Hamza Abu Al-Tarabeesh shares stories from the first two weeks of the Great March of Return in Gaza. Despite the fact Yousef Abu Eida, 26, was shot in the leg last Friday, he was back today using crutches and a metal brace. “I came today despite the pain to send two messages,” he tells Abu Al-Tarabeesh. “The first is that I will not give up the right of my return to my occupied town ‘Ashdod’ and another message to the Israeli sniper that we are not afraid of him.”
Last Friday’s massacre by Israel of 17 Palestinians in Gaza and the US support for the action makes it plain that it is we must throw all our weight against the unholy alliance that has made possible decades of apartheid and periodic mass murder. We can resist; we can protest; or we can be complicit. There is no such thing as neutrality, Michael Lesher writes.
Mohammed Abu Amr’s last creation on the beach in Gaza was a sand sculpture that said, “I will return.” A day later he was killed along with 16 other Palestinians demonstrating on the 42nd anniversary of Land Day. He had been planning to carve a 100-meter map of Palestine along with a huge key on the beach to coincide with upcoming anniversary of the Nakba, and his friends have completed his mission. “This sandy map was Mohammed’s uncompleted dream,” artist Osama Sbeata tells Mondoweiss.
The Israeli human rights organization B’Tselem is calling on soldiers to disobey “patently illegal” shoot-to-kill orders against unarmed protesters in Gaza. The Israeli policy in Gaza has not been the result of one illegal order, but doctrine of collective punishment endorsed by the entire political and military leadership of the county. Thus, refusing orders to attack nonviolent protesters arguably amounts to a mutiny against the state. In Israel, simply following international law is a radical act.
The Israeli IDF spokesperson released photos of some of the Palestinians shot dead in Friday’s Gaza massacre, suggesting they were “terrorists” because they were affiliated with Hamas. This dubious propaganda campaign eliminates distinctions between civilians and combatants and is an incitement to state terror.
A video posted by a Gaza journalist today appears to show the moment that Mohammed Khalil, a young Palestinian football player, was shot in the leg, destroying his knee, and his career, evidently by an Israeli sniper while the young man was merely video’ing himself near the Israeli border last Friday. Israel killed 17 Palestinian protesters and wounded hundreds more.
Rana Shubair set out with her husband, two children, and a collection of other relatives to join 30,000 more Palestinians who marched to the border with Israel for Gaza’s Great March of Return: “As I pondered the faces of my people there with me, one fact was clear to me more than ever: None of us had anything more valuable to lose than what we already had—our home.”
US officials have defended Israel’s massacre of civilians in Gaza as a ‘response’ to terrorism – even before it happened. And afterward, the US “sheriff”, UN Ambassador Nikki Haley, again kicked her high heels, blocking a draft UN Security Council statement which called for an “independent and transparent investigation” of the violence. The only answer to official support is grassroots pressure.
Bethlehem University’s Jamil Khader writes of the Great March of Return: “The importance of the Great March of Return lies in the way it staged a raw and unmediated confrontation between the brute high-tech power of one of the most powerful armies in the world and the bare life of thousands of unarmed people in their humanity and dignity . . the message of the march reframes the right of return and freedom not only within international human rights law, but also within an emancipatory and utopian future for all.”
Ahmad Kabariti reports from the first day of the Great March of Return in Gaza where 15 Palestinians were killed by Israeli forces. Despite the Israeli violence, there are scenes of nonviolent protest and persistence, and even a wedding. Groom Alaa Shahin tells Kabariti, “A few hundred meters away from those soldiers eyes, I emphasize my right and the whole Palestinian peoples’ right to return home after 70 years of displacement, we will not wait another 70!”