palestine association and the independent jewish voices we thank all the groups that came together to make this a year lity so basically right here i just wanted to g people in case you don't have a sense of where gaza is in historic palestine it's on the west coast roughly central and it's forty kilometers long and at its widest point it's only twelve kilometers wide and you can see it's somewhat bottle shaped so that the southern edge will be the widest point and in that small space of land there are one point seven million people two thirds of whom are refugees and the refugees live in squalid and overcrowded and under serviced refugee camps living with the very basic necessities and even in many cases without the basic necessities without water without sewage lines so this first image is a map of the gaza strip with a thick red line and kevin alluded to the buffer zone but just in case you're not aware what that is all spell it out it is a and is a really imposed you know you know laterally imposed no go zone it has expanded from fifty meters to a so called three hundred meter limit but in fact u n reports themselves cite israeli assault on palestinians in border areas as far as two kilometers away the buffer zone even in the three hundred minute three hundred meter limit annex is one third of palestinian farmland and this land is some of gaza's most fertile land it was formerly known as the bread basket of gaza it in it grew grains and all sorts of fruits and vegetables of course all of and citrus and fruit and nut trees and now you'll see in the next photos and images that it's vastly it's not a wasteland because it is still fertile but it's been rendered unused it's been rendered flat and barren almost so basically in the buffer zone the israeli army reserves the right to fire on any person be they palestinian or international and using firepower such as what kevin mentioned  remote controlled machine gun tower which with precision surveillance equipment can target a person to the t v or with the regular military towers in which israeli soldiers are there  beside them or perhaps they're in israeli jeeps which are patrolling the border twenty four seven so in this photo you might notice in the background a very lush and green field and a tree lined up that is of course an israeli side on the palestinian side it's brown and rotted from the bulldozer incursions that happen on a weekly and every two week basis and in this photo you also see three israeli soldiers with their guns drawn this is one of many occasions when we were with farmers on land beyond this so called three hundred meter buffer zone an israeli soldiers opened fire on the farmers coming within meters of the farmers and ourselves there also dirt mounds on to which they jeeps can go on to or also sometimes israeli soldiers get out of the jeeps and scurry up and assume sniper positions and shoot on farmers so the i asked sam we would don bright colors and carry bullhorns and cameras and we would document the israeli soldiers would fire and palestinian farmers we would also call out to the soldiers not that we really expected them to to cease firing but because we were filming them it does have an impact on later when we are sharing the films people getting really getting the full picture when we say things like israeli soldiers stop shooting on palestinian farmers these are civilians there are palestinian farmland you are targeting innocent civilians so the average you tube watcher might actually it would maybe sink in a little bit deeper that my goodness this is a horrific crime i will cause now to show you a brief clip and so it's a mix of about three different instances in which we were with farmers on land all cases beyond five hundred meters and in which the farmers were either trying to harvest or work on their land and came under heavy israeli gunfire so in the first instance we came under heavy fire for about forty minutes the bullets were close enough to hear them with the past and see puffs of dirt at our feet on that last shot you saw of a few who all about five of us walking hands in the air surrounding one farmer that was us escorting farmers by twos and threes and ones off the land because they really gun fire didn't stop even when farmers were trying to retreat and back away from their own farmland so in fact we had to escort them in groups behind and till we got behind a one room shed and even then when we'd escorted all the farmers the israeli army continued to target and try to get try to hit us behind that shed the other scenes in the video you saw  farmers pushing a pickup truck that had stalled so in that case we were on farmland five hundred meters from the border we had been there two hours israeli jeeps had stopped periodically watched us left come back stopped watched us left  hours and it was only when the farmers were pushing the stalled pickup truck full of personally that the israeli start soldiers started firing on them and they hit they hit this young man a seventeen year old farm laborer who was working to earn the equivalent of five dollars a day to contribute to his large and poor family they hit him in the leg so thankfully he did not die but you might have sno the video that as the young men picked him up and carried him they tripped over the cacti and picked him up again and started moving so thankfully first of all he wasn't hit in a major artery and he was able to get to medical care but in many cases actually because ambulances are targeted routinely by the israeli army they are afraid to come too close to the border areas where farmers and other laborers are hit so in many cases farmers if they're even if they're not critically injured they still can bleed out before they reach medical care so actually this indian man i just showed you his cousin was killed three weeks prior shot in the neck by an israeli soldier leaving behind two young children who have no father and whose grandparents are disabled these are some of the farmers we work with and who come under gunfire on a regular basis their elders who have worked there all their lives and perhaps their their grandparents have worked the are farm laborers and there are children helping there for their fathers and mothers and grandparents and they're all subject to israeli gunfire this man is from northern gaza so one day in about it would have been april two thousand and nine his son went missing he's from a very poor bedouin area of northern gaza and they're desperately poor and they have a large family so one day ahmed his son goes missing and after a month nothing after two months nothing so the father starts to worry and he starts asking around and a shepherd who's been working in the northeastern area near the border very close to the border herding the sheep says he thinks he smelled something so the father goes and asks a variety of n g o s if they would go and search for his son's body because he's pretty sure that the son is dead and no one not that i not the red cross not any n g o s will go in search for them so he contacts a group of palestinian volunteers from the north and they contact the ice and we all go together and we comb the land until we find the bodies so i'm just going to show you this clip and i warn you that some of the images in my presentation are graphic and you will see not up close but you will see the son's body as we find him so the father is with us looking for his son and we come to know gunfire as well so you probably hear the bullets they army continued firing on as especially as we found the body and tried to carry it away we did finally reach a point where we could put it on a donkey cart and then transfer it to ambulance and then to the hospital but this just illustrates how even a father trying to retrieve his son's remains to bury the son and have some closure even that is impossible in many cases and even this morning i was reading about israeli officials refusing to hand over the remains of s palestinians in the west bank so this is just another facet of life that palestinians have to endure the humiliation and being treated as if they're not human after the two thousand and eight two thousand and nine israeli war in gaza this young woman went back to her home and which is in southeastern gaza her home was eight hundred meters from the border and when she and her mom and two brothers went back to check out what remained of the home which was nothing she was standing by the remains of the home and was kneecapped by an israeli soldier at the border this farmer about a week after the sation of the two thousand and nine attacks went back to farmland over three hundred metres from the border and he was shot in the back luckily not in the spine but still a serious injury as you as he drove his tractor and this boy was walking along the northwestern coast he actually is father told me he had this habit of going to the the fishing boats are only a kilometer off the coast so the kid got scared and he started running and in his in his fear he started running towards the northern border where an israeli soldier in a military tower then started firing and shot him in the neck and since he was close enough to the border and israelis to enter into gaza's area military jeep entered and a couple of soldiers got out kicked him in the head kicked in the body dragged him by the feet put them in their jeep and took him to israel and finally  some hours later returned him to gaza not having given him medical care so it is a miracle he survived was he was on family farm land five hundred meters from the border in stone northeastern g he was with his family they were checking up their land looking at the trees and plants and they were going to have a picnic which is one of the few things nice things that you can do in gaza but because he was shot and killed by an israeli soldier so this is one of the farmers we worked with quite a bit jobber and his house is four hundred eighty metres from the border and he says he knows this because he actually google map to it so he took the the easternmost edge and so we know to be on the so called but nonetheless his house regularly comes under israeli army incursions he suffered three major incursions the first being may two thousand and eight when the israeli army invaded with jeeps and bulldozers bulldozing the majority of nut trees and is well if you look to the right of the photo you can see kind of some blown out rooms and that was his chicken barn in which there were two thousand birds but most of these birds were killed by the israeli army invasion in the explosives they thr into the barn one year later also in may the army came back bulldoze more land did more damage and then one year later in may two thousand and ten they came back and destroyed the remains of the chicken barn which you can see  again this time to the left of the photo so jobber didn't have any birds in there but he had equipment and he had crops he had just harvested grains and onions and other vegetables that he was going to take to farm it to market i'm sorry that week and when the army came in bulldozed it they plowed everything under the ground and they also destroyed a home nearby so jobber is one of the most resilient people i know this obviously made him break down but you know the palestinian resilience that kevin was alluding to  even though on this day when i visited jobber and his wife and kids and his kids by the way who are traumatized by these different invasions by the end of the visit they were they were smiling and they were offering tea and coffee in their usual selves despite tragedy this woman and her sister lived on land seven hundred meters from the border in central eastern gaza and said that they've never actually had any problems surprisingly with the israeli army and they've lived there all their lives they've never married they were living together on the land tending their seventy or so all of trees which themselves were about seventy years old and one day in march or april two thousand and nine the israeli army invaded and destroyed everything including their home including all of their trees which to them felt like their family their army also destroyed two neighboring homes and the family living in the home you just saw photo of had nowhere else to go as many families do not so they continue to try to live in the rubble of their home this is what normal israeli sweeping operation looks like so this happens every week or two all along gaza's border the army invades with tanks and heavy duty bulldozers and they bulldozed huge swaths of land in this instance we were at jabbers house so we are four hundred eighty meters from the border and we are on the roof and the tanks and bulldozers came within five fifty meters of the home so they  es well beyond the so called three hundred meter limit leaving a huge swath of bulldozed land now on another occasion called me and he said even the army is just bulldoze my land so i went down there with another volunteer and we looked and saw similar huge swaths of land ripping through his crops and his cacti and this man has already lost land on the israeli side and he's already lost land to the buffer zone but this  just the latest of many blows to him this was prior to that bulldozing you can see the red fruits that palestinians eat the fruits of the cock dying another tactic the israeli army uses is to set fire to crops so on another instance farmers called myself and george another activist and said are of our crops are on fire and by the time we got there everything was burned they said they'd seen israeli soldiers throwing in scenary devices on their crops which were either by and they were just about ready to be harvested israeli army has systematically demolished wells and cisterns throughout the border regions i went from north to south and i was documenting this in writing an article on it and saw demolished well in sr and after demolished well and cistern and in a very arid place like gaza it is imperative that palestinians can save their water so they can irrigate their land or for their own drinking purposes but in this case  the whole of the buffer zone has been rendered in the palestinian have been rendered an able to save the water and irrigate their land and i met this couple who were trying to actually irrigate their land by using gallon jugs and making repeated trips in and out of the border region there by exposing themselves more and more and more to israeli gunfire and in the end they could never haul enough water to truly take care of their crops something we never hear about in the corporate media is that there are actually palestinian gandhi's as there have been for decades we always i mean i certainly always hear people say where the palestinian gandhi's but they exist in every day they live and defy the occupation but they also exist as they do in delaying and lean in other places parts of the west bank they exist in gaza and they have been nonviolently demonstrating against israeli policies for years and they also come under heavy israeli gunfire and they include not only men but older men  gunfire on one occasion a young man was at one of these demonstrations and when israelis opened fire he was shot in his pulmonary artery and although he did reach shiva hospital he had lost too much blood by that time and he died so kevin mentioned the policies on the seas as well and that palestinians have the right to fish twenty miles out but in fact the israeli navy due to israeli authority policies basically annex eighty five percent of palestinian fishing waters meaning they're left to six miles or three miles but in the end it's not a big difference because fisher say that the sea shore the floor is sandy in till about seven and a half miles so they're very little fish there but once it past seven and a half miles you have the big schools of fish so palestinians are forced to fish within six or less miles they're also forced to fish in water that is contaminated by sewage and while in that limited area overcrowding one another in their attempts to fish and earn their livelihoods their routinely attacked by the israeli navy which attacks them by heavy duty water cannons which can shatter glass break wood in components and destroy and also a heavy duty machine gun fire so you can see that this boat is studded with machine gun fire on both sides and also you see in the top right hand corner hole where a shell hit the boat so in this case i wasn't with the fishers i was on land and we received a call that a boat in northern gaza was under attack and had been shelled and we saw the boat myself and another activist saw the boat and filmed it as it was towed back to gaza port and it was completely under fire billowing smoke by the time i got back to port and the fire people put it out it was just a shell of itself so the boat is virtually destroyed and so are the lives of the eight people that worked on the boat every day and the people that service of the boat and the people that bought the fish from the boat and there's no way that palestinians can rehabilitate this boat any time soon because fishers are among gaza's most desperately poor they can't afford to buy a new trawler let alone even buy new  nets occupation is a fluid term that can be easily manipulated by the powerful and occupying powers when the occupied is portrayed as by land and the occupier is victim then democracy and justice have to be redefined if the international community cannot stop israel's apartheid wall and the destruction of people on their livelihood then humanity is at stake separation barrier that is meant to choke the palestinian population and drive them from their livelihood compared to the ninety six mile eleven point eight feet high berlin wall that was destroyed in  the israel separation wall extends more than four hundred eighty miles and reaches between six and twenty four feet high it consists of solid concrete in some areas and a fellow the meter complex of trenches six to eight feet deep barbed wires electronic surveillance fences and the track in other areas the wall which swallows more than forty two percent of the west bank is in most areas not all on or near the nineteen sixty seven green line that divides palestine from israel its makes its path as deep as ten miles inside the west bank and in circle cities like  entirely trapping all in its path and separating palestinians from their families whose land and water and livelihoods numerous villages have already been confiscated hundred thousand people separated thirty five thousand meters of irrigation network seized unleavened thousand four hundred of agricultural lands confiscated and one hundred thousand trees destroyed that's hospital is becoming a risky adventure and immediately after its occupation of the west bank and gaza strip in one nine hundred sixty seven israel took control of all water resources and prohibited palestinians from water development and drilling the required infrastructure to date not a single permit issued for agriculture or domestic use in palestinian areas has been granted in addition to its undeclared agenda confiscating more land and forcing people to become refugees for the third time the separate wall aims at isolating more natural water wells by palestinians