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Al
Jazeera TV footage showed the bodies of five Palestinian men executed
when Israeli soldiers found out where they'd hidden in a building
in Ramallah on Sunday. They had feared for their lives and apparently
had good reason to do so. Four were shot with a single bullet
to the head. One was murdered with sixteen bullets, mostly fired
into his face and chest. Their weapons were confiscated. They
lay on the floor, mostly face down. Dark streaks of dried blood
covered the walls of their room.
On
Monday, an Al-Jazeera cameraman filmed the morgue of a Ramallah
hospital so full of the dead that new bodies arriving had to be
put in separate rooms where fans running with an electricity generator
could keep them from decomposing too quickly. This is just Ramallah.
It has been closed off to most of the outside world and its residents
huddle inside their houses unable to replenish badly needed supplies.
A repeat of the destruction of this once bustling West Bank city
is taking place as I write: in Bethlehem, Tulkarem, and Qalqiliya.
This is just the beginning.
Gazans are tired and their nerves are on edge. So far we are relatively
untouched by Sharon's new "war" against Palestine and
"the enemy of the world," Yassir Arafat, who continues
to sit in a closet-like room without light, water, or communication
with the outside. There is probably a secret microphone hidden
in his kuffiyah from which he whispers his instructions to potential
suicide bombers all over Palestine to wreak their destruction
on the defenseless Israels each time another member of his security
forces is murdered for existing.
We
watch the news, read the reports coming in, talk over our mobile
phones to people cut off from us in Rafah and Khan Yunis, Deir
al-Balah, and Bureij. They can't come to work until the IDF
feels like opening the checkpoints near Netzarim and Gush Katif.
So offices and businesses in Gaza City are half-staffed or simply
closed. At the Ramattan TV station, the producer asks, half embarrassed,
if I can lend him $500 to distribute to people there who haven't
been paid in over a month; people who are desperately stocking
up on supplies for when they, too, are confined to their homes
while indignant and arrogant tanks roll through their streets,
crushing everything in their paths into the concrete and the sand.
Yesterday
Israeli soldiers shot dead a ten year old boy in Rafah for having
the audacity to play too close to the border. The children of
Rafah make good target practice for those planning their nighttime
raids into the refugee camps there and elsewhere throughout the
Strip: Khan Yunis, Bureij, Jabaliya, Shati – places languishing
in their own debris. Israeli "patrols" drove through
Jabaliya and Beit Hanoun in the north early yesterday morning
reminding the inmates just who is in charge here. They like to
keep things clear.
Today
in Ramallah the office of Preventive Security is under attack.
People fear yet another massacre, and with good reason. Will Marwan
Barghouti survive? I have my doubts. Reports are that the IDF
wishes to arrest him. But the people in Preventive Security refuse
to surrender. A good pretext for murder, to be sure.
Sixty
people, mostly women and children, have been herded into a single
flat of the "La Ilaha Illa Allah" apartment building
next to where the gun battle is taking place. They cannot leave;
they cannot get food and water; some have fainted from the pressure,
and the fear. This is happening as I write. A friend in the States
writes to me that he is waiting for "all hell to break loose".
I hate to tell you this, dear friend, but it already has.
Another
writes reminding me to tell people that the Israelis are violating
international law – and the decades long list of violations
begins to tally itself up in my head. Then I shake my head clear.
You think this point hasn't been stressed in every article,
communiqué, report, TV broadcast, radio talk show emanating
from the streets here and in activist circles elsewhere ad absurdum?
It isn't working. It isn't working. What will it take
to wake people up to what is happening here? How do you force
the Indifferent to confront the miserable face of Injustice?
At
night in Beit Hanoun the fragrance from the orange trees is so
strong it seems the air is perfumed. Bright red roses grow along
the pathways to people's homes and the stars don't have
to compete with city lights so they dominate the sky, each one
a tear; each one a promise whispered into the night. We will never
leave our land.
Jennifer Loewenstein lives in
Gaza City, and works for the Mezan Center for Human Rights.
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