Gaza refugee camp now center of resistance to Israel

Associated Press, Jabalia

Transcribed from the clipping

“JABALIA, Occupied Gaza Strip (AP) — This crowded refugee camp, the largest and most densely populated in the Gaza Strip, has become a center of resistance in the last two weeks of anti-Israeli rioting and bloodshed. Residents say they have nothing to lose by throwing stones at Israeli soldiers armed with submachine guns. Many here have lived in squalor for decades. ‘When my sons go outside to demonstrate, I’m afraid for them, but I’m not going to stop them,’ said Neama Khalil Abu Sisi, 55, whose son, Hatem, 17, was killed in a clash with soldiers the previous week… ‘Camp residents compose the bulk of the resistance (to the Israeli occupation), and the Jabalia camp is more militant than any other place,’ said Faez Abu Rahme, a prominent Palestinian lawyer. There are two main reasons for the rising tensions in Jabalia, which lies two miles north of Gaza City and is home to 55,000 refugees. Jabalia is the most densely populated of the eight refugee camps in the Gaza Strip, and it is the only one to have an Israeli army base within its boundaries. The camp was set up in 1948. The stone huts built then as temporary shelters have long since turned into permanent housing… A camp doctor, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said residents haul drinking water from three wells contaminated by sewage, and that there was an epidemic of parasitic diseases, including intestinal worms. Four doctors see 400 to 500 patients each day, he said. In the home of Mohammed Yousef Abu Sisi, father of the youth newly dead in violence, 13 people share four rooms. Mrs. Abu Sisi and her two daughters-in-law must wait their turn to cook for their families on a single-flame stove.”

Context added by this archive

Thirteen days into the first intifada, and the Associated Press sent somebody to the camp and printed what they found: three wells contaminated by sewage, four doctors seeing four to five hundred patients a day, thirteen people in four rooms, one stove. The dateline says Occupied Gaza Strip, which most American papers were not setting at the time. Four Palestinians are named in it — a mother, her dead son, a lawyer and a father — and the mother is the first voice in the story. Three American papers ran this dispatch on 20 December 1987 under three headlines. This one calls the camp a center of resistance to Israel; the Press & Sun-Bulletin called it defiance running high (CP-1987-006); the Staten Island Advance took the residents’ own words, ‘Nothing to lose’ in camps (CP-1987-011). The copy underneath is the same in all three, and what it reports is that the water was bad.

Cite this item

"Gaza refugee camp now center of resistance to Israel," Peninsula Times Tribune, 20 December 1987. Covering Palestine archive, CP-1987-005. https://coveringpalestine.org/archive/cp-1987-005