Holy Land: Eyewitness report from Aida refugee camp

Anas Abu Srour, executive director of Aida Youth Centre

During their parish pilgrimage to the Holy Land last week, Fleur Brennan and her husband Colin from Holy Apostles, Pimlico, central London, visited Aida refugee camp, just outside Bethlehem. They brought some children's clothes, coloured pencils and art materials for the refugees.

Fleur Brennan writes: The torrential rain and thunder driving our sodden band of pilgrims back from Jerusalem to Bethlehem on Wednesday afternoon gave us a welcome opportunity to visit the Aida refugee camp there, tracing the footsteps of Pope Francis in 2014, where we were welcomed at the Aida Youth Centre. As the rain let up, trying to keep our feet dry, we picked our way round the remaining puddles through the entrance, under the iconic arch surmounted by a huge replica key, representing the individual keys to their homes all the families took during the expulsion from their houses in 1948, when they were promised they would shortly return. Now it is the grandparents who guard their families' keys, clinging to hope that one day at least their grandchildren will be able to return.

First established in 1950, the camp in the northern part of Bethlehem, is crammed into an area of 0.07 square kilometres, surrounded on two sides by the separation wall. Initially, the refugees, both Muslim and Christian, lived in 94 green fabric tents but in 1956, UNRWA (United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestinian Refugees) replaced the tents with single-storey cinder block housing units, still standing today as foundations for new floors built above by each new generation of families. Overcrowding is chronic, with 5,500 men, women and children jam-packed into the narrow streets, with their fragile infrastructure of limited water supplies, unstable electricity and unreliable sewage system.

As afternoon turned to evening, it would have been easy to feel intimidated, but in fact we were heading for a heart-warming welcome at Aida Youth Centre, where the Executive Director, Anas Abu Srour, was eager to show how their work inspires hope and resilience in the beleaguered children and young people of the camp. Proud and resourceful, they are incredibly plucky and creative, producing handiwork, crafts, pictures, story-telling and cartoon creations.

Anas is working tirelessly to resist non-violently the systematic intimidation meted out by Israeli forces. Of all the refugee camps in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, Aida is the most blighted by Israeli violence and military incursions. The United Nations report an increasing number of injuries as a result of excessive force by the Israeli military. Counsellors in the two UNRWA schools in and near Aida work continuously to mitigate the stress and trauma the children experience, and UNWRA partner organisations, like the Aida Youth Centre put on activities providing recreation and mental and emotional support to the youngsters. They are struggling against massive odds. Just days before our visit, the residents had been subjected to another of the regular onslaughts of their streets being sprayed with skunk water, otherwise known as liquid sewage or sh*t spray.

Israeli forces regularly use tear gas here as part of their campaign of intimidation. The Human Rights Centre of the University of California at Berkeley reported in 2016 that Israel's security forces carried out "widespread, frequent and indiscriminate" use of tear gas against Palestinian refugees in Aida refugee camp. The report surveyed 236 residents of Aida, all exposed to tear gas in strengths which can kill or maim, 84 percent of whom were exposed while in their houses. Recently, a soldier admitted that they used the camp for training exercises in tactics of repression. Each morning, men wake at 2am to join other West Bank workers employed in cheap labour by Israel, who have to queue for many hours to pass through the checkpoints of the separation wall, and don't arrive home until 5pm.

"It is humiliating," said Anas. "Every day, workers have to endure this tortuous wait to get through the separation wall, and labour at menial jobs on construction sites or cleaning, just to feed their families."

One of the Centre's workers, Saed Zboan, showed us an inspiring but poignant set of drawings by the kids in the centre.

"This is absolutely their own creation, because they wanted to tell this story as a cartoon," Saed told us. "Here we are next door to an Israeli military training centre, which often uses the camp to target us and train the soldiers in aggressive tactics in their campaign of ethnic cleansing to get rid of us. One day, children were playing near the gate of the training centre, which was open. As they were riding their bikes around, the soldiers drove through, so the children were scared and started running away and the military took their bicycles and drove off."

Ignoring the danger, the children ran back to the gate which was now closed, and started rattling and banging on it.

"This was insane," said Saed. "They knew they could be beaten and killed". The commanding officer came out and demanded what they thought they were up to, and when the kids said "Your soldiers have stolen our bikes," the officer said: "Our soldiers don't steal." The children all shouted for him to go and look for the bikes to prove they were telling the truth. They did a stand-in, as opposed to a sit-in, and refused to go away until the commander went to search for their bikes. Shortly, he appeared with the stolen bikes and returned them. This was a rare example of non-violent resistance having an immediate and tangible result. The cartoon was the idea of one of the boys who got his bike back in this courageous way and is a lasting record of their success.

Having spent the afternoon listening to these bitter-sweet stories, we gave gifts of clothes and art materials to the Centre, before making our way out of the camp, stopping to photograph one four storey home, with geraniums on the balconies, possibly housing four generations, with a smart new car outside, and down the road a burnt-out car and graffiti over a map of the world, declaring "WE MUST RAPIDLY BEGIN TO SHIFT FROM A THINGS ORIENTED SOCIETY TO A PERSON ORIENTED SOCIETY" signed MLK. As we headed for the famous arch and key, we met a couple on their way to break their fast in their iftar, who greeted us with "Salaam Aleikum", to which we gave the traditional reply, "Aleikum Salaam", after a truly inspiring, enriching and heart-rending visit.

Footnote: The total number of Palestinian children killed by Israeli forces in the West Bank so far in 2023 is 17, compared with eight in the equivalent period of 2022. During the first quarter of 2023, the number of Palestinians killed by Israeli forces (84) was almost four times higher than during the same period in 2022 (22), according to the United Nations Protection of Civilians Report. (OCHA)

LINKS

OCHA opt: www.ochaopt.org/
Aida Youth Center: www.aidacenter.org/
UNRW Aida Camp: www.unrwa.org/where-we-work/west-bank/aida-camp