Nov 17, 2023
Recently freed prisoner of 18 years Muhammad Al-Zitawi: "The Israeli occupation prisons are functioning like Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib."
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Recently freed prisoner of 18 years Muhammad Al-Zitawi: "The Israeli occupation prisons are functioning like Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib."
With no safe place to turn to, some Palestinians have returned to their destroyed homes while others have sought refuge in farms
"We decided to come to this farm because we could not find any other place to go to," said Rafat Lukman, whose family of 32 includes newborns and small children. "We came here thinking that we can put up with it for a few days, but this war has taken much longer. I cannot believe that my own children are sleeping in cages where chickens slept. I look at them and my heart breaks for the childhood I am giving them. But what else could I do?" From inside the chicken cages, the children can easily spot the Egyptian-controlled Rafah border with its high walls covered with barbed wires. "My daughter took her teddy bear with her when we evacuated the first time. She'd kept it with her the whole time," Lukman said. "But the other day, it rained and the farm flooded. She was sleeping in the cage and her teddy fell into the rainwater and got lost. She cried so much about it the next day. And again, her mum and I felt so helpless. We can't even get her a new teddy bear." Lukman's children say they have become used to their new reality now and it is difficult to remember that one day they had a house and bedrooms. "We are still lucky that we are not dead and that our parents are alive," Rafat's 12-year-old daughter, Mais, said. "But to be honest, I still feel scared sleeping in the cages. They are very cold and dark at night. I have always hated insects, but they are everywhere here, and I cannot do anything about it." In central Gaza, meanwhile, displaced people have also been living in squalid conditions due to overcrowding in shelters - which include schools, hospitals and mosques - and lack of basic services, including clean water, sanitation and a working sewage system. Abu Ahmed Jaber, a father and grandfather, had been sheltering in a UN-run school and decided to go back to his house that was bombed one afternoon while the family was home having lunch. "The situation in the schools is horrible. They are overcrowded. No toilets, no food, no water and no privacy whatsoever. So I decided to come back with my family to my bombed house and live in whatever space was left standing," Jaber told MEE. When Israel bombed his house, smoke engulfed the family, blackening the afternoon light. "We thought we were dead," Jaber said. The elderly man and his sons pulled out their pregnant sister and her one-year-old daughter from under the rubble with their bare hands. The family fled to a school for shelter, where his daughter bled for hours before an ambulance was able to make its way to them. Despite their traumatic experience, Jaber, who suffers from heart problems and diabetes, made the decision to return to their destroyed home in Bureij, in central Gaza, because he felt that all other alternatives lacked dignity. "This is my house. How can I let go of it? I literally built it with my hands stone by stone. I look at it 20 times a day and I struggle with the fact that I cannot even rebuild or fix anything," said Jaber, in a voice full of sorrow and anger. "I cry every night. I cannot even sleep anymore. If I fall asleep and wake up for any reason, I cannot fall back asleep. I am living a very primitive life amid the rubble, but I would rather do that than leave my house and evacuate from one place to another like chess pieces. And what for? What have I and my family done?" ... Palestinians in Gaza are living today what their grandparents lived over 70 years ago, and the fear of never being able to return is at the heart of their concern. "If the house is destroyed, the land is still there, and it is mine. I would rather die here than live another Nakba like my family did before me," Jaber said.
17 Feb 24
shortly after committing another massacre at an UNRWA school where people were sheltering, the occupying entity has accused 12 UNRWA workers of involvement in Oct 7th attacks. this is not their first accusation of UNRWA involvement with Hamas, but this time they approached UNRWA with individual names. UNRWA immediately fired the accused workers while their investigation into the allegations is ongoing. but the US, who said they were "gravely concerned" by reports of the massacre, has now paused funding to UNRWA. currently UNRWA is one of the only orgs able to provide any kind of relief to the millions of homeless and starving Palestinians in Gaza Bisan interviewed Ghazal, 11 years old, who was shot in the neck by a sniper at the UNRWA school:
We are being annihilated. We are running out of options.
"Our new camp in Rafah, after our third displacement, is located in a graveyard near the Egyptian border. Each day the tents of new arrivals – of those forcibly displaced by Israeli attacks – creep closer to the graves.
After every Israeli massacre, both graveyard and camp expand, crawling toward the outer edges of the desert.
We’ve been here since December 2023. Nine of us share a tent that is 16 square meters.
We are in the desert, but sometimes it does not feel that way because of the density and the near-constant sounds of Israeli explosions and drones.
There are so many people in the camp, all of us in tents that do not protect from heat or cold.
Winds sometimes uproot tents. There are stray dogs everywhere. Every day we line up for drinking water. Sometimes the water runs out and we return to our tents empty-handed.
My family’s tent is in the middle of the camp. Next door is a medical point that supports those who have been displaced here.
I’ve seen doctors stitch up children’s wounds with care. Often there is no local anesthesia, so the doctors compensate with extra warmth and smiles. An elderly woman came to the tent for treatment for a chronic condition. They treated her with kindness. They did not have much medicine for her.
Since medical supplies are scarce, the doctors use what they have on hand.
We are being annihilated. We are running out of options. The north and south are separated, and communication is cut off. I used to hope that I would see friends and family in the north again, but now I just don’t know.
After this war ends, where will we go? Israel has destroyed our homes, and our favorite places no longer exist."
22 April 24
Amina Ghanem, 13 years old, tells journalist Belal Khaled that she and her family were sleeping in a metal caravan and IOF tanks ran over it and crushed it with them inside. They were squeezed inside the crushed caravan until the morning, when she discovered that her father and little sister were killed:
The secret artists of Israeli detention facilities. 'They fear our art. They fear our memories.'
"I will carry my soul in my palm, And cast it into the abyss of death, Either a life that pleases a friend, or a death that angers an enemy.
When I asked my uncle Khader Shaat, 47, about the poetry verse that he inscribed on the embroidered, handmade notebook about 30 years ago in Asqalan Israeli prison, he told me that it was the fuel that made him survive.
'Clinging to a life of freedom kept me alive,' he said, remembering the notebook he made out of black fabric and framed using many beads.
Khader Shaat was detained when he was 17, sent to prison as a child, and released as a very strong young man. ... Israel detains these children for nothing more than being Palestinian. You may be walking in the street, performing your prayer at a mosque or a church, doing your job at a company, studying for your exam to a school, or whatever and whenever. The accusation is homelove. They want the young Palestinians to grow up with fear, to stop raising their voices, to never defend their land.
Khader spent four years in Israeli detention facilities, and a part of him still exists in prison. He relives his experiences there through his memories, stories, and art.
'I still remember that some inscribed their emotions on letters or prison walls by their blood [spilled during] interrogation. It is known that the prison walls are a huge picture of emotional documentation. We used to know previous detainees through their writings.'
Pictures drawn in blood link decades of legacies of people who have been imprisoned and tortured by Israeli guards. A hidden archive of poems, letters, drawings, and handmade objects—containing stories of resistance, messages of despair, and hope—amass behind prison walls. Throughout each resounds a pulsing call for freedom. ... Detained Palestinians don't just suffer the loss of their years or their family members, but they also mourn the loss of the only hope to have a legacy outside the prison. They live in fear of losing their art.
'I had a rich notebook where I poured my years of fruitful knowledge and experience,' Khader sadly told me. 'Israel confiscated it.'
Every three or four months, Israeli occupation forces invade the cells to confiscate or damage what Palestinian detainees create. Thus, many cannot save their work unless they succeed in passing it to their lawyers and family when visiting, or to a soon-released detainee.
... 'I think I produced more than 100 pieces [while detained]' Uncle Khader said with pride.
Amazed and excited, I asked Khader to show me more handmade art. Suddenly, the conversation changed. His voice faded, his smile disappeared, and his eyes shrunk a little. The wrinkles of age and sorrow were clearly painted on his face.
'Israeli bulldozers entirely demolished our old home in 2004. You were only three years and don't remember. There, under the rubble, I lost all my photos, memories, and handicrafts —the ones I made and the ones my detained friends gifted me after release.'
Israel chases Palestinian crafts inside and outside prison. They fear our art. They fear our memories."
from a 2018 interview with Dr. Ghassan Abu Sitta on his experiences treating protesters wounded by the IOF during the Great March of Return:
"By 7:00 P.M., the system was on the verge of collapse. There were more injuries than there were beds, or operating rooms, in all of Gaza. Patients at al-Shifa were waiting four to five hours to get into the operating theater. At al-Awda alone, we had seen 120 gunshot wounds, and we were only a 3-operating room, 70-bed hospital. Every single case needed some kind of surgical intervention. And then suddenly there was a decision by the organizing committee of the march, I believe, to start pulling people back because they realized the system was basically about to collapse. By 7:00 P.M. it had become apparent that over a four-hour period, the number of injured had reached 3,500, with around 1,500–2,000 of those being gunshot wounds. Other than the 120 gunshot wounds at al-Awda, we had a lot of gas inhalation cases. And this wasn’t tear gas but nerve gas. These cases have continuous convulsions for an hour and need close monitoring and intervention in the form of anticonvulsants. ... The following day, the number of injured actually dropped because the whole of Gaza was in a state of shock: there had been 63 killed, 44 amputations, and 3,500 wounded in the space of four hours the day before, meaning that we were looking at something closer to a World War I–type carnage than a demonstration. The drop in casualty numbers allowed us to take on more cases: by day three, we were beginning to look at reconstruction for the previously injured and to really start to figure out what we would need for them. And the initial waiting list of 500 I mentioned earlier had more than tripled: there were now 1,600 cases that needed reconstructive surgery, that is, repeated surgical interventions were required to reconstruct these injuries.
Can you give us examples of specific cases? There were lots of cases of what we call 'fragmentation bullets,' historically known as 'dumdum' bullets. Fragmentation bullets were the first weapons to be banned in international law because the very point of that particular weapon is to maximize injury: a fragmentation bullet fragments into 20–25 different pieces when it hits the body. We saw lots of those. A guy came in one day with two bullet wounds, one in each of his ankles. From the trajectory of the bullet, we could tell that this was not a 'through-and-through,' that is, when a bullet penetrates one limb, exits, and then goes into another limb. These were two separate bullets, and the fact that they were both lodged in his ankles meant that they were fired at the same time or else he would have fallen. This man was shot at the same time by two different snipers. So, it is very likely that the two snipers were coordinating with each other to target this man, that it was not an accident. They must have been talking and saying let’s shoot this guy, I’ll take the right ankle and you take the left. That is what this injury implies. Yes absolutely, it was not an accident. It’s like a game, a sport.
... Tissue damage is all about the transfer of energy from the bullet to the tissue. So by definition, by their very nature, 'regular' sniper bullets have the highest form of energy and therefore the amount of damage that they are capable of causing is immense. But what we saw is that even these bullets were being tampered with by the snipers to allow them to behave like fragmentation bullets so that they would release more energy as they hit the body. They were drilling the bullets in such a way as to weaken the tips, so that once a bullet hit the body it would fragment into multiple pieces. ... The Israelis understand that the world counts the dead and considers the injured or the wounded a lesser crime, so to speak, and so it is an attempt at creating an 'iceberg effect': that is, a situation where what is apparent is the killed but the real crime is in the wounded [who are not as visible] and the type of wounds that have been inflicted. To have 13,000 wounded in a place that counts 1.8 million people ... that figure bespeaks a battlefield, not a demonstration." By the end of 2019, occupation forces killed 322 demonstrators (x) and injured 35,600 more (x), including many thousands with severe injuries leading to long-term disability (x). IOF snipers were documented shooting unarmed protesters with the intent to kill (x), as well as targeting kneecaps to permanently disable protesters (x). Their targets included children, paramedics, and journalists. Many protesters were left with long-term disabilities and trauma (x). This is how the occupation responds to unarmed resistance (or what liberals call "peaceful protest"): with "World War I-type carnage" that "bespeaks a battlefield."
Detainees beaten, starved and threatened with rape in retaliation for 7 October.