Al-Awda New York, The Palestine Right to Return Coalition

NEIGHBORHOOD DESTRUCTION IN PALESTINE

By Samia A. Halaby

A photo essay documenting an inspection tour June 29-30 and July 1, 2001. The team was composed of one member of the New York branch of Al-Awda (Palestine Right to Return Coalition) and one from Idust Foundation in Colorado, one from Laka Foundation in Amsterdam. They worked in cooperation with the Union of Health Work Committees in the West Bank and Ghazze (Gaza). The author, and organizer of the team, is a Palestinian activist born in AlQuds (Jerusalem) prior to the establishment of Israel on Palestinian soil.

Part Four -- The Malalha Tribe

These are the missiles labeled with Israeli Hebrew which kill Palestinian children and their families. This is the work that some misguided Jewish American and European families send their sons and daughters to do.

These children are members of the Malalha trive which our team is visiting. It is camped in Ghazze near where Israelis confiscated land and built the Nezarim settlement. Members of the Malalha family once lived in southern Palestine from whence they had been driven by Israel and had come to Ghazze as refugees. Since January 2001, the Israeli government has begun 25 new Israeli settlements.

In the photo above we stand on the location where the Israelis recently killed 3 of the Malalha women. We collect some flechettes which were in a missile or bomb and which explode in universal directions. They are like little destructive nails and we saw where they had penetrated metal. The Malalha family marked the spot with a memorial wreath. They tell us that one night at 11:00 PM, the 9th of June, the night of the killing of the three women, they were bombed for fifteen minutes continuously from tanks who had come from Nezarim settlement and parked within a few feet of the perimeter of the encampment.

Members of the Malalha family add with great anger that a handicapped man was also injured in the attack. They are indignant at the cowardice of injuring a physically challenged man. In the photo on the right you see his tent where we were taken to pay our respects. We also examined the tracks left by the Israeli tanks.

We were also told that the tanks had come at a previous time approximately 10 days in advance of the day that the three women had been killed. Seven tanks had surrounded the camp at approximately 4:00 to 4:30 AM and "they shot at us for ½ to 1 hour." One woman made a "PRRRR PRRRR" sound demonstrating how much they shot and the sound of the ammunition. Our team examined the expended missile fragments.