Here it is, in two parts. The details about the payments for child martyrs is in Part Two, I believe. The monthly payments are higher now, according to a recent piece in the N.Y. Daily News. These figures represent wealth in Palestine.
Part One: Playing War
December 24, 2000, Sunday
By Michael Finkel
A little before noon on the last day of his life, 15-year-old Ahmed Abutayeh invented a toothache. This was the first time he had ever complained of a health problem in school, so his science teacher wrote him a permission slip to visit a nearby clinic. Ahmed shouldered his plaid-patterned book bag and walked out of the Rimal Boys' School and onto the chaotic streets of Beach Camp, where 75,000 Palestinian refugees are corralled into a half-square-mile block, at the northern end of the Gaza Strip. It was Nov. 1 of this year. The previous day, Ahmed had sold his pet nightingale for a few shekels, and now, carrying this money, he caught a taxi and asked to be driven to a place called Karni crossing. He was wearing the nicest shirt he owned, a light blue button-down, and a few dabs of his father's cologne. On the outside of his book bag, in blue ink, he had inscribed a four-word epitaph: ''The Martyr Ahmed Abutayeh.''
Karni crossing, as its name implies, is an intersection. It's where the Karni Road crosses the so-called Green Line, the razor-wire border dividing the occupied territory of Gaza from Israel proper. The Gaza Strip is a place small enough to be easily fenced. It pokes from the northern end of the Egypt-Israel border and follows the shoreline of the Mediterranean Sea; its silhouette is roughly that of a pistol, aimed just west of Jerusalem. Karni crossing is at a point about midway along the pistol's barrel.
Palestinians are not allowed through the Karni crossing. The road is reserved for Israeli access to a settlement called Netzarim. Forty percent of the Gaza Strip's land is controlled by Israel and is home to 6,500 or so Israeli settlers, many of whom believe they have a property claim that is spelled out in the Old Testament. The other 60 percent is home to more than a million Palestinians, half of whom live in refugee camps. Most Israeli settlements in Gaza are clustered in one of the large, fortified areas at both ends of the strip, but Netzarim is in the middle, an Israeli island in a Palestinian sea. There is something about the Karni crossing, several Palestinians told me, that seems emblematic of the entire half-century-long Israeli-Palestinian conflict: it's a place where Arabs are not considered equal citizens, in an area dominated by the Israeli armed forces, permitting entrance to a settlement provocatively situated to deny the Palestinians a homeland. And so when the peace process fell apart in September and fighting resumed, it made sense that Karni was a scene of daily clashes. This is why Ahmed Abutayeh wanted to go there.
The confrontation on Nov. 1, the day Ahmed took the taxi, was intense. The Israeli Defense Forces had placed a tank and two armored vehicles along the Karni Road, trying as usual to maintain a safe route for settlers to pass through. Also beside the road, crouched in dirt trenches and behind cement barricades, were at least a hundred Palestinians, all of them male and many of them, like Ahmed, too young to be away from school. The boys Ahmed's age were armed with stones and Molotov cocktails. A few older fighters, wearing dark green uniforms indicating membership in the loosely controlled Palestinian security services, carried guns.
Ahmed had a sling with him, made of a bit of denim the size of an eye patch and a long piece of twine. He'd cup a stone in the denim, twirl the sling about his head, then snap the line taut. By all accounts he was a fierce and fearless stone-slinger. Sometime around 4 o'clock, as the desert sun was low and the dust that hovers about the Gaza Strip turned golden, the level of violence escalated. Two carloads of settlers wanted to drive through, and the Palestinians showed no signs of permitting a trouble-free passage. Live ammunition was fired from the Israeli side. Many of the boys fled or dove behind barricades, but Ahmed continued to twirl his sling. He did not seem concerned about finding protection. He stood up and flung another stone. A bullet from an M-16 struck Ahmed just above his right ear. The bullet was traveling at a downward angle, and it passed through his head and throat and settled in his chest. He was dead before an ambulance crew could reach him. The permission slip from his science teacher was found in the front pocket of his blue jeans.
This is a strange war. The rhetoric and geo-politics of the conflict -- the claims of Biblical or Koranic privilege; the push-pull of Middle Eastern power; the status of refugee rights and occupied lands and religious sovereignty -- are all cast in the loftiest of ideals. And yet, on the Palestinian side at least, much of the fighting is being carried out by children. There are preteenagers and midteenagers and boys as young as 5 hurling stones at Israeli soldiers. Children are dying with shocking frequency. Since late September, at least 68 boys under the age of 18 have been killed and thousands wounded in clashes in the Gaza Strip and West Bank. The violence, though, does not deter the children; quite the opposite, in fact.
The day after Ahmed's death, there were more boys at Karni crossing than ever before. At the front, in the trenches, the energy level felt wild and unfocused and adolescent; not much different, really, than an unruly middle-school recess. Here I met half a dozen boys who'd known Ahmed: I met Sameh and Muhammad and Hares and Yehya and Aymen and Rami. All of them were 13 or 14 or 15 years old, skinny and dirty and friendly. Each held a couple of rocks in his hands and jiggled them idly. Protruding from back pockets, where one might expect to see combs, were wooden slingshots and denim-and-twine slings. Aymen wore silver-framed glasses that sat crooked on his nose and sported a strip of cloth tied ninja-style about his head, upon which he'd written, ''Better to die a martyr than die in your sleep.'' Rami's left wrist was bandaged; he'd been hit, he said, by a rubber bullet. I commented on his bravery, and all the boys lifted their shirts or raised their pants legs to show me various scars. Each one said they'd seen people die. Hares insisted that the red stain on his shirt was Ahmed's blood; he'd tried to stem the bleeding until the medics arrived, he said, but the attempt was hopeless.
Hares was one of the unofficial leaders of the front. He seemed perpetually agitated, in the noisy, inexhaustible manner of a child who might benefit from Ritalin. During a stone-throwing volley, he'd always leap up first, or nearly so, and he leapt in a way that seemed designed for maximum bravado, leaving himself exposed as if daring the soldiers to fire at him. Most of the boys appeared to admire this, but Muhammad admitted to me that he sometimes worries about Hares.
Muhammad was a little calmer than the others and more cautious, and only slightly averse to introspection. He had gone to school with Ahmed -- they were in the same class -- and Muhammad's family lived a few doors down from Ahmed's, in the center of Beach Camp. They'd been friends, Muhammad said. Muhammad had an easy, inviting grin, a slight fuzz of a mustache and front teeth just shy of being buck. He kept a stash of roasted watermelon seeds in his pocket and nibbled them in the smooth, casual way a smoker handles his cigarettes. The trenches weren't the place for lengthy conversation, but Muhammad mentioned that if I met him after school tomorrow we could talk. I told him I would.
The fighting progressed in fits and starts. Sameh owned a pair of binoculars, and though one eyepiece was broken they were still usable.
He focused on an Israeli tank, 100 feet away, and studied the soldier in the hatch, helmet lowered to his eyebrows, straps tight against his cheeks, his mouth a thin pair of lines, one hand about the trigger of his rifle and an eye at the scope, watching the boys watching him. The vehicle crept along the Green Line, and when it reached the spot directly in front of us there was a surge of momentum, 20 or 30 boys leaping up at once, the air a hailstorm of stones. The soldier ducked into the hatch and the stones fell harmlessly against the tank. There was no return fire, but the boys all said it was only a matter of time before the Israelis' patience wore thin.
The exceptionally large turnout at Karni didn't happen by chance. Dozens of fighters were there specifically because of Ahmed. Most had not known him personally, but his martyrdom had been embraced by the Palestinian leadership and transformed, in short order, into a powerful recruiting device. Within an hour of Ahmed's shooting, his mother, Afaf, was perched on the edge of a bed in Shifa Hospital, where her son had been pronounced dead. She was wrapped in a black headdress and robe, her eyes furious and red as she looked into a Palestinian Broadcasting Corporation television camera. She spoke in Arabic, using the baroque argot of the uprising, rhythmic and sharp. ''Who killed my son, who shot my son, I am asking God to kill him, to spread his blood,'' she intoned. ''We must flood Israel with blood like they have flooded us with blood. Let their blood wash them out of Palestine.''
Two other Palestinians were also killed in Gaza the same day. One of them, Ibrahim Omar, was a friend and classmate of Ahmed's. Ibrahim, too, was 15 years old. He was shot in the neck while standing behind the same barricade where Ahmed had earlier been killed. The third victim was a 17-year-old named Muhammad Hajjaj. Ibrahim and Muhammad's families also delivered pleas for vengeance. These were broadcast throughout Gaza, on radio and television, along with an announcement that the three funerals would be conducted simultaneously the following day. Schools would be released early, it was reported, so that students could attend.
The next morning, in the minutes before Ahmed and Ibrahim and Muhammad's funeral procession was scheduled to arrive, Gaza City was quiet. All of the buildings -- five, six, seven stories tall -- appeared to be constructed of cinder blocks. There were cracks in some walls wide enough to offer glimpses of the apartments inside. Falafels were frying at outdoor stands; groceries sold cigarettes and soft drinks and penny candies. Tea shops were open. Clattering over the broken pavement came a mule-drawn cart, transporting a crateload of live chickens, dirty and squawkless. A few taxis passed. A bright new banner was stretched across the road, and my translator read it aloud: ''Glory and Eternity for Our Martyrs.''
Faces of the dead gazed from a dozen posters. Within hours of the boys' shootings, printing presses across Gaza had begun churning out posters. Each featured a head shot of one of the dead superimposed in front of the giant, gilded Dome of the Rock, in Jerusalem's Old City, the place where the Prophet Muhammad is thought to have ascended to heaven. In the posters' upper right-hand corner was an outline of the State of Israel, shaded in the colors of the Palestinian flag.
From down the street came the sound of chanting, and there seemed to be a change in the air, a ratcheting of pressure, as if a storm front were approaching. The demonstration blew in. At its head were three pickup trucks, each ferrying a stack of concert-size loudspeakers. An announcer stood atop each stack, shouting into a microphone, his voice so amplified and reverberative that the words felt as if they were being hurled outward, smacking against our ears and chest.
The trucks crept forward, each enmeshed by a turbulent crowd, shouting and reacting to the announcer's calls, many of the marchers spreading their fingers into victory signs. A man held up a Kalashnikov and fired round after round into the simmering sky. ''Will we forgive those who killed our children?'' cried one truck's preacher, his face a commingling of rapture and grief.
''No!'' responded the marchers.
''Will we forget our martyrs' blood?''
''No!''
''Will we compromise for peace?''
''No!''
Behind the trucks swelled a larger pack of mourners. They carried flags, hundreds of them, representing every political faction in Gaza -- Popular Front flags and Fatah Youth flags and Islamic Jihad flags; flags with images of clenched fists and crossed rifles and soaring minarets -- and they marched in a mass that stretched from sidewalk to sidewalk, and anyone standing and watching had the choice of joining the demonstration or being trampled by the flow.
At the crowd's core were the three bodies. They were laid out on gurneys, wrapped in Palestinian flags, flowers piled on their chests, riding atop the crowd. Up close, I noticed that Ahmed did not have the
jet-black hair typical of a Palestinian. It was slightly red. His eyebrows were thick and caterpillery. His left ear, the only one visible (the right one, presumably damaged, was covered by a head cloth), stuck out like an open door. He seemed to be sweating. Perhaps it was the mortician's makeup, melting under the heat.
The marchers pressed toward Martyrs' Cemetery, a simple expanse of sand dotted with headstones and fenced by palm trees. Three fresh graves had been dug, and mourners packed around them. Women tipped their heads skyward and keened in trilling strains. Men linked arms and swayed forward and back. A mullah stood in the center, among the graves, and as the bodies arrived he shouted, ''With our soul, with our blood, we will sacrifice ourselves for God.'' He shouted it again and a third time, and the crowd picked up the chant. The three boys were slid into the ground and the dirt was piled on, a thousand hands pawing at the graves. After the bodies were covered, the mounds atop their graves were a collage of palm prints, and everyone was still chanting, even the smallest of children, who wandered about the cemetery dazed from the excitement, repeating the words softly to themselves.
As the funeral ended there seemed to be a general exodus in the direction of Karni crossing, a short walk away. Toward the rear of the battlefield, a few hundred yards from the Green Line, rose several large mounds of dirt, almost a miniature mountain range. These were the equivalent of the battle's grandstands, and the hills were heavy with spectators, about half teenagers and half older, a hundred people milling around, arguing politics and charting the progress of the clashes. At moments when the situation became hazardous, everyone retreated from the hilltops and stood behind the dirt, and the conversations scarcely missed a beat.
In front of the dirt mounds, closer to the Green Line, were a series of cement blocks, about the size of dishwashers, each pocked with bullet scars and protecting a small clot of fighters. A few broken blocks hid just a single person, a fighting force of one. At the very front, about 30 yards from the Green Line, were a series of wide trenches cut into the soft desert soil, protected by dirt walls. The trenches were jammed with dozens of stone-throwers, almost all of them high-school age or younger. At the Green Line itself, on the far side of the fence, were three Israeli armored trucks and one tank, driving back and forth. Soldiers poked out the top hatches, rifles poised. There were no Israeli soldiers outside of the vehicles, at least none visible. A dog had been killed the day before, and its corpse lay on the battlefield, infusing the trenches with a miasmic tang. Plastic bags caught in the razor wire flapped in the wind. A burning tire exhaled black columns of smoke.
The area was wide open -- there were heaps of uprooted tangerine trees, a mess of twisted steel where a factory once stood and the remains of a demolished house. The Israeli Defense Force's policy is to bulldoze any spot on a battlefield that might offer protection to Palestinians. But instead of being deterred, the fighters who show up each day face an increasingly greater risk. At Karni, no one I spotted anywhere near the front carried a gun. The 10 or so Palestinian soldiers I saw were all well back, at the dirt mounds, their weapons slung casually over their shoulders. ''We don't fire our weapons during the day,'' one of them explained. The children were the warm-up act. At dark, the real fighting began -- soldiers against soldiers. Several Israeli officers confirmed that virtually all the shooting from the Palestinian side occurred after nightfall.
Most of the stone-throwers at the front, it seemed, lived in refugee camps. Still, even in the trenches, the boys wore collared shirts, school-uniform pants and stylish sneakers; Palestinians are fastidious dressers, no matter the occasion. Toward the rear, kids in leather belts and jean jackets and penny loafers crouched safely behind the dirt mounds, too far from the Green Line to throw stones. The boys in the back were nearly all from the more middle-class neighborhoods outside Gaza City. Their parents were carpenters and electricians and merchants. They had clean fingernails and careful haircuts; they owned watches and Walkmans.
At the back there were vendors selling soft drinks and ring-shaped loaves of bread and, from a cart beneath a red umbrella, flavored ices. Bicycles and book bags were scattered about. A boy sat cross-legged in the dirt, studying from a mathematics book. Another boasted about his personal computer, which housed, he said, a Pentium 1 chip and Windows 98 and a collection of Pamela Anderson photos -- O.K. to keep, he explained, because she wasn't Islamic. Eight ambulances, with red crescent moons painted on the sides, were lined up like cabs at an airport, the drivers socializing and smoking. Parked nearby were two dump trucks, property of the Palestinian security services. At sunset the trucks would roll onto the battlefield and the kids would scramble aboard, to be driven back to their neighborhoods as if riding the school bus.
What was missing was anger. even in the trenches, even while throwing stones, none of the boys seemed particularly enraged. If anything, they appeared to be having fun. Yehya and Rami, two of the kids who had known Ahmed, spent half an hour assembling an enormous slingshot that required both of them to operate. They called it a Palestinian tank. Nobody cared that its accuracy could at best be considered random. Anyone who found a soda bottle would rush off and soon return with it half-filled with gasoline, a rag stuffed in the neck. The rag would be lit and the bottle tossed, to trenchwide cheers. It usually landed nowhere near an Israeli soldier. The Gaza soil never seemed short of rocks, though once in a while a donkey cart laden with cinder blocks would arrive and the boys would race to the cart, smash the blocks and return to the front with armloads of fresh ammunition. During the frequent cigarette breaks, the preferred brand was Marlboro, because if you took a pack and turned it upside down, the word ''Marlboro,'' when inverted, approximated the Arabic script for the phrase ''Horrible Jew.''
Not one Palestinian political faction, no matter how militant, claims that it encourages children to participate in the clashes. Every party's official position is that it's better for the children to stay home. But if the boys decide on their own to fight, the organizations all say, well, there's nothing we can do to stop them -- this is a popular uprising, after all, and the children, like the rest of us, feel strongly about recapturing our homeland. At the front, the boys themselves could not say precisely who or what had motivated them to fight. They were too young to be affiliated with a political party, though most knew their parents' party, which was overwhelmingly Hamas, the fundamentalist movement that denies Israel's right to exist. Nobody told them to come, the boys all affirmed. They saw images on television, they said, or joined a demonstration, or knew a friend who fought. There were no recruitment drives or strategy sessions or battle plans. They were just here to throw rocks. It was better than going to school.
Of Ahmed's six friends at the front, two claimed that their fathers had granted them permission to fight, and all said that their mothers forbade it. It's not uncommon to witness a mother arrive at the front, spot her child and haul him off with an arm grip that indicated further punishment to come. About 5 percent of boys under 18 in Gaza regularly join the clashes, more than enough to compose a potent fighting force.
''If my mother knew I was here,'' said Sameh, ''I'd be beaten.''
''I told my mom I'm playing soccer,'' said Yehya.
''Mine thinks I'm at Aymen's house,'' said Hares.
''And mine thinks I'm at his house,'' said Aymen, and everyone broke into laughter.
When they tried to explain exactly why they were throwing stones, everyone said the same thing -- not approximately the same thing, but exactly the same thing. ''I'm fighting for Palestinian freedom,'' they said. ''I'm fighting so that Jerusalem can be the capital of Palestine. I'm fighting because the Jews stole our land and we want it back.'' Every sentence was taken, verbatim, from messages played and replayed on Palestinian TV.
At one point, following a rock-throwing jag, there was a sudden series of suctionlike pops. ''Fireworks!'' the kids shouted, and in an instant tear-gas canisters exploded about us. For reasons that didn't seem clear, the Israeli retaliation had begun. No one panicked. The boys reached into their pockets and produced cotton balls that had been rubbed with garlic and onion and pressed them to their eyes. Aymen tore his in two and gave half to me. Then the games began. Several boys vaulted out of the trenches, ran to the steaming canisters, picked them up and hurled them back at the Israelis. They were playing with army men, just as I did at their age, only mine were plastic and theirs were real.
Canisters that had already discharged their gas were brought to the trenches so the boys could play hot potato, staging contests to see who could hold the scalding metal in their fingers the longest. ''Look,'' said Hares, making a face. ''Built in America. I hate America.'' The writing on the outside of the 560 CS Long-Range Projectile said that it was manufactured by Federal Laboratories in Pittsburgh. When it had sufficiently cooled, Hares stuffed it in my pocket. Everyone was working on an ammunition collection. A basic set included the two styles of rubber-coated bullets (spherical and cylindrical), an M-16 bullet, a tear-gas canister and a .50-caliber bullet. Sometimes the kids traded them back and forth, like baseball cards.
Shortly after the tear-gas attack, which inspired nobody to leave the front, came rubber-coated bullets. Two, three, four shots. These were the spherical ones -- musket-type balls sheathed with a few millimeters of cushioning. They're launched from high-powered rifles; boys have died from being struck in the head by them. They ricocheted unpredictably about the trenches, and the boys hunkered down and the atmosphere turned a notch serious. A few people began crawling toward the rear of the battlefield, though all of Ahmed's friends remained. Muhammad curled himself into an insectlike ball and bit down hard on his lower lip. Sameh lay on his side and knocked two stones together, tapping out a jittery beat. Hares retrieved one of the bullets, stuck his fingernail into the rubber, peeled it like an orange, put the metal ball into his slingshot and fired it back.
Despite the scare, the next time an armored car approached, nearly everyone jumped up and launched an especially exuberant barrage of rocks. The boys, so far as I could tell, were convinced that their stones would eventually disable the Israeli Army. This may one day prove correct, though probably not in the David-versus-Goliath fashion the boys envision. What's clear to many Palestinian leaders but not apparent to the children is that the stones, and those who throw them, are playing an almost purely symbolic role in the war. In Mecca, Muslims throw stones at a statue representing the Devil; it's a centuries-old tradition. In Gaza, Israeli soldiers fill the Devil's role. Stones, the Palestinian leaders know, won't directly defeat the Israelis, but repeated images of rock-throwing youths being shot by highly trained soldiers might turn international opinion against Israel and persuade other Arab nations to join the war. In this way, Palestinian thinking goes, Israel could be defeated and erased from the map, replaced with the nation of Palestine.
After about 10 rubber shots in five minutes, a real bullet was fired. Again, it wasn't clear why. No vehicle seemed to require access to the Karni Road; nothing more lethal than rocks, as far as I could tell, was coming from the Palestinian side. I knew it was a live bullet because the sound was different -- just a hummingbird's whoosh and a quick spray of sand -- and because every boy's eyes instantly popped wide open. But the proof came with the second shot. There was another whoosh, followed by a moment of strained silence, everyone's shoulders instinctively hunched, and then a choking gasp that swiftly accelerated into an agonized cry. Someone was hit. A few feet down the trench there was a burst of whistling and yelling, and a dozen boys raced to the spot. Hands grabbed for the body. The wounded boy was hoisted out of the trench, dropped once, then picked up again and carried into the open. His right thigh was bent in an unnatural way. Blood blossomed on his pants. There was the sound of spinning wheels; a siren.
The Israeli Defense Forces have an official rule of engagement: live ammunition is never to be used unless Israeli soldiers or the people they are protecting are in immediate danger. The situation at Karni crossing, it was explained to me by an army spokesman, fell under this definition. Thrown rocks, I was told, have killed motorists. And for a few hundred Israelis, the Karni Road is their only link to the outside world. Israeli settlers have the right to drive. Palestinian children refuse to vacate the road. Something has to give.
I spent two weeks at Karni during daylight hours, and in my time there, the Israeli Army fired live ammunition almost every day. Sometimes only two or three shots, sometimes a dozen or more. On occasion the shots were fired when cars or buses needed to enter or exit the settlement, at other times I could ascertain no reason for the shooting. Not once did I see or hear a single shot from the Palestinian side. Never during the time I spent at Karni did an Israeli soldier appear to be in mortal danger. Nor was either an Israeli soldier or settler even slightly injured. In that two-week period, at least 11 Palestinians were killed during the day at Karni...
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