Madison Rafah Journal

Owen Fay, Al Jazeera, DECEMBER 01, 2007

Gaza — It is only a few days since the talk was of the prospects for peace and renewed hope for the future of Palestinians.

But for a generation of Palestinian children, things may only be getting worse.

In the streets of Gaza, isolated by the Palestinian government and much of the world, growing numbers of children are being sent out to work.

With 70 per cent of people in Gaza living below the poverty line, children are being forced to take on the role of provider for their struggling families.

Statistics show that seven per cent of children in Palestine, where 52 per cent of the population are under the age of 18, are now working

Child mechanic (Read on …)

Donald Macintyre, The Independent, 08 December 2007

Shajaia, Gaza — It’s not surprising the buyers at yesterday’s weekly donkey market here were looking over their prospective purchases with care. They opened the jaws of the tolerant beasts to examine their teeth, and test-drove them, harnessed to a cart, out of the crowded yard to gauge their pulling power.

“You need to make sure that it doesn’t kick people with its back legs, that it’s strong and that the colour of the coat is all right,” said Saber Dabour, 25. He had just bought a donkey for 410 Jordanian dinars, or just under £290.

For, while working donkeys have been bought and sold in Gaza since before Samson pulled down the Philistines’ temple, it is a long time since they have been as valuable as they are now. Prices have risen, according to the traders, by up to 60 per cent since Israel closed off the enclave after Hamas’s enforced takeover of the Strip almost six months ago.

Yet despite that – and, he says, that the donkey feed has also gone up from five to 15 shekels (£1.95) a day since June – Mr Sabour has decided it makes sense to sell his car and buy the creature instead. The unemployed Mr Dabour has sold his car and now intends to use a donkey and cart to sell cucumbers, onions and other vegetables door to door. “There are no jobs here, so I am going to create my own work,” he said.

Pointing out that vehicle spare parts have dried up since the closure, Mr Dabour added: “A donkey doesn’t need tyres, it doesn’t need spare parts, and it doesn’t need gasoline.” (Read on …)

Toni O’Loughlin, UNICEF, 12 December 2007

GAZA STRIP, Occupied Palestinian Territory – Najwa Al Smairi, 11, goes to school just metres from Gaza’s heavily guarded perimeter. She is one of the brightest students in her class but fears failure due to the violence and uncertainty around her.

Recently, Najwah has slipped from fourth to fifth in her class, and the studious 11-year-old is concerned. “When I spoke to my sister she told me not to worry, that it was normal, but I am still worried,” she says.

Palestinians have long traded on excellence in education as an investment in the future, working their way into the upper echelons of governments and businesses throughout the region. Now, increased political tensions and conflict are having devastating effects in Gaza, where children make up more than half of the population.

Low grades have become endemic in Gaza’s schools. According to the World Bank, 80 per cent of students here are failing math, while an astounding 40 per cent are failing Arabic, their mother tongue.

Coping with a lack of classrooms (Read on …)

A Palestinian boy fills plastic bottles with water from a stream as temperatures reach 100 degrees F in Jericho, West Bank, last July. (UPI Photo/ Debbie Hill via Newscom)

Amid peace talks between Israelis and Palestinians over how to divide land, there is another conflict bubbling just beneath the surface; this one is over water, a precious resource in the Middle East.

The sleepy Palestinian village of Qattaneh just north-west of Jerusalem and with approximately 10,000 inhabitants, many of them refugees, has had its piped water reduced to only one day per week, according to a recent Humanitarian Monitor report released by the U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA).

(Read on …)

The birthplace of Jesus is today one of the most contentious places on Earth. Israelis fear Bethlehem’s radicalized residents, who seethe at the concrete wall that surrounds them.

Michael Finkel, National Geographic, December 2007

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This is not how Mary and Joseph came into Bethlehem, but this is how you enter now. You wait at the wall. It’s a daunting concrete barricade, three stories high, thorned with razor wire. Standing beside it, you feel as if you’re at the base of a dam. Israeli soldiers armed with assault rifles examine your papers. They search your vehicle. No Israeli civilian, by military order, is allowed in. And few Bethlehem residents are permitted out—the reason the wall exists here, according to the Israeli government, is to keep terrorists away from Jerusalem.

Bethlehem and Jerusalem are only six miles apart (ten kilometers), though in the compressed and fractious geography of the region, this places them in different realms. It can take a month for a postcard to go from one city to the other. Bethlehem is in the West Bank, on land taken by Israel during the Six Day War of 1967. It’s a Palestinian city; the majority of its 35,000 residents are Muslim. In 1900, more than 90 percent of the city was Christian. Today Bethlehem is only about one-third Christian, and this proportion is steadily shrinking as Christians leave for Europe or the Americas. At least a dozen suicide bombers have come from the city and surrounding district. The truth is that Bethlehem, the “little town” venerated during Christmas, is one of the most contentious places on Earth.

If you’re cleared to enter, a sliding steel door, like that on a boxcar, grinds open. The soldiers step aside, and you drive through the temporary gap in the wall. Then the door slides back, squealing on its track, booming shut. You’re in Bethlehem.

The city, at the scrabbly hem of the Judaean desert, is built over several broad, flat-topped hills, stingy with vegetation. The older homes are made of pale yellow stone, wedged along steep, narrow streets. A couple of battered taxis ply the roads, drivers heavy on the horns. At an outdoor stall, lamb meat rotates on a spit, dripping fat. Men sit on plastic chairs and sip from small glasses of thick Arabic coffee. There’s an odor of uncollected garbage. As you work your way up the hill, you can see the scope of the wall and chart its ongoing expansion—a gray snake, segmented by cylindrical guard towers, methodically constricting the city. (Read on …)

Construction proceeding last week in the disputed region of Har Homa, Jerusalem, as seen from the West Bank town of Bethlehem. (AP)

w w w . h a a r e t z . c o m
Barak Ravid, 12 Dec 2007

There are hundreds, even thousands, of planned housing units in the West Bank that have building permits and do not need any further government approval before their construction can begin, Brigadier General Yoav Mordechai, the head of the Civil Administration, told the interministerial committee on illegal outposts Tuesday.

Their construction “could cause similar embarrassment to that created by the publication of the tender for building in Har Homa,” he added. (Read on …)