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At the end of Kussufin Road some army watch towers guard the bypass
road to the east of the Abu Holi traffic lights. Close to the
prefabricated wall and barbed wire separating the watch towers
from the Palestinian territory, stand half a dozen small houses
with corrugated asbestos sheet roofs, so near the Israeli watch
towers that the Israeli soldiers can see inside the Palestinians'
houses. From each window of the house a different watch tower
can be seen, all less than ten meters from the house.
The family leaving in the little houses on the dunes is happy
to see us and at once shows us the holes of the most recent bullets
that the bored soldiers have fired into one of their homes, just
to intimidate them, forcing them to move about in the rooms on
hands and knees.
One of the men of the house has taken a degree in pedagogy while
his sister will be graduating in English language in the next
three weeks. The fist exam will be poetry and she will present
a study on T. S. Eliot.
"I was born here, at the end of Kussufin Roasd, 22 years
ago, and my brothers have also been born here. My mother was born
in Khan Younis in 1948 and came to live here after marrying. Here
she gave birth to six brothers and six sisters, but nowadays only
for of my brothers, my younger sister and I with my parents live
in these houses. There are 36 of us in all including the children
of my brothers and sister.
My father wanted to take us to another house, but we can't stay
there for long and so it is not worth the trouble. There is no
way of going away from here and there is no one who can help us.
If we left our houses we wouldn't know where to go. There is no
solution to our condition. We are obliged to stay in this place
till we die.
They built the watch towers when the finished the bypass road
for the settlers to go to the settlements. That was more than
10 years ago and since then we have been living like this. Since
the beginning of the Intifada the soldiers have become more dangerous.
Before they did not come into our houses to threaten us and they
did not fire at us as they have been doing since October 2000.
We cannot sleep like other people because we are waiting for them
to arrive at any moment. They come silently and suddenly knock
at our doors… They come once a week in the middle of the night,
open the door and come into the house. Some times they prevent
the frightened children from going to the bathroom and when I
want to go they would like to come with me, but I refuse and don't
let them follow me into the bathroom to see what I do. The soldier
understands me but says nothing, he stays silent.
The children are frightened and my mother starts screaming when
the soldiers try to touch me. I am afraid but I do not allow it
and they say bad words to me. My mother always tells me to put
on old clothes so as not to attract them, because all the soldiers
are very young, there are no old ones among them.
I study English and last month I was getting ready for an exam.
I am in my last year at university and in the coming weeks I have
to get through a number of exams to graduate. But during the night
the soldiers come in and I loose concentration and I cannot study
anymore and I am frightened of what they can do to me. I am not
frightened of their guns or their force but of what they can do
to me…
When I went to the exam I explained the situation to the professor
but he told me that we are all living in bad conditions. I tried
to insist and asked him to come and see where I live, but he did
not come. He was afraid because nobody lives so close to the soldiers
like us, and nobody wants to believe me when I tell them.
At night we cannot open the windows even if it is very hot, because
they have forbidden us to and then they would be able to look
inside. Now I think they can see inside even with the windows
closed.
Sometimes my father does not want to open the door to the soldiers
and then my mother gets angry because it is not proper for her
to go and open. She is a woman. But if we do not open the door,
the soldiers shoot from the window and my mother suffers from
rheumatism and when they shoot into our rooms she cannot go on
hands and knees like us.
If one gets ill and urgently need to go to hospital in the night,
we cannot go and the ambulance cannot come here. We couldn't even
phone for one because they have confiscated my brother's mobile
and forbidden us to have a normal telephone. We cannot go out
when it is dark because of the curfew and no one can come to us.
We are very tired of living like this.
Three months ago they went into a house down there and filled
it with explosives before demolishing it. Then they returned with
tanks and many soldiers were hidden behind the wall to protect
the work of the bulldozer. One of my brothers stood in front of
the bulldozer to try to stop it, to prevent it from destroying
everything, but in the end they blew up the house and passed over
it with the bulldozer flattening everything. They also destroyed
all our olive trees. Thank be to God my brother is still alive.
Once they came in with dogs -they were German shepherds- they
nosed everywhere. The children were very frightened. The dogs
even nosed into our plates in the kitchen and afterwards we had
to wash everything because the dogs are dirty animals and they
stink.
One evening I was sitting on the doorstep washing the dishes and
they saw me with the telecamera, the one on the post. So they
came and asked me if I was waiting for a terrorist. But I was
only washing the dishes and not waiting for anyone. I was afraid
that they were going to kill me but they saw the dishes and believed
me.
They can do whatever they want in the name of their security,
even if we don't do them any harm. We don't throw stones, much
less shoot at them. Otherwise, they have warned us, they will
immediately come and demolish all our houses without any notice.
They observe us the whole time with that telecamera on the post,
do you see how they are observing us? If some stranger comes to
see us, than they come and want to know everything: who is he?
and why has he come? and what does he do? No, it is different
with you, you are not Palestinians."
We hear shouted orders from a megaphone, then a tank raises a
cloud of dust. They are probably changing the guard, it is the
night shift.
"This child is very young, he is my brother's son. The first
word he spoke was not 'ma' or 'da', but 'tak' (shoot). When he
sees soldiers, he is always very frightened and calls: mummy,
mummy.
Some foreign psychologists sent by the United Nations came to
speak with our children, but they could not find any solution.
When they left after five months they were more depressed than
us. There is no hope for us and no future."
The night passed accompanied by distant explosions and bursts
if fire towards the west. Silence, instead, reign here. The muezzin
cannot give the morning call to prayer at four in the morning,
like every other place in the Gaza Strip. Even the cockerels seem
to be introverted on these sand dunes at the end of the Kussufin
Road.
Greetings
Maurizio Cucci (White Peace Berets)
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