Dying Under the Summer Sky and International Eye: Gazans Continue to Be Targeted by IOF and Border ClosuresBy Mohammed Omer.
The latest Israeli air strikes have targeted 4 Palestinians in two different strikes in less than 24 hours. In the first, on Salah Al Dein road, Israeli warplanes fired at and hit a car, leaving 3 Islamic Jihad members dead including a senior leader of the movement, Omer Al Khatib. A second strike, in Rafah, targeted and killed a Hamas member, injuring many others. Hamas said the man who was killed was a member of its military wing, Al Qassam brigades, who had been involved in confronting the Israeli incursion.
According to eyewitnesses, "Al Khatib jumped out of his car when the first rocket hit the car, but other rockets flew over the car, hitting him and other two members."
Meanwhile, also in Rafah where Israeli Occupation Forces are patrolling along the border, a number of missiles were fired on Rafah's eastern areas, destroying trees, agricultural land, and greenhouses. No casualties have been reported in that incident.
Medical sources have reported that the body of a 21 year old woman, from Burij camp in the middle of Gaza Strip, was found face-down on the ground. The body appears to have been stabbed by a knife, the criminals unknown.
Border Crises:
The crisis at the Rafah border continues, with fatalities increased to 30 civilians dead as a result of the 6-week-long unrelenting closing, the dead mostly young and elderly. Those at the border are living in the streets, with no shelter and very limited food and medication, under the burning sun in the hottest and most unforgiving days of summer. People are appealing to Israel, Egypt, and the Palestinian Authority, as well as the US and EU, to open the Rafah crossing and allow the trapped and ravaged masses back into Gaza. The situation is extremely dire right now, and people have a well-founded fear things will quickly get even worse in the coming days if the border remains closed as it has after promises to open it in the recent past.
When the media reports, if at all, on the state of life at the border, it is in dry terms, repeating empty promises of opening the border (weeks ago!) or patting the back of some politician who vaguely denounces the economic-related problems of a month and a half border closure (preceded by a year and a half of international sanctions on Gaza). The news negates the very real and painful suffering of thousands of innocent people who have committed no crime except to seek medical treatment or other and cross the border at a time when they could not have known it would be subsequently closed and sealed.
Numerous demonstrations have protested the closing of the border, closed for over 50 days now, and the torturous slide towards death people are experiencing and losing loved ones to. Umm Salman, 63, interviewed by phone, grieved: "I can't live like this, I need to go home. Animals have much better lives than us. We have no clean water, and I don't have money. What do you expect me to do when I have no money to buy food?" she asked.
"I sold my clothes, my watch, my ring and all my belongings, what else should I sell? Should I sell my grand-child who came with me for medication before we got marooned at the border and now can't go home? For God's sake, open the border, I want to go home. This is enough. I can't keep sleeping here, among thousands, under the unbearably scorching sun and with mosquitoes, snakes, and insects moving over our heads while we try to sleep at night."
To make matters worse, skin diseases are becoming rife among the six thousand who are trapped at the no man's land between Egypt and Gaza. In an even further injustice, 16 babies who were born at the border, with no certificates or legal documents, now won't be allowed back into Gaza: they were transported out of Gaza while inside their mother's stomachs, but now, as babies, with no identification, even if the border opens, there is a great risk that they might not be let into their homes! Yet another cruel twist of fate for those, who through no accord of their own, happen to be born in an area that the world has decided should suffer indefinitely.
Mohammed Omer is a young journalist/photographer in the Gaza Strip. He and his family have a very rough time in living day to day and they have lost much. In October of 2003, one of Mohammed's younger bothers, Issam, was injured and had to have a leg amputated. Later in the same month another younger brother, Hussam Al-Mouhagir, was killed in his home; shot to death by the Israeli Army that occupies and regularly devastates Palestine. These stories are written by Mohammed who knows no peace, only the continued devastation forced upon civilians who have little voice in the world. Mohammed has covered the Occupied Territories for several years. In 2006 Mohammed won the New American Media National Ethnic Media Award for best Youth Voice. On May 18th, 2007, Mohammed was shot at by unknown militants in Gaza yet he continues to report. Visit Mohammed's Web site, or write to him to get a more complete picture of what is really happening that main-stream news sources rarely brings to its audience. We are proud to feature articles from Mohammed Omer here at BBSNews, his reporting is some of the only original, on the ground reporting available from the Israeli Occupied Territories.
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