Post by Teddy Bear on Oct 1, 2007 17:37:01 GMT
The Sunday Times, vis a vis their reporter Marie Colvin, has come out with a fabulous exposee of what life is really like in Gaza under Hamas. Contrast this with any BBC article on the subject to better understand how corruptly and immorally biased they are in their reporting.
For the rest of this brilliant article please click here
September 30, 2007
Gaza's deadly guardians
A radical Islamist state has emerged from the smoking ruins of Gaza, threatening a new war with nearby Israel. Marie Colvin ventures into the lair of the Hamas extremists imposing their hardline doctrine on Palestinians trapped there. Photograph by Seamus Murphy
Hamas wants you to believe it has created a benevolent sanctuary where once chaos reigned. At the beginning of the journey into Gaza it’s easy to believe that things are better.
There is no longer a Palestinian immigration desk after the long walk from the air-conditioned Erez terminal on the Israeli side, past concrete blast walls, and down a dusty track in the furnace heat. But further down the road, Hamas gunmen have taken over the checkpoints. They are polite and well turned out in blue camouflage trousers, clean black T-shirts, shiny black boots.
Once hostile, they now smile at returning foreigners who fled after the kidnapping of Alan Johnston, the BBC reporter, and the savage bloodletting between the Palestinian National Authority (PNA) forces and Hamas in June that left the fundamentalist party in absolute power.
So does everyone else in Gaza. It’s like hearing the first songbird of spring. The welcome starts in the taxi. “Gaza is safe now. We have security, praise be to God,” says Munir, my driver for years, who always in the past shook his head and moaned about how terrible everything was.
It’s the same at the Al Deira hotel, mostly empty, where once aid workers, diplomats, journalists and sophisticated Gazans mixed on the terrace overlooking the Mediterranean. “Everything is safe now. You are welcome,” says Amir at the front desk.
For the first time on a trip to Gaza, I was stopped going the wrong way down a one-way street, by one of the young Hamas volunteers in yellow vests now standing up to drivers in a culture that considers a red light to be a mere suggestion to slow down.
The rubbish still smells, but now it is piled neatly in the streets. Families stroll late at night. Gone is the gunfire that used to punctuate days and nights and often escalated into street battles that left innocents dead on the pavements.
Then you start talking to people – in private.
Young men show you bruised limbs and welts on their feet; every girl wears a hijab head covering and, for the first time, women wear niqab – Saudi-style face coverings that reveal only the eyes. And people whisper.
Welcome to Hamastan.
Ahmed Al-Naba’at, 24, sits in his courtyard in an oversized Barcelona shirt. He looks too young to be the father of the three young children who toddle barefoot round the tiny dirt courtyard.
His feet still hurt. Hamas came for him at 2am.
About 30 armed men, their faces masked but wearing the black uniforms and badges of the Izzedine al-Qassam Brigade, the military wing of Hamas, had surrounded the house. They covered his eyes and took him away in a car.
“They took me somewhere, I don’t know, a room,” Naba’at says. He has high cheekbones and the near-black skin of his Sudanese ancestry. “They were screaming and beating me, punching me, slapping me on the face,” he says. “Then they tied my legs together and started falaka” – a traditional Arabic torture where the soles of the feet are beaten with sticks. “I relaxed.”
He sees the surprise in my face. “I thought they were going to kill me,” he explains.
“When I realised it’s just falaka, I thought, okay, it’s just torture.”
Qassam dumped him near his home, hours later. It took him half an hour to walk what usually takes two minutes. “You were lucky,” interjects his unsympathetic father, who is sitting against a courtyard wall. “Most of the people they beat, they throw them unconscious in the street and they are not found until the morning.”
His crime? Earlier that night at a party for a friend’s wedding, Naba’at had danced and played a song popular in Gaza – an over-romanticised ballad to Samih al-Madhoun, a Fatah commander executed by Hamas during the fighting. Hamas cameramen had filmed as Madhoun was dragged down the street amid spitting crowds, shot in the stomach, beaten and shot some more. It was shown on Hamas television that night.
The overblown ballad of his death – “Your blood is not for free Samih/You left behind an earthquake/We will not forget you Samih” – is such a Gazan hit that many young people have it on their mobile phones. Hamas, predictably, is furious. Three of Al-Naba’at’s friends who had danced at the wedding were also beaten.
Gaza's deadly guardians
A radical Islamist state has emerged from the smoking ruins of Gaza, threatening a new war with nearby Israel. Marie Colvin ventures into the lair of the Hamas extremists imposing their hardline doctrine on Palestinians trapped there. Photograph by Seamus Murphy
Hamas wants you to believe it has created a benevolent sanctuary where once chaos reigned. At the beginning of the journey into Gaza it’s easy to believe that things are better.
There is no longer a Palestinian immigration desk after the long walk from the air-conditioned Erez terminal on the Israeli side, past concrete blast walls, and down a dusty track in the furnace heat. But further down the road, Hamas gunmen have taken over the checkpoints. They are polite and well turned out in blue camouflage trousers, clean black T-shirts, shiny black boots.
Once hostile, they now smile at returning foreigners who fled after the kidnapping of Alan Johnston, the BBC reporter, and the savage bloodletting between the Palestinian National Authority (PNA) forces and Hamas in June that left the fundamentalist party in absolute power.
So does everyone else in Gaza. It’s like hearing the first songbird of spring. The welcome starts in the taxi. “Gaza is safe now. We have security, praise be to God,” says Munir, my driver for years, who always in the past shook his head and moaned about how terrible everything was.
It’s the same at the Al Deira hotel, mostly empty, where once aid workers, diplomats, journalists and sophisticated Gazans mixed on the terrace overlooking the Mediterranean. “Everything is safe now. You are welcome,” says Amir at the front desk.
For the first time on a trip to Gaza, I was stopped going the wrong way down a one-way street, by one of the young Hamas volunteers in yellow vests now standing up to drivers in a culture that considers a red light to be a mere suggestion to slow down.
The rubbish still smells, but now it is piled neatly in the streets. Families stroll late at night. Gone is the gunfire that used to punctuate days and nights and often escalated into street battles that left innocents dead on the pavements.
Then you start talking to people – in private.
Young men show you bruised limbs and welts on their feet; every girl wears a hijab head covering and, for the first time, women wear niqab – Saudi-style face coverings that reveal only the eyes. And people whisper.
Welcome to Hamastan.
Ahmed Al-Naba’at, 24, sits in his courtyard in an oversized Barcelona shirt. He looks too young to be the father of the three young children who toddle barefoot round the tiny dirt courtyard.
His feet still hurt. Hamas came for him at 2am.
About 30 armed men, their faces masked but wearing the black uniforms and badges of the Izzedine al-Qassam Brigade, the military wing of Hamas, had surrounded the house. They covered his eyes and took him away in a car.
“They took me somewhere, I don’t know, a room,” Naba’at says. He has high cheekbones and the near-black skin of his Sudanese ancestry. “They were screaming and beating me, punching me, slapping me on the face,” he says. “Then they tied my legs together and started falaka” – a traditional Arabic torture where the soles of the feet are beaten with sticks. “I relaxed.”
He sees the surprise in my face. “I thought they were going to kill me,” he explains.
“When I realised it’s just falaka, I thought, okay, it’s just torture.”
Qassam dumped him near his home, hours later. It took him half an hour to walk what usually takes two minutes. “You were lucky,” interjects his unsympathetic father, who is sitting against a courtyard wall. “Most of the people they beat, they throw them unconscious in the street and they are not found until the morning.”
His crime? Earlier that night at a party for a friend’s wedding, Naba’at had danced and played a song popular in Gaza – an over-romanticised ballad to Samih al-Madhoun, a Fatah commander executed by Hamas during the fighting. Hamas cameramen had filmed as Madhoun was dragged down the street amid spitting crowds, shot in the stomach, beaten and shot some more. It was shown on Hamas television that night.
The overblown ballad of his death – “Your blood is not for free Samih/You left behind an earthquake/We will not forget you Samih” – is such a Gazan hit that many young people have it on their mobile phones. Hamas, predictably, is furious. Three of Al-Naba’at’s friends who had danced at the wedding were also beaten.
For the rest of this brilliant article please click here