Gaza families eat grass as Israel locks border

Gaza families eat grass as Israel locks border
Marie Colvin
The Sunday Times
December 14, 2008
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/middle_east/article5338014
.ece

AS a convoy of blue-and-white United Nations trucks loaded with food
waited last night for Israeli permission to enter Gaza, Jindiya Abu
Amra and her 12-year-old daughter went scrounging for the wild grass
their family now lives on.

"We had one meal today - khobbeizeh," said Abu Amra, 43, showing the
leaves of a plant that grows along the streets of Gaza. "Every day, I
wake up and start looking for wood and plastic to burn for fuel and I
beg. When I find nothing, we eat this grass."

Abu Amra and her unemployed husband have seven daughters and a son.
Their tiny breeze-block house has had no furniture since they burnt
the last cupboard for heat.

"I can't remember seeing a fruit," said Rabab, 12, who goes with her
mother most mornings to scavenge. She is dressed in a tracksuit top
and holed jeans, and her feet are bare.

Conditions for most of the 1.5m Gazans have deteriorated dramatically
in the past month, since a truce between Israel and Hamas, the ruling
Islamist party, broke down.

Israel says it will open the borders again when Hamas stops launching
rockets at southern Israel. Hamas says it will crack down on the
rocket launchers when Israel opens the borders.

The fragile truce technically ends this Thursday, and there have been
few signs it will be renewed. Nobody knows how to resolve the
stalemate. Secret talks are under way through Egyptian
intermediaries, although both sides deny any contact.

Israel controls the borders and allows in humanitarian supplies only
sporadically. Families had electricity for six hours a day last week.
Cooking gas was available only through the illegal tunnels that run
into Egypt, and by last week had jumped in price from 80 shekels per
canister (£14) to 380 shekels (£66).

The UN, which has responsibility for 1m refugees in Gaza, is in
despair. "The economy has been crushed and there are no imports or
exports," said John Ging, director of its relief and works agency.
"Two weeks ago, for the first time in 60 years, we ran out of food,"
he said. "We used to get 70 to 80 trucks per day, now we are getting
15 trucks a day, and only when the border opens. We're living hand to
mouth."

He has four days of food in stock for distribution to the most
desperate - and no idea whether Israel will reopen the border. The
Abu Amra family may have to eat wild grass for the foreseeable future.

===

Israel Must End the Blockade
Bill Fletcher, Jr.
http://www.blackcommentator.com/303/303_aw_israel_end_gaza_blockade.ht
ml


When it comes to Israel's blockade of Gaza, the silence is deafening,
at least outside of Palestine. One wonders how many international
conventions the Israelis need to break before there is an actual
global outcry and action against their repeated human rights abuses
against Palestine. The blockade of Gaza is only the latest in a long
list of such abuses, but the scale of the abuse is beyond dramatic.

Israel justifies its blockade of Gaza, and their repeated refusals to
consistently allow in humanitarian aid, due to rocket attacks against
Israeli positions. Yet the reality of the situation is a bit more
complicated. From the moment that Hamas, the Palestinian Islamist
party, won free elections in 2006, there was a concerted effort by
Israel and the USA to destabilize the situation and ultimately to
destroy Hamas. In point of fact, both the USA and Israel were more
than content to permit Palestinian elections as long as the
candidates that Israel and the USA favored, won. When this did not
happen, both countries went into action in order to destroy the
Palestinian government.

If one has any questions as to whether this suggestion is paranoid,
one need only read the April 2008 Vanity Fair article "The Gaza
Bombshell" for a remarkable exposure of the US-led plot to carry out
a coup against the Hamas government. Once Hamas got a hint of the
plot, a semi-civil war unfolded which resulted in Hamas military
units taking over Gaza, and the further splintering of Palestine.

Since the Palestinian semi-civil war, the Israelis have been doing
all that they can to further isolate and destroy Hamas in particular
and Gaza in general. Thus, their blockade of Gaza is nothing short
of "collective punishment", a war crime according to the 1949 Geneva
Conventions. In other words, the civilian population of Gaza is being
punished by the Israelis as a means of forcing Hamas to submit. One
can ask the legitimate question, how is such a course of action
different from terrorism?

Although Israeli naval authorities permitted a symbolic violation of
the blockade by a small ship carrying relief supplies, on December
1st the Israelis turned back a Libyan ship bringing a more
substantial amount of assistance. While this drama has been
unfolding, Gaza is running out of money, fuel and food. Humanitarian
organizations have been repeatedly sounding the alarm, but this has
been all but ignored outside of the Arab World.

Human rights abuses inflicted against the Palestinians are regularly
excused away by mainstream opinion in the USA. The excusing away is
largely framed in terms of defending Israel's right to exist, and
permitting Israel to do what it needs to do in order to survive. But
this defense ignores the daily horrors inflicted on the Palestinian
people, Gaza being only one, but the illegal so-called apartheid Wall
built by Israel in and around the Palestinian territories being
another notorious example. All of this is unfolding, of course, in
the context of a denial of the Palestinian people's right to exist.

The attempt to block discussion of Palestine in the USA has suffered
some set backs. Former President Jimmy Carter's best-selling book
Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid helped to begin a reframing of the
conflict. Nevertheless, Carter's treatment at the 2008 Democratic
National Convention (where he was not permitted to speak) seems to
indicate an on-going fear that anyone who challenges the
establishment "wisdom" when it comes to Palestine is a contagious
pariah. In fact, the attorney Alan Dershowitz has claimed that he was
personally responsible for undermining Carter's speaking at the
Democratic Convention because of Carter's views on Palestine.

So, Gaza represents another test, less for the world and more for the
leaders and people of the USA. President-elect Obama has been
relatively silent on the question of Palestine, at least as of
recent, but his appointments do not make one particularly optimistic
that a different approach to the Israeli/Palestinian conflict is in
store. While one should not jump to conclusions, it is worth
suggesting that no change in the US relationship to the conflict, and
particularly toward Palestinian national self-determination, is in
store until and unless a significant, organized, and vocal
constituency emerges in the USA, upholding of Palestinian rights as
well as fighting for a just peace. This is what makes the work of
groups such as the "US Campaign to End the Israeli Occupation" so
critical. That said, the scale of this work must be increased
geometrically.

Silence is not an acceptable alternative, because continued silence
toward human rights abuses against the Palestinian people means the
removal or elimination of a people, a stated objective, by the way,
of a segment of the Israeli ruling elite.

BlackCommentator.com Executive Editor, Bill Fletcher, Jr., is a
Senior Scholar with the Institute for Policy Studies, the immediate
past president of TransAfrica Forum and co-author of, Solidarity
Divided: The Crisis in Organized Labor and a New Path toward Social
Justice (University of California Press), which examines the crisis
of organized labor in the USA.

===

Musical resistance against the siege
Sameh A. Habeeb
The Electronic Intifada
8 December 2008
http://electronicintifada.net/v2/article10014.shtml

A Palestinian singer performs at the Gaza Concert.


On 27 October, a group of young Palestinians, none of them over the
age of 25, organized the first music concert of its kind in the Gaza
Strip, called Gaza Concert '08. Regardless of the awful conditions in
the Gaza Strip brought on by the 19-month Israeli siege, the youth
sang for freedom, peace and ending the unjust siege. Thousands of
people came from all over Gaza while several international and local
media outlets covered the event that was sponsored by Action for
Peace Italia. A mixture of traditional Palestinian debka dance, rap,
and nationalist anthems were performed calling for lifting the siege
and ending Israeli occupation.

Ahmed, one of the dabka dance performers, lost his hand in an Israeli
military operation in 2006 in the Jabaliya refugee camp when he and
his friends were hit by Israeli shelling. "I came here to express my
readiness and willingness for peace. I lost my hand but I want a just
peace with Israelis if they give me my full rights."

Hatem Shurab, a 24-year-old singer based in Gaza and one of the
concert organizers, is a another victim of Israeli siege. He is
involved in a journalism training program in the US. However, due to
the closure, Shurab was trapped in Gaza and missed his chance along
with some friends who were also supposed to participate. He
explained, "I came here to sing for peace and freedom. I came here to
make the suffering of people heard through songs and music. I sang
for Sarah who was sick and unable to get treatment due to the siege.
The words of my song say: 'A girl called Sarah, innocence in her
eyes, because of no medications she is about to die. Don't let Sarah
feel the pain, let her fly like a bird in the sky, take the siege
away.'"

According to the International Palestinian Campaign to End the Siege
on Gaza, this concert was intended to convey the message of a people
whose voice is not heard. Nadine Rajab, a coordinator of the
campaign, said the concert was to include musicians from Gaza, the
West Bank and inside Israel. Because of the siege it was limited to
Gaza. Because Israel does not issue permits for Palestinians outside
of Gaza to enter the besieged territory, musicians in the West Bank
and Israel were featured on pre-recorded video.

Rajab stated, "The occupation banned us from having our brothers from
the West Bank. We overcame this as they have sent us a video of their
songs. Next year we want to make it regional so our voice would be
heard widely. All in one, we have succeeded to achieve our aim of
telling our story. Many people think we are savage and terrorists but
today's concert would prove the opposite. Many people abroad are fed
up of our news but through this way they will know what's happening."

Conditions in the Gaza Strip, already extremely difficult because of
the siege, have worsened over the past month. Patients are denied the
ability to travel abroad for treatment. And basic commodities like
flour, sugar and rice have nearly vanished. Yet Gaza Concert '08 is
further proof that Palestinians are stronger than siege and
occupation. The concert reflects the paradoxical images of sadness,
joy, life and death that are found in Gaza on a daily basis. While
Israelis may have succeeded in shutting Gaza's borders to the outside
world, they have failed to silence the sounds, hymns and music of
young Gazans.

All images credited to the Gaza Concert '08.

Sameh A. Habeeb is a photojournalist, humanitarian and peace
activist based in Gaza, Palestine. He writes for several news
websites on a freelance basis.