Living Without Hope In A land Of Ruins

DIANA Rahman will wake this morning, barely able to open her eyes. The Palestinian girl, born on the day Diana, Princess of Wales died, and after whom she is named, is paralysed, in need of urgent medical help.

She is too young to understand that more than two years of intifada, dozens of suicide bombings and Israel’s hard-line military response have left her stranded at her home in the small West Bank village of Brukin.

For her family, the election overnight of another ultra-orthodox, right-wing coalition, shoring up the incumbent prime minister, Ariel Sharon, and the failure of the Palestinians to find an inspirational leader to replace the impotence of Yasser Arafat, simply means that the prospect of peace in the Holy Land is as remote as ever.

Against the backdrop of at least 2,323 Palestinian and 698 Israeli deaths since the launch of the second intifada in September 2000, an unfolding humanitarian crisis has been described by the United Nations as a "Palestinian society teetering on the edge of collapse".

In Brukin, after running the gauntlet of heavily fortified army checkpoints, a convoy of volunteer Israeli Jewish doctors is trying to prevent a human crisis sliding toward disaster.

Physicians for Human Rights has brought six doctors and two nurses to treat some 200 patients, many of whom have walked for hours across the harsh, mountainous terrain from neighbouring villages to seek assistance.

"Diana doesn’t have any energy and I don’t know why," said Ahmed, 45, the girl’s father, before taking his daughter into a makeshift clinic, with bed sheets for walls. "The doctors want to take her to hospital in Tel Aviv, but we are not sure if we will get a permit."

Across the militarised state, barely bigger than Wales, the over-riding push for security means few Israelis are opening their eyes to the third-world crisis happening behind the checkpoints that shield their first-world state.

According to the UN, chronic malnutrition affects about 22 per cent of children in the occupied territories. In the Gaza Strip, more than 80 per cent of the population is unemployed, and 70 per cent survives on less than the official poverty line of $2 (£1.22) a day. This year, more than 1.1 million refugees will receive food handouts of flour, olive oil and chickpeas from the World Food Programme.

Miri Weingarten, 28, the intervention co-ordinator for Physicians for Human Rights, herself an Israeli Jew, said: "We are seen by others as being all things from naïve to traitors. This is not a crisis forced on us by nature. These are the results of intentional policies from the Israeli government which could be lifted tomorrow. This is happening on our doorstep. It takes a lot of will not to open your eyes to this."

Christian Aid, the UK charity, is supporting humanitarian projects across the West Bank and Gaza Strip. The church organisation will today call on the British government and the European Union to apply pressure on Israel to alleviate the humanitarian crisis with the launch of a major new report, Losing Ground, at both the Scottish and Westminster parliaments.

Among its recommendations, the report calls for the implementation of "an international protection mechanism in order to avert further loss of life among Israeli and Palestinian civilians, allow negotiations between the two sides to resume and ensure that humanitarian work can proceed unhindered".

William Bell, the co-author of the report, added: "The international community must either find the political will to tackle this situation, or witness a further descent into abject poverty, despair and hopelessness."

The report’s publication comes on a day when Palestinians are granted limited freedom of movement, after a 62-hour blanket ban on travel within the Occupied Territories as Israelis went to the polls.

Christian Aid claims an accelerated Israeli programme of curfews, clearances, land confiscation and collective punishment breaches the Fourth Geneva Convention, which provides protection to civilians under occupation.

Tony Baldry, the Conservative MP for Banbury and the chairman of the Commons select committee on international development, who accompanied Christian Aid to view the crisis, is overseeing £18 million of UK aid being spent on the West Bank and Gaza this year.

He described Gaza, as "the biggest open air prison in the world" and said he was "appalled and outraged" by the humanitarian crisis.

Touring Gaza’s farmland, which once bore barely enough citrus, olives and strawberries for subsistence levels, Mr Baldry denounced recent Israeli incursions to raze fields and destroy water supplies to allow a clear line of fire between settlements and Israeli Defence Force positions. Some 50,000 acres has been expropriated and 150,000 olive and fruit trees uprooted, according to the Jerusalem Centre for Social and Economic Rights.

Mr Baldry said: "The Israeli forces literally came along one day with armoured bulldozers and destroyed the land and the greenhouses.

"Whatever argument a government may have, there is no justification for destroying people’s livelihoods, destroying water and their ability to grow food. I can’t see any rational justification for that."

Inspecting the recently turned soil, Israeli soldiers nearby fired warning shots into the air, forcing the aid workers and journalists back to their vehicles.

Gaza itself is heavily fortified, with 1.3 million Palestinians confined to 60 per cent of the land roughly the size of the Isle of Wight. The other 40 per cent of the Gaza Strip is occupied by Israeli settlers, the 6,900 mainly ideological inhabitants accounting for 0.6 per cent of the total population. Across the West Bank, 2.3 million Palestinians have watched as 370,000 settlers claim more than 200 settlements, built after the Six Day War in 1967, when Israel seized the Palestinian territories.

Jewish settler roads dissect the West Bank and Gaza, allowing unfettered access for Israelis but disrupting trade and transport for Palestinians detained at checkpoints.

The escalating cost of defending Israel is beginning to bankrupt the economy. In 2001, Israel spent 16 per cent of its GDP on defence, compared with 2.5 per cent in the UK. About 10 per cent of the 6.4 million Israelis is unemployed, and a second year of recession is taking hold.

But in Gaza, the cost to the economy is calculated by the number of buildings left demolished. In the southern city of Khan Yunis, in a crowded street, children filled donkey-drawn carts with the remains of shops and homes, destroyed on 11 January, by 50 Israeli tanks, and armoured bulldozers, supported by helicopter gunships.

The operation was a precursor to last Saturday’s incursion, the biggest in two years, which saw 12 Palestinians killed, half of them gunmen resisting the assault. The Israelis claim the attacks were to destroy bomb-making workshops.

Kahla Shurab, 55, surrounded by her grandchildren, despaired at the damage to the flat she spent four years preparing as a gift to her son, due to marry next week.

"The children hid behind the wall, but it fell down on top of them," she recalled. "All of us thought we would not survive, we thought we would die at any minute. We spent all of our efforts building a home for our son, now, everything has been lost."

She added her fear, echoed by many of her fellow refugees, that with war looming in Iraq, the eyes of the world will leave the West Bank and Gaza Strip, quickly followed by vital humanitarian aid. "Then," she said, "only God will help us."