Curfew scenes
By: Amira Hass (transl. by Prof. Israel Shahak)
Haaretz, 28 December 1992.
Some burning tires in the darkness were the first thing we saw in the southern section of Salah A-Din Street in Gaza. A routinely fire, especially in those days ad curfew marked by the deportation to Lebanon. We slowed down and S. hooted and winked with his car lights so that the young men who broke the curfew should not think we are soldiers. They assembled there, hidden in the darkness, between the houses and the garbage heaps. Their shadows moved along the shut shop doors. Some of the youngsters shouted "Allahu Akhbar", others left the dark houses and removed for us a temporary barricade from the road. They had built the barrier between heaps of rubbish, iron scraps, empty barrels, a garbage carriage turned upside down – all were alternately lightened and darkened by the burning tires. It was 7 p.m. – "late", by the terms of Gaza.
We had just returned from Khan Yunis and the illusion of space and free movement during the drive turned at once into a depressed feeling. Later, when the fire of the tires was already behind us, we had to bypass a few deep holes in the road – no wonder that there are so many damaged tires in Gaza that are usable only for long burning and giant pools of rain water assembled in the course of the week in road junctions. In the absence of an orderly municipality and a reasonable budget, it will probably remain so many days. We have just passed luckily a few Israeli army roadblocks, one or two were marked and lightened by flames burning In bowels Inside the concrete pillars erected on both sides of the track. The fire played on the faces of the soldiers who stopped us, turned torchlight inside the car and on our faces and then read meticulously the series of permits and identification certificates that every "local inhabitant" must carry. It is hard to say what their eyes expressed, when they were standing there in the cold and in the darkness. Fear and alienation and nervousness or also hatred or perhaps just indifference and disengagement. In any case, it seemed not to bother them that we do not know if the signal with a remote lamp orders us to continue waiting or to continue driving. I read the fear on the face of S. A wrong interpretation of the intention of the soldiers, one start too early, and who knows how the soldier outside will react with his gun aimed at us. No wonder that the soldier is so nervous, said S. Curfew means obviously a temporary removal of all of us, hundreds of thousands, and the soldiers are already used to the empty streets, as if we all had disappeared. That is why each of us, who is going out freely, still rouses astonishment and suspicion among the soldiers.
We returned from the mourners in Khan Yunis, a day after six people were killed there by the well-aimed gunfire of Israeli soldiers. In Khan Yunis we were accompanied by H, a resident of the town, who was increasingly upset when we moved from one house of mourners to the other. You have turned all of us into Hamas, he said. Meretz has proved that Hamas is right, that there is no difference between the Israeli parties. What have so many soldiers done yesterday in the town? What have they done? We want Shamir back.
On the main highway to Gaza. opposite the Kfar Darom Jewish settlement, in an area of requisitioned land that was allotted to a Jewish Orthodox farming research institute, we saw a crowd of soldiers, and behind them, behind the barbed electrified wire fence surrounding the caravans of the Institute, a bunch of settlers was dancing. The festival of Hanukkah, I remembered. Next day, Monday morning, under the cover of curfew, a sightseeing bus arrived with 5-6 individuals – probably settlers – in the Rimal Quarter of Gaza, close to the house of the head of the Palestinian delegation, Dr. Haidar Abd A-Shafi. Noisy music was heard from the car. From the car stopped down some Jews with skullcaps, wrapped in prayer shawls. One of them was armed with a gun. Frightened inhabitants were looking at them from the windows. Nobody knew what the armed man was going to do. A military jeep or two arrived to guard them and the settlers in the bus offered them pancakes. Then they followed the soldiers to a military camp at the outskirts of the quarter.
In Gaza they ceased already counting the long periods of curfew imposed on the Strip since the beginning of the Intifada, and especially since the Gulf War. Nor do they expect that the army or the Civil Administration will announce clearly in all areas and neighborhoods, when the curfew will be removed, when will it be lifted temporarily to buy food and get some exercise outside. Nor is anybody excited about soldiers who like to have fun and drive around in jeeps at 4 a.m. calling in the loudspeakers something like "curfew, curfew, for a whole month", and the inhabitants try to suppress the fear roused by the noise of a helicopter buzzing at dawn. The silence during curfew is greater because also the muezzin is not allowed to call through the loudspeaker for prayer. And anyhow, during the days of mass curfew after the murder of Toledano, soldiers entered many mosques "of Hamas" and requisitioned all the loudspeakers found there. In the first days of curfew, the main streets were really empty. The emptiness was emphasized by a driving car from. whIch a branch of a palm tree was shown – sign of somebody’s death In the family – or a procession of a few crying women and a man carrying a dead infant wrapped in a woven carpet, on their way to the mosque. But gradually, the number of cars whose owners got movement permits during curfew, was growing, and more people were seen who broke the curfew, went around in the alleys and crossed the courtyards of houses to be with friends, with the family. In some places shouting soldiers were heard: Enter the houses, get inside.
This mass house arrest of hundreds of thousands of people creates a feeling of isolation, uncertainty and fear, that was still aggravated by the late publication of the names of arrestees and deportees and the difficulties involved in the disclosure of the names of the deportees. Therefore, many people, adults and young, without reading the analyses of the Israeli press, know that the arrests and the deportation were carried out at random. "I escaped the transfer", told me one who evaded the Shabak agent who came to arrest him – and he is not the only one. The very fact that the army or the Shabak came not back to look for him, proved to him and his neighborhood, that not he as an individual was important, but the number of arrestees that can be shown.
Also the story of Advocate Omar Abu Boresh, which passed from mouth to ear in Gaza, in spite of the curfew, only strengthened their estimate: On December 16, when he returned to Jebalya from Ketziyot Camp, visiting a prisoner, somebody from the office of the Consultant on Arab affairs in Civil Administration contacted him. Come, take your detained brother, he was told. And in the room of the Administration, two Shabak agents named Zaki and Abu Zaid offered him tea with mint and told him and another dignitary to wait there for an important meeting with Rabin. Suddenly they disappeared from the room, he tells, soldiers entered, tied their hands and eyes and said: Yallah, go to Lebanon. Both were driven to the prison compounds on the beach of Gaza, where they were kept detained till that night, the night of the deportations. In the evening the soldiers started reading the numbers of the detainees who were concentrated in that place. They did not get to his number – 54113. And he heard somebody saying in Hebrew: This is enough now, the bus is full.