Ahmed Moussa was a 12-year-old Palestinian
boy from the West Bank village of Nilin, near
Ramallah. Mohamed Bahloul is a 12-year-old
Palestinian boy from Gaza City. The former was
shot and killed 29 July by Israeli forces
following a peaceful protest against the
Israeli apartheid wall. The latter is awaiting
death in a dilapidated hospital in Gaza.
Reports on Moussa's death vary. The Anti-
Apartheid Wall Campaign's report said that the
boy was "sitting under a tree with his friends
when a military jeep drove up and the army
shot him -- a live bullet pierced his head.
The boy died immediately."
Agency France Press's report, the day
following his death, confirmed the nature of
the death but said that the boy was killed
during the demonstration. Nilin, one of the
numerous villages losing land to the Israeli
wall -- deemed illegal according to the
International Court of Justice in 2004 --
holds regular protests against the
confiscation and destruction of the village's
farms. It's part of a sustained non- violent
campaign that brings together Israeli,
Palestinian and international peace activists.
"Moussa tried to run away but his sandal
slipped off after he stumbled over a part of
the fence," according to one of Moussa's
friends.
The fact is, a young boy who should be at
home enjoying the company of his family and
friends, or attending a summer camp, or
playing in the sunshine, is now dead. He is
one of hundreds of Palestinian children killed
by Israeli soldiers in recent years in a
consistent pattern of deliberately targeting
children.
Trying to make sense out of his tragedy,
the father had this to say: "God gave me my
son Ahmed, and he took him as a martyr."
Not an hour and a half drive away from
Nilin, Bahloul is suffering from kidney
failure. He is hooked up to a pitiable looking
dialysis machine in a Gaza hospital.
Aljazeera.net reported on Bahloul's case: for
three months, said his mother, Nadia, he
received no medication and no vitamins to
strengthen his sickly body. "There isn't one
door I didn't knock on, hoping to find
medicine for Mohamed," said Nadia. In a place
similar in many respects to a concentration
camp, where 1.5 million people are subject to
the most inhumane conditions, Bahloul's case
is hardly the exception.
Despite the ceasefire between the Hamas
government in Gaza and Israel that ensured
that homemade Palestinian rockets are no
longer fired at southern Israeli towns, there
is no respite from poverty and siege in Gaza.
UNRWA's head of Gaza operations, John Ging,
said that the situation is getting "worse and
worse" for the people in Gaza, who are largely
aid- dependant. He promised that his office
would do all it can to help "those poor
people, as they continue to get poorer and
poorer."
The extent of the humanitarian catastrophe
in Gaza has already passed many thresholds as
poverty has rendered most Gazans dependant on
food aid for survival. Hospitals are lacking
equipment and medicine, and neither Israel nor
Egypt allows Palestinians from Gaza suffering
from life threatening illnesses to travel
freely, and on a regular basis. Now even water
in Gaza is polluted beyond foreseeable remedy.
The Christian Science Monitor reported 21
July that only one-sixth of Gaza's daily
sewage -- estimated at up to 120 million
litres a day -- is fully treated. The massive
amount of untreated sewage finds its way into
the sea, and into the Strip's water supply.
"If there is a stronger word than catastrophe,
I would use that word," said Nader Al-Khateeb,
the Palestinian director of Friends of the
Earth Middle East. The catastrophe is a
"result of Gaza's dilapidated water and sewage
infrastructure undermined by [Israeli] attacks
and fuel blockades."
According to Monther Shoblak, director of
the Gaza Emergency Waste Project funded by the
World Bank, due to sewage seeping into the
ground, the aquifer beneath Gaza, which
provides water for drinking and washing, is
now so polluted with nitrates that only 10 per
cent currently meets World Health Organisation
standards for safety. As a result,
water-related diseases in Gaza are rife.
Gaza is experiencing devastation on so many
levels that it is impossible to locate any
positive health or economic indicators.
Bahloul's mother's wrenching search for
medicine to save her son is compounded by her
husband having lost his job due to the Israeli
siege and while there are other mouths to
feed. Unemployment in Gaza is skyrocketing and
children are often forced out of school to
help bolster the meagre incomes of poor
families. Selling tea in the street from giant
teapots hauled by children often not old
enough to enrol in school is a growing
profession.
While Palestinian villagers in the West
Bank are fighting eviction notices from their
homes and lands to make space for Israel's
projected 723 kilometre (454 miles) long wall,
of which 57 per cent is already complete,
Palestinians in Gaza are fighting for bare
survival. Their plight is dreadfully similar.
Despite the fact that the West Bank and Gaza
were divided by occupation and self- seeking
and wealthy politicians, they are united by
grief, and by their common struggle.
Meanwhile, in a report released 30 July,
Human Rights Watch claims that Hamas and Fatah
have both carried out serious human rights
abuses, including torture, against members of
the opposing group. While Hamas is regularly
derided for human rights violations reported
in Gaza, which have been used to
retrospectively justify the lethal siege,
Mahmoud Abbas's party hardly receives any
reprimand. The report faulted "the United
States and other donors, which have bankrolled
President Mahmoud Abbas's Palestinian
Authority and Fatah-dominated security
agencies", for "not paying adequate attention
to the systematic abuses by those forces,"
reported Al-Bawaba in Jordan.
Media reports with titles such as
"Palestinians torture Palestinians" quickly
flooded newspapers. Hamas and Fatah members
screamed obscenities against each other and
the arrests and torture campaign, reportedly
continued. The conflict seemed for a moment
entirely Palestinian, with Israel an innocent
observer.
Meanwhile, Moussa's father continues to
seek "God's mercy" for his son's soul. Prayer
and supplication are his only resort. In Gaza,
death continues to hover over Bahloul's
household.
There is something utterly cruel about all
of this, utterly inhumane.
-Ramzy Baroud (www.ramzybaroud.net) is
an author and editor of PalestineChronicle.com.
His work has been published in many newspapers
and journals worldwide. His latest book is The
Second Palestinian Intifada: A Chronicle of a
People's Struggle (Pluto Press, London).
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