“Day in the Life of a Palestinian”
*Names changed to protect their identity and families still in Palestine.
Palestinians have experienced hardships throughout history, and this has increased as time goes on. During the First Intifada, or “the uprising,” it got worse for Palestinians. Depending on where you lived in Palestine, you experienced different yet similar struggles, whether it was the West Bank or the stolen Palestinian land. A day in the life of a Palestinian is living every day as if is your last.
The First Intifada started on December 8th, 1987, in Gaza. An Israeli citizen in a vehicle ran over a group of four Palestinians and killed them. This created an uprising among the Palestinians throughout all of Palestine especially in Ramallah. A youth growing up at this time had all aspects of their life affected. Sarah* was a 10th grader in Ramallah who experienced the first Intifada. Schooling became very hard as schools were only open for about a week and closed the rest of the month due to the ongoing violence. During school hours the students would often gather and start protests during the day there were also different types of strikes during the school day. When schools were closed due to the Israeli occupation, Sarah recalled that the older students in her neighborhood would help teach the younger students. There would be an older student who is good in Math, Social Studies, English, Islamic Studies, etc. that would help the younger students understand each subject. They would all gather in someone's house to have these sessions together.
Due to the occupation, typical cleaning crews and city personnel could not conduct their duties of keeping the city clean, so local youth decided to work together and keep their streets clean. There were also groups of youth that led the protests and the strikes. The youth organized for strikes to take place on the 8th of every month during the intifada, and this lasted five years. In those five years, many Palestinians were killed by the Israeli army. Sarah discusses a very personal experience her family faced during this time that really affected her youth. Over 1,000 people were killed by the Israeli Occupation, and two of those people were Sarah’s brother, Rami*, and his best friend Yahya*. They were both killed on July 10th. Zainab*, Yahya’s family friend, recounted the day this happened.
“On July 10, 1989, Yahya and Rami took their last breath. Yahya was 17 years old and Rami was 16 years old when they were murdered by Israeli forces. I remember this like it was yesterday as Rami was my cousin's friend and they lived less than a minute walk from our house. I remember the events of that day so vividly. Yahya was sitting in a coffee shop with his friends when he was faced by Israeli assassins. He ran and they chased him. Yahya tripped and when he tried to get up he was shot in the leg. The assassins then caught up with him and shot him in the head while he was in agony on the ground. They then placed his limp body on top of their car and drove around the city. When Rami heard that his best friend was murdered he and a group of friends, amid tears and heartbreak, ran to the streets of town in protest. The group of young teens was faced with fully armed Israeli soldiers who proceeded to shoot Rami in the neck and back. He later succumbed to his wounds and passed away.” - Zainab
Yahya was the leader of a group in Ramallah and the Israeli army was always looking for him trying to kill him for actively organizing youth to resist the occupation. When Yahya was shot in the back of his neck, the Israelis were celebrating his death. Sarah recalls when Rami was shot and killed, his body was taken by the Israeli army. They refused to give his body to his family for 4-5 days, and on those days they took out his organs.(1) The Israeli army gave the Rami’s family his body at around midnight in the village of Nililn. Sarah added that the reason they gave her family his body back so late was so the young boys of the city would not be awake so they wouldn't have a protest. However, the young boys in the city were acting like they were asleep. When they got his body they had a protest in the middle of the night just to show that every Palestinian that dies will be remembered, and we will always fight for them.
Sarah also discussed how her other brother, Adam*, who was twelve years old at the time, was shot in the back of his thigh while at a protest in Ramallah. Adam could not go to any Ramallah hospitals because there would always be Israeli soldiers there waiting for people with gunshot wounds so that they could arrest them. If they happened to be killed, they would most likely take their corpses and remove their organs. They often would not let their families see them for days and sometimes they would never give the families their bodies. To avoid this, Adam had to be taken to a hospital that was out of the way, in another city, Jerusalem.
Sarah continued to discuss how the intifada further affected her as she graduated high school and moved on to the next phase of her life. In 1990, she had just begun her first year of college and was attending Maqasid Nursing College in Jerusalem, though she was still living in Ramallah. Her commute became impossible as the crossing from Ramallah would randomly close when the Israeli Occupation Forces felt like doing so. She decided to live at her grandfather’s home in Jerusalem on the days she had classes so that she was not kept from getting her education. This meant she had to adapt to living in a new environment and living with a family that was not hers. She also didn't have a car, so she and her Aunt, Khadija*, had to hitchhike so they could get to their college and work. She also added that being in college and away from her family was hard for her as she would be able to see her family usually one week out of a month.
As a part of her studies, she was training at Al Maqasid Hospital. There she had to provide care to patients from two massacres that the Israeli army had inflicted against Palestinian citizens. One out of the two massacres was at Masjid Al Ibrahimi during Fajr prayer, where an Israeli came into the mosque and shot and killed twenty-five Palestinians as they were praying(2). The other massacre she witnessed during her time working at Al Maqasid Hospital was in Masjid Al Aqsa in the year of 1990 on October 8th. Twenty-one Palestinians were shot and killed and hundreds were injured as they were in prayer(3). Aside from the massacres she witnessed, Sarah also had to provide care when Israeli Occupation Forces shot or injured Palestinians regularly. She recalled one time when the corpse of a Palestinian youth was sent to the hospital after being shot by the Israeli Occupation Forces, and a group of Palestinian boys smuggled his body out of the hospital so the Israeli army would not steal his organs and skin. She remembers that the Israeli army was coming into the hospital from the main entrance and the group of boys snuck out from the back and tossed his body over the back hospital wall to another group of boys.
Zayn* was also interviewed about his daily life during the first intifada. He lived in Jerusalem in the village of Al Isawiya in occupied Palestine. He was in college during the first intifada in Switzerland but he returned to Palestine in the midst of the intifada. He and a couple of the guys from his village and the surrounding ones would come together and organize against the Israeli army. Zayn would usually pass out pamphlets with information and tasks for the people in the villages to do. They would have information on them explaining how to boycott Israeli products, how to farm and grow their own crops, and how to raise animals. The pamphlets also explained that Palestinians should boycott Israeli courthouses and go to the smaller ones that the Palestinians had full control over. They would also have information on how to trade with villages that were nearby and their next-door neighbors that lived in their village. Zayn also discussed in his interview how he and a couple of his friends would wake up around 2 AM and would graffiti “فلسطين حرة” (Free Palestine) on the walls of occupied Jerusalem.
In his village of Al Isawiya before the intifada, it would take one Israeli army tank to enter and arrest anyone they wanted to. During the intifada though, it would take over 40 Israeli tanks to arrest one Palestinian, and the tanks would not be able to leave peacefully without their tanks being ruined. Zayn was arrested six times during the first intifada by the Israeli army for suspicion of being a leader of a group that came out of Jerusalem, and he mentioned that his brothers were also arrested during this time. Zayn described his time in Israeli military detention centers as horrific and traumatizing. He added that when escalations went on in any Palestinian city, the prison guards would take their anger out on the prisoners, depriving them of food and increasing their physical assaults on the prisoners. Zayn reported losing 15 dear friends to him just during the first intifada, but still ended his interview by saying, “The first intifada put Palestine back onto the map.”
The stories of Sarah and Zayn are only a small glimpse of what a day in a Palestinian’s life is like. They both vulnerably shared their experiences where they were face to face with death while trying to lead normal lives. Their stories offer perspectives on the Palestinians' determination, and that they persevered no matter what obstacles were put in their way.