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By Mehul Srivastava
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After months of blockade, many were encouraged to see the ocean.
By Mehul Srivastava
Locked in her Ramallah home for much of this sweltering summer, in poor health for weeks of COVID-19, Faten promised herself that when she recovered, she would pass into the sea.
More than 30 years had passed since the 58-year-old Palestinian grandmother had wandered on a Kuwaiti beach before the first Gulf War forced her to return to the occupied and landlocked West Bank.
Determined to reach the beach, an hour’s drive away but on the other side of the wall separating Israel’s territory, Faten, her four daughters and 10 children illegally crossed the beaches of Jaffa, an Arab suburb of Tel. Aviv, last week.
“It’s amazing, I can’t, I’m near the sea. I’ve never noticed anything like this before,” Faten exclaimed as he approached the boardwalk.
Thousands of Palestinians made similar and illicit trips to Jaffa, Haifa and Acre, arab beach towns in Israel, hiding among their cousins and friends, and sought to escape, exhausted by blockades in the West Bank, where the coronavirus has devastated the economy. and cancelled weddings and festivals that unra up close-knit communities. West Bank citizens were also trapped inside the territory across its border with Jordan, a border also controlled through Israel, which was closed for months by the pandemic.
With Israel’s national blockade looming today, trips to the beach will become more difficult, if not impossible. “Every day I get a hundred calls asking me when the next one will take place,” said an Arab-Israeli woman, who organizes illicits, using her Israeli ID card to pass through checkpoints. “I don’t have enough buses!”
In weeks, coronavirus cases have increased in both Israel and the Palestinian territories. Israel is now the worst country in the world in terms of new infections, in line with the capita, with more than 5,000 new cases reported on Tuesday. On Tuesday, the World Health Organization recorded 788 new cases in Palestinian Cities.
With limited hospital capacity, the Palestinian Authority, which manages the major cities and vages of the West Bank in a complicated partnership with the Israeli army, has relied on extensive closures to prevent the spread of the virus. Some 37,000 Palestinians have been converted and 224 have died. A lock at the moment is also imminent.
Israel has a complex licensing regime for Palestinians, described through human rights teams as exploitative and arbitrary. Apart from those granted for annual devotee holidays, just under 90,000 entry permits are issued to workers, mainly to young men running in structure sites, according to Israel’s Ministry of Defense. Humanitarian permits for medical remedies may be granted and some employers download more expensive permits that allow them to use the airport and freely pass through checkpoints.
In response to questions about the number of Palestinians passing to the beach, the Israeli army said in a statement: “The Israel Defence Forces [IDF] see with wonderful severity the illegal passage to Israeli territory and take steps to oppose it in accordance with the assessment of the armed forces and on the ground in the region. “
Illegal crossings accumulate and minimize according to the force with which the IDF attacks them. This year, for reasons that are not yet clear, they seem to have been one or the other and more common.
Faten, who did not need his full call published, said he had continually asked permission to make a stopover in his long circle of relatives in Israel, but had been denied. “It’s an occupation, ” he said. They are the air, the water, the earth, everything. “
Instead, the circle of relatives paid a bus driving force with East Jerusalem license plates to carry them and a dozen more into a Volvo. They stopped at a hole in the fence and glided, one through one, as the bus’s driving force crossed a checkpoint and found them on the other side.
The first to prevent Ramat Gan Safari, the largest zoo in the Middle East, alongside Israel’s high-tech work complexes and largest diamond exchange. “Wow, just wow, ” whispered one of Faten’s grandchildren, his eyes wide open. I’d noticed a bear, once at Qalqilya Zoo, a city in the West Bank, but none of that.
“It’s not easy, you know, to see all this,” Faten said, referring to gleaming skyscrapers, eight-lane roads and upscale neighborhoods. His parents were expelled from a northern village during the 1948 war that gave rise to Israel. I found myself on the bus wondering, “How did we lose all this land?”»»
But for now, after 30 years, she in the bevery, dizzy with emotion, splashed in the water, dressed in her conservative Friday costume, her grandchildren squealing and dusting each other.
His 16-year-old granddaughter, Batul, was intoxicated to see so much water. “Before that, I’d only noticed one pool,” he says. Nearthrough Israeli women sunbathed in bikinis, smoking weed with their boyfriends, drinking beers. your picnic mats.
“I wish I had come alone, with my friends, to see the nightlife. Maybe I would wear something less traditional,” Batul said, wearing his fashionable but conservative pants and shirt, a shawl wrapped around his hair.
“No borders, no walls, no checkpoints,” he said. Everything is imaginable when you look at the sea. “
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