Rami Almeghari

As I walked into one of the largest food processing plants in the central Gaza Strip, the first thing I noticed were two workers sitting idle in the ice-cream production area of the plant. I arrived during working hours, but all the machines were completely stopped. The factory was silent, the silence was overwhelming. The workers, Ibrahim and Hassan, were sitting idle in a corner - not because there is no desire in Gaza for ice cream, but because the Al-Awda factory, for which both workers work, is no longer able to produce ice cream, due to the electricity outages in the Gaza Strip.

In wintertime, we are used to having heavy rains sometimes in some places, while in other places nearby, there is no rain at all. You know why, simply because a cloud might be somewhere else. In Palestine, our climate is arid, dry - normally we only have rain in winter. But this summer, for the first time ever, we have been experiencing “summer rains”. Since June 27, they have been falling very heavily, with a few brief pauses when the cloud moved north to Lebanon, a region with a climate very similar to Gaza. This very dark cloud has moved back to Palestine, where people had just begun to lift their heads after the first deluge.

Mayor Mansour pointed out that “for more than 40 days, the Shouka rural area has been under Israeli attack, as the Israeli tanks have been firing, by day and night, on the people’s houses and farms.” “The damages are immense; 129 green houses have been destroyed, 58 houses were torn down, while many of our village’s inhabitants have been evacuated to safe shelters at local UNRWA [United Nations Refugee and Works Agency] schools. The water networks in the village have been totally destroyed. Shouka is a traumatized village”, Mayor Mansour confirmed.

”Yousef, Yousef, Yousef!” was how Aziza Mughari of the Alburaij refugee camp first reacted when news of her son’s death spread in her local community. Her son was being treated in the Israeli hospital of Ekhelof in Tel Aviv for critical injuries he sustained during an Israeli army incursion into the nearby refugee camp of Maghazi almost ten days ago. Because the hospital is inside Israel, Aziza was not able to visit her dying son. “Who will bring me my medicine, who will do errands for me? Son, where are you? I don’t believe you are dead, they are liars,” Aziza, a sick mother, called again on Yousef, but Yousef was no longer there.

”I have lost a total of $1,000 US dollars since the power supply has been cut, the number of my customers has decreased to minimum, I stay idle at my shop for long hours; what shall I do?” asked 31-year-old Alaa’ Salahat, a local vendor of frozen foods from the central Gaza Strip refugee camp of Maghazi. He spoke of his experience while sitting in the darkness with only a kerosene lamp illuminating the worry lines in his face. “This is really a very terrible situation; we are civilians - what does Israel want? This is really a collective punishment against an entire people,” said Alaa’.

”Summer rains are a good blessing” — this is the title for a lesson in the second-grade grammar book of Palestinian children in Gaza. And while it is true that rains are a good blessing, the current “Operation Summer Rains” being carried out by Israel is anything but a blessing. Now, with summer rains being dropped artificially by humans from war planes and tanks, these school children have learned the hard lesson that ‘summer rains’ are neither good, nor a blessing. 2006’s unique summer rains in Gaza have shown themselves to be a curse, not a blessing — not because they have fallen in summer, but rather because they are human-made.

Most areas of the Gaza Strip are currently experiencing an extremely difficult period — Israeli warplanes and tanks never stop, day or night, firing heavy artillery against every target possible. Homes, institutions and infrastructure never escape the Israeli shelling; power and water plants have been severely hit so far, main roads have been damaged, buildings and homes have been shelled. Moreover, civilians along with resistance fighters have been killed and wounded due to such non-stop Israeli aggression. It is as if Gaza has returned to 1967 and the first days of its occupation.

The Palestinian people have been longing for freedom and sovereignty since the collapse of the Ottoman Empire in World War I. In 1917, the British colonial power at the time dominated historical Palestine, where the Jewish state was merely a dream in Jews’ minds around the globe and the Ottoman Empire was drawing to an end, the factors that made the Palestinians hope they would eventually have their own sovereignty on their own soil. Yet, amid such great expectations by the Palestinians, the British colonial government had promised the Jews, for free, ‘a national Jewish homeland’ in another people’s land, making the Jewish immigrants also hope of practicing some kind of sovereignty.

Food for everybody in the world is a means to survive, to stay alive and maintain a normal, healthy life. But in Palestine, food has become increasingly hard to buy, as groceries and supermarkets have been unable to sustain the debts owed by their local customers. Because of a forced delay of more than 140,000 government employees’ salaries in both the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, the customers have been unable to pay their supermarket tabs. Both grocers and customers have begun to complain about an increasing financial crisis due to such a delay.

8 April 2006—Last Saturday, crowds estimated at tens of thousands marched in the funeral procession of Eyad Abulineen, a Palestinian resistance fighter of Rafah, his 7-year old son Belal and four other people, who were all killed by Israeli missiles on Friday. Prior to heading to the Rafah cemetery east of the city, the crowd said a last farewell to their martyrs in a local mosque. Chanting angry slogans, with resistance fighters firing into the air, the crowd marched toward the cemetery, where the martyrs were laid to rest.