[R-G] For hire: the boy human shields in Gaza's most desperate town - Guardian

[shniad at sfu.ca]

http://www.guardian.co.uk/Archive/Article/0,4273,4476288,00.html

Guardian August 6, 2002 

For hire: the boy human shields in Gaza's most desperate town 

Palestinian children tout for risky work at border as Israel's tightening
grip creates poverty and hunger 

Jonathan Steele in Khan Yunis

Every day Usama Khalid jumps into a car or taxi queuing at an Israeli
checkpoint, travels 300 yards, and gets one shekel for the trip. The
11-year-old Palestinian is an officially sanctioned human shield. 

For the Israeli troops who squint out of a watchtower above the road, the
boy's presence is taken as proof that a suicide bomber is not at the wheel
of the car passing beneath them. Cars with a lone occupant will be
immediately fired upon, according to an Israeli warning. 

So drivers give boys like Usama the equivalent of 14p for the short journey.
A gang of boys presses round the waiting cars and although Usama often works
15 hours a day, he usually earns only about seven to 10 shekels. 

"Older boys often push us away so that they can ride. Sometimes they bully
us to hand over our takings," he said as we drove him to his
miserable-looking home of concrete blocks, topped by corrugated iron, where
he lives with his parents and six younger siblings in the sand-blown
outskirts of Khan Yunis. 

As Israel announced a complete ban on Palestinian travel in most of the West
Bank and tanks sealed off part of the Gaza Strip, in retaliation for the
Palestinian attacks that killed 13 people in 24 hours, no part of Gaza was
as wretched as its southern tip. 

When large numbers of Palestinians could still work in Israel, Khan Yunis
had fewer people in work there as it was furthest from Israel's main cities.
Now Israel has stopped most Palestinians coming in, distance still plagues
the town. 

Several Israeli checkpoints cut the main road north and there are frequent
unexplained closures, leaving hospitals without guaranteed supplies of
drugs, ambulances delayed, and women in labour sometimes in crisis. Israeli
tanks yesterday blocked the crossings south into Egypt. 

The closures mean that one in 10 children under the age of five suffers from
acute malnutrition, putting Gaza on a par with Nigeria and Chad, according
to an assessment funded by the US Agency for International Development
published yesterday. 

In 2000 only one in 40 children under five in the West Bank and Gaza was
acutely malnourished, the survey, conducted by Johns Hopkins University in
the US and al-Quds University in Jerusalem, found. 

The stretch of road where Usama touts himself as a human shield goes under a
new bridge connecting Israel with the beachfront Jewish settlement of Qatif.


On one side of the road 10ft-high concrete slabs screen the new highway
which Israelis alone can use. On the other side the bridge's approaches are
protected by coils of razorwire and a slope of sand which is raked regularly
to make suspicious nocturnal footprints easy to detect. The air conditioned
cars of Israeli settlers swish over the bridge to their seaside outpost
above the battered orange Mercedes taxis of impoverished Palestinians. 

Donkey-carts are almost as common as private cars in this part of Gaza and
most vehicles are taxis. 

"Usama is our only breadwinner", says Mirvat Khalid, his mother. The
bright-eyed child is as thin as a rake. "I had bread and tea for breakfast,
and bread and a piece of tomato and cucumber in the evening," he says. The
extra-white marks on his front teeth are a sign of vitamin deficiency. 

"People are giving up meat and fruit," reports Dr Abdul Ati al-Muzayen, a
senior obstetrician at the Nasser hospital in Khan Yunis. Just under half of
the area's women of child-bearing age suffer from anaemia which is caused by
deficiencies in diet, according to the USAID-funded survey. It notes
shortages of fish, chickens, and dairy produce. 

"This gives rise to an abnormally high incidence of premature births and
lack of breast-milk," says Dr al-Muzayen. The survey found that due to
border closures, half the wholesalers were short of powdered milk. 

Nearby Israeli settlements have put the desert under giant hothouses at the
expense of fresh water for Khan Yunis. "We have had no water for three days
in parts of the city, and when it comes it's not fit for drinking," says Dr
al-Muzayen. 

Khan Yunis has four small UN-funded filtration plants where fresh water is
available. But getting water from them is hard work. In a modern city of
three- and four-storey buildings, teenage boys queue with plastic cans at
the equivalent of village pumps to take water home. 

"People have a feeling of hopelessness," says Dr Eyad Zarqut, who heads the
crisis intervention team at Gaza's community mental health programme. "There
is no escape."