Khan Yunis: Before the juggernaut
JENNIFER LOEWENSTEIN
Counterpunch, 9 October 2002
A mobile watchtower, lifted into the air by a crane, surveys Khan Yunis day and night. An ambulance from the city waits behind a nearby concrete building day after day; it waits so that the next child shot for playing too close to the wall can make it to the local hospital before dying. The wall is a vast, menacing construction stretching down the coast as far as you can see, separating Khan Yunis from the Gush Katif settlement block in the Gaza Strip. Israeli soldiers sit poised with machine guns in the cylindrical bunker at the northern edge of the wall overlooking the ruins they've made of the Khan Yunis refugee camp.
Over there to the south and west, in the Jewish settlements, no one worries about water shortages or electricity outages. Families don't live in corrugated iron shacks unrecognizable as homes from the outside until someone points out what is supposed to be a door; until you see ragged clothing hanging up to dry above a parched piece of earth beside the shack. Parents in the settlements aren't afraid that their children will be murdered for absentmindedly playing too close to a wall. Their panorama is the buoyant, sparkling Mediterranean lapping the white sands outside their windows; an occupied view: for settlers only.
There are children from the refugee camp playing in the shell of a building not far from the wall. A small Gaza girl eyed me with a dark face, suspicious but curious, the last time I walked this area. When I asked to take her picture she simply stood still with the same brooding expression on her face as I clicked the camera. A year later and here she is playing among the ruins; taller and longer haired but with the same knowing look. When she sees me she stops and we both flash a quick smile of recognition. She's not dead, I think. One cannot help but wonder this about those who go on living here.
And now I wonder again about her and her playmates; about the men and women mulling about in the hot streets of the market. I wonder about the boy who was shot in the arm by a soldier in the mobile target practice watchtower carried away by the ever-present ambulance just after I arrived to gape incredulously at the wall. I wonder about the boy who draped a Palestinian flag over his shoulders like a cape after the funeral of two others killed in the night by a tank. He ran past us to his home, a white apartment building with bullet holes and tank-blasted craters in the concrete decorating its sorry fa