THE INDEPENDENT

Victims of a conflict that has paralysed the Middle East

Date: 01 October 2004

It was probably the bloodiest single day in Gaza since the Palestinian uprising began exactly four years ago. More than 25 Palestinians and three Israelis were killed after the Israeli Army escalated its operations to halt the firing of increasingly lethal Qassam rockets by Palestinian militants.

The deaths marked the fourth, bleak anniversary of the intifida as Ariel Sharon authorised what amounts to military reoccupation in northern Gaza, partly to demonstrate that his planned withdrawal from the strip is not a retreat under fire. It followed the killing of two children on Wednesday night in a rocket attack by Hamas militants equally determined to prove the opposite at any price.

An Israeli woman jogger, Shulamit Batito, 36, and two soldiers, Sergeant Victor Ariel, 20, and Staff Sergeant Gil'ad Fisher, were killed in separate Palestinian attacks in the northern Gaza Strip, while Israeli troops pushed their way into the heart of the Jabalya refugee camp for the first time since the uprising began in September 2000, in response to Wednesday's attack on the Israeli border town of Sderot.

But the deadliest single incident of the day came in Jabalya itself, when an Israeli tank shell fired on the busy market area close to a school killed seven Palestinians including two children, 11, and 13. Medics and local witnesses said that the majority of the dead and 43 people wounded in the same attack were civilians. An Israeli commander, while apologizing for civilian casualties, said a tank had fired at gunmen who had detonated a bomb that had wounded soldiers and launched an anti-tank rocket at Israeli forces.

A Palestinian policeman, Basel Abu Shakfa, 25, who witnessed the scene, acknowledged the presence of armed men among the shoppers but said that they had fired no shots when the shell landed. "I saw dead bodies," he said. "I saw human flesh littered around, I saw people crying for help, I saw people uttering the last word of Shahada [before death]. I saw a man with big hole on the right side of his skull."

The carnage in Gaza yesterday added to an already massive toll of victims, both Israel and Palestinian, in four years of conflict which have appeared to make a just settlement an even more distant prospect than when it began.

The figures issued at such anniversaries normally concentrate on the dead, who are often named in media reports of specific incidents. More easily forgotten are the usually anonymous victims who have been wounded, some of them irrecoverably and in ways which shatter their lives for ever.

According to Israeli Army figures, 11,400 Israelis have been wounded since September 2000. And according to the Palestinian Red Crescent, 21,342 Palestinians were injured in the same period. This week four such victims talked candidly about the scars they bear from attacks they suffered in the four years of fighting.

For each of them the date when their lives were changed for ever is burnt into the memory; it is what they invariably mention first. They all remember exactly what they were doing and where they were when the tragic, irreversible, moment came; peeling an orange, or looking upwards from the corner of the first-floor balcony at home. None of them can filter out their memories of the happy, healthy lives they lived before it happened; one even asked to be photographed at the top of the familiar staircase that he will never use again.

Because two of them are Israeli and two Palestinian, their outlooks are very different. But Aron Gozland, Shoshana Gottlieb, Husam Khadr and Majdi Shaheen have more in common than the fact that all are now confined to wheelchairs by the fighting in which they played no part. All four have shown outstanding courage in facing the afflictions which so inextricably linked their fates to the travails of the land they live in. None can be said to be optimistic, at least in the foreseeable future, about the outcome of the conflict.

Shoshana Gottlieb

Israeli, injured in Palestinian ambush

Shoshana Gottlieb's paralysis was caused by a bullet which missed her aorta by a millimetre but destroyed a section of her spinal cord.

Shoshana, happily married with four children aged between 12 and 29 - including a son in the Israeli army - and three grandchildren, was travelling home in a minibus on 27 February 2001 from her work as an import-export manager in Jerusalem's industrial suburb of Atarot when a group of Palestinians opened fire with AK47s and M16s.

She had just turned to throw away orange peel when she was hit; she says now that she knew almost immediately there was "something wrong" with her legs after they flew forwards when her upper body was thrown back by the force of the shot. When she woke up after surgery, she found she couldn't talk. Signalling for paper, she wrote questions for her sister: "What happened to me? What's wrong with my legs? Am I going to be paralysed?"

Her sister said, truthfully, that she didn't know. Her husbandcould not bring himself to tell her the news because she had always said she would rather die than become physically dependent on others. But when she wrote a note to the doctor demanding to know the truth, he drew her a spinal cord, showing where the vertebra had been shattered, and told her bluntly: "You're paralysed."

Shoshana says now: "I was shocked but I wasn't hysterical." She would wake regularly at about 4am when the drugs wore off. "I did my crying then. By the time the nurses came round I had my make-up on and I was ready for the day."

Despite the paralysis in her legs, she still suffers from thesensation of burning and a feeling that "millions of ants are eating my legs". Like other Israelis seriously wounded in the conflict she has a state-funded helper or maid.

And she now drives, continues to work in her old job at home and cooks and swims, having talked her way into membership of the Ha Lochm centre for wounded soldiers. She says one of the men involved in the attack was caught and testified that the group consisted of four men who had worked as Palestinian policemen and one member of Yasser Arafat's bodyguard group, 4-17.

She insists that she was always brought up, and has brought her children up, not to hate Arabs. "My anger is specifically against terrorists. I don't regard myself as a victim. I regard myself as a survivor."

Husam Mofid Khadr

Palestinian, shot by Israeli troops near Nablus

Husam Mofid Khadr, now 16, says he had walked out to see why the main road passing his village of Beita, close to Nablus, had been blocked when he was shot by Israeli troops on 5 April 2002. He took six bullets: one in his chest, one in his back, one in his left leg, two in his left arm, and one that hit his spinal cord.

"When the soldiers came they asked me to stand up, but I couldn't." Did they show concern? "I can't speak of another person's emotions at such a moment. But one of them told me: 'Now you see what happens when you throw stones.' "

Husam says he was doing no such thing. Instead, he thinks, the soldiers could have mistaken him for a grown man because he was - before he was paralysed and confined to a wheelchair by the shooting - relatively tall at 1.65m.

Strong-willed and sporting, with a love of basketball and swimming, he was also a model student, scoring an average 85 per cent grade.

The driver of the first ambulance that came for him said that Husam needed intensive treatment, but the road to Nablus was closed. An army jeep then arrived with a doctor who administered first aid on the spot and called an Israeli ambulance, which took him to Ariel, and after another delay to find a bed, to the Israeli Schneider hospital in Beta Tekva. How was he treated at the hospital? "They treated me very well, better even than they treat Jews." Some, though by no means all, of the doctors were Israeli Arabs, he says. "I learnt a lot, I learned that Israeli soldiers do their jobs in shooting and that Israeli doctors do their jobs in healing people."

His friends push him to and from school; sometimes his father takes him by car. He has, of course, had to scale down his sport to billiards and table tennis. What he hates most is the humiliating physical dependence on others; he volunteers that he is taking training to control bowel motions. His English teacher, Mohammed Fawaz, says: "He is confronting his problems. He will not surrender or give up. He has a very strong personality."

Of Israelis in general, he says: "They are human beings like everyone else. Some are good people. Some are bad people." But, in the end, he adds: "The doctors and soldiers are all occupiers, enemies."

He is not, he says, political, preferring to read sports magazines and to follow world footballers such as Ronaldo and Ronaldhino, supporting the Palestinian national team first and Brazil second.

His immediate ambition is to get to university, and then to work in information technology.

Aron Gozland

Israeli, injured trying to stop suicide bomber

On June 19, 2002, Aron Gozland was off duty and carefree having just returned from a trip to Eilat and was in the Jerusalem suburb of French Hill to collect his car keys from his brother. He said goodbye to his workmates and got off the bus, laden with bags, when he noticed, "a very strange-looking person with close cropped hair, sweating and very nervous with a big rucksack on his back. What made me suspicious was that he was had a Nokia mobile which he was holding upside down with the battery to his ear and the aerial pointing downwards."

In a split second something clicked; as Aron made eye contact with the man he started to move towards one of the bus stops, crowded with waiting people. "I don't know whether I shouted 'terrorist' but I didn't take time to draw my pistol. I just jumped on him, with all my bags." As the man fell back, his bomb exploded, and Aron was sent flying seven metres through the air. "After a few seconds I opened my eyes. There were papers and smoke everywhere. And silence. The silence that follows an explosion is something that only someone who has experienced it can understand."

Still conscious, he applied pressure to the wound of a badly injured middle aged woman beside him - and a tourniquet to his own leg. Seven people, including the suicide bomber, were killed in the explosion; Aron was told later it would have been 20 to 30 had he not acted.

But the price he paid was a 15 month, and ultimately unsuccessful, battle to save his legs. Now 31, Aron, a devoted father who has four children under seven, wears a hexagonal bolt on a gold neck chain, one of hundreds of little metal objects with which the bomb was packed for maximum impact. More than a dozen remain in his body.

Finally, Aron, who used to keep fit by walking around nine miles a day, was told there was no hope: his legs were amputated. But it was too much for his wife, who had lived through all the battle to save the legs, and the additional blow, mid-way through Aron's treatment, of their 10-month old daughter falling seriously ill with the rare Guillaume Barre disease. After the amputation, Aron's wife left him. Yet he sees his children almost daily. He visits and helps others who have suffered similar trauma. He intends to return to office work in the border police when he can. He is confronting the huge task of learning to walk with artificial legs: "My goal is to get rid of the wheelchair."

Majdi Shaheen

Palestinian, shot in Israeli gunship raid on Nablus

Majdi Shaheen 23, had returned to his home in the impoverished heart of Nablus's old city on 1 August 2002 for the weekend from his job as an upholsterer in the Israeli village of Mas Har, when the Israeli raid started.

It was about 3am. He was standing with his mother on the balcony trying to see in the darkness what was happening when he was hit by from the Israeli helicopter gunship they had just noticed. The 250mm bullet entered his left shoulder and exploded in his spine, blasting the T4 vertebra and paralysing him from above the waist down for life.

He lost consciousness instantly and only came round in the city's Rafidia hospital seven days later - which may have been just as well since the incursion prevented an ambulance reaching his home for four hours. "When I woke up I saw many pipes leading into my body. I was shocked. I wasn't aware that I was wounded." After 13 days, the doctors told him, perhaps to break him in gently, that it would take six months to establish whether the destruction of the use of his legs was permanent. He lost hope after four months.

Majdi - who lives with his mother, who was also injured, and his father - doesn't dramatise, but if you ask him how he feels he is candid: "I lost my future. I lost my life. In two months I will be 24. I had a plan in my mind before I was shot. I had dreams." Instead, he spends £80 of his £150 monthly disability allowance from the Palestinian Authority on a taxi to take him every day to the local rehabilitation centre where he is training to mend electrical appliances. "If I can find someone to support me maybe one day I will have my own shop." Unlike Israel's wounded in the conflict, he is not given the funds to employ a helper.

But he was able to raise the money for a tiny lift for his family's first floor home. Understandably, he finds wellwishers' claims that he will live a normal life unconvincing. "It makes me depressed because I have to compare my present life with my previous one."

He recognises that it may take years, but he wants to pursue compensation through the Israeli courts. "The day before, I came through the checkpoint. The Israeli soldiers checked my ID card. They let me in because they knew I was not a militant. The next day they shot me in my home. They say on television they are shooting terrorists. But my mother and I are not terrorists." He says several times that his is a "destiny decided by God." But at one point, Majdi, whose preferred solution to the conflict would be two states along pre-1967 borders, insists: "God is not the cause for this problem; the cause of the problem is Israel."

SOURCE

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