Abu Juwairiya
Junior Member
"The most common metaphor used to describe life for the 1.5 million inhabitants of the Gaza Strip in Palestine is that of a prison. Having been trapped in Gaza by Israel’s forces at Erez on one side, and the Egyptian border police at Rafah on the other, I am able to report conclusively that this metaphor is inaccurate. I appeal to those with an interest in honest reporting to stop using this term to describe conditions here.
Because Gaza, besides having fixed perimeters patrolled by armed forces, has little in common with a prison. For a start, prisoners in Europe receive three meals a day. While the taste and quality of these meals varies, each day’s food allowance is nutritionally balanced to ensure that prisoners receive the optimum vitamins and minerals appropriate for their age group. No one goes hungry in a British jail.
Palestinians in Gaza are eating less. Parents are forced by the ever-tightening Israeli restrictions at the border, forcing them to reduce their children’s daily intake merely to ensure that they can survive day by day.
A study by the World Food Programme and UNRWA in May of 2008 found that 89 percent of the surveyed population had reduced the quality of food they have bought, while 75 percent had reduced the quantity they ate since January 2008. The food that packs the shelves here is largely made up of biscuits, sweets, crisps, and fizzy drinks—empty carbs, sugar, and fat- laden junk.
Local medical experts report that in Gaza, a diabetes time bomb is about to explode as a result of the siege. Almost all families have reduced their consumption of fresh fruit and vegetables to save money and very few Palestinians now eat fresh (red) meat. Families cannot afford to compensate for the lack of protein and vitamins. Considering the high prevalence of anaemia and other micronutrient deficiencies, this will have health consequences in the long term, especially for children.
I walked through Beach Camp, the refugee camp where Ismail Haniyeh, the prime minister, lives with his family. We were immediately surrounded by many of the camp’s curious children. Many of the children’s eyes seemed oddly flat and dull; a milky mist covers the cornea in many cases. Dr. Khamis El Essi, a rehabilitation specialist, randomly inspected the skin, teeth, and eyes of the barefoot children crowding around us on the muddy paths running between their impoverished homes.
Children of Beach Camp with Dr. Khamis El Essi
“This boy’s eyes are dull—lack of minerals,” he said of one eight-year-old boy. Another child, whom I estimated to be roughly the same as my eldest daughter Alex (seven), was smiling at us and waving “hello.” His mouth revealed five or more partially formed uneven stumps. I presumed his milk teeth had just fallen out. After a brief interview with the boy, Dr. Khamis told me “This boy is small for his age. He is twelve. The lack of vitamins in his diet has affected his bones. His poor diet has already ruined his teeth.”
Signs were clearly visible in all the children of varying degrees of anaemia, poor growth, and malnutrition.
One of my first invitations was to meet the Hamas prime minister, Ismail Haniyeh. A group of us from the peace boat had been asked to dinner at his home, an apartment in the heart of a refugee camp. The entrance to the dining area is unpaved and broken. There are pools of muddy water, which I had to step through to get to the door.
I was quickly surrounded by Haniyeh’s special guards, a group of boys all looking too young to be carrying such big guns. I would have been tenser, but I have gotten used to the casual way guns are carried by the police force. They scowled at us as we walked in, perhaps trying to portray weighty authority, an air somewhat undermined by their propensity to grin and giggle when spoken to. For all their geniality, discipline and control were their bywords.
Increasingly on the streets, women not wearing the hijab receive disapproving glances. Rumors abound in the Shisha restaurants, places with outdoor space to smoke Arabic hubbly-bubbly pipes, of beatings meted out to those found with alcohol. We ate in a bombed-out ground-floor hall, open to the elements save for uneven sheets of corrugated iron. Simple trestle tables had been placed in lines and covered in plastic cloths.
Haniyeh is a giant of a man but with a “Hey guys, trust me” demeanor that disarms his critics; he’s the Tony Blair of Hamas. After we had eaten, we walked the tight, rubbishstrewn alleyways of the refugee camp. There were skinny children everywhere making games out of the trash lying around. The main one seemed to entail crouching in the dirt and donkey dung, and flicking stones at tin cans.
Dr. Khamis, Lauren and Yasser with Beach Camp children
Israel has now restricted entry of food items like fruit, milk and other dairy products, wheat, flour, rice, sugar, salt, cooking oil, and frozen foods. All the key elements of vulnerability in the population have their roots in the military and administrative measures imposed by the Israeli occupation.
This is no natural disaster. This is deliberate man-made malnutrition. Gazans are faced with regimented border closures and the destruction of assets, such as acres of orchards, like in the town of Beit Hanoun and many other communities. This rationing of imported food supplies, and destruction of domestic food production has lead to soaring food prices, falling incomes and growing unemployment; elements which combine to jeopardize the livelihoods of Palestinians, leading to heavy debt and changes in family eating habits. Previously self-reliant families are falling into the poverty trap: unable to escape from their situation.
I repeat: Gaza is not a prison. It is much more than that.
Since September 19, 2007, almost 1.5 million Gazans have been tortured emotionally, physically and psychologically by crippling sanctions. Movement beyond this forty-byten kilometer enclave has been made not merely difficult, but (since the Rafah crossing has been open to the public just eight days this year), largely impossible.
Yesterday, I met with Dr. Basem N. Naim, the minister of Health in Gaza. His office was experiencing a black out, and there was no lighting. We sat in dimness to talk about the current situation for hospitals and patients.
With the international refusal of governments to cooperate with Hamas, even on social issues such as health and education, it is impossible for the ministry of health to have any forward planning for patient care. Dr. Basem gave the example of many cancer patients who receive the first two treatments for their life threatening condition. When the date for the third treatment arrives, the drugs are unavailable. Their condition worsens. At some unknown stage in the future, treatment will have to recommence from the start.
Over 240 patients in Gaza have died as a direct result of the siege conditions since autumn 2007. Health care is in a constant state of crisis now due to deteriorating infrastructure. Before June 2007 some 9,000 essential items were reaching the Gaza Strip; since then only nine groups of items are allowed in. This summer, between fifty and one hundred and fifty different essential supplies of medicine have been reduced to zero stock. Another 100 to 120 items of disposable essentials such as syringes have also reached zero stock. Elevator parts for lifts have been recently banned by Israel, too.
Without spare parts from the outside world, hospital lifts are breaking down. Dr. Basem cites the case of a hospital where patients have needed to be carried on the shoulders of orderlies up four flights of stairs between a ward and an operating theater. Since July 2008, the ministry of health has had NO surgical alcohol. Today the health ministry has NO chlorine for cleaning.
Gaza is no prison. Prisoners in the UK receive high quality health care as needed. In a prison, the inmates have access to clean water, good, clean sanitation, and a twentyfour/ seven supply of electricity. Here in Gaza, electricity, fuel, and gas have been drastically reduced and are now intermittently cut off due to a lack of fuel. Things are bad here and getting worse.
The fuel situation is a catastrophe. Power is in short supply, affecting hospitals, fresh water availability, sanitation, and the functioning of daily life here under conditions of extreme duress. I have visited hovels in Beach Camp, whose paltry stoves can no longer be used to prepare a single hot meal each day for families of ten and more, who are confined together in very small spaces.
There is no access to fuel. Wood is in sparse supply in this increasingly dusty, barren land, yet increasingly open fires are the only available method of cooking for the mothers of Gaza. Shops are short of everything, and even basic materials have spotty availability.
Banned items that are hard to find here but available in western prisons include: clothing, books, computers, telephones, and even shoes.
During our meeting with John Ging (the director of UNWRA), the difficulties faced by aid agencies in getting the raw materials of life through the checkpoints that handle cargo were outlined. For example, it has taken UNRWA many months of wrangling with the Israeli authorities in order to have paper, needed to print books for the agency’s many schools, allowed through.
The unwarranted, unreasonable delays meant tens of thousands of Gazan school children faced the 2009 school year without essential textbooks.
In the UK, the notorious child killer Ian Huntley relaxes in Frankland Maximum security prison in county Durham. Officers guarding Huntley have reportedly been told to play games with him, including Scrabble and chess. He is allowed special sports clothes and has a cell to himself with a television, CD player, and a Nintendo Game Cube console inside. It has also been claimed that guards must address him as Mr. Huntley, presumably to boost his self-esteem. Depression amongst prisoners in the UK is high, but there are numerous channels through which effective treatment and support can be provided. In British prisons, the mental health and comfort, not to mention the rehabilitation of prisoners, is taken seriously. Their rights are protected by law. In UK prisons, inmates are offered a range of activities including access to college and university courses.
Gaza is not a prison. Families (including spouses) are cut off from one another for unlimited periods of time. Life here is one of relentless interruption after another. I attended a candlelit vigil in the Gardens of the Unknown Soldier in Gaza City. This ceremony was held by mothers who had been separated by the IOF from their families in the West Bank and also abroad, and are unable to reach their children because of the siege.
Nisreen is twenty-seven, a stunning beauty with a quiet grace. Candle shaking in her hand, she could hardly restrain her emotional pain as she told me her story. In 2006 she went on a visit from her home in the West Bank town of Qalqilya to relatives in a neighboring village. On her return, a temporary Israeli checkpoint blocked her route home.
Born in Gaza, her papers for Qalqilya were ignored; her permit to live there disregarded. Her place of birth was Gaza, and the Israeli guards insisted that back to Gaza she must return. She was driven, crying for mercy, to Erez, accompanied by a female IOF soldier who spoke no Arabic. “I was roughly forced to cross Erez,” she told me, “then left here to rot.” Nisreen has seen neither her ten-year-old nor her three-year-old son for “fourteen months and two days.”
Nisreen is stuck in Gaza, separated from her childen and husband, who are in the West
Bank. Mona El-Farra has a daughter suck in Jordan trying to get home to Gaza
There are many parents in a similar situation encased in this overcrowded Gazan internment camp. They have been suffering the emotional effects of an enforced separation (of unknown length) from their children, their partners, and their homes in the West Bank, Israel, Egypt, and beyond.
Just this morning my good friend Dr. Mona El-Farra, a highly respected physician and author of the award-winning blog From Gaza from Love, was shaking after a call from her sixteen-year-old daughter. Sondos has been visiting family in Jordan; her school year started this week here in Gaza, but for two weeks permission for her return home to her mother has been confounded and refused without explanation by Israel’s border authority.
Why and on what legal grounds would a schoolchild be refused return to her parental home? No one here can explain. If this policy of refused permits and enforced incarceration or exile is not Israel’s intention, then the closure policy is an utter failure. If the intention is to punish the innocent, as must be suspected when one witnesses the daily, hourly monotony of the cruel, permit/no permit process, then it is a very effective and emotionally devastating policy indeed.
Family unification has been denied further after the Israeli Knesset passed the Nationality and Entry into Israel Law (July 2003). This bars Palestinians in the occupied territories with an Israeli spouse from getting citizenship or residency status in Israel. The net result is that these families are not allowed to live together. Thousands of married couples and their children are forced to remain apart or leave both Israel and the occupied territories and move abroad. The new law solely targets Palestinians. Besides this law, Israeli Arabs married to Gazans are barred from entering Gaza to visit their families. Meanwhile, Jewish prisoners in Israel are permitted conjugal visits from spouses under law. Wives regularly get pregnant during these ‘compassionate’ visits. Prisoners around the world may have regular contact with friends and relatives.
The most psychologically punishing element of all under this cruel siege is that Palestinians in Gaza have no idea and certainly no say in when it will end. In a prison, inmates have a fixed release date they can look forward to, a time in the near (or distant) future when they know they will be reunited with loved ones. The people I have met, since arriving here with the Free Gaza Boats are denied this hope. They live devoid of self-determination, adrift from the rest of the world on a sea of imposed uncertainty. In short, they dare not hope at all.
Gaza is not a prison. Someone who is imprisoned is closely confined as a punishment for a crime after due process of law. Is this a concentration camp? This definition of an enclosed space where innocent victims (usually of one race and including children held against their will) collectively suffer punishment because of their ethnicity or creed is one that should be familiar to every Israeli soldier, politician and citizen.
For Palestinians in Gaza, a UK prison with access visits from family members, three square meals a day, rehabilitation and education programs, good sanitary conditions and health care would be an improvement over life here.
Gaza 2008 is not a prison. It is the largest internment camp, slowly becoming the largest concentration camp, in history."
Because Gaza, besides having fixed perimeters patrolled by armed forces, has little in common with a prison. For a start, prisoners in Europe receive three meals a day. While the taste and quality of these meals varies, each day’s food allowance is nutritionally balanced to ensure that prisoners receive the optimum vitamins and minerals appropriate for their age group. No one goes hungry in a British jail.
Palestinians in Gaza are eating less. Parents are forced by the ever-tightening Israeli restrictions at the border, forcing them to reduce their children’s daily intake merely to ensure that they can survive day by day.
A study by the World Food Programme and UNRWA in May of 2008 found that 89 percent of the surveyed population had reduced the quality of food they have bought, while 75 percent had reduced the quantity they ate since January 2008. The food that packs the shelves here is largely made up of biscuits, sweets, crisps, and fizzy drinks—empty carbs, sugar, and fat- laden junk.
Local medical experts report that in Gaza, a diabetes time bomb is about to explode as a result of the siege. Almost all families have reduced their consumption of fresh fruit and vegetables to save money and very few Palestinians now eat fresh (red) meat. Families cannot afford to compensate for the lack of protein and vitamins. Considering the high prevalence of anaemia and other micronutrient deficiencies, this will have health consequences in the long term, especially for children.
I walked through Beach Camp, the refugee camp where Ismail Haniyeh, the prime minister, lives with his family. We were immediately surrounded by many of the camp’s curious children. Many of the children’s eyes seemed oddly flat and dull; a milky mist covers the cornea in many cases. Dr. Khamis El Essi, a rehabilitation specialist, randomly inspected the skin, teeth, and eyes of the barefoot children crowding around us on the muddy paths running between their impoverished homes.
Children of Beach Camp with Dr. Khamis El Essi
“This boy’s eyes are dull—lack of minerals,” he said of one eight-year-old boy. Another child, whom I estimated to be roughly the same as my eldest daughter Alex (seven), was smiling at us and waving “hello.” His mouth revealed five or more partially formed uneven stumps. I presumed his milk teeth had just fallen out. After a brief interview with the boy, Dr. Khamis told me “This boy is small for his age. He is twelve. The lack of vitamins in his diet has affected his bones. His poor diet has already ruined his teeth.”
Signs were clearly visible in all the children of varying degrees of anaemia, poor growth, and malnutrition.
One of my first invitations was to meet the Hamas prime minister, Ismail Haniyeh. A group of us from the peace boat had been asked to dinner at his home, an apartment in the heart of a refugee camp. The entrance to the dining area is unpaved and broken. There are pools of muddy water, which I had to step through to get to the door.
I was quickly surrounded by Haniyeh’s special guards, a group of boys all looking too young to be carrying such big guns. I would have been tenser, but I have gotten used to the casual way guns are carried by the police force. They scowled at us as we walked in, perhaps trying to portray weighty authority, an air somewhat undermined by their propensity to grin and giggle when spoken to. For all their geniality, discipline and control were their bywords.
Increasingly on the streets, women not wearing the hijab receive disapproving glances. Rumors abound in the Shisha restaurants, places with outdoor space to smoke Arabic hubbly-bubbly pipes, of beatings meted out to those found with alcohol. We ate in a bombed-out ground-floor hall, open to the elements save for uneven sheets of corrugated iron. Simple trestle tables had been placed in lines and covered in plastic cloths.
Haniyeh is a giant of a man but with a “Hey guys, trust me” demeanor that disarms his critics; he’s the Tony Blair of Hamas. After we had eaten, we walked the tight, rubbishstrewn alleyways of the refugee camp. There were skinny children everywhere making games out of the trash lying around. The main one seemed to entail crouching in the dirt and donkey dung, and flicking stones at tin cans.
Dr. Khamis, Lauren and Yasser with Beach Camp children
Israel has now restricted entry of food items like fruit, milk and other dairy products, wheat, flour, rice, sugar, salt, cooking oil, and frozen foods. All the key elements of vulnerability in the population have their roots in the military and administrative measures imposed by the Israeli occupation.
This is no natural disaster. This is deliberate man-made malnutrition. Gazans are faced with regimented border closures and the destruction of assets, such as acres of orchards, like in the town of Beit Hanoun and many other communities. This rationing of imported food supplies, and destruction of domestic food production has lead to soaring food prices, falling incomes and growing unemployment; elements which combine to jeopardize the livelihoods of Palestinians, leading to heavy debt and changes in family eating habits. Previously self-reliant families are falling into the poverty trap: unable to escape from their situation.
I repeat: Gaza is not a prison. It is much more than that.
Since September 19, 2007, almost 1.5 million Gazans have been tortured emotionally, physically and psychologically by crippling sanctions. Movement beyond this forty-byten kilometer enclave has been made not merely difficult, but (since the Rafah crossing has been open to the public just eight days this year), largely impossible.
Yesterday, I met with Dr. Basem N. Naim, the minister of Health in Gaza. His office was experiencing a black out, and there was no lighting. We sat in dimness to talk about the current situation for hospitals and patients.
With the international refusal of governments to cooperate with Hamas, even on social issues such as health and education, it is impossible for the ministry of health to have any forward planning for patient care. Dr. Basem gave the example of many cancer patients who receive the first two treatments for their life threatening condition. When the date for the third treatment arrives, the drugs are unavailable. Their condition worsens. At some unknown stage in the future, treatment will have to recommence from the start.
Over 240 patients in Gaza have died as a direct result of the siege conditions since autumn 2007. Health care is in a constant state of crisis now due to deteriorating infrastructure. Before June 2007 some 9,000 essential items were reaching the Gaza Strip; since then only nine groups of items are allowed in. This summer, between fifty and one hundred and fifty different essential supplies of medicine have been reduced to zero stock. Another 100 to 120 items of disposable essentials such as syringes have also reached zero stock. Elevator parts for lifts have been recently banned by Israel, too.
Without spare parts from the outside world, hospital lifts are breaking down. Dr. Basem cites the case of a hospital where patients have needed to be carried on the shoulders of orderlies up four flights of stairs between a ward and an operating theater. Since July 2008, the ministry of health has had NO surgical alcohol. Today the health ministry has NO chlorine for cleaning.
Gaza is no prison. Prisoners in the UK receive high quality health care as needed. In a prison, the inmates have access to clean water, good, clean sanitation, and a twentyfour/ seven supply of electricity. Here in Gaza, electricity, fuel, and gas have been drastically reduced and are now intermittently cut off due to a lack of fuel. Things are bad here and getting worse.
The fuel situation is a catastrophe. Power is in short supply, affecting hospitals, fresh water availability, sanitation, and the functioning of daily life here under conditions of extreme duress. I have visited hovels in Beach Camp, whose paltry stoves can no longer be used to prepare a single hot meal each day for families of ten and more, who are confined together in very small spaces.
There is no access to fuel. Wood is in sparse supply in this increasingly dusty, barren land, yet increasingly open fires are the only available method of cooking for the mothers of Gaza. Shops are short of everything, and even basic materials have spotty availability.
Banned items that are hard to find here but available in western prisons include: clothing, books, computers, telephones, and even shoes.
During our meeting with John Ging (the director of UNWRA), the difficulties faced by aid agencies in getting the raw materials of life through the checkpoints that handle cargo were outlined. For example, it has taken UNRWA many months of wrangling with the Israeli authorities in order to have paper, needed to print books for the agency’s many schools, allowed through.
The unwarranted, unreasonable delays meant tens of thousands of Gazan school children faced the 2009 school year without essential textbooks.
In the UK, the notorious child killer Ian Huntley relaxes in Frankland Maximum security prison in county Durham. Officers guarding Huntley have reportedly been told to play games with him, including Scrabble and chess. He is allowed special sports clothes and has a cell to himself with a television, CD player, and a Nintendo Game Cube console inside. It has also been claimed that guards must address him as Mr. Huntley, presumably to boost his self-esteem. Depression amongst prisoners in the UK is high, but there are numerous channels through which effective treatment and support can be provided. In British prisons, the mental health and comfort, not to mention the rehabilitation of prisoners, is taken seriously. Their rights are protected by law. In UK prisons, inmates are offered a range of activities including access to college and university courses.
Gaza is not a prison. Families (including spouses) are cut off from one another for unlimited periods of time. Life here is one of relentless interruption after another. I attended a candlelit vigil in the Gardens of the Unknown Soldier in Gaza City. This ceremony was held by mothers who had been separated by the IOF from their families in the West Bank and also abroad, and are unable to reach their children because of the siege.
Nisreen is twenty-seven, a stunning beauty with a quiet grace. Candle shaking in her hand, she could hardly restrain her emotional pain as she told me her story. In 2006 she went on a visit from her home in the West Bank town of Qalqilya to relatives in a neighboring village. On her return, a temporary Israeli checkpoint blocked her route home.
Born in Gaza, her papers for Qalqilya were ignored; her permit to live there disregarded. Her place of birth was Gaza, and the Israeli guards insisted that back to Gaza she must return. She was driven, crying for mercy, to Erez, accompanied by a female IOF soldier who spoke no Arabic. “I was roughly forced to cross Erez,” she told me, “then left here to rot.” Nisreen has seen neither her ten-year-old nor her three-year-old son for “fourteen months and two days.”
Nisreen is stuck in Gaza, separated from her childen and husband, who are in the West
Bank. Mona El-Farra has a daughter suck in Jordan trying to get home to Gaza
There are many parents in a similar situation encased in this overcrowded Gazan internment camp. They have been suffering the emotional effects of an enforced separation (of unknown length) from their children, their partners, and their homes in the West Bank, Israel, Egypt, and beyond.
Just this morning my good friend Dr. Mona El-Farra, a highly respected physician and author of the award-winning blog From Gaza from Love, was shaking after a call from her sixteen-year-old daughter. Sondos has been visiting family in Jordan; her school year started this week here in Gaza, but for two weeks permission for her return home to her mother has been confounded and refused without explanation by Israel’s border authority.
Why and on what legal grounds would a schoolchild be refused return to her parental home? No one here can explain. If this policy of refused permits and enforced incarceration or exile is not Israel’s intention, then the closure policy is an utter failure. If the intention is to punish the innocent, as must be suspected when one witnesses the daily, hourly monotony of the cruel, permit/no permit process, then it is a very effective and emotionally devastating policy indeed.
Family unification has been denied further after the Israeli Knesset passed the Nationality and Entry into Israel Law (July 2003). This bars Palestinians in the occupied territories with an Israeli spouse from getting citizenship or residency status in Israel. The net result is that these families are not allowed to live together. Thousands of married couples and their children are forced to remain apart or leave both Israel and the occupied territories and move abroad. The new law solely targets Palestinians. Besides this law, Israeli Arabs married to Gazans are barred from entering Gaza to visit their families. Meanwhile, Jewish prisoners in Israel are permitted conjugal visits from spouses under law. Wives regularly get pregnant during these ‘compassionate’ visits. Prisoners around the world may have regular contact with friends and relatives.
The most psychologically punishing element of all under this cruel siege is that Palestinians in Gaza have no idea and certainly no say in when it will end. In a prison, inmates have a fixed release date they can look forward to, a time in the near (or distant) future when they know they will be reunited with loved ones. The people I have met, since arriving here with the Free Gaza Boats are denied this hope. They live devoid of self-determination, adrift from the rest of the world on a sea of imposed uncertainty. In short, they dare not hope at all.
Gaza is not a prison. Someone who is imprisoned is closely confined as a punishment for a crime after due process of law. Is this a concentration camp? This definition of an enclosed space where innocent victims (usually of one race and including children held against their will) collectively suffer punishment because of their ethnicity or creed is one that should be familiar to every Israeli soldier, politician and citizen.
For Palestinians in Gaza, a UK prison with access visits from family members, three square meals a day, rehabilitation and education programs, good sanitary conditions and health care would be an improvement over life here.
Gaza 2008 is not a prison. It is the largest internment camp, slowly becoming the largest concentration camp, in history."
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