Flora Nicoletta
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Emad Marzuq, 2006 - Photo by Caritas-Gaza

"One night Emad was walking in the neighborhood of Shejayia in Gaza City. While he was speaking on his cell phone a missile was fired at him. His brothers explained me that inside such kind of missile there are some sort of turning knives which cut everything."

"In our Qur'an it is written that everyone of us has two angels on his shoulders. On the right, angel Atid registers all our good actions. On the left, angel Raqib registers all our sins and bad actions. On Judgment Day, angel Esrafil will ask us to stand up in front of God and the books will be read.

We the Palestinian people keep a book like the two angels for all the countries and all the men. We will never close the books till the day will come for their Judgment. They will have to respond to all the crimes and atrocities committed against our nation, since more than a century." ~ Mohammad, Gaza.

When, in June 1967, Israel captured the Gaza Strip, the West Bank including Jerusalem and the Golan Heights, the then Israeli Minister of Defense Moshe Dayan declared it would be an enlighted occupation. And, indeed, since 33 years now the occupied experience day in, day out the enlighted occupation.

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Flora Nicoletta

"Why Pharaoh is so arrogant? Because nobody stops him!" ~ Palestinian saying

"In the occupied and besieged Gaza Strip live 1.5 m people. At least 800 are in jail in Israeli and have been deprived of family visitation for three years. The Israeli navy fire at the fishermen, arrest them, confiscate their equipment. IOF fire at farmers working on their lands close to the "security belt"; at the workers collecting raw construction materials from ruins of destroyed buildings in border areas; at Palestinians and Internationals who peacefully demonstrate at the border against the establishment of a buffer zone. Furthermore, IOF conduct "limited' incursions into the Gaza Strip."

At present in Gaza the flame trees bear enormous balls of orange-red flowers. The frangipani trees perfume the streets with their white flowers which seem porcelain. Other big trees bear clusters of yellow or mauve flowers.

The Gazans love ice cream, are fond of pizza, adore their children, inundate their beaches and meditate about their fate. Many foreigners have always lived and worked in Gaza and they feel very well here. So one wonders: why is it compulsory to murder Palestinians, dispossess them, imprison them, expel them, occupy them, besiege them? Why and why?

There is a question always in our ears. The people ask: "Kif Ghaza?", how is Gaza? how is the situation? From the tone of their voice we understand they are not content. Nobody is content here. The man-made disaster that envelop Gaza and all Palestine has pushed them on the edge of an abyss. Many don't dream anymore of Jerusalem and Haifa. They dream of Norway and a Schengen visa.

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Flora Nicoletta

"We swear by Allah the Great... We swear by Allah the Great... We swear by Allah the Great / We commit ourselves to be faithful to our religion, to our home and to our holy places / We pledge to maintain our right to return to all our cities and villages, sparing no efforts to achieve this aim, and letting no one relinquish, renounce or negotiate it / We do pledge to Allah, our People and our Nation to do that through our life." Pledge of Return, the High Committee for the Commemoration of the 62nd Anniversary of the Nakba.

In Et-Tuffah neighborhood in Gaza City there is a cemetery with a number of graves. Here are buried Arab fighters who fall during the 1948 Zionist conquest of historic Palestine, called by the Palestinian the Nakba. Following the 1967 war, when the Israeli forces also captured the West Bank and Gaza Strip they entirely covered all the graves with casts cement... and they remain so till the present day.

The word Nakba and the word Awda are the first two words of the Palestinian dictionary. Nakba and Return are Siamese words.

Nakba means catastrophe, disaster. Every 15 May the Palestinians commemorate the Nakba, that is the eradication from historic Palestine of most of its original inhabitants because "Palestine was given by God to the chosen people." But as said once Mustafa En-Natche, a former mayor of Hebron, nobody has never seen the receipt. Awda means return, return to their former houses, lands, shops, factories, mosques, churches, in brief to their normal lives which were shattered in 1948.

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