News Wire

Ethnic Media
Contributors
Gallery
 
NCM TV
New California Media - The New America Now
 
NCM Network Profile
El Andar
The Latino magazine for the new millennium

Complete NCM Ethnic Media Directory
 
In Gaza, Truce Has Little Impact for Palestinians Defending Homes
By Chris Smith, Pacific News Service, July 18, 2001

The U.S.-brokered cease-fire between Palestinians and Israelis, now more than a month old, feels anything but peaceful from the inside. The violence that rages for the one million Palestinians in the Gaza strip, says Chris Smith, goes largely unnoticed by the outside world. Smith is a free-lance writer currently on assignment in the region for Pacific News Service.

KFAR DARON, GAZA -- The air is unnaturally still in this southern Gaza settlement. There is no bird song or farmer in the fields; the only sound is the roar of a passing Israeli settler or military vehicle racing down an Israeli-only bypass that connects with Israel.

A heavily fortified checkpoint watches over the junction where the settler bypass meets the local Palestinian road. All cars must stop and pass through Israeli gun sights.

Surrounding the checkpoint, the land is barren. Churned-up dirt alternates with concrete rubble, tree limbs and wrecked greenhouses. Israeli soldiers have occupied the only house left standing, installing a welter of antennas on the roof and sandbags at its main door.

In southern Gaza, life goes on as if the U.S.-brokered cease-fire, which went into effect on June 13, means nothing at all. The Israeli government said such security measures are essential to prevent Palestinians from firing on soldiers and settlers, and detonating bomb attacks. Prime Minister Ariel Sharon has harshly criticized Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat for not reining in militants.

The Palestinians, however, denounce the collective punishment and say that routine Israeli violations of the cease-fire -- less dramatic than the assassinations of Palestinian activists carried out in recent days -- have mostly gone unreported.

They say this is especially true in southern Gaza, where Israel continues to confiscate land, raze crops and flatten homes.

The army has demolished 269 homes in the West Bank and Gaza and destroyed 2,280 acres of crops since the new intifada began 10 months ago, according to the Palestinian Society for the Protection of Human Rights & the Environment, a prominent East Jerusalem group founded by Palestinian lawyers.

Noor Eddin Mohammed, 45, lives near the Kfar Daron checkpoint in a Mediterranean-style house only slightly pockmarked by bullet holes. Pointing through a shuttered window toward the army-occupied house, Mohammed said: "The owner lost his mind when he became homeless. The United Nations gave him a tent."

The soft-spoken Mohammed teaches English in Gaza City. He said the cease-fire has had little impact. "Every night we hear the tanks, bulldozers and shooting," he said. "I can hear it all sitting in my house watching TV."

Both Palestinian and Israeli rights groups have condemned the daily breaches of the truce.

While criticizing Palestinian attacks on Israeli settlers, Lior Yavne, spokesman for the Israeli human rights group B'Tselem, said the violence committed by the settlers has not been taken seriously by Israeli authorities, and that demolition of Palestinian homes and land confiscation continue. "All are serious violations and have been going on since the cease-fire," he said.

Rafah, a dusty town of boarded-up storefronts and shell-scarred buildings near the Egyptian border, has received particularly harsh treatment since the cease-fire. Many residents say that once the sun goes down Israeli soldiers shoot indiscriminately from a watchtower a few hundred feet away on the Egyptian border.

On June 23, three bulldozers, backed by four Israeli tanks, rolled into Mohammed Barhoum's neighborhood. In two hours, the army demolished 20 houses, according to B'Tselem and the Palestinian Center for Human Rights, an affiliate of the International Committee of Jurists, based in Geneva. In all, 110 people were rendered homeless.

"There was no warning," said Barhoum, 55, whose cheeks are burnt red by the sun. "I was asleep when I heard the tanks, and all I could do was get the children and get out."

On July 10, army bulldozers returned to Rafah to level houses and shops, igniting a fierce gun battle. The army said the razed structures had been used by Palestinian gunmen as cover for attacks on Israeli troops. At least five Palestinians and three Israeli soldiers were wounded.

But U.S. State Department Spokesman Richard Boucher described the action as "highly provocative" and urged an immediate halt to the destruction.

"We have no interest in going in and destroying buildings," said an Israeli army spokeswoman who refused to give her name. "Unfortunately, when (we) are fired on, there's nothing else we can do."

Some Palestinian residents, however, scoff at the idea that gunmen use their homes as snipers' nests.

"The Israelis claim these houses were used as places of shooting," said Mohammed's older brother Mansour, who lost his house and now lives in a U.N.-supplied tent. "That's a lie. I would never open my door to them. No one here would."

On June 18, human rights groups reported the destruction of nearly three acres of olive groves near Rafah by Israeli settlers, and the shelling of apartment buildings in the nearby town of Khan Yunis two days later. The Israeli army justified its actions by an increase in Palestinian violence.

Many observers agree that the vast majority of incidents in Gaza -- attacks committed by both Israeli settlers and soldiers by Palestinians -- have occurred near Israeli settlements, which are sources of constant friction.

About 6,500 settlers, along with the military outposts to protect them, occupy 42 percent of the Gaza Strip, according to the Israeli activist group Peace Now. Roughly one million Palestinians live in the remaining 58 percent.

Palestinians demand that Israel abandon the settlements, established after the 1967 Arab-Israeli War and deemed illegal under international law. However, successive Israeli governments have continued to expand them.

The issue was the main sticking point in Israel's acceptance of the recent Mitchell Report, a U.S. plan aimed at halting the conflict. Although Sharon accepted the report's findings, he rejected its call for an a freeze on settlement expansion.

In the meantime, many Gazan civilians say they continue to pay the price for a failed cease-fire.

As Barhoum tries to salvage what he can from his demolished home, he watches a boy pull out knives and spoons from the rubble. Through a hole, the boy eyes the remnants of the master bedroom, a bed's yellow sheets covered with dust, but otherwise intact.


Back to Top | NCM Home | Pacific News Service

 

Pacific News Focus: Palestinian-Israeli Relations

NCM: Middle Eastern
Pacific News: Relations
 
Inter-Ethnic
Media Exchange
 

   
  Pacific News Service Pacific News Service
 
Copyright © Pacific News Service