Tuesday, August 26, 2008
Palestinian Beaten Near Death
Border police also brutalized a local resident, Haythem ‘Elayan Musa, while he was attempting to visit his grandmother. He was surrounded outside her home and severely beaten, with the attackers aiming blows at his head. Leaving the scene, a border policeman fired a single rubber bullet from close range at the semi-conscious Musa, striking him in the head. Musa was rushed to the Ramallah hospital, where he remains in critical condition.
Read more and remember that Zionists find it very offensive when they are compared to Nazis:
http://stopthewall.org/latestnews/1715.shtml
Read more and remember that Zionists find it very offensive when they are compared to Nazis:
http://stopthewall.org/latestnews/1715.shtml
Thursday, August 21, 2008
Funeral for Mahmud Darwish in his destroyed home village of Birweh, Galilee, Palestine
From Zahi via Al-Awda
My Mother (Ummi)
by Mahmoud Darwish
I long for my mother's bread
My mother's coffee
Her touch
Childhood memories grow up in me
Day after day
I must be worth my life
At the hour of my death
Worth the tears of my mother
And if I come back one day
Take me as a veil to your eyelashes
Cover my bones with the grass
Blessed by your footsteps
Bind us together
with a lock of your hair
With a thread that trails from the back of your dress
I might become immortal
Become a god
If I touch the depths of your heart
If I come back
Use me as wood to feed your fire
As the clothesline on the roof of your house
Without your blessing
I am too weak to stand
I am old
Give me back the star maps of childhood
So that I
Along with the swallows
Can chart the path
Back to your waiting nest
My Mother (Ummi)
by Mahmoud Darwish
I long for my mother's bread
My mother's coffee
Her touch
Childhood memories grow up in me
Day after day
I must be worth my life
At the hour of my death
Worth the tears of my mother
And if I come back one day
Take me as a veil to your eyelashes
Cover my bones with the grass
Blessed by your footsteps
Bind us together
with a lock of your hair
With a thread that trails from the back of your dress
I might become immortal
Become a god
If I touch the depths of your heart
If I come back
Use me as wood to feed your fire
As the clothesline on the roof of your house
Without your blessing
I am too weak to stand
I am old
Give me back the star maps of childhood
So that I
Along with the swallows
Can chart the path
Back to your waiting nest
Wednesday, August 06, 2008
United By Misery in Gaza and Nilin
Ramzy Baroud/ Arab News
AHMAD Musa was a 12-year-old Palestinian boy from the West Bank village of Nilin, near Ramallah. Mohammed Bahloul is a 12-year-old Palestinian boy from Gaza City. The former was shot and killed July 29, by Israeli forces, following a peaceful protest against the Israeli wall. The latter is awaiting death in a dilapidated hospital in Gaza.
Reports on Ahmad’s death vary. 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.”
Agence France Presse report, a 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 nonviolent campaign that brings together Israeli, Palestinian and international peace activists. “Musa tried to run away but his sandal slipped off after he stumbled over a part of the fence,” according to one of Ahmed’s friends.
The fact is, a young boy who should be home enjoying the company of his family and friends, or attending a summer camp 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 Ahmad, and he took him as a martyr.”
Not an hour and a half drive away from Nilin, another 12-year-old, Mohammed Bahloul is suffering from kidney failure. He is hooked up to a pitiable looking dialysis machine in a Gaza hospital. Aljazeera.net reported on Mohammed’s case. For three months, said his mother, Nadia, Mohammed received no medications and no vitamins to strengthen his sickly body. “There isn’t one door I didn’t knock on, hoping to find medicine for Mohammed,” said Nadia. In a place similar in many respects to a concentration camp, where 1.5 million people are held under extremely inhumane conditions, Mohammed’s case is hardly the exception. Despite the cease-fire between the Hamas government in Gaza and Israel, which ensured that homemade Palestinian rockets are no longer fired at a southern Israeli town, there is no respite from poverty and siege in Gaza. UNRWA head of Gaza operations, John Ging, said that the situation is getting “worse and worse” for 1.2 million people in Gaza, who are aid-dependent. 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 dependent 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. And now the water of Gaza is polluted beyond foreseeable remedy.
The Christian Science Monitor reported, on July 21 that only one-sixth of Gaza’s daily sewage — estimated at up to 120 million liters 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, the director of 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 polluted with nitrate that only 10 percent currently meets World Health Organization standards for safety. As a result, water-related diseases in Gaza are rife. Gaza is experiencing real devastation on so many levels that it is impossible to locate any positive health or economic indicators whatsoever. Mohammed’s mother’s search for medicine to save her son is not promising either, as her husband lost his job due to the siege, and there are other mouths to feed. Unemployment in Gaza is skyrocketing, and children are often forced out of school to help with poor families’ meager income. Selling tea in the street from giant teapots hauled by little children, often not old enough to enroll in school, is a growing profession.
While Palestinian villages in the West Bank are fighting eviction notices from their homes and lands to make space for Israel’s projected 723 kilometer-long wall (454 miles), out of which 57 percent is already complete, Palestinians in Gaza are fighting for mere 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 common struggle.
AHMAD Musa was a 12-year-old Palestinian boy from the West Bank village of Nilin, near Ramallah. Mohammed Bahloul is a 12-year-old Palestinian boy from Gaza City. The former was shot and killed July 29, by Israeli forces, following a peaceful protest against the Israeli wall. The latter is awaiting death in a dilapidated hospital in Gaza.
Reports on Ahmad’s death vary. 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.”
Agence France Presse report, a 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 nonviolent campaign that brings together Israeli, Palestinian and international peace activists. “Musa tried to run away but his sandal slipped off after he stumbled over a part of the fence,” according to one of Ahmed’s friends.
The fact is, a young boy who should be home enjoying the company of his family and friends, or attending a summer camp 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 Ahmad, and he took him as a martyr.”
Not an hour and a half drive away from Nilin, another 12-year-old, Mohammed Bahloul is suffering from kidney failure. He is hooked up to a pitiable looking dialysis machine in a Gaza hospital. Aljazeera.net reported on Mohammed’s case. For three months, said his mother, Nadia, Mohammed received no medications and no vitamins to strengthen his sickly body. “There isn’t one door I didn’t knock on, hoping to find medicine for Mohammed,” said Nadia. In a place similar in many respects to a concentration camp, where 1.5 million people are held under extremely inhumane conditions, Mohammed’s case is hardly the exception. Despite the cease-fire between the Hamas government in Gaza and Israel, which ensured that homemade Palestinian rockets are no longer fired at a southern Israeli town, there is no respite from poverty and siege in Gaza. UNRWA head of Gaza operations, John Ging, said that the situation is getting “worse and worse” for 1.2 million people in Gaza, who are aid-dependent. 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 dependent 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. And now the water of Gaza is polluted beyond foreseeable remedy.
The Christian Science Monitor reported, on July 21 that only one-sixth of Gaza’s daily sewage — estimated at up to 120 million liters 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, the director of 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 polluted with nitrate that only 10 percent currently meets World Health Organization standards for safety. As a result, water-related diseases in Gaza are rife. Gaza is experiencing real devastation on so many levels that it is impossible to locate any positive health or economic indicators whatsoever. Mohammed’s mother’s search for medicine to save her son is not promising either, as her husband lost his job due to the siege, and there are other mouths to feed. Unemployment in Gaza is skyrocketing, and children are often forced out of school to help with poor families’ meager income. Selling tea in the street from giant teapots hauled by little children, often not old enough to enroll in school, is a growing profession.
While Palestinian villages in the West Bank are fighting eviction notices from their homes and lands to make space for Israel’s projected 723 kilometer-long wall (454 miles), out of which 57 percent is already complete, Palestinians in Gaza are fighting for mere 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 common struggle.
