Tags:
Journalism of Courage
KHAN YOUNIS (GAZA), DEC 25: Scampering through muddy puddles, the children of the Khan Younis refugee camp believe they are only temporary visitors in gaza until they can return to homes that may now exist only as family memories.
Like many of the 3.5 million Palestinian refugees in the West Bank, Gaza Strip and the Arab world, the people of Khan Younis believe conflict with Israel will end only when they are allowed to go back to their homes in the jewish state.
Palestinians burying one of the latest casualties in their uprising were infuriated by rumours from Washington peace talks that the Palestinian leadership might compromise over the return of refugees in exchange for sovereignty over arab east jerusalem.
“The most important issue is the refugees,” said mourner Shadi Mohammed, standing in a funeral procession amid a sea of flags, mostly from militant Islamic groups but also peppered with iraqi banners and a picture of Saddam Hussein.
“The violence will continue as long as the refugee problem remains unsolved,” he said.
However, many Israelis are sceptical.
Some believe that allowing even five per cent of the refugees to return would be a demographic timebomb for the world’s only Jewish state set up after six million jews were killed in the nazi holocaust during World War II.
Palestinians describe Israel’s establishment in 1948 on most of historical Palestine as the naqba
, or Great Catastrophe, that led to what they consider the occupation of their land and their dispersal by force.
For the refugees of Khan Younis whose squalid, concrete shacks overlook a lush Jewish settlement peeping through sand dunes in the distance, the right to return to homes they have dreamed about for 52 years is sacrosanct.
“Where will they (the refugees) go?” asked an elderly woman. “They have nowhere.”
The woman, Fahtma, said she was originally from Ashdod, today abustling Israeli port-city slightly North of gaza. But for most of her life she has not lived there.
The gaza strip is crowded with refugees and there are at least eight refugee camps dotting the narrow coastal strip. Home to around 1.2 million palestinians, it is one of the most densely populated places in the world.
At least 60 per cent of gazans are refugees or the descendants of refugees brought up on bedtime stories of family homes and villages that are only a memory. Standing instead are israeli towns with different names and communities.
During the 1948 conflict, in which jews defeated arab armies in what Israel calls its war of independence, hundreds of thousands of Palestinians fled or were forced to flee to nearby Gaza and have lived there ever since.
Squeezed between the Israeli desert and the Mediterranean Sea,the narrow strip was under Egyptian rule until Israel captured it in the 1967 Middle East war.
“We need to have our right to return,” said Ahmed Abu Mustafa (19), who believes he will one day return to Beersheba, the town his grandparents fled.
Two years ago, he visited Beersheba briefly, and he said reality was just as good as his imagination.
“I have never seen anything more wonderful in my life,” he said about the economically depressed desert town where many residents are immigrants who left arab countries after israel was created.
“We need everything — Jerusalem and the refugees, otherwise the Intifada will continue,” Abu Mustafa said, referring to the uprising that erupted nearly three months ago.
His words were punctuated by gunshots fired in an act of defiance by a mourner at the funeral of Abdullah Knaan (42), a father of seven.
