‘Dear Palestinian Brothers . . . Please Return to Gaza’

 

غزة، نهار خارجي، بعد فك الحصار قسرا.

اضغط على الصورة لمشاهدة باقي المجموعة الأولي

تصوير نورا يونس

‘Dear Palestinian Brothers . . . Please Return to Gaza’

By Nora Younis and Ellen Knickmeyer
Washington Post Foreign Service

RAFAH, Egypt, Jan. 25 — Throngs of Palestinians fought off Egyptian security forces trying to drive them back behind the breached border walls of the Gaza Strip on Friday, thwarting Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak’s efforts to end the Palestinian exodus from Gaza as protests on their behalf grew across the Arab world.

The standoff threatened to bring the armed Hamas movement that governs Gaza into open confrontation with Mubarak’s administration. Hamas officials supported the Palestinians’ refusal to be forced back into Gaza, a cramped slice of coast inhabited by 1.5 million people.

By some witness accounts, Hamas members used a bulldozer to break a new hole late Friday in the walls separating Egypt and Gaza. Other witnesses described the drivers only as masked men.

Even as they defied the Egyptian government, Palestinian civilians and Hamas officials also appealed to it, saying that pushing Palestinans back into Gaza would subject them to an Israeli siege. Israel has virtually sealed the crossings into and out of Gaza since June, when Hamas, which the Jewish state considers a terrorist organization, took control of the strip by force.

“There is no ability by anyone to prevent the people from moving en masse to these openings,” said Fawzi Barhoum, a Hamas spokesman in Gaza. He urged Egypt “to appreciate the Palestinian need for food and fuel and medicine for the people.”

The Palestinians began pouring into the Sinai early Wednesday after gunmen used explosives and machinery to topple much of the seven-mile-long barricade between Egypt and Gaza. Five days earlier, Israel had stopped most deliveries of fuel and food to the strip in response to a spike in rocket attacks from there targeting southern Israel.

Hundreds of thousands of Palestinians have poured out since the wall fell, reveling in their escape from the Israeli restrictions, which had caused power blackouts and shortages of food and medicine. Palestinians picked store shelves bare in Egyptian border towns. On Friday, some of them used a forklift to hoist a newly bought Egyptian camel over the broken wall into Gaza.

“If they close the border, we will stay in Egypt,” said a 54-year-old Gaza woman who identified herself by the nickname Um Kamal and was heading back to Gaza with two female relatives and two children. The group shared a load of sacks filled with blankets, dishware, honey, cheese, tea and clothes that they had just bought.

“Egypt is closer to us than Israel. They are our brothers,” Um Kamal said. “Israel is putting us under siege. Jordan is closed to us. We have no alternative but Egypt.”

Egyptian security forces tried unsuccessfully Friday to end the Palestinian exodus. Police cars drove through Egyptian border towns blaring the message: “Dear Palestinian brothers, when you have finished buying your goods, please return to Gaza. The border is closing.”

Early Friday, scores of Egyptian police carrying riot shields took up positions along the border, blocking more Palestinians from entering Egypt. Armored vehicles and trucks carrying barbed wire and water cannons rolled to the border.

Violence broke out in the late afternoon, when police were due to close the border. Palestinian witnesses said Egyptian security forces fired tear gas and unleashed attack dogs. Palestinians abruptly turned on the Egyptians, pummeling them.

By dusk, crowds were flowing freely across the border again, and Egyptian security forces had retreated. The Egyptians stood with two dead police dogs at their feet. Witnesses said Hamas gunmen had shot them. Ambulances took away at least three wounded Egyptian officers.

Hamas security guards with guns slung over their shoulders patrolled the narrow buffer between the Egyptian wall and the Israeli-built Gaza border fence.

Hamas officials searched the heavily laden returning Palestinians at scattered checkpoints. But the breaches also appeared to provide an opportunity for gunmen to bring in materials that could be used to make weapons.

While Egyptian security forces busied themselves closing two gaps in the wall, men driving a pickup truck stacked high with metal pipes rolled through an unguarded section. Fighters in Gaza sometimes use pipes to make the crude rockets they fire into Israel.

Mubarak risks stirring up domestic dissent, particularly among Islamic groups, if he acts too roughly in returning the Palestinians to Gaza, where the Israeli restrictions remain in force.

Islamic political movements in Egypt and Jordan led mass protests Friday against the restrictions, which the Israeli government says have reduced the number of rocket attacks from Gaza.

Thousands more people demonstrated in Bahrain. King Abdullah of Jordan, which is one of only two Arab countries with full relations with Israel, has criticized the Israeli blockade, as have officials from the Arab League and the European Union.

“To be honest, what the Israelis did with blocking the borders gave a boost to Hamas,” said Walid Awad, a spokesman for Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, a leader of the rival Fatah party that governs the West Bank. “It was a strategic mistake.”

Knickmeyer reported from Jerusalem.
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Some Israelis Want Egypt to Control Strip

Order Begins to Return To Breached Gaza Border
Some Israelis Want Egypt to Control Strip

By Ellen Knickmeyer
Washington Post Foreign Service
Friday, January 25, 2008; Page A13

RAFAH, Gaza Strip, Jan. 24 — Egyptian security forces began imposing control over the country’s breached border with the Gaza Strip on Thursday, using clubs and dogs to police the thousands of Gazans still making their way past barricades blown up or toppled by Palestinian gunmen a day earlier.
Some Israeli officials said the breach would allow them to push responsibility for Gaza’s 1.5 million residents onto Egypt, drawing immediate objections from the Egyptian government.

“When Gaza is open to the other side, we lose responsibility for it,” Israeli Deputy Defense Minister Matan Vilnai said in a statement released by his aides, according to news agencies. “So we want to disconnect from it.

“We want to stop supplying electricity to them, stop supplying them with water and medicine, so it would come from another place,” said Vilnai, a member of Israel’s Labor Party, which has favored negotiations with Palestinians and the emergence of a Palestinian state in Gaza and the West Bank.

Defense Minister Ehud Barak distanced himself from Vilnai’s comments, but some Israeli leaders have long imagined Egypt taking control of Gaza, and Jordan becoming responsible for Palestinians in the West Bank.

Israeli officials generally have reacted mildly to the breach, saying they are watching to see how well Egypt regains control of the border.

“Some people are happy that this has happened,” said one Israeli official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was relaying the private views of other officials. “Some people believe if they get all their needs from Egypt,” he said of the Palestinians in Gaza, “that would mean we wouldn’t have to do it, and the pressure on Israel from the humanitarian situation would disappear, or at least ease significantly.”

Barak appeared to play down this approach. “I don’t go too far in my interpretation of this,” he told the Associated Press on the sidelines of the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.

Hossam Zaki, a spokesman for Egypt’s Foreign Ministry, said there was “no possibility” of Egypt taking more responsibility for Gaza. “This might be in the Israeli imagination, but it does not relieve them of the responsibility” under existing border accords and international law.

Severing the Gaza Strip from Israel could further jeopardize Palestinian hopes of uniting the West Bank and Gaza in a single Palestinian state. Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, whose Fatah movement was routed by the armed Hamas movement in Gaza last June, has repeatedly charged that Hamas’s takeover endangered Palestinian statehood.

In Gaza City, Hamas spokesman Sami Abu Zuhri said Thursday that one goal of his movement “is to tie our economy to the Arab and Islamic economy and to liberate it from the Israeli monopoly.” However, “the idea of separating Gaza from the West Bank and from Palestine is completely rejected by the Palestinians,” he said.

Abu Zuhri spoke in a city noticeably emptier than just two days ago. A day after fighters blew open the border wall — Hamas did not assert responsibility for the demolition, but Gaza residents say nothing of such magnitude could happen here without Hamas’s knowledge — Egypt’s and Gaza’s economies were starting to meld, at least temporarily.
Following Wednesday’s exuberant rush after the wall fell, order and routine started taking hold Thursday. Money-changers carrying Egyptian pounds appeared in Gaza, ready to serve Gazans eager to shop in Egypt for goods that have become scarce in the strip because of Israeli trade and travel restrictions. Private cars began ferrying shoppers from Gaza City to the border. Small boys stood at the broken concrete border walls with chairs and stepladders, charging one Israeli shekel, the currency most commonly used in the Palestinian territories, to those needing a boost to hoist themselves over the barricade.

At midday, tensions rose for a time on both sides of the border when Egyptian security forces moved in with riot shields, clubs and dogs to cut off the stream of people clambering over the wall into Egypt. Thick crowds massed at the border, anxiously watching the Egyptian guards. But a cheer went up when Palestinians realized the Egyptians were only clearing a traffic jam of donkey carts. “Go!” waiting men screamed, and hundreds stampeded across as one, running and leaping.

Most Gazans sense that their time of liberty is limited. Egypt has closed the border within days or weeks of earlier, smaller breaches.

In the Egyptian city of El Arish, 30 miles from the Gaza border, Egyptian authorities instructed hotels not to accept Gazan guests, but residents opened their guest rooms, basements and back yards to the Palestinians.

Late Wednesday, the first night of the wall’s breach, dozens of young Palestinian men from Gaza gathered in front of the only bar in El Arish to celebrate. The Palestinians zipped their jackets against the cold and cuddled prized cans of beer in gloved hands. “There is not a single drop of beer back in Gaza,” said Mohammed Amer, 28.

“We will spend the night in the open,” Amer said. “But we don’t mind. Spending the night here in the streets is much better than in our own houses back in Gaza.”

Special correspondents Nora Younis in El Arish and Samuel Sockol in Jerusalem contributed to this report.
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غير متاح مؤقتا

فور انتهاء لقاء عمل قفز الموبايل من بين يديها منتحرا في أحد الشوارع الجانبية بوسط القاهرة أمام احدى البنايات المهمة.. انزلق برشاقة وعزم في فتحة شديدة الضيق لبالوعة مجاري تساعه بالكاد.. وانتحرت معه عشرات الرسائل التي نحتت روايتهما القصيرة.. مد أحد عساكر الحراسة يده داخل البالوعة وخرج ذراعه ينقط الماء العطن.. عبثا حاول انقاذه – تعب الانتظار حسم الموقف، لقد اتخذ الصمت ملاذا..

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أدارت المفتاح في باب الشقة ومدت رأسها من فتحة صغيرة.. همت أن تطلق ندهة عالية ثم أجهضتها ودخلت في صمت.. فتحت النوافذ على وسعها رغم برد الشتاء وأغلقت باب الشقة بالمفتاح.. تممت على ملابسه في الخزانة وأكوابه المفضلة في المطبخ..

نفضت التراب عن عدة الهاتف الأرضي، أوصلتها بالمقبس، ووقفت تتأملها للمرة الأولى.. آخر مرة تعاملت فيها مع هاتف أرضي كان رماديا بقرص دوار.. كتبت الأرقام العربية بالفضي على خلفية حمراء، والانجليزية بالأحمر بين فراغات الأصابع العشرة.. كان أبيها يضع قفلا صغيرا بين رقمي واحد واتنين حين شك أن شابا يعاكسها وهي بعد في الثانية عشرة.. وكانت –بالطبع– تعرف مخبأ المفتاح بفضل تواطؤ أمها.. ومنذ نهاية سنوات المدرسة لم يفارق الموبايل كفيها.. حتى كان موبايلها الأخير.. ساعة، فهرست، وتأريخ لزخم شفهي..

خطت خمسة أرقام بقلم رصاص على ورقة صغيرة وأرقدتها جوار الهاتف.. ثلاثة أصدقاء، والسوبرماركت، ورقم هاتف منزلها.. ثلاثة أرقام أخرى لم تحتاج أن تكتبها، فقد نحتت في ذاكرتها: أمها، وأخيها، وحبيبها الغائب.. اتصلت بالسوبر ماركت وطلبت أصنافه المفضلة ثم أسكنتها البراد.. في المساء أخذت دشا ساخنا والتقطت زجاجة عطره من أمام المرآة.. نثرت بعض رذاذها على كتفيها وذراعيها.. أزاحت الغطاء جانبا واحتضنت نفسها ونامت..

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يا أجمل ليلة في عمري حبيبي جاي
يا وردة بيضا في شعري حبيبي جاي
يا عقد ياقوت على صدري حبيبي جاي

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الحب الأول بدون موبايل كان له طعم خاص.. كانت تنتظر حبيبها متصنعة المذاكرة في الشرفة أيام الثلاثاء والأربعاء.. يمر أمام منزلها في أي وقت بين السابعة والتاسعة.. يطلق نفير سيارته فتختفي سلالم الأدوار الأربعة تحت قدميها.. كان تعاقدها الأول مع موبينيل بقيمة ألف جنية للخط فقط، ولم يكن هناك أية خيارات أخرى حين ذاك.. وبالطبع كانت هدية حبيبها الغيور حتى يجدها في أي وقت، فلم يكن أبيها ليدفع هذا المبلغ على “كلام فاضي”..

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صباح اليوم التالي اكتشفت أنه بعد مصرع الموبايل لا توجد ساعة واحدة في المنزل.. من ذا الذي يشتري ساعة حائط اليوم؟.. رفعت سماعة الهاتف وضغطت أزرار التون واحد ثم خمسة “تم تغيير الرقم الخاص بالساعة الناطقة الى الرقم 150″.. عبس وجهها وهي تضرب 150 ولكن سرعان ما اطلقت ضحكة صاخبة حين طالعها صوت أبلة فضيلة الدافيء “الساعة السابعة، وستة وأربعين دقيقة، تماما”..

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أطبق صمت أليف على المنزل لعدة شموس وليال.. لم تذهب لاستقبال أصدقائها العائدين الى مصر بعد غياب، ولا لدفع الفواتير.. آثرت العزلة.. ففي وحدتها فقط تكون معه.. من ذا الرجل الذي دخل منزلها ذات ليلة وقلب حياتها رأسا على عقب؟ قلبت في أوراقه التي خلفها في المنزل.. راجعت ما نشر من أعماله الأولى.. دارت في رأسها قصص طفولته وشخوص أقاربه الذين عرفتهم من حكاياته.. حتى قبر أمه، زارته في خيالها عدة مرات.. في لقائهما الأول توقفا عند السوبرماركت للتسوق.. مشاجرة مفتعلة بينهما لحظة دفع الحساب دفعته لحملها عن الأرض بين ذراعيه قائلا للكاشير “لحظة واحدة وراجعلك” أدخلها سيارته وأغلق الباب بحزم وحنو قائلا “استنيني هنا ياحبيبة بابا”..

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الورد كله كله
كسا الجناين
واشمعنى انتي
اللي شاردة منا

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تداعى فيها صوته الدافيء وهي تقلب وعاءا تصاعد دخانه فوق الموقد.. “عندي معاد شغل وعايزك تيجي معايا”.. “عايز ورنيش أسود وبني”.. “حبيبتي احنا محتاجين نركب ستارة في الحمام”.. “جبتلك الترابيزة دي عشان نلم فيها الجرايد المبعترة في كل حتة”.. “يا سلاام لو الواحد يقوم على ريحة طبيخ في البيت”.. “ألبس ايه؟”.. “خليكي انتي، أنا هافتح الباب”.. “معزوم على عرض مسرحي.. تعالي معايا ونطلع من هناك على….

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في أول لقاء لهما بعد غيابه الأول جلست بين ذراعيه واجمة.. رأسه على كتفها ورأسها على كتفه.. قالت بصوت خفيض “أنا مسحت نمرتك من الموبايل”.. أمسك كتفيها وأبعدها عنه قليلا محدقا في عينيها “بس انتي أكيد حافظاها”.. قالت كاذبة “لأ”.. صمت ثم قال مازحا متملصا من ثقل الموقف “يعني أنا لما أطلبك دالوقت كأن شيماء بتطلبك مثلا؟”

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في ناس كتير
لكن بيصير
ما في غيره

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غير قابل للتفسير.. هكذا وجدت حالها.. رفضت شراء موبايل جديد وآثرت الصمت.. تحول صخب حياتها الى سكون عبثا ينتظر رجل خرج ذات يوم ولم يعد.. وحدها تعرف أنها كانت أمه وعشيقته وليس ابنته.. سيعود.. وحدها تأنس في حمى “يقين ما”.. تخاف أن ينكسر.. جلست وعيناها هناك.. على باب الشقة، بدلا من الموبايل..