where my boys, 2-year-old Hikmet and 6-month-old Ahmed, once slept. Their toys were broken, shrapnel had punched through the closet and the bedroom wall had collapsed. I don't know if we will ever go back.

There are other pictures that haunt me. The Israeli army issued a video of the bombing of the Hamas-run government compound, which it posted on YouTube. In it, I also can see my home being destroyed, and I watch it obsessively.

Some of my colleagues lost their houses to the shelling as well, and are sleeping on mattresses spread across the
Advertisement
Quantcast
floors of an apartment upstairs from The Associated Press bureau.

On Tuesday, I stood outside my apartment building but didn't dare enter. I was worried the remains of the nearby compound might again be shelled.

Othman, the owner of the Addar restaurant where my wife and I bought takeaway when we were both working, put up aluminum sheeting over the broken windows to stop looters. On the pavement, phone and power lines were tangled together like twine.

Driving to central Gaza City, I took the road where Gaza's two main universities are. It was covered with shards of glass, telephone cables, electricity wires and flattened cars. This road was once crowded with students, taxis and street vendors.

The Mazaj coffee shop on Omar Mukhtar street, Gaza's main thoroughfare, was shuttered. It was popular with wealthy university students and foreigners working for nonprofit agencies because it served really good Guatemalan coffee—rumored to have been smuggled in through the same tunnels under the Egyptian border the militants used to bring in weapons.

Al Dera, a beautiful hotel on the Mediterranean shore, was a place where young men and women smoked water pipes and flirted, and where families went for dinner on Thursdays.

Those days are gone now.

On Tuesday, the only shop I found open was the Shifa pharmacy run by my friend Eyad Sayegh. He's an Orthodox Christian, and I stopped to wish him a Merry Christmas—Eastern churches celebrate Christmas on Wednesday.

Eyad told me he forgot it was Christmas.

All the landmark buildings I covered as a reporter have vanished.

The colonial-era Seraya was the main security compound for the succession of Gaza's rulers—the British, Egyptians, Israelis, the Palestinian Authority and then the rival Palestinians of Hamas.

We used to fear the Seraya, where the central jail was. Now it's rubble.

The Al Shuhada mosque on the eastern corner of the compound, where I prayed every day, was one of the few in Gaza with good air conditioning. A local philanthropist who liked Moroccan architecture redecorated the interior with intricate wooden arabesques and Quranic verses etched on the roof. The roof caved in when the Israelis bombed the jail next door.

Of the presidential office overlooking the sea, only a few walls remain. For many Gazans it was a symbol of our statehood, even though President Mahmoud Abbas, who also heads the Fatah movement, hasn't been there since Hamas seized control of the territory in June 2007.

Someone planted a Palestinian flag on the building's remains. The huge gate at the western entrance still stands, giving an illusion of something big behind it.

And across the city, the Parliament house is half destroyed. It used to tower above the Unknown Soldier park and the shops that lined downtown Omar Mukhtar Street.

On Jala Street, one of Gaza's main roads, I saw about 30 boys around a leaky irrigation tap on a traffic island. They were clutching empty soft drink bottles and jerry cans, trying to fill them with water.

Samir, who is 9, told me his family has no water at home and he wanted to bring enough for a bath because he and his brother smell.

That's a problem for most people in Gaza right now.

In my father-in-law's building, residents throw out bags of spoiled food. With no power, refrigerators don't run and fresh food quickly rots.

There were few cars on the roads, and most of those were media cars, ambulances and vehicles packed with civilians. Some looked like they were fleeing, with mattresses tied to the roofs, but who knows where they can go.

Israeli helicopters flew overhead. I heard blasts in the distance. The roads were ripped apart by explosives.

I drove into downtown Gaza, trying to prove to myself I can still do something I have done so often before—drive through my city.

I reached the Catholic Latin Patriarchate School I attended, where my late father—also an AP correspondent—used to bring me every day. The building was undamaged.

I stood in front of it, wondering if I will ever be able to walk my children to this school.
www
Last edited at 25/1/2009 01:16:12 by p]]> http://www.meipi.org/rafah.meipi.php?open_entry=23 Mon, 19 Jan 2009 23:58:31
Category: historic facts
(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 much about Shehada coming to terms with his own relation to this tragedy as it is about recording the destruction.

This personal perspective is obvious from the very first scene. In a smoky, dimly lit room, Shehada narrates as he writes about his feelings of being weighed down by "pictures [that] were a burden on my shoulders." Seeming more like a film noir than a documentary, this intro works surprisingly well to set up Shehada's sub-plot -- which questions the role of the artist in a life that is surrounded by death and destruction.

A film still from "Rainbow"
A recurrent figure throughout the film is painter and sculptor Ibrahim, who creates artwork amidst the destruction. In homage to those killed, Ibrahim forms haunting open-mouthed vacant-eyed faces in the sand and then buries them in the rubble. Ibrahim explains, "It's as if ... the land is a human being screaming." Perhaps questioning his own effectiveness in this society, Shehada asks his childhood friend, "Do you think that all of that can show the pain that is inside us and others?"

Armed at times only with his video camera, Shehada's exposure of the personal stories of families whose lives were irrevocably changed in just minutes sometimes seems intrusive. It is hard to watch as Raed stands in the remains of his demolished house and searches for the clothes and toys he gave to his children the day that they were killed. But Raed continues, talking to the camera almost as if he needs to tell his story as part of his grieving process.

Even the narrator Shehada admits to his feeling "shy watching people through [his] camera," but this does not stop him from capturing emotionally charged scenes. In one, women search through the wreckage of their blasted out homes, as their private lives have been made public, open for anyone walking by to see. Some of the hardest images though are the close-ups of the dead that Shehada records. Placed in a cooling container that once held flowers, thirty two bodies transform the space into a gruesome arbiter of death.

A seasoned filmmaker, Shehada succeeds in creating a powerful film that pushes the boundaries of what a documentary should be. While Rainbow ingrains unforgettable images in the viewer and gives voice to those who are typically silenced in the popular news media, it also reflects upon the medium itself. The camera is not merely seen as an objective lens through which to document the outside world, but artfully becomes the subjective extension of one man's search for understanding. The resultant compelling, short documentary is not for the faint of heart.

Jenny Gheith is a film critic for the Electronic Intifada]]> http://www.meipi.org/rafah.meipi.php?open_entry=20 Mon, 19 Jan 2009 12:16:50
Category: historic facts
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 its inhabitants was evident. The Hamas mayor of Rafah had been building a new house for himself; it had been pulverised and lay in ruins.

Earlier, as we entered Gaza from Egypt – among the first Western journalists to do so – the red lights of Palestinian ambulances flashing against a darkening sky as medics unloaded the wounded at the border were the first real sign of the war that had raged for three weeks. A boy, perhaps 15 years old, was delicately lifted from one ambulance to another, the medics struggling to prevent the drips attached to him from tangling.

As night fell over Rafah, from which thousands had fled to escape the relentless bombing of the smuggling tunnels along the border, you could still hear a pilotless Israeli drone overhead, a reminder of how uneasy the ceasefire that began at 2am yesterday will be.

The Harb family were reinstalling the windows of their second-floor apartment, little more than 500m from the border. Even without fuel for the generator to heat the house during the power cuts, explained Jawwad Harb, it was preferable to expose his six children to the January cold, using coats and blankets to protect them, rather than risk them being cut by glass during the scores of repeated explosions that had shaken the house.

"The Israelis were using a weapon that seemed to go deep underground," said Mr Harb. "It sent out waves like an earthquake. It was like being in an earthquake every hour."

Mr Harb, who works for the humanitarian organisation, Care, said he had felt helpless during the airstrikes as he snuggled against his children, trying to comfort them with the idea that the bombing they could hear would be "very temporary".

He recalled that when he had said this, his 15-year-old daughter, Banyas, had replied: "This is temporary for ever", meaning that she "is forever moving from war to war since she was born. Then my six-year-old son, Ziad, asked me 'are we going to die?' That really broke my heart."

With electricity blackouts periodically cutting water supplies to the apartment, Mr Harb set out one day to fetch 20 litres of clean water from the local desalination plant.

"On my way back there were four airstrikes. Some people poured out the water and ran away. But I have six children at home in need of clean water so I hugged my canisters to my chest like something precious and kept on till I got home."

But the worst day, he said, was probably last Friday.

As we waited in vain on the other side of the crossing for the Egyptians to let us in to Gaza on Saturday, we had watched what seemed fairly relentless bombing sorties of F16s streaking across the sky along the border.

But Mr Harb said this was nothing compared to the previous day. Their house is near the offices – empty since the beginning of the offensive – of the Hamas "benevolent association", part of the social network which has helped to form its political base.

When the family heard the bombing start at about 3.30pm, the children had run out of their houses, terrified, and their families had been obliged to follow them. Nearly the whole neighbourhood had run about 200m up the street and waited for about two-and-a-half hours until it was simply too cold for the children to stay out of doors.

Mr Harb's neighbour Mohammed Jeish, 36, described how his two-year-old son Khaled had started suffering headaches and loss of appetite. "When I took him to the doctor, he asked if he had been scared recently. Of course he had. It was psychological." But the Harb family knows well that even these privations are far exceeded by many of those likely to come to light in the coming days across Gaza.

Mr Harb's good friend, Walid al Zubi, a construction engineer, was one of the many men arrested in the intense fighting in the Tel al Hawa district of southern Gaza City last Thursday. Mr Al Zubi had described to him how nine soldiers had arrived at his apartment, taken away his wife, his six-year-old daughter and infant son, and opened intimidatory fire at the walls and television.

Mr Al Zubi, who Mr Harb says has no connection with any political faction, was then blindfolded and interrogated for an hour about the identity and whereabouts of armed gunmen before being taken down to a basement, where he realised that his had not been the only apartment attacked.

The military had handed over his wife and children to the Palestinian Red Crescent but Mr Al Zubi did not know that until he was told at 7am that he could go and pick them up. That, said Mr Harb, was part of the pressure put on him to give information. He had described to Mr Harb his night of anxiety as a "new synonym for pain".

Asked about Israel's charge that Hamas, because it operates in residential areas, is to blame for putting in harm's way the many hundreds of civilians who are part of the total casualty toll of more than 1,200, Mr Harb said: "I am not a politician. But according to the Geneva Convention civilians must be able to leave the war area and the battlefields. In other places this may happen. Only in Gaza it seems they are prevented from leaving the battlefield."

In other areas of Gaza yesterday, Palestinians – 60,000 or so are estimated by the UN to have fled their homes in the past three weeks – slowly began returning to their shattered homes, on foot or using donkeys and carts, loaded up with mattresses, and household belongings.

In Beit Lahiya, rescue workers used bulldozers to pull scores of dead bodies, many of them believed to be Hamas fighters, from debris.

Last night, Gaza's de facto Prime Minister, Ismail Haniyeh, in hiding since the Israeli onslaught began, declared "victory" over Israel.

He said his movement's decision to match Israel's unilateral ceasefire with its own truce, announced 12 hours after Israel's came into being, was "wise and responsible".

In a broadcast, he said: "The enemy has failed to achieve its goals". In Rafah, reporters who had been denied access to Gaza for three weeks, arrived to be greeted by Ghazi Hamad, a senior adviser to Mr Haniyeh, who is very much at the more pragmatic end of the Hamas spectrum and therefore not necessarily representative of the Islamic faction's political hard-liners, let alone its military wing.

But Mr Hamad lost little time in warning that the ceasefire was precarious, and that if Israel did not withdraw its forces within a week, then "resistance" would resume.

Even with shops open again in Rafah yesterday – with people venturing out to buy supplies and with the guns, tanks and warplanes silent for the first time in three weeks – no one is counting on the war not starting again.]]> http://www.meipi.org/rafah.meipi.php?open_entry=19 Sun, 11 Jan 2009 02:38:54
Category: historic facts
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 machine is in full swing, churning out lies by the minute.

Once and for all it is time to expose the myths that they have created:

- Israel claimed to have ended the occupation of the Gaza Strip in 2005. While Israel has indeed abandoned its settlements in the tiny coastal Strip, it has in no way ended the occupation. It remained in control of Gaza's borders, airspace and waterways, and has carried out frequent raids and targeted assassinations since its "disengagement".

Furthermore, since 2006 Israel has imposed a comprehensive siege on the Strip. For over two years, Gazans have lived on the edge of starvation and without the most basic necessities of human life, such as cooking or heating oil and basic medications. This siege has already caused a humanitarian catastrophe that has only been exacerbated by the dramatic increase in Israeli military aggression.

- Israel claims that Hamas violated the ceasefire and abandoned it unilaterally. Hamas indeed respected their side of the ceasefire, except on those occasions early on when Israel carried out major offensives in the West Bank. In the last two months, the ceasefire broke down with Israelis killing several Palestinians and resulting in the response of Hamas. In other words, Hamas has not carried out an unprovoked attack throughout the period of the ceasefire.

Israel, however, did not live up to any of its obligations of ending the siege and allowing vital humanitarian aid to resume in Gaza. Rather than the average of 450 trucks per day being allowed across the border, on the best days, only 80 have been allowed in, with the border remaining hermetically sealed 70 per cent of the time. Throughout the supposed "ceasefire" Gazans have been forced to live like animals, with 262 dying due to the inaccessibility of proper medical care.

Now after hundreds dead and counting, it is Israel that refuses to re-enter talks over a ceasefire. They are not intent on securing peace as they claim; it is more and more clear that they are seeking regime change, whatever the cost.

- Israel claims to be pursuing peace with "peaceful Palestinians". Before the ongoing massacre in the Gaza Strip, and throughout the entirety of the Annapolis peace process, Israel has continued and even intensified its occupation of the West Bank. In 2008, settlement expansion increased by a factor of 38, a further 4,950 Palestinians were arrested (mostly from the West Bank), and checkpoints rose in number from 521 to 699.

Furthermore, since the onset of peace talks, Israel has killed 546 Palestinians, among them 76 children. These gruesome statistics are set to rise dramatically now, but previous Israeli transgressions should not be forgotten amidst this most recent horror.

This week Israel shot and killed a young peaceful protester in the West Bank village of Nihlin and has injured dozens more. It is certain that they will continue to employ deadly force at non-violent demonstrations and we expect a sizeable body count in the West Bank as a result. If Israel is in fact pursuing peace with "good Palestinians", whom are they talking about?

- Israel is acting in self-defence. It is difficult to claim self-defence in a confrontation that they themselves have sparked, but they are doing it anyway. Self- defence is reactionary, while the actions of Israel over the past few days have been clearly premeditated. Not only did the Israeli press widely report the ongoing public relations campaign being undertaken by Israel to prepare Israeli and international public opinion for the attack, but Israel has also reportedly tried to convince the Palestinians that an attack was not coming by briefly opening crossings and reporting future meetings on the topic. They did so to insure that casualties would be maximised and that the citizens of Gaza would be unprepared for their impending slaughter.

It is also misleading to claim self-defence in a conflict with such an overwhelming asymmetry of power. Israel is the largest military force in the region, and the fifth largest in the world. Furthermore, they are the fourth largest exporter of arms and have a military industrial complex rivaling that of the United States. In other words, Israel has always had a comprehensive monopoly over the use of force, and much like its superpower ally, Israel uses war as an advertising showcase of its many instruments of death.

- Israel claims to have struck military targets only. Even while image after image of dead and mutilated women and children flash across our televisions, Israel brazenly claims that their munitions expertly struck only military installations. We know this to be false, as many other civilian sites have been hit by air strikes, including a hospital and a mosque.

In the most densely populated area on the planet, tons upon tons of explosives have been dropped. The first estimates of injured are in the thousands. Israel will claim that these are merely "collateral damage" or accidental deaths. The sheer ridiculousness and inhumanity of such a claim should sicken the world community.

- Israel claims that it is attacking Hamas and not the Palestinian people. First and foremost, missiles do not differentiate people by their political affiliation; they simply kill everyone in their path. Israel knows this, and so do the Palestinians. What Israel also knows, but is not saying publicly, is how much their recent actions will actually strengthen Hamas, whose message of resistance and revenge is being echoed by the angry and the grieving.

The targets of the strike, police and not Hamas militants, give us some clue as to Israel's mistaken intention. They are hoping to create anarchy in the Strip by removing the pillar of law and order.

- Israel claims that Palestinians are the source of violence. Let us be clear and unequivocal. The occupation of Palestine since the war of 1967 has been and remains the root of violence between Israelis and Palestinians. Violence can be ended with the end of the occupation and the granting of Palestine's national and human rights. Hamas does not control the West Bank and yet we remain occupied, our rights violated and our children killed.

With these myths understood, let us ponder the real reasons behind these air strikes; what we find may be even more disgusting than the act itself.

The leaders of Israel are holding press conferences, dressed in black, with sleeves rolled up. "It's time to fight," they say, "but it won't be easy."

To prove just how hard it is, Livni, Olmert and Barak did not even wear makeup to the press conference, and Barak has ended his presidential campaign to focus on the Gaza campaign. What heroes... what leaders.

We all know the truth: the suspension of electioneering is exactly that -- electioneering. Like John McCain's suspension of his presidential campaign to return to Washington to "deal with" the financial crisis, this act is little more than a publicity stunt.

The candidates have to appear "tough enough to lead", and there is seemingly no better way of doing that than bathing in Palestinian blood.

"Look at me," Livni said in her black suit and unkempt hair, "I am a warrior. I am strong enough to pull the trigger. Don't you feel more confident about voting for me, now that you know I am as ruthless as Bibi Netanyahu?"

I do not know which is more disturbing, her and Barak, or the constituency they are trying to please.

In the end, this will in no way improve the security of the average Israeli; in fact it can be expected to get much worse in the coming days as the massacre could presumably provoke a new generation of suicide bombers.

It will not undermine Hamas either, and it will not result in the three fools, Barak, Livni and Olmert, looking "tough". Their misguided political venture will likely blow up in their faces as did the brutally similar 2006 invasion of Lebanon.

In closing, there is another reason -- beyond the internal politics of Israel -- why this attack has been allowed to occur: the complicity and silence of the international community.

Israel cannot and would not act against the will of its economic allies in Europe or its military allies in the US. Israel may be pulling the trigger and ending hundreds, perhaps even thousands of lives this week, but it is the apathy of the world and the inhumane tolerance of Palestinian suffering that allows this to occur.

"Evil only exists because the good remain silent."

* The writer is secretary-general of the Palestinian National Initiative.
www
Last edited at 11/1/2009 02:40:12 by p]]> http://www.meipi.org/rafah.meipi.php?open_entry=14 Sat, 10 Jan 2009 16:48:58
Category: historic facts
ISM report]]> http://www.meipi.org/rafah.meipi.php?open_entry=11 Sat, 10 Jan 2009 16:45:25
Category: historic facts
Interview Fida Qishta, Rafah, Gaza, 2 January 2009, 11 p m]]> http://www.meipi.org/rafah.meipi.php?open_entry=10 Sat, 10 Jan 2009 16:42:13
Category: historic facts
Interview Fida Qishta, Rafah]]> http://www.meipi.org/rafah.meipi.php?open_entry=9 Thu, 08 Jan 2009 03:59:23
Category: historic facts
A lo largo de los últimos 20 años se han abierto túneles entre las fronteras más calientes del planeta. Por ejemplo, entre México y Estados Unidos: tras la gran operación iniciada en 1994 para levantar un poderoso dique a la inmigración mexicana hacia el gran vecino del norte, se han descubierto alrededor de 70 túneles a lo largo de esa frontera. Otro ejemplo: los sótanos de la franja de Gaza, perforados por multitud de túneles a lo largo de la frontera con Egipto, ahora bombardeados por la aviación israelí. Y un tercero: los boat peoples que se lanzan incansables desde las costas africanas hacia Canarias, el sur de Italia y Grecia. La proliferación de tecnologías contra el paso ilegal de las fronteras y de normas represivas para frenar a los inmigrantes indocumentados son, por el momento, las armas al uso en la UE para hacer frente a los escalones económicos que le separan de sus vecinos.
www]]> http://www.meipi.org/rafah.meipi.php?open_entry=8 Thu, 01 Jan 2009 06:17:53
Category: historic facts
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.
www
Last edited at 1/1/2009 08:33:19 by p]]> http://www.meipi.org/rafah.meipi.php?open_entry=1