In Gaza

Gaza, a city so rich in trees as to be like a cloth of brocade spread out on the sand.

The other night I was flipping through Mahfouz’s Palestine: A Guide, by Mariam Shahin. In my browsing, I came across two different references to Gaza’s former fertility, so lavish that I had to note them, as one would today believe these were lies.

The second:

Beit Lahiya (in Roman times): Then its sweet water nourished delicious fruits and beautiful gardens. It once looked like a forest, with many apple, fig, peach and orange trees.

I try to imagine the flourish of green with flowering buds… but can’t.

There are trees in Gaza, sparsely pitched and stunted by water shortages or re-planting after Israeli bulldozing.

But since I first came here in November 2008, every time I’ve gone to border regions, I’ve been told by proud locals: this was the most beautiful area of Gaza, people used to come from all over with picnics, to enjoy the trees, the birds, the flowers…

Beit Hanoun and Faraheen locals rival with their memories, and surely all along the Green-Line border separating Gaza and Israel there were such bounties of green.

*destroyed agricultural land, Wadi Salqa, eastern central Gaza. post continues

first published by Eva Bartlett at the New Internationalist

Wedding season began weeks ago with the first convoys of honking cars overloaded with singing, dancing, cheering shebab [guys]. From 4pm onwards, the beeping cars and wedding bands – five or more musicians dressed in traditional trousers and blouses, playing different-sized drums and something akin to a kazoo – blot out all other noise as they pass my apartment every half hour or so, en route to the seaside wedding halls.

Gaza evenings are filled with the sounds of celebration. Those who can scrape together the money to rent one of Gaza’s many wedding halls do so – borrowing, taking a bank loan, or if they are lucky having saved from years of work – and invite a few hundred of their family, relatives and friends to the night of dancing. post continues

I met Dr. Khamis El Essi in November 2008, after arriving in Gaza on Free Gaza’s 3^rd voyage to Gaza on the Karama, the Dignity. The Wafa hospital and rehabilitation centre (for people with neurological and spinal ailments, including victims of Israeli attacks, stroke patients and others) is in eastern Gaza, roughly 1 km from the Green-Line border with Israel, and has been attacked many times during Israel’s many invasions. [Wafa was seriously attacked during the last Israeli war on Gaza in 2008-2009, during which time the roof of the main hospital was shelled and set afire and shot at, the old folks home was shelled, and many white phosphorous rounds were fired at the hospital complex. I saw clumps of still-burning white phosphorous a week after the hospital was shelled.]

Recently, I wanted to find out more about alternative medicine in Gaza.  It turns out that Dr. Khamis, although medically trained and specializing in spinal and neurological rehabilitation, also does acupuncture, Chinese massage, and cupping. But he corrected me, saying these aren’t “alternative” therapies but “complementary” ones, as some ailments, he says, cannot be solved by alternative means alone.

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For eight years, Umm Bilal has not been able to see her son in Israeli prison.

GAZA CITY, Jul 25, 2011 (IPS) – By Eva Bartlett

“We could enter the Guinness book of records for the longest running weekly sit- ins in the world,” Nasser Farrah, from the Palestinian Prisoners’ Association, jokes dryly. Since 1995, Palestinian women from Beit Hanoun to Rafah have met every Monday outside the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) office in Gaza City, holding photos and posters of their imprisoned loved ones, calling on the ICRC to ensure the human rights of Palestinians imprisoned in Israel’s 24 prisons and detention centres.

Since 2007, the sit-ins have taken on greater significance: Gaza families want Israel to re-grant them the right – under international humanitarian law – to visit their imprisoned family members. This right was taken from Gaza’s families in 2007, post continues

Speaking with lifeguards on their work. One laments having a scuba license but being forbidden from scuba diving in Gaza:

It’s like having a drivers license but no car.

The power is with the Israelis.  We have to abide by the Oslo agreements, but they can change what rules they want, like the fishing limits which should be 20 miles but they limit us to less than 3 miles.

And the siege:

Give a bird water, food… but it wants freedom.  Same with people.  Give a person food, drink, a room, thousands of dollars—you can sleep on it—and bring them anything they want, but they are forbidden from leaving.  The only thing they want in the end is freedom.

After quarter of an hour speaking with these lifeguards, Abu Mohammed insisted that if I need anything –money, a drive somewhere, have any problems –I can always call him.

Yesterday, visiting Ibrahim Jeradeh at the Gaza War cemetery –it’d been over a year since I last saw him –he ended by saying: I have 9 daughters, you are my tenth.  Our house is your house, anything you need you tell me.

Mahfouz’s family the other day scolded me for not visiting more often: we are your Gazan family… echoes of Jaber and Leila and so many others.

For the past week students have been counting the days until their high school exam results are released.  Tawjihi, the last year of high school, is notoriously difficult in Palestine, and many students feel that this year was among the more difficult tests.

Some here feel that the reason the test has become more difficult Palestine-wide is, with over 20,000 university and college graduates already sitting unemployed in Gaza alone, not to mention thousands more in the occupied West Bank and occupied Jerusalem, more challenging exams might persuade potential students to go to trade schools or open small businesses like small grocery stores, to decrease the number of new university students and future unemployed. An ironic solution for a nation which prides itself on its high rates of education and higher education.  I’ve constantly marveled that Palestinians not only pursue higher education in the face of unimaginable obstacles under occupation and siege.  Even the simplest of the problems: electricity.  Imagine studying by candlelight… on a regular basis.  Or the problem of materials in Gaza: not having textbooks, notebooks, access to internet resources (power cuts). post continues

After reading so many reports (for years) on Gaza’s failing health system and economy, I became a bit numb to the reality of what zero-stock drugs and supplies, and over 45% unemployment of the working age actually means. I know it means people with serious diseases like cancer, diabetes, hypertension, psychological disease, kidney failure… suffer for want of treatment, and that the thousands of new university and college graduates sit jobless, parents sit jobless and line for food aid, families suffer.

But the words “shortage” or “suffer” or “crisis” don’t suffice. Nor even the numbers or facts which should shock, especially considering that these are long-term shortages, increasing by the year:

-180 of the 480 essential medications at zero

-190 of the 700 essential medical disposables at zero

-rubber gloves are being re-used, disposable tubes re-sterlized

-200 kidney patients waiting to receive dialysis from machines without filters because filters unavailable

-diabetes patients lacking medications, insulin shortages

-medication for hypertension patients out of stock for 3 months

-17% of antibiotics for serious infections out of stock

-9% of chemotherapy drugs zero stock

-syringes at zero stock

-gauze out of stock
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GAZA CITY, Jul 18, 2011 (IPS) -By Eva Bartlett

“When I came back to Gaza in 2006, before the siege started, people came to me for acupuncture,” says Dr. Hisham Mwtoweh, a medical doctor and acupuncture practitioner trained in China and Korea.

“After the siege began, life here got very difficult and money became a serious problem. Now if someone has money, they use it for food, not for something like acupuncture.” post continues

furniture from Bsaiso and Alami Company limited at trade show

GAZA CITY, Jul 16, 2011 (IPS) By Eva Bartlett 

Waddah Bsaiso is ready to export, if the Israeli-imposed siege would allow him. He has the experience, the contacts, and the products, but is prevented by Israel’s strict ban on virtually all Gazan exports, save a token amount of flowers periodically allowed out of the Strip. post continues

Wet clothes are actually a blessing, for me at least in Gaza.  I only wear them indoors, or sometimes underneath outer layers, and they do what non-existent air-con or fans-wanting-electricity can’t: cool me down for a bit.

our washing machine helps.

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