Posts tagged with Israel
Louisa Waugh, Friday, November 21, 2008
Israel is responsible for a hell of a lot of the misery and human rights violations in the Gaza Strip: but Hamas is also harassing, interrogating and mistreating civilians. Between them, Israel and Hamas are choking the life out of the people trapped inside Gaza.
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Louisa Waugh, Tuesday, November 18, 2008
Gaza is not facing a humanitarian crisis: this is a human rights
crisis.
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Louisa Waugh, Tuesday, November 4, 2008
The international media has devoured the story of Palestinian and
international human rights activists, doctors, academics,
parliamentarians and lawyers sailing through Israeli gunboat-infested
waters to reach the besieged Gaza Strip. But inside Gaza, the reaction
has been decidedly mixed.
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Louisa Waugh, Tuesday, October 28, 2008
As a consequence of the illegal siege, many Gazans are literally going underground to circumvent the border controls that keep them imprisoned.
Louisa Waugh, Wednesday, October 15, 2008
I am stranded and can’t get home. I left Gaza early Friday morning,
before the border at Erez closed, and thought I would be back at home
by Sunday afternoon: but this is turning into a bit of an epic.
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Louisa Waugh, Tuesday, October 7, 2008
The festival of Eid al-Fitr ended a couple of days ago, and most of us
in Gaza have just dragged ourselves back to work. After the sluggish
month of Ramadan – when most people fasted, followed by a week of
almost solid eating, drinking and visiting friends and relatives – it’s
actually a bit of relief to get back to being busy every morning.
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Louisa Waugh, Monday, September 29, 2008
Resistance to the Israeli occupation of Palestine comes in many forms:
every Friday, Israeli, Palestinian and international activists gather
in the village of Nil’in, near Ramallah, in the Palestinian West Bank,
to protest peacefully at the construction of a new slab of Israel’s
so-called ‘Barrier Wall’ that will slice through Nil’in and separate
the villagers from their land. And every Friday the activists are
teargassed by Israeli soldiers, and sprayed with a foul-smelling
liquid: they are often shot with rubber-coated bullets too.
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Louisa Waugh, Tuesday, September 9, 2008
The month of Ramadan began about ten days ago. Most of my colleagues
are fasting, as are most of my friends, though – as you may already
have guessed – I am not. Abstaining from food from sunrise to sunset
would be OK, because the weather is still hot and I don’t feel like
eating very much – but going without water is really more than I could
bear. So I eat and drink discreetly, and observe Ramadan from a subtle
distance.
Louisa Waugh, Wednesday, September 3, 2008
When two small fishing vessels sailed into Gaza Port on 23 August with their renegade crews of international solidarity activists, thousands of Gazans came to greet them. It was a glorious sunny afternoon, and the 46 activists on board the boats had done something amazing: after sailing more than 30 hours from Cyprus, they’d broken the siege of Gaza. Few of us who live here thought they’d make it, and we were delighted to be proved wrong.
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Louisa Waugh, Friday, August 22, 2008
Four months ago, on April 16, the Israeli military carried out two separate attacks against groups of civilians in Juhor al-dik, a village in the middle area of the Gaza Strip. In the first attack, Israeli troops fired two missiles from a helicopter into a crowd of adults and children who had gathered together during an Israeli incursion into Juhor al-dik. The first missile killed two children, and when the crowd ran screaming, the soldiers fired a second missile that landed inside in the garden of Mahmoud Ahmed Mohammed. He was killed instantly, as was his brother, and four other children.
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Louisa Waugh, Tuesday, July 1, 2008
Ten days into the Tahdiya, or ‘Calm’ between Hamas and Israel,
we haven’t seen anything change here inside Gaza. In fact the only real
difference I’ve noticed is that over the last couple of weeks the power
cuts have been worse than ever. Like many other people, I have power
cuts at home for eight hours at a time now. So the food in my fridge
gets ruined and wasted.
Please tell me how that contributes to security in Israel.
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Louisa Waugh, Monday, June 23, 2008
The Arabic word tahdiya means ‘calming’ or ‘quieting.’ Hamas and the
Government of Israel agreed to a six month tahdiya a few days ago, just
after the first anniversary of the Hamas takeover of the Gaza Strip.
Hostilities on both sides would cease, and the Israeli siege of Gaza
would gradually ease. The Tahdiya started at 6:00am on June 19. I was
startled out of sleep about fifteen minutes beforehand by a familiar
sound– the pounding of bombs. Israel was bombing the northern Gaza
Strip, just a few miles away from where I live. At six o’clock exactly,
the bombing stopped. But it didn’t bode well.
Louisa Waugh, Tuesday, June 3, 2008
Most of the bad news you hear about Gaza is true. There are chronic
fuel shortages here: this week I’ve seen hundreds of men queuing to
refill their empty canisters of cooking gas, so they can cook at home,
and hundreds of drivers queuing outside one gas station in Gaza city,
desperately hoping they can refuel their cars. There are constant
shortages of electricity, fresh drinking water (because the electric
water pumps keep shutting down), fresh milk, medicines and hearing aids
- which the Government of Israel won’t allow into Gaza for ‘security’
reasons. Israel has also banned construction materials, which is why a
lot of the Gaza Strip literally looks like a bomb site.
