RAFAH (Gaza Strip): Playing on a pile of concrete rubble here, one of the most wrecked towns, Khalil proudly estimates he has thrown 30 or 40 “grenades” at Israeli soldiers in nearby posts and the tanks which tear down houses looking for gunmen.
But ask the shy 13-year-old how many soldiers he and his friends have hurt, or how many tanks they have disabled, with their grenades, and he shifts on his worn running shoes and shakes his head: “They make colours sometimes.”
Israel’s army claims its troops and posts have been hit with nearly 700 grenades since the start of the Palestinian intifada, against the military occupation in the Gaza Strip and West Bank which erupted last September.
However, many people on the streets of this city, where only a few kebab restaurants still serve customers and donkey carts fumble between cars, also complain that most of the time the ”grenades” which can provoke the Israelis are pipes their children have been filling with fireworks.
“The kids bring me these pipes, they find them on the street or wherever, and I cut them into pieces,” said Omar, the burly owner of a metal shop littered with scrap on the main street here and who helps the boys make them. “We fill them with the powder from fireworks and seal off the tops with a little hole in one end. You light it up with a cigarette and when you throw it one of the tops flies in the air,” he said. “It’s really a kid’s game, and you know they make a lot of noise but they can’t hurt anybody. It drives me crazy when the Israelis call them grenades,” he said.
Khalil and his friends sit on crumbled concrete overlooking the nearby Saladin gate into Egypt and say they know it is a dangerous game, but that they want to join the “resistance” against Israel. Many are quick to pull up their pants to show off bullet wounds to their legs.
One of the black or brownish metal tubes costs about $2, Khalil says. “Me and my friends save up our allowances and then we all go to the metal shop after a couple of weeks we see how much we’ve collected. Then we go to the metal shop and we sit there when he makes them,” he said.
Khalil’s brother, Ehab, a slight 20-year-old university student dressed in a plaid shirt, admits he also sometimes throws the homemade grenades. He said the kids were doing it because ”nothing changes here.”
“The kids here just want go to fight the Israelis. The Israelis consider it a weapon, but it’s not a weapon whatsoever,” he said.
“They do it because they don’t sleep at night. When the kids go to school in the morning they’re sleepy because they’re up crying all night. Our kids wet their beds, that didn’t happen before,” said Ehab.
He also laughs when he says Rafah is starting to get a reputation for its homemade grenades. “When my friends in Gaza hear we throw grenades (in the press) they say “what are you doing in Rafah?” It’s fireworks.”
The Israeli army simply says the boys should not be taking on tanks. “We don’t mean to hurt kids. The only thing I can say is that they should not let their children throw those explosive devices at us,” the spokesman said.—AFP
