Republican News · Thursday 31 January 2002

Amid Gaza's ruins

Gaza City 8 July

BY SILVIO CERULLI

"We were born to suffer. This is our life. Exploited, subjected, slaughtered." Rahid is speaking from his Gaza City slum-area flat. The missile-riddled spire of a mosque protrudes from a line of white roofs broken here and there by gutted gaps of grey rubble. The disfiguration is a result of the F-16 bombers that hammered the city all winter. But as there is nowhere else to go and this is the largest open prison on earth, the people simply go on living here amid the ruins.

Since last winter, no attempt to occupy the Gaza Strip has been made by the Israeli Army, the IDF. While Jenin, Nablus and Ramallah were invaded during the April Defensive Shield operation, Gaza remained the only area in Palestine not directly in the hands of Israeli military forces.

Although extensive invasion, in the long term, seems inevitable, for the moment there are strong reasons for postponing it. The IDF faced (and killed) 500 partisans in Jenin and lost over 40 dead. In the Gaza Strip (a Hamas bastion where the first Intifada began in 1987 and where the majority of the 300 Palestinian children killed during the present insurrection lived) Israel might have to come to terms with an estimated 4,000-5,000 strong resistance.

Yet this is not the only reason why the Israelis prefer helicopter, artillery and battleship shelling to infantry incursions. As the Gazans themselves claim, "conditions have never been so atrocious". The closure of the checkpoint and the strangling apartheid imposed by Tel Aviv have a very high cost in human terms: in many cases the IDF are killing innocent civilians, children and the elderly in particular, without firing even a single bullet.

The hospitals have run out of medical supplies, the local farmers are meeting staple demands only in part. The people are often obliged to use contaminated water from the open sewage running through the Strip's alleyways. Women and children search for leftovers in skips and bins.

Misery and poverty are transforming Gaza (1.2 million Palestinians, of whom 700,000 are refugees - living in a 365 square km area, while 6,000 Jewish settlers occupy almost 40% of the Strip) into a time bomb ready to blow up at any moment. Exasperated, the population has started taking to the streets. The people march with dry bread and empty plates, women, children, the elderly, their faces emaciated with hunger, full of the hatred of those who have been denied everything. They are deprived of the right to food and water, work and education, with large families to feed. "Victims of Israeli occupation and of Palestinian indifference" recites the banner heading the march of the hopeless.

"Israel's ethnic cleansing created this situation, did its utmost to bring us to our knees, starving us through siege and the closure of the Strip. And the Palestinian authorities have done nothing to back us. We have shared the bloodshed, we deserve to share the bread," declare the organisers.

The Gaza protest is also against Yasser Arafat's PNA, accused of not having provided sufficiently for those who survive thanks only to humanitarian aid provided by the UNO and the Red Cross.

The Israeli generals, watching the march on television, must have fumed. Sharon's fundamentalist and religious majority is pressing for a "permanent reoccupation" of the Palestinian territories. A solution which, at first glance, may appear a mere military matter, really implies far more.

The destruction of Palestinian autonomy will be followed, inevitably, by a rebirth of the former "civil administrative units" controlled by the Israeli military commands which ruled over the Palestinians from 1967 to the Oslo treaty of 1993. The IDF will thus have to take on over 3.5 million Palestinians. A population which has lost everything, and of which 60%, children and adolescents between ages one and 18 and adults who have been unemployed for at least two years, live below the level of poverty.

Meanwhile, military repression continues to reap innocent victims. There may have been no military invasion, but killings are a feature of everyday life in Gaza. Children throwing stones are killed because they pose an obvious threat to heavily armoured tanks. The last two were murdered only two days ago. They were not even throwing stones but simply playing football.

There have been cases of children's corpses returned to their families after being burnt, or bulldozed, or maimed, or torn to pieces by settlers' dogs. Extra-judicial executions of Islamic leaders are still the order of the day, but selective targets are often tantamount to an attack against civilians.

As Rahid stated: "Our lives are not worth anything to anybody. We are Palestinians and nobody wants us. According to Egypt, Israel, the United States, we should simply vanish silently from their world, their history, their memory."