An
Appeal For An Abandoned People
By Donald Macintyre
in Gaza
06 December 2006
The
Independent
Maybe
they are just conveniently forgetting other periods in Gaza's turbulent
and blood-stained history, but most Gazans will tell you that 2006 is
the worst year they can remember.
In Gaza City's deserted gold
souk, people are not even coming to sell their jewellery any more. "We
just sit and drink tea," said Yasser Moteer, 35, who runs a jewellery
stall. "It's worse than any time in the 20 years I've been here.
It's crazy."
The gold-selling started
soon after the international and Israeli boycott of the Hamas-led Palestinian
Authority started to plunge Gaza's economy into collapse last March.
But having long ceased to buy here, the poor now have nothing left to
sell.
Certainly, the 1.3 million
population of this ancient coastal strip of territory, a mere 225 square
miles, can never have experienced as intense a swing of hope to despair
as they have in little more than 12 months. Ariel Sharon's decision
to withdraw Israel's settlers and troops in August 2005, unilateral
and circumscribed in both its genesis and its implementation as it was,
made many Palestinians here, almost despite themselves, hope for a better
future.
It was not just the sudden
freedom to travel from north to south without the endless delays at
the hated Abu Houli checkpoint, or that children in the southern town
of Khan Younis could run west through what were now the ruins of the
Jewish settlement of Neve Dekalim and plunge into a Mediterranean they
had only ever dreamt about.
It was the sense that for
the first time in five dark, stifling and dangerous years, Gaza could
breathe, psychologically, and just maybe, economically.
As 2006 nears its close and
The Independent launches its Christmas appeal partly focused on Gaza,
it is easy to see how cruelly those hopes have been mocked by what has
happened this year.
Since Hamas and other Gaza
militants seized the Israeli corporal, Gilad Shalit, and killed two
of his comrades in late June, shells, drones and machine gun-fire from
Israeli forces have killed some 400 Palestinians, civilians, women and
children among them, in an operation Israel stated was to free Cpl Shalit
and stop the Qassam rockets being fired from Gaza.
For five long months, electricity
was cut to eight hours a day, damaging water supplies, after a surgically
accurate bombing condemned by Israelis as well as foreign human rights
groups as collective punishment in breach of humanitarian law.
Reaching a peak in July,
the use of sonic booms, often deliberately timed as children were going
to school, created misery and fear. As if that was not enough, a far
lower but significant number of civilians, also including children,
have been killed or wounded in the sporadic fighting between Fatah and
Hamas, the two dominant factions in Palestinian politics, or in clan
battles.
For the immediate survivors
of the Israeli shells that killed 17 members of the Athamneh family
as they tried to flee their home in Beit Hanoun as it was attacked,
the bereavement is, if anything, harder to bear now that more than three
weeks have elapsed since it happened. In late afternoon sunshine on
Sunday, in the now eerily peaceful alley where the carnage was perpetrated,
Hayat Athamneh, 56, a strong woman who lost three adult sons, all fathers
themselves, sat with their still devastated and injured brother Amjad,
31, and his wife, who lost their own son Mahmoud, 10. "Now I feel
it," said Hayat, covering her eyes as they fill with tears. "
It wasn't so bad at the beginning. There were a lot of people around.
Now there is nobody."
As she reeled off the list
of Palestinian and foreign dignitaries who had visited the site, her
daughter-in-law Tahani, 35, said: "They all came. But nothing happened."
Tahani talks about the three surviving Athamneh members, two of them
children, who lost limbs in the attack.
"We have to worry about
the ones who lost arms and legs now and will see the others who haven't.
We have to look after them and then worry about where we are going to
live."
Arriving to join them, her
brother-in-law Majdi Athamneh, who lost his 12-year-old son Saad, says
that not only do the extended family fear to go back to their shelled
house because of the structural damage, but they no longer think they
should live together as they did for so many years.
"When so many members
of one family were killed, it is better to make sure it doesn't happen
again and live apart," he said.
Five miles away in Gaza City,
Adeeb Zarhouk, 44, is a man used to hard work and 4am starts to support
his wife Majda, 44, and their seven children in the 20 years he was
employed in Israel as a freelance metalworker and electrician, and then
for five working for an Israeli company in the now flattened Erez industrial
zone on the northern edge of Gaza. But this morning he apologises for
being asleep when we call.
Each day, he hopes for a
request to install a TV satellite or do another odd job. "But the
phone hasn't rung for two weeks," he says. " Nobody has any
money to do these things." Mr Zarhouk is part of the 64 per cent
increase in "deep poverty" among Palestinian refugees in the
past year.
He is naturally cheerful
but, as his wife prepares a three-shekel (36p) family breakfast of beans,
felafal and a few tomatoes, he says: "When I'm at home by myself
I start crying. When your son asks you for half a shekel and you do
not have it ..."
Mr Zarhouk gets up to wash
the tears from his eyes. Then he says that although as a refugee he
earned $240 (£120) a month on a three-month UNRWA job programme,
he now owes $540 in rent and that the family eat meat only when his
20-year-old policeman son has an irregular 1,500-shekel handout in lieu
of his salary as a policeman.
Who does Mr Zarhouk, who
voted Fatah in the last election, blame? "I blame democracy,"
he says with a flash of sarcasm. "The whole world wanted us to
have democracy and said how fair had been our election. The problem
is they didn't like our results."
The world's boycott since
those elections did not only end salaries for the PA employees on whom
Gaza's economy disproportionately depends. The health service, in many
ways highly professional but desperately under-equipped, is also suffering.
In her bed at Shifa Hospital, Intisar al Saqqa is waiting for the drug
Taxoter which doctors said she needs to treat a breast cancer which
has spread to her lung and her liver. "Every week, they say it
will come on Monday," says her mother, Hadra, 62. "But it
doesn't. Inshallah, it will come soon." Her daughter says: "I
don't blame anybody. I just want this [the political problems beyond
her control] to end. "
The EU-sponsored Temporary
International Mechanism was supposed to get a full range of drugs and
badly needed new equipment to Gaza long before now but because
of its own bureaucratic delays has failed to do so.
Similarly, a year after Condoleezza
Rice brokered an agreement to open up Gaza's borders, a UN report said
last week that Gaza's access to the outside world was "extremely
limited" and that commercial trade was " negligible".
That is diplomatese for saying
Gaza is the word every Palestinian uses a prison again.
Israel refuses to take the blame, saying the boycott and closures result
directly from security anxieties and from the refusal of Hamas to modify
its stances on recognition and violence.
The power is back on and
a fragile ceasefire holding. But with Fatah-Hamas talks collapsed, there
is little political hope in sight; and plenty to do for the NGOs and
charities like Merlin and the Welfare Association which
are trying to keep Gaza alive.
© 2006 Independent News
and Media Limited
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