South Florida Sun-Sentinel
Turmoil takes its toll on children in the Mideast
Date: Thu, Nov. 25, 2004
BY TIM COLLIE
BETHLEHEM, West Bank - (KRT) - Like any good mother, Abeer Fada is careful about letting her young son out on the streets. There are the traffic and the ever-present bullies, but also Israeli soldiers, tanks, high-velocity-rifle fire and the occasional missile targeting local leaders.
But on a quiet day last spring in the West Bank town of Tulkarem, Fada thought it was safe enough for her 9-year-old son Ahmed to wander down to the corner store for some bread. There hadn't been any shooting for days, and no Palestinian attacks in Israel that would prompt reprisals.
Ahmed had just made it out the door when an Israeli armored personnel carrier rumbled down the street and began firing, according to witnesses. A bullet hit him in the head, shattering the left side of his skull, which now resembles a deflated basketball.
His memory remains intact, but he may never speak again. He drags his right foot and his right arm swings with little control.
"If I could I would put him back in my womb," said his mother. "I never would have brought a child into this world to suffer this."
That's a common sentiment in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, where thousands of children under age 16 have been crippled, disfigured and killed over the last four years of the Palestinian uprising, known as the "Second Intifada."
Under the late Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat, local authority in the lands occupied by Israel since 1967 has almost collapsed. A ghetto culture has left an overwhelmingly young population at the mercy of the rough streets, where militants often battle daily with Israeli troops.
This is the reality that will face peacemakers in any post-Arafat era. After four years of bloodshed and the devastation of their cities, Palestinians are bitter, cynical and fatalistic about their future. Those with the means and education to flee the territories can do so, but the bulk of this stillborn state's population face a future of unemployment, urban desolation and political powerlessness.
Most victims are young boys, Palestinians and Israeli human rights experts say, because girls are kept closer to home in conservative Arab culture. Drawn to the busy streets for games of soccer, stickball and tag, they often get caught in the crossfire or are seen as potential threats by jumpy Israeli soldiers. Others are simply ensnared in the Palestinian culture of resistance, in which manhood is often measured by standing up to the Israeli occupiers.
Left behind are their mothers - proud, angry women who are often depicted in Israeli and Western media as eager to encourage their children to become suicide bombers or gunmen. While some have publicly lauded their offspring's attempts to kill Israelis, far more seem frightened and powerless over the choices and realities they face in the conflict zones, occupied and increasingly settled by Israel since 1967.
"I'm very angry about what happened. If I ever had the chance, I'd ask them why they, the Jews, do this to Ahmed," said Fada, 32, sitting in the hospital room she shares with Ahmed at The Bethlehem Arab Society for Rehabilitation. "When you hear about gunmen who are killed, you don't feel very sorry for them. They had guns, they fought others with guns, and we think they are martyrs and go to heaven anyway. But a boy like Ahmed - he didn't do anything.
"They're afraid for their children but we have children too," she added. "Aren't we allowed to be afraid for them? He wasn't resisting, but let's say he picked up some stones and threw them. Does that give them the right to shoot him?
At least 695 children under the age of 18 have been killed during the last four years of the Arab-Israeli conflict - 590 were Palestinian and 105 Israelis, according to statistics compiled by Israeli and Palestinian human rights groups and the United Nations.
In all, nearly 1,000 Israelis and more than 3,500 Palestinians have been killed in that time frame. Additionally, the United Nations estimated that 33,000 Palestinians and 5,000 Israelis have been wounded in the fighting. The disparity between the two reflects that much of the military fighting has been in the occupied territories while suicide bombs and isolated attacks have occurred inside Israel.
By one estimate from doctors on both sides, at least 30 percent of the civilians wounded have been children. That estimate - 10,000 wounded Palestinian children, with about 500 permanently disabled - surprises no one in the West Bank and Gaza Strip.
And those figures only hint at the psychological wounds suffered in the fighting. One recent study of Palestinian children found that 80 percent suffer some form of post-traumatic stress disorder. Morover, 83 percent had witnessed shooting, and 61 percent had seen family members shot, according to the study by Eyad El Sarraj, director of the Gaza Community Mental Health Program.
"Palestinian children have lost all sense of normalcy. They don't know whether they'll be able to go to school, whether they'll come home safely because of curfews and (Israeli) army incursions," said Yoad Ghanadreh, a U.N. refugee official who oversees psychological programs in Palestinian schools. "They often suffer from psychosomatic troubles, depression and low concentration that are related to their fear of the present and the future."
The result is a deep sense of fatalism among adolescent boys here, as well as a natural rebelliousness that undermines parental authority as well as state-building. Many youths expect to die young, so they figure, why not go down fighting? That cynicism is widespread. At least 60 percent of the Palestinian population is under age 18.
That reality is likely to influence the lives - and policies - of the region's future leaders.
"Anything is possible here any day of the week, even if you're not in the resistance," said Mahmoud Sajadi, 16, who lost his hand when he picked up a parcel that exploded during an Israeli incursion into the Dheisheh refugee camp near Bethlehem. "The army comes in here, the shooting starts. People can be sitting at home and die. So it really makes no difference if I help out or what. I might as well help the resistance."
The brother of an alleged Palestinian sniper now serving time in an Israeli prison, Sajadi recently joined the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, or PFLP, the militant faction that's popular in his neighborhood. The Marxist group claimed responsibility for the 16-year-old suicide bomber who killed three Israelis at an open-air market in Tel Aviv in November.
Sitting next to a television in a small apartment littered with video games and other toys, Sajadi said he wants to become an "engineer" when he finishes high school - using the Palestinian shorthand for "explosives expert."
"I want to be an engineer - an engineer of explosives - so I'll know next time if a bag has explosives in it," Sajadi said. "When the army comes in, and they put mines or booby traps in places, I'd be able to warn people if there are mines there."
Hardly a week goes by without a Palestinian child being wounded or killed during military operations in the West Bank or Gaza. Israeli military officials say they investigate some claims of improper force against civilians, but most are not brought to their attention. They and soldiers who serve in the West Bank stress that operations are carried out against Palestinian militants and identified terrorists who have been behind suicide bombings in Israel.
But the Israeli human rights group B'tselem contends that civilian casualties are not aggressively investigated by the IDF.
"In the past four years, at least 1,625 Palestinians who did not participate in the hostilities have been killed by the IDF," a recent report by the group stated. "Yet, only 90 military police investigations have been opened into these incidents, which have only led to one indictment."
In October, Israeli President Moshe Katsav apologized for the accidental deaths of civilians after more than 100 Palestinians were killed during a raid into Gaza. At least 20 of the dead were children.
But one episode during the Gaza incursion was cited by Palestinians as an example of what they describe as Israeli terrorism - the indiscriminate shooting of children by soldiers who are rarely held accountable for their actions.
On Oct. 5, a 13-year-old Palestinian girl named Iman al-Hams was shot to death walking to her school. After the girl was lying wounded, perhaps already dead, an Israeli officer walked up to her body and emptied his pistol clip into her head and chest.
An army investigation cleared the officer, even after several of his own soldiers testified that he gave the order to shoot after they could see it was a young girl. The soldiers continued to protest, and Israel's military police launched a separate investigation. The IDF's Judge Advocate General's office said charges were expected to be filed against the officer this week. Israeli authorities have asked the girl's parents for permission to exhume the body for an autopsy.
Palestinian doctors counted 17 bullet wounds in the child, and soldiers at the scene confirmed the account of Arab witnesses in interviews they gave to Yedioth Ahronoth, Israel's largest newspaper.
"The company commander approached her, shot two bullets into her, walked back towards the force, turned back to her, switched his weapon to automatic and emptied his entire magazine into her," said one soldier, who asked not to be named. "We were in shock. We couldn't believe what he was doing."
The girl had walked into a "forbidden zone" near an Israeli watchtower that dominates the area of Rafah, next to the heavily militarized border with Egypt. Al-Ham's school sits right next to the tower and the zone.
Last year, a 13-year-old was shot to death by soldiers outside of the school. Earlier this year, bullets shot inside the school grounds wounded a teacher and two students.
No one disputes that the girl should have been more careful, but Palestinian parents and others say it is simply impossible for children never to encounter Israeli soldiers, outposts or tanks. Most grow up seeing them as part of the landscape, authority figures to challenge and taunt.
In Gaza and the West Bank, areas have been carved up by Jewish settlements. An Israeli-only road network has been built to serve them, and a vast military presence is deployed to protect the large outposts that look like American suburbs. The practical effect is that Palestinians often cannot travel between their villages and sometimes even between areas of their own towns.
"I had five girls before Ahmed, and we keep them at home," said Fada. "But the situation for us, in our culture, is that the girls don't go out that much. Ahmed, though, he likes to get out of the house, to play with his friends, to go to the store, to the mosque. He's a boy, you know. Sometimes when there's troops in the area, I run out and bring him home.
"These days, the level of fear among Palestinians is just so low," she said. "These kids see troops, tanks, hear shooting, so it becomes a part of their environment. They're not afraid of these things. It gets to the point that you don't stop opening your shop, don't stop shopping or going to school just because the army is in town. Do they scare us? Of course, they scare us. These are big scary weapons."
But those weapons don't scare some children, especially those who look up to the underground fighters who are often members of their own families.
Sami, 15, whose mother requested that only his first name be used, was shot in the back of the head with plastic bullets after he attempted to paste a poster of a dead relative on the side of an Israeli border patrol jeep. Border patrol soldiers, known as "Druze," are particularly galling to many Palestinians because they often are Druze by faith, members of an Arabic-speaking religious minority in Israel that combines elements of Islam and Christianity.
"Nobody was ever killed in front of me. I didn't think they would shoot because I was just a kid," said Sami. During one visit for rehabilitation, soldiers pulled the crippled Sami out of the car and threatened to arrest him because they suspected his wounds were "intifada injuries," his mother said.
"I raised him well," said Sami's mother, Maleeha, 35. "I always kept him at home. I never dreamed that people would come to me and say that Sami had jumped on a jeep or put a poster on a Druze jeep. I'd whip him so that he wouldn't go out in those streets. His older brother, too, told him he'd beat him if he ever heard him going after soldiers. But he doesn't listen.
"He thought it was a game, that nothing would happen to him if he threw stones or put a poster on a Druze jeep," she said. "It was just a big game to him and these other children, a big game on the streets."
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© 2004 South Florida Sun-Sentinel.
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