Staten Island Advance · Staten Island, New York · 20 December 1987

CP-1987-011

‘Nothing to lose’ in camps

Karin Laub, Associated Press, Jabalia

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Transcribed from the clipping

“JABALIA, Occupied Gaza Strip — 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… The camp was set up in 1948. The stone huts built then as temporary shelters have long since turned into permanent housing.

A stagnant, reeking pool surrounded by rusted car wrecks lies at the camp’s center… 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… There is little employment in the Gaza Strip. Most men rise before dawn to travel to Israel to dig ditches, lay bricks or prune trees.

About 60,000 members of the Gaza Strip’s 100,000-strong labor force work in Israel. Abu Sisi, 55, works as a stone cutter in the Israeli coastal city of Ashkelon, earning $19 a day.

His son, Ghazi, 31, who holds a degree in accounting from Cairo University, is a day laborer in Tel Aviv… The camp doctor said the army will not be able to quell the protests with force. ‘They (the camp residents) demonstrate because they have nothing to lose,’ he said.”

Context added by this archive

The Associated Press ran this from Jabalia on 20 December 1987 and it is in the archive twice: here, and in the Courier Post the same day under a different headline. It counts the camp’s water, its doctors and its wages, and it names the household it stands in.

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