UN-Truth

Foreign journalists entered Gaza for the first time in many weeks without restrictions — at least, there were no restrictions either on their numbers, or where they go inside Gaza.

The international press core based in Israel had fought for this right for months. They wrote to the authorities. They petitioned the Israeli Supreme Court. They appealed the Government’s maneuvers to keep the press out of Gaza. They asked questions about the ban in press conferences from Sderot to Washington. They wrote about it. And, when the borders were open, many were there.

[The McClatchy Newspaper group's Jerusalem bureau chief Dion Nissenbaum wrote about trying -- and eventually succeeding -- to get into Gaza via Egypt and the Rafah crossing a few days earlier. Some excerpts are posted below. Dion's posting can be read in full here.]

We had been asked by the IDF to bring waivers saying that we would not hold Israel’s Ministry of Defense or the Israeli army responsible for anything that happens to us. (Some of these waivers were collected, but some were not … )

“When will you be coming back to Israel?”, asked the young woman in khaki uniform sitting in the passport control booth at Erez crossing — as if what is on the other side is, really, another country. (A European diplomat say that it is not legal for Israel to treat Gaza as another country, or to stamp passports with exit and re-entry visas. An Israeli lawyer in Tel Aviv advised a few months ago that Erez Terminal is not on the official Israeli list of its international border crossings).

Nevertheless, each passage through passport control into Gaza is treated with more deliberation than for someone leaving Israel through Ben Gurion international airport.

Perhaps this is why the stamp in the passport has changed from the one used a year ago. Now, the exit visa says, simply “Erez Terminal” (as opposed, say, to “Allenby Border Control”, or “Ben Gurion Border Control”). In fact, it is really a grey area, where Israel keeps unilaterally changing the rules, mainly to reinforce its own argument that it does not still occupy Gaza.

The re-entry visa, stamped hours later, does not say anything in English, and does not indicate any time duration — but it says “Erez Terminal” in Hebrew.

Because journalists are one of the few categories allowed to enter Gaza, the re-entry stamp has a notation added by hand at the passport control both, which reads “B/1″ – which essentially indicates that it is a tourist visa with a working permit for foreign journalists who are not paid by an Israeli entity.

A normal tourist visa is a “B/2″.

A year ago, a reentry permit from Gaza read “Erez Terminal Border Control” – and “Visit Permit B/2 – valid for 3 months”.

Inside Gaza … the Hamas border control, further inside the Gaza Strip than the Palestinian Coordination Office, inspected out passports and equipment, then waved us though.

[Dion Nissenbaum, however, got a Hamas-issued stamp inside his passport when he entered the Gaza Strip through Rafah a few days ago. He wrote: "Then, when all hope seemed to be lost, the gates opened and the reporters stumbled over each other to get inside. Screaming matches broke out inside the terminal and the Egyptian authorities threatened to shut the whole process down if reporters didn’t calm down. After signing yet another piece of paper vowing to leave Gaza within a certain number of days, we were all allowed to cross into Gaza. Waiting for us on the other side were the Hamas border guards in their black uniforms and beards. One of those standing watch was Ramzi, a 27-year-old border guard who pointed out the ceiling tiles knocked out of place by the Israeli bombing. Ramzi said he wasn’t Hamas, but he stood by the Hamas leaders who were democratically elected to lead the Palestinian Authority in 2006. Though Hamas had seized military control of Gaza in 2007, Ramzi thought the U.S. and Israel had pushed Hamas into a corner ... While we waited in the terminal, the Gaza border guards stamped our passports with a specially-designed Palestinian Authority entry stamp — the first such stamp I’ve ever received for crossing into Gaza"...]

The young woman who met us, and accompanied us through the day, said that her family survived the three-week Israeli onslaught, but their house was bombed and destroyed. They received a warning via a phone call to evacuate their house within ten minutes — an attack was imminent. They were not told where it would be safe to go, or where not. They went to stay with relatives, and they’ve survived, but their home has been destroyed.

Houses and factories in one area were completely demolished. In another area, a hospital (Al-Wafd) was clearly targetted, and had a large hole in the exact center of its facade, with marks of other firing all over. The carcasses of three cows were rotting along the side of the road. Inside Gaza City, it was one house flattened here, one mosque crushed there.

One man whose home is a pile of rubble showed us where he was sleeping, in an area created in another pile of rubble across the street from his former home, where he has created a tent out of blue-and-white striped plastic sheeting, and where he has placed a thin mattress on a concrete slab floor. He told us he had sent his two sons to live with relatives in Deir al-Balah, while he was staying by his former home. “We have nothing now. I will wait here for help from the United Nations”.

The owners of two small factories destroyed not far away, and some of their employees, were huddled on a small hill of rubble of a former enterprise, sitting in a circle around a small camp-fire they had made of broken concrete blocks. With flames produced from burning pieces of broken trees for fuel, they were preparing tea. They had begun to pick up pieces of material that could be salvaged, which were piled up nearby. “Some of us are here around the clock to guard what remains”, they said, “otherwise we would have nothing left”. They said they had seen no government officials, and that they, too, were waiting for someone to come to offer help.

Several U.S. media reports indicate that Hamas was paying for dates and coffee served in mourning tents for those who died in the Israeli military offensive that was said to have as its aim the creation of an improved security situation for Israelis in the south of the country. On Friday, there were reports that Hamas officals began distributing $500 – in crisp $100 bills – as an initial emergency grant to families whose homes had been destroyed, with more financial aid (apparently also to be denominated in dollars) to come on Sunday.

The journalists who entered from Israel carried with them Israeli shekels to pay for transportation and interpretation assistance, as well as for, food and lodging during their time inside the Gaza Strip.

The Israeli government — with, possibly, the assent of the Palestinian Authority, but this is a very murky area — has been refusing to ship Israeli shekels inside Gaza since the military withdrawal, on the grounds that it does not want to help Hamas. The European Community, however, has been pushing for the currency shipment, to pay the salaries of the loyal Palestinian Authority employees, as well as social assistance such as pensions and welfare benefits, and for various other bills. Without that cash infusion, people do not have funds to buy anything, the Europeans stress. There are reports that Hamas wants to switch to using the U.S. dollar …

All the people we spoke to said they were neither Hamas nor Fatah, but they wanted the emnity between the two largest Palestinian organizations ended, and unity restored. They all also said they wanted the Israelis to realize that not all Palestinians were their enemies — they said they wanted to go back to “living together” – as it was “twenty years before”.

There were green flags (Hamas) on many buildings. There were Palestinian four-color flags (white, black, green and red) flying alone, and Palestinian flags with Hamas green flags placed just above. There were yellow Fatah flags. And there were the red flags of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP). There were not, in the areas we visited, any black flags of mourning — at least, not yet.

And, there was the occasional graffiti sign on a wall, most often the word “Hamas”.

As-Shifa Hospital, the main one in Gaza City, was quieter than before the cease-fire. “Since the cease-fire, the situation is almost normal”, one doctor said … A Danish nurse who came to Gaza for a week with the ICRC said that after the two unilateral cease-fires kicked in on Sunday, also said that the situation became almost normal. But before that, he said, there was daily mayhem.

The head of orthopedic surgery (when bones are involved, rather than just the abdomen or chest cavity, for example), Dr. Subhi Skeik, said that the first day of the attack, on 27 December, was just madness, with over 200 people brought to Shifa Hospital, many needing surgery. “We have six operating rooms”, he said, “and each one is normally used for just one patient at the time. That day, we had two to three patients in each operating room, and we were also operating in the corridors, in the intensive care units, and other places that were not so good …” his voice trailed off. “Definitely we lost lives due to the lack of capacity”, Dr. Skeik said.

Dr. Skeik said that “the types of injuries we say, and the way patients were killed, showed us different injuries than we have seen before, and different weapons. A big number were exposed definitely to unusual types of weapons. There were plenty of cases where we saw minute injuries to the abdomen and chest, but inside there was massive destruction of internal organs. The pinpointed inlets cannot explain the amount of internal damage. And there were no exit wounds. Then we saw metallic objects in the abdomen. We did not remove all of them (he indicated that this was because they had to move to repair the major damage in a series of urgent cases), if they are not causing apparent blood loss. But after the surgery, when the patient should have been more or less stable, they then dramatically died. We cannot explain this way of dying — neither us, nor the doctors from various countries who were with us. We wonder if these foreign bodies, these metallic objects, are killing the patients. Another type of wounds involved bilateral amputations (an arm and a leg, for example), or both lower limbs destroyed totally, as if cut by a knife — and the tissues were cauterized. These patients, too, suddenly died in recovery”.

In a flash of emotion, he said “we needed help during this aggression or massacre. But it came late”.

A Jerusalem-based Italian journalist who has been in Gaza for about a week has been writing that the death figure (about 1,300) is too high, and has been deliberately inflated for propaganda purposes. He wrote that the true figure is only about 500, and that “the Palestinian journalists know the truth”. One reason he knows this, the Italian journalist wrote, is that the hospitals are no longer full.

We asked Dr. Skeik about this. He said that “in the first three weeks, this hospital (Shifa Hospital), received so many patients that we did a triage, and gave initial treatment before evacuating the patients to local hospitals to make room for more incoming casualties. We did this two to three times a day. We were using beds in different hospitals. Then, a number of cases were transferred through Rafah, Egypt, to other countries. I don’t know where they all are — some may still be in Egypt, and eleven were sent to Italy”.

[Dion Nissenbaum wrote about his adventure in getting in through Rafah that "From the start, it was clear that Israel had no intention of allowing journalists into Gaza to see what their military was doing ... Eventually, enterprising journalists figured out how to navigate the Egyptian bureaucracy and get into Gaza. For American reporters, it meant going to the U.S. embassy and signing an affidavit that basically cleared the U.S. of any responsibility for you in Gaza and getting a letter from the Egyptian press office. But getting in wasn’t quite that simple. The rules at the Rafah border seemed to mutate. After the first few reporters rushed across into Gaza in the final days of the war, Egypt shut the borders when dozens of journalists turned up to try and get in ... Normally, getting to Gaza is a 50-minute drive from Jerusalem to Israel’s Erez terminal, followed by a brief stop at Israeli passport control, a walk through the high-security Israeli terminal and into the demolished Palestinian side. From there it’s a 20-minute drive to Gaza City. This time, it took 48 hours to get into Gaza.
First it was an hour drive to the Israel-Jordan border, followed by a long wait at the border crossing. Then it was an hour drive to the Amman airport to catch a 90-minute flight to Cairo to pick up the requisite paperwork. Once the paperwork was in hand, it was another five hour drive from Cairo to the Rafah border. But by the time I arrived in Rafah on Tuesday night, it appeared that the rules had once again changed. When I turned up, dozens of reporters had been idling on the border for two days. And the man standing between us and Gaza was Captain Islam. Captain Islam was young, friendly and spoke great English. Hour after hour, he patiently listened to impassioned appeals from journalists. He was like a border therapist who calmly listened to every gripe and offered calming words of assurances. He claimed, probably rightly, that, if it were his decision, he would let all the reporters in. But, in reality, he was just the gatekeeper, and the decisions were being made by Egyptian intelligence. And Egyptian intelligence was telling Western reporters that Israel was putting pressure on them not to let reporters into Gaza. That might have been true, or it could have been an excuse. It didn’t matter either way to the reporters. Either way, journalists were still being kept out ... While Barack Obama was delivering his historic speech, we were frantically speeding around trying to come up with the last-minute paperwork Captain Islam assured us would be our golden ticket to Gaza. Once we had the paperwork in hand, we rushed back to the border where Captain Islam sadly told us that the border was closed for the night. But he assured us that we would be able to get in first thing Wednesday morning. When we returned with our new paperwork, Captain Islam told us, sadly, that the rules had changed again, and that reporters were not going to get in. Period ... Reporters began to interview each other about the standoff ... With hopes fading, I booked a flight back to Tel Aviv. Israel had begun letting a handful of reporters into Gaza every day. But it was still going to be days before my number was up in the mercurial lottery system established by the Foreign Press Association ..."]

Filed under: Boundaries & Borders, Gaza, Iran, Israel, Journalism and Journalists, Palestine & Palestinians, UN Secretary-General, UN Security Council