Jason Keyser | Associated Press
JERUSALEM – The Israeli army raided the West Bank offices of a foreign pro-Palestinian group yesterday, confiscating computers and documents and arresting an American and an Australian, witnesses and a group spokeswoman said.
Israeli troops also demolished eight Palestinian homes yesterday in the Gaza Strip near the site of an earlier car … Continue reading
by Kristin Ess
Over 1000 children, aged roughly between 8 and 12 years old, gathered today in Manger Square in front of Bethlehem’s Church of the Nativity to demonstrate in support of the Iraqi people. The kids were holding hand-made signs and banners.
Manger Square is not near an Israeli imposed checkpoint, nor is it near an illegal Israeli settlement. It is the center of an Area A Palestinian town under Palestinian Authority control (before Israel’s invasion). According to numerous eye-witnesses, two Israeli jeeps drove up and began throwing sound bombs, firing tear gas at the children, and shooting into the air.
These … Continue reading
by Kristin Ess
Yesterday Israeli soldiers were standing in the middle of baba skak (the main intersection in Bethlehem) pointing guns at school children and screaming at them to go home. All the little kids here wear uniforms to school, and all the kids are just so short in these little dresses and sweaters. A foreigner who lives in Hebron told me he asked Israeli soldiers why they were pointing guns at school girls the other day, preventing them from going to their elementary school. They answered him, “because they’re terrorists.”
A young women named Neda wrote “Midnight Victim” after talking … Continue reading
by Neda, Beit Sahour
It could happen very simply to any girl of us, and without any consideration to any international law or any humanitarian sense, one girl of my classmates was arrested while she was drowning in her innocent dreams, and has not any single political relation, in the middle of the night a tremendous number of Israeli soldiers, tanks and all kinds of weapons swept over Fida’s house.
Fida, whose mother died many years ago and lives with her old father, was arrested in justification that she is planning to a suicide bombing. They searched the house and turned it … Continue reading
by Megan
Ok… here is what happened in Bethlehem.
I went to Jerusalem, to the Damascus Gate, and took a cab to a side route into Bethlehem because the town was under curfew so no one could enter or leave. I hiked up a small rocky hill and to the other side where the cabs waited to take the people who were sneaking back in to their homes. I was met by the trainers of the group I am working for and not long after went to the house where I was staying. We had made signs at the office announcing that … Continue reading
by Kristin Ess
Last night 30 invading Israeli soldiers tore through a house on the edge of a Bethlehem refugee camp. Arriving in 12 heavily armoured jeeps with blue lights flashing at midnight, they took measurements of the house, home to several units of the same extended family, and the house next door.
That house is small, someone’s grandmother’s home. She is sitting in a chair in her leafy garden in front of the house. She is staring to the side, not speaking, not crying. The larger house, which Israeli soldiers will blow up the grandmother’s house in order to get to, … Continue reading
by Kristin Ess
Just over an hour ago Israeli soldiers opened fire on a small group of children in Bethlehem’s Aida Refugee Camp.
The Israeli occupying army entered the camp, as they do most days and nights, in jeeps,with their tanks rumbling on the side roads.
The Israeli soldiers were throwing tear gas into the camp, choking its Palestinian residents who could not escape from their homes because the Israeli military had imposed curfew on them. To leave ones home means arrest or death.
A group of Palestinian children protested the Israeli invasion by throwing stones at the heavily armoured jeeps and tanks. Israeli … Continue reading
Hi Folks,
In the past week since I left, it’s been hard to sit down and put together some thoughts, since new experiences keep happening. Here are a few.
The volunteers for the International Solidarity Movement (ISM) who showed up in Jerusalem last weekend were guided to Beit Sahour, near Bethlehem, for a day of training on Monday. We spent the next day and a half working intensively through Palestinian history, operations of the ISM, principles of non-violence, role-plays, cultural sensitivity, and much more. We met in Bethlehem with a member of the Applied Research Institute of Jerusalem, who shared with us … Continue reading
by Chris and Carl
Our affinity group members, Mike, Ronise (who is deaf) and Jennie went to the Deaf School in Bethlehem. The school serves boys and girls from 6 months to 15 years old. It was a well equipped modern school run by the Catholic Church. The school is currently closed because of the clamp down of the military occupation. The Italian nuns that work there showed our team bullet holes around the school and in a student desk. It makes you wonder what worse target the Israeli army could pick to shoot.
Our group had a meeting to discuss our … Continue reading
by Bob of the New York Solidarity Delegation
It is Friday. I am writing from inside the Deheisha refugee camp. My body is sore – less from the sun or the walking, or the lack of water but from holding this truth that I see and feel and hear.
It smells here. If you were in New York mid-September you remember it smelled pretty foul. On the 2 train, the first time they opened the stations below Brooklyn Bridge, those of us from Brooklyn rode into Manhattan with a nervous silence. Most of us were pretending to read our books, papers, morning … Continue reading
