On Wednesday 12 May the Israeli army began an incursion into the Gaza Strip, with air strikes on the Rafah camp in the south of the territory near the Egyptian border. It followed the killing of 13 Israeli soldiers.
The next day 10 homes were destroyed in Rafah. It emerged that the Israeli government planned to destroy perhaps hundreds more homes in due course. The Israelis said they wanted to widen the "Philadelphi route", an Israeli-controlled wedge separating the Palestinian Gaza Strip from Egypt, and they wanted to destroy tunnels under the border which are used to carry weapons into Palestinian territory.
On Wednesday 19 May, Israeli tanks fired on Palestinian protesters in the occupied Gaza Strip, killing at least ten and injuring more than 50. The army only began to pull back on 21 May.
At the end of this stage of the Israeli operation - and we cannot assume that it is over - some 1,600 Rafah residents have been made homeless.
These accounts by Israeli activists tell the story of these dreadful days. And Uri Avnery of the Israeli Peace Bloc, Gush Shalom, makes some comments about Sharon's policy.
15 May, Tel Aviv: A carnival of opinion
Saturday night, May 15, Rabin Square Tel-Aviv. For the first time in years, peaceminded Israelis were out on the street in force.
The radical groups who had been excluded from the podium were busy among the enormous crowd [150,000, the equivalent of 1.5 million in Britain] adding the points which none of the speakers made. Organisers [had banned] signs advocating refusal - but in practice nobody stopped Courage to Refuse and Yesh Gvul from holding up "It will not end if you don't refuse!". The Refuser Parents Forum collected a considerable number of signatures in support of the six imprisoned refusers.
The whole spectrum of moderate and radical groups were there with stalls and stickers, from the Women's Peace Coalition and the Geneva Initiative to the Anarchists ("two states for two peoples is two states too many").
The newly-founded "Shuvi" women were collecting signatures on their petition for withdrawal from Gaza (reportedly they already flooded the email of the PM's office). The "Daber" initiative told about collecting testimonies of soldiers who had served in the territories, while "All for Peace" are initiating a peace radio, to begin with through the internet.
Gush Shalom
17 May, Rafah: Fleeing the bulldozer
The streets of Rafah were filled yesterday evening with horse-drawn carts, trucks and pick-ups, all laden to the brim with any and every item that the town's residents could remove from their homes - mattresses, water tanks taken down from roofs, clothes, blankets, doors and windows removed from their hinges, dismantled beds and closets, school books, tin and asbestos sheeting, baby carriages, refrigerators, gas canisters and more.
Everyone living up to 300 metres from the border with Egypt and the Israel Defense Forces positions and machine guns; everyone who saw IDF bulldozers raze the homes of his neighbors; everyone who could and had not yet cleared his home of its contents; everyone living close to the site where an IDF armored personnel carrier was blown up last Wednesday - all hastily packed up their belongings. And when the loading was completed, the women sat at the entrances to the homes, on concrete blocks or plastic chairs, and watched the vehicles roll north, to neighborhoods far from the bulldozers.
On Saturday (15 May), after the High Court issued a "qualified temporary injunction" that stopped the IDF "from carrying out planned demolitions of any of the homes of the petitioners," there were those who felt a sense of reprieve. One of the petitioners, a big man, burst into tears unashamedly in public on hearing the High Court order. But yesterday morning, after the High Court hastily rejected the petitions, the petitioners understood that they had better try to at least save the contents of their homes.
The Kishta and a-Sha'ar families are two of the original clans of the area, not refugee families. Their homes were built on their privately owned land, where some 40-50 years ago they cultivated vegetables and watermelons. The Kishta family father moved to the area in 1956; and in the 1980s, the Kishtas began gradually building a concrete home for the expanding family.
The Kishta family has stopped counting the number of times IDF bulldozers, supported by tanks, APCs and helicopters, have demolished homes in the area - maybe five, or six. Last Thursday, bullets and shells left holes in the walls of their son Abed's home.
On Thursday and Friday, more homes belonging to members of the Kishta clan were demolished, when APCs, tanks and helicopters raided the area. A missile was fired at a group of women; seven people were killed. Rafah residents vehemently deny IDF claims that the army was targeting armed Palestinians. Human rights organizations in the town said all those killed were civilians.
Amira Hass, Ha'aretz
20 May, Sufa Junction and Tel Aviv: Protesters and police clash
At 11am on 20 May I went to Sufa junction, at one of the entrances to the Gaza Strip from Israel. Demonstrators had gathered there for the second day. This vigil, like many other demonstrations that took place in the last several months, especially against the separation wall, brought together many activists from different movements and organisations. In total, over 50 people were standing there, holding signs saying: Not in my name, Down with the occupation, Sharon-Mofaz-Ya'alon to trial, collective punishment is a war crime, and others.
Later we decided to go back to Tel-Aviv to an urgent protest in front of the defense ministry. About 500 people arrived - with less than 4 hours notice. After half an hour we got off the pavement and starting walking on the street, blocking both directions.
After 45 minutes special police forces started raiding us, beating a few protesters with sticks and isolating them from the crowd. I tried to defend a friend from being beaten up and arrested, and I was dragged myself. Eight ended up arrested, three of them wounded.
Naama Nagar, Jerusalem
Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions, 7 Ben-Yehuda St., PO Box 2030, Jerusalem 91020, Israel
Global Campaign to Rebuild Palestinian Homes
May, Tel Aviv: It is not all over yet
At long last, the Israeli armed forces have ended their occupation of Rafah. It had cost the lives of 59 Palestinians - 12 of them unarmed civilians according to the army's own account. The invasion aroused worldwide condemnation, including a censuring resolution by the UN Security Council which the United States, exceptionally, did not veto, and aroused widespread controversy inside Israel.
After the fatal "warning shots" fired last Wednesday (19 May) by a tank at an unarmed demonstration, it was widely expected that the Rafah operation would be terminated. But with the tacit agreement of Washington, the army continued its operation and even extended it into hitherto untouched neighborhoods of Rafah. On Sunday, there were widespread home demolitions at the Barazil Neighbourhood.
This morning Kol Yisrael interviewed Brigadier-General Shmuel Zakai, commander of the Israeli forces in the Gaza Strip, and asked him to account for the fifty-six houses the army now admits to destroying at Rafah (after several days when they claimed to have demolished "only five"). His answer: "We had reason to think that the Palestinians had mined the roads, so we wanted to create a cleared space to let the tanks and armoured personnel carriers pass through". General Zakai evidently assumed that Israelis would accept this as an acceptable reason for wiping out whole streets...
Now, the army is out of Rafah, and the Israeli headlines are caught by Sharon's plan to pass through his cabinet some form of a "Gaza Disengagement Plan" - though, it seems, one even more partial and vague than the earlier one. And meanwhile, the issue of Rafah is far from off the agenda.
In today's Yediot Aharonot General Gabi Ashkenazi, deputy Chief-of-Staff, reiterated the army's position: "We must keep hold of the Philadelphi Route".
The plans to widen "Philadelphi", at the expanse of destroying some 2000 houses (!) at Rafah are not off the agenda, either. They are likely to resurface in the event of a new attack on Israeli soldiers in the Gaza Strip - or of any other event which would provide a "need for a retaliation."
Adam Keller, Gush Shalom
