Yesterday we bade a sad farewell to the friends we made in Aida Camp and visited Dheisheh Camp, also in Bethlehem. Originally designed for 3,000 people, there are now 15,000 crammed into an area of less than 1 sq km. We were hosted by our friend Hazem at the Shoruq Centre, whose mission is to empower refugees, offering high quality training in dance, music, photography and film, summer camps for children, legal aid and advocacy.
Hazem told us how the Israeli army invade the camp two or three times a week as ‘training exercises’. We saw footage filmed on secret cameras of soldiers pouring into people’s houses in the middle of the night, shouting and shining lights into children’s faces, who were left traumatised for months afterwards, afraid to sleep alone. We also saw footage of distraught young children being arrested and dragged away by soldiers, to be detained sometimes for months, with little access to their parents, before being tried in a military court.
Our young friend Dahlia showed us round the camp, pausing at the numerous pictures on the walls of young men who had been killed by Israeli troops. She knew many of them personally and was able to tell us all their stories.
Dahlia herself is a talented rap artist, a student sponsored by the Sheffield Palestine Women’s Scholarship fund and we had the amazing opportunity to use the well-equipped recording studio at the Shoruq Centre to record our song ‘I Stand With You’ while Dahlia rapped over the top.
And side by side with all the horror and trauma, daily life goes on. People stopped to welcome us, we queued for ‘the best falafels in town’ while groups of young children shouted ‘Hello, what’s your name? Bye, bye’. The delighted smiles on their faces made it hard to realise the trauma they face daily.
Then we said goodbye again and boarded our bus for our unexpectedly eventful journey to Sebastia, where we were met with a warm welcome and as always, delicious food. And so ended a day that had been amazing, exhausting, inspiring and at times deeply upsetting.
