Thomas Baldwin offers first hand accounts from Gaza and Lebanon from Christian Aid partners in the region.

CHRISTIAN Aid partners have told supporters and church leaders about the plight of Palestinian people, both in and outside Gaza.

Representatives of four organisations visited Scotland in March, also addressing the Scottish Parliament’s Cross Party Group on Palestine. Three of them visited the Church of Scotland offices to meet an ecumenical group representing Scottish churches and other charities.

They arrived shortly after Israel’s attacks on Gaza were resumed following a brief ceasefire.

Dr Hasan Jabareen, General Director of Adalah, which leads legal efforts to protect Palestinian rights in Israel, said that over 1000 people had been killed and injured in Gaza in 48 hours in the new attacks.

Describing conditions in Gaza, he said: “80 per cent have no access to water or electricity. You cannot say ‘I am going home’ because you don’t have a home, you cannot say ‘I am going to work’, you cannot tell your friends ‘let us meet in this or that place’ because these places do not exist. Day and night are not that different: you face attacks night or day.”

Peter Nasir, the General Secretary of East Jerusalem YMCA, which works with Palestinian youth and communities, said that his organisation was helping hundreds of children who were traumatised after being detained by the Israeli authorities. “We’re not like other YMCAs. Our situation does not allow us just to run a gym and pretend that’s enough.

“Our major programme is rehabilitation, specialising in child detention. 150 to 250 children a year are released from Israeli prisons. They’re not criminals – my cousin was put in detention because she was part of a dance group.”

He added: “(Palestinians) are consistently subject to violence. It torments you. We don’t know when we will be arrested. We don’t know when we will be interrogated. My reality is most of what we go through in an everyday basis is not normal.”

The third person at the meeting was Leila El Ali, executive director of Association Najdah, which advocates for the estimated nearly 500,000 Palestinian refugees in Lebanon. These include the Palestinians who were displaced from their land by Israel in 1948 and their descendants, whom Leila described as ‘the invisible and forgotten people… humiliated and discriminated against by the international community which is not willing to implement our right to return’.

She said that most of the refugees were totally dependent on UNRWA, the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine. “We live in 12 official camps and 30 other places. The conditions are terrible and cause a lot of problems including domestic violence.

“You cannot say ‘I am going home’ because you don’t have a home…

“We cannot travel, we cannot meet as Palestinians, we cannot travel to Palestine. We don’t have citizenship, we don’t have any basic rights. We’re not allowed to work and we don’t have freedom of movement.”

The Very Rev Dr Andrew McLellan, former Moderator and convener of the Church of Scotland’s World Mission Council, was among the church representatives at the meeting. He said he listened to the Palestinians’ accounts with ‘a sense of shame at the weakness of western governments and the western church’ that had failed to speak out more on the treatment of Palestinians.