(no subject)
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ICP 806 Galilee. The Parod immigrant transit camp.
In 1948 the British evacuated Palestine, and Israel was proclaimed an independent state, recognized as the Jewish homeland. The Jews, many of whom were survivors of the Holocaust, settled on land that was claimed by the Arabs.
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JORDAN. 1967. An old blind woman and a woman with child in the Jericho Arab refugee camp during the Six Day War.
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ISRAEL. Jerusalem. 1967. No Man's Land between Israel and Jordan, during the Six Day War.
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ISRAEL. Shati Refugee Camp, Gaza. 1994. Man shot and killed during peace celebrations. (Then Palestine, page 26-27) ©Larry Towell/Magnum Photos
PLO activists began to appear in the Gaza in spite of the continued Israeli military presence. Israeli soldiers ignored them. Palestinian prisoners were released from the central jail. Israeli soldiers began to evacuate Palestinian towns and refugee camps after the Cairo accords were signed.
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ISRAEL/PALESTINE. Rafat village, West Bank. 1996. Yahiya Ayyash Jr., born four days before his father's assassination in January 1996 by Israeli agents, is held by his mother (Hiam, age: 25) above the rubble of their home destroyed by the Israeli security forces. Ayyash Sr. had been Israel's most wanted man.
In 1996, four Palestinian youths blew themselves up on two Jerusalem buses, at a hitchhiking post, and on a Tel Aviv street killing 59 Israelis and wounding scores. The "suicide bombers" were partly responsible for the Israeli election of the conservative Likud government and the toppling of the pro-peace Labour government of Shimon Peres later that year. Contrary to popular media coverage of "proud parents" of the bombers, the photographer found them to be deeply opposed to the actions of their children. These pictures are an intimate look at the Palestinian families of the Hamas and Islamic Jihad suicide bombers, of those who made the bombs, and of those who recruited the bombers.
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PALESTINE.ISRAEL. Ramallah, West Bank. 2001. Protester with gas mask in cloud of tear gas.
Larry Towell has frozen violence, the violence of the catapults and the Molotov cocktails and the Kalashnikovs, and of regular life for the little girls who pick their way among the rocks that litter the street when the protesters and soldiers move on. It was an interest in human rights that led Towell to photograph "the culture of resistance." He recorded the effects of the Contra war in Nicaragua in the 1980s, the war in El Salvador, the mothers of "The Disappeared" in Guatemala, the rebellion in the Chiapas region of Mexico. In the Israeli-Palestinian conflict he finds another twist on a theme that intrigues him: Landlessness, and what happens to a people when they lose their land. He first went to the region while the Intifada still raged, in January, 1993, then returned two days after the Oslo Accord was signed in Washington on September 13, drawn by the sense that history was happening.
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WEST BANK. Hebron. April 23, 2002. The body of a suspected informer for Israel hangs from a utility pole. Three suspected informers, all Palestinians, were shot in retaliation for an Israeli helicopter missile attack which killed Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigades Hebron Commander Marwan Zalloum and his bodyguard.
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GAZA STRIP. Shifa Hospital, Gaza City. February 2003. A white sheet wraps the body of a Palestinian that lays in front of two coolers in the morgue. The man was killed during on of the most violent months of the intifada in the Gaza. In February, the Israeli army was sent into the Gaza Strip almost every night with tanks and helicopters. In the last two weeks of February, more than 40 Palestinians were killed during the nighttime incursions.
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ISRAEL. Shati refugee camp, Gaza. 1993. Mother of Ahmed Salem Deep ELHAPAT with photo of son, 21-year-old PLO guerilla killed by Israeli agents near the Egyptian border in May 1993. (Then Palestine, cover & page 49) ©Larry Towell/Magnum Photos
May 1993 proved to be the bloodiest month of the intifada since it began in December 1987. Military and economic tensions increased in the Gaza Strip. Due to border closures with Israel, unemployment rose from 40 to 70 percent. House demolitions and collective punishment continued as resistance to the occupation increased in the latter days of the war.