\"I did not hear anyone knocking at the door, only the rain and the wind beating on the corrugated iron sheets around my house in the middle of the night, and I heard the sound of a car that stopped in front of my house for a few minutes and left. Curiosity took hold of me to find out about the car, and I was startled to find three children shaking, somewhere between freezing with cold and with fear, sitting in the rain on the doorstep without knocking. When I quickly brought them in I found they were the children of my wife's sister's husband and were starving with hunger, and I learned from them that their father had dumped them in front of my house and left without even letting me know by phone or knocking on my door. Had it not been for chance and for my going out, the children would have died of cold, fear and hunger, and it would have been possible for the dogs to set upon them and tear at their small and sickly flesh,\" said the brother-in-law of the children's father.<\/p>\n
This was one of the stories we came across in the journey to find the origins of the story of the three children whose parents threw them into the street.<\/p>\n
The terrifying trinity
\nThe beginning of the crime: ten years ago the father of the girl, who was no more than sixteen at the time, agreed to marry his daughter to a young man who had not yet reached twenty, without expecting that his daughter would live through torment of various and backward kinds, from beating and confinement to being denied treatment and even food and drink at times.<\/p>\n
Neither she nor he went beyond the primary stage of education, meaning ignorance, added to which was an early marriage and then illness, with a girl coming from a poor family living in one of the villages south of Bethlehem while he lives in Qalandiya camp north of Jerusalem, so that the equation became a terrifying trinity of ignorance, poverty and illness, and the result is three flowers crushed under the wheels of family breakdown, with illness taking hold of them and threatening their lives, which appear limited, and their days may come to an end at any moment.<\/p>\n
The mother is under the weight of suffering, between the children of her heart, the oppression and the grave of her husband and the poverty of her family, while the husband is out of the fields and under the influence of alcohol and other things around the clock, until the children ended up at a rubbish container. So what is the origin of the story?<\/p>\n
The children in the rubbish container as a suitable option for everyone
\nIt began with a statement from the Palestinian police about three children who reached them via a taxi driver, who said: \"A man gave me an address to take the children to and said it was their grandfather's house in this village, and when I reached the house in question the surprise was an attack by the wife's father on the vehicle, threatening to smash it over the children's heads. He stopped their mother from coming out to receive them and asked me to return them to the person who had asked him to deliver them, or to throw them into the street. So I went back to the person's location and could not find him. I called him on his mobile and told him what had happened, and he said to me: 'I am from Ramallah and I am on my way back, and I am not responsible for them and do not want them. Throw them into the street as their grandfather told you.'\" With these words the father ended his call and hung up the phone.<\/p>\n
What the police statement did not say is that the father told the driver, word for word: \"You can throw them in any rubbish container, I do not want them, that is it, throw them at the nearest container.\" But the driver, after a little thought, felt for the children and chose to go to the police.<\/p>\n
The father, the husband: speak without embarrassment
\nIt was not difficult to obtain full information about the husband, because we found he was well known in the area where he lives and there was a consensus that it would be an injustice for the children to live under his care, given his well-known conduct. We found his respectable and concerned relatives in a meeting to discuss the consequences of the children's fate, and we discovered the main reason they had ended up in the street.<\/p>\n
The poor children have a grandfather who lives in the camp, and some swore to us that he leaves at six in the morning to return at twelve at night, broken and barely conscious.<\/p>\n
The grandfather is not like the father, who also returns in that state because of drink and other things; rather the grandfather is worn out by the long hours of work collecting rubbish, since he is a cleaning worker until midday and then moves on to repairing sewers in the city of Ramallah, and all this for the sake of Baraa, 8 years old, Ashjan, 4 years old, and Adam, 5 years old. The three carry beautiful names with beautiful braids but with days that are not beautiful, and a childhood exhausted by illness and worn down by their father's screaming and his physical assaults on them and on their mother.<\/p>\n
When the tent pole falls, the catastrophe becomes an even greater catastrophe
\nOn Saturday the fourteenth of May, the young men in front of Qalandiya camp were rising in anger against the occupation soldiers at the Qalandiya checkpoint on the anniversary of the Nakba, and the grandfather, stricken by the occupation and by his son's behaviour, was crossing the road amid stone-throwing on one side and tear gas on the other, when the wheels of a driver who had lost control because of the gas and the situation caught him, and his torments stopped here and he departed this life, leaving the children prey to his departure, which formed the greatest and most dangerous turning point, and the children lost their source of livelihood, tenderness and care.<\/p>\n
Jamal Lafi, one of the Fatah cadres in Qalandiya, told us: \"We will try to write to the President to have the grandfather recognised as a civilian martyr, in order to provide a source of livelihood for the children.\"<\/p>\n
Even if the President does not approve that, the belief, and God knows best, is that the Lord of all worlds will count him a martyr for the morsel of bread and the struggle he went out for, in addition to the fact that the occupation was also a party to his departure.<\/p>\n
The husband's relatives said that the children's lives are in grave danger, since Ashjan and Adam have thalassaemia, in addition to liver fibrosis and other illnesses, and they are in a critical state of health that may not allow them to live long. We were not able to verify with a medical source their state of health and how serious it is.<\/p>\n
For its part, the police, in our conversation with Captain Mohammed Zamaara, deputy director of family protection at the police, said it had not yet reached the mother, but that the father's identity may be known, and that they are working with all the parties to address the matter and that there is great interest from many quarters. He confirmed that the children do not know their father's name or his female friends, and do not know their family name.<\/p>\n
And at last we reached the father of the wife, the mother
\nAt last we obtained the address of the father of the wife, the mother, who revealed to us that his daughter, the mother of the three children, is officially divorced and that a woman lawyer is following up the case. He revealed that his daughter had tried to commit suicide on more than one occasion because of the practices of the husband, who excelled at torture and at depriving her of the most basic conditions of life, with no food, drink, clothing or even treatment, amid illness and pain, as well as financial blackmail. Her father showed us documents, cheques, promissory notes and papers, that he had previously made her sign for tens of thousands of shekels amid beating and torture.<\/p>\n
We conveyed to him a proposal from the husband's family stating the readiness of the grandmother, the husband's mother, to care for the children on condition that the husband and wife give them up, out of fear of any legal pursuit should anything happen to the children. The grandmother says she is ready to raise them but is afraid of her son and his wife and of future developments.<\/p>\n
The mother's father said: \"I do not know, and the decision is their mother's, but I do not believe there is any mother who would give up her children.\"<\/p>\n
He added that he would go to the police in the morning to follow up the matter.<\/p>\n
The head of the town's municipality received us over a cup of coffee, expressing his readiness to help and to engage with the girl's family on one side and the Qalandiya organisations on the other, to help reach a solution that saves the children from being lost.<\/p>\n
A worrying subject and an unhelpful and futile ending after hours of searching, calling, talking and building bridges, and a story fit only for publication. But is this what we want?<\/p>\n
A midnight phone call may carry a solution
\nWe wanted to have a role beyond telling the story and conveying the truth, and to help. Shortly before midnight we called Mr. Mohammed Al-Shalalda, director of the SOS children's villages, who had been director of the village in Bethlehem. Given our acquaintance with the man and our good relationship, we apologised for the late call, but the man welcomed it warmly once he learned of the matter and said: \"We at the village are ready to help, but we need a request from the mother. We can help through a programme being carried out to assist 2,000 children in the West Bank and the Strip, without removing them from their mother's tenderness, until they can rely on themselves, unless there are specific reports, in which case we receive them into full care at the institution.\"<\/p>\n
At a late hour last night and this morning we finished the journalistic follow-up on this painful story. Is there any body, group or individual who will take up the good deed and complete the rest of the story, closing this wound with a healing, sufficient and restoring balm for those whose hearts have been hurt, whose livers have hardened and whom thalassaemia has torn at, and for whom the rubbish container was an option chosen deliberately by those who are supposed to be the dearest, most beloved and most precious of people, in a time when people have ceased to be people?<\/p>\n
So where are those with a conscience? And where are the fathers who rush to marry off their daughters and deprive them of education? Will the message get through? And the reader has the right to choose the criminal.<\/p>\n
Reproduced from Ma'an News Agency
\nInvestigation by Mohammed Al-Laham, Ramallah<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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