The first
thing you notice at the entrance to the Balata Refugee Camp is
the overturned, burned out car stuck in a huge man-made crater
in the ground. But this was the battleground of the previous three
days, as the Israeli Army sacked the camp and destroyed homes,
cars, property, and lives with wanton abandon and without much
purpose. Other than to attack and terrorize a people who have
nothing in this world and who have already been made homeless
– and who have remained refugees for over 50 years. Inside
the camp, this alleged “hotbed of terrorism” the group
of us eight internationals were met and greeted by the residents
with inquisitive looks, “salaam aleikum” shouted from
time to time, and lots of little kids running up to us to see
who were these
strangers. All tried to make us feel welcome and when they learned
that we were there in solidarity with the people of the camp and
wanted to take pictures to show the world, we were pulled in many
different directions
at once to witness what the Israelis had done. What they had done
was obvious, and it was all over the camp. Immediately noticeable,
at eye level, was the black spray paint on the walls – arrows,
numbers, Hebrew writing and stars of David, markings the soldiers
made to allow themselves to navigate through the crowded camp.
Permanent markings of the three days of hell the camp endured.
We later found these markings inside people’s homes as well,
painted on the walls.
Thirty
homes were destroyed in the camp, but hundreds more effectively
ruined and damaged. The camp is
densely populated and some alleyways between the buildings are
barely wide enough for me – an average sized male –
to pass through. Other structures are just built wall-to-wall.
When the Israeli army took down a building – allegedly looking
for weapons or rockets (no evidence of any found) – it meant
that the neighbors’ buildings also were damaged. The first
place I visited was a destroyed home. Next door, the building
was still standing, but upon walking in, I discovered that the
neighbor had lost his wall. The home was also damaged by the demolition
and the home utterly unusable. If each house demolished results
in the two or three neighboring buildings also being damaged beyond
use, then the result is between 90 and 120 structures affected.
Each structure contains at least two (and usually more) apartments,
housing anywhere from 10 to 40 people. Therefore, at minimum,
900 people were left homeless by the home demolitions in the camp
– this is the calculus of Israel’s war on the Palestinian
people.
Walking
through the streets of the camp, destruction was all around us.
Peering down alleyways, we inevitably spotted the chunks of stone,
the twisted metal and the broken piece of furniture that indicated
a home was demolished. Cars had been set ablaze and riddled with
bullet-holes – the carcasses lay in the streets as added
testimony to the siege. Every house we visited had a story to
tell. Some were simply shot up, others had tear gas thrown inside,
while others were invaded and occupied by the soldiers. We visited
one home that had been occupied during the entire siege by Israeli
soldiers. Upon entering the house, the soldiers offered to allow
the family to leave, but promised them they would never come back
to the house. The family stayed – three children (aged 4
to 9), two young women (one pregnant) and an elderly woman. The
man of the house – PLC member and leading figure in the camp,
Hussam Khader – was not home for fear of his life. The soldiers
forced the family into one room – approximately 8x10 feet
– and made them stay there the entire three days. For the
first twenty-four hours, not a single person was allowed to leave
the room at all – not for the bathroom, not for food, not
for water. The soldiers ransacked the entire place – taking
money and computer disks, breaking furniture and emptying drawers,
ripping apart passports and overturning children’s beds.
We knocked at the door of the home when we arrived. As we entered
the sitting room, we heard child whimper – little Ahmed (four
years old) was afraid we were the Israelis coming back to the
house. He is traumatized by the
experience and needs to be near his mom and aunt constantly. But
he is tough, and before long he was
playing with my camera. He told me to follow him upstairs and
there he showed me how the soldiers had
ransacked his room. He was amazed by the sight and asked me why
the soldiers did this to him.
The
last home we visited in the camp was located on the main street,
near the cemetery. A ground floor apartment was located adjacent
to a store. The main gate of the store was blown apart and the
glass from the window lay in the street. The back wall of the
small store was torn down and you could see directly into the
apartment behind – but there was not much to see. Walking
into the house we were unable to step on the floor directly –
it was covered with clothing, broken dishes, broken furniture,
etc. The electricity was cut, so we had to poke around in the
diminishing light until a portable fixture was brought in. The
lit room revealed the full destruction – even the washing
machine was not safe from the brutality of the soldiers. A fully
veiled young woman (only her eyes showed) boldly came up to me
and asked if I spoke English. I replied that I did and that she
could speak to me in either English or Arabic. She explained that
she was the oldest of four children in the house – 14-years
old – and that her father was dead. She led me over to where
the kitchen had been and searched in the broken glass for something.
Finally, she pulled up a picture frame with a photo of her father
in it and explained to me that Israeli spies had killed him in
1994. In a flash she was back in the pile on the ground looking
for another photo – that of her grandfather, also dead. Now
holding both pictures, this young Muslim woman, proud to know
English and proud of her family, calmly explained what had happened
when the soldiers came – how they had to flee and spend the
night outside the camp in the nearby fields. For more than fifty
years they had been refugees, and now Israel wanted to attack
them again. But, she told me, struggling with her emotions and
her sense of dignity, “they must know we are strong children
and we won’t leave this land, my
grandfather’s land. We will return to the land which they
occupied in 1948.”
These
refugees, like those in the other camps, have lost everything
and live with virtually nothing. Now, day after day, the Israeli
army is going after them in a pogrom deliberately designed to
provoke and to strike terror in the hearts of an entire people.
Like little Ahmed Khader, the world must ask, why are the Israelis
doing this?
