Jerusalem – As they watch their people suffer a total siege and major bombings in the Gaza Strip, Palestinians in the Israeli-occupied territories are being subjected to unrelenting violence. Intimidated by police and settlers, arrested indiscriminately or in massive Army raids, and finally killed by Israeli bullets that convey a “thirst for revenge” that will only engender more fear and anger. Special delivery from Jerusalem.
Anyone who has toured the Old City of Jerusalem knows that the amphitheater at the Damascus Gate is abuzz; There are always Muslim parishioners, also Jews, crossing its entrance, while on the sides there are sellers of cooked corn and vegetables, creating an atmosphere of gathering, in which the smell of coffee gives way to the aroma of freshly baked bread. in the Avenue. This, at least, used to be Damascus.
Now, its residents repeat, “the city has no soul”. The deadly attack by Hamas in southern Israel on October 7 and the war declared by Israel in retaliation, with bombings in Gaza “at an average not seen in decades” in the words of the Army, has left an air of strangeness in Jewish cities. . But while these resume activity, in occupied East Jerusalem – roughly the Palestinian side – nothing has ever been the same.
In the first week, the conflict paralyzed the streets. Salah* He wanted to go to work during those days, “but there was no one there, only the (Israeli) Army, so I returned home because I didn’t want something to happen and I would be left outside.” Today that total emptiness goes on at times, although the tension persists and is felt in the low influx of people; in the profile of those who go out, more men than women; And in the shops, well, not all of them open, and if they do, they close early.
“This is crazy. Difficult,” snaps a man who, in the solitude of a road, smokes a cigarette. He alludes to his people, to the 2.3 million Palestinians under attack and Israeli blockade in the Strip, but also to the 3.3 million who like him live in Jerusalem and the West Bank. Like other people, he quickly ends our interaction and remains silent.
The mood is not there to talk, people feel pain and are afraid
The synthesis of Khalid* is the feeling that reverberates within the walls of the walled city, with a Christian and Muslim Palestinian majority. On the one hand, sadness and helplessness for the dead, injured and displaced “brothers” in Gaza, who suffer a “humanitarian catastrophe”; On the other hand, fear in the flesh, because the Israeli Police are patrolling the streets much more.
“There are people who are worse. There is nothing to say”
The control of the Israeli authorities over the Palestinians is, in the occupied territories, the usual dynamic. But after October 7complaints have increased for intimidation, assault for no apparent reason and arbitrary arrest by Israeli forcestransmitting to the Palestinians a “thirst for revenge” against them for the multiple massacres of the Islamist group in the border area.
“In Jerusalem, the Police search you. If you post a message in support of Gaza, the Police come and take your phone, and if they find it, they arrest you,” he says. Muhammad*, very upset with the United States and the foreign countries that support Israel in this war, although concrete: “It’s okay. Israel says it fights a ‘terrorist organization’, let it do so, but don’t kill civilians who don’t have no responsibility”.
In separate conversations, and despite the fact that the Police see us talking to him, Khalid* regrets the same: “If you speak, they come to you and ask you what you saidthey rebuke you saying ‘we saw you talking to journalists.'” This is the reason why the testimonies appear with fictitious names and it does not even occur to them to show themselves on camera, because only in the last few days the Israeli Prosecutor’s Office accused four residents under the argument of “sympathy, support or identification with an act of terrorism or terrorist organizations”.
In the middle, however, life prevails: going out to work, shopping; move forward the food business, the grocery store souvenirsin a ghost place without tourists and foreigners who have left, been evacuated or repatriated: “It is even worse than in the time of Covid-19 because everyone has left,” he says Khalid*, with who Jaber* I would not agree even if I shared a guild.
“With everything that is happening, to hell with my store! My people are suffering in Gaza, I don’t care about the business. I open and come here just to distract myself, to talk to my cousin and change ideas because tonight I cried three times looking at all the images. There are people who are worse off than us. There is nothing to say“.
Control, fear, violence, anger. These ingredients are being concentrated especially around the Esplanade of the Mosques – the complex where Al-Aqsa and the Dome of the Rock are located. where Israel, this being the third most important place in Islam, has decided “for security” to restrict prayer to those over 60 years of age.
Fridays in the Old City are more tense than ever: the 40,000 to 60,000 faithful who used to come from different parts of the West Bank can no longer attend, young people or young adults can no longer enter, and those who try or start praying in the street they have been expelled or repressed with tear gas.
West Bank: under mass arrests and attacks by Israeli settlers
“You can imagine how under a state of emergency the situation easily deteriorates,” summarizes the NGO Addameer. Indeed, the restrictions extend and multiply beyond Jerusalem and beyond its residents, since they are also being suffered by Palestinians with Israeli citizenship and Israeli activists.
Just to mention a few cases: members of the ‘Standing Together’ group, who were putting up posters in the city with a message of coexistence in Hebrew and Arabic, were imprisoned; also the anti-war protesters in Haifa; and the same for the Palestinian singer from Nazareth, Dalal Abu Amina, arrested for publications on social networks that for the Israeli police constitute “incitement” against Israel and “support” for the Palestinian cause.
The human rights organization Adalah also points out that At least 40 Palestinian citizens of Israel have been fired or suspended from their jobs for their messageswhile they have received reports of dozens arrested for posting slogans in solidarity with Gaza or simply spreading verses from the Koran.
However, the occupied West Bank is that third front of violence that Israel says it does not want (the others are the Gaza Strip and Lebanon), but there, since the start of the war, it has imposed very restrictive controls, movement blockades and closures. military in Palestinian cities, some of which have responded with protests and deadly clashes with both Israeli and Palestinian Authority forces.
And in the West Bank, Israel is starring daily raids to arrest “suspicious” Palestiniansallegedly linked to Hamas or acts of terror, a campaign of mass arrests that Israel estimates at almost 600 – although Addameer raises it at more than 900 – and that worries the UN Human Rights Office, as families denounce that this “thirst for revenge” is sneaking into prisons, with power and water cuts.
There has been an increase in arbitrary detentions of Palestinians in the occupied West Bank and of Arab Israelis in Israel, including Palestinian activists and Palestinian workers working in Israel, with accounts of ill-treatment and lack of due process. This must end,” UN agency spokesperson Ravina Shamdasani emphasized on October 19.
“I can’t find words to describe what’s happening. We need to invent a new vocabulary,” he says sadly. Ali*, who no longer knows how to put into words this violence and slaughter in the Palestinian Territories, which also accumulate 85 Israeli attacks on health centers, 26 attacks on ambulances and 56 impediments for ambulances to reach hospitals. Ali* resigns with a “We have to stay strong, there is no other option”.
Because to the almost 4,400 Gazans killed at the time of writing, there are at least 78 Palestinians killed so far in the war in East Jerusalem and the West Bank, by bullets from the Israeli Army, a figure that will continue to increase and that the NGO Al- Haq reveals that it is also due to Israel’s hardening of the use of live ammunition both in operations and raids.
And the Israeli settlers have done the same, who have multiplied their attacks and have received new shipments of weapons from the Israeli Minister of Security, the ultranationalist Itamar Ben-Gvir, who has also promoted an emergency regulation to relax access to the carrying licenses.
As a result, in two weeks of escalation another six Palestinians have been killed by settlers, while their threats and the impediments of the Israeli Army have forced the displacement of 545 Palestinians from 13 pastoralist communities in Area C of the West Bankan area under Israeli administrative and security control, according to figures from the UN Office of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA).
“In the end we are all equal. Nobody chooses their father, mother, sex, religion… Why, if we are equal, can’t we all live with dignity?“, ask Ali*, among the last Palestinians to parade through the streets near the Damascus Gate, before the sun sets and another dawn reveals new horrors.
*Names have been changed to preserve the security of the sources.
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