Palestinian protestor attempts to immolate himself

Monday October 15, 2007 00:30 by Rami Almeghari, Saed Bannoura - IMEMC & Agencies

During a protest Sunday in Gaza City against Israeli travel restrictions, Palestinian Mohammed Jnaid attempted to set himself on fire in protest.  Jnaid's action indicates the growing desperation among Gazans to escape from what has been called 'the largest open-air prison on earth'.

Non-holders of Palestinian ID protest in front of the Palestinian parliament building in Gaza City Sunday / Photo by IMEMC's Iyad Albaba

1.3 million Palestinian residents are squeezed into the Gaza Strip, many of them refugees (or the children of refugees) from inside what is now Israel.  50,000 of these Palestinians lack the Israeli-issued identity cards that could potentially allow them to travel. Even those Palestinians who hold identity cards face extremely difficult conditions -- closed borders, refused permits and Israeli harassment -- when attempting to travel in and out of the Gaza Strip through the Israeli-controlled borders. 

But the 54,000 people who have no identity card no chance at all to even apply for an Israeli permit to travel.  They are imprisoned in Gaza, with no chance of escape. It is from this desperate context that Jnaid came to Sunday's protest, which was initially a peaceful gathering outside the Palestinian Legislative Council building in Gaza City.  He poured gasoline on himself and attempted to set himself on fire in an act of protest.  He was stopped by other protestors.

Self-immolation as an act of protest became known worldwide primarily during the Vietnam war in the 1960s, when dozens of Buddhist monks and nuns set themselves in fire to protest the violent destruction of their country, Vietnam, by American invaders. 

Dozens of non-holders of Palestinian ID protest in Gaza

by Rami Almeghari 

Sun, 14 Oct 2007 17:09:48 

Dozens of non-holders of Palestinian ID protested on Sunday in Gaza against the concerned authorities for the latter’s inability to supply them with their Palestinian ID for more than a decade now.

In a bid of stark protest, one of the protesters was reportedly attempted to commit suicide by setting himself into fire in a Gaza street today. Mohammad Jnaid, a young man, survived death after having been prevented by bystanders.

Jnaid , along with thousands of others, has been unable to leave the Gaza Strip, since he managed to returned to Gaza from the Diaspora, within Palestinian-Israeli arrangements, agreed upon in the 1993’s Oslo accords.

Since 1994, approximately 54.0000 Palestinians have been given permission by Israel to enter Gaza, yet they have been unable to secure their Palestinian ID cards, due to Israel’s intransigence to solve the problem of Palestinian refugees, who fled to neighboring Arab countries in 1967 or 1948.

Mahmoud aL-Khaldi, a 36-year-old returnee, entered Gaza back from the Arab republic of Libya in 1995, yet he has not been given the ID, nor he could leave for where he came from. “ It’s a total paralysis, whether at the internal or at the external levels; I have been living very narrowly in Gaza, where I used to be jobless for many times, and even unable to register my children by my name, except by my wife’s ID. There has been also my permanent concern over my sister, who was forced to stay in Lybia with her Lybian husband” Mahmoud told the IMEMC.

Raja’y Abu Daqqa, head of the national committee for the defense of citizenship rights, criticized the relevant Israeli-Palestinian arrangements, saying that ‘even we accept such measures, we need about 24 years to absorb a total of 54.0000 returnees’.

According to these arrangements, Israel would have to enable 5.000 Palestinians secure their Palestinian ID cards, every six months, Abu Daqqa maintained.

Today’s protests come ahead of the next month’s Washington-sponsored conference on Middle East peace, where concerned parties including the Americans, the Palestinians, the Israelis and some Arab countries, will be discussing an independent Palestinian state living alongside Israel, with a just solution for the problem of Palestinian refugees.

Hundreds of thousands of Palestinians, known as the displaced, fled to neighboring Arab countries following the Arab-Israeli war in June4, 1967, during which Israel occupied the West Bank, East Jerusalem, the Gaza Strip, the Syrian Golan Heights and the Egyptian peninsula of Sinai.

gaza strip | refugees/immigration | news report rami at imemc dot org