Every day Usama Khalid jumps into a car or taxi queuing at an Israeli checkpoint, travels 273m and gets one shekel for the trip. The 11-year-old Palestinian is an officially sanctioned human shield.
For the Israeli troops who squint out of a watchtower above the road, the boy’s presence is taken as proof that a suicide bomber is not at the wheel of the car passing beneath them. Cars with a lone occupant will be immediately fired upon, according to an Israeli warning.
So drivers give boys like Khalid the equivalent of US21c for the short journey. A gang of boys presses round the waiting cars and although Khalid often works 15 hours a day he usually earns between $1,50 and $2,13.
”Older boys often push us away so that they can ride. Sometimes they bully us to hand over our takings,” he said as we drove him to his miserable-looking home of concrete blocks, topped by corrugated iron, where he lives with his parents and six younger siblings in the sand-blown outskirts of Khan Yunis.
As Israel announced a ban on Palestinian travel in most of the West Bank and tanks sealed off part of the Gaza Strip, in retaliation for the Palestinian attacks that killed 13 people in 24 hours, no part of Gaza was as wretched as its southern tip.
When large numbers of Palestinians could still work in Israel, Khan Yunis had fewer people in work there as it was furthest from Israel’s main cities. Now that Israel has stopped most Palestinians coming in, distance still plagues the town.
The closures mean that one in 10 children under the age of five suffers from acute malnutrition, putting Gaza on a par with Nigeria and Chad, according to a poverty and nutrition assessment funded by USAid and published this week.
In 2000 only one in 40 children under five in the West Bank and Gaza was acutely malnourished, the survey, conducted by Johns Hopkins University in the United States and al-Quds University in Jerusalem, found.
The stretch of road where Khalid touts himself as a human shield goes under a new bridge connecting Israel with the beachfront Jewish settlement of Qatif.
It is as if apartheid South Africa had its own Berlin Wall. On one side of the road 3m-high concrete slabs screen the new highway that Israelis alone can use. On the other side the bridge’s approaches are protected by coils of razorwire and a slope of sand that is raked regularly to make suspicious nocturnal footprints easy to detect.
”Usama is our only breadwinner,” says Mirvat Khalid, his mother. She means it literally. ”I had bread and tea for breakfast and bread and a piece of tomato and cucumber in the evening,” he says. The bright-eyed child is as thin as a rake and the extra-white marks on his front teeth are a sign of vitamin deficiency.
”People are giving up meat and fruit,” reports Dr Abdul Ati al-Muzayen, a senior obstetrician at the Nasser hospital in Khan Yunis.
Just less than half of the area’s women of child-bearing age suffer from anaemia caused by deficiencies in diet, according to the nutrition survey. It notes shortages of fish, chickens and dairy produce.
The survey found that due to border closures, half the wholesalers were short of powdered milk.
Nearby Israeli settlements have put the desert under giant hothouses at the expense of fresh water for Khan Yunis. ”We have had no water for three days in parts of the city and when it comes it’s not fit for drinking,” says al-Muzayen.
Khan Yunis has four small United Nations-funded filtration plants where fresh water is available. But getting water from them is hard work.
Other Palestinian doctors who ask not to be named wonder where the money provided to the Palestine Authority for drugs and other medical supplies has ”disappeared”.
Matching the shortage of food and decent water is an abundance of factors causing stress. ”People have a feeling of hopelessness,” says Dr Eyad Zarqut, who heads the crisis intervention team at Gaza’s community mental health programme. ”There is no escape.”
Peaceniks may face treason trial
Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon is trying to stamp out dissent over army actions on the West Bank by ordering an inquiry into whether a peace group committed treason by telling officers they could be charged with war crimes, reports Jonathan Steele.
The radical group, Gush Shalom, sent letters to 15 senior officers advising them that imposing collective punishments or making hostages of civilians violated the Geneva Convention. It said the officers had been identified by their own statements to the media.
Sharon was reportedly enraged by the letters and spent much of a Cabinet meeting on Sunday discussing it.
The attorney general was ordered to see if there were legal grounds for taking action against Gush Shalom. Its letters warn officers that evidence ?has been compiled and put in a file … which is likely to be submitted as evidence in an Israeli court or to an international war crimes tribunal”.
The peace group has also organised petitions in which reservists pledge not to serve in the West Bank or Gaza. — (c) Guardian Newspapers