Solitary confinement

Israel announced that it will ‘ease the blockade’ of Gaza, but hundreds of detained Palestinians’ relatives remain banned from visiting their loved ones, just like the 1.5 million Gazans imprisoned in the coastal enclave

Hunched in a corner of the front yard of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) office in Gaza City, 84-year-old Um Fares Ahmed Baroud holds a framed photo of her son amid dozens of other mothers and relatives who gather here every Monday.


Behind the cracked glass pane, the discolouring picture of her 47-year-old son Fares Ahmed, taken years ago when she could still visit him in the Israeli jail where he is serving a life sentence since 1988.

Blinded by old age, Um Fares wakes up early every Monday to make the trip from her impoverished house in Shati Camp to the ICRC office for the weekly prisoners’ relatives demonstration demanding their right to visit their loved ones.

For the last 10 years, Um Fares has been banned by Israel from visiting her son, together with hundreds of others.

“He is only allowed one phone call a year in Eid (the Muslim holy feast), so I only get to hear his voice for three minutes a year. Isn’t that a sin?” the frail mother said with tears in her eyes. “It’s bad enough that I can’t visit him, but if only I could hear his voice, a couple of words… He’s the only thing I think of at home, as all his brothers live abroad and I’m on my own.”

In the last four years of blockade of Gaza, all Palestinians living in the strip have been completely forbidden from visiting and calling their imprisoned relatives. Israeli authorities suspended indefinitely the ICRC-run Family Visits Programme as part of the blockade, and despite the rhetoric from Netanyahu’s right-wing government claiming it was “easing the siege” a month ago, relatives remain cruelly divided with no chance of movement, not to mention the entire Gaza population that is imprisoned in the strip, banned from moving to the West Bank or travelling abroad.

More than 11,000 prisoners are held captive in Israeli jails. According to the ICRC, around 1,000 of them are from Gaza, while around 280 are in administrative detention, which is arrest without trial.

Palestinians, on the other hand, have only one Israeli arrested. Gilad Shalit was captured by Palestinian fighters during active military duty on the Gaza border in June 2006. Now under the Hamas government’s responsibility, his warders refuse to have the ICRC visit him on security grounds, but a video tape showing he was alive was released last October in exchange for the release of 20 female Palestinian prisoners.

ICRC head of media relations and communications, Iyad Nasr, said that since Israel imposed the blockade of Gaza, all the Gazan families have been banned from visiting their relatives in Israeli prisons.

“Every Monday we get prisoners’ relatives and welcome them in our building, and our delegates listen to their concerns, because they have nobody to refer to,” Nasr said. “Some of them are 80-year-old mothers who haven’t seen their children in years, and it’s a very cruel and unjustified situation. Israel has a right to defend its security concerns, but it could take all the security provisions it needs to take and allow such visits. One such mother I knew passed away two weeks ago after not seeing her son in seven years.

“In keeping the detainees outside the occupied territories, Israel is violating Article 49 (of the Fourth Geneva Convention) which prohibits the deportation of individuals from occupied territories,” Nasr added. “We keep raising the question of resuming the family visits programme with Israel, as it is a crucial programme for prisoners’ relatives who are distressed without any contact with their beloved ones.”

Last December, relatives of Gaza prisoners went to the Israeli high court seeking an end to the ban on prison visits, but the Israeli court rejected the lawsuit filed by Israeli and Palestinian human rights organisations, claiming that such visits were “not a humanitarian need”.

The Palestinian Centre for Human Rights (PCHR) says prisoners in Israeli jails “continue to be denied their basic rights, besides being used as political bargaining chips in flagrant violation of international human rights and humanitarian law”.

PCHR reports that Palestinian prisoners in Israeli jails continuously suffer from ill treatment and poor detention conditions, medical negligence and denial of healthcare, torture and consistent denial of visitors’ rights.

“As political focus in recent days remains on changes to the movement of goods, it is critical to remember the broader policy of the siege on Gaza, which includes restrictions on freedom of movement and the isolation of Gaza from the West Bank, and the human element of the siege, apart from the growing humanitarian crisis on the ground,” said Sharon Rose Goldberg, spokesperson for Hamoked, and Israeli human rights organisation. “Although the flow of goods may have been eased, Gaza’s population of 1.5 million is still held captive, and the human face of the siege may be lost in the political rhetoric.”

Since the beginning of the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip in 1967, more than 700,000 men, women and children have been detained in Israel, representing 20% of Palestinians living in the occupied territories. Around 200 of them died in Israeli jails, with human rights organisations accusing Israel of killing some of them deliberately or because of medical negligence.

In the same period, 4,000 children were imprisoned, with some 300 of them still in detention and many of them subjected to torture and ill-treatment. The 30 Israeli prisons include detention centres in the desert, where prisoners are held in tents in the searing summer heat and bitter winter cold. Around 400 women have been jailed since the 1987 Intifada, with some of them having given birth in prison.

Three years of blockade, 1.5 million trapped

Easing the siege will keep turning Gazans into beggars

In his dimly lit shop in Gaza City’s popular market, Khaled Nasan is shuffling through the new batch of second hand clothes just arrived from Israel.

He is tired. The previous night he spent it washing every item: jeans, shirts, trousers, blouses, football gears, and ironing them meticulously. But it is a chance that comes only once in a while, that of getting a consignment to fill his little clothes shop. Israel only allows a limited number of containers of such clothes every month, so Khaled has to team up with other clothes sellers to bring in containers according to a schedule fixed by Israeli authorities.

Khaled’s story is a case of bitter irony. Six years ago he used to employ 200 people in his sewing factory, getting materials, designs and orders from Israeli agents and exporting the finished products. Nowadays he sits waiting for second hand clothes from Israel to sell them to Palestinians who are, like him, trapped in Gaza.

The only sewing machine inside his shop nowadays is used to repair old clothes and for some alterations his customers might need. But having no electricity right now he cannot even use it.

“Until 2004 we used to send up to 400 clothing items to Israel everyday – from trousers to shirts and underwear,” he tells me. “Now we depend on the second hand clothes the Israelis send us. I used to make NIS1,000 a day. Nowadays I just open the shop so that by the end of the day I might make enough money to eat with my wife and four children, and pay the university fees of two of them.”

With the Israeli blockade of Gaza, Khaled has been turned from an employer of a couple of hundreds of Palestinians into a corner shop owner dependent on food aid distributed by UNRWA.

“Thank God for that, because without that help what would we do?” he says.

With exports from Gaza and imports of raw materials brutally banned by Israel, more than 3,500 factories have closed down in the last four years.

Israel’s decision to ‘ease the siege’ as announced a couple of weeks ago will ease nothing of Khaled’s financial woes as he is bound in chains to the low scale business until Gaza is allowed again to export its products.

So far, the only effect on the ground has been the importation of Israeli dairy products and ketchup at lower prices than the items brought through the tunnels. But that’s a far cry from what the Israeli hype and propaganda make outsiders believe in the wake of the flotilla massacre.

To this day, Israel is still imposing an obscure list of allowed items into Gaza, despite promises to the Middle East Quartet to change the list into a much smaller one of items that are banned instead.

The outrage and frustration in Gaza could be felt palpably when Middle East Quartet representative Tony Blair ‘met’ Palestinians through a video conference from Jerusalem two days after Israel declared it would ‘ease the siege’.

Gazans from across the board – from businessmen to humanitarian workers, from lawyers to students – slammed Blair and grilled him with their questions from a hall inside Roots Restaurant on 22 June, as news that ketchup and mayonnaise were the first items to enter Gaza.

“The de-development of Gaza has taken us 40 years back,” said Issam Younis, director general of Al Mezan Centre for Human Rights. “The question about the blockade is not just about movement of trucks at the crossings. It violates international law, it is illegal. It is not about what is permitted to enter and what’s prohibited, but about what Gaza needs. It is unacceptable to have two entities – the West Bank and Gaza. … We have no guarantee that Israel will not go back on its decision to have a list of banned items [instead of allowed items]. I can’t see why after years of unpredictability Israel will change its behaviour.”

A businessman and board member of the Gaza Businessmen Association voiced his aspiration to get Gaza’s economy back on its feet and open it up to Middle Eastern markets when he told Blair that getting more varieties of food satisfied nobody.

“Today we’re getting about 92 trucks [of imports] per day; in 2005 we used to get 700. In fact we need around 900 trucks of material per day. Israel is not banning items for Hamas but for Palestinians,” said Ali Abu Shamla. “We need an independent authority to be established for Gaza’s reconstruction… we need a safe passage between the West Bank and Gaza, and we need to start looking at Gaza as the free trade zone of the future for all the Middle East.”

A newly graduated young woman called Yasmine Al Khoudary gave Blair what was perhaps the bleakest outlook on Gaza after more than three years of siege.

“The new generation of Gazans is lost,” she told him. “Their situation has deteriorated to such an extent that no movement of trucks and opening of crossings is going to repair the damage. A lost generation means that prospects for peace have been destroyed.”
Another university student, Hiba Timari, said: “We lack freedom before food, ketchup, mayonnaise or anything else.”

Blair ended up on the defensive, saying he could only keep working on the practical little things that would pave the way for greater things, but few Palestinians emerged optimistic from the meeting.

Even if the so-called easing of the siege had to be judged solely on Israel’s promise to allow more items into Gaza, the figures belie the rhetoric. In June – the month of Israel’s decision, a total of 331 trucks of materials were allowed into Gaza through the Karni crossing. That is half the amount of trucks that entered in May, a month before Israel said it would ease the siege.

The only entries through Karni crossing after the Israeli cabinet decision have been UNRWA trucks of gravel and cement, 19 trucks of wheat and chickpeas, and 25 trucks of animal feed. No cement and wood is being allowed through for commercial use so far, nor are any exports allowed – the last export from Gaza was one truck of flowers in April.

Fishermen will also remain out of their jobs as the 3 nautical mile limit does not seem likely to be lifted.

“Unless we can export our produce and import the raw materials we need, we will remain jobless and dependent on humanitarian aid,” said Mohammed Abu Al Fouz, a former factory worker in Israel, unemployed since 2004.