By External Source
Apr 13 2020 (IPS-Partners)

No. 39, Spring 2020, Agriculture for Development: open edition

14th Hugh Bunting Memorial Lecture: Smarter foods | Agricultural hazard management in Bangladesh |IPPC special report Climate change and land: extended review | Getting more, much more, from tropical agriculture | Sir George Stapledon | Agriculture and rural roads | TAA 2019 AGM report | TAA 2019 Honours |Moving coastlines: farming the mudflats of Bangladesh | Digital farming and tropical agriculture.

Agriculture for Development, 39 (2020)

Contents

2 Editorial
2 Ag4Dev39: an open issue | Karim Hussein
4 Article 1
4 The 14th Hugh Bunting Memorial Lecture: Smarter foods – the future for our diets, health
and the environment | Andrew Bennett
11 TAAF news 1 | Jane Wilkinson, James Alden and Lydia Handford
12 Article 2
12 Agricultural hazard management in Bangladesh | Hugh Brammer
17 Article 3
17 The IPCC special report on Climate change and land: an extended review | Brian Sims
23 Newsflash 1
23 Fostering rural–urban linkages for sustainable
urbanisation and to achieve the 2030 Agenda for
Sustainable Development | Karim Hussein
25 Article 4
25 Getting more, much more, from tropical agriculture: from ‘land failing’ to ‘land maxing’ |
Roger RB Leakey
28 International agricultural research news
28 CGIAR reform continues and diversifying diets | Geoff Hawtin
30 TAAF news 2 | Diemante Lersten
32 Article 5
32 Sir George Stapledon FRS and his international grassland legacy | Alan Hopkins and
Roger J Wilkins
37 TAAF news 3 | Shreya Pillai and Ryan Anderton
40 Newsflash 2
40 Launching collaboration between IPS News Agency and TAA/Ag4Dev | Karim Hussein
and Farhana Haque Rahman
41 Article 6
41 Agriculture and rural roads – synergies and opportunities | Robert Petts
44 Bookstack
44 On fire: the burning case for a Green New Deal (Klein N) I Brian Sims
45 The case for the Green New Deal (Pettifor A) | Brian Sims
47 Mailbox
48 TAA Forum – TAA 2019 AGM
48 TAA 2019 AGM report | Martin Evans
49 Chairman’s AGM report | Keith Virgo
52 Treasurer’s 2019 annual report and accounts| Jim Ellis-Jones
53 TAA 2019 Honours David Radcliffe
55 Young Development Agriculturist (YDA) 2019 acceptance speech: Developing climatesmart
cocoa in Ghana’s value chain: exploring industry and smallholder perspectives,
Emma Amadi. | Acceptance speech for the Development Agriculturalist 2019 Award,
Amir Kassam
63 News from the regions
63 TAA London and South-East Curry Club talk, 28 March 2019: Moving coastlines: farming
the mudflats of Bangladesh in the face of climate change | Edward Mallorie
67 TAA London and South-East Curry Club talk, London, 30 January 2020: Digital farming
and tropical agriculture | Jonathan Shoham and Alan Bullion
70 TAA South-West seminar: TAA Grasslands Seminar, Royal Agricultural University,
Cirencester, 17 October 2019 | Raymond Bartlett
73 Reminiscences and reflections
73 Enjoying an active retirement, 1987–2019 | Hugh Brammer
76 Obituary Professor Tecwyn Jones | Dai Jones
78 Upcoming eve

Photo courtesy: Shelter Associates

By Pratima Joshi
PUNE, India , Jan 21 2019 (IPS)

One of the most laudable initiatives of the current government’s regime is the Swachh Bharat Mission (SBM) that was launched on Oct 2, 2014, with a larger vision of a clean India. The critical aspect of the mission was that—unlike many of the movements that preceded it—this had a measurable outcome (making India open defecation free) and a firm timeline (by 2019).

Having a mandate like this from the government gave nonprofits already working in the field of urban sanitation a major impetus, since prior to this it was a space largely neglected by policy makers. Even corporates, foundations, and public trusts started looking at the sanitation space and began aligning their vision with the Government of India’s by channelling their funds towards the same.

Over the last four years, there is a lot that the SBM has achieved. Through the gaps in the programme, however, there are important lessons that we can learn on what work needs to be done to help meet the mission of a cleaner India, and how best we should go ahead with that work.

What SBM (Urban) has achieved so far

With the deadline of Oct 2, 2019 fast approaching, it is important to take a holistic view of the positive outcomes of SBM.

Communities have been mere witnesses through this process of making India Open Defecation Free. They have not been made a part of the process which should ideally have been a prerequisite, in order to make it sustainable.

The core programme focuses on ensuring the building and usage of toilets to reach a national Open Defecation Free (ODF) status. Since October 2014, according to the central government, SBM (U) has equipped over 5,219,604* households with toilets, and 417,496* community and public toilets have been delivered. A whopping 3,362* cities have been declared ODF, which accounts for 94 percent of the targeted cities.

There are still gaps that need to be filled
If we have to reach the target of an ODF India in less than a year, we need to study some of the gaps in the SBM, and identify certain key action and policy recommendations.

1. There is a lack of granular data

One of the major drawbacks has been the absence of use of granular spatial data to make informed decisions and plan targeted interventions. Unavailability of evidence-based data has been a lacuna of the SBM model—which, combined with the preconceived notion that the urban poor will not have space for a household toilet—has resulted in urban local bodies (ULBs) continuing to provide community toilets instead of individual household ones.

Since the authorities possess very little or no concrete data about certain areas of the cities—particularly slums—there is no solid means of monitoring the progress of the ongoing as well as completed work. Lack of critical data on existing infrastructure and household level data often leads to skewed delivery, where households have toilets with no drainage networks or lines to connect to and vice versa.

2. Outputs have been measured, not outcomes

The measurability of the campaign has been largely focused on the construction of and access to toilets—the actual need assessment and behaviour change has not been measured with the same exuberance.

This happened because communities have been mere witnesses through this process of making India ODF. They have not been made a part of the process which should ideally have been a prerequisite, in order to make it sustainable.

3. The focus has been limited to toilet construction

To make India ODF, just the construction of toilets is not enough. Areas such as behaviour change, monitoring and tracking, and faecal sludge management are some of the other parameters that need attention.

a) Behaviour change communication: Education around, and promotion of the usage of toilets are key to creating a truly Swachh Bharat. The key parameters around building awareness and changing behaviour are as follows:

• Show a strong linkage between health and sanitation
• Generate a demand for toilets
• Encourage solid waste management systems

b) Monitoring and tracking: The process of monitoring and tracking the programme has not been given due attention. For example, the current SBM model provides funding support to people in instalments—one given prior to the toilet being built, and the other after it is completed.

However, as this Policy Review Paper (commissioned by Shelter Associates) points out, because this process has not been rigorously tracked, there have been some unintended outcomes. It has led to either abuse of funds by families or delays in releasing instalments by ULBs (resulting in families swamped by debt even though their toilet stands completed). What’s more, there have been several instances where families who built a toilet had no drainage networks to connect to, thereby wasting premium space in their homes occupied by these toilets.

c) Faecal sludge management: Owing to sanitation being just one of the vital components of a larger value chain, the subsequent component of faecal sludge management should also be taken into account, and end-to-end solutions should be propagated.

4. Toilet instalment models need re-evaluation

The SBM model offers delivery of the toilets in two ways:

• Instalment model: Where the ULB transfers money into the bank accounts of the people served in two or three instalments for construction of toilets.
• Contractor model: Contractors are appointed and paid for by the local municipal corporation to provide material and construct toilets in households. This is a fully subsidised model where people get a free toilet.

However, as evident by the work done by both models (in Maharashtra), each of them has significant gaps that need to be addressed.

In the instalment model, there can be significant delays in the release of funds resulting in financial hardship for the family. On the other hand, families may utilise the first instalment—which is given before construction starts—for purposes other than building a toilet, for which, the ULB has no recovery mechanism in place. Overall, as a model, this is time consuming and tedious for the ULB.

The contractor model, while faster, gives the people served no control over the quality of work that is executed, as it is free. This often leads to dissatisfaction as people get shoddy toilets which start falling apart very soon.

One solution can be to draw upon CSR funds to deliver household toilets on a cost sharing basis. CSR money can be used to buy the material, which is then delivered at the doorstep of the individual, who then constructs it at their own cost. Only those houses that have access to a network are prioritised. The remaining houses get toilets as and when the ULB lays the networks. This is a model that we at Shelter Associates have tried.

5. Greater community involvement is needed

The last area of improvement would be to create a larger role for the community, civic body organisations, and nonprofits in the entire process, right from awareness building to the actual delivery of the product.

The national political leadership has certainly succeeded in sustaining the impetus to achieve ODF status by giving it visibility over the last four years. While a lot remains to be achieved, it took foresight to put toilets on the national agenda.

*Figures sourced from the website of Swachh Bharat Urban—Ministry of Housing and Urban Affairs, Government of India (as of Dec 10^th)

Pratima Joshi has worked in the area of affordable housing and sanitation for the urban poor for nearly 25 years. Having completed her Masters in Architecture (Building Design for Developing Countries) from Bartlett School of Architecture and Planning, University College (London), she is widely recognised as a leading planner and designer of slum infrastructure. She is one of the co-founders of Shelter Associates (SA), which aims to convert slums into housing societies for the poor by giving access to basic services like water, sanitation, and electricity, which urban slums often lack. Pratima is an Aga Khan scholar, Ashoka fellow, and Google Earth Hero (the only Indian to have received it).

This story was originally published by India Development Review (IDR)

Palestinian child on donkey cart next to garbage container in Gaza City. Credit: Mohammed Omer/IPS

By Will Higginbotham and Tharanga Yakupitiyage
UNITED NATIONS, May 10 2018 (IPS)

Reham Qudaih wakes up nightly to the same nightmare: her father shot, lying on the ground in a pool of blood.

“In my dreams he is on the ground shot. When I have that dream – which I’ve had more than once I wake up screaming,” she told the Norwegian Refugee Council (NRC).

In a recent study, NRC found that children living in the Gaza Strip are experiencing are showing increasing signs of psychosocial deterioration since clashes reignited in the region.

“The violence children are witnessing in Gaza comes on top of an already worsening situation negatively impacting their mental wellbeing,” said NRC Secretary General Jan Egeland.

“They have faced three devastating wars and have been living under occupation for the past 11. Now they are once again faced with the horrifying prospect of losing their loved ones, as they see more and more friends and relatives getting killed and injured,” he continued.

Now in their sixth week, ongoing protests at the border between Gaza and Israel have left over 40 killed and more than 5,500 injured since its inception in March.

While Palestinian demonstrators are reportedly using burning tires and wirecutters to breach the barbed-wire border fence, Israeli forces have retaliated with rubber bullets and live ammunition.

Dubbed the ‘Great Return March,’ the demonstrations are centered on Palestinian refugees’ right to return and resettle in Israel.

NRC’s study—which saw 300 school children aged 10 to 12 surveyed—found that 56 per cent reported they were suffering from nightmares.

Principals from 20 schools also reported a rise in symptoms of post-traumatic stress in children, including fears, anxiety, stress and nightmares.

The principals ranked increased psychosocial support in schools as their top need currently.

One of the many schools in Gaza damaged in Israeli attacks. Credit: Eva Bartlett/IPS

Qudaih is fourteen and lives in the Gaza strip. She has suffered from ongoing nightmares since the 2014 Gaza-Israeli conflict.

She was making progress in coping with her trauma, but much was unravelled after her father was shot in the leg while attending the protests.

On the day that Qudaih’s father was shot, Israeli troops killed 20 Palestinian protesters and wounded more than 700 – including children.

“We went there [to the protests] to reclaim our rights that were taken away by the occupation…we do not have electricity, rights or food. We don’t get any treatment or a chance to play,” Qudaih said.

Since 2007, Gaza has faced an economic blockade by Israel and Egypt, contributing to a persistent humanitarian crisis.

According to the UN Children’s Fund (UNICEF), half of the region’s children depend on humanitarian assistance and one in four needs pscyhosocial care.

The United States’ recent move to cut aid to the UN agency for Palestinian refugees further threatens the already very fragile community.

In addition, there is a lack of medicine and health equipment while power cuts and fuel shortages have disrupted water and sanitation services leaving nine out of 10 families without regular access to safe water.

If such trends continue, the UN has predicted that Gaza will be uninhabitable by 2020.

Inconsolable since the incident, Qudaih constantly worries about the safety of her family and her future.

And her nightmares keep on returning.

Sadly, her story is not a unique for the children living in the Gaza strip.

“The escalating violence in Gaza has exacerbated the suffering of children whose lives have already been unbearably difficult for several years,” said UNICEF’s Regional Director for the Middle East and North Africa Geert Cappelaere.

Apart from the symptoms of severe distress and trauma, Geert added that children are also experiencing physical injuries.

Fourteen-year-old Mohammad Ayoub was among the children that was killed in the protests, significantly impacting the younger members of his family and the larger community.

“Children belong in schools, homes and playgrounds – they should never be targeted or encouraged to participate in violence,” Cappelaere said.

UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Zeid Ra’ad Al Hussein called on Israeli forces to curb the use of “lethal force against unarmed demonstrators,” while questioning “how children…can present a threat of imminent death or serious injury to heavily protected security force personnel.”

NRC highlighted the need for long-term investment in psychosocial suppor. t

“For the children we work with, the nightmares continue for months and years after the violence that causes them. For these children they don’t have a chance to recover from previous trauma before fresh layers arise. That builds up,” said Jon-Håkon Schultz, Professor in Educational Psychology at the University of Tromsø in Norway.

“We need people to look seriously and invest in ways that we can counter these harmful psychological impacts,” he added.

The NRC provides psychosocial support to children living in Gaza and provide training for teachers through their Better Learning Programme (BLP) developed in partnership with University of Tromsø in Norway.

One of the features of the program involved screening children for nightmares and helping them work through their re-occurring ones through breathing and drawing exercises.

Qudaih is among the 250,000 children supported by NRC.

“We want to have dignified lives,” she said, urging the need for peaceful demonstrations.

The ‘Great Return March’ began on 30 March and will end on 15 May to mark what Palestinians refer to as the “Nakba”, a day that commemorates Palestinians’ displacement after the establishment of Israel in 1948.

Marchers have also pointed to the relocation fo the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem as a driver for the demonstration, a move that will take place on 15 May.

Tens of thousands of Syrians flocked to the Syrian embassy in Beirut on May 28. Voting was extended to a second day due to the large numbers. Credit Eva Bartlett/IPS

By Eva Bartlett
BEIRUT, May 30 2014 (IPS)

Roughly three kilometres north of Beirut’s Syrian embassy in Baabda, Syrians crammed in one of an endless stream of buses, exited and continued on foot. The masses opted to walk the remaining few kilometres rather than sit in a traffic jam generated by the tens of thousands flocking to vote.

Clogging the main street leading to the embassy, vehicles of all sorts – many decked out with posters of President Bashar al-Assad and Syrian flags – sat waiting to inch forward. Those on foot moved faster than the halted traffic, and the many long-haul truck drivers gave up, rigs pulled off to the side, resigned to wait until the crowds thinned out, a wait that lasted well into the night.

Syrians in Lebanon were on their way to cast votes at their embassy in Syria’s presidential elections. Although Syrians in Syria will vote on June 3, those overseas were called to vote this week. Due to the heavy flow, the embassy in Beirut had to extend voting to a second day.“We want to elect President Bashar al-Assad. There's no one like him, nor will there be. The terrorists believe everyone else is an infidel. They'll kill me, they'll you, they'll kill anyone who isn't with them” – Hassan, a Syrian from Raqqa, eastern Syria

Lebanon has over 1 million registered Syrian refugees, many more unregistered and others who have been working in Lebanon for years.

The Lebanese army was present, soldiers checking each person who neared the embassy, a helicopter circling above. “Bless the army, they are protecting us, protecting the elections,” said Hassan, a Syrian from Raqqa, eastern Syria, an area where foreign insurgents are killing Syrian civilians for not being Muslim enough, even crucifying them. Syrians of all faiths reject this external sectarianism, from Saudi sheikhs’ fatwas, and the funding of many of the armed insurgents in Syria.

“We want to elect President Bashar al-Assad. There’s no one like him, nor will there be. The terrorists believe everyone else is an infidel. They’ll kill me, they’ll you, they’ll kill anyone who isn’t with them.”

Voters of all ages and faiths were present, the majority having walked several kilometres from their halted vehicles. A veiled woman with the Syrian flag draped around her shoulders, her daughter wearing a t-shirt with Bashar encircled in a heart, posed for a photo. Young women in sunglasses wearing Bashar t-shirts and carrying ‘like’ posters and Syrian flags passed by.

The energy was of defiance and determination to vote, for Syria, though for most it entailed waiting for hours under the sun in crowded quarters.

Amassed under and beside the bridge nearest the Syrian embassy, the crowd of Syrians waited for their chance to approach the embassy, and ultimately vote.  Such a high voter turn-out meant their wait was long. “I arrived here at 9 am and didn’t get to vote till 4 pm,” said one voter.

Closer to the embassy, those waiting were jubilant, others exhausted but determined.

An older woman from Aleppo sitting on the pavement off to the side of the road said her family had told her to stay home. “I’m ill, they were worried about me. But I will vote even if I die trying to do so.”

Her son, like most in the crowd, was emphatic in his support for President Assad. “The terrorist rebels are in my city. God bless Dr. Bashar al-Assad and the army. We don’t want anyone else.”

Every so often, the Lebanese army would push the crowds back, to which chants praising the Lebanese soldiers broke out.  More dominant were the chants praising Assad and Syria.

“Syria will get back its dignity,” said an engineering student from Tartous. “The ‘revolution’ is a lie, it’s a farce engineered by the West and Saudi Arabia, Qatar,” he said.

“We don’t want anyone else, we love him,” said another man nearby.

Others vied for their chance to praise how Syria was before the manufactured crisis began. “We had free health care, safety, our bread was subsidised. We were happy. We want Syria to be like it was,” was a widely shared sentiment.

Syrian supporters of President Bashar al-Assad at Beirut’s Syrian embassy. Children and elderly alike went to lend their support and cast their votes. Credit: Eva Bartlett/IPS

The chorus of cheers and chanting was punctuated by the thud of the helicopter circling above, tight security to ensure that the elections were not derailed.

“We love him.  I’m Sunni, not Alawi,” Walid, from Raqqa, noted. “They’re afraid our voices will be heard,” he said, regarding the many countries which will not allow Syrians to vote.

The United States – at the forefront of those nations calling for “democratic change” in Syria – did not allow Syrian expatriates a vote. Nor did Canada, France, Germany, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Egypt, Turkey and others.

To allow voters in countries where voting is prohibited, the Syrian government is encouraging Syrians living abroad to fly to Syria and cast their votes.

Roland Dumas, former French Foreign Minister, supported Syria’s elections, and criticised France’s refusal to allow Syrians their right to vote as “ridiculous, politicised and morally unacceptable.”  Dumas is notable for having publicly stated that the chaos is Syria was engineered long before the events of 2011.

“I met with top British officials, who confessed to me that they were preparing something in Syria. They even asked me, although I was no longer minister for foreign affairs, if I would like to participate.”

Syria’s Sana News reported that over 200,000 Syrians voted at 39 Syrian embassies overseas on Wednesday and cited ambassador Ali Abdul Karim as stating that the vast number of votes was, “an expression that the Syrians are proud of their Army and its achievements as well as it is a reflection on the Syrian people’s support to their wise leadership.”

“I’m from Deir Ezzor,” said a voter. “ISIS (Islamic State of Iraq and Syria) is in our area. We want Bashar al-Assad. The guy walks straight,” he said, with a gesture of his hand.

Another man, from Aleppo, reiterated what many already said. “There’s no revolution, absolutely not. People from around the world have pounced on Syria. People who cut off heads … what kind of revolution is that?”

Emphatically pro-Assad, he did say that the two other candidates were respected. “Maher al-Hajjar and Hassan al-Nouri, they are good. But not like Bashar, our hero.”

Formerly a teacher in Aleppo, he now works construction in Lebanon. “In another month or two, I’m returning to Syria, to stay.”

In a Hamra mini-mart, Abu Mohammed, from Sweida, commented on Ahmad Jarba, the candidate backed by Western countries.

“We don’t know him nor where he came from. We want one of us, a Syrian in Syria. People in Syria aren’t blind, we know this has been planned for years. They want to do to Syria what they did to Libya. Today, thousands went to the embassy. Why? Because we know Bashar is the right person. Be sure, if we didn’t want him, he wouldn’t have lasted three years.”

UNFCCC Lighthouse Award Projects Presentation - 4PCCD project leader Vanesa Castan Broto third from the right. Credit: Silvia Giannelli/IPS

By Silvia Giannelli
WARSAW, Nov 22 2013 (IPS)

In Maputo, a port city on the Indian Ocean in Mozambique, 44 percent of the 1.2 million inhabitants live in poverty, making them even more vulnerable to the effects of sea level rise, floods and cyclones. But despite their severe poverty, their day-to-day experience gives them practical knowledge on how to deal with climate change effects.

The Public Private People Partnership for Climate Compatible Development (4PCCD) received the prestigious UNFCCC climate convention Lighthouse Award at the Nov. 11-22 COP19 climate change summit in Warsaw.

The 4PCCD, declared one of the 2013 Lighthouse Activities under the U.N. Momentum for Change initiative, brought together the national government, local authorities and citizens in the construction of strategies to boost resilience against climate change in Maputo.

“Relating to their own experiences, citizens showed they had a good understanding of climate change,” Vanesa Castan Broto, 4PCCD project leader, explained during her presentation at COP19 in Warsaw.

“Thanks to the mediation of local facilitators, local residents could discuss and develop adaptation plans that are feasible and sustainable: organising waste collection, constructing toilet blocks, fixing leaky pipes, etc.”

This is just one example of clashing realities inside the National Stadium, where the 19th Session of the Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) is coming to an end.

While hopes for relevant outcomes from the negotiations are fading away and national governments seem to have reached a stalemate, the success of small, bottom-up projects like the 4PCCD has brought fresh air to the corridors of the conference.

On Thursday, cities and local authorities took the stage in what was the first ‘Cities Day’ ever celebrated during a COP – an initiative by the COP presidency, the UNFCCC secretariat, the city of Warsaw and ICLEI-Local Governments for Sustainability and partners.

In fact, cities were for the first time allowed to participate in the official negotiations, under the “Friends of the Cities” group at UNFCCC.

“We are opening up a dialogue at the national level, between national governments and cities, on what they can collectively do if they all use their maximum efforts, and what the private sector role can be in that process,” David Cadman, president of ICLEI, told IPS.

“Half of the world population lives in cities. By the end of the century 90 percent will, and we are going to build more in the next 40 years than we’ve built in all of humanity,” he continued. “So if we don’t build it right, then it’s going to be a draw on energy, and the form of energy will probably be a dirty one.”

Around 12,000 cities and towns already joined ICLEI’s network and decided to take concrete action on mitigation, adaptation, urban biodiversity, ecological purchasing, and ecomobility.

“When everyone said it was very difficult to have an MRV [measurable, reportable, verifiable] greenhouse gas [GHG] reduction plan, we put it in place,” he said. “And we’ve got a software that cities can now use to measure GHGs and we are seeing really dramatic drops: in 107 municipalities they’re exceeding one percent lowering of GHGs per year.”

Yet, according to Cadman, better coordination among local and national authorities is necessary to obtain greater results: “The most interesting study on this has been done by the city of London, which basically said ‘we can get a 30 percent reduction of CO2 if we use all of our facilities. But if simultaneously we had these actions from the national government, we could get to 60-80 percent’. The limits [of local authorities] depend on what your sources of energy are.”

And ICLEI is not the only network of cities engaged in tackling climate change.
The Climate Alliance (CA) of European Cities with Indigenous Rainforest Peoples is another example of cross-national cooperation, where European member cities and municipalities aim to reduce GHGs at their source.

“When they become a member of CA,” Thomas Brose, from the European Secretariat of CA, explained to IPS, “they commit to the following goals: reduce CO2 emissions by 10 percent every five years, halve per capita emissions by 2030 at the latest [from a 1990 baseline], preserve the tropical rainforests by avoiding the use of tropical timber, and support projects and initiatives of the indigenous partners.”

Their alliance with indigenous communities through the Coordinadora de las Organizaciones Indígenas de la Cuenca Amazónica – COICA (Coordinator of Indigenous Organisations of the Amazon River Basin) is based on an acknowledgment that while industrialised countries are mainly responsible for climate change, its effects will largely impact populations that live in ecologically sensitive areas.

Furthermore, protecting those areas is crucial to reducing the greenhouse effect.

“Destruction of forests worldwide is responsible for about 17 percent of GHG emissions. Effective protection of this environment will only be achieved if we integrate the people who live in these environments into our protection strategies,” Brose told IPS.

At the foundation of these networks is the warning by scientists that time is running out and concrete action is needed if we are to stay below the two degree C threshold of temperature rise and avoid catastrophic consequences. Yet, cities and local governments need to be included in an international framework.

“They need to be included in the legal frameworks on energy, housing or transportation,” Brose underlined. “And they also need financial support programmes to implement and develop their activities.”

Hopefully, the participation of local authorities in the UNFCCC process is a good sign that such inclusion is about to happen.

“Whereas national governments have been somewhat slow in terms of establishing national goals, and in achieving those goals, cities have been establishing and exceeding local goals. Cities can, and are, leading this process,” Cadman concluded.

Gathering for the first time here in Washington, representatives of the newly established human rights commission of the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) stated Thursday that they plan to start their substantive work by the end of the month.

The commission’s priority areas will include women’s and children’s issues, political and minority rights, as well as the Israel-Palestine conflict. Credit: Eva Bartlett/IPS

“In recent months we have outlined a series of priority issues, and we now plan to start our work to highlight those issues in working groups later this month in Jeddah,” the commission’s chair, Siti Ruhaini Dzuhayatin, told journalists in Washington on Thursday.

“In particular, this commission is expected to work on removing misperceptions over the issue of perceived incompatibility between Islam and universal principles of human rights.”

On this latter point, she and others involved with the new body are emphasising that the commission’s mandate is to deal with civil, political, economic, social and cultural rights in the context of universal application – that the commission will not be attempting to apply any hybrid understanding of human rights as filtered through Islam. They also reiterate that the OIC itself is a political, not a religious, body.

Founded in 1969 and representing 56 countries and the Palestinian Authority, the OIC is the second-largest intergovernmental organisation in existence, after the United Nations. The idea of creating an OIC-wide body on human rights first officially surfaced in 2005, when the member states agreed to a new 10-year plan that included the commission’s formation.

That 10-year plan was also a broad attempt to redefine the nature of the OIC, moulded around ideas of moderation and modernisation. In mid-2011, the OIC formally established the new Independent Permanent Human Rights Commission and elected its 18 commissioners, to operate in an advisory role to the OIC Council of Foreign Ministers.

Those members are made up of lawyers, activists, academics and diplomats, and also comprise four women, including the commission’s chair, an Indonesian sociology scholar. Each of the OIC’s three main areas – Asia, Africa and the Arab world – will be allotted six commissioners.

On Thursday, Siti Ruhaini Dzuhayatin reported that the commission had spent the past year formulating its terms of reference and rules of procedure. An important part of that process has been to agree on priority areas, which will include women’s and children’s issues, political and minority rights, as well as the Israel-Palestine conflict.

Over the four decades of the OIC’s tenure, this latter topic has been a defining one for the body, now described as a standing agenda item.

“This will not be from a political point of view, however, but rather from the human rights perspective,” she noted. “For instance, how the conflict affects the lives of people, of women and children in particular, in their right to development, their right to peace, security and education.”

Advisory capacity

Beyond these broad areas, relatively little detail has yet been decided upon regarding the processes by which the commissioners choose which issues to focus upon. Rizwan Sheikh, the executive director of the commission’s interim secretariat in Jeddah, told IPS that the commission will receive agenda items from above and below, meaning from the OIC Council of Foreign Ministers and from grassroots concerns.

The commission’s autonomy and independence have clearly been a defining concern for those engaged in the new body, as they remain for many outside observers. As currently mandated, each commissioner will be nominated by his or her home country and then voted upon, through a secret ballot, by the Council of Foreign Ministers.

But Sheikh emphasises that it would be up to the commission’s collective discretion to decide on how and when to proceed with its agenda.

“The governing statute provides the commission with a degree of independence that has never been seen in the OIC’s work over the last four decades – for the first time in its history, the OIC has created a body of independent experts,” Sheikh says.

“Independence is further ensured by the fact that the nature of the body is of an advisory capacity. Had this not been the case, there would have been certain political considerations that could have crept into the work of this commission. But the very fact that it’s an advisory body emboldens the commission … to act in a very candid and unvarnished fashion in rendering its opinions.”

Once it starts work in late December, some of the issues on which the commission could presumably be offering such opinions, Sheikh suggests, could include violence against women, child labour, children in armed conflict, and more sensitive topics such as early marriage, right to education and the like.

At the two preliminary sessions held by the commission this year, the recent violence against Rohingya Muslims in Myanmar’s west, the bloodshed in Syria and the Quran-burning in Afghanistan were each noted as especially urgent.

So too was a recent OIC-sponsored U.N. resolution against religious intolerance, though the latter action sparked initial concern among human rights groups when the OIC pushed for a global ban on “blasphemy”, a stance it later reversed.

Wait and watch

For now, the commissioners have decided that one of their first moves will be to request each OIC member state to forward all relevant national legislation touching on the commission’s priority areas, so the commission can begin to examine and rank current practice.

Still, the body’s budget – to be provided by OIC member states – is not yet publicly known, and much of the commission’s efficacy will undoubtedly hinge on this single piece of information, which will also offer insight into just how active the member states are willing to allow the commission to be.

“We very much hope this body will be both independent and able to have the means to speak out to OIC governments and reaffirm universal human rights,” Joelle Fiss, a senior associate with Human Rights First, a Washington-based advocacy group, told IPS.

Like Fiss, many observers are withholding judgement on the prospects of the new commission.

“Any time you have a well-respected international body like the OIC taking up these issues, it is significant,” Ibrahim Hooper, a spokesperson for the Council on American-Islamic Relations, the United States’ largest Muslim civil liberties group, told IPS.

“We’ll see where it goes from here, but for now it deserves to be encouraged by U.S. government officials and others. Eventually, of course, we will need to evaluate the commission’s work to see that it’s addressing issues of particular concern to the Muslim world.”

“I waited from 10 am till 5 pm for my wife to cross from Egypt. She was among many hundreds who were coming into Gaza. Some waited since 6 am, some since the day before.”

The Rafah crossing. Credit: Eva Bartlett/IPS.

Jaber (who requested anonymity out of fear of future restrictions on his exiting Gaza) was relieved when, a few days before Eid holiday began on Aug. 19, his wife was able to cross from Egypt into the Gaza Strip. During the three days of Eid, the Rafah border crossing was closed in both directions.

“Of course I was happy that my wife got through, but I was also disgusted at how Palestinians are forced to wait for, or are denied, the right to exit and enter our country.”

On Aug. 25, the border opened anew, temporarily easing the worries of Palestinians in Gaza who feared the opposite outcome: indefinite closure.

Maher Abu Sabha, head of Gaza’s border crossings, explained the reason for such worries.

“On Aug. 5, unidentified gunman attacked an Egyptian military checkpoint near the Rafah crossing, killing 16 Egyptian soldiers. Immediately, many Israeli and Egyptian journalists wrote that Palestinians had committed the attack.”

Also immediately after the attacks – the perpetrators of which remain unknown – Egypt ordered the Rafah crossing closed.

“Just over a week later, near the end of Ramadan, the border reopened for three days for humanitarian cases needing to travel to or via Egypt, and for Palestinians needing to return to Gaza,” said Abu Sabha.

With no clear border procedure yet defined by Egyptian authorities, Palestinians in Gaza are wondering whether the border crossing will remain less restrictive, as it became after Mohammed Mursi was elected Egypt’s new president, or whether it will devolve to the Mubarak days of heavy restrictions and constant closures.

Abu Sabha says nothing is yet clear. “We’re still waiting for confirmation from Egyptian authorities on what exactly the procedure will be at the Rafah crossing.” Yet, he says that relations between Gaza’s Palestinian authorities and those of the Mursi government are very good.

“Prime Minister Haniyeh (Ismail Haniyeh, prime minister from the Hamas party in Gaza) has visited with Mr. Mursi. They have good relations and there is talk of positive developments for the border and of President Mursi’s promise that Rafah crossing will be open 12 hours every day,” says Abu Sabha.

After Hamas was democratically elected in 2006, and in tandem with implementation of the Israeli-led total siege of Gaza, the Rafah crossing border procedures became as trying and impossible as when Israel physically and militarily occupied the Gaza Strip.

Israeli rights group Gisha reported that from June 2007 to March 2009, Rafah crossing was closed permanently “except for random and limited openings by Egypt, which meet only 3 percent of the needs of the residents of the Gaza Strip to enter and leave.”

“During the hardest years of the ongoing siege of Gaza, Rafah was closed indefinitely. When it did sporadically open, only at most 400 could leave,” says Maher Abu Sabha. “Mubarak was one of the key reasons for Gaza’s closure by the Egyptian side. Since he has been replaced, more people have been able to cross in and out of Gaza via Rafah.

“The Rafah crossing is like no other,” says Abu Sabha. “Other borders around the world, and even other Egyptian borders, are open 24 hours a day, seven days a week, no holidays. But Rafah closes Fridays and holidays and is only open from 10 am to 6 pm. It also differs from other borders because it is Palestinians’ only real door to the outside world.”

In 2000, Israel closed Gaza’s sole airport; Israeli bombings in 2001 destroyed it.

Under international law, Palestinians, like any people, have the right to leave and enter their country, “a basic right, which the parties who exert control over Rafah crossing are obligated to respect and safeguard,” Gisha notes.

Mazen Aiysh, 35, en route to Jordan to visit family, reiterates Abu Sabha’s words. “Our situation is different from anyone else’s, that’s obvious. Any other nationality can come and go as they like, but we can’t. It’s my right to leave my country to see my family, to travel, to go other places.”

Also exiting, Iman Salim, 58, says her return home to Jordan was delayed. “I was supposed to leave before today but wasn’t able to because the border closed. The attack that happened in Egypt has nothing to do with us, but we were punished nonetheless.”

Still waiting for the final word from Egypt, Abu Sabha is optimistic. “I hope that the Rafah crossing is opened for 24 hours a day, like borders anywhere else in the world, and that goods which are banned under the Israeli siege may be permitted to enter and exit through Rafah.”

Although happy to be reunited with his wife, Jaber does not share the optimism. “All of this control and these political games are to make our lives difficult and to destroy our will to live. No one actually wants to solve our problem.”

By David Elkins and - -
WASHINGTON, Mar 7 2012 (IPS)

A new policy paper published earlier this week by the U.S. Campaign to End the Israeli Occupation documents a number of cases occurring over the past decade in which weapons and ammunition produced and financed by the U.S. have been used to kill unarmed Palestinians and U.S. citizens.

For many survivors of the last Israeli war on Gaza, time has not healed their wounds, physical or emotional. Credit: Eva Bartlett/IPS

“U.S. weapons provided to Israel at taxpayer expense make the U.S. complicit in Israel’s human rights abuses of Palestinians living under Israel’s 44-year military occupation of the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and Gaza Strip and defeat U.S. foreign policy objectives of halting Israeli settlement expansion, ending Israeli military occupation, and establishing a just and lasting Israeli-Palestinian peace,” Ruebner added.

Between the years 2000 and 2009, the U.S. transferred “more than 670 million weapons, rounds of ammunition, and related equipment”, according to the report.

During the same period, “Israel killed at least 2,969 unarmed Palestinians, including 1,128 children, often with U.S. weapons in violation of the Foreign Assistance Act and Arms Export Control Act.”

The Foreign Assistance Act, signed into law in 1961, stipulates that “no security assistance may be provided to any country the government of which engages in a consistent pattern of gross violations of internationally recognized human rights.”

Several U.S. administrations have sanctioned or withheld funding from countries, including Israel, that violated laws such as the Foreign Assistance Act. But according to the report, official inquires and investigations into U.S. military aid to Israel over recent decades have been met with growing resistance from groups both within and outside of the U.S. government.

Although more expensive weapons systems such as tanks and aircraft make up the bulk of purchasing contracts made between the Israeli government and U.S. manufacturers, small arms and ammunition purchases account for the largest number of deaths.

The report notes evidence that the Israeli Defense Forces load some of their guns with high-velocity tear gas canisters and rubber-coated bullets manufactured in the U.S. – a frequent culprit in deaths throughout the Palestinian territories.

“From fiscal year 2000 to 2009, the State Department licensed – and U.S. taxpayers funded – the delivery of more than 595,000 tear gas canisters and other ‘riot control’ equipment to the Israeli military, valued at more than 20.5 million (dollars),” according to the report.

In a 2007 memorandum of understanding, the U.S. pledged 30 billion dollars in military assistance to Israel between 2009 and 2018 – a 25-percent increase in average annual military aid over previous years. Israel will receive roughly 3.1 billion dollars in U.S. military aid for fiscal year 2012.

Speaking at a conference held at the Center for Palestine on Monday, Ruebner argued that, apart from the seeming contradiction of the U.S.’s pledge to protect human rights for everyone, military aid to Israel imperils U.S. strategic interests in the region.

It also defers much-needed U.S. tax revenues away from domestic programmes, and contributes to a positive feedback loop that conditions the fulfillment of U.S. goals in the region, such as a negotiated, two-state settlement, on even more military aid that, in turn, is used to continue the Israeli occupation of Palestinian territories, he said.

Citing data obtained for the U.S. Internal Revenue Service and Census Bureau, the report places the quantity of U.S. military aid in a larger context.

“With the same amount of money that the U.S. gives each year to fund weapons for Israel, the federal government could instead fund affordable housing vouchers for 350,000 low-income families, or green jobs training for 500,000 unemployed workers, or early reading programs for 900,000 at-risk students, or primary health care to 24 million people without insurance,” according to the report.

“Far from being a strategic benefit to the U.S., (military aid to Israel) is actually a growing political, economic and strategic liability,” Ruebner said.

The release of the policy paper coincided with the annual conference of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, a lobbying group, in Washington that included speeches by senior U.S. government officials, including President Barack Obama.

U.S. Secretary of Defence Leon Panetta reaffirmed the U.S.’s security commitment to Israel, including financing for a missile defence and fighter-jet weapons systems in a speech at conference.

“This is an ironclad pledge which says that the United States will provide whatever support is necessary so that Israel can maintain military superiority over any state or coalition of states, as well as non-state actors,” Panetta told attendees.

On Monday, U.S. Congressmen Eric Cantor and Steny Hoyer introduced legislation that will “expand Israel’s authority to make purchases under the foreign military financing program,” and require the president to report to Congress on “actions to improve the process relating to Israel’s purchase of F-35 aircraft to improve cost efficiency and timely delivery”.

“Today, my friend Democratic Whip Steny Hoyer and I are introducing legislation to reaffirm our enduring commitment to the U.S.-Israel strategic relationship and to ensure that threats to Israeli and American security will be answered with strength,” Congressman Cantor stated in a press release on Monday.

“It is a bond that reflects the shared values of our people and our shared interests in preserving stability in the Middle East…It is a reminder that support for Israel is not and should never be a partisan issue,” Congressman Hoyer added.

Ruebner emphasised several steps U.S. lawmakers could take to prevent additional human rights violations, most notably the enactment of laws that would leverage U.S. military aid to freeze Israeli settlement building in the West Bank and end the blockade of the Gaza Strip.

Excerpt:

“During hard times, we have survived off olive oil,” says Ahmed Sourani from the Palestinian Agricultural Relief Committee. “During the last war many people who couldn’t leave their homes had only bread and olive oil to sustain them for long periods.”

An olive nursery set up by in Gaza to restore decimated cultivation. Credit: Eva Bartlett/IPS.

Even during the first Intifadah (Palestinian uprising against the Israeli occupation), olives and olive oil were vital to survival. “They enabled many thousands of very poor Palestinian families to survive,” recalls Sourani. “When the Israeli army imposes curfews on us, it is our main food source. Most students take za’atar (wild thyme) and olive oil sandwiches to school for their lunch.”

This source of sustenance has been targeted by Israel over years. In November 2008, Oxfam reported that since 2000, 112,000 olive trees had been destroyed in the Gaza Strip.

“According to Israeli authorities, the ‘buffer zone’, an Israeli-imposed no-go zone prohibiting Palestinians from their land, is 300 metres from the Gaza-Israel Green Line border,” says Sourani. “But in reality it extends well beyond 600 metres, encompassing 30 percent of Gaza’s agricultural land.”

The UN cites areas of up to two kilometres into Gaza from the border rendered inaccessible due to Israel’s policy of shooting, shelling and intrusions into Gaza’s borderlands.

According to the Palestinian Agricultural Relief Committee (PARC), more than 42 percent of the 175,000 dunams (one dunam is roughly 1,000 square metres) of cultivable land in the Strip has been destroyed during Israeli invasions and operations. The World Health Organisation reports that the last Israeli war on Gaza alone destroyed up to 60 percent of the agricultural industry.

Despite the systematic campaign of destroying olive trees and rendering farmland inaccessible, Sourani says that “some areas of Gaza still have olive trees that are hundreds of years old.” These are particularly in Zaytoun, Sheyjayee and Tuffah neighbourhoods.

The comparatively insignificant number of ancient trees aside, the average age of a tree is around five years, Sourani says.

In the face of the Strip’s increasingly barren farmlands, Gaza’s Ministry of Agriculture now plans non- violent resistance to Israel’s decimation of the Palestinian agricultural industry.

Ahmad Fatayar from the ministry says that over the years including and following the Israeli occupation of the Gaza Strip, Israeli-influenced policies and economic incentives were designed to force Palestinian farmers away from growing trees on their land towards working in greenhouses or as labourers in Israel.

After Israeli bulldozing of Palestinian farmland, Palestinians found it difficult if not impossible to cultivate their olive trees.

“We have established an olive tree arboretum in order to cultivate one million olive trees throughout the Gaza Strip, particularly in the buffer zone which has been so largely destroyed,” said Fatayar.

Fatayar lists a surprisingly vast variety of benefits and uses of olives: “They can be cultivated in streets, school yards, and in front of houses and can endure severe dryness, salty water, can be stored for long periods, and are used in various industries like food, animal feed, coal, compost, and medicines.”

For an average Palestinian family of eight members, he adds, “two or three olive trees suffice to provide the oil and olives needed for yearly consumption.”

Their practical nutritional and economic aspects aside, olive trees are important for many more reasons, says Ahmed Sourani. “Palestinians also consider the olive tree a symbol of the land, of independence, of peace and dignity.

“We use olive oil for everything, even for the hair. When we are sick, we rub olive oil on our bodies. It is even a source of cosmetics: we use it to make kohl, a non-toxic version of eyeliner. Olive tree leaves are medicinal and can be used in pharmaceuticals and as a tea to treat diabetes and stomach pain.”

To meet the needs of the disproportionate number of Palestinians living in the Gaza Strip (1.6 million in 365 square kilometres), much of Gaza’s olives and oil needs were previously met by farmers from the occupied West Bank.

An Oxfam 2010 report notes that “the Israeli imposed blockade on the Gaza Strip has affected the import of olives and olive oil from the West Bank considerably.” It notes an increase of imports of “oil that was reduced in price because it had reached its expiry date.”

“Now we only get a small amount from the West Bank, the rest coming from Syria, Lebanon, Egypt and Spain,” says Sourani. “But we still prefer the olive oil of Palestine: Surri, the favourite olive tree and oil, originally from Roman times.”

Like olive trees, date palms hold special historical, nutritional, economic, and cultural importance for Palestinians. “They are an important source of nutrition, are very productive and don’t cost much to raise,” says Sourani.

“Date palms can be cultivated in only one or two square metres,” notes Ahmad Fatayar. “A single date palm tree can produce from up to 200 kilograms of dates.”

The Ministry of Agriculture’s plan for self-sufficiency includes the nurturing of date palm trees.

“One seedling will about seven years later yield a fruit-bearing palm tree and another ten seedlings,” says Fatayar. “Ten seedlings will seven years later yield ten productive palms and 100 seedlings.”

According to the Ministry’s estimates, by 2020 there will be roughly three million seedlings, a significant number of which will be productive.

The benefits of successful date palm include food (molasses, sweets and oil), textiles (furniture and cloth), agriculture (animal feed), and paper.

Yousef walks barefoot into a children’s room with four beds and points to a snoopy-blanketed bed by the window. “That’s where I sleep,” he says. A red remote-controlled toy racecar sits atop a new mini-laptop. The closet is full of clothes, a pot of soup simmering on the gas range in the spacious kitchen, and the wooden dining table is piled with seasonal fruit.

The Amal Institute for Orphans cares for 120 of Gaza City's orphans. Credit: Eva Bartlett/IPS.

His home, one of 14 in the village hosting 111 orphans, is new, has plenty of natural light and is larger than the cramped refugee camp homes in which more than 75 percent of Gaza’s population lives.

Yousef, his brother, and his younger sister are among what Al Jazeera news cites as the Gaza Strip’s 53,000 orphans. Over 2,000 children more were orphaned during the 2008-2009 Israeli war on Gaza. An orphan here is defined as a child who has lost his father or both parents, as men are traditionally the income-generators in Gaza.

Yousef’s father died of natural causes, and his mother lost a leg after being injured during the war on Gaza. So Yousef and his siblings were more apt to join the increasing numbers of children selling trinkets in Gaza’s streets, or scouring dumps and streets for sellable recyclables.

“The family was already very poor. Now his mother has no income and no way to provide for her children,” says Samar, an employee at the SOS Rafah village. The children would not have finished school, she says, let alone have been cared for adequately.

With donations from groups and individual sponsors, children like Yousef are able to stay at the SOS village where they attend a nearby regular school, learn life skills for their future independence, and have their university tuition paid. Their medical needs are met, and they are encouraged to mingle with non- orphan children and to visit their real families on weekends.

“At any time their mothers can visit them here at the village,” says Samar. The need for such sponsorship, whether home-based or institute-based, is immense. Some programmes, like the Dar el Yateem association, sponsor orphans who remain in their families’ homes. With headquarters in Deir al Balah, Dar el Yateem has eight branches throughout the Strip which provide child sponsorship, transportation to schools, school uniforms and study materials, and daily meals for orphan children.

During Muslim holidays, the association gives food to the orphans and other impoverished families and organises activities for the children throughout the year.

Other Islamic charities throughout Gaza fill similar roles of basic child sponsorship and emergency assistance.

The needs of Gaza’s orphans have increased so dramatically over the years that many more international charities and NGOs are taking active roles in child sponsorship, extending the scope to widowed mothers.

“One of the problems we face is that people sometimes focus only on orphans whose parents were martyred by Israeli attacks,” says Hazem Sarraj, chairman of the Amal Institute for Orphans in Gaza City.

“But we have many more orphans whose parents died of natural causes or from reasons related to the siege imposed on Gaza. Many people in Gaza suffer from depression, due to our situation here. Some die from it.”

Other siege-related deaths include patients denied exit permits for treatment outside of Gaza, accidents and fires related to misuse of generators during the daily electricity outages, and men and youths killed in tunnel collapses or electrocution by poor wiring in the narrow tunnels.

“We have 120 orphans, ages five to 18, who live at our institute,” says Sarraj. “They eat and sleep here, go to regular schools, and visit their families on weekends.”

Until many countries cut ties with the Gaza Strip after Israel imposed its siege on Gaza in early 2006, the Amal Institute, established in 1949, was functioning well and expanding its programmes.

“All development in our institute has stopped since the siege,” says Sarraj. “The buildings we currently have we built with money from the Islamic bank and foreign NGOs and donors, before the blockade.”

The institute ensures the orphans’ needs are met financially, educationally, medically and socially. But Sarraj worries about the institute’s funding.

“Our means are very limited. Do you know what it takes to care for 120 orphans, to provide them food, clothes, medicine, and everything they need? We have to pay our employees’ salaries as well. We are independent, not political, but the siege is punishing us, our orphans. We used to receive more donations before the siege, but now we get very little.”

The institute continues to run under the siege, providing quality care and offering extras like the chance for orphans to study martial arts and music, and opening day programmes to more than 500 non-orphan children in the city. Like most societies helping orphans, counseling is given to address traumas Gaza’s children, particularly orphans, endure.

“Until now we are still suffering from the last war on Gaza,” says Hazem Sarraj. “We are living as though in a bad dream.”

Excerpt:

For the women who participated in the political and social revolutions during the Arab Spring in 2011, there is a significant opportunity to enact real change for women’s roles and relationships in the region – and also the possibility things could go the other way.

For Palestinian women, the uprisings are nothing new. Credit: Eva Bartlett/IPS

Such was the focus of a U.S. Senate Foreign Relations joint subcommittee hearing in Washington Wednesday, in which witnesses testified about the role of women’s participation in the Arab Spring, and the outlook for the future.

The subcommittee on International Operations and Organizations, Human Rights, Democracy and Global Women’s Issues is the first of its kind for Congress, and met with the intention of recognising and defining this moment of transition.

“It’s not every day that you’re negotiating a new social contract, that you’re creating a new constitution,” said Manal Omar of the U.S. Institute of Peace, who commented not as a member of USIP but as a witness in her testimony before the Senate subcommittee.

Omar stressed that the urgency to solve the myriad of problems facing countries following the Arab Spring could actually be a detriment if all social groups are not included in the process.

“If this process is fast-forwarded, women, minorities (and) other groups who are marginalised politically will be missing from the decision-making table,” she said.

The role of women in the Arab Spring has been heralded as a key to the success of the social movements, and has been recognised even by the international community.

The 2011 Nobel Peace Prize was awarded to Yemeni citizen and journalist Tawakkol Karman, called the “iron woman” of the Arab Spring, who shares the award jointly with two other women, each of whom demonstrate an element of establishing women’s rights and full participation.

“It is a time of critical opportunity for women and girls in the Middle East and North Africa, but it also a time of serious risk for women’s rights,” said Mahnaz Afkhami, founder and president of the Women’s Learning Partnership, during her testimony at the hearing. “There is a very real possibility that women will not only be marginalised but also lose ground here.”

The issues facing women in the participating Arab Spring countries range from access to voting, property and family rights, and educational and economic opportunities.

Afhkami, whose organisation is a partnership of women’s rights activists and non-governmental organisations in 20 countries, said that women were facing challenges rooted in history.

“Traditional social and cultural norms have relegated Middle Eastern women,” Afkhami said in her testimony. “They often lack the social, economic, and political power they need to overcome antagonistic groups and aggressive policy.”

Witnesses said that although the push for democratic reform and the inclusion process for women was a significant step, there were immediate concerns of a push backwards in the fight for women’s rights, and the effects could be detrimental in the long-term.

“Despite the rhetoric of democracy that drove the reform movement in Egypt, the large numbers of women who played key roles during the Tahrir Square protests, and the longstanding networks of women’s civil society organisations in the country, no women were included in the country’s constitutional reform committee,” Afkhami said.

The most comprehensive effort to create an inclusive policy for women on a global scale, addressed at the Senate subcommittee hearing, has been the United Nations Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW), adopted by the U.N. General Assembly in 1979, which works to both define discrimination and set guidelines for nations to impose equality-driven legislation.

“No country can benefit if it leaves half of its country behind,” said Melanne Verveer, ambassador-at-large for global women’s issues at the U.S. Department of State, in testimony at the hearing.

Thus far, CEDAW has been ratified by 187 out of 193 U.N. member countries, with the exceptions being Iran, Somalia, Sudan, two South Pacific island nations, and – some argue the most symbolic – the U.S.

While the Barack Obama administration has come out in favour of CEDAW and its mission, the treaty has yet to be brought to the Senate floor for a vote since 1980, despite the U.S. playing a role in its drafting.

“The U.S. is schizophrenic when it comes to treaties – it works on creating them, but then has problems ratifying them,” Kraus told IPS, who said that failure of the U.S. to ratify CEDAW could hurt its credibility when advocating for women’s rights in other countries.

“U.S. ratification would provide credibility to U.S. diplomats when they urge other nations to abide by commitments they made when they ratified CEDAW,” he said.

CEDAW’s design is context-specific – the convention permits each country to determine when and how to bring its policies in line with ending discrimination against women.

“It’s up to each country as to how to implement (CEDAW),” June Zeitlin, director of the CEDAW Education Project at the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, told IPS. “The programmes we have to combat violence against women may be different than another country, but protecting women against violence is a universal right.”

The adjustments that each country makes upon enacting CEDAW, or the inclusion of reservations, understandings and declarations (RUDs), are present in most enactments of the treaty, experts said, but that the ultimate goal was equality without reservations.

“Once governments have adopted the treaty, women use it as a tool to improve the status of women in their country,” Kraus told IPS. “In Morocco and Tunisia, political pressure resulted in their reservations being scrapped – it’s an evolutionary process.”

By Eva Bartlett
SHEIK RAJLEEN, Gaza, Aug 17 2011 (IPS)

It’s a sunny Gaza morning and although a work day, the beach along Sheik Rajleen has enough people on it to keep Gaza’s small number of lifeguards busy and alert. From a simple, raised wooden hut, a team of three monitor the sea, periodically calling out to swimmers below to move to calmer waters.

In the face of the siege, Gaza's lifeguards have created their own rescue equipment. Credit: Eva Bartlett/IPS.

“I’m a fisher, my father is a fisher, and my grandfather was a fisher. Most of the lifeguards in Gaza are from fishing families, so they know how to swim well. But we also take training courses in first aid and in sea rescue from the Civil Defence.”

In the besieged Gaza Strip, under siege since early 2006 after Hamas was democratically elected, the sea is one of few options for recreation and relaxation. It also offers a means of cooling down when the Strip endures its daily power cuts.

“Most people don’t have the chance to take swimming lessons here. If they had money, they could learn, but most don’t have enough money to feed their families, let alone spend on swimming lessons,” says Basha.

This, says Abu Assam Masharawi, another lifeguard at Basha’s station, is the main cause of swimming accidents in Gaza.

“When we see people who obviously can’t swim, we call them in close to the shore. No one has drowned this year during life guard hours.”

However there have been at least three drowning incidents in the Gaza Strip this year.

“The danger is swimming after hours. Some people prefer to swim at night, like women who come together to swim when men aren’t around, or people who swim after work,” says Masharawi.

“We tell people not to swim after lifeguard hours, but not everyone listens,” says Abu Nidal, 44, at a lifeguard station a few hundred metres south along the Sheik Rajleen beach.

“Last night, after 9 pm when lifeguards were off-duty, a man went out too far. He didn’t know how to swim and he drowned.”

Aside from public safety awareness, the greatest obstacles Gaza’s lifeguards face are siege-constructed.

“I’m trained in scuba diving,” says Masharawi. “But we don’t have oxygen tanks, they are forbidden by the Israelis for security reasons, under the Oslo accords. We didn’t have rescue equipment either. But I designed some based on one an American friend brought me. Now we have these basic rescue floats, at least.”

As with every aspect of life in the Strip, the regular power cuts affect the lifeguards’ work.

“Our megaphones don’t work when the power cuts, and we can’t shout loud enough to warn people swimming to come in if we feel they’re in danger,” he says as another lifeguard blasts on a plastic whistle and gestures with waving arms for swimmers to move southward away from higher waves.

The fact that the lifeguards even have the microphones in the first place is due to the tunnels from Egypt.

“The microphone normally costs 500 shekels (180 dollars), but because we had to bring it through the tunnels, we paid 1,300 shekels,” notes Abu Nidal.

“We don’t have jet-skis, which would allow us to reach people in trouble quickly. We are forbidden from having jet-skis under the Oslo accords,” says Masharawi.

“We have a motorboat, but only have enough fuel to run it on Fridays, when the beach is busiest,” he says. “Anyway, one boat for three kilometers isn’t enough. If we need to reach a victim two kilometeres from where the boat is, there might not be enough time.”

The latter is a problem of funding, says Masharawi, as is the insufficient number of trained lifeguards along Sheik Rajleen. Although speaking of his district, the municipality of Sheik Rajleen, Masharawi’s comments apply to the different municipalities along the coast, all facing similar constraints under the siege.

“In the Sheik Rajleen beach region, about three kilometers, there are 10 lifeguard stations, which is a good ratio,” he explains. “But we don’t have enough lifeguards at each station. We need more support: funding and training, it’s been cut under the siege on Gaza. Many of our lifeguards are volunteers,” says Masharawi, himself a volunteer.

But despite the many siege-related obstacles, Masharawi and his colleagues love their work.

“I once saved four people who had swum too far out. Then I realised there was a fifth further out who had gone under. Thanks to God, I was able to fish him out and he was fine,” says Masharawi.

As with Gaza’s medics and Civil Defence, most take pride in their work, humanitarian work which is furthered rendered difficult by the impossible situation of Gaza under siege and regular Israeli attacks.

“Lifeguarding is work for our community and work for God. I love it and feel it is my duty,” says Masharawi. “The sea is one of the only places people in Gaza can relax. It needs to be a safe place.”

Excerpt:

By Eva Bartlett
GAZA CITY, Aug 12 2011 (IPS)

It’s a weekday morning, the beach is yet to fill with crowds seeking a break from the heat, but already the odd-jobbers are at work selling toys, clothes and food along the coast.

Mohammed Daowul has found a new trade. Credit: Eva Bartlett/IPS.

“I have two young children and no other work, so I do this every day. Usually I earn around 40 shekels (13 dollars) a day, but Fridays are better because so many come to the sea.”

Before Israel imposed the siege on Gaza in mid-2006, options for work were more plentiful. But Palestinian construction workers and other labourers who worked in Israel have been looking for new work since borders closed a decade ago.

Unemployment levels in the Strip have continually risen for years and currently soar at over 45 percent.

Abu Kass, one of those former workers, sought anything to replace his lost income. “Construction work was better, but there’s no chance for that here,” he says.

Following Abu Kass along the beach, Mohammed Daowul, 28, likewise brings his horse and cart full of cheap plastic inflatable toys beachside everyday.

“I’ve done this for the last ten years. I used to work as a tailor in Gaza City, when we could still export clothes to Israel or the West Bank,” he says. “But the closed borders and siege prevent both export and import of the materials I need. I already had a horse, so I started using it for work.”

The inflatables sell for between five to 10 shekels, the slushy drink for a shekel a cup.

“Life here is difficult for everyone now. Even just some years ago parents would buy all their children toys at the beach. Now if they have many kids they just buy one toy for all them. They can’t afford more than that,” says Daowul.

“I earned more as a tailor, and the cost of living was lower. Even if I make the same 50 shekels a day now that I made years ago, everything is more expensive now. What I earn isn’t enough for my three kids, wife and myself, not to mention my horse.”

In Gaza’s municipal park, Issa Ghoul, 19, sells chips and chocolates to park-goers to support his family. “I quit school and started working when I was 14. My father died when I was young and no one else works in my family,” says Ghoul.

Many children younger than Ghoul zig-zag between cars at traffic stops selling one-shekel items like gum, cheap chocolates and fresh mint in order to add to their families’ incomes.

“I can’t find any other jobs,” says Ghoul. “My mother is ill, my three-year-old sister is ill, what can I do but hope people will buy from me?”

Most Palestinians take pride in their education, and Ghoul is no different, except that his impossible situation denied him the opportunity to study. “I would have liked to have finished school like everyone, I would have liked to have been a teacher.”

The Jundi park in downtown Gaza is at any time of day a constant buzz of tea and snack sellers seeing opportunity in the lounging crowds.

At one corner of the park, Mohammed Awaida, 15, from the Zeitoun district of Gaza City and his younger brother sell plastic cell phone cases strung from an improvised rack.

“We started this just the other day, for the month of Ramadan. We come in the mornings and our father works here in the evening,” says Awaida.

“I like this work, it helps my family. Ramadan is an expensive month, and we need to buy new clothes for school after Ramadan.”

At an entrance halfway through the park, Abu Fares, 38, sells coffee, tea and cigarettes from a barebones table, working from morning to evening. Formerly a construction worker in Israel, this is now his only source of income.

“We’ve got ten people in our family. I’ve done this for seven years and now my eldest son, Feres, helps me,” he says, nodding at his ten-year-old son.

Despite his demotion in work and salary, Abu Feres has kept his sense of humour. “Thankfully I don’t have to buy a permit to put my table here. If we were not a country under occupation I’d probably have to have a permit.”

Abu Mohammed, a Beit Hanoun man in his forties, peddles the popular slushy drink, barad, from a cooler in his bicycle basket.

On the beachside, another man in his thirties stacks his bicycle with swimming inflatables as he pushes through the sand on a daily quest to earn a living.

Children and adults alike sift through dumpsters and litter-ridden lots, collecting water bottles and other recyclable goods in large cloth sacks.

Abu Sobheh, 42, is another who formerly worked in Israel. “I am a mechanic and worked all over Israel and the West Bank. I made good money then for my skills. When the borders closed I just worked our land. But it’s been bulldozed many times by the Israeli army, so I do whatever I can now to earn money for my ten children,” he says.

Throughout the Strip, similar scenes play out: children taking on responsibilities of adults to help their families, adults reverting from skilled labour to doing nearly anything to bring in a salary.

The adults remember when times were less choking, when borders were open and an economy was allowed. The children are learning what to expect from lives under occupation.

Excerpt:

By Eva Bartlett
GAZA CITY, Aug 9 2011 (IPS)

On any given evening, Gaza’s small downtown pedestrian area, the Jundi, is crowded with adults and children. Many are fleeing the heat of their homes during the regular power cuts. The majority are there for want of something to do, even if that means merely sitting on the park’s simple concrete benches to talk and sip tea.

Short of passengers who can pay, a toy train still trundles on in Gaza. Credit: Eva Bartlett/IPS.

The owners of the carriage rides say their idea came from the old days.

“Four years ago, my father saw a horse and carriage in an old film and it reminded him of Palestine in the past when horses and carriages were common,” says Ramadan Al, 21, a blacksmith.

Al and his 13 siblings became jobless when Israel imposed its extensive siege on the Gaza Strip in 2006. The family needed a new source of income.

“We used to make doors, windows, whatever people wanted, but after the borders closed, steel stopped coming into Gaza, and we couldn’t do much with the steel we had because of the constant power cuts,” Al says.

“Since we already had horses and knew how to work with metal, we decided to design a leisure carriage.”

The project was an immediate success. “We had a lot of work right away, because it was a novelty. People started asking us to deliver couples to their wedding halls.”

But now, a few years later, work is not as steady. “The novelty has worn off a little,” Ramadan Al admits. On an average evening, ten families ride the carriages; on a weekend, half as many more.

“The problem is that people who have money are saving it for gifts and donations during the month of Ramadan, and for the new school year,” says Al.

“We charge five shekels to circle around the park, but when I see families who don’t have the money but whose children want to ride, we take them without fare, so the kids can enjoy themselves a little.”

Al says he preferred the blacksmith work, but was left with no choice under the Israeli siege but to craft a new source of income. “As difficult as the siege is and our lives in Gaza have become, we always find a means to continue living, despite the worst conditions.”

With a similar desire to create something novel for Gaza’s Palestinians, Gazan engineers created their version of a children’s train.

Made largely from scraps and spare car parts, the red and white, two-car one-“engine” train cruises from the Jundi along Gaza’s main streets churning music and giving children a ride for just two shekels. Idyllic scenes of green pastures dress the passenger cars as Gaza’s children escape the bleak reality of grey cement, bombed buildings, and bulldozed farmland.

Gaza City’s municipal park offers little other than dehydrated greenery and a different place to while away the hot afternoon hours. The fountain is waterless, the plants stunted. The children’s play area has a number of short plastic slides and a swing-less swing.

With a dearth of leisure options to choose from, families still visit the park, friends take breaks together and children hunt for a place to play.

In summer, Gaza’s coast is the most congested leisure venue, families seeking cool and change. Most families come equipped with thermoses of tea and picnic spreads. Children swim, fly kites, and play football, women wade and cool off in the low waves, and young men sit together with tea and tobacco water pipes.

Yet while the sea itself doesn’t cost anything, getting there does and not everyone can afford the excursion. Jaber Rjila, from a repeatedly bulldozed farming area in southeastern Gaza, is among those who rarely go to the beach, even though it is just a half hour ride from his home.

“To take my six kids and my wife, it’d cost nearly 200 shekels just for transportation and a simple picnic. We can’t afford that, so we just try to enjoy ourselves on our land here.

“Our kids might have a school trip once a year to the sea or a park and for half a day they get to play. But that’s not enough, it’s not like elsewhere where there is safety, where there is work, and children have places like amusement parks.”

Slightly south of the Gaza harbour, the women and children of a family from Beach Camp not far away bask in the sea’s cooling water. Children, having learned about buoyancy, stuff their shorts and t-shirts with washed up pieces of Styrofoam. Simplicity at its best, the sea is the main leisure option in a Strip devoid of movie theatres and where the few existing playgrounds are run down.

For those with the shekels to spare at the beach, Fadel Bakr’s small motorboat offers short coast- hugging jaunts on the sea.

“I started this seven years ago. But these days not as many people take rides: either they don’t have money or they are afraid of the Israeli navy’s shooting,” says Bakr.

It’s a 20 shekel per boat 10-minute ride that not all will take.

“We used to go much further out into the water, a real sea ride, but now we generally go just a few hundred metres. Even so the Israelis have shot at my boat with passengers in it.”

Some are still willing to risk it, keen for a change and some leisure activity in their lives encaged and under siege.

Excerpt:

By Eva Bartlett
GAZA CITY, Aug 1 2011 (IPS)

“My father was a boat-builder and I learned from him, worked on boats all my life. Now there’s no work at all.” Abu Fayez Bakr, 64, is one of two boat-builders in the Gaza Strip, the last of a dying trade, despite Palestinians’ penchant for the sea and its bounty.

The now useless boat built by Abu Fayez. Credit: Eva Bartlett/IPS.

In Gaza’s simple harbour, Bakr sits beside a hefty boat he built nearly a decade ago, one of his last projects.

“We received funding from Denmark to make this research boat, equipped with special oceanography equipment. I built it about nine years ago, but it isn’t much use now. You need to go out into the sea to use it properly, not just a couple of miles,” he says, referring to the Israeli lethal imposition of a three- mile boundary on Gaza’s sea, despite the Oslo agreements according Palestinian fishermen 20 miles.

“It was damaged in the last Israeli war on Gaza. We’re repairing it now,” he explains.

Bakr laments his working conditions, as well as those of fishermen in general. “The Israeli siege has made everything here difficult, and it bans the materials I need for my work.

“We don’t even have the proper nails any more. They need to be copper or another rust-proof material. Now we’re forced to use nails that will rust and need to be replaced in a year or two. The fiberglass is poor quality also, like what people use to fix leaks in their homes.”

The ban on wood and machinery hurts Bakr the most.

“I used to get good oak via Israel, from Brazil or elsewhere. Now I have to use expensive Eucalyptus that we bring in through the tunnels from Egypt. It isn’t ideal for boat building and after five years the wood will be damaged from rot.”

Having worked as a builder outside of the Strip, Abu Fayez is acutely aware of Gaza’s shortcomings in equipment and materials.

“In Gaza, we make do with simplicity, even repairing the boats right on the beach. But that’s wrong, they should be in a sheltered workshop,” he says, pointing to the tilted 130 ton research boat propped up with blocks.

“No one has the money to make a workshop. Most fishermen can barely feed their families,” he says.

Across the harbour a mid-sized vessel sits steadied on blocks. “We’ve been enlarging it for the owner. Since the materials are expensive it will cost ten times more than it should.”

With no orders coming in for new boats, Bakr survives by boat maintenance, including normal sea wear and paint touch-ups.

But it is the repairs from Israeli attacks that continue to send fishermen to Bakr.

“The boats are damaged with bullet holes from the Israeli machine guns. Some are damaged by Israeli shelling. The water cannons, too, they seriously damage the boats: they destroy the equipment and weaken the wood.”

Even with the constant stream of repair work, Bakr just earns enough for his family.

“If I was outside of Gaza, every day I’d make good money for this work. But here no one has money to make new boats, or to pay for their repairs. Most of the fishermen are in debt.”

In the late nineties, when investors had hope for Palestine’s economy, one Gazan Palestinian commissioned Bakr to make a large, two-level tourist cruising boat.

“It was ready in 2000 and sailed for a couple of summers just beyond the port. But people stopped going on it because of the Israeli navy’s shooting,” Bakr says.

“So the owner moved it inside the harbour to use as a floating restaurant. Even then people were frightened off by the Israeli navy shooting along the beach. Eventually the owner decided to stop wasting money on a project no one would go on,” says Bakr, standing in front of the defunct Dolphin, now weathering on the harbour sand.

Abu Said Najjar, 35, from Rafah, is the second-last boat-builder in the Strip. “I learned from my uncle, when I was young. We worked in Gaza and Egypt,” he says.

Like Bakr, the forced decrease in fishing impacts Najjar’s own work. “I haven’t worked regularly for the last five years, because the fishermen are either not working or don’t catch enough fish to save any money.”

One of Najjar’s last projects is still being curved into the shape of a hull. It now sits gleaming with a new coat of paint, almost sea-worthy.

“It still needs finishing inside but the owner doesn’t have the money for those materials,” he says. “Even if he borrows money to pay for the boat, he’ll never be able to pay off the loan. Not when he’s limited to three miles.”

With 13 children, Najjar knows the consequences of being banned from the sea. “I sold my trawler, which I’d worked off for 20 years, because I had debts,” he says, pointing to the boat undergoing renovations across the harbour, whose new owner is one of very few in Gaza with the money to buy a boat for the sport of it.

Like Bakr, one of Najjar’s sons was learning the trade but stopped with the absence of building work.

“Years ago there were more boat-builders. But the tradition is dying out because our youths look for any work that will pay now, and boat-building isn’t that work, ” Najjar says.

“We need the means to keep our boat-building tradition alive: funding, a proper place to repair and build the boats, and an economy and open seas that allow our fishermen to fish properly.”

Excerpt:

By Eva Bartlett
GAZA CITY, Jul 25 2011 (IPS)

“We could enter the Guinness book of records for the longest running weekly sit- ins in the world,” Nasser Farrah, from the Palestinian Prisoners’ Association, jokes dryly. Since 1995, Palestinian women from Beit Hanoun to Rafah have met every Monday outside the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) office in Gaza City, holding photos and posters of their imprisoned loved ones, calling on the ICRC to ensure the human rights of Palestinians imprisoned in Israel’s 24 prisons and detention centres.

For eight years, Umm Bilal has not been able to see her son in Israeli prison. Credit: Eva Bartlett/IPS.

The sit-ins have grown, with over 200 women and men showing up weekly. On Jul. 11, ICRC and the Palestinian Red Crescent Society (PRCS) helped facilitate a demonstration from the ICRC office to the unknown soldier park, Jundi, to protest the ban on Palestinians from Gaza visiting their imprisoned loved ones.

“We can’t send letters, we can’t see him, we can’t talk to him,” says Umm Ahmed of her 32-year-old son. Ahmed Abu Ghazi was imprisoned four years ago and sentenced to 16 years in Israeli prison.

“Because we have no connection with him, every Monday we go to the Red Cross. But nothing changes. Last week we slept outside the Red Cross, waiting for them to help us talk to our sons and daughters,” Umm Ahmed says.

“While our sons are in prison, their parents might die without seeing them again.”

For Palestinian prisoner Bilal Adyani, from Deir al-Balah, such was the case. On Jul. 11, Adayni’s father died, after waiting for years to see his son again. The ICRC reports that over 30 relatives of Palestinian prisoners have died since the prison visits were cut.

Umm Bilal, an elderly woman in a simple white headscarf, walks among the demonstrators, holding a plastic-framed photo of her son when he was 16. The teen wears a black dress shirt, has combed and gelled hair, and smiles easily to the camera.

“Twenty years, ten months, he’s been in prison. I haven’t been allowed to visit him in eight years,” says Umm Bilal.

“The prison canteen should sell phone cards, clothes, or food, but Israel is making it difficult now. He wanted to study but in prison but he hasn’t been allowed.”

In December 2009, the Israeli Supreme Court ruled with the Israeli government to deny families from Gaza visitation rights to prisoners in Israeli prisons. Among the stated reasons for the Court’s decision were that “family visits are not a basic humanitarian need for Gaza residents” and that there was no need for family visits since prisoners could obtain basic supplies through the prison canteen.

In June, 2011, Israeli Prison Service is reported to have taken away various rights of prisoners, including that allowing prisoners to enroll in universities, and blocked cell phone use.

“The world is calling for Shalit to be released. But he is just one man, a soldier,” says Umm Bilal. “Many Palestinian prisoners were taken from their homes. Shalit was in his tank when he was taken. Those tanks shoot on Gaza, kill our people, destroy our land. Take Shalit, but release our prisoners.”

According to Nasser Farrah, “there are over 7,000 Palestinians in Israeli prisons, including nearly 40 women and over 300 children. Seven hundred prisoners are from the Gaza Strip.”

Other estimates range from 7,500 to 11,000 Palestinian prisoners. “The ‘over 7000’ does not include the thousands of Palestinians who are regularly taken by the Israelis in the occupied West Bank, and even from Gaza, as well as those held in administrative detention for varying periods,” Farrah notes.

Under administrative detention, Palestinians, including minors, are denied trial and imprisoned for renewable periods, with many imprisoned between six months to six years.

According to B’Tselem, as of February 2011, Israel is holding 214 Palestinians under administrative detention.

Article 49 of the Fourth Geneva Convention prevents forcible transfers of people from occupied territory. But Israel has been doing just that since 1967, and has imprisoned over 700,000 Palestinian men, women and children according to the UN.

Aside from denial of family visits, higher education, and canteen supplies, roughly 1,500 Palestinian prisoners are believed to be seriously ill, and are denied adequate healthcare.

Majed Komeh’s mother has many years of Monday demonstrations ahead of her. Her son, 34 years old, was given a 19-year sentence, of which he has served six years.

“For the last four years I haven’t heard from him,” Umm Majed says. “He has developed stomach and back problems in prison, but he’s not getting the medicine he needs.”

Nasser Farrah says this is a serious problem. “Many have cancer and critical illnesses. Many need around-the-clock hospital care, not simply headache pills.”

A 2010-2011 report from the Palestinian Prisoners Society said that 20 prisoners have been diagnosed with cancer, 88 with diabetes and 25 have had kidney failures. “Over 200 prisoners have died from lack of proper medical care in prisons,” the report says.

One of the ways ill Palestinians end up in prison is by abduction when passing through the Erez crossing for medical treatment outside of Gaza.

“The Israelis give them permits to exit Gaza for treatment in Israel or the West bank, but after they cross through the border Israel imprisons many of them,” says Farrah.

“We are a people under occupation. We have no other options to secure our prisoners’ rights but to demonstrate in front of the ICRC. It’s their job to ensure prisoners are receiving their rights under international humanitarian law.”

Excerpt:

By Eva Bartlett
GAZA CITY, Jul 18 2011 (IPS)

“When I came back to Gaza in 2006, before the siege started, people came to me for acupuncture,” says Dr. Hisham Mwtoweh, a medical doctor and acupuncture practitioner trained in China and Korea.

Modern cupping equipment based on an old tradition in Gaza. Credit: Eva Bartlett/IPS.

Since 2007, zero stock levels of essential medications in the Gaza Strip have been an increasingly problem (37 percent of the 480 essential drugs were at zero stock in June 2011). With one of the highest rates of unemployment in the world and 80 percent of Palestinians food aid dependent, few in Gaza can afford treatments like acupuncture.

“Acupuncture is not cheap,” says Dr. Mwtoweh. “The needles are single-use, and are more expensive than before. A box of needles which cost me 10 shekels (three dollars) years ago costs me 60 shekels now.”

The cost is complicated by the longevity of the sessions. “I can treat migraines, lower back pain, sinusitis, and strokes, among other things,” Mwtoweh says. “But people here are used to medicine which normally has a rapid result.

“Acupuncture needs time, more than five or six sessions before you start to feel the effects of the therapy, and many people don’t want to wait or to spend precious money on that many visits.”

Consequently, Mwtoweh’s acupuncture practice has taken a dramatic fall. “In 2006, I had an average of over 50 patients per month. Now a good month is six patients.”

Business is steady for Mahmoud Shamali, a pharmacist and practitioner of hijama, a cupping practice which treat certain ailments and invigorates the blood.

“With Gaza’s poor economy, more people started to seek out alternative healers, because many are cheaper than using pain medications or repeated visits to the doctor,” says Shamali.

“Hijama is not a foreign concept in Palestine, since Islam speaks of the importance of cupping as a therapy and for overall health. So people trust it.”

Traditionally, cupping was done by heating sterilised glasses and applying them at various points of the body, often the back and neck.

Dr. Khamis Elessi, certified in physical medicine and rehabilitation, also practices complementary medicine, including Tuina (Chinese massage), acupuncture, herbal remedies, and cupping.

“The idea of wet cupping – when incisions are made in the skin and a small amount of blood is let out – is that it stimulates the bone marrow to produce fresh red blood cells, which have a life span of 120 days.” An increase of young red blood cells increases the body’s energy, he says.

“Cupping will boost your immune system and normalise your blood pressure.”

As cupping does not routinely require new equipment and usually needs just one session, the costs per visit are low. For some with ailments not treated for want of expensive or non-existent medicine, hijama is an option.

“Many people who go for cupping can’t find the medicine they need, so they look for alternative remedies,” says Khamis.

“Backaches, headaches, toothaches, and depression – these are some of the things cupping treats,” says Mahmoud Shamali.

A World Health Organisation (WHO) survey in July 2009 found that 23 percent of children aged 5-14 developed bed-wetting problems after the last Israeli war on Gaza.

“Hijama can treat this, as can acupuncture,” says Shamali.

Following the 2008-2009 Israeli war on Gaza, the Gaza Community Mental Health Centre (GCMHC) reported over 90 percent of Palestinian children in Gaza and 65 percent of the general population suffered symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).

GCMHC also notes a continual rise in depression among children and adults. For adults, with the crushing responsibility of caring for a family in an impossible situation – under siege and still reeling from the last Israeli war on Gaza – the depression can be severe.

Dr. Mwtoweh says acupuncture can treat depression and PTSD, but that many in Gaza are reluctant to admit they have a problem.

Instead, many have turned to Tramadol, a synthetic opioid painkiller sold in pharmacies. “After the war many people started using Tramadol to numb their psychological pain. They temporarily forget their problems with it,” says Mwtoweh.

“People here think it is a medicine, not a drug, so they use Tramadol too much and become addicted.”

Dr. Mwtoweh says his acupuncture therapy can stop the addiction, if people were aware they are addicted and are aware of the treatment.

Abu Ali, 43, a holistic practitioner, treats patients free of charge from his one-room house in Gaza’s Beach Camp.

His herbal remedies treat physical ailments, depression, and even extend to those with diabetes. The WHO reports some diabetes drugs are at zero-stock levels in Gaza.

“I give diabetes patients amoora, a herb similar to za’atar (wild thyme). I also give za’atar and strawberry leaves, depending on the severity of their diabetes or other health problems.”

He lists other herbs common to Palestine, like ekleel jebal, a mountain plant whose green leaves help treat 52 different kinds of ailments.

“Add the leaves to water and drink it for 10 days,” he advises. Aside from invigorating the body, the herb helps regulate high blood pressure, he says. Drugs for hypertension and cardiac conditions are on the zero-stock list.

Abu Ali believes that any illness can be treated holistically. “People must have the will to cure themselves,” he says. “They have to believe that they can be their own doctor and are stronger than their disease.”

While other complementary medicine practitioners like doctors Khamis, Mwtoweh and Shamali see a niche for their work, they say it is imperative that the essential medicines and supplies at zero stock levels be brought into Gaza.

“Not all problems can be treated by complementary or alternative means,” caution Mwtoweh and Shamali. “Like anti-cancer drugs: there are no alternatives,” says Shamali, whose own grandmother suffers for want of an anti-cancer drug unavailable in Gaza.

Excerpt:

By Eva Bartlett
GAZA CITY, Jul 16 2011 (IPS)

Waddah Bsaiso is ready to export, if the Israeli-imposed siege would allow him. He has the experience, the contacts, and the products, but is prevented by Israel’s strict ban on virtually all Gazan exports, save a token amount of flowers periodically allowed out of the Strip.

Furniture on display at the trade show in Gaza. Credit: Eva Bartlett/IPS.

“Now we are lucky if we can earn 400,000 dollars per year,” he says.

A mix of classic wooden furniture and modern, bright-fabric living room sets, his furniture factory is one of over 30 businesses participating in the 2011 National Furniture Show organised by the Palestine Federation of Industries (PFI) and Paltrade, an organisation promoting Palestinian trade, among others.

Ahmad Munir, manager of the Industrial Modernisation Centre (IMC), an arm of PFI, greets visitors at the entrance and answers their questions. “We give training in craft and furniture making, and connect recent design and other graduates with firms.”

PFI played a significant role in getting Gaza’s mangled factories back in running condition. “We helped repair factories and brought in equipment that was needed,” says Munir.

Over 700 private businesses were destroyed or damaged in Israel’s 2008-2009 war on Gaza, among them 325 factories and workshops, according to the Palestinian Centre for Human Rights (PCHR). Even before the 23-day Israeli attacks, 97 percent of Gaza’s industry had shut down for want of raw materials and replacement machine parts banned under the Israeli-siege imposed in 2006 shortly after Hamas was elected.

The World Bank notes that factories in Gaza import 95 percent of their raw materials, rendering them heavily dependent on the border crossings. All but the Rafah crossing, under Egyptian control, are controlled by Israel. Kerem Abu Salem, the crossing sporadically open to imports and almost never to exports, is less functional and more congested than the former Karni crossing.

Despite Israel’s declared “easing” in June 2010 of the total siege on Gaza, in June 2011 the World Food Programme (WFP) reported that “only 5 percent of the pre-blockade export volume was reached from November 2010 to April 2011.”

The El Helou furniture company has found a way around the Israeli control of the entry of raw materials. “Many of our products are made from olive trees bulldozed in the last Israeli war on Gaza,” Mohammed el Helou explains. Near him, an irregular-shaped olive wood mirror frame and a three-piece table and chair set still in the shape of the tree trunk itself. These products, popular in North American and European markets, sell for a fraction of their market value or not at all in Gaza’s over-stocked furniture market.

“When we were able to export to European markets, our prices were higher because the standard of living there is higher. But to sell anything in Gaza we have to drastically reduce our prices,” says Waddah Bsaiso.

“Other factories that formerly exported are now forced to sell solely in Gaza, so the market is flooded, and our outside contacts have lost faith in receiving anything from Gaza,” he says.

“Our greatest problem today is that we can’t export anything. Consequently, we are using just ten percent of our production capabilities.”

The loss in revenue does not affect just Bsaiso and his family. “If we had the customers, we could employ up to 150 workers. But at present we only employ 15.”

Abed Abu Seedo imported recycled glass vases and bottles from Nablus, in the occupied West Bank, to refinish and sell abroad. Decorated with smoky finishes and fine painting, the glassware sold well in British, European and U.S. markets.

“I haven’t been able to import glass from Nablus for years now. And exporting is out of the question. There isn’t much interest in my products in Gaza. People think about the necessities, not frivolities like glass decorations.”

Down the aisle, a wall of hand-embroidered purses and pillow covers, as well as hand-woven decorative rugs, once sold in Jerusalem’s busy tourist markets.Now Mahmoud el Sawaf sells to some foreigners in Gaza, but his shop is otherwise largely unvisited. Facing export impossibilities, Waddah Bsaiso feels Israel has an ulterior motive for prohibiting exports. “Israel wants people like me who export to feel like we can’t do anything. The policies are to destroy our will to work, produce, and survive,” he says.

“Gaza these days is merely a recipient of aid, not an exporting, self-sufficient country. We don’t want this, we want to sell our own goods and live like normal people,” says Bsaiso.

A March 2011 Pal Trade study highlights that the main constraints on Gaza businesses are “the unreliable supply of electricity, the unpredictable availability of raw materials and extremely limited access to export markets.” “Everything is ready: the machinery, workers, everything,” says Waddah Bsaiso. “We just need the border to open to exports.”

Excerpt:

By Eva Bartlett
GAZA CITY, Jul 7 2011 (IPS)

“The mosque was just 100 metres from our house. We prayed there every day, five times a day. But it was more than a house of prayer,” says Mohammed, a Beit Hanoun resident, of one of the 34 mosques completely destroyed during the 23-day Israeli war on Gaza in 2008-2009.

A destroyed mosque in Gaza. Credit: Eva Bartlett/IPS.

“The blast sent rubble to our house,” Mohammed recalls. “Now we have go to one 15 minutes away, one we don’t know intimately.”

According to Dr Hassan Saifi, assistant to the Minister of Religious Affairs in Gaza, a quarter of the Strip’s 800 mosques were damaged or destroyed in the Israeli war on Gaza.

“Two hundred damaged mosques is a shocking amount,” Saifi says. “Among those, 34 throughout the Gaza Strip were completely destroyed.

“Especially in Gaza’s north, which was hit the hardest, completely destroying 15 mosques, the bombing of mosques inflicted many civilian casualties,” says Saifi, noting that Gaza’s north has a higher proportion of Palestinian refugees living in densely-inhabited camps.

“Mosque walls are frequently also the walls of the many homes packed around it. So when mosques are bombed, many homes are bombed at the same time.”

With many mosques decimated and over 150 more badly damaged by Israeli bombings, many in Gaza believe the destruction was intentional.

“The Israelis used state-of-the-art warplanes and unmanned drones with precision visual equipment. They destroyed many of our mosques during the very first days of their attacks,” notes Dr Saifi. “They obviously intended to destroy our mosques, irrespective of those living next door or praying within.”

The Palestinian Centre for Human Rights (PCHR) lists a number of the mosques struck, noting that indeed many of the Israeli attacks on mosques came within the first week of Israel’s war on Gaza.

On Dec. 28, Israeli warplanes bombed Jabaliya’s Imad Aqel mosque, killing five young girls, ages 4 to 17, sleeping in their home next to the mosque. Another 17 civilians were injured in the bombing, and many of the cheaply built cement-walled, asbestos-roofed homes surrounding the mosque were destroyed or badly damaged.

The Ibrahim Maqadma mosque in Jabaliya was hit by a drone-fired missile on Jan. 3 2009, reports PCHR, injuring more than 30 and killing 15 civilians, among them four children and those praying at the time of the attack.

The targeting of mosques, along with other civilian areas, is in contravention to international law and the Geneva Conventions.

“The Zionist occupation state doesn’t respect churches and mosques, nor any international law. They bombed the UN food storage warehouse, UN schools, and attacked the Red Cross even though these are international organisations,” says Dr. Saifi.

Israel’s killing of Palestinian civilians during the war on Gaza stretched beyond mosques, including targeting kindergartens, schools, hospitals, ambulances, cars and homes, and universities. The widespread destruction wreaked on Gaza impacted on all aspects of life, cultural, academic, industry, personal, and religious.

The bombings also assaulted Gaza’s historical buildings and places, among them the Nasser mosque in Beit Hanoun. Built in 736 AD, the mosque was hit by Israeli bombing on Jan. 2, 2009, completely destroying it.

“It was a historic building and should have been preserved,” Hassan Saifi says. “Like any historical site in the world, our relics also must be protected as heritage sites, for all of the world not just for Palestine.”

The Ministry of Religious Affairs states Gaza’s mosque rebuilding efforts will run over 13.5 million dollars. Under the Israeli-led siege which bans imports of construction materials and which for the past five years has caused many international donors to freeze their funding, little rebuilding has actually taken place.

“Some people and organisations have donated money and materials, via the tunnels from Egypt. After two and a half years we have begun building just ten of the mosques destroyed throughout the Gaza Strip,” says the assistant Minister of Religious Affairs.

“As poor as most Palestinians in Gaza are, people give what they can, however little, because mosques are important to their daily lives.”

Since January 2009, Palestinians in Gaza accustomed to praying in their local mosques have resorted to praying in mosques further away or in makeshift mosques of wire fencing and plastic sheeting.

As religious centres worldwide serve as meeting places for family and friends, mosques also serve roles beyond venues of prayer.

“Anyone traveling or away from their home can enter the mosque to drink water, use the bathroom, rest and pray,” says Dr. Saifi.

In Beit Hanoun, Mohammed recalls the mosque dear to his family. “My grandfather built it decades ago and neighbours contributed what they could. Some gave money, some gave materials like stones, doors, or whatever they could offer. It was a part of us and our community.”

Excerpt:

By Eva Bartlett
SHEIK RAJLEEN, GAZA, Jul 4 2011 (IPS)

“Farmed fish are now better than sea fish in Gaza. They shouldn’t be, but because of the sewage in Gaza’s sea and the Israeli fishing restrictions, farmed fish are cleaner and healthier than sea fish.”

Fish pools at the Ekhail farm. Credit: Eva Bartlett/IPS.

“It is almost impossible for our fishermen to fish in the sea, so fish farms provide another source of salt water fish.”

Compared to the late 1990s, before the Israeli-led siege choking Gaza since Hamas’s election in 2006, fishermen’s catches are meagre, from a former over 3,500 tons per year to the current less than 500 tons a year. Fishermen, forced by Israeli gunfire to fish within less than three miles, at the same time deplete future stocks of fish.

And, as Ekhail said, the fish caught are polluted, swimming in the sewage that is daily pumped into Gaza’s sea for want of treatment facilities.

“Anyway Gaza is already importing frozen fish from Egypt via the tunnels,” Ekhail points out. There is a growing need for edible fish.

His six pools contain hundreds of maturing fish, a process which takes around eight to 10 months. “But with the power cuts, its taking longer than 10 months,” he says.

Large, electricity powered water wheels spin over the surface of each pool, oxygenating the salt water pumped from underground, and emptied twice a day into the sea.

Among three varieties of fish, the red and silver tilapia are the most popular and his cheapest, at 25 shekels (eight dollars) per kilo. But this is a price the vast majority rendered aid-dependent in Gaza cannot afford.

“We sell mainly to restaurants,” he says, though some families with the means to do so buy from the farm.

The Ekhail fish farm has problems other than the power outages.

“Customers buy frozen fish from Egypt instead of ours, because it’s cheaper,” he says. “And the pellets we feed the fish come from Israel. They are often delayed.”

The greatest problem was the complete destruction of the Ekhail fish farm during the 2008-2009 Israeli war on Gaza. “It was bulldozed, everything destroyed.”

Rebuilt on its rented plot of land, the fish farm is just five minutes by car outside Gaza city. Sea waves crash 50 metres beyond the tent-shaded pools, the paradox of Gaza’s off-limits sea audible and visible.

The region has a history of dependency on the rich catches of the sea, something reflected in the fish- based meals traditional to Gaza and the legacy of fishermen in trawlers, speedboats, and hand-paddled boats the size of a canoe.

The development of aquaculture reflects the continued ingenuity of Palestinians in Gaza, determined to create sources of employment and food in the face of the ruthless, internationally backed Israeli siege on Gaza.

But the rise of aquaculture also reflects the continued international apathy to the plight of Gaza’s roughly 4,000 fishermen who, on a daily basis, are shot at, shelled at, water cannoned with an excrement-scented chemical, and abducted by the Israeli navy from within Palestinian waters.

The 20 nautical miles accorded to Palestinians under Oslo are now an Israeli-reduced less than three miles fishing limit. Many fishermen have been killed or seriously injured while fishing in waters within the Israeli-decreed limits. Hundreds are abducted from Palestinian waters by the Israeli navy every year, an attempt to discourage fishermen from plying their trade.

Aside from the human toll of the Israeli fishing restrictions, there is an economic toll very real to the 65,000 people that the World Food Project (WFP) says are directly affected by the fishing limitations. And there are the 80 percent of food-aid dependent Palestinians in Gaza for whom fish were a source of nutrition sporadically afforded.

With current catches inadequate and much of the available fish farmed or imported, most families can no longer afford the luxury of the protein fish provides.

Whereas aid organisations like WFP and others encourage fish farming in Gaza to provide an alternative source of nutrition to the 1.6 million residents of the Strip, aquaculture is an inadequate temporary fix, not a solution.

It is a fix that, intentionally or not, works in tandem with the Israeli-led siege on Gaza: to deprive Palestinians of their self-sufficiency and their fishing skills passed on through the generations. And it is a fix that does not address the roots of the problem: the siege and the Israeli navy’s lethal games in Palestinian waters, both combined to render Palestinians in Gaza dependent on hand-outs.

Excerpt:

By Eva Bartlett
GAZA CITY, Jun 19 2011 (IPS)

“During the first years of the siege, we could still manage, but nowadays we have no alternatives,” says Dr. Hassan Khalaf, Deputy Health Minister in Gaza. “It is a major crisis: many health services have stopped, and I’m afraid this will spiral out of control, because Gaza doesn’t have the essential medicines and supplies needed.”

Too many medicines are too expensive for Gazans, or simply unavailable. Credit: Eva Bartlett/IPS.

Following the democratic elections in 2006 that brought Hamas to power in Gaza, the population has been constrained under a siege which bans food items, construction materials, and school supplies among thousands of items. Medical supplies and equipment do not escape the blacklist, for years now depriving Palestinians in Gaza of basics like baby formulas, antibiotics, and MRI and X-Ray machines, which Israel reasons could be used for “terror” purposes.

While alarming zero-stock levels of drugs were already being reported in 2007 – when 80-90 drugs of the 480 deemed essential were at zero – Palestinian physicians could still find ways around the shortages. The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) in November 2008 reported that “medical staff try to cope by using the next best solution which is not always a good one – for example, if they need tubes for a medical procedure, they will use a tube size smaller or bigger than the appropriate one.” While the alternatives were not optimal and could result in inadequate and painful treatments, there were at least alternatives. But with each year of the total siege on Gaza, particularly after the 23 days of Israeli war on Gaza in 2008-2009, the already dilapidated medical system in Gaza has been rendered more sickly. During the Israeli war on Gaza, Israeli warplanes bombed over half of Gaza’s hospitals, as well as 44 clinics and the medical storage facility of the Palestinian Red Crescent Society.

In February 2011, an Israeli bombing destroyed a medical warehouse in Jabliya. “We lost a large amount of stocks we had finally received from Ramallah just a few days prior to the bombing,” says Dr. Khalaf.

In June 2010, the World Health Organization (WHO) issued a call for “unimpeded access into the Gaza Strip of life-saving medical supplies, including equipment and medicines, as well as more effective movement of people in and out of the territory for medical training and the repair of devices needed to deliver appropriate healthcare and respond to the population’s humanitarian health needs.”

But prolonged shortages of medical supplies have set-off new alarm bells.

“During 2008, Gaza received less than half of the needed medicines and supplies,” says Dr. Khalaf. The WHO reported that in 2010 Gaza received even less, only 40 percent of the Strip’s needs transferred to Gaza. “As of now, in 2011 we’ve received only third of what is needed,” says Khalaf.

With years of delays by both the Israeli-led siege and the Ramallah Health Ministry, Gaza’s zero-stock items list – now at 180 items – has grown as has the number of items temporarily re-stocked in hospitals and clinics.

“We’re missing painkillers and anesthetics, cancer and epilepsy drugs, antibiotics, infant formulas, medicines for dialysis, even rubber gloves,” says Khalaf.

The ministry’s warning is echoed by the WHO, the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) and the Palestinian Centre for Human Rights (PCHR), which noted on Jun. 13 that Gaza has not received medical supplies since February 2011. PCHR reports that the medical shortages affect “ICUs, nurseries of premature infants; operation rooms; anesthesia and recovery; emergency; cardiac catheterisation; hematology and oncology; nephritic diseases; and pediatrics.”

According to Dr. Khalaf, hundreds of patients await “eye surgeries, endoscopic, vascular and pediatric surgeries, and neurosurgery” among others.

A group of Norwegian doctors surveyed Gaza’s hospitals and clinics in February this year. Their study, reported in the Lancet, highlighted the difficulties for cancer patients in Gaza who receive only part of their chemotherapy treatments. Many have died as a result.

“Oncologists said 100 of 260 cancer patients at Gaza’s largest hospital were unable to receive effective treatment because the required combination of several drugs was not obtainable,” reported the Lancet.

To alleviate the current medical crisis, the ICRC on Jun. 14 gave its stocks of medical supply to hospitals in Gaza. The Ramallah-based Ministry of Health announced it would send medical supplies from its warehouses and that Egypt would soon send essential medicines.

Having dealt with the issue of delayed and banned medical supplies for years, the Ministry of Health in Gaza sees this as a temporary and insufficient fix.

“Israel and the Ramallah government hold mutual responsibility for Gaza’s medical crisis,” says Dr. Khalaf, citing Israeli obstacles and delays on permissions and shipments via the Israeli-controlled crossings as well as what he says is the Ramallah Ministry’s intentional negligence.

“When international donors first cut aid to Gaza, it was resumed via the Ramallah government, with the understanding that Gaza receives 40 percent of the total donations, according to our population needs,” he says.

This system worked until the ministry in Ramallah stopped coordinating with the ministry in Gaza, relying instead on its own contacts in Gaza.

Dr. Khalaf believes neither the Israeli siege nor the Ramallah government’s reluctance to send medical supplies to Gaza could occur without international compliance. “It is intentional, it’s part of the siege on Gaza’s government,” he says. “The international donor countries and Ramallah Health Ministry give us temporary, interrupted solutions.”

Whether or not it is intentional, the severe lack of medical supplies harms Gaza’s 1.5 million residents, not the Hamas government.

Excerpt:

By Eva Bartlett
GAZA CITY, Jun 12 2011 (IPS)

In Gaza’s main port, beyond the newly-built memorial to the Freedom Flotilla martyrs, Gaza’s fishermen prepare to go out trawling at shallow depths in Palestinian waters. Other fishers stay on land to mend nets and fix boats damaged or destroyed by Israeli navy gunfire, shelling, water cannoning and even ramming. Such moves as the opening of Rafah have done nothing for Gaza’s fishermen.

Gaza harbour, as seen from a destroyed boat. Credit: Eva Bartlett/IPS.

Tracings in the sand reveal where a damaged hassaka (a small speedboat or smaller hand-paddled boat) sat for repairs from an Israeli navy machine gun assault on Jun. 1 this year. “There were 25 bullets in both sides of the boat, as well as one in the engine,” Kabarati says. “Two fishermen work from it, Ramadan Zidan, 51, and his son Mohammed, 20. They weren’t even out at sea, they were just beyond the harbour.”

Down the sandy road to the dock for larger fishing boats, Farej, 23, stands aboard a larger, roofless fishing trawler, the detached roof splayed across a port wall opposite the boat.

“Our nets were in the water when the Israeli gun boat came at us,” says Farej, one of the fishermen on board the trawler less than three miles off Gaza’s coast when assaulted by the Israeli navy on May 26.

“The Israeli soldiers shot at our nets which we tried to pull in,” he says, noting that the severed nets disappeared into the sea. “Then they rammed our boat, knocking the roof off.”

With ample deck space for pulling in catches and sorting the fish for storage, most Palestinian fishing trawlers are between 15 to 20 metres, with a steel “umbrella” over the work area. “The roof fell down on my brother Raed, but we couldn’t reach him to help him. The Israelis kept firing on us and on the area of the fallen roof,” Farej says.

“They kept threatening to take us to Ashdod,” he says. “They kept cursing at us and taunting us.”

While Raed, 28, survived the attack with a broken leg and injured back, Farej worries how his brother will feed his five children while incapacitated.

“I was studying business management at university,” Farej says. “I had to quit because I couldn’t afford the fees and we need my income to feed our families.”

Sufyan, 43, works on the same trawler. “Just the day before that we were water cannoned by the Israelis,” he says. “They doused us with high-powered water for about 30 minutes, broke our GPS system and ruined anything electrical on board. We were only three miles off the coast.”

Under the Oslo accords, Palestinian fishermen have the right to fish 20 nautical miles off the Gazan coast. This limit has been unilaterally micro-sized by the Israeli navy by lethal imposition via gunfire, shelling and water-cannoning. A year ago fishermen scarcely caught any fish when just six miles out. The prospects for catching fish are all the more dire at the new insufficient three-mile limit.

On the evening of May 30, Ragab Hissy’s 15.5 metre trawler was again attacked by Israeli water cannoning, gunfire and ramming. “They water cannoned us so strongly and for so long that we hid inside, under the deck,” says a 32-year-old fisherman who gives his name as M. “While we were hiding, the Israeli gunboat rammed us.” He points out a newly-replaced slot of wood in the boat’s hull and a dent in the steel framing the hull where the Israeli gunboat rammed his trawler. “The Israeli soldiers were shouting at us, swearing at us and cursing Islam,” he says. “We were less than three miles out from this port. The Israelis accused us of waiting to go out further at night. They told us, ‘you have to go back to 2.5 miles from the coast so that you don’t cross three miles’,” M says.

“Since 2005 we have had serious problems from the Israelis while fishing,” says Sufyan Koolah, from the same trawler. “This trawler was badly damaged in 2007 by Israeli gunfire. It cost roughly 20,000 dollars to repair it. During 2008 we lost much of our fishing equipment and nets to Israeli attacks.”

A father of ten, with three children in university, Koolah will be out of work for the next two months, the amount of time he says it will take to repair the trawler. “Seventeen people work on this boat and will be out of an income, not just me and my family.”

Families like Koolah’s, Abu Ouda’s, Hissy’s and the countless other nameless of Gaza’s roughly 4,000 fishermen face unprovoked Israeli navy assaults on a daily basis but continue to trawl the waters for food and income for their families.

“Three miles is too shallow. People swim at three miles. We need to be able to fish like we did in the past, beyond ten miles and up to 20 miles,” says M, the fisherman on Hissy’s boat.

Catches these days are neutered versions of Palestinian fishermen’s former hauls. Unable to breech three miles, Gaza’s fishermen are left to harvest undersized fish seeped in the pollution of Gaza’s sewage run-off. The greater numbers and quality of fish lie at least six miles out.

“Between March and June, large schools of sardines migrate through Palestinian waters over ten miles out,” says Nizar Ayash, director of Gaza’s Fishing Syndicate. “They are abundant in number, all fishermen can benefit, and they were traditionally Gaza’s cheapest source of quality protein.”

In a May 2011 report, the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) cites poverty among Gaza’s fishermen at 90 percent, the poorest earning less than 100 dollars per month, an increase of 40 percent from 2008.

“In the last five years, at least seven fishermen have been killed by the Israeli navy,” Nizar Ayash says, estimating tens more have been injured and over 300 arrested while fishing in Palestinian waters. “But they will keep fishing, they have no choice.”

Excerpt:

By Eva Bartlett
GAZA CITY, Sep 29 2010 (IPS)

“Sometimes, for a day or two we don’t even have bread, nor flour to make bread. There’s a store nearby that, when we are truly desperate, lets us take a bag of bread or something simple, on credit. I owe them a lot of money for the food I’ve brought from them, but I still can’t pay them.”

Umm Khamis Khattab, 52, lives in a single, bare-bones room in central Gaza’s Bureij refugee camp. Khamis, her disabled son, 30, is married but has no source of income.

“Our situation is very bad. We used to receive financial support because my son is disabled. Now, we get nothing. After my husband died five years ago, his family tried to help us, for a short while. But they can’t take care of themselves, let alone us,” says the widow. “So we get by on hand-outs from neighbours now and then.”

Umm Khamis tries to generate an income selling eggs from the handful of chickens she tends. “We are three people living off 20 shekels (roughly five dollars) per week from the eggs.”

The World Food Programme (WFP) and Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) define food insecurity as people not having “adequate physical, social or economic access to sufficient, safe and nutritious food which meets their dietary needs.”

Palestinians vulnerable to food insecurity are further defined as “households with both income and consumption below 5.6 dollars per adult equivalent per day.” Actual food insecure households are defined as having “an income and consumption below 4.7 dollars per adult equivalent per day.”

In the Gaza Strip, where unemployment levels soar up to 65 percent, and more than 80 percent people are food aid dependent, the average income per day per person is just two dollars. According to the WFP and FAO, the food insecure in Gaza are an alarming 61 percent, with another 16 percent vulnerable to food insecurity.

“I’d be happy just selling things on the street if it brought five shekels per day,” says Abu Suleiman, 51, father of four. He, his wife and their young children live in Sheik Radwan, north of Gaza City, in a windowless, concrete block room, the kind that is ordinarily used as a space for small shops.

“We all sleep together in this room, which is our kitchen and bathroom as well,” he says.

The building owner uses the room next door for his sheep and chickens. “The stench is incredible, we can’t escape it. And I worry about my children’s health, but there’s nowhere better we can go.”

Abu Suleiman works making tea and coffee and cleaning the office of a media group in Gaza. “I work from 7am to 4:30pm and earn just 350 shekels per month,” he says. “The rent for our room is 150 shekels per month, so that leaves just 200 shekels to get by on.” He says he walks the hour both ways to work in order to avoid taxi fares.

“But 200 shekels isn’t enough for five people and a baby. If I even thought about buying meat, the money would be gone quickly. So we buy cheaper food: rice, lentils, pasta. Never meat.”

With food prices highly inflated under the siege Israel has imposed on Gaza since shortly after Hamas’s election in 2006, few families can afford meats, fish, or fresh produce. The 2008-2009 Israeli war on Gaza further destroyed meat and poultry production besides devastating the agricultural sector.

Ten percent of poultry and 17 percent of cattle and ruminants were killed. Eighteen percent of Gaza’s productive agricultural lands were destroyed, along with another 17 percent of greenhouse-grown vegetables, says the United Nations (UN).

The combination of this agricultural destruction and the mortal Israeli imposition of a no-go zone on Gaza’s border lands, encompassing roughly one-third of Gaza’s arable land means that as of June 2009, 46 percent of agricultural land in Gaza was either inaccessible or out of production, impacting on the availability of fresh and nutritious produce in the Strip and affecting over 60,000 people earning a living from agriculture alone.

At the same time, fishers are no longer able to breach more than miles, most usually staying within less than a mile of Gaza’s shores. While the Oslo accords granted Gazan fishermen the right to fish 20 nautical miles off Gaza ‘s coast, Israel has incrementally and violently reduced the fishing limits.

The FAO reports a decline in total fishing catch by 47 percent between 2008 and 2009, with fishers subject to daily shooting from Israeli gunboats in Gazan water.

“Every day in Gaza, more and more people become hungry, more new people come for help,” says Dr. Al-Wahaidi, Director of Health for Ard al-Insan, Gaza’s prime centre for the hungry and malnourished. “And there’s no difference between city dwellers and camp residents, except that maybe camp families have more of a social network to rely on, and country residents have more possibilities for growing produce for themselves.”

According to Amani Jouda, Nutrition Officer for the World Health Orgnanisation (WHO) in Gaza, 74 percent of children aged 9-12 months are anaemic, up from 65 percent in 2009, as are another 32 percent of children aged 7-15 years, and 45 percent of pregnant women in their first months of pregnancy.

The UN Millennium Project Hunger Task Force cites the importance of local agriculture and livestock in reducing hunger.

Ard al-Insan’s Dr. Al-Wahaidi sees it clearly. “The main reason for hunger in Gaza is Israeli politics on the people Gaza. Gaza is different than other places. When we have a disaster, we cannot leave our small piece of land to find work or safety elsewhere. We are trapped inside.”

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