Democratic Palestine : 37 (ص 7)
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- Democratic Palestine : 37 (ص 7)
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Phyllis Bennis is a progressive US journalist who has traveled
extensively in occupied Palestine since the outbreak of the intifada.
Umm Tala’at sat quietly, surrounded
by her extended family and friends.
The visitors had come to the Zakout
family’s bare, two-room house 1n Shab-
ura Camp in Rafah, to mourn with
Umm Tala’at for her 18-year-old son,
Ayman, killed two days earlier by an
Israeli soldier’s bullet.
Eighteen months earlier, friends and
family had gathered once before with
Umm Tala’at, when her eldest son,
Tala’at, also eighteen at the time, was
shot and killed by soldiers of the occu-
pation. Mrs. Zakout had raised Tala’at
and Ayman, as well as their younger
brother and two sisters, on her own;
her husband had died fifteen years ear-
lier. Umm Tala’at had herself spent 15
months in prison, beginning shortly
before the intifada started. Among her
cousins and extended family, nearly 25
people are currently in prison.
Rafah’s Shabura Camp, at the south-
ern tip of the Gaza Strip, has been the
scene of four weeks of savage repres-
sion. Following the attack on an Israeli
tourist bus in Egypt, Israeli occupation
troops launched a massive retaliation
against the people of Rafah. Some
Israeli officials claimed the perpet-
rators of the bus incident came from
Rafah. Palestinian residents dispute
this, but the allegation was enough to
justify a savage weeks-long siege using
bullets, helicopters, and a fearsome
gas, apparently a nerve gas, which col-
lectively devastated the population.
It started with a curfew clamped on
the camp. Then, as one Shabura resi-
dent described it, «After the first
couple of days, they didn’t seem to
bother much with curfews. Except at
night (during Gaza’s ‘normal’ intifada
curfew of 8:00 p.m. till 3:00 a. m.), the
soldiers almost seemed to want us to
gO into the streets, so they could mow
us down».
Democratic Palestine, February 1990
9
After the first few days, bullet-
inflicted casualties strained the hospi-
tals to overflowing. It was so bad, with
scores of gunshot injuries every day,
that UNRWA sent an almost-unpre-
cedented letter of protest to the Israeli
occupation authorities, stating concern
about the high level of casualties and
the resulting problems for the
UNRWA medical facilities and person-
nel.
Some of the weapons created new
challenges for the medical tearas.
Shabura residents described the hor-
rific effects of a different type of gas
than the usual extra-strong CS tear gas
provided to the Israeli military by the
U.S. «We haven’t seen this kind of gas
since the first weeks of the intifada,»
one victim of the new gas said. «It
seems to affect the neurological sys-
tem, not just the eyes. It made people
feel sleepy, and for some, it caused a
kind of paralysis. For me, my hands
were affected; I couldn’t move my
hands or close my fists for about half
an hour.» A Gaza journalist, filming
the helicopter-borne gas _ attack,
described how the gas cannisters, still
in cartons, were dropped in quantity
on crowded residential sections of the
refugee camp. «I saw one house where
22 cannisters of the gas had landed
inside,» he said. «This was already
seven hours after the gas was dropped,
and I still couldn’t stay in the house for
even a minute. Imagine what it must
have been like for the people inside.»
The cameraman described the cannis-
ters as printed with green Hebrew let-
ters, not written in English as the ordi-
nary (US-supplied) tear gas cannisters
usually are.
The local Palestinian cameraman
was one of the only journalists working
in Gaza during the most intense
periods of the assault. The Israeli
occupation authorities had declared
the entire Gaza Strip a «closed military
area» during much of the Rafah
assault, so that journalists and non-
residents were routinely turned away
at the checkpoints. But those restric-
tions would not, by themselves, have
prevented the usually creative and
often innovative press corps from find-
ing a way in to the besieged camp,
restrictions or no restrictions. The
more serious problem lay in the virtual
absence of the foreign press from all of
Palestine during this period. Dozens of
reporters, camera crews, radio corres-
pondents, etc., once stationed in
Jerusalem to cover the «intifada beat»
have been transferred to new hot
spots, with the eastern European cap-
itals edging out the Palestinian uprising
in the cut-throat competition for media
attention.
Many Shabura residents described
their anguish and their fear at the
realization that the Israeli shootings,
gassings, arrest raids and beatings,
were taking place completely outside
the spotlight of global media attention.
Despite the difficult conditions facing
Gaza residents because of economic
deprivation and severe repression,
especially in Shabura and the other
camps, people are avid followers of the
twists and turns of political develop-
ments in the Soviet Union, the Euro-
pean socialist countries, and other
focal points of global conflict. But that
political consciousness co-exists with a
parallel awareness that every news
team transferred from Jerusalem to
Prague or Berlin means the loss of an
important weapon in Palestine’s battle
for international public opinion.
There is bitter knowledge, too, that
Tel Aviv is just as aware of that press
vacuum in occupied Palestine, and that
the Israeli assaults in Shabura, in
Rafah, in Khan Yunis and elsewhere,
against Tala’at and Ayman Zakout and
the hundreds of other Gaza victims,
are carefully designed to take advan-
tage of that vacuum. ©}
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