Feature: In East Jerusalem, Palestinian childhood obscured by violence, poverty

Every day, 11-year-old Mahmud Ali, unlike kids in the western side of East Jerusalem, returns to Shuafat, a walled refugee camp with shoddy infrastructure, after he finishes his school day.

"I wish there were a soccer field where we could play after school," Ali says.

Shuafat is home to more than 60,000 Palestinian refugees, where the Municipality of Jerusalem has not built any sports facilities, playgrounds, parks, gardens, community centers, or even a mall.

Ali says he and his friends have no place to spend their spare time, so they play at a garbage mound that came into being because the municipality doesn't collect the garbage from the neighborhood.

The dumpster is located next to the Separation Wall, a controversial separation barrier Israel has erected around the West Bank and some of East Jerusalem's neighborhoods, citing security reasons, and a few meters away from a military checkpoint, manned with armed Border Police officers.

PREVALENT POVERTY

About 300,200 Palestinians live in the municipal area of Jerusalem, constituting more than a third of the total population.

Poverty is prevalent, with more than 78 percent of the Palestinians and 84 percent of the Palestinian children living below the poverty line, according to official figures by Israel's National Security.

Israel seized Jerusalem's Old City and its surrounding neighborhoods in the 1967 Mideast War, along with the rest of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. It later annexed East Jerusalem and claimed it as part of its "indivisible" capital, a move that has never been recognized by the international community.

Israel didn't allow the Palestinian residents to become Israeli citizens but enabled them to hold a status of "permanent residents" of the country, meaning they cannot vote in the general elections but are entitled to all rights and services that are provided to Israeli citizens.

In reality, however, over the past four decades, the Israeli government has not allocated the necessary resources to develop East Jerusalem, according to a 2015 report by the Association for Civil Rights in Israel.

As a result, there is a severe lack of public services and infrastructure, including in health, education, welfare services, postal services and water and sewage systems.

The report indicates a shortage of approximately 30 kilometers of sewage pipes to meet basic sanitation standards in East Jerusalem.

Poverty rates are about three times higher among Jerusalem's Palestinian population than in the overall Israeli population. Health services are also poor, with only six infant healthcare stations being operated by the Health Ministry in the Palestinian neighborhoods, against 26 stations in the Israeli neighborhoods, three of which are designated also for the Palestinians.

The poor state of services means even trivial errands such as sending a letter can become a formidable task as only eight post offices operate in Palestinian neighborhoods, compared with 40 in Israeli neighborhoods.

People in Palestinian neighborhoods sometimes have to wait in line for up to two hours at the local post offices.

COLLAPSING EDUCATION SYSTEM

"While the development of the Israeli neighborhoods has seen significant progress in the improvement of the living standards, the quality of life in Palestinian communities has steeply deteriorated," Ronit Sela, from the Association for Civil Rights, told Xinhua.

She said that the situation is particularly grave in the neighborhoods behind the Separation Wall, like Shuafat, where the education and welfare systems have "collapsed."

Investment in infrastructure falls short of the natural growth rate of the population. Only 40 percent of Palestinian children are enrolled in municipal schools, because this is the maximum capacity of the available classrooms, according to figures released by the Municipality of Jerusalem.

In 2011, there was a shortage of 1,000 classrooms; in 2015, the number more than doubled, to nearly 2,250, said the Association for Civil Rights report.

Some 36 percent of students do not graduate from high school.

According to the report, in the Jewish education system in West Jerusalem, 41 schools offer special drop-out prevention programs for at-risk youth. Only four similar programs are offered in Palestinian schools in East Jerusalem.

The Israeli Ministry of Education offers a retention program, which includes additional hours, but only under the condition that schools adopt the Israeli curriculum, which is a highly contentious issue of national identity.

Currently, only eight out of 180 educational institutions in East Jerusalem adhere to the Israeli curriculum, and the rest follow a Palestinian one.

The Municipality of Jerusalem acknowledges some "shortages" in the eastern part of the city but says that it is working to correct the situation.

"A year ago, a five-year plan to invest 200 million shekels (about 53 million U.S. dollars) in the construction of playgrounds and classrooms in eastern Jerusalem was approved," Ben Avrahmi, the Municipality's advisor on East Jerusalem, told Xinhua in a written comment.

Avrahami said the budget should allow the construction of at least one playground in every Palestinian neighborhood.

"We are in the midst of coordination procedures with most of East Jerusalem's neighborhoods to locate and prepare land for the construction of playgrounds," he said.

According to Avrahami, 100 new classrooms have been constructed each year since 2009 and that 1,000 more are planned to be constructed in the next five years.

Back in Shuafat, Mahmud Ali said his dream is to help free his homeland, Palestine, from Israeli occupation.

Such statements, frequently heard from amongst Palestinian children, come amidst a seven-month bloody uprising, in which youths, sometimes as young as 12, take major part as leaders of the struggle and also as its victims.

Several attackers went out from Ali's neighborhood to perpetrate attacks against Israelis in the western side of the city. The latest wave of violence has claimed the lives of at least 200 Palestinians and 28 Israelis.

Sela, of the Association for Civil Rights, said that from 2014, at least nine Palestinians under the age of 15 were seriously injured; some lost their eyesight in one eye due to sponge-tipped bullets, which police use to disperse protests in East Jerusalem. One teen, 16-year-old Muhammad Sunqart, was killed by such bullet in September 2014.

Police spokeswoman Luba Samri defended the use of sponge-tipped bullets, saying they are fired only in violent clashes where civilian or police lives are in danger.

"Throwing of firecrackers, Molotov cocktails and stones are significant life threatening situations, which oblige police to act to protect citizens and officers," Samri said. Endit