APRIL-MAY2008

IRELAND IS A DEMOCRACY SO THE HUMANITARIAN APPROACH, RATHER THAN CONFRONTING OUR GOVERNMENT WITH POLITICAL OPPOSITION, MAY SUCCESSFULLY LOBBY THE DEPARTMENT OF FOREIGN AFFAIRS. THERE IS NEED FOR HUMANITARIANS TO APPROACH GOVERNMENT IN GREAT NUMBERS SO THAT THE EU HAVE TO ACKNOWLEDGE THE IRISH GOVERNMENT'S ON-GOING STRUGGLE TO ACCESS GAZA.
Working with his camera and reporting since 2003, Mohammed Omer has paused for only two short episodes outside Gaza from his self-inflicted self-created life as a "journalist" in Gaza. How different from the normal run of journalists you may understand if you have become acquainted with his work in The Handstand or more realistically you have chased up his own web-site in Rafah. http://rafah.virtualactivism.net/news/todaymain.htm During that time his mother has been seriously ill and had an operation and his father is now victim of a stroke and far from home in hospital. This family as any other has been unable to receive food parcels from well-wishers as Israel denies them entry. Our Dept. of Foreign Affairs recently, regrettably without my knowledge, let an important group of politicians go to Palestine and Israel without mentioning him or his incredible resilience over these years reporting on the hell of Palestinian CIVILIAN lives. It is important for humanitarian concern to lobby government to give it extra power of argument on four points:
1) medicines for Hospitals in Gaza
2)Bedding for hospitals
3) Insure sources of fuel for all hospital ambulances
4) Access of food parcels to families from individual well-wishers

Please do so and contact the Minister, D.Ahern : minister@dfa.ie
After a meeting with Michael Gaffey our Goverment's Middle East representative I wrote the following letter to the Irish Times who had published an adverse letter, coincidentally, the day of this meeting:

reports from gaza,palestine:

Flowers, Strawberries, and Missiles

BEIT LAHIYA, Gaza- Just 300 yards from the hidden eyes in the Israeli tank, Ahmed Felfel picks his strawberries. But it isn't the Israelis in the tank who worry him as much as those others who will not let him sell them.

Earlier, it was flowers grown in Gaza and then fed to camels because the Israeli blockade would not let them through. Now it is strawberries grown and wasted.

It is Gaza's irony that the most desperate conditions produce some of the finest people seek. Nature itself has been kind to Gaza; the soil is rich, there is plenty of sunshine, and predictable rainfall. All that produces strawberries of a quality that the best restaurants in Europe like to serve.

After Gaza elected Hamas, Israel moved swiftly with U.S. backing to isolate the 23-mile long strip of land with Israel on one side and the Mediterranean on the other. It's a siege that will not let even flowers and strawberries through.

"I am alive but I feel dead," says Ahmed Felfel. He is expecting losses of 35,000 to 45,000 dollars as a result of the Israeli blockade. That is above more direct losses. "Israeli tanks and bulldozers demolished my irrigation system, my greenhouses, my equipment."

Beit Lahiya is close to the Israeli border, and just a few miles from the Israeli town Siderot which has been within reach of home-made rockets fired from within Gaza. Israel, in turn, has launched deadly missile attacks on Gaza.

The Israelis come in and simply bulldoze any place they think can hide a launching pad for rockets. When they find nothing, no compensation is offered.

In an average year, Gaza's 6,000 strawberry farmers harvest nearly 2,000 tonnes of the fruit that sell altogether for about 10 million dollars. Two-thirds is normally shipped out through Agrexco, the agriculture exchange half-owned by the Israeli government that Gaza's fruit and flower growers are required to use.

In November two trucks carrying flowers and six carrying strawberries were allowed through by the Israelis. Then the blockade came down again.

Agrexco vice-president Malachy J. Malinovich has said "Palestinian producers have decided not to continue shipping." That could be partly true, because many Palestinian farmers have decided not to grow fruits and flowers rather than spend all that time and money only to see their produce rot.

Ahmed al-Shafi, director of Gaza's Agriculture Cooperative, says that one shipment of 12 tonnes of strawberries was destroyed in December last year because it was held up at the Karem Shalom crossing (Hebrew for what the Palestinians call Karm Abu Salem).

Gaza has an airport and sea port, but Israel prevents their use. On the other hand the border crossing at Rafah into Egypt is sealed by Egypt, under heavy U.S. pressure.

"We used to sell a kilo of strawberries for 4.50 dollars," says al-Shafi. "Now it sells for 50 cents here."

Two years ago, he said, 40 to 45 tonnes of strawberries were exported from Gaza daily in season. This year, no more than 100 tonnes have been exported so far.

And this may do long-term damage. Europe could simply get used to importing from elsewhere. And Gaza could face an "emigration of experience" because the best farmers are heading out to Egypt.

Al-Shafi has been privileged enough to be allowed out of Gaza. He has spoken to EU representatives and to U.S. officials in Tel Aviv. "We Palestinians and Israelis are neighbours and farmers," he said. "We should seek a way to co-exist."

Particularly now, and particularly Israelis. It's the year of Shimita that comes every seven years, when Orthodox Jews are required to eat foods produced by non-Jewish sources. Some, at least, of the Israeli blockade is against Israelis.

April 10th

Palestinian child holding poster of her father in Israeli prisons	Palestinian child holding poster of his dad during a protest

In Prison, Who Knows Why?

GAZA CITY - You would think the baby boy named Yousef has his life ahead of him. But who knows, with a child born to Palestinian parents from Gaza. What's more, Yousef was born in an Israeli prison.

He is the only one of Fatima al-Zeq's nine children who is with her for that reason -- she was arrested nine months ago. But these days the baby is not with her. He developed stomach pain, began to vomit, and has been transferred to a hospital inside Hasharon prison in Israel.

Fatima has written to human rights organisations in Gaza asking for their help in seeing the baby is looked after, something she cannot do herself.

Her other children do not know why mother is in prison; the Israelis haven't told them, and they haven't told Palestinian authorities. And they declined to tell IPS. If anything, the Israelis say the arrests are for "security reasons".

According to a Palestinian source, she was arrested because Israeli authorities suspected she would carry out an attack in Israel. No explosives were found on her. Another source suggests that she was arrested because she is a relative of an Islamic Jihad leader.

Fatema had gone to an Israeli hospital to seek treatment, and had a permit for it, her family members say. But at the checkpoint they arrested her and threw her in jail. She joins thousands of Palestinians inside Israeli jails. And their families are not always told why they are in prison, whether they have been charged, or convicted, and when, if ever, they will be released.

Jumana Abu Jazar, 7, knows all about this. "My mother died, and I have no brothers and sisters," she says, looping the string of a picture frame around a rusting nail in her house in Gaza. "Father is in jail in Israel. He lives there in a dark cell. I saw him once."

Jumana lives with her grandmother Umm Ala'a in the Rafah refugee camp in the southern Gaza Strip. Umm Ala'a says Jumana's father "was arrested by Israeli occupation forces in 2001 on his way back through the Rafah border. He was accompanying his father, who had received medical treatment abroad. An Israeli judge sentenced him to 18 years in jail."

Again, the family say they have no idea what crime he committed. But one thing is clear; he, and so many others arrested, are not the ones being punished for firing rockets into Israel. Nor have most of them carried out what Israel considers terrorist attacks. They are guilty of being members of political groups -- or so their families believe.

"His crime is he was Palestinian," Umm Ala'a said. "This is a tax on life that we all pay."

Many Palestinians are convicted on charges never disclosed, but many are in Israeli prisons without ever being charged. Ahmad Abu Haniyah, youth coordinator for the Alternative Information Centre, a 20-year-old project set up jointly by Israeli and Palestinian journalists, was arrested by the Israelis in May 2005. He was released in May last year. The Israelis never told him why he was arrested in the first place. He was never charged or tried; the Israelis call this administrative detention.

By now every Palestinian family knows a relative or friend who has been detained like this.

Israel occasionally releases batches of prisoners as a "goodwill gesture". This plays well internationally, but these are usually people close to release date anyway. The gesture benefits few Palestinians, and fools fewer.

Atia Abu Mussa has been held in the Nafha desert prison for 14 years now; he was detained when he was 21. Every Monday friends and relatives of Atia, and others, gather outside the office of the International Red Cross in Gaza to hold a vigil for their loved ones.

"My son has been on hunger strike for a week," says Ramdan al-Baba, standing outside the Red Cross office. "He worked as a guard at (former) president Yasser Arafat's compound in Ramallah in 2003. His crime was that he had that job." The conditions in Israeli prison are dire, he said. "I can't even send him a letter."

Palestinians find themselves unable to invoke habeas corpus (meaning literally, 'bring forth the body'), a provision under the Geneva Convention by which a state must produce information on the whereabouts of a person -- or the body -- within its jurisdiction. Israel denies this option on the grounds that it is not necessary for persons under "administrative detention". At the moment 863 Palestinians have been in jail for more than 15 years under such detention, according to official Palestinian figures.

There are a total of 10,400 Palestinian prisoners in Israeli jails. These include 90 women and 328 children below the age of 18, according to the Palestinian Ministry of Detainees and Ex-Detainees. Forty-six of the prisoners are members of parliament, mostly affiliated to Hamas.

Israeli human rights groups say that security forces called Shin Bet regularly torture Palestinians in Israeli jails. The two groups B'Tselem and HaMoked: Centre for Defence of Individuals tracked 73 prisoners between July 2005 and July 2006. They reported that Shin Bet routinely uses "beatings, painful binding, back bending, body stretching and prolonged sleep deprivation" to torture Palestinian prisoners.

The Son Who Did Not Die, The One Who Did
March 25.2008
GAZA CITY- The family had been mourning for 16-year-old Ahmed Abu Salamah. What was left of what was thought to be his body had been buried. After two weeks of mourning, they found Ahmed alive in the intensive care unit at Gaza City's al-Shifa Hospital.

But a boy had been buried. And, a family had spent two weeks outside the intensive care unit, believing the boy inside was theirs. It was their boy who had died.

The discovery of the mistake brought joy to the family of Ahmed Abu Salamah. And it plunged into uncontrollable grief the family who had gathered at hospital and prayed daily for recovery of the boy within in intensive care.

Through this misunderstanding, one thing everyone understood. The body of the boy who was buried had been mangled beyond recognition. As was the boy still alive in intensive care.

"Israel is using missiles and materials which rip apart and burn beyond recognition the humans they target, so much so that a mother can't identify the body of her own son," Dr. Raed al-Arini, head of public relations at al-Shifa Hospital told IPS.

Israel had used banned materials such as Dense Inert Metal Explosive (DIME) and white phosphorus, he said.

Ahmed has suffered brain haemorrhage and has serious wounds all over his body. He had left home on Saturday Mar. 1, his mother said, and was soon hit by an Israeli F-16 missile strike just outside his house. It was a day when more than 55 Palestinians were killed, many of them civilians and children.

For three days the family could find no trace of Ahmed. Then they were called by the hospital to say that the remains of a body in the morgue was Ahmed.

But two weeks later, Ahmed's friends informed his mother Karima that her son was still alive. She rushed to the hospital. "I shook his bed, and when he opened his eyes I said to him, 'this is your mother, I'm here with you'."

The other side of this story was that of mourning after hope.

The mangled body that the Salamah family had buried was that of Mohammed Hejazi, a 17-year-old from the same neighbourhood. Mohammed's mother Aminah Hejazi and his family had sat outside the ICU everyday for two weeks, believing that the boy inside was their Mohammed.

Ahmed's face was covered by bandages. The boys were about the same size, and the Hejazi family thought it was Mohammed. "At first I doubted whether this was really my son, but I felt the need to be close to him anyway," Aminah said. But in a few days, she said she came to believe the boy inside was her son. Until the other family arrived in hospital, and the doctors broke the news to her.

Aminah sobs as she recounts that moment. The family was broken, she said. Her husband would not believe Mohammed was dead.

Identifying Ahmed finally came down to the hair. Karima said Ahmed has brown hair; Aminah that her son's hair was black.

As the Abu Salamah family did earlier, the Hejazi family set up a mourning tent to receive condolences from friends and neighbours. On the other side, many of Ahmed's friends who had thought they would never see him again, following his 'funeral', have been streaming to the hospital to look him up.

Ahmed cannot speak to his friends. He is conscious, his eyes are open, but he is paralysed, and his condition is critical. Doctors say they are short of medicines to treat him.

Aminah mourns the death of her own, and prays for the boy who survived. "I pray that God will heal him," she said, in tears.

palestine :no pause in this suffering, and everyone globally aware of it ; who is demanding an end to it?


Look at the Date : 2 February 05
is there any month in the annals of palestine when this would be a unique photo?
This is the fifth time in the last two years that children have been killed or seriously injured inside UNRWA school premises in the Gaza Strip. Two girls were killed in separate incidents in Rafah and Khan Younis last year; fifth grade boys were shot in their Rafah classroom last year, and a little
girl was permanently blinded in Khan Younis in March 2003.

HAS THIS MACHINE YET BEEN REMOVED FROM CHECKPOINTS ?

Look at the Date : 29 April 05

The controversial ionizing radiation screening device used by the Israeli Army to screen all Palestinians passing through the Gaza/Egypt border crossing at Rafah apparently claimed its first victim when Fatmah Abu Ebaed, a woman of 56, died during the screening. Over a month ago, doctors in Gaza City raised the alarm about the possible harmful effects& ugrave;immediate and long-termùon the Palestinians forced to enter the lead-shielded room for multiple screening photographs taken by an Israeli Army operator safely outside the room. They had seen a number of cases of headache, dizziness, and nausea experienced by passengers soon after screening, and also expressed concern about long-term effects, especially on children, the elderly, pregnant women, and medical patients. After the Israeli group, Physicians for Human Rights, and other human rights groups joined the protest, the IOF agreed to stop using the machineùthen quietly resumed forcing all travelers to pass through the so-called "death chamber" a few weeks later. The Palestinian government department that controls Rafah crossing, in an unprecedented move, shut the crossing for a few hours this week to protest Israeli foot-dragging. The Palestinian Authority issued a formal request to the World Health Organization to send a multi-national group of experts to evaluate the safety of the machine.

Human rights organizations have also protested the fact that these scr eening machines produce a nude image on the screening monitor. Worldwide, people of many backgrounds and cultures find such a procedure offensive, but it is especially humiliating to observant Moslems whose ingrained aversion to casual nudity is a matter of both custom and religious law.

Palestinian Minister of Health Al Wuheidi said today that the Ministry of Health has not yet managed to collect enough solid data about the screening device the Israeli forces are using at Rafah border terminal, as well as the one used at Erez Checkpoint, in the north of the Gaza Strip. But, he added, "What we saw with our own eyes during our traveling was shocking. We asked some colleagues who were screened and they told us that they were photographed by the device more than 10 times, indicated by the ticking of the camera. Orders are given to the screened individual by a microphone inside the room. The ticking sounds suggest the use of radiation inside the device," the Minister said. He added that the issue was not about the type or quantity of the radiation used; as they don't yet have that inform ation. It was rather the duration of exposure to radiation, stressed Dr. Wuheidi.

"The preliminary information we obtained indicate that they can take photos penetrating the skin into the deep layers of the body, reaching to the bones. Even if we hypothetically assume there is no harm in that, we are looking at an appalling infringement of the Palestinian people's human rights and religious codes," Dr. Wuheidi said.

The Minister said that he had recently heard that Israeli forces had a pregnant Israeli soldier walk through the device to convince the Palestinian travelers it was safe. Dr. Wuheidi dismissed this as a farce, since the Israeli Army routinely gives its soldiers maternity leave late in pregnancy. "Any amount of radiation can affect growing fetuses and might cause mutations during the first four months of pregnancy," said the health minister. Even worse, many Palestinian women who travel abroad while pregnant are seeking specialized treatment for complications of pregnancy, so are at unusually high risk .

A similar screening machine is in use at the Erez checkpoint, where Palestinian workers in the industrial zone must cross twice daily. Dr. Wuheidi said that the Ministry of Health will start drawing blood and tissue samples from the workers passing through Erez and examine them thoroughly, then draw new samples a month later to check for negative effects of repeated exposure to this screening device. Early in April, the Erez checkpoint opened a new "secondary" tunnel for press, foreign visitors and members of NGOs allowed into Gaza, which is completely hidden from the area where Palestinians cross. So there is now no chance that press or international visitors can see exactly what happens to Palestinian travelers.

Ironically, while the Palestinian authorities shut down Rafah crossing in protest, thousands more Gazans have been stranded at the closed Abu Holi checkpoint in the central Gaza Strip. There have been hundreds of Israeli settlers at Gush Katif staging protest demonstrations against their upcoming relocation. It has been a week of slow death by strangulation for the people of Gazaùworkers unable to get to jobs and losing their pay, university students missing all their classes. Students in North Gaza who can reach their schools in Gaza City often find there is no class because their teachers are stuck on the wrong side of Abu Holi. The Israeli Army recognizes no exceptionsùeven patients needing emergency medical care cannot pass. All these clear violations of the Geneva Conventions are still met mainly by silence from the rest of the world.

targeted from a plane
August 2003 : Look at the Date

Today , tw0 F16 plane killed three civilians Palestinians in Gaza, while they were in their car. This crime was committed near the United Nations office, and more than 30 people were injured, 5 of whom seriously. Four of the injured were children who were returning to their homes after a day in the market where they bought a new supplies for the new year school 2003/2004.

According to eyewitnesses, the two F16s planes was covered also by other two helicopters which was watching the area since the morning, the F16 plane shoot two rockets, and they shot the third one after the people and ambulances were gathered to help the injured people. That's why the number of the injured people was high. All the injured people were carried to Al Shifa hospital in Gaza.

IS THIS POOR DEAR WOMAN YET ALIVE? SHE WAS PHOTOGRAPHED IN 2004, YES THAT WAS THE DATE




sINCE HE WAS 18 YRS OLD mOHAMMED oMER HAS RUN A WEB-SITE IN gAZA - NOW 23 CAN WE NOT BRING HIM OUT OF THERE ON A MISSION TO THE EU PARLIAMENT OR A SPEAKING TOUR IN EUROPE?