From Occupied Palestine

Testimony: Life under curfew
NADYYA AZIZ
Jenin, 9 October 2003

 printer friendly

We met with Nadyya behind the locked steel green doors of an internet cafe in Jenin. She was breaking curfew in order to communicate with her children in Jordan, and connect with the outside world after five days of 24-hour curfew.

In 1969 Nadyya left Jenin, where she was born, to study English literature in Jordan. She returned to Palestine after 30 years to work as a government translator in Ramallah in the department of International Relations and moved back to Jenin in 2000 to work for the municipality.

She has been working to acquire residency since arriving back in Palestine, but the process is dependent upon the Israeli government – which has broken off communication with the Palestinian Authority. Because she is without residency, she cannot travel throughout Palestine, for at each checkpoint she risks deportation. For this reason, Nadyya has not seen her children – two sons, 29 and 25, and one daughter, 23 – in more than two years. She is 53 years old.

Her testimony was transcribed to the crackle of gunfire, rumble of tanks and the wail of the Palestine Red Crescent ambulance sirens – signalling the end of a four hour lifting of curfew, the first reprieve in five days. Curfew is in place again indefinitely.

---

Jenin -- Nadyya Aziz: I am not going to talk politics. Everyone is talking politics. I want to talk about the effect of curfew on human beings: on Palestinian individuals, Palestinian families and Palestinian society.

Where I am living, in al-Marah district, the Israeli tanks and jeeps come regularly - at night, at dawn... They come in the early morning announcing "Mamnou'a al-tajawool!, Mamnou'a al-tajawool!" which means that curfew is imposed. You have no right to leave your home, to go anywhere. We are breaking curfew now, but on our own. The consequences are simple: if a soldier in a tank or a jeep sees you at any time you can be killed. And [the Israelis] will say that it is your fault; you didn't follow the orders. 24 hours at home. That's curfew.

During the invasion of Jenin in 2002, we lived for 19 days under curfew without water, without electricity... It was risky to even look from the window or the balcony. We heard constant shelling and helicopters. The tanks were all over the streets, everywhere. When they were at my doorstep, I said, 'Thank God the tanks are here. That means that we will not be shelled by helicopters.'

~~~

This September there were 21 days of curfew. Students were able to study for only one week in the entire month. And today, it is the 9th of October, and the fifth day of curfew this month. They say that there will be curfew for another 10 days, maybe more. Nobody knows.

You see children in the streets now. Instead of being in school, they are in the streets, following the tanks and the jeeps. What happens to them depends on the soldier and his morality - if he likes to shoot or not. These days are easier than last year - last year we had many children who were killed on the streets because they were following the tanks.

Sometimes I feel that for a child who is locked in the home, he sees the tanks as a huge toy, as something to play with. To follow with stones, to put garbage on, to talk to the soldiers using dirty words - I feel as if they are playing. Children need to play. They don't have pens and paper to use. So they play with tanks and stones.

~~~

The concept of normal life is absent here. There is no tomorrow, because tomorrow is uncertain. Everyday when I talk with my neighbours, we say, 'Tomorrow, I will do this and this... if they lift the curfew.' Every detail of our life is controlled by the Israeli army. Everything. We feel like animals in cages. In this kind of atmosphere people become violent, and this violence is turned against ourselves most of all. Our society is not the same anymore. People quarrel with one another - wives, husbands, children...

I talked to some people who said that those who need psychotherapy are becoming more and more. The number of people coming to receive treatment is rising, especially children. We are used to hearing tanks and shooting in Jenin, but for children, it's not the same. I know a little girl who is eight years old. When she hears any shooting she begins vomiting, she spends her time on the toilet... she doesn't speak, she doesn't eat.

Fear is accumulating. We have been living in these conditions now for about three years. The other day I met with a woman whose son was killed, leaving behind a wife who was pregnant, and now has a child with no father. I asked her how she is managing to live with this grief, this disaster. She told me that she and other mothers come together weekly in the [Jenin] Camp and they talk. They talk, and they cry: "I am a mother, I lost my son, but I have found another mother in the same circumstances as me. Her son was killed, and he also left a woman and a child. So I feel relief that there are others who are feeling the same."

~~~

These long days of curfew are very damaging - there are people here who work in the market, in the shops, who depend this for a living each day. When you don’t work, how can you live? As for myself, I have enough money to live for another three months. I don’t like to think about this because there are people who don’t have enough money for tomorrow. It's a luxury to have three months of money to live on. It is shameful for me to talk this way while others cannot find money for their next meal, and have to stand in a row in front of the Red Cross and wait for their rations.

Before this intifada, the level of poverty was not like this. Now, if you walk in the city, you can see young unemployed people everywhere. Unemployment is about 70% in the West Bank and Gaza strip, and poverty is about the same. It is catastrophic. Many, many Palestinians are living on the assistance of the Red Cross and other organizations. For about a year now the Red Cross has been running a program to feed over 1/2 million Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

~~~

The concept of a normal life is absurd here. What is normal? We have forgotten normal. Even the normal roads we have forgotten. Before the intifada, there were normal roads to Nablus, to Ramallah... To go to Ramallah now you have to use long roads through mountains, walk through paths, anything. There was once normal roads, and there still are, but we have forgotten them. To go to Ramallah before took one hour. Now you have to spend five hours to reach Ramallah, if you reach Ramallah. If I am to go there, I say, "Thank God, at least I got there on the same day."

Once I went to Ramallah to see if my papers had been renewed, and when I came back to Jenin I was held for many hours by soldiers. One soldier was talking slowly, and asking many questions. I said to him, "It seems that you are bored. This I why you are talking to me. You need someone to talk to - even us." When I tried to look him in the face he didn't do it. You know, I felt an unspoken sympathy with him. I don't really know how to express it. After that I saw a soldier on TV who was killed in Bethlehem. He had a similar face to this young man. And I cried.

To some, this is all a big game - they are interested in continuing this bloodshed. They are killing the humanity in us, in both the Israeli and the Palestinian people. I can't talk this way to many people here, they won't understand. We are living in a mentality of revenge, violence, acting and reacting... this cycle of violence. We are suppressing the human side of us, which I think is very dangerous. And we are paying the price with people - Palestinian and Israeli.

For some years now people here look at me as though I am from Mars. How can I feel sympathy for a soldier or an officer? Many people see only a killer. And maybe they are right, because they see only those who are holding guns, trying to kill, imposing curfew. But sometimes I see the depth of the human being - what there is inside, as a human being. When any child in Israel or in Palestine falls down, killed, this makes me cry. I speak as a mother. And a mother is a mother, here, there, or anywhere in the world.