Saying “I didn’t know” is no excuse anymore

By Reham Alhelsi 

A couple of days ago I read an article by Haitham Sabbah entitled Murder at Huwara Checkpoint. It talks about the killing of a 15 year old Palestinian boy by the Israeli soldiers at the Huwara Checkpoint. What drew my attention to the article was the accompanying photo. It was a painting of a Palestinian boy lying dead with stretched arms, an image that is a companion to many Palestinians. While reading the article my mind was moving faster than my eyes. Unfortunately, it was all so familiar; young people waiting to cross a military checkpoint, a rush of bullets coming without any warning, keeping the rest of the people away, preventing the medical teams from saving lives, waiting till the person lying on the ground bleeds to death and then the real "show" begins. The Israeli soldiers take off the dead Palestinian's clothes, they wash off the pool of blood to remove any traces of their crimes, and then hurry and announce that they have just killed a terrorist who intended to blow himself up. The sad thing is, this scenario has been taking place for decades now and the world still believes these lies and very few dare to question them, despite the existence of witnesses and proof to contradict these lies.

When I was a child we used to spend our summer holidays at my grandparents' house in Dheisheh refugee camp. At the time the rocky hill opposite the camp was uninhabited and there was a police station at its base. During one visit, my youngest uncle told me that boys from the camp used to go to that hill and sit on the rocks there, talk and laugh and drink soft drinks, mainly cola, while watching the camp. He said that one afternoon one of the boys bought himself a cola bottle and went to the hill. He just sat there drinking his cola and watching the camp. All of a sudden, the sound of bullets being fired alarmed the camp residents. The soldiers dragged the boy, still alive, down to the police station and left him lying there on the ground till he bled to death. As my uncle was telling the story I was trying to imagine the boy sitting there on the rocks enjoying the warm sun and drinking his cola. We often used to go to the nearby hills and collect flowers, especially cyclamen, which we called Zuzu. The only place we could find these flowers was the hills surrounding Dheisheh. They grew near rocks and it seemed to us as if they grew out of the rocks. Till today, this is one of my favorite flowers and the last time I visited Palestine I planted some in our garden and they are still there, as strong as the rocks they used to grow from. My uncle went on with his story telling how the boy was just lying there, bleeding to death, and the Israeli soldiers were all surrounding him and preventing anyone from coming closer. I suppose he was very affected by this because he tried imitating what he saw: he said the boy was drawing in long noisy breaths, as if he was hiccupping and kept doing that till his last breath. Since the day I heard my uncle describing how the boy died, the image of him lying on the ground bleeding and that chocking sound my uncle tried to imitate, this image is the first thing that comes to my mind whenever I hear of someone, often it is the youth, being shot at and left lying to bleed to death.

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