On February 24, 2008, I phoned Guss, a civil engineer in Gaza City who informed me, "Lately we have been receiving two days of electricity for about 12 hours a day, but on the third day we are without any power. Most all the gas stations have been closed for the last three days because they are out of gas…The children go to school but they are not cheerful. You can see it in their eyes something is very wrong. When the boys play, they play war games and fight each other pretending to be Hamas or Israelis. They make weapons out of sticks of wood and are getting more aggressive. The girls spend their time helping their mothers and doing housework. When they draw pictures they are always pictures of war. They are forbidden happiness, they are afraid of the dark and parents are loosing patience and yelling instead of talking…Yesterday all over Gaza City people peacefully demonstrated against the siege but we are feeling like nobody is listening. Every action requires reaction not words and inaction."
On February 24, 2008, I received an email from Jerusalem, sent by Reverend Bob and Maurine Tobin who are leaders for SABEEL's [Arabic for THE WAY] Feb. 28-March 7th's reality tour through the West Bank and Israel to mark and commemorate:
• 90 years since the Balfour Declaration
• 60 years since the Nakba and the founding of the state of Israel
• 40 years of Occupation
• 25 years since Sabra/Shatila
• 20 years since the First Intifada
• 5 years of the Apartheid Wall
The Tobin's wrote:
[We] spent Wednesday in Gaza…Please keep the people of Gaza in your prayers as Israel is preparing to launch a wide scale ground operation there…Collective punishment on this scale is truly beyond comprehension…
…We went to visit Al Ahli Arab Hospital in Gaza City on Wednesday, 20 February, our first visit in almost a year…The first thing that struck us was the near emptiness of the huge Israeli “terminal” that one passes through – we saw no one else entering and passed only one emaciated man in a wheelchair seeking to exit. He is apparently one of the very few to obtain a permit for medical care, while more than 80 have died in the past few weeks while trying to exit for health reasons. We made our way through the endless gates and turnstiles and then waited in the cement enclosure until a huge metal door finally slid open and let us enter the long tunnel that leads to “no man’s land.”
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