Human Touch

A Palestinian journalist looks for something beyond the guns, despite growing violence.

*Note: In keeping with our mission, the Hot Zone is putting a human face on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. We're profiling doctors, victims of the violence, journalists and artists -- one from each side. In focusing more on the human picture than the political one, we aim to present a clearer portrayal of the scope of the conflict. 

GAZA -- Sami Al Salem is sleeping like a baby. In fact, he is snoring -- despite the fact there are explosions literally rocking the ground of his apartment building on this night.

The Israeli army is pounding a deserted patch of Gaza with airstrikes in a kind of proportional response to Palestinian militants firing Kassam rockets into

With the exception of trips to London, New York City and Tokyo, Al Salem has spent all 38 years of his life here and can sleep through the nightly rhythms of this conflict with little effort.

But he, like everyone here, is far from untouched by it. One of his brothers was killed in 1987 during the first intifada (Palestinian uprising against Israel). He was shot, Al Salem claims, during a confrontation with Israeli soldiers after spray painting graffiti. He was 17.

Al Salem is the English-language reporter for WAFA, the Palestinian News Agency, which acts as the information arm for the

"I like to do stories with the human touch," he tells me at the WAFA offices in Gaza City while pulling up a selection of his works from the online archives.

He tells me he thinks most reporters focus on the violence in Gaza and not about the other side of life.

"I tell them to write stories about music and art -- it's not just about the guns in everyone's hands," he says.

But while we travel through Gaza, the guns are hard to ignore. Since the victory of Hamas in the recent Palestinian elections, the Al Aqsa Martyrs' Brigades, the armed-militia of the defeated

For two nights in a row they fired rockets into Israel. On the third night they attempted to attack the Israeli checkpoint at the Erez border crossing. Six militants were killed in the violence.

On the day after one of the incidents Al Salem takes me to an area of northern Gaza where a funeral procession for two of the Al Aqsa members is assembling. Everywhere there are Palestinian men in army fatigues, many with black masks over their heads to hide their identities. They carry rocket-propelled grenade launchers, RPK machine guns and AK-47s. Others, mostly young boys, roughhouse in the streets waiting for the procession to begin.

"When they bring the bodies out of the mosque, they will march toward the cemetery," Al Salem says.

But at that moment there's a sound like an explosion. The boys go running in different directions while the militants crouch down, clutching their weapons to their chest while looking for the direction of the attack. Others fire into the air.

Two of them run down the streets shouting and waving their arms high above their heads. The crowd seems to settle.

"It was just a tire exploding," Al Salem tells me. "They thought the Israelis were attacking."

As the crowd regroups, a truck piled high with armed men leads the procession forward as groups of pallbearers carry the bodies of the slain men through the streets. The bodies are wrapped in white linen and draped with the yellow flag of Fatah.

"I tell [reporters] to write stories about music and art -- it's not just about the guns in everyone's hands."— Sami Al Salem

Al Salem and I begin taking photographs of the event: He works against the crowd, making sure there is never more than a few feet between us. He is wary of the looks that I'm getting as a Western journalist in the midst of this event that is intensified not only by the death of the Al Aqsa members but also over recently published Danish cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad.

At one point he grabs my arm and tells me to follow him as the funeral moves down the street in another direction. He ducks down an alleyway and begins to sprint. I follow him, veering left and right down the narrow strip between buildings until we come out into an opening just ahead of the procession again. Al Salem helps me climb up on a telephone box so that I can get better video of the crowds of about 1,000 people as they stream past.

At the cemetery, as the people begin to gather around two separate fresh gravesites, Al Salem stops for a moment, bends down and wipes the dirt off a flat, white stone slat.

"This is the grave of my brother," he says. "The one killed during the intifada." He covers his face for a moment, says a prayer and we move to the gravesites just as the men carrying the bodies arrive at the cemetery.

"Everyone will crowd around now for the last look; everyone wants to say their last goodbye," Al Salem says.

The gunfire has increased as angry-looking men spray rounds into the air. A large ring of people is surrounding one site as I hold my video camera high above my head to capture the images.

One of the bodies is passed over the crowd and the white linen that covers it is now red with blood. While it's placed in the grave, the dead man's mother kneels beside it, supported by people on both sides. She alternates between sobbing and shouting in anger while shaking her fist at the sky.

Al Salem tugs at my arm again. "I think we should go," he says. "There's too much gunfire; people get hurt when the bullets come back down."

We sit and drink a coffee at a nearby café and I ask him to tell me how he views this conflict after living within it for so long.

"Some people see this as a religious struggle," he says. "I don't. I believe it's a nationalist struggle." Al Salem says he doesn't have problems with Jews, but that he has a problem with Israelis. "When they come here to Palestine from other places, that's when I have a problem."

Before the intifada, he used to work as an agricultural laborer in Israel during his breaks from school. "It fascinated me, but also saddened me," he says. "I never had any exposure to anyone in Israeli society; we just did the work and then had to return home again. We were segregated."

Al Salem taught English before he went to work as a journalist for WAFA. At his house there are books both in Arabic and English, including a paperback by Thomas Hardy. He tells me he used to read a lot of literature by Israeli writers to try to understand them better.

"I learned two things from the Israeli writers I read," he says. "There is racism against Palestinians, but also a racism between Israelis -- depending on what part of the world they've come from."

Al Salem says he started to lose hope when he was reading these books so he stopped.

"I want to go to Israel; I want to meet the people," he says. "I want to experience that society and see for myself what it's really like. I see Israeli journalists come to Gaza sometimes and I'm jealous of them. I want to be able to do the same but I can't."

Al Salem rides with me in a taxi to the Erez border crossing as I leave Gaza to go back into Israel. He gets a phone call and after talking to the person on the other end shouts "No!" and tells the driver to turn on the radio.

Two more members of Al Aqsa Martyrs' Brigades have been killed while trying to fire rockets into Israel. After he hears the report he relaxes. I ask him what happened.

"I thought one of my friends had been killed," he says, "but the radio just said it was someone else -- a similar name."

Sami Al Salem says he is getting married soon, later in the month. His new wife will come and live with him in his apartment in northern Gaza.

He says he knows his life will change after he is the married and he's ready for it.

He says he will continue looking for stories with a "human touch" despite the violence that lives around him.

Previously: Israeli Journalist 

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