MONITORING THE DRONES of deaths, injuries and properties destroyed, as well as anything that can increase the understanding of each attack, including the type of weapon used. Their initial information is collected by fieldworkers who go to the scene of an attack, assess the evidence and talk to eyewitnesses and people affected. Established in the late nineties, Al Mezan has been recording drone strikes for as long as they have happened in the Strip. This is not always a straightforward task.
In the Gaza Strip there is no escape from Israel's drones. Nicknamed 'zenana' by Palestinians because of their noisy buzzing, the drones (remote control aircraft) are omnipresent. Sometimes they are there to carry out an extra judicial killing and sometimes they are there for surveillance. If you are on the ground you do not know which and you have no choice but to try to ignore them. Since Israel's partial withdrawal in 2005, there is not a permanent presence of Israeli soldiers in the majority of the Gaza Strip (although soldiers are a presence in the 'buffer zone', off Gaza's coasts and during frequent invasions), but there is no doubt that the occupation is still brutally enforced - only now a lot of of it is done remotely from the skies.
According to the UK research group Drone Wars UK, the Israeli military has never, despite the mounting evidence to the contrary, admitted publicly that it is using armed drones in Gaza. 2 According to Yamin Al Madhoun, one of Al Mezan's fieldworkers, people were confused when evidence of drone strikes first started to be noticed around the year 2000. It was a new kind of warfare which changed everything: “When they started to use the drones we did not know what drones were”, Yamin said. “We did not understand. Explosions just seemed to come out of nowhere. It took us about a year to start learning about drones”.
During our visit to Gaza, Corporate Watch talked to the Al Mezan Centre for Human Rights about the changing impact of drones on the people of Gaza. Al Mezan is a monitoring organisation working for the protection of human rights in the Gaza Strip. As such, they keep extensive records detailing all violations, with separate databases for external and internal abuses. Their files record the number
A selection of the weaponry fired on Gaza over the years collected by Al Mezan Centre for Human Rights. Photo taken by Corporate Watch - November 201 3.
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