Jerusalemites

– Gaza-Kitchen-Palestinian-Culinary-Journey by Laila El-Haddad Maggie Schmitt

– Gaza in Crisis: Reflections on Israel’s War Against the Palestinians by Noam Chomsky

– I Shall Not Hate: A Gaza Doctor’s Journey on the Road to Peace and Human Dignity by Izzeldin Abuelaish

– A Month by the Sea: Encounters in Gaza Dervla Murphy

– Meet Me in Gaza: Uncommon Stories of Life Inside the Stri by Louisa B. Waugh

– Gaza Writes Back: Short Stories from Young Writers in Gaza, Palestine, by Refaat Alareer

– The Book of Gaza: A City in Short Fiction (Reading the City) by Atef Abu Seif and Abdallah Tayeh

http://www.socialwatch.org/

Source:

Gaza: Life and death under Israel’s drones

Posted on: Nov 2013

By Jonathan Cook

There are many things to fear in Gaza: Attacks from Israel’s Apache helicopters and F-16 fighter jets, the coastal enclave’s growing isolation, the regular blackouts from power shortages, increasingly polluted drinking water and rivers of sewage flooding the streets.

Meanwhile, for most Palestinians in Gaza the anxiety-inducing soundtrack to their lives is the constant buzz of the remotely piloted aircraft – better known as “drones” – that hover in the skies above.

Drones are increasingly being used for surveillance and extra-judicial execution in parts of the Middle East, especially by the US, but in nowhere more than Gaza has the drone become a permanent fixture of life. More than 1.7 million Palestinians, confined by Israel to a small territory in one of the most densely populated areas in the world, are subject to near continual surveillance and intermittent death raining down from the sky.

There is little hope of escaping the zenana – an Arabic word referring to a wife’s relentless nagging that Gazans have adopted to describe the drone’s oppressive noise and their feelings about it. According to statistics compiled by human rights groups in Gaza, civilians are the chief casualties of what Israel refers to as “surgical” strikes from drones.

“When you hear the drones, you feel naked and vulnerable,” said Hamdi Shaqura, deputy director of the Palestinian Centre for Human Rights, based in Gaza City. “The buzz is the sound of death. There is no escape, nowhere is private. It is a reminder that, whatever Israel and the international community assert, the occupation has not ended. We are still living completely under Israeli control. They control the borders and the sea and they decide our fates from their position in the sky,” said Shaqura.

The Israeli military did not respond to Al Jazeera’s requests for comment.

Suffer the children

The sense of permanent exposure, coupled with the fear of being mistakenly targeted, has inflicted deep psychological scars on civilians, especially children, according to experts.

“There is a great sense of insecurity. Nowhere feels safe for the children, and they feel no one can offer them protection, not even their parents,” said Ahmed Tawahina, a psychologist running clinics in Gaza as part of the Community Mental Health Programme. “That traumatises both the children and parents, who feel they are failing in their most basic responsibility.”

Shaqura observed: “From a political perspective, there is a deep paradox. Israel says it needs security, but it demands it at the cost of our constant insecurity.”

There are no statistics that detail the effect of the drones on Palestinians in Gaza. Doctors admit it is impossible to separate the psychological toll inflicted by drones from other sources of damage to mental health, such as air strikes by F-16s, severe restrictions on movement and the economic insecurity caused by Israel’s blockade.

But field researchers working for Palestinian rights groups point out that the use of drones is intimately tied to these other sources of fear and anxiety. Drones fire missiles themselves, they guide attacks by F-16s or helicopters, and they patrol and oversee the borders.

A survey in medical journal The Lancet following Operation Cast Lead, Israel’s month-long attack on Gaza in winter 2008-09, found large percentages of children suffered from symptoms of psychological trauma: Fifty-eight percent permanently feared the dark; 43 percent reported regular nightmares; 37 percent wet the bed and 42 percent had crying attacks.

Tawahina described the sense of being constantly observed as a “form of psychological torture, which exhausts people’s mental and emotional resources. Among children at school, this can be seen in poor concentration and unruly behaviour.” The trauma for children is compounded by the fact that the drones also disrupt what should be their safest activity – watching TV at home. When a drone is operating nearby, it invariably interferes with satellite reception.

“”It doesn’t make headlines, but it is another example of how there is no escape from the drones. Parents want their children indoors, where it feels safer and where they’re less likely to hear the drones, but still the drone finds a way into their home. The children cannot even switch off from the traumas around them by watching TV because of the drones.”

Israel’s ‘major advantage’

Israel developed its first drones in the early 1980s, during its long occupation of south Lebanon, to gather aerial intelligence without exposing Israeli pilots to anti-aircraft missiles. Efraim Inbar, director of the Begin-Sadat Centre for Strategic Studies at Bar Ilan University, said drones help in situations where good, on-the-ground intelligence is lacking. “What the UAV gives you is eyes on the other side of the hill or over the border,” he said. “That provides Israel with a major advantage over its enemies.”

Other Israeli analysts have claimed that the use of drones, with their detailed intelligence-collecting abilities, is justified because they reduce the chances of errors and the likelihood of “collateral damage” – civilian deaths – during attacks.

But, according to Inbar, the drone is no better equipped than other aircraft for gathering intelligence or carrying out an execution.

“The advantage from Israel’s point of view is that using a drone for these tasks reduces the risk of endangering a pilot’s life or losing an expensive plane. That is why we are moving towards much greater use of these kinds of robots on the battlefield,” he said.

‘Mistakes can happen’

According to Gaza human rights group al-Mezan, Israel started using drones over the territory from the start of the second intifada in 2000, but only for surveillance.

Israel’s first extra-judicial executions using drones occurred in 2004, when two Palestinians were killed. But these operations greatly expanded after 2006, in the wake of Israel’s withdrawal of settlers and soldiers from Gaza and the rise to power of the Palestinian Islamic movement Hamas.

Drones, the front-line weapon in Israel’s surveillance operations and efforts to foil rocket attacks, killed more than 90 Palestinians in each of the years 2006 and 2007, according to al-Mezan. The figures soared during Operation Cast Lead and in its aftermath, with 461 Palestinians killed by drones in 2009. The number peaked again with 199 deaths in 2012, the year when Israel launched the eight-day Operation Pillar of Defence against Gaza.

Despite Israeli claims that the intelligence provided by drones makes it easier to target those Palestinians it has defined as “terrorists”, research shows civilians are the main victims. In the 2012 Pillar of Defence operation, 36 of the 162 Palestinians killed were a result of drone strikes, and a further 100 were injured by drones. Of those 36 killed, two-thirds were civilians.

Also revealing was a finding that, although drones were used in only five percent of air strikes, they accounted for 23 percent of the total deaths during Pillar of Defence. According to theEconomist magazine, the assassination of Hamas leader Ahmed Jabari, which triggered that operation, was carried out using a Hermes 450 drone.

Palestinian fighters report that they have responded to the constant surveillance by living in hiding, rarely going outdoors and avoiding using phones or cars. It is a way of life not possible for most people in Gaza.

Gaza’s armed groups are reported to be trying to find a way to jam the drones’ navigation systems. In the meantime, Hamas has claimed it has shot down three drones, the latest this month, though Israel says all three crashed due to malfunctions.

Last week, on the anniversary of the launch of Pillar of Defence, an Israeli commander whose soldiers control the drones over Gaza from a base south of Tel Aviv told the Haaretz newspaper that “many” air strikes during the operation had involved drones. “Lt Col Shay” was quoted saying: “Ultimately, we are at war. As much as the IDF strives to carry out the most precise surgical strikes, mistakes can happen in the air or on the ground.”

Random death by drone

It is for this reason that drones have become increasingly associated with random death from the sky, said Samir Zaqout, a senior field researcher for Al-Mezan.

“We know from the footage taken by drones that Israel can see what is happening below in the finest detail. And yet women and children keep being killed in drone attacks. Why the continual mistakes? The answer, I think, is that these aren’t mistakes. The message Israel wants to send us is that there is no protection whether you are a civilian or fighter. They want us afraid and to make us turn on the resistance [Palestinian fighters].”

Zaqout also points to a more recent use of drones – what has come to be known as “roof-knocking”. This is when a drone fires small missiles at the roof of a building to warn the inhabitants to evacuate – a practice Israel developed during Operation Cast Lead three years earlier, to allay international concerns about its repeated levellings of buildings with civilians inside.

In Pillar of Defence in 2012, 33 buildings were targeted by roof-knocking.

Israel says it provides 10 minutes’ warning from a roof-knock to an air strike, but, in practice, families find they often have much less time. This, said Zaqout, puts large families in great danger as they usually send their members out in small groups to be sure they will not be attacked as they move onto the streets.

One notorious case occurred during Cast Lead, when six members of the Salha family, all women and children, were killed when their home was shelled moments after a roof-knocking. The father, Fayez Salha, who survived, lost a case for damages in Israel’s Supreme Court last February and was ordered to pay costs after the judges ruled that the attack was legitimate because it occurred as part of a military operation.

A US citizen who has lived long-term in Gaza, who wished not be named for fear of reprisals from Israel, said she often heard the drones at night when the street noise dies down, or as they hover above her while out walking. “The sound is like the buzz of a mosquito, although there is one type of drone that sometimes comes into view that is silent,” she said.

She added that she knew of families that, before moving into a new apartment building, checked to see whether it housed a fighter or a relative of a fighter, for fear that the building may be attacked by Israel.

Shaqura said the drones inevitably affect one’s day-to-day behaviour. He said he was jogging early one morning while a drone hovered overhead.

“I got 100 metres from my front door when I started to feel overwhelmed with fear. I realised that my tracksuit was black, the same colour as many of the fighters’ uniforms. I read in my work too many reports of civilians being killed by drones not to see the danger. So I hurried back home.”

Relevant Books on Gaza

– Gaza-Kitchen-Palestinian-Culinary-Journey by Laila El-Haddad Maggie Schmitt

– Gaza in Crisis: Reflections on Israel’s War Against the Palestinians by Noam Chomsky

– I Shall Not Hate: A Gaza Doctor’s Journey on the Road to Peace and Human Dignity by Izzeldin Abuelaish

– A Month by the Sea: Encounters in Gaza Dervla Murphy

– Meet Me in Gaza: Uncommon Stories of Life Inside the Stri by Louisa B. Waugh

– Gaza Writes Back: Short Stories from Young Writers in Gaza, Palestine, by Refaat Alareer

– The Book of Gaza: A City in Short Fiction (Reading the City) by Atef Abu Seif and Abdallah Tayeh

http://www.aljazeera.com/

Source:

Is Gaza Still Occupied and Why Does It Matter?

Posted on: July 14, 2014

By Lisa Hajjar

In view of Israel’s assertions that it has not occupied the Gaza Strip since 2005, Jadaliyya re-posts an analysis of this claim authored by Lisa Hajjar, initially published in 2012.

Yes, the Gaza Strip is still occupied. Despiteofficial Israeli remonstrations that the unilateral disengagement of 2005, which removed Israeli military bases and Jewish settlers, transformed Gaza into “no longer occupied territory,” neither those changes nor anything that has transpired since has ended the occupation.

“Occupation” is a legal designation of an international nature. Israel’s occupation of Gaza continues to the present day because (a) Israel continues to exercise “effective control” over this area, (b) the conflict that produced the occupation has not ended, and (c) an occupying state cannot unilaterally (and without international/diplomatic agreement) transform the internationalstatus of occupied territory except, perhaps, if that unilateral action terminates all manner of effective control.

Sui Generis Nonsense

The irony of Israel’s assertion that Gaza is no longer occupied can be best appreciated when one considers Israel’s earlier position that Gaza and the West Bank were not occupied in 1967. Israeli officials claimed that the status of these areas was sui generis because, at the time of conquest, they were controlled by but not sovereign to Egypt and Jordan, respectively. “Occupation,” according to Israel, only pertains to areas that were recognized sovereign territory of the displaced states. Hence the premise, never accepted by the international community, was: no sovereignty, therefore no occupation. Rather, Israel insisted that Gaza and the West Bank were “administered” territory. The other premise of the original “not occupied” position was that Israel could lay claim to all or parts of these lands because they compose the remainder of Eretz Israelto which the Jewish people have historic and/or biblical rights.

The motivation for projecting the notion that the status of the Palestinian territories was sui generis was political: If Israel were to accept the international consensus that it was an “occupant,” it would be constrained from permanently seizing or settling territory acquired by force. Instead, Israeli officials constructed an edifice of ornate legal reasoning to legitimize territorially expansive policies. Of course, Israel had no aspiration to assert permanent control over the Palestinian residents of these putatively sui generis territories, so the people were regarded as occupied.

The concept of sui generis territory may be fitting for some places (like Antarctica). However, it is irrelevant and erroneous in the case of territory that was militarily occupied as a result of armed conflict, as Gaza and the West Bank were. The claim that the occupation of Gaza ended in 2005, and that its status is now sui generis, should be assessed in light of Israel’s earlier attempts to legally license unilateral policies implemented in defiance of international law.

Those who assert the sui generis status of Gaza today willfully ignore the criteria for what anactual end to an occupation requires. Not only does it require an end to the conflict, but also the reestablishment—or in the Palestinian case the establishment—of sovereignty through which the “previously” occupied population can exercise and enjoy the right of self-determination. (The also-and-still-occupied Golan Heights was Syrian territory, so an end to that occupation would entail the restoration of Syrian sovereignty.)

Annexation of occupied territory, while contrary to the international proscription against the acquisition of land by armed force, could be an alternative if that outcome were an internationally recognized means to bring the conflict to an end. It would require that the occupied population be afforded their right of self-determination by becoming citizens of the annexing state.

Occupied Territory under International Humanitarian Law

Territory that was militarily conquered remains occupied until sovereignty supplants foreign control. As long as the Gaza Strip is non-sovereign, it is occupied, and as long as it is occupied its relationship to Israel continues to be governed by international humanitarian law (IHL), which forms part of the laws of war. In addition to the four Geneva Conventions of 1949, these laws include the Hague Regulations of 1907 and the Geneva Conventions Additional Protocols I and II of 1977. Under the Fourth Geneva Convention, which governs territories militarily conquered by a foreign government, the civilian population who resides there is legally designated “protected persons.”

The laws of war are lex specialis, that is, “special law.” What is “special” is conflict, and its opposite, the “not special,” is peace. (IHL pertains to the conduct of armed conflict, jus in bello,and is agnostic about the lawfulness of causes that initiate armed conflict, jus ad bellum.)

An occupation, even a prolonged one, is a continuation of conflict, and, therefore, IHL remains in effect until peace has been restored. This point of customary international humanitarian law is explained in unambiguous terms in the Prosecutor v. Tadic decision of the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia:

International humanitarian law applies from the initiation of such armed conflicts and extends beyond the cessation of hostilities until a general conclusion of peace is reached…Until that moment, international humanitarian law continues to apply in the whole territory of the warring States or, in the case of internal conflicts, the whole territory under the control of a party, whether or not actual combat takes place there.

Any proposition that there is a sui generis third option—neither sovereign nor occupied but nevertheless in a continuing state of conflict—is a spurious interpretation of law. As Mark Levine and I have written elsewhere,

The designation sui generis literally places the West Bank and Gaza and their populations into a state of exception, outside the reach of IHL and thus open to any and all policies Israel may choose to impose, without fear of violating—at least according to Israel’s interpretations—international human rights and humanitarian norms.

Proclamations that the occupation ended in Gaza in 2005 because Israel removed its fixed military presence and civilian settlements are political arguments. This is equally the case whengovernment lawyers and legal scholars make them. Even if one was to bracket or ignore the legal in favor of the political, there has been no end to Israel’s capacity to exercise “effective control” over Gaza.

Effective Control Criteria

What constitutes measures of effective control in the context of Gaza? In 2007, John Dugard, then UN Special Rapporteur on the Situation of Human Rights in the Occupied Palestinian Territory, explained that the manifestations of Israel’s continuing effective control include: (a) substantial control of Gaza’s six land crossings; (b) control through military incursions, rocket attacks and sonic booms, and the declaration of areas inside the Strip as “no-go” zones where anyone who enters can be shot; (c) complete control of Gaza’s airspace and territorial waters; and (d) control of the Palestinian Population Registry, which has the power and authority to define who is a “Palestinian” and who is a resident of Gaza.

To these must be added Israel’s continuing capacity to invade Gaza, arrest residents, and transport them into Israel. In the wake of Israel’s unilateral disengagement, which included the dissolution of the military court at the Erez base on the edge of Gaza, the Knesset enacted the 2006 Criminal Procedure Law to allow for the prosecution of Gazans in Israeli civil courts, and their imprisonment inside Israel. Moreover, on the very day Israel implemented the completion of its unilateral disengagement plan (12 September 2005), the military issued detention orders for two Gazans under the 2002 Internment of Unlawful Combatants Law. That Israeli law (modeled on the military order issued by US President George W. Bush on 13 November 2001) was originally promulgated to provide legal cover for the imprisonment of kidnapped Lebanese nationals who were to be used as “bargaining chips” in exchange for Israeli prisoners of war and the remains of those who had been killed in Lebanon. Since 2005, that law has been used primarily to administratively detain (i.e., imprison without trial) Gazans.

According to Addameer, the Prisoner Support and Human Rights Association, as of 1 November 2012, 445 Gazans were imprisoned in Israel. The International Committee of the Red Cross reports a higher figure of 550.

Since 2007, when Dugard offered up his authoritative calculus, much has changed, but none of these changes support the contention that Israel does not exercise effective control over Gaza. Sara Roy, in a recent Boston Globe article, offers examples of how, despite the absence of a military administration, Israel continues to control what happens “on the ground” on a daily basis. She writes:

Israeli-imposed buffer zones—areas of restricted access—now absorb nearly 14 percent of Gaza’s total land and at least 48 percent of total arable land. Similarly, the sea buffer zone covers 85 percent of the maritime area promised to Palestinians in the Oslo Accords, reducing 20 nautical miles to three, where waters are fouled by sewage flows in excess of 23 million gallons daily.

Assaf Kfoury, who traveled into Gaza as part of an academic delegation in October, summarizessome of the well-documented elements of Israel’s ongoing effective control. He writes:

The Gaza Strip is hemmed in from all sides. The Israeli naval blockade prevents all transport of people and goods from the sea. The land border with Israel is tightly sealed. Rafah at the southern edge of the Strip…is the only and hard way in and out, via Egypt, for the vast majority of Palestinians. Israel controls the Erez crossing, strictly monitoring entry of international aid workers, journalists, and a trickle of Palestinians…Over past decades and years, Palestinian industry has been systematically sabotaged in favor of Israeli industry, including industry (or whatever is worthy of the name) in Gaza, whose economy is essentially controlled by Israel. Most alarming is a recent UN report, Gaza in 2020, which suggests that Gaza will no longer be a “livable place” in 2020.

Kfoury also offers some examples of Israel’s effective control that he witnessed firsthand.

Turning one’s back to the misery inland, and looking out to the Mediterranean and its shimmering waters, should normally be a soothing escape, but not in Gaza. Our mornings over breakfast at the hotel were punctuated by gunfire from somewhere off shore. These were not dynamite sticks that kids or poor people detonated underwater to collect large quantities of stunned fish, as I initially thought, but gunfire from Israeli patrol boats warning fishermen to stay inside the three nautical-mile limit. On the morning we left the Strip, we were told that two fishermen who went beyond the limit were killed the day before.

These effective control measures and their adverse humanitarian consequences preceded the 2005 unilateral withdrawal and have continued since. Indeed, they were and remain the stock and trade of Israel’s occupation of Gaza.

Sui Generis Nonsense as a License To Kill

Israel did not formulate the “no longer occupied” position in 2005, or even in the immediately preceding years. Rather, the building blocks of this position began to pile up in the 1990s as a result of Israeli-Palestinian negotiations. Under the terms of the Oslo Accords, the Israeli military redeployed from Palestinian population centers, the Civil Administration was dissolved although the military courts continued to function on relocated bases in the territories, and a non-sovereign Palestinian Authority (PA) was established.

These political changes prompted Israel to modify its position that the legal status of the West Bank and Gaza was “administered” territory. Officials asserted that areas under the semi-autonomous control of the PA had become differently non-sovereign and, importantly, “foreign.” This became highly significant following the breakdown of negotiations in July 2000 and the start of a second intifada in September whose immediate trigger was Ariel Sharon’s provocative campaign stunt to go with 1,000 armed guards to the Haram al-Sharif.

In response to Palestinian protests, Israel loosened the military’s rules of engagement and quickly began using heavy weapons, including tanks and helicopter gunships. Under international consensus-based interpretations of IHL, massive use of military force by an occupying state against civilians in occupied territories (i.e., protected persons) would be categorically illegal.

Israeli officials justified the use of high-end military force by asserting that policing and riot control tactics were no longer an option because the military was “out” of Palestinian areas, and because Palestinians possessed (small) arms and thus constituted a foreign “armed adversary.” Officials described the second intifada was an “armed conflict short of war,” and asserted Israel’s right of self-defense to attack an “enemy entity,” while denying that those stateless enemies had any right to use force, even in self-defense. Noura Erakat elaborates on these issues here.

In November 2000, two months into the increasingly and reciprocally violent second intifada, Israel became the first state in the world to publicly proclaim a policy of “preemptive targeted killing.” (Israel had engaged in extra-judicial assassinations in the territories since the first intifada,but until then had denied the policy.) Officials formulated a position to assert the legality of preemptive targeted killing on the following bases: (1) Palestinians were to blame for the hostilities, which constituted a war of terror against Israel, (2) the laws of war permit states to kill their enemies, (3) targeted individuals were “ticking bombs” who had to be killed because they could not be arrested and were ostensibly poised to inflict imminent harm, and (4) killing terrorists by means of assassination is a legitimate form of national self-defense. The death of untargeted civilians was termed, in accordance with the discourse of war, “collateral damage.”

In 2001, two petitions were submitted to Israel’s High Court of Justice (HCJ) to challenge the legality of the targeted killing policy. The Court declined to accept these petitions, arguing that the “choice of means of warfare, used by the [state] to preempt murderous terrorist attacks, is not the kind of issue the Court would see fit to intervene in.” However, the following year the HCJ reconsidered its non-justiciability position and accepted the petition submitted by the Public Committee against Torture in Israel and LAW: The Palestinian Society for the Protection of Human Rights and the Environment.

The HCJ targeted killing ruling, rendered on 15 December 2006 and written by former Chief Justice Aharon Barak, begins with a section on the “factual background” which states: “A massive assault of terrorism was directed against the State of Israel, and against Israelis, merely because they are Israelis.”

Because targeted killings conducted in Gaza and the West Bank were part of the same policy, the litigation made no distinction between them. Neither did the HCJ judgment; rather these locales were referred to as “the area” and “outside the bounds of the state,” thereby evading the question of whether Palestinians are still “occupied” and thus “protected persons.” The “armed conflict” at issue is described as between Israel and “terrorist organizations,” and the decision claims that there has been “a continuous situation of armed conflict…since the first intifada.” The significance of this conflation of Gaza and the West Bank illustrates the flimsiness of the post-2005 proposition that Gaza differs from the West Bank in a purportedly no-longer-occupied sui generis way.

Siege as War by Other Means

Following the 2006 Palestinian legislative elections that Hamas won, a conflict erupted between Hamas and Fatah that left Hamas in control of Gaza and the Fatah-dominated PA relegated to the West Bank. On 19 September 2007, Israel declared that Gaza had become a “hostile territory,” a term that does not appear in any of the treaties that compose IHL. In a statement issued that day by the Ministerial Committee on National Security Issues, Israel stated its intention to continue“military and counter-terrorist operations against the terrorist organizations.”

The same statement announced:

Additional sanctions will be placed on the Hamas regime in order to restrict the passage of various goods to the Gaza Strip and reduce the supply of fuel and electricity. Restrictions will also be placed on the movement of people to and from the Gaza Strip. The sanctions will be enacted following a legal examination, while taking into account both the humanitarian aspects relevant to the Gaza Strip and the intention to avoid a humanitarian crisis.

Immediately following that announcement, a group of human rights organizations petitioned the HCJ. They charged that the restriction or limitation of the supply of fuel and electricity to Gaza was illegal behavior by an occupying state because it would constitute collective punishment. Moreover, it would have serious adverse humanitarian consequences including affecting essential services like the functioning of hospitals and the treatment of water and sewage.

The HCJ’s decision put sole onus on Hamas for posing a danger to Israeli security, and dodged the charge of illegal collective punishment by credulously accepting official statements about the fine-grained monitoring of humanitarian needs of “inhabitants” in the Strip. The Court endorsed the state’s decision to limit these resources as part of its fight against terrorism. In doing so, the HCJ relied on the spurious assertion that Gaza is no longer occupied. Like the earlier targeted killing decision, the HCJ concluded that the only relationship Israel now has with Gaza is a belligerent conflict with Hamas. In this decision, the HCJ averred that the state has none of “positive duties” of an occupying state, only “negative duties” of a belligerent not to inflict deliberate humanitarian harm on civilians.

Contrary to claims of humanitarian attentiveness, since 2007 Gaza has suffered a humanitarian crisis of staggering magnitude. Foodstuffs were restricted as a matter of policy, allowing in only so much (calculated in a ratio of gross calories to total population) to avoid massive malnourishment. The siege, enforced through a land-and-sea blockade and the aerial bombing of smuggling tunnels linking the Strip to the Sinai, deprived the population of access to medical supplies, building equipment, and all manner of essential goods.

The humanitarian impact of these deprivations intensified massively as a result of the wreckage and ruination of Operation Cast Lead, the full-scale military assault on Gaza in the winter of 2008-2009. By the summer of 2012, as the siege was entering its sixth year, the UN Office of Humanitarian Affairs reported that forty-four percent of Gazans are food insecure; a severe fuel and electricity shortage results in outages of up to twelve hours a day; and the economy has been so crippled that the GDP per capita is at least seventeen percent lower than in 2005 and the unemployment rate, especially for youth, is higher than ever.

UN human rights experts, the International Committee of the Red Cross, and other authoritative sources have condemned the siege as illegal. The crux of these condemnations is the fact thatGaza is still occupied.

Why Does It Matter That Gaza Is Still Occupied?

International law is not a panacea for the harms and ills of conflict. However, international law provides a standard against which empirical realities can be judged and an instrumental means through which consequences for violations can be pursued. For stateless peoples, including those living under occupation, international law is exceptionally important because they have no national law-based alternative to assert, let alone exercise, their right of self-determination. International law provides the point of reference for that and all the other rights they can claim by virtue of being humans.

Palestinians may achieve their rights (or not) through political, diplomatic or military means. But that does not alter the fact that as long as the occupation continues—which it will until there is peace and sovereignty and self-determination—what happens in Gaza and in the West Bank are matters of international law, and therefore of international concern.

If international law did not matter, Israel would not have gone to such lengths to concoct alternative interpretations in order to cover its intentions and policies in the territories from the time they were conquered in 1967 until today. Those concocted interpretations defy international consensus and authoritative interpretations of international law.

I believe that it is important for people to understand that gap between what international law demands or allows and what Israel does and asserts as its right vis-à-vis Palestinians and the territories occupied since 1967. Why? Because understanding international law is a means of showing respect for the humanitarian norms and human rights that were hard fought to establish. Understanding is a step to making international law into an effective standard and instrument for rights and for justice. Absorbing and spreading that understanding is more than some abstract “cause;” it is a project and an invitation to make the law matter to the lives of those who need it most, and to the lives of those who disregard and violate it.

Relevant Books on Gaza

– Gaza-Kitchen-Palestinian-Culinary-Journey by Laila El-Haddad Maggie Schmitt

– Gaza in Crisis: Reflections on Israel’s War Against the Palestinians by Noam Chomsky

– I Shall Not Hate: A Gaza Doctor’s Journey on the Road to Peace and Human Dignity by Izzeldin Abuelaish

– A Month by the Sea: Encounters in Gaza Dervla Murphy

– Meet Me in Gaza: Uncommon Stories of Life Inside the Stri by Louisa B. Waugh

– Gaza Writes Back: Short Stories from Young Writers in Gaza, Palestine, by Refaat Alareer

– The Book of Gaza: A City in Short Fiction (Reading the City) by Atef Abu Seif and Abdallah Tayeh

http://www.jadaliyya.com/

Source:

Life as a refugee in Gaza: “We had nothing except for the clothes we were wearing”

Posted on: January 2015

Hani Uliwa’s deadpan eyes move slowly across the cement rubble that was once his family’s living room. His movements are stilted. His greying skin wears the battered scars of a troubled life. A deep sigh is released before the 44 year old begins to explain what life has been like living as a refugee in the Gaza Strip.

Obligated to cut short his education to support his family, Hani’s working life started at 17 years of age, labouring in construction in Israel. But during the second intifada, in 2000, he was forced back to Gaza where the only paid employment he could find was setting himself up as a taxi driver, using his savings to buy a car.

”I used to earn a monthly income of US$ 1,200 when I worked as a labourer, but then earned US$ 200 as a taxi driver. This drastic decrease in income made it very hard for me to make ends meet,” Hani says.

There are many mouths reliant on Hani. In 1990, at age 20, he was married. He now has eight sons and one daughter aged between five and 24.

Muna, Hani’s 40-year-old wife, says that life is very difficult in Gaza, particularly following the demolition of the family home during the recent conflict. “Fortunately, my family managed to survive the heavy bombing in Toufah Area, Gaza City, and took refuge in al-Yarmouk area. First, seven days at my brother-in-law’s home, then at an UNRWA shelter in Beach Camp. Finally, at an UNRWA Collective Centre at Zaitoun Prep Girls School.

“When we arrived at the Collective Centre, we had nothing except for the clothes we were wearing. We received mattresses and blankets, some clothing and other basic supplies.”

In early November 2014, after shelter assessments declared their home destroyed, the family received US$ 1,500 from UNRWA – US$ 1,000 transitional shelter cash assistance and a US$ 500 reintegration package.

“We managed to rent a flat close to our demolished home and we bought a washing machine and kitchen kits to have the minimum requirements for living in the new apartment,” Muna said.

Since the deadly summer conflict broke out in July 2014, the family has remained reliant on UNRWA services to meet their basic needs. This includes utilizing UNRWA food, health, education and social service support – a programme that has spiraled from supporting 80,000 Palestine refugees in Gaza in 2000, to over 867,000 registered beneficiaries since 2014.

With the seven-year Israeli-imposed blockade crippling local industry, the Uliwa family now depend exclusively on the UNRWA food assistance programme for daily food needs. Hani’s modest self-employment as a taxi driver was cut short when his car was destroyed in the summer conflict; however, he has been able to secure employment working as a bus driver for a private school and earns US$ 120 per month. Thousands of others in Gaza are not so lucky.

Prior to the summer hostilities, the unemployment rate in Gaza surged to a record high 44.5 per cent in the second quarter of 2014 according to data from the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics. Almost half of all refugees are unemployed (45.5 per cent); the highest level ever reported in the UNRWA PCBS-based records.

Hani wastes little time explaining how precarious day-to-day life has become for his family. “Electricity is a concern for everyone in Gaza. It poses additional challenge to our weary family, I am unable to warm my children in this urgent and hard winter; my children need electricity to study, and it is very hard living conditions without electricity,” he says.

Despite these hardships, Hani’s wife Muna is trying to remain optimistic for the sake of her children. “The only dream I have now is to see my home rebuilt and to move to a normal life again, with a permanent job for my husband,” she says.

Relevant Books on Gaza

– Gaza-Kitchen-Palestinian-Culinary-Journey by Laila El-Haddad Maggie Schmitt

– Gaza in Crisis: Reflections on Israel’s War Against the Palestinians by Noam Chomsky

– I Shall Not Hate: A Gaza Doctor’s Journey on the Road to Peace and Human Dignity by Izzeldin Abuelaish

– A Month by the Sea: Encounters in Gaza Dervla Murphy

– Meet Me in Gaza: Uncommon Stories of Life Inside the Stri by Louisa B. Waugh

– Gaza Writes Back: Short Stories from Young Writers in Gaza, Palestine, by Refaat Alareer

– The Book of Gaza: A City in Short Fiction (Reading the City) by Atef Abu Seif and Abdallah Tayeh

Source:

http://www.unrwa.org/

Trapped in Gaza: Young Palestinians face pressure to escape life under siege

Posted on: January 20, 2015

By Dan Cohen

“We are all under unbelievable amounts of psychological pressure. If anyone breaks down and goes crazy in the street, no one will blame them,” Belal El-Shafi, 24, from Nuseirat refugee camp told me. Married with one child, El-Shafi works as a dishwasher in the Lightroom restaurant in Gaza City though he has advanced training as a nurse. He earns a meager living that affords a single room and food for his family. “I want to leave Gaza but I would go with my own dignity,” El-Shafi remarked. “We’re not living — this is not a life.”

As a foreign journalist, the process of exiting the Gaza Strip is a jarring one — not for the difficulty, but for the ease. Palestinian friends and colleagues of mine who live in Gaza are unable to leave the bombed-out ghetto — they are effectively sentenced to live and die in Israel’s open-air-prison. In stark contrast, I seamlessly pass from the dense, rubble-covered cityscape of the Gaza Strip to unobstructed views of abundance in southern Israel — where many of my friends’ relatives were expelled from several decades ago.

Since the conclusion of the summer’s devastating war in Gaza, the pressure on residents to leave the rubble-covered ghetto has become unbearable. Between the slash-and-burn Israeli assaults — another of which appears to be inevitable — and the Israeli-Egyptian siege that suffocates the economy and severely restricts the entry of basic necessities, there is little hope among the 1.8 million Palestinians living inside Gaza.

Most of those who wish to escape the Gaza Strip will run up against the iron wall of Israel’s siege. The Middle East’s most well-armed navy maintains a blockade on Gaza’s Mediterranean coast and the southern border is controlled by Egypt, which destroys the once-thriving tunnel economy that sustained life in Gaza. The northern and eastern borders are controlled by a system of concrete walls and fences that are lined with intermittent pillboxes mounted with remote control machine guns, surveilled by high-tech cameras and patrolled by trigger-happy soldiers.

“If I walk to close to the border, Israeli soldiers will shoot me,” 18-year-old Ezzeldeen Awad Obaid said with a nervous laugh.

Indeed, Israel carries out what it has euphemistically termed a “distancing procedure,” in which soldiers open fire on any Palestinian who walks within 300 meters of the fence. In practice, soldiers have frequently shot at Palestinians beyond that distance.

Against this severe reality, the desire to look elsewhere for a better future is ubiquitous, especially among young people. Some are torn between the desire for a decent livelihood and the urge to stay in Gaza as an act of resistance.

I met 18-year-old Yusef Abu Kader in a lot in Gaza City where he was collecting scrap metal that earned him a few dollars each day. “I’d leave Gaza in the morning,” he told me without blinking.

I asked Abu Kader why he thinks Israel creates unbearable conditions that compel him to think about life abroad, however, he instinctively replied, “I will never leave Gaza. I’ll never give it to the Israelis. This our land. This is our home.”

In greater numbers than ever, Palestinians are risking their lives to flee the Gaza Strip through tunnels — sometimes with deadly outcomes. Hundreds of migrants drowned when rival smugglers attacked their boat this summer. The authorities of Egypt’s junta have imprisoned hundreds of others before deportation back to the Gaza Strip.

In an email, the Israeli historian and professor with the College of Social Sciences and International Studies at the University of Exeter Ilan Pappe explained how these methods have been deployed for decades to advance Israel’s colonization of Palestine:

“In many ways the Israeli brutality in Gaza is a unique case in the overall Israeli strategy since 1948, but only in its duration and intensity — not in the method,” Pappe said. “A softer version of decreasing numbers of Palestinians in areas coveted by Israel is by strangulation – not with the same means employed in Gaza but through belts of colonization, or as it is called in Israel – Judaization – have led to immigration of Palestinians from the Galilee and parts of the West Bank.”

The strangulation effect is felt by Palestinians in the Gaza Strip across the socioeconomic spectrum.

“The huge scale of destruction and killing has made life intolerable for a lot of people here. Anyone who has the chance to leave will understandably take it,” Mohammed Suliman, a former researcher at the Al Mezan Center for Human Rights from Gaza City, explained. “If you are fortunate enough [to leave Gaza], people look at you with envy because you are a lucky person — a survivor.”

Suliman, 25, earned a full-ride scholarship to pursue a Ph.D. in Sociology at the University of South Australia beginning in the 2015 spring semester. Yet he will miss at least part of the semester due to a seemingly insurmountable myriad of travel restrictions imposed on Palestinians in the Gaza Strip.

After having earned a scholarship — no small feat in itself — Suliman must obtain a visa from the Australian embassy in Tel Aviv because there is no embassy in Gaza nor is there an embassy capable of providing a visa in the West Bank. In order to do that, he must mail hard copies of his transcripts to Australia. But there is no post office in Gaza. So his transcripts must be mailed from an office in Gaza to the West Bank and then to Israel, where they will finally be sent to Australia.

In order for Suliman’s wife, Leila Najjar, 24, to obtain an Australian residency visa, the couple must prove that she has health insurance. But even after Suliman and Najjar managed to raise funds from abroad for insurance, the donors refused to send the money to Gaza because of the risk of being prosecuted for ties to terrorist organizations.

“After I get my visa, the real problem starts: How to leave Gaza.” Suliman explained. “I am allowed to leave, but how can I practically?”

The only exits from Gaza are through Egyptian-controlled southern Rafah crossing or through the Israeli-controlled Erez crossing, both of which require lengthy application processes to travel through.

After General Abdel Fatah al-Sisi seized power in Egypt through a coup and a sham election, his regime embraced a policy of collective punishment to Gaza, strangling the coastal enclave from the south in hopes of toppling a government it viewed as the Palestinian cut-out of the Muslim Brotherhood. “They punish the people for the supposed mistakes of their government. I am someone who is paying the price for mistakes of political actors,” Suliman said.

With the Rafah border closed except for rare instances, Suliman has no viable means of leaving Gaza. “I just have to wait and pray that it opens,” he remarked. If the crossing does open — typically this happens for a few hours a day — he must have the right connection because of the sheer number of people.

“There are tens of thousands who want to travel — I’m not the only one,” Suliman explained. Without a connection, he must book a day to travel two months in advance, which almost guarantees he misses part of the academic semester in Australia.

The other alternative for Suliman and Najjar is to travel through the Erez crossing in the north. Not allowed to travel from Israel’s Ben-Gurion International Airport, they would have to pass through Israel, the West Bank, to Jordan and finally to Australia. To cross Erez, Suliman has to apply to the Ministry of Civil Affairs in Gaza or a human rights organization.

They told me, ‘You can’t just apply. What’s your reason to come through Israeli land?’”

If Suliman receives a positive response from Israel — assuming there is no hold-up with Israeli intelligence and security — he then must apply for a travel permit from Jordan. Barring some small miracle, he is certain he will miss at least part of the semester.

“I can’t complain because this is all I know,” Suliman said with a look of resignation. “I just accept it and deal with it, you know?”

For the few lucky enough to leave Gaza, returning home after building a life abroad is an unknown. “I thought there would be no way for me to live away from Gaza forever but I don’t really know what’s going to happen,” Suliman said.

Stories like Suliman’s remind me the ordeals of countless Latin-Americans I met in the United States who migrated because of economic conditions with the intention of returning, yet after setting roots, never did. As an observer, I can’t help but wonder if those who say they would return to Gaza might have different feelings down the road.

As arduous as his trip to Australia promises to be, Suliman is among the lucky ones. Though Gaza’s population is among the most educated in the world, residents with advanced degrees in the arts and sciences are increasingly taking up menial jobs as waiters and taxi drivers. Since this summer’s war, the unemployment rate has shot above 55%.

Khalil Hijazi, 24, studied physical therapy in Al-Azha University and completed a year-long internship in a hospital. After his internship ended, he received unemployment payment through the United Nations Relief Agency for Palestinians in the Near East (UNRWA) for three months.

During Israel’s war on Gaza this summer, Hijazi volunteered at al-Shifa hospital for 30 days. After the war, he found it impossible to obtain work, even as a volunteer. He was thus forced to accept the humiliation of taking money from his parents to survive. Eventually, he took a job as a taxi driver.

Leaving Gaza remains a distant dream for Hijazi, who has never traveled outside. He is eager to get a master’s in physical therapy in Egypt, then travel to Europe to make a living. But under the current conditions of siege and regular wars, his ambitions are obstructed.

Despite the unprecedented devastation of the summer war on Gaza, there are those who remain determined to stay in Gaza no matter the cost. “More people are deciding to leave for good because of this hell we’re in,” said 20-year-old Shaima Ziara. “But you’ll find people who tell you ‘no, this is our country.’ We’re staying here because it’s our job to fight for it.”

A senior at the Islamic University of Gaza, Ziara studies English Literature, a pursuit that she views as a form of resistance against Israel’s colonial project.

“Communicating to the world is one of the most important forms of resistance,” she said. “During the last war, we saw the world’s reaction to the assault on Gaza. There were huge demonstrations around the world. This is something we did not see in the wars of 2012 and 2008/2009.”

Ziara credits international displays of solidarity with Gaza to the embrace of social media platforms by Palestinians who have survived successive Israeli assaults and were able to provide a shocking portrayal of reality there. “We can give them another source of information other than the mainstream media that manipulates and twists the truth,” she said. “We want to enable ourselves to defend it by any means possible — by education, improving our mentality and our abilities to communicate to the world our story.”

Last month, a group of Palestinian children orphaned during the war on Gaza received permits to visit Israel, only to be stymied at the last minute by Gazan authorities at the Erez border crossing. The visit was hyped by Israeli government linked publicists as a humanitarian gesture towards the suffering population of Gaza. Yet as the Electronic Intifada’s Ali Abunimah revealed, the children were being exploited as tools in a stunningly cynical government propaganda stunt that was deployed “to show a positive face of Israel” and “to gain points in the hostile world opinion.” With little understanding of the scheme that they had been corralled into, their children returned to parentless homes with their trauma compounded.

Relevant Books on Gaza

– Gaza-Kitchen-Palestinian-Culinary-Journey by Laila El-Haddad Maggie Schmitt

– Gaza in Crisis: Reflections on Israel’s War Against the Palestinians by Noam Chomsky

– I Shall Not Hate: A Gaza Doctor’s Journey on the Road to Peace and Human Dignity by Izzeldin Abuelaish

– A Month by the Sea: Encounters in Gaza Dervla Murphy

– Meet Me in Gaza: Uncommon Stories of Life Inside the Stri by Louisa B. Waugh

– Gaza Writes Back: Short Stories from Young Writers in Gaza, Palestine, by Refaat Alareer

– The Book of Gaza: A City in Short Fiction (Reading the City) by Atef Abu Seif and Abdallah Tayeh

Source:

http://mondoweiss.net

Life in Gaza is worse than ever

Posted on: February 15, 2015

By William Booth

Khan Younus: In almost every way, the Gaza Strip is much worse off now than before last summer’s war between the Israeli regime and Hamas. Scenes of misery are one of the few things in abundance in the battered coastal enclave.

Reconstruction of the tens of thousands of homes damaged or destroyed in the hostilities has barely begun, almost six months after the ceasefire. At current rates, it will take decades to rebuild what was destroyed.

The economy is in deep recession; pledges of billions in aid have not been honoured; and Hamas, which controls the enclave, refuses to loosen its grip.

Diplomats, aid workers and residents warn of a looming humanitarian crisis and escalation of violence.

“After every war, we say it cannot get worse, but I will say this time is the worst ever,” said Omar Sha’aban, a respected Gaza economist. “There is no sign of life. Trade. Import. Export. Reconstruction. Aid? Dead. I’m not exaggerating when I tell my friends abroad: Gaza could collapse, maybe soon.”

At night, Gaza twinkles with thousands of campfires. Electricity is often available only six hours a day.

About 10,000 Gaza residents are still sleeping on the floors of UN-run schools. Many more are living in caravans or tents, or huddling in their bombed-out apartments. All told, 100,000 people remain displaced.

He went blue,” said Moeen Khassi, the grandfather of a 5-month-old who died in his sleep in freezing temperatures in a gutted home near the former front lines. The family blamed the cold.

The 50-day Israeli war on Gaza left more than 2,100 Palestinians dead, almost 70 per cent of them civilians, according to the United Nations. Seventy-two Israelis were killed, most of them soldiers.

Cash assistance from the United Nations to displaced refugee families has stopped. The programme ran out of money last month.

With great fanfare, donors promised in October at a conference in Cairo to give $5.4 billion to the Palestinians, much of it for reconstruction. But virtually none of the pledges have been honoured, according to UN officials in Gaza.

East of the crowded Gaza city of Khan Younus, Adnan Abu Daqqa and his extended family live in tents left over from a previous war. He can’t remember which one. “You never throw anything away in Gaza,” said the 57-year-old farmer.

During the summer war, he said, Israeli tanks left trails across his farm. The family’s home is in ruins, levelled by Israeli explosives, he said. “We had animals, rabbits, goats, a horse.”

He held up a bridle. Where is the horse? He pointed to the sky.

He and the relatives he lives with, including six grown sons and their families, got $2,000 in war reparations from Hamas. His wife cooks food on an open fire. The children play in the rubble.

The Israeli regime has maintained a partial trade and travel blockade against Gaza since Hamas took over in 2007. These days, in a deal struck by the Israeli regime, the Palestinian National Authority and the United Nations after last summer’s war, families and their dwellings are assessed for damage by the United Nations, lists are provided to the Israeli military for clearance, and truckloads of steel bars and cement are allowed into Gaza.

In December, the most recent month for which figures are available, 2,259 truckloads of building materials entered Gaza. The United Nations estimates that to cover housing reconstruction and repair within three years, it would take 735 truckloads per day, seven days a week.

The Israeli regime restricts and monitors imports into Gaza.

“All this does is prevent civilians in Gaza from rebuilding,” said Sari Bashi, director of the Israeli human rights group Gisha. “The restrictions will have minimal to zero impact on Hamas tunnelling. They can rebuild using recycled materials.”

Gaza factories were hit especially hard during the war. One of the largest private employers in Gaza is the Alwada ice cream, potato chip and cookie factory. Its top two floors were gutted, damaged by Israeli shelling.

“We haven’t gotten a penny from the UN, NGOs, the Palestinian [National] Authority or Hamas,” said Alwada’s executive manager, Manil Hassan.

Company officials estimated the damage at $24 million. They tried to sue in Israeli courts but were denied jurisdiction. Hassan said the company could rebuild, if the Israeli regime would allow spare parts and a couple of Italian and Danish technicians to visit.

“We need them to show us how to fix their stuff,” Manil said, referring to the factory’s foreign-made equipment.

The factory has restarted two assembly lines to make cookies but is operating at a third of its capacity.

“Ice cream will have to wait,” Manil said.

Palestinians in Gaza say they are trapped more than ever in what they call an open-air prison. The Israeli regime restricts exits, allowing medical patients, business traders and some special humanitarian cases to cross.

For Gazans, the main portal to the greater world is the Rafah crossing into Egypt, which has been mostly closed since last summer’s war.

Mohammad Abu Anza, 19, was trying last month to get to the Cairo airport. He was awarded a scholarship to study engineering at a university in Algeria.

At the end of January, the crossing was open for three days. Desperate travellers pressed onto the buses to make it to the Egyptian side. On the third day, Anza won a seat on the 10th bus in line to leave. The Egyptians only allowed seven buses that day. Anza said he would try again, but then he turned away, because it looked as if he wanted to cry.

Relevant Books on Gaza

– Gaza-Kitchen-Palestinian-Culinary-Journey by Laila El-Haddad Maggie Schmitt

– Gaza in Crisis: Reflections on Israel’s War Against the Palestinians by Noam Chomsky

– I Shall Not Hate: A Gaza Doctor’s Journey on the Road to Peace and Human Dignity by Izzeldin Abuelaish

– A Month by the Sea: Encounters in Gaza Dervla Murphy

– Meet Me in Gaza: Uncommon Stories of Life Inside the Stri by Louisa B. Waugh

– Gaza Writes Back: Short Stories from Young Writers in Gaza, Palestine, by Refaat Alareer

– The Book of Gaza: A City in Short Fiction (Reading the City) by Atef Abu Seif and Abdallah Tayeh

Source:

http://gulfnews.com