Photographing Gaza

By Mark Stover

We have come down off the plateau of Jerusalem, through the heavily irrigated Kidron Valley, and out into the flatlands of southwestern Israel. I am riding with Mirvat Nofal, a Palestinian woman from Jerusalem who works as liaison for a Washington, DC-based charity. We are going to the Gaza Strip, where I have volunteered to photograph hospitals, health clinics and physical therapists at work. The photos will be used for fund-raising.

The land outside the window turns from brown to beige as we approach the border, and the heat of the day shimmers off the dry ground. The number of trees is conspicuously declining. So are the tourist buses and vehicles on the coast highways. Tourists do not go to Gaza.

The road through the checkpoint weaves a slalom course of barricades, designed to slow approaching vehicles. I conceal my camera within my jacket. The soldiers see our yellow license plate and wave us through without question.

In Israel, the license plates come in four colors: yellow for Israelis, blue for West Bank Palestinians, white for Gaza Strip Palestinians and black for the military. The blue and white plates carry a Hebrew letter designating which occupied town they come from. Mirvat and her husband are Palestinians, but as Jerusalem residents they have Israeli license plates.

Even with her yellow plates, Mirvat's life is not easy. Her windshield has been broken more than 30 times by stone-throwing Palestinians. The back windows have been blown out by bullets—blasting in one window and out the other—while people were sitting in the back seat.

When she drives in the West Bank, she places a keffiyeh, the checkered Arab headscarf, on her dashboard to alert Palestinians that she is not an Israeli. When she approaches an Israeli checkpoint, she puts it under the seat. The keffiyeh trick is too risky for Gaza, however. We are to leave her car after we cross the border, and ride with Ahmad, a friend of Mirvat's, who has white license plates.

On this spring morning in 1992, the Gaza Strip has been relatively quiet for several days. Still, my apprehension level is high. I feel as though I have descended into an enormous open-air jail, with desert on one side, ocean on the other, and hostile, closed borders at either end.

Beyond the checkpoint is a gas station where Ahmad is waiting in a tiny car with just enough room for his two passengers and a suitcase. I squeeze into the back seat and sit with my knees hunched up while my head barely clears the ceiling.

On the highway, we pass two-wheeled donkey carts bearing the white license plates of the Gaza Strip. The barren landscape gives way to shacks and hovels, alternating with orange groves, the trees laden with fruit. It is jarring to see the green rows of trees in a place ranked by the United Nations in 1991 as the most densely populated place on earth.

Mirvat explains that the abundant Gaza oranges, which have flourished there for generations, are not as dependable a source of income as they seem. Several years ago, the oranges were harvested but the Israelis refused to allow them to be exported. The entire crop spoiled.

The situation is similar with fishing. When the Israelis impose collective punishment on all the fishermen for the crimes of one, fishing is halted for days. Every evening, the Israelis rake the beaches and then check them in the morning to see if there are footprints. They claim it is to see if anyone is smuggling in weapons, but the Palestinians say it is to enforce the ban on fishing during curfews.

We cross a black stagnant river. As a stench fills the car, Mirvat explains: "That is human waste. There is no basic human health care here at all. Nothing."

By the time the low sprawl of Gaza City comes into view, the day has turned gray and overcast. Plain concrete buildings blend into ash-colored sky. Streets are lined with gray, unpainted slab buildings. There are few people in sight, but political graffiti covers many walls. We come upon a fence made of the wrecked shells of cars, coated with gray dust. At a corner, a young man stands holding a very round baby dressed all in pink.

The city has an uncompleted look. Some of these buildings have not been improved since the 1967 war. Although most are single-story homes, some have two or three floors. Their occupants live in the upper stories, in anticipation of the day when they will rent out the ground floors to shops.

Like the West Bank, the Gaza Strip is occupied and ruled by Israelis, but here, for the most part, they are hidden in bunkers. "Have you noticed there are no soldiers?" Mirvat asks. "They are afraid. "

"We are ruling each other!" Ahmad says cheerfully. He is right. The soldiers come out, when they must, in armored personnel carriers. We see no military personnel on the streets throughout the entire day.

Gaza is a dangerous place for Israeli soldiers. This is where the Palestinian uprising, the intifada, started in December 1987. Feelings run very high.

We pass by a military post, a wall of sandbags and concrete topped by barbed wire. At the corners, soldiers in helmets and flak jackets sit in high towers watching.

In addition to the photos, I have volunteered to videotape Palestinian social workers visiting clients in their homes. We have borrowed a video camera from a West Bank rehabilitation clinic, but we need a blank cassette. Ahmad says he knows where we might find one on the far side of town.

Nearing our destination, Ahmad turns into a street filled with cars locked at crazy angles in massive gridlock. The street quickly fills in behind us, and we are trapped. The trouble turns out to be two monstrous holes in the road, each ten feet across and three feet deep.

As Ahmad joins a narrow e-curve of cars snaking its way around the holes, no horns honk. The drivers move through it all calmly. Although there are no soldiers, policemen, traffic signs or road repair, there is a quiet sense of order. As Ahmad said, they "are ruling each other."

At the end of the block is our destination. We walk down a narrow, unlit hallway to a glass door. Fuji, Kodak and Sony signs hang from the ceiling. This shop has seven brands of videocassettes in three different formats, as well as film and batteries.

The next stop is an office of a large charitable organization run by Palestinians. From here we will accompany a social worker on visits to some of her charges. The office is behind a high wall at the end of a broad, desolate avenue. A rising wind scatters loose papers like kites.

Beyond the wall is a courtyard filled with bright pink, purple and red bougainvillea flowers. From inside the building comes the sound of children laughing. In addition to the offices, this building houses a school and a counseling center.

"Where we are going there is a boy who insists that the social worker is his mother," Mirvat says. "She tries to tell him about the other one, but no, he insists." The Palestinian children come to place great trust in their social workers and often become distraught when their visits come to an end.

The house is a decrepit place down an alley that is barely wider than the car. Rooms open like small, damp caves off a tiny courtyard. The boy is inside the main room, propped up on a bed against the wall. He is four years old and both of his legs are in casts. When he spots the social worker, he is at once smiling and laughing. As she talks with him, I photograph his older brother and sister, who have come inside with us. Their expressions are hard and distrustful. Their mother is not at home.

As we leave, we are surrounded by children who have gathered by the doorway. They are shouting in Arabic. As I photograph them, a grim-faced man steps from a doorway to ask if I am an Israeli.

Our next visit is to a young widow and her three children. They live in one of the worst slums of Gaza City. Sewage runs down the narrow dirt lane and collects in puddles. The house itself is just a compound with three rooms and a shed, surrounded by a cement wall. Ducks waddle across the uneven yard. The family tries to keep sheep, but they are frequently stolen. While the social worker is talking with the children, our hostess shares with us her one treasure, a steel bowl filled with green mulberries.

We drop the social worker off at her house, and drive to another office of the charity. Here they manufacture artificial limbs and braces for the many Palestinians suffering from polio or from gunshot wounds. This is also the office of the director of the society, a large man with a regal bearing. His organization has received support from the charity for which I am taking pictures, and he welcomes us warmly.

The director leads us on a tour of his facility, where limbs are being fitted and physical therapy conducted. An elderly man is walking again after years in a wheelchair. He asks to be photographed.

Before we leave, over glasses of fruit juice in his office, the director describes some of the society's other good works. He tells me of Hadil Sarhan, a woman in the Arab Ahli Hospital where we will go next. The society has provided $3,100 for an oxygen extractor, without which she would be unable to breathe.

Arab Ahli Hospital

Arab Ahli Hospital is a compound of several buildings surrounded by a low wall at the end of a dusty street. The place looks like a clinic Albert Schweitzer might have operated a century ago in rural Africa. For Ahmad, a visit to Arab Ahli is a homecoming of sorts. As we walk to the office of the director he says, "At this hospital, I will show you my bed!"

"Your bed?"

"Yes, I was in this hospital for eight months. I was the second casualty in the 1967 war here in Gaza."

"You must have been very young."

"Yes, I was 13." He stops and rolls up his pant leg. His right leg below the knee is a mass of purple scars. "It was a rocket. And so I came here for eight months." He smiles. "It was home to me!"

We have coffee with the director, a bustling woman whose phone rings constantly. She tells me that 80 percent of the services are provided free of charge, and she is always worried about money. With no government to subsidize it, and a clientele that lives for the most part at the poverty level, this hospital, like many others in Gaza and the West Bank, functions mainly on donations.

We begin our tour. On the stairs, a male nurse is carrying a child up from the ground floor. "You see how we have to transport the patients," the director says. "We cannot afford an elevator, and when we have a large man, sometimes it takes many people to lift him upstairs."

On the second floor, Ahmad becomes very excited and tells his story again. The director sighs and says, "Yes, yes, you are our famous patient."

In the intensive care unit we visit Hadil Sarhan, the woman the director had told us about, breathing through her oxygen extractor. Her lungs were severely damaged when the Israelis fired tear gas into her house during a riot. Now she cannot breathe without the oxygen tank, and ultimately may require a heart and lung transplant. She is crying, and the tears run along the green plastic of her oxygen mask. She has just been visited by her children, and she is afraid she will die in here and never return to her home. "The tear gas is the worst," the director says. "We have many, many birth defects here from the tear gas. Her husband has now taken another wife to help raise her children."

We go to visit the office of the social workers we are videotaping. It is in a two-story building set behind a low stone wall. A gutter runs in front of the wall like a moat, and a stone slab serves as a bridge to the doorway. Inside, the air is thick with dust, and the only light comes from a bare bulb that hangs from the ceiling, illuminating little piles of building debris. But, at the top of the stairs, a doorway opens to a room that is modern and clean, with white tile and fluorescent lights. There is a window that runs almost the entire length of one wall and commands a view of brown rooftops that run out of sight. There is no glass in the window and sounds from the street below drift in with the breeze.

I shake hands with 13 social workers, who work in teams. We are going to video four of them at work. From downstairs food is brought in: fish, salad, bread, and potatoes cooked in cinnamon. They give me the largest fish and before I can finish that one they give me two more.

As we eat, Mirvat tries to explain the role of these charitable organizations in Gaza, and how they manage to function in the absence of an organized government. Some are run by families, many of which have managed to retain influence despite 25 years of Israeli occupation. Some of the families even carry out some of the duties of local government.

Mirvat explains how it is often very difficult to bring health care to the people of the occupied territories when the Palestinians have no government of their own, and receive little help from the Israelis. "But still we are doing something," she says. "The Israelis are not."