United by Misery:
Two Boys from Gaza and Nilin
By Ramzy Baroud
09/08/08 "ICH"
-- - Ahmed Moussa was a 12-year-old Palestinian boy from the
West Bank village of Nilin, near Ramallah. Mohamed Bahloul is a
12-year-old Palestinian boy from Gaza City. The former was shot
and killed 29 July by Israeli forces following a peaceful
protest against the Israeli apartheid wall. The latter is
awaiting death in a dilapidated hospital in Gaza.
Reports on Moussa's death vary. The Anti- Apartheid Wall
Campaign's report said that the boy was "sitting under a tree
with his friends when a military jeep drove up and the army shot
him -- a live bullet pierced his head. The boy died
immediately."
Agency France Press's report, the day following his death,
confirmed the nature of the death but said that the boy was
killed during the demonstration. Nilin, one of the numerous
villages losing land to the Israeli wall -- deemed illegal
according to the International Court of Justice in 2004 -- holds
regular protests against the confiscation and destruction of the
village's farms. It's part of a sustained non- violent campaign
that brings together Israeli, Palestinian and international
peace activists.
"Moussa tried to run away but his sandal slipped off after he
stumbled over a part of the fence," according to one of Moussa's
friends.
The fact is, a young boy who should be at home enjoying the
company of his family and friends, or attending a summer camp,
or playing in the sunshine, is now dead. He is one of hundreds
of Palestinian children killed by Israeli soldiers in recent
years in a consistent pattern of deliberately targeting
children.
Trying to make sense out of his tragedy, the father had this to
say: "God gave me my son Ahmed, and he took him as a martyr."
Not an hour and a half drive away from Nilin, Bahloul is
suffering from kidney failure. He is hooked up to a pitiable
looking dialysis machine in a Gaza hospital. Aljazeera.net
reported on Bahloul's case: for three months, said his mother,
Nadia, he received no medication and no vitamins to strengthen
his sickly body. "There isn't one door I didn't knock on, hoping
to find medicine for Mohamed," said Nadia. In a place similar in
many respects to a concentration camp, where 1.5 million people
are subject to the most inhumane conditions, Bahloul's case is
hardly the exception.
Despite the ceasefire between the Hamas government in Gaza and
Israel that ensured that homemade Palestinian rockets are no
longer fired at southern Israeli towns, there is no respite from
poverty and siege in Gaza. UNRWA's head of Gaza operations, John
Ging, said that the situation is getting "worse and worse" for
the people in Gaza, who are largely aid- dependant. He promised
that his office would do all it can to help "those poor people,
as they continue to get poorer and poorer."
The extent of the humanitarian catastrophe in Gaza has already
passed many thresholds as poverty has rendered most Gazans
dependant on food aid for survival. Hospitals are lacking
equipment and medicine, and neither Israel nor Egypt allows
Palestinians from Gaza suffering from life threatening illnesses
to travel freely, and on a regular basis. Now even water in Gaza
is polluted beyond foreseeable remedy.
The Christian Science Monitor reported 21 July that only
one-sixth of Gaza's daily sewage -- estimated at up to 120
million litres a day -- is fully treated. The massive amount of
untreated sewage finds its way into the sea, and into the
Strip's water supply. "If there is a stronger word than
catastrophe, I would use that word," said Nader Al-Khateeb, the
Palestinian director of Friends of the Earth Middle East. The
catastrophe is a "result of Gaza's dilapidated water and sewage
infrastructure undermined by [Israeli] attacks and fuel
blockades."
According to Monther Shoblak, director of the Gaza Emergency
Waste Project funded by the World Bank, due to sewage seeping
into the ground, the aquifer beneath Gaza, which provides water
for drinking and washing, is now so polluted with nitrates that
only 10 per cent currently meets World Health Organisation
standards for safety. As a result, water-related diseases in
Gaza are rife.
Gaza is experiencing devastation on so many levels that it is
impossible to locate any positive health or economic indicators.
Bahloul's mother's wrenching search for medicine to save her son
is compounded by her husband having lost his job due to the
Israeli siege and while there are other mouths to feed.
Unemployment in Gaza is skyrocketing and children are often
forced out of school to help bolster the meagre incomes of poor
families. Selling tea in the street from giant teapots hauled by
children often not old enough to enrol in school is a growing
profession.
While Palestinian villagers in the West Bank are fighting
eviction notices from their homes and lands to make space for
Israel's projected 723 kilometre (454 miles) long wall, of which
57 per cent is already complete, Palestinians in Gaza are
fighting for bare survival. Their plight is dreadfully similar.
Despite the fact that the West Bank and Gaza were divided by
occupation and self- seeking and wealthy politicians, they are
united by grief, and by their common struggle.
Meanwhile, in a report released 30 July, Human Rights Watch
claims that Hamas and Fatah have both carried out serious human
rights abuses, including torture, against members of the
opposing group. While Hamas is regularly derided for human
rights violations reported in Gaza, which have been used to
retrospectively justify the lethal siege, Mahmoud Abbas's party
hardly receives any reprimand. The report faulted "the United
States and other donors, which have bankrolled President Mahmoud
Abbas's Palestinian Authority and Fatah-dominated security
agencies", for "not paying adequate attention to the systematic
abuses by those forces," reported Al-Bawaba in Jordan.
Media reports with titles such as "Palestinians torture
Palestinians" quickly flooded newspapers. Hamas and Fatah
members screamed obscenities against each other and the arrests
and torture campaign, reportedly continued. The conflict seemed
for a moment entirely Palestinian, with Israel an innocent
observer.
Meanwhile, Moussa's father continues to seek "God's mercy" for
his son's soul. Prayer and supplication are his only resort. In
Gaza, death continues to hover over Bahloul's household.
There is something utterly cruel about all of this, utterly
inhumane.
-Ramzy Baroud (www.ramzybaroud.net)
is an author and editor of PalestineChronicle.com. His work has
been published in many newspapers and journals worldwide. His
latest book is The Second Palestinian Intifada: A Chronicle of a
People's Struggle (Pluto Press, London).
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