ANDREW KENNIS

Naema says that her people live in a big, crowded prison. Israeli General Doron Almog concurs, saying that Naema and her people are imprisoned. A little boy draws pictures not of flowers or the nearby beach, but of tanks, fighter jets and bulldozers. These are scenes from the most densely populated territory in the world: the Gaza strip.

The Gaza strip is one of the two occupied Palestinian territories that has been under Israeli military occupation for thirty-six years. A closer look at the history and conditions in the Gaza Strip takes us much closer to an understanding of the conditions described above.

The Gaza strip is a small piece of land, 360 square kilometers long and no longer than 70 kilometers wide at any one point (its coastline is only 40 kilometers long). The strip is located in the southwest of Israel and has been under Israeli occupation since 1967.

Some 1.2 million Palestinians live in the Gaza strip, of which three-fourths are refugees from the war of 1948 that led to Israeli control over most of the territory that the UN had intended to split between Jews and Palestinians. Despite the overwhelming majority of Gaza’s residents being Palestinian, 42% of the strip is under the control of the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) and is reserved for 6,000 Israeli settlers. Settlers and Israeli soldiers, however, only account for 0.5% of the population and are thus at the center of the conflict in the Gaza strip, with their disproportionate land holdings and occupational military tactics.

In addition to disproportionate land holdings, Israeli soldiers and settlers enjoy a number of economic advantages and freedoms that Palestinians are not entitled to. For example, 88% of water, a precious resource in the largely desert climate of the region, is diverted from Palestinian territories by Israel for its own use. Digging wells is illegal for Palestinians, but not for Israeli settlers. As a result, settlers consume 1,000 times more water than do Palestinians in Gaza, while they pay one-fourth the price that Palestinians do.

However, there is more to the story of the Israeli settlers than the advantages they enjoy over Palestinians. I spoke to Ram Rahat-Goodman, an Israeli conscientious objector, after one of the events in his US speaking tour. Rahat-Goodman, like hundreds of others in the group Yesh Gvul (There is a Limit), has refused to serve in the Israeli military. Most settlers came from poor backgrounds in Israel, he explained. They may have even been immigrants, and came to the occupied territories to get a house and raise a family. While some settlers do believe in the Greater Israel vision that advocates annexing all of the Palestinian territories into Israel, Rahat-Goodman points out that these settlers are simply not the majority. In fact, he said, they are a significant, but distinct minority. Rahat-Goodman went on to explain that since the start of the intifada, even if settlers wanted to sell their houses, they couldn’t, because nobody will buy them at this point. Without government assistance in relocating something not forthcoming in the current political climate the large majority of settlers are nearly as trapped as their Palestinian neighbors.

The 49th Article of the Fourth Geneva Convention and subsequent UN resolutions have affirmed the illegality of settling or annexing territory conquered during war. As such, Israel’s occupation has been condemned by international and national human rights groups. For instance, the Israeli human rights group B’Tselem, based in Jerusalem, stated that International humanitarian law prohibits an occupying power from transferring citizens from its own territory to the occupied territory Israel’s settlement policy violates these regulations.

Amnesty International, an internationally renowned human rights organization, has described the occupation as collective punishment, referring to the worsening Palestinian living conditions since the second intifada (uprising) began in October of 2000. Many of the same conditions were present before the intifada began, but open conflict has exacerbated them.

In particular, a state of siege and closure, as the Palestinian Centre for Human Rights (PCHR) put it, has been effectively put into place in Gaza. According to the PCHR, siege and closure result into the following conditions:

the Gaza strip has been divided into at least three parts by military checkpoints. As a result, relatives find it difficult to visit families especially those imprisoned in Israel students cannot go to school or are stranded away from home, access to places of worship is curtailed, fisherman cannot ply their trade.

The rest of this report will examine the consequences of siege and closure on the daily lives of Palestinians in the Gaza strip.

A pre-med student named Haifa was brave enough to take me down to her home in Rafah, a city from which she is informally exiled. Rafah is marked by the sight houses that have been destroyed or damaged by the occupying Israeli military. It is similarly marked by the residents’ tales of nightmarish incidents witnessed first-hand.

They just shot him in the middle of our soccer game, explained Haifa’s brother to me. The person who was shot was a teenage boy and the best friend of her brother. I had never seen my brother the way he was after he lost his best friend, Haifa said to me while reflecting on our trip to her home in Gaza City. He just closed himself in his room for three days thinking over and over again why was it not him who was shot or if it was his fault, thinking that maybe he could have done something to prevent it from happening.

In the midst of the killings and the destruction of homes there is also the humiliation and the frustration of living a life under military rule. It is safe to say that Rafah residents have forgotten what the beach and the ocean look like, said Khalil Shahin, Haifa’s uncle and a researcher with the PCHR, explaining how Rafah’s Palestinian residents have been banned from going to the beach since the start of the intifada. This also has a detrimental effect on the economy, as fishing and sea commerce were a significant part of the local economy here in Rafah.

After her tearful recollection of Mohammed’s death, Naema said that living in the Gaza strip was comparable with living in a crowded prison. She was not alone in employing such metaphors. Even the Israeli military General Doron Almog, who has served in the Gaza strip for many years, was quoted saying as much in a recent New York Times cover story.

The Gaza strip is the world’s largest jail, said Connie Hackbarth of the Alternative Information Center, a Jewish-Palestinian group that publishes independent information and organizes improved communication between civil society groups on both sides of the green line that defines Israeli territory prior to the 1967 war and subsequent occupation. For outsiders, it is hard to imagine the horror and suffering that Palestinians deal with on a daily basis in the Gaza strip.

Merely visiting the Gaza strip hardly makes one an insider. Yet, a deeper knowledge of the extent to which Palestinians are treated as criminals and prisoners in their own cities clarifies many aspects of the situation. In particular, such knowledge might instruct us to seek the fastest possible way to stop such occupational tactics that certainly help to fuel the region’s violence.