May. 14, 2002 - Gaza's children court death, worship martyrdom
By ASSOCIATED PRESS
GAZA CITY, Gaza Strip - The walls of a Gaza City community center are lined with row after row of drawings by Palestinian children asked to express what's on their minds. Of 1,500 sketches, only 10 do not depict violent scenes.
Nearly 20 months of Israeli-Palestinian fighting and a culture that increasingly glorifies violence have taken a heavy toll on Gaza's children.
"We don't have a single child in Gaza who knows what it's like to be a normal child," said Abdul-Rahman Bakr, director of Gaza's psychiatric hospital.
The drawings in the conference room of the Gaza City community center show battle scenes complete with tanks, guns, jets, helicopters, ambulances and many dead people.
"We wanted the children to express themselves through the drawings and this is what we got," said Fadl Abu Hein, a child psychologist. "Everyone can now see what's really worrying our children."
Life in Gaza leaves children with little chance not to think of violence.
Funerals and rallies with gunmen firing into the air are almost daily events. Virtually every outside wall is covered with graffiti glorifying martyrs and thousands of posters bearing images of those killed in attacks on Israelis. Mosque preachers exhort worshippers to seek martyrdom.
"The climate in Gaza gives the impression that being a martyr wins respect," said Abu Hein who, with other experts, says parents, Palestinian media and mosque preachers are not doing enough to shelter children.
"Parents are too preoccupied with watching the news on television to listen to their own children," said Abu Hein.
A narrow coastal strip wedged between Egypt and Israel, Gaza is one of the world's most densely populated areas. It has been the hardest hit economically by the violence, with many thousands losing their sole income from jobs in Israel they can longer go to because of closures.
Of its 1.1 million inhabitants, about 70 percent are refugees and their descendants who either fled or were forced out of their homes elsewhere in historic Palestine at the time of Israel's 1948 creation and now live in some half a dozen refugee camps.
The worsening economic conditions, the fighting and the uncertainty have filtered down to Gaza children with what experts believe to be devastating psychological effect.
Close to 20 percent of the more than 1,600 Palestinians killed in the West Bank and Gaza Strip since September 2000 were 18 and younger, according to Palestinian health officials. Several thousand minors have been injured.
Most of the deaths and injuries among children occur when they join protests to throw stones, bottles and sometimes firebombs at Israeli army troops, checkpoints or Jewish settlements. Troops often respond with rubber bullets or tear gas, but also fire live bullets at times.
A March survey of 2,300 children between the ages of 6 and 13 showed that up to 73 percent in some areas of Gaza have taken part in violence and that 98 percent have witnessed events that frightened them.
In some areas, as many as 50 percent of those questioned said they knew another child who died in the violence, according to the survey by the Center for Social Training and Crisis Management, a Palestinian NGO.
With "martyrdom" now nearly an obsession among youngsters frustrated by the uncertainty and low quality of life, Gazans have been alarmed in recent weeks by a spate of incidents in which teen-agers tried to infiltrate heavily guarded Jewish settlements or attack Israeli army posts.
One was 15-year-old Yousef Zaqout, a ninth-grader shot dead April 23 with two friends, ages 14 and 13, by Israeli troops as the trio tried to slip into the settlement of Netzarim in central Gaza.
Zaqout left a heart-wrenching will for his family, saying that it was his wish to be a martyr, begging the forgiveness of his parents and exhorting his six siblings to pray regularly and fast from dawn-to-sunset twice a week.
"He was older than his 15 years. Our children are no longer children," said Bassem Zaqout, his father, of Yousef, who took karate lessons and was the goalkeeper of his school's soccer team.
Ahmed, Youssef's older brother, said he too wanted to be a martyr. But the 16-year-old added: "I will do something that's well-planned and effective. I might as well, since in these days we can all be sitting here at home and suddenly die from Israeli shelling."
Gazans have traditionally viewed themselves as leaders of the fight against Israeli occupation. Gazan children have been used by grown-ups to feed this notion.
In Gaza's funerals for "shaheeds," or martyrs, and in rallies by Palestinian factions like Arafat's Fatah or the militant Islamic group Hamas, children as young as three or four are fitted out in combat fatigues, masks and given toy guns. Such occasions routinely attract hundreds of children, all accustomed by now to the deafening noise made by gunmen firing in the air at the event.
Children are sometimes symbolically wrapped in white sheets to suggest their desire for martyrdom - Muslims wrap their dead in white sheets before burying them - with participants around them shouting slogans glorifying martyrdom.
The violent aspects of life in Gaza are reflected in play time and games. One game, "Arabs and Jews," is a local version of "Cowboys and Indians." The "checkpoints" game entails children trying to flag down passing cars to identify the passengers, as happens to Palestinians crossing checkpoints manned by Israeli troops.
The most telling is the game "shaheed," in which the children take turns being carried by friends shouting "with our blood, our souls we sacrifice you," a mimicry of funeral processions.
"There isn't a single street or family here that doesn't have someone who died in the fighting," said Bakr, the hospital director. "The children are both frightened and rebellious." |
