For more information about the Olive Harvest Campaign 2008 click here
A Palestinian family home near the settlement of Yizhar has been under constant attacks from its inhabitants. On Friday 5 September settlers came down the mountain, a mere kilometre from the village, to the families’ home and threw stones and painted stars of David on the walls. This has not been the first occasion.
The home has been under constant attack from settlers over the past four years, coming down the mountain, harassing and intimidating the family who have small children and two other Palestinian homes in close proximity. On one occasion settlers fired guns into the air and ground forcing the family on each occasion to lock themselves in their home. When the Israeli army have been contacted about the attacks they have not taken any further action against the perpetrators and the attacks have continued.
The village of Asira al Qibliya is also dependent on its annual olive harvest and farmers attempting to harvest and tend to their trees next to the settlement have been under repeated attacks over the past few years from both settlers and the army. This year they will be accompanied by international solidarity activists with the aim of achieving as full a harvest as possible.
Britain seems reluctant to take a firm stand against the illegal colonisation activities by Jewish settlers
By Abe Hayeem
To view original article, published by the Guardian on the 9th September, click here
When Britain’s prime minister, Gordon Brown, visited Ramallah in mid-July, he told the Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas: “We want to see a freeze on settlements. Settlement expansion has made peace harder to achieve. It erodes trust, it heightens Palestinian suffering, it makes the compromises Israel needs to make for peace more difficult.”
In that case, the decision by the British government to rent space for our new embassy in Tel Aviv from the Africa-Israel Investments company chaired by businessman Lev Leviev sends precisely the wrong message.
Leviev, a Russian-Israeli real estate and diamond billionaire who recently became a UK resident, is also a major settlement builder. Danya Cebus, a subsidiary of Leviev’s Africa-Israel group, has built homes in three West Bank settlements – Mattityahu East, Har Homa, and Ma’ale Adumim.
Additionally, Leviev is a major donor to the Land Redemption Fund (LRF), which is affiliated with the radical fundamentalist Gush Emunim settler movement. The LRF uses highly questionable methods to secure Palestinian land for Jewish settlements in the occupied West Bank, in clear violation of international law and the Fourth Geneva convention.
The settlement of Mattityahu East along with Israel’s wall, which was built mostly inside the occupied West Bank to grab land for settlements, seizes 50% of the village of Bil’in’s land, including olive groves that its residents have relied on for centuries. Leviev’s Zufim settlement, again along with Israel’s Wall, seizes as much as two-thirds of the village of Jayyous’ agricultural land and six wells, effectively annexing one of the West Bank’s most fertile agricultural zones. Since 2002, residents of Bil’in and Jayyous have held more than 250 nonviolent protests, with the support of Israeli and international activists, in an effort to save their lands.
The Israeli army meets the protesters with clubs, teargas, bullets, curfews, arrests and stink sprays.
The settlements where Leviev’s companies have recently built homes trap Palestinians in disconnected enclaves, destroying the possibility of creating a viable Palestinian state. The settlements of Ma’ale Adumim and Har Homa constitute part of an outer ring of settlements that cut off East Jerusalem from the occupied West Bank, and separate its north from its south.
Israel’s facts on the ground, created by companies like Leviev’s, make the two-state solution impossible, resulting in a de facto one-state solution, in which half the population lives under apartheid-like conditions – contradicting Israel’s proclaimed democracy. Having raised this issue in petitions and pressure on Israel’s architects and construction industry, Architects and Planners for Justice in Palestine has protested at Leviev’s Bond Street jewelry boutique, in conjunction with Adalah-NY, which has also carried out a series of protests at Leviev’s Madison Avenue store in New York. These actions respond to a call for a boycott of Leviev’s companies issued by the villages of Jayyous and Bil’in – a call that has also been taken up by US and Israel-based peace groups and the Palestinian Boycott National Committee, which represents 171 Palestinian civil society organisations.
Yet the British government seems to be immune to taking positive action. In late June, after three Israeli settler leaders were invited to the Tel Aviv home of the UK ambassador, Tom Phillips, for the Queen’s birthday, Crispin Blunt MP sent a blistering protest letter to Foreign Office minister Kim Howells. “Entertaining the pioneers of this colonisation movement has certainly given the strong impression that Britain tacitly endorses it or no longer objects to it,” demonstrating a “weakening in the government’s long-held position that settlements were illegal and an obstacle to peace”.
Blunt demanded that British taxpayers’ money should not be “spent entertaining those who violate the Fourth Geneva Conventions and whose very presence has been an obstacle to a vital and much needed peace deal in the Middle East”. Kim Howells responded that the settlers’ presence “was not helpful” and that they would not receive such invitations again.
Rewarding Leviev with the contract for our new embassy shows that Her Majesty’s government is not serious about stopping Israeli settlements. Rather than mouthing admirable but empty platitudes about freezing settlements, for the sake of all Israelis and Palestinians, let us apply serious sanctions to stop Israel expanding illegal settlements and the Wall, and take our business elsewhere.
In order to highlight the impact of the siege and closure of the Gaza Strip on the civilian population, PCHR is publishing a series of “Narratives Under Siege.” These short articles are based on personal testimonies and experiences of life in the Gaza Strip, and we hope they will serve to highlight the restrictions, and the violations, being imposed on the civilians of Gaza. To view all narrative articles click here
Nevin Abu Taima fears she will lose her university scholarship if she cannot reach the US within the next few days.
During the last two days of August, the Egyptian authorities permitted approximately 3,300 people to cross the Gazan border at Rafah into Egypt ‘for humanitarian reasons’.
Those who entered Egypt included Gazan patients, students, and an undisclosed number of Egyptians who had been stranded inside the Gaza Strip. The sight of more than fifty busloads of travelers heading out of Gaza may have given the impression that movement restrictions are finally easing inside the Gaza Strip. But almost 900 other Gazans on board the buses were turned back at the border. Amongst them was twenty year old Nevin Abu Taima from Rafah – who is still desperately trying to return to the US in order to resume her political science degree.
‘My family lives in the Brazil refugee camp, in [the south of] Rafah’ she says. ‘Our house was destroyed by the Israelis in 2005, and we spent the next six months living in a local UNRWA school. We are a big family of eleven children, and some of my brothers and sisters also have families of their own – all of us were living together in one classroom. Can you imagine that?’ Nevin left Gaza whilst her family was still being housed in the classroom. ‘I was only sixteen’ she says. ‘But I had very good grades at school, and I was offered a United World College Scholarship in Italy. I left my home and lived in Trieste [in northern Italy] for two years. I had to study Italian and English at the same time, and after two years I received my International Baccalaureate.’
Whilst she was living in Italy, Nevin traveled to Egypt each summer, to try to see her family in Gaza. ‘I traveled to Rafah on the Egyptian side of the border twice, and waited for almost three months each time, to see if the border would open’ she says. ‘All my family is inside Gaza and I badly wanted to see them. But I never managed to get across the border, and had to return to Italy without seeing them.’
Israel’s closure of the Gaza Strip has separated tens of thousands of Gazans from their immediate families. Individuals who travel outside of Gaza have often not been allowed to return for years, or else remain frightened of re-entering Gaza for fear of being trapped inside the Strip, as many subsequently have been. Many families are therefore forced to rely on photographs, telephones and the Internet to stay in touch with their parents, partners and siblings, though even Internet access is restricted to those who can afford it.
Nevin did not see her parents for three years. After receiving her Baccalaureate she was awarded a scholarship to study political science at St Lawrence University in upstate New York. The four-year scholarship, which covers her living expenses and tuition fees, is worth $50,000 per year. Nevin traveled from Italy to New York, and spent the 2007/8 academic year at St Lawrence, where she also worked part-time to pay for her return flight back to Egypt, determined to try and visit her family again. ‘I flew to Cairo on 9 May this year, went straight to Rafah and just waited for the border to open’ she says.
‘I was sleeping outside under some trees with other Palestinians who were also trying to enter Gaza: there were old people and sick people. There was no-one to help us. We waited for almost two months, and I reached the point where I was knocking on doors asking for food.’
At the beginning of July this year, the Egyptian authorities agreed to re-open the Rafah Crossing for three days for humanitarian cases to enter and leave Gaza. Nevin fought her way through the crowds surging to the border, and finally crossed into Gaza on 3 July.
‘I had been away for three years, and the change was shocking’ she says. ‘I didn’t even recognise the way back to my own house – there had been so much destruction since I left. It was wonderful to go home, but our land had also been bulldozed. I really didn’t expect the situation to be so bad.’ She knew that leaving Gaza would probably be very difficult, so she began making enquiries within a week. She needed to be back in the US at the end of August in order to start her second year at St Lawrence.
When rumours started circulating that Rafah would open for the two days before Ramadan, she went straight to nearby Khan Yunis to wait to board one of the Egypt-bound buses. After two days she was allowed on board and the bus joined the queue at Rafah. ‘My passport was stamped [at Rafah] by the Palestinian officials, and I really thought we would cross’ she says, ‘but after waiting in the bus for four hours, stuck between Gaza and Egypt, the driver was ordered to turn the bus around and drive back to Gaza, because no else could cross. People were crying and screaming all the way back’.
During those two days that Rafah was partially re-opened, approximately 200 Gazan students studying at foreign universities managed to cross into Egypt. However, another two hundred, like Nevin, remain stranded inside Gaza. In addition, up to 1,200 Gazan school leavers are in the process of applying to study at foreign universities, and are also completely dependent on being issued exit permits by Israel, or else managing to cross to Egypt. Rafah Crossing does not have regular opening hours, and even when it is open, there are no guarantees that Gazan civilians can enter Egypt. More than two months after the Egypt brokered Tahdiya between Israel and Gaza came into force, Gazans still do not have the basic human right of freedom of movement.
The bitter irony for Nevin is that St Lawrence has now emailed her, informing her that her scholarship is too expense to maintain in her absence: unless she can manage to somehow travel to the US by Monday, she understands that her scholarship will be either suspended or canceled. She will also have to re-submit all of her documentation in order to re-enter the US, and may have her student visa canceled, leaving her in complete limbo. ‘My university doesn’t understand about life in Gaza’ she says. ‘My family live in a refugee camp, and they can’t afford to send me to university in Gaza. I am now trying to travel via Erez [into Israel] and then from Jordan to the US. But I have very little time left.’
On Saturday August 31 2008 Ibrahim from Ni’lin was stopped in an Israeli checkpoint on his way to work and was prevented from going since his working permission, which makes it possible for him to enter Israel, had been taken away from him. It was his first day at work after 15 days in Israeli prison were he had experienced isolation and daily interrogation. He was accused of leading the boys in their resistance against the building of the apartheid wall in Ni’lin, he could not answer the questions he was asked, hence his working permission was taken away due to lack of co-operation with the Shabaq.
After 15 days in a dark cell with interrogations of up to 4 times a day, the only break from the darkness came as Ibrahim was relieved from Maskubia prison to go to court.
Only the last 5 minutes of the court case was reserved for him to defend himself. He spoke to the judge in Hebrew, said how important the land the apartheid wall steals away from him is to him and his family. He told of how his two little twins ask him why they all of a sudden they cannot go to have picnic in the family’s olive groves and asked the judge what he should reply the next time his children brought up this topic. He told about the importance for his children having this free space, to spend time outside without fear. His family still have the key for their home in Jaffa and he used to bring his children to the sea 10 years ago before Israel took away their freedom of movement and prevented them from going. He told them that the only nature he could offer his children now is the olive groves that are now taken away from them.
The accusations against him was that he was the leader of the young boys who remove barbed-wire from their families’ land and fight against the heavily armed Israeli army by throwing stones at their jeeps when they come into arrest innocent villagers at night.
He had told them already under the first interrogation that he was not a part of the groups of boys and that being 42 and as a member of the Popular Committee in Ni’lin he had no knowledge about the names of these boys.
Ibrahim was arrested in his home at 2am on the 14th of August. The border police took him to the police station in the nearby settlement where they left him outside, handcuffed and blindfolded until 10 a clock next morning. In the 8 hours he was sitting outside the police station the border police ordered him to sit in a stress position with his back bent over. They told him that they would hit him if he stretched his back.
After the 8 hours first in the cool night and the following hot sunny day Ibrahim was taken into a jeep still ordered to sit in the stress position for two hours on bumpy roads to Maskubia prison.
The cell Ibrahim was held in was small and no light ever reached him. He did not know whether it was day or night and when he asked the guards they refused to talk to him or made fun of him. He lost track of time, the interrogation being as monotone as the dark cell, with the same questions asked over and over again. ‘What are the names of the boys? How do you plan with them?’
At one interrogation, 3 interrogators sat on chairs all the way around Ibrahim with two pressing their boots into his head from each side and one pressing his boots into Ibrahim’s face. Under other interrogations the soldiers pinched him under his arms and accused him of buying the influence with the boys with ice cream and water.
Ibrahim did not give any information to the Shabaq, hence they took away his permission to go and work inside Israel. He has subsequently lost his job, the only income of the family of 10, due to false accusations. Accusations based on no evidence, made up to punish and scare a caring father and his entire family.
Ibrahim’s oldest son just started studying engineering at university, while his other children are supposed to start university in the following two years; bright children whose future are put on risk by the occupation that takes away their freedom and even their chances of building up a society based on knowledge. Ibrahim has to borrow money from friends and family to put food on his family’s table, but he is proud of his decision not just to give a random name to escape the hard conditions he knew would follow the arrest.
He will try to borrow money for the rest of his children’s education if he can not find a new job.
He is known as a man with a lot of friends and he does not believe in or accept political party conflicts. Ibrahim believes one of the strongest ways of resisting the occupation is to stand united no matter what political or religious stands the Palestinian people have.
To view original press release published by B’Tselem click here
B’Tselem’s data indicate that security forces have adopted a practice of reckless firing of rubber-coated steel bullets in the West Bank, killing two Palestinians and injuring many more since the beginning of the year.
Photo by B’Tselem
Since the intifada began, 21 Palestinians have been killed by rubber-coated steel bullet fire, a measure that is meant to be non-lethal.The organization has requested Attorney General Menachem Mazuz to stop the illegal firing and prosecute both soldiers and police officers who violate the Open-Fire Regulations and commanders who condone the trigger-happy attitude.
Early this morning, ‘Awwad Sadeq Sror, a mentally disabled father of four from Ni’lin, was severely injured when a soldier fired a cylinder containing three rubber-coated steel bullets at him from short range. B’Tselem’s initial investigation indicates that two bullets penetrated his skull and a third struck him in the chest.
The recent wave of similar cases, which led to B’Tselem’s request, raises the grave suspicion that soldiers and Border Police officers systematically breach the Open-Fire Regulations in their use of rubber-coated bullets, often with the knowledge and approval of officers. The request included a list of 19 cases B’Tselem has investigated in which soldiers and police officers fired rubber-coated bullets from potentially lethal short ranges, although the forces were not in a life-threatening situation. The organization also reported cases in which children were shot and in which security forces fired with the intention of wounding and punishing Palestinians.
B’Tselem knows of only one case in which an indictment has been filed against security forces for breaching the Open-Fire Regulations. The failure to prosecute offenders conveys to soldiers, police officers, and commanders that they will not be held accountable for killing or wounding Palestinians, and encourages a trigger-happy attitude among the forces.
