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Atalla Fayoumi walks on crutches across the sunny plain near the Israeli perimeter fence in the Gaza Strip, watching the smoke feathers that begin to rise from a clutch of tires on fire in the distance.
The Palestinian's right leg, aged 18, was amputated after Israeli soldiers shot her here in April, during one of the mass demonstrations against Israel's long blockade of Gaza. holds each week. Yet he has continued to return to the protests – just like thousands of other desperate unemployed who feel that they have nothing left to lose.
Eight months after the start of the protests, it seems that there is no end to what has become a predictable routine that generates dozens of new victims each week. Fayoumi knows that in the next few hours, the crowd will be counted by the thousands. They will burn a lot of tires, the sky will turn black. They will attack the fence with stones and incendiary bombs, Israeli gunfire will sound and Palestinian ambulance sirens will wail all the time.
At the end of the ceremony, at least 80 Palestinians will be wounded and three will be dead.
At sunset, Fayoumi and the others turn abruptly and return home, while the Israelis emerge from their positions and walk the other way.
In a week, as if on wheels, they will be back, ready for anything so that the murderous ritual recommences.
Pressure on Hamas
The Gaza Strip has been the front line of clashes between Palestinians and Israel for generations. But the territory has been on its knees in the past decade through three severe wars with Israel and an air, sea and land blockade.
The 11-year blockade, imposed by Israel and Egypt, aims to weaken Hamas, the militant group that took power in Gaza from the Palestinian Authority, backed by the international community, in 2007. But its impact is felt by all. Raw sewage flows directly onto once-picturesque Mediterranean beaches, tap water is non-potable and electricity is only available for a few hours a day. More than half of the 2 million residents of the Gaza Strip are unemployed and most residents can not leave what has become a mass prison, even for medical reasons.
The blockade and growing anger over the harsh living conditions have put tremendous pressure on Hamas, which is trying to reorient it towards Israel with incessant protests, said Mkhaimar Abusada, associate professor of political science at the university. al-Azhar from Gaza.
"But it's a very slippery slope," Abusada said. "Because they're not going to stop before the siege is lifted – or that there's another war."
It almost happened this month when an Israeli raid in Gaza killed seven Palestinian militants and a senior Israeli army officer. The raid prompted Hamas and other armed groups to fire hundreds of rockets and mortar shells on Israel, unleashing a devastating wave of Israeli air strikes – the most significant fighting since the war in 2014 in this region.
The two sides withdrew with a truce and Hamas restricted protests last Friday – but not enough to prevent 40 Palestinian casualties.
While most Gazans regard the protests as an inevitable response to the siege of Israel, Israel has a completely different point of view.
"We do not see them as demonstrations … we do not see anyone exercising his democratic right to come together and express his opinion," said the spokesman of the army Israeli, Lieutenant Colonel Jonathan Conricus. "We are facing violent attacks along our security fence of an entity, Gaza, which is controlled by a terrorist organization, Hamas."
Since 30 March, Israeli troops – using live ammunition against Palestinians who are mainly armed with stones – have killed more than 170 people and shot dead nearly 6,000 others, many of them children. Thousands of others were injured during demonstrations by tear gas or rubber-coated bullets. On the Israeli side, one soldier was killed by a sniper and six others wounded.
Every Friday there are more.
"What is the point of life?"
It is 14:30 in Malaka, one of five demonstration venues along the border, and several boys are training to fight.
They throw large rocks on a barren field with homemade fronds. One of them, Ahmed al-Burdaini, aged 17, presents a bucket filled with fragments of steel reinforcing bars. He spent the working week picking up the ruins of houses destroyed by Israeli air raids.
"We want to use it against them," he says proudly.
Another boy walks across the border and writes in the journalist's notebook: "This is our land." This is a reference to another demand for protests, according to which Palestinians should be allowed to return to the lands lost during the 1948 war that created the Jewish state. – a request that Israel categorically rejects.
The perimeter fence itself is a few hundred meters away. Israeli soldiers on the other side observe the bunkers built at the top of pyramid-shaped berms along the fence.
The site of the protest is still largely empty, but people are flocking. Among them is Fayoumi, an amputee who threw stones near the fence and who was shot while rushing to help a wounded friend. A few days earlier, speaking in a clinic of Doctors Without Borders, he had sworn to continue to participate in the protests despite his injuries. But why risk that?
"Because I want to die," he says.
He would prefer that the blockade be lifted to leave Gaza to obtain a new prosthetic leg. But if that does not happen, "what's the point of living?"
The sun is falling sharply as some 20 Palestinians drive some tires to the fence and set them on fire. The first shots sounded at 3:14 pm, in the Israeli standard response at the beginning of the demonstrations. An Israeli armored jeep at the edge of the fence fires a volley of tear gas bombs letting white bows drag in the sky at dusk. The protesters are not appeased.
Among the growing crowd, there is an incongruous spectacle: five street vendors pushing dilapidated food carts hauling seeds, nuts and ice-cold slush. One of them is equipped with a cheap wooden speaker, reminiscent of traditional Bedouin music. This gives the protest the atmosphere of a peasant fair.
The 17-year-old salesman Adam Badwan has a simple explanation for coming: "Business is good here, much better than in town."
Hamas security agents in plain clothes appear. A local television crew arrives with bulletproof vests and helmets. Only one ambulance arrives.
After Friday afternoon prayers around 4 pm, Hamas sends huge buses to many mosques to take their supporters to the border. But many others come alone, on foot, by car, motorcycle, bicycle or wheelchair. In one hour, at least 13,000 people are gathered along the border.
Sorting begins
Dr. Khalil Siam stands in a sorting tent about a kilometer from the border when the ambulance sirens start ringing just after 5 pm.
The first to arrive drops a 22-year-old man who was shot in the left leg. The second brings back an 18-year-old man who was hit by a shrapnel, blood flowing from his face.
When the third arrives shortly after, carrying a 31-year-old bullet in the chest, there is shouting and panic – and the most dangerous phase of the protests may have begun. The bullet pierced the man's lung and the man is gently lowered onto a cart as eight doctors and nurses gather around him.
One of the doctors inserts a transparent tube into the man's chest and, in a few seconds, the blood and liquid drip into a blue plastic bowl on the floor.
"Keep breathing! Keep breathing!"
"Every Friday, we wait for injuries, and every Friday, it's always the same," says Siam. "They always come"
Outside, a convoy of vehicles passes. Young men are standing on them, fists in the air, their faces hidden by Guy Fawkes scarves and white masks. This is the "Burning Tire Unit" – and it will soon fill a large part of the border with a wall of fire and smoke leaves.
A few dozen meters away, five men wearing a black and white plaid scarf perform a traditional folk dance with arms crossed for a captivated crowd under a massive tent. Behind them, in the distance, the fence looks like a war zone; the sky is completely black, tires on fire are flaming in the air and gunshots are heard every few minutes.
But no one is looking at the border and few people notice the steady stream of ambulances crisscrossing the adjacent road. Here, vendors sell corn on the cob and peanuts and fathers hold children in balance on their shoulders.
In the skies behind the scene, four kites float in the wind, many with fiery incendiary streaks; such kites burned thousands of acres of Israeli farmland and burned down vehicles.
Colorful balloons also float above the head; Israel says that they found them on the other side of the fence, linked to small homemade bombs.
It is 5.45 pm now, and the air is getting colder. The dancers are soon replaced by a poet, then by a play featuring two actors disguised as Israeli guards pushing a Palestinian prisoner to the ground. At one point, the prisoner told the guard, "Resistance is not terrorism."
The crowd applauds.
Constant clamor
At 6 pm, at the border, all hell breaks loose.
Hundreds of hardened protesters swarm the fence 12 feet high. The wall of smoke allowed some, armed with cutting pliers, to cut the rolls of barbed wire. A man is hanging on top of the fence, shaking him with the weight of his body. Another hangs from the other side and another tries to melt the fence with a burning tire.
The noise is constant here, like a waterfall. Men are hissing. Others scream at the top of their voices.
"Allahu Akbar!" – God is the greatest!
Most throw stones over the fence, throwing their fists in the air, taking selfies, making the V a sign of victory. There are also women, carrying black flags and waving Palestinian flags. A man with a loudspeaker on his back plays Palestinian music to encourage them. Some boys pick up cans of tear gas and send them over the fence with tennis rackets.
Whenever a shot is fired, the crowds hide, like a school of fish running in unison. Sometimes a man falls off and in a few seconds he is surrounded by orange uniformed nurses who bandage him on the spot and rush him onto a stretcher to get to the ambulances waiting for him at the back.
Further away is a vast sea of spectators. One of them, an older man, named Khalil Ayesh, is sitting in a light blue Subaru with his family, as if he had come to the cinema. He was at the same place last week, watching the Israeli drone carefully crisscross the sky like a black spider, dropping tear gas on the crowd from above.
"I bring them every week," said Ayesh about the three children in the back seat – his son and daughter, and his daughter's neighbor, "so that they can understand what this struggle is about. "
After sunset, the crowd dissipates quickly as two black drones turn overhead. At 18:52, a huge explosion one kilometer from the border sends bursts of concrete and debris into the air. Eight minutes later, this is happening again. Later, in a statement, the Israeli army will say that a plane and a tank hit two Hamas watchtowers after one of their soldiers was wounded by a homemade bomb.
It is time to go there.
At the medical tent, it is now dark night and the last victim arrives at 19:24. It's a bleeding head man who has been hit by a tear gas canister.
Siam said his team had treated 25 people this Friday, mainly for gunshot wounds. Half were shot in the leg, the others in the chest, stomach, back and pelvis. A doctor had to take leave when his nephew arrived, hit in the head.
Funeral
Almost every Friday in Gaza, an event is followed by at least one funeral Saturday. This week there are three.
One, for an 11-year-old boy named Shady Abdel-al, is remarkable because he is calm. The funeral processions here are usually accompanied by young men doing something that they usually avoid at the border: shooting Kalashnikov rifles into the sky.
Although the Ministry of Health initially announced that Abdel-al had been hit by Israeli gunfire, the Israeli army claimed that he had been accidentally hit by a rock thrown by the protesters. Two Gaza rights groups say he died after being hit "with a solid object".
At his funeral, the political complexity of Gaza is laid bare. His body was wrapped in a yellow flag with a grenade and an automatic rifle on it; it belongs to Fatah, the party of Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas and a fierce Hamas rival.
Abdel-al's mother, Isma, says that she told the boy not to go, but he boarded a bus to the border organized by Hamas, whose followers were teaching him the Qur'an. .
When the boy's body is transported to the neighborhood, he is surrounded by a sea of yellow flags. But when he reaches the mosque, another huge group of teenagers is waiting with the green flag of Hamas. Hassan Walli, a Fatah official, is with the family while the distraught father stands over his son and kisses him on the forehead.
"We will never break the seat that way," said Walli, shaking his head. "The only way to do that is with Palestinian unity."
Pride and despair
It's Sunday in Gaza and Atalla Fayoumi is sitting on the little bed in his little room and is showing pictures of him during Friday's protest.
He is proud to have been there. Proud to have defended the Palestinian cause. But when asked if having a job would have changed anything, his answer is clear: "I would never have left".
After his injury, Fayoumi received a payment of 200 dollars from Hamas. It was spent a long time ago, he says, in medical bills.
Now he has nothing. No job. Hopeless. And little else to lose.
Next Friday, he says, he will return to the demonstration.
