This Sucks (Commentary and News Articles
by USCitizen1040
Comment:
How would you like to be a shopkeeper in Rafah? Israel thrives, while their occupying military makes sure the occupied territories suffer.
News Articles:
Palestinians isolated in violent Gaza border zone
By Mark Heinrich
RAFAH, Gaza Strip (Reuters) - Shopkeeper Jamal Abu Radwan waits stoically for paying customers who rarely come into the twilight zone of conflict between Palestinians and Israeli soldiers on the Gaza Strip's border with Egypt.
Israeli tanks, watchtowers, barbed wire and barricades hem in the city of Rafah on three sides. The road linking it with the rest of the Gaza Strip to the north is often closed without warning by an Israeli checkpoint guarding Jewish settlements.
Radwan recalled how shopkeepers in Rafah once thrived from Arab tourists and traders crossing the nearby border -- until the Israeli army isolated the region in response to a Palestinian uprising launched in September 2000.
Rafah, a teeming city of 100,000, has become one of the most impoverished and deadly pockets of the Palestinian territories in Gaza and the West Bank, where militant groups are fighting for independence after 35 years of Israeli occupation.
Gunmen wage almost daily gunbattles with Israeli forces who regularly enter Rafah, including its large refugee quarter on the frontier, and demolish homes with the stated aim of destroying tunnels used to smuggle in weapons from Egypt.
Radwan lives in a tangle of alleyways strewn with refuse and spent ammunition, houses riddled with bullet holes, ending abruptly in a desert strip dotted by the rubble of scores of bulldozed homes -- "no man's land" under Israeli guns.
Behind him stretches an uneven wall of concrete slabs and an Egyptian flag just beyond shimmering in the heat.
Radwan's shop had been open for business for five hours Tuesday before he sold his first item -- a pen from Taiwan that had hung on display for two years.
A few odds and ends were left, including two more pens and a 2-year-old sack of rice. Radwan scooped up some grains in his hand. "Too stale to tempt anyone now," he said.
"I lived well from the tourists and border trade until 2000. I haven't replenished my stock since then. At first I couldn't get it past checkpoints. Now I simply cannot afford it."
PENNILESS CREDITOR
Radwan produced a dog-eared notebook filled with scrawled names of people and numbers alongside.
"These are all the local customers who bought here on credit since then. Hardly anyone can pay me any more. You're the first customer with cash I've had in awhile," he told a Western visitor who needed a new pen.
Rafah's isolation has also made it among the most indigent of Palestinian cities where overall around 70 percent of the people languish below the poverty line of $2 a day, according to World Bank figures cited by a new U.S. aid agency study.
Radwan said he supported a wife, four children, four brothers and eight sisters with his rapidly depleting savings and U.N. humanitarian aid, but his family's diet hardly ranged beyond bread and tea these days.
A sudden boom from an unseen tank vibrated the flimsy cinder-block facades of the densely packed neighborhood, and was followed by the grinding growl of a bulldozer.
Around the next corner, the extended Khasahah family said they had scarcely slept for months because of constant tank and small-arms fire at night and the roar of bulldozers.
"We don't sleep at home any more. Shooting starts just after dark, as the mosque is calling out 'God is Greatest' to bring us to prayer," said Sobheah Khasahah, 60, who lives with her husband, her son, his wife and six grandchildren in two rooms.
"We run out of the house, because we fear the roof will be hit and fall on us, and flatten ourselves against street walls, then, like others, go on to the local school where it's safer.
"We often have to stay out all night, and it turns into a neighborhood social, like broad daylight, but this is no life."
The Palestinian Center for Human Rights says over a quarter of some 450 Palestinian deaths in Gaza during the uprising were in Rafah, the majority of them civilians.
More than 1,470 Palestinians and 566 Israelis have been killed since the uprising began after peace talks stalled.
07/30/02 14:37 ET
Copyright 2002 Reuters Limited.
Israel makes their own laws, laws which require no proof, just suspicion, for imprisonment.
Rights group urges Israel to free journalists
PARIS (Reuters) - Paris-based press watchdog Reporters Without Borders called on the Israeli government Tuesday to free five jailed Palestinian journalists, including Reuters cameraman Jussry al-Jamal.
"The arrest of these five journalists was completely arbitrary," the group quoted its secretary-general Robert Menard as writing in a letter to Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon.
"The authorities say two of them helped terrorist organizations, but they have offered no proof of this. The three others have not even been told why they are being held."
The five journalists are Jamal; Agence France Presse photographer Hussam Abu Alan; Khalid Ali Mohammed Zwawi of the Gaza-based Palestinian weekly El Istiqlal, Kamel Ali Jbeil of the East Jerusalem daily Palestinian Al-Quds; and Nizar Ramadan, of the Qater newspaper.
The Israeli army has told Reuters that Jamal was detained "on suspicion of aiding a terror organization" but the Israeli authorities have provided no details since then, ignoring repeated demands for his release by Reuters.
The five were arrested during a military offensive in the West Bank which Israel said was intended to root out militants blamed for a wave of Palestinian suicide attacks.
Some of the five have now been imprisoned for more than three months in very poor conditions, Reporters Whitout Borders said in a statement.
Troops detained Jamal, 23, in the West Bank city of Hebron on the afternoon of April 30 as he filmed outside a hospital. Mazen Dana, another Reuters cameraman, was detained with him but was released the following day.
Reporters Without Borders said the AFP's Alan was arrested April 24 at the Beit Anun checkpoint near Hebron on his way to cover the funeral of two Palestinians.
Zwawi was arrested in the middle of the night at his home in Nablus by Israeli soldiers who searched his house and seized material, it said.
The Israeli army and government have come under increasing pressure over their handling of the Palestinian and international media since Palestinians rose up against Israeli occupation in September 2000.
The Committee to Protect Journalists, a New York-based rights group, last week urged the army to probe the killing of a Palestinian photographer and all cases in which soldiers have shot and wounded journalists in 22 months of conflict.
07/30/02 13:37 ET
Copyright 2002 Reuters Limited.
