Maltese activist injured by Israeli forces

Maltese national Bianca Zammit was injured by Israeli forces today when they shot her with live ammunition during a peaceful rally in Gaza in solidarity with Palestinian farmers.

The 28-year-old human rights activist was accompanying Palestinians on agricultural land in Al Maghazi at around 12pm in the 300-metre area from the buffer zone with Israel, designated by the latter as a “no-go area”.

Zammit was hit in her left thigh as she was filming the activity, between 80 and 100 metres away from Israeli soldiers. She was rushed to Al Aqsa Hospital in Deir Al Balah where she was found to be suffering from light injuries and no fractures.

“I was lucky because the bullet went through my skin without hitting me in the bones,” Zammit said from a hospital bed shortly after a medical intervention.

Two others, both Palestinian, were injured by the gun fire. Hind Al Akra, a 22-year-old woman, was in critical condition after she was hit in her stomach. Eighteen-year-old Nidal Al Naql was hit in his right thigh.

Zammit said that about 30 minutes after the demonstration started, Israeli soldiers opened fire on the protestors.

“We were walking towards the fence surrounding Gaza when Israeli soldiers opened fire at us,” Zammit said. “People sought cover but I kept filming. When the protestors stood up again to keep walking ahead, they shot again and hit three of us.

“All the Palestinians do in these demonstrations is to get as close as possible to the fence and plant the Palestinian flag. We posed no threat whatsoever.”

Zammit was released from Al Aqsa Hospital shortly after surgery, but was later taken to Al Awda Hospital in Jabalya for further observation after bleeding resumed. Doctors said they were keeping her under observation for 24 hours.

“I can still walk and will be going back to the protests soon,” she said yesterday evening, as friends crowded her room in hospital.

A spokesman for Foreign Minister Tonio Borg said the Maltese government will be presenting an official complaint to the Israeli government. No official statement was released by the ministry by late Saturday night.

The Maltese Ambassador in Israel, Abraham Borg, said he will be demanding explanations from the Israeli government and that he was monitoring the case.

The Israeli military said it fired "warning shots" at a group of Palestinians gathering "very close to the security fence" in central Gaza. A spokesman said Israeli forces had identified "hitting three of the Palestinians".

"The area adjacent to the security fence is a combat zone used by terrorist organizations to execute attacks against Israel," the Israeli army said, adding that it would "not allow anyone to be present in it, since it is considered a threat to the residents of Israel and to Israeli security forces".

The Maltese embassy in Egypt and the Maltese representative to the Palestinian Authority were also alerted about the case and were following it from Cairo and Ramallah.

Zammit said the most important message to all the people who wanted justice for Palestinians was to keep lobbying for the boycott, divestments and sanctions of Israeli companies and institutions that kept turning a blind eye to the occupation.

“Boycotts can be effective in getting Israelis to realise that not all is alright, and they have to range from academic to commercial and artistic boycotts of everything Israeli, while supporting Palestinian products made in Palestine,” Zammit said.

An activist with the International Solidarity Movement – a group of volunteers working with Palestinian grassroots organisations against the Israeli occupation – Zammit has been living in Gaza since May last year, after three months living and working in the West Bank.

In the last months, she has been participating in daily protests around Gaza’s buffer zone with Israel, where farmers are banned from working their land under threat of Israeli gunfire. Many farmers have abandoned their fertile fields as daily incursions and gunfire makes their work extremely dangerous. Up to 20 per cent of the Gaza Strip’s arable land is inaccessible to Palestinian farmers because it is caught in the no-go area.

“We join farmers and form a human shield to protect them while they work their land,” Zammit explained. “All the time, we tell soldiers through our megaphones that we are peaceful people who are there in solidarity with the farmers. They know we are nonviolent, they see our hands up in the air all the time, but they still shoot at us.”

Many other Palestinians, especially children, are also shot at as they collect rubble and steel from the border regions to recycle it for construction, as the blockade imposed by Israel forbids construction material from entering the strip.

In an interview with MaltaToday last year from the West Bank before leaving for Gaza, Zammit said: “You can read a lot about what’s happening here, but you have to come to witness what the occupation means. It’s extremely difficult to understand what the everyday reality is unless you witness it firsthand. I used to think I understood the reality here, but then I realised my understanding was only intellectual, not on a human level.”

She added: “There is no middle road. You’re either against injustice or else you’re accepting it.”

Stuck at the border

Looking back, I should have realised from the very start that the day did not bode well.

Just as I was having what I thought would be my last shower in Gaza before leaving for holidays on Tuesday morning, the electricity and water went off, leaving me covered with soap. The only way to get rid of it was to use a water bottle, with cold water.

At the office, my colleagues were all bidding me farewell as if it was the last time we would see each other. I kept telling them it was only for three weeks, but deep down you never know. Something could happen upon my return at the border, some official might not like me or think my country is part of the axis of evil and turn me back without appeal. That’s what borders are for.

“So you’re leaving through the Rafah border?” they kept asking me, intrigued at the fact that a foreigner is going through the Palestinian route.

“I’m going to the Rafah border,” I replied – which is another thing altogether – always distrustful of borders and the creatures manning them.

Having entered the Gaza Strip through the Egyptian crossing last September after months of waiting, the only way out is through the same border in Rafah. The Israeli border in Erez is only open to those who came in through Israel with special permits – a handful of foreign aid workers, journalists of Israel’s choosing, some diplomats and a few Palestinian patients in need of special treatment out of Gaza.

In the seven months I have been living in Gaza, I had realised the Rafah border logic, if there ever was one. For foreigners, it is next to impossible to come through to Gaza, but once they are in, getting out is a piece of cake: A call to the embassy, the embassy informs Egyptian authorities and you’re out on the day of your choosing. I have seen countless foreigners doing precisely that.

For Palestinians of Gaza it is the other way round – getting in is ‘normal’ procedure (forgetting for a second the long queues and ghastly treatment by Egyptian border guards) but getting out of Gaza is just a dream.
The layers of bureaucracy, corruption and favouritism holding them trapped inside Gaza are just endless. They need to get on the Hams ‘list’ of people who are assigned a bus to the border. They have to wait until the border is officially open for three days whenever Egypt decides to open the gates, more or less every two months. They need confirmation from the Egyptian security services that they would be allowed into Egypt, and rushed to the Cairo airport just in case they even think of staying an extra day in their neighbouring country. And they need a solid reason for getting out of this prison – ideally an amputation or some serious disease about to kill them; a scholarship abroad may or may not work; holidays do not count.

For the really desperate, the tunnels may be an alternative, but besides risking their life, they would also need to bribe Egyptian border guards to get their passports stamped so that they are not arrested and deported once in Egyptian territory. I am told this can be done for around $1,000 – you send the passport through the tunnels, get it stamped and returned, then crawl through the underground network and pray the Israelis won’t bomb the area and that the tunnel does not collapse and bury you inside.

Last Tuesday, however, what I thought was my expert grasp of the Rafah border logic turned out to be out of date. A Hamas police officer greeted me politely and, speaking fluent English, told me there is a problem.

“The Egyptians did not forward us your name,” he said looking sympathetically concerned. “Even if we allow you to pass, they will send you back and make a whole scene with us. It has happened already.”

I told him my embassy had informed Egyptian authorities about my intentions, that I had a flight booked to Malta for Thursday, and that countless other foreigners had passed through before me in this way.

“If it were up to me, I would take you with my own car to the other side,” he said.

Unlike countless other border officials I have met in my life, there was no hint of sarcasm in the Hamas officers dealing with me – quite the opposite. They guard a border that is totally controlled by Egypt and Israel, totally empty until Mubarak’s regime decides to open the gates and then thousands of Gazans present themselves in their attempt to get out.

I frantically called the Maltese embassy in Cairo, which had forwarded my documents and an official letter to the Egyptians two weeks ahead of the date of my intended departure. The ambassador had warned me there was no reply yet to our request, but I had mentally downplayed the issue given the dozens of foreigners who had left before me in the same way.

As time passed and phone calls became more frequent, it became clear the ‘Rafah logic’ no longer applied.

While the Maltese embassy was chasing one Egyptian official after the other, a colleague of mine in Cairo was similarly trying to get my name ‘forwarded’ to the border list of privileged travellers.

The problem is that despite the relations between diplomats and the Egyptian foreign ministry, it is the unapproachable security services who decide who can travel and when. Embassies can only forward particulars to the Egyptian foreign ministry, which then sends the documents to the security services and refer back to the ministry.

“The Egyptian security services are more powerful than all of the Egyptian ministers put together,” one former diplomat had told me.

As the hours passed by, I sat with Kamal, my good Bedouin friend and colleague who waited patiently with me and kept me in good spirits, as we smoked shisha at the ‘Border Cafeteria’ outside the deserted Rafah crossing. I was still hoping that a phone call would give me the green light to cross over to the other side, but I couldn’t stop wondering what had led to the change in procedure. After even more hours waiting and more phone calls, the Hamas border guards were kind enough to take my mobile number and promised to call me if they received any news from their Egyptian counterparts, prompting us to head back to Gaza City, about 30 minutes away from Rafah by car.

The next day was practically a repeat of phone calls and waiting, until late in the evening, the ambassador called to tell me the security services’ final reply: No foreigners are allowed to cross Rafah until the border is officially open. Just like the Gazans.

The unofficial explanation is that since an Egyptian border guard was killed by gun fire during demonstrations at the Rafah border last January, Egypt has hardened its stand with Hamas and virtually cut all ties, adding foreigners to the collective punishment. It was never convincingly established that he was killed by Palestinians, but the Egyptian media spinned the whole incident against Hamas and Palestinians to unprecedented heights.

Also, the fact that Hamas did not sign the reconciliation agreement with Fatah brokered by Egypt after months of meetings in Cairo seems to have pissed off Mubarak’s regime, but Hamas says some points were added unilaterally and needed clarification before committing itself.

Others told me that with Mubarak reportedly on his death bed, the Egyptian security services have taken over all the state apparatus to ensure a smooth succession of the regime.

I decided to focus on the practicalities of my predicament rather than getting overly depressed – cancelling my flight, trying to get a refund, informing my girlfriend and family, unpacking my luggage, rescheduling my off days, and informing my Gazan friends that I’m still here after all. That’s what Palestinians wanting to travel have to do all the time.

The dates of the next border opening are unknown – they are only announced about three days in advance – though if the past is anything to go by, it might happen sometime next week. I know that together with me there are thousands of other Gazans eagerly awaiting the news, and I’m still privileged to have an ambassador to refer to, a foreign passport that means something, and a home I can eventually return to without applying for permits. I am also lucky to be surrounded by great Palestinian friends who despite being trapped here for the last four years keep showering me with compassion, which just humbles me and reminds me I have nothing to complain about.

Don't say 'cheese' in Gaza

Scores of flies are scavenging bucketfuls of cheese and milk strewn amid disfigured iron beams in the dust and the pungent smell of sourness.

The afternoon sun is quickly turning the latest fresh produce of the Dalloul family’s cheese factory into a repulsive dairy disaster, but the scene of destruction obscures the details for the distraught onlookers.

It is the second time in a year that the Israeli air force has destroyed the factory in the Al Sabra neighbourhood of Gaza City, but last nights’ raid came without warning.

During the Israeli offensive on Gaza in January 2009 dubbed as Operation Cast Lead, the Dalloul cheese factory was bombed shortly after a telephone call warning the family and neighbours to leave the area.

“In the war the Israelis had a policy of calling in advance to warn us they were about to attack, so we had the chance to escape,” says Motasem Dalloul, factory owner and father of seven children who lives next to the destroyed factory. “But last night we were all asleep. The bomb shook the house, my children were in shock and my wife collapsed.”

On the night between Thursday 1 and Friday 2 April, Israeli aircrafts bombed the factory and 13 other targets across the Gaza Strip, injuring three children.

The Israeli government had said it would respond to recent violence at the buffer with Israel where two soldiers and three Palestinian militants were killed, and previous rocket fire that hit Ashkelon killing a Thai worker.

While the Israeli government claims that it targeted Hamas infrastructure, Motasem, who speaks fluent English and also works as a freelance journalist, said the factory only produced dairy products.

“Do you think I would be producing weapons next to my house?” he says. “We also have a blacksmiths’ workshop away from here that was never targeted. I believe our factory has been targeted, together with other factories, because they want to destroy our economy. Our work undermines the siege. Israel wants to stop some commodities and food from being produced in Gaza so that we become dependent on outside supplies. That’s why I believe we were targeted.”

Until the war when it was first targeted, the factory was producing up to 2 tonnes of dairy products daily. It took the Dalloul family six months to open a new factory producing merely 400kg of cheese and yoghurt a day whose distribution was limited to Gaza City.

The business was just recovering from the thousands of dollars in losses sustained in the war, forcing the family to seek loans and use its entire savings to rebuild.

“Our factory had been open since 1996,” Motasem said. “It took us six months and thousands of dollars of loans and savings to rebuild after it was destroyed last year, and we could only provide cheese for Gaza City. Now we are bankrupt.”

Motasem’s claim that Israel is purposely destroying Gaza’s economic infrastructure was clearly stated by the United Nations fact-finding mission’s inquiry headed by Judge Richard Goldstone in the wake of Cast Lead, calling it a war crime.

Among the cases investigated by the UN mission there was the destruction of the Al Bader flour mill – the only operating mill in Gaza – that was hit by air strikes on 9 January 2009.

“The Mission finds that its destruction had no military justification” the Goldstone report says about the mill that employed 85 people. “The nature of the strikes, in particular the precise targeting of crucial machinery, suggests that the intention was to disable the factory in terms of its productive capacity. ... The Mission also finds that the destruction of the mill was carried out for the purposes of denying sustenance to the civilian population, which is a violation of customary international law”.

A similar case of destruction by the Israeli military investigated in the Goldstone inquiry happened in Zeytoun, where Sameeh Sawafiri’s chicken farm was completely destroyed by Israeli tanks and bulldozers during the same operation Cast Lead. A total of 30,000 chickens were flattened alive in their cages as Sameeh’s family fled the area. After months rebuilding and assembling cages from recycled iron, Sameeh is now somehow back in business with one-third the amount of chickens that he had a year ago, and a lot of debts.
“International aid agencies used to buy eggs from my farm to distribute to poor families, but after the war I was turned into a beggar asking for help,” he says.

In both cases investigated by the UN mission as well as in the case of last week, Israel’s targets were well-established businesses set up for more than a decade and reduced to rubble in the 22-day assault. Similar examples abound: the Sarayo biscuits factory in Shijaiya was completely wiped out in Cast Lead, leaving 50 people without a job and its watchman dead. The Gaza juice factory was severely damaged, with workers having to affix labels and seal bottle caps by hand after the machinery was destroyed, as was the factory’s cold store.

“Unlawful and wanton destruction which is not justified by military necessity amounts to a war crime,” the Goldstone report states.

Economist Omar Shaban, who is also director of independent Palestinian think tank PalThink, says the net effect of such strikes is to keep Gaza’s economy unsustainable.

“We need to distinguish between the daily economic activity, which is nowadays much better, and Gaza’s production and industrial activity which is destroyed,” he says.

While new shops are opening, smuggling tunnels thriving, Israel is allowing more goods to enter Gaza, there have been some job creation programmes and people are spending more money, the coastal enclave’s economy remains subjected to a crippling blockade that keeps 1.5 million people in a man-made humanitarian situation dependent on foreign aid.
Out of 3,900 factories, 3,500 have been closed over the last three years, causing 75,000 job losses in the private sector.

“We are witnessing activation of economic activity only at the service level, but the productive, industrial and even agriculture and fishing sectors are at a standstill,” Shaban says. “There is no sustainability and there are no exports. We can only speak of slight economic improvements alleviating daily hardships.”

Fruit that used to be grown in Gaza and fish that was once Palestinians’ staple food now being imported from Egypt through the tunnels are testimony to the almost destroyed agriculture and fishing industries – both under continuous threat of direct Israeli destruction. For years now fishermen have been allowed to travel only up to three nautical miles as Israeli gunboats await them on the horizon, while farmers on the buffer zone have had to abandon entire fields where they are greeted with Israeli gunfire and tanks.

World Food Programme figures for the month after Cast Lead show that the sea blockade has reduced fish catches by more than 72 per cent compared to the same month in 2008. Out of around 10,000 fishermen in 2000, today less than 3,500 remain.

“The targeting of the cheese factory is just another example of unjust Israeli actions claiming they are targeting terrorist or Hamas infrastructure. It exposes Israel’s hidden agenda,” Shaban said.

At the decimated factory in Al Sabra, Motasem is occupied with clearing the rubble and restoring electricity to his house after the connection was also destroyed in the bombing. He is keen on starting again, although he doesn’t know yet how.

“We have to restart from scratch,” Motasem Dalloul says. “We have no other option. I can’t leave my brothers without a job, we need to work. It will take us a long time to restart, but that’s the only way we have.”

Guns n' teddy bears

Ensherah Zakkout, a Gazan psychologist, is on her way to a home visit in Beit Lahiya, but from the outset this is clearly not an ordinary visit.

To begin with, there is no home. It was flattened last January by Israeli bulldozers, with Kamal Awaja, his wife and five children inside.
Ten-year-old Subhi was huddled with his father and younger brother Ibrahim when on 4 January 2009 the first bomb hit the house in the dead of night, at the start of the first land attack.

Kamal told his sons not be afraid if he fainted, and that was when a piece of shrapnel ripped through Ibrahim’s abdomen and wounded Subhi in his head. As they regained their senses under the rubble, Subhi realised his nine-year-old brother was dying.

“He kissed Ibrahim on his forehead while he lay dying,” his mother, Wafa, says. “Subhi saw death with his eyes.”

After the bombardment, bulldozers started flattening the houses to make way for the incursion. Kamal told his family to pretend they were dead as the soldiers passed by them.

“Israelis thought we were all dead, but once they passed we could not go anywhere,” Kamal said. The village in northern Gaza bordering with Israel was under intense attack until the troops made it into central Gaza, making it impossible for the wounded to go to hospital. “We had to remain next to Ibrahim’s dead body for four days.”

Since the day of his brother’s death, his parents say Subhi has changed completely. Formerly a high achiever at school, he can now barely stand five minutes with a book. The dwindling grades are accompanied by alarming cases of aggression towards other school children and teachers. In the tent where his family is now living, he repeatedly beats his sisters for no apparent reason, destroying their toys and spending most of his time alone or playing violent video games at an internet cafe nearby.

On the day of the psychologist’s visit, Subhi’s father was preparing to accompany his son at school where a disciplinary board was to decide what to do with him after, yet again, he beat up another boy.

“We have lost all control on him,” his mother, in her eighth month of pregnancy, says. “He terrifies his siblings all the time. He used to be first in class but now he is always out looking for trouble.”

“Subhi feels he is totally unprotected; the war taught him that not even home was safe and that his father was powerless,” says Zakkout, the psychologist and herself the mother of a child killed by Israeli soldiers three years ago. “The trauma Subhi suffered, if we’re unsuccessful with therapy, can lead to anywhere – from becoming anti-social and criminal to fanatic religious behaviour. His is the normal reaction to abnormal circumstances.”

A lost generation
The ‘normal reaction’ which mental health professionals and child workers fear in Gaza is the path to radicalisation. Subhi’s family has never engaged in militancy – his father is a Palestinian Authority clerk who was stopped working in Gaza by Hamas. Yet the threat that young children – even from moderate families – might be lured into a militant, extremist lifestyle is real, surrounded as they are by images glorifying ‘martyrs’ and Islamist rhetoric.

 “All Gaza’s children are at risk,” said GCMHP senior psychologist Hasan Zeyada. “They are learning that the only way to tackle every obstacle in life is through violence and aggression. They feel helpless and powerless, that parents can’t protect them. That leads them to identify with the fighter or even the Israeli soldier representing absolute power, like God.”

Living under total siege as opposed to Palestinian children in the West Bank, their only contact with foreigners is the sight of Israeli soldiers destroying their homes and killing their relatives. According to the UN agency chief helping Palestinian refugees (UNRWA) John Ging, a whole generation of children – who make up half of Gaza’s 1.5 million population – risks being lost forever.

“If you have no reason to live, you will seek a glorious death,” he said. “It’s worse now than it ever was before. A whole generation of Palestinians will have never got out of the besieged strip, never interacted with foreigners or even met Israelis except as enemy soldiers intent on killing and destruction. Their violent behaviour and disrespect to their parents is symptomatic of the desperation they are growing up in.”

A study published by the Gaza Community Mental Health Programme after the Israeli aggression shows his concerns are well-founded. Just under 50% of children aged 6-17, who were exposed to the last war that lasted 23 days and claimed the lives of around 1,400 Palestinians, think “often” or “almost always” of seeking revenge on whoever is responsible for the death of close people.

“A six-year-old asked me why God created the Jews,” Zeyada says. “They do not even differentiate between Jews and Israelis.”

Even if the responses are to be expected, the figures remain alarming and show that Subhi is far from alone in the Gaza Strip. Over 60% of Gazan children showed severe to very severe post-traumatic stress disorder according to the same study.

In the last war, 50% of children lost a close relative or friend, 54% witnessed assassination of people by rockets. Over 90% heard the shelling of their area by Israeli artillery and the sonic sounds of jetfighters, and an equal amount witnessed shelling on the ground and saw mutilated bodies on TV.

A particular case highlighted in the UN investigation into Gaza war crimes headed by South African judge Richard Goldstone speaks of a mother whose children aged 3 to 16 had witnessed the killing of their father in their own house. As Israeli soldiers forcefully questioned her and vandalised the house, the children asked their mother whether they would be killed as well.

“Their mother felt the only comfort she could give them was to tell them to say the Shehada, the prayer recited in the face of death,” the report says.

As many as 69% of children were forced to flee their home during the war, and a staggering 99% said they did not feel safe at home and felt neither the family nor anyone else could protect them.

But talking of post-traumatic stress can be misleading as the younger generation is “living an ongoing trauma” according to Hasan Zeyada. Even before the war, the crippling siege and fierce factional divisions were already leaving their toll on children.

“The siege, internal divisions and the war create an overwhelming feeling of helplessness,” Dr Zeyada said. “All the people feel they cannot do anything to stop the violations. It’s a very painful emotion.”

That sense of helplessness and lack of protection explains children’s widespread use of toy guns whenever they play, Zeyada says.

While adult men used to the culture of being family leaders get more withdrawn in the face of helplessness, women are left making important family decisions on their own, says Heba Zayyam an officer working at the UN development fund for women.

This is also forcing young girls to abandon dreams of furthering their studies and developing.

“I studied at the University of Jordan 10 years ago,” Zayyam said. “Now sending girls to study abroad is frowned upon. There is a whole new generation who never left Gaza, who don’t know what a cinema looks like, and who don’t know how the world looks like out there.”

Children, UNRWA’s John Ging says, are being punished for a crime they did not commit.

“Israel designated Gaza as a hostile entity after Hamas won the election, so it’s a self-fulfilling prophecy that breeds violent hostility,” Ging said. “Half of the Gazan population is made of kids; they didn’t vote for anybody. We’re in a self-reinforcing cycle of rhetoric and violence.”

Political fragmentation – which took a violent head in the 2007 civil war when Fatah troops loyal to President Mahmoud Abbas were ousted from Gaza by Hamas – permeates as early as the primary school years, with five-year-olds wearing green or yellow tops in support Hamas or Fatah. Children are also victims of physical punishment, in schools and in families – an issue which Dr Zeyada calls “one of the main problems of Gaza’s social reality”.

The same Goldstone report which accuses both Israel and Hamas of committing war crimes speaks of “indoctrination programmes allegedly introduced by the Gaza authorities, and of a process of ideological and political polarization”. Such programmes “have a high potential for imposing models of education at odds with human rights values and with a culture of peace and tolerance”.

Meanwhile according to UNICEF, 280 schools damaged by the war still cannot be rehabilitated due to the ongoing blockade. UNRWA itself hosts 200,000 children in its schools across Gaza, but it can’t get the raw materials to rebuild schools, to furnish classes with desks and distribute text books – all items that are banned by Israel.

Striving for normality
At the Qattan Centre for the Child in Gaza City, Director Reem Abu Jaber leafs through dozens of drawings by children after the war. The recurrent images are disturbing, coming as they are from children under 15. Tanks, missiles, helicopters, phosphorus falling from the sky, bombs and corpses fill the pages, but there are also glimpses of flowers and the sun shining over houses.

The centre runs a free, impressive state of the art library and organises free lessons in creative writing, literacy, web design, film making, critical thinking and empowerment classes for parents.

“You don’t need a stamp or a passport to read a book,” Abu Jaber says “A book can take you somewhere else, and that’s what our children need right now.”

The centre is a veritable oasis of learning and entertainment for thousands of children under 15, and the Qattan Foundation running it is lucky to be a registered charity in the UK enabling it to receive funding from abroad. All the other Gazan organisations have been otherwise cut off since the Hamas takeover.

Yet even for the Qattan Centre, replacing books and buying paper for children is proving extremely difficult, having to wait long months until orders are somehow smuggled in by travellers coming through the Erez crossing from Israel or the Rafah border with Egypt. Tiles lining the colourful halls and classes that are broken have to be replaced with what is available.

“We were very lucky the building was not hit in the war,” Abu Jaber says.

The success of Qattan’s oversubscribed classes is also a cause of concern for Abu Jaber, concerned that there are no outlets catering for children over 15.
“After that, you just have Fatah and Hamas,” she said.

It is also the age from when young people are becoming increasingly addicted to Tramadol, the powerful painkiller with a narcotic effect leaving its users sedated for hours. Despite the Hamas government’s belated crackdown on the drug’s abuse, mental health professionals have seen an alarming rise since the war. Tunnel workers, most of them children, are believed to be on a constant supply to forget about their lethal surroundings.

US Actress and children’s rights activist Mia Farrow spoke about children’s widespread trauma but also highlighted glimmers of resilience during her visit to Gaza last October as UNICEF Goodwill Ambassador.

“A teacher said that when they hear a loud noise they look at the sky and scream and run and some will cry,” said Farrow, who also related stories of children whose houses were bombed around them, whose relatives were killed, and one who was placed by Israeli soldiers with her family in a hole and worried they would be buried alive. “A little girl said I don’t know what will happen next, and yet I was told by a group of children I want to be a doctor, I want to be a teacher. The children were full of hope and determination.”

Back in the Awajas’ tent in Beit Lahiya, Kamal the father has tears in his eyes as he speaks about his dead son Ibrahim. The psychologist tries consoling him, but it is time to head to school with Subhi to face the disciplinary board.

According to figures released by Defence for Children International, Ibrahim is one of 352 children killed during Operation Cast Lead, as the Israeli offensive was known. And that’s far from the high price that a whole generation of children is having to pay.