BALATA REFUGEE CAMP (West Bank): Hosni Abu Layl, one of the most recent fatalities of the Israeli-Palestinian confrontation, was no suicide bomber. But he risked his life for a cause.
Every week, Abu Layl, 19, would infiltrate Israel, not to mount an attack, just in the hopes of finding some odd jobs so that he could bring money back to his 10 brothers and two sisters over the weekend. With his father not healthy enough to work, the burden of supporting the family had fallen on him and his brother Mohammed, 22.
“We were afraid, but we needed the money to live,” said Mohammed. Last Saturday night, Abu Layl began the six-hour night-time journey through back roads of the West Bank that normally landed him in the Tel Aviv area in time to look for work. Three other cars full of workers just as desperate as he were in the convoy that came up against a barricade of stones near Silat a-Zahir village in the West Bank at 1:30 a.m.
As witnesses tell it, several people got out to remove the stones, but soldiers nearby opened fire with automatic weapons. Abu Layl, sitting inside one of the taxis, was hit in the chest, arm and neck. Another worker, a gardener named Khalil Sarafandi, 50, was also killed and 10 other Palestinians were injured.
Abu Layl’s secret life beneath the margins as an illegal worker in Israel, as related by his brother, is nearly as disturbing as his death: a tale of constant fear, exploitation, of sleeping under trees. But it is a daily reality for about 1,000 Palestinians driven to endure it in order to have some work.
Three years ago, Mohammed and Abu Layl started going to Israel to get work. Even after the outbreak of the Palestinian uprising a year ago, when traffic on paved roads was curbed by the army and Israeli troops were allowed by their officers to shoot with much greater freedom, the two continued to make the trip. Most illegal workers opted out of the journey at that point.
“People like Hosni Abu Layl are the ones left with no choices. They’re willing to risk it because they have nothing to lose,” said Lucy Renee of the Democracy and Workers Rights Centre in Ramallah. —Dawn/The InterPress News Service.