7th July 2012 | International Solidarity Movement, West Bank
The Israeli Occupation Forces (IOF) violently suppressed the weekly demonstration at Kafr Qaddum on Friday the 6th of July, injuring one man, and arresting another. Majid Joomaa, 40 years old, was arrested as the IOF stormed the village. Joomaa, who is a father of ten, was unable to flee from the advancing soldiers due to a prior injury in his leg. Another man suffered from overexposure to tear gas, and was carried to an ambulance after he collapsed.
The injured Palestinian man being carried to safety by another peaceful protestor.
Next week marks the one year anniversary of the popular demonstrations against the Israeli Occupation in Kafr Qaddum. In 2003 the IOF closed the main road that connected the small village with Nablus, which lies only 13km away. Palestinians are forced to drive around the illegal settlement of Kedumim, which was erected in 1975, extending their journey by 22 kilometers instead of the usual 10 to reach Nablus.
Marshall Pinkerton is a volunteer with the International Solidarity Movement (name has been changed).
The number of Palestinian children in Israeli detention has increased 40 percent since last September. (Ryan Rodrick Beiler)
A new report funded and supported by the UK government that accuses Israel of violating international law with its treatment of Palestinian child detainees was launched in London by a high-profile group of human rights lawyers on Tuesday.
But there is pessimism in some quarters that the report’s recommendations will be implemented. The document has been criticized as “toothless” by a prominent Palestinian human rights activist.
“Children in Military Custody” was funded and backed by the UK Foreign and Commonwealth Office, and written by an ad hoc group including a former attorney general, a former court of appeal judge and several prominent attorneys known as QCs. The delegation visited Palestine in September and met with Palestinian, Israeli and international nongovernmental organizations, British diplomats and a wide range of Israeli government and military officials.
The report details the military law Israel applies to all Palestinians in the occupied West Bank, including children, and how it differs from the civilian law applied to Israeli settlers who live in the same territory. It states there it was “uncontested [by Israel] that there are major differentials between the law governing the treatment of Palestinian children and the law governing treatment of Israeli children.”
Unequal treatment of children
At the heart of the report are three core recommendations to the Israeli government: start applying international law to the West Bank (which Israel refuses to do), the best interests of the child should come first and, crucially, that Israel “should deal with Palestinian children on an equal footing with Israeli children.”
Israel currently applies two separate and unequal systems of laws in the West Bank. Palestinians are subject to a harsh military regime in which Israeli army officers and police, arrest, interrogate, judge and sentence, while Israeli settlers colonizing the West Bank are subject to Israeli civilian law.
These systematic inequalities include: the minimum age for Palestinian children to receive a custodial sentence is 12, but for Israelis it is 14; Palestinian children have no right to have a parent present during interrogation, while Israeli children generally do.
The most stark inequalities are evident in the time it takes for the two systems to work. Palestinian children could have to wait up to eight days before being brought before a judge, while Israeli children have a right to see one within 24 hours; Palestinian children can be detained without charge for 188 days, while for Israelis the limit is 40.
In a press release about the report, Council for Arab-British Understanding director Chris Doyle describes witnessing in Palestine “nothing less than a kangaroo court that does nothing to improve Israel’s security while criminalizing an entire generation of Palestinian children.”
Children kept in solitary confinement
Drawing on their meetings with nongovernmental organizations such as Defence for Children International-Palestine Section, the authors detail the shocking treatment of Palestinian children at the hands of Israeli soldiers.
Arrested in nighttime raids, Palestinian children are often physically and verbally abused, brought before adult military courts, shackled, given little choice than taking a plea bargain, and can be sentenced to as many as 20 years for “crimes” as trivial as stone throwing. Some are even kept in solitary confinement, according to DCI.
When Palestinian children file complaints about their abuse at the hands of Israeli soldiers, they are almost always ignored. Israeli occupation authorities were able to give to the delegation “only one example of a complaint being upheld.” The authors report that there are “a significant number of allegations of physical and emotional abuse of child detainees by the military which neither the complaints system nor the justice system is addressing satisfactorily.”
The report compiles some shocking statistics. As many as 94 percent of Palestinian children arrested in the West Bank are denied bail, according to nongovernmental organizations. Some 97-98 percent of such cases end with a plea bargain, meaning they go to jail without even reaching the trial stage (as flawed as military courts are).
A key conclusion reached by the report’s authors is that Israel is in breach of articles of UN Convention of the Rights of the Child (UNCRC) that prohibit: national or ethnic discrimination; ignoring a child’s best interests; the premature resort to detention, imprisonment and trial alongside adult prisoners; preventing prompt access to lawyers and the use of shackles.
While the report notes “the International Court of Justice’s 2004 Advisory Opinion [on Israel’s wall in the West Bank] which concludes categorically that the UNCRC is applicable in the Occupied Palestinian Territories,” Israeli officials the delegation met with refused to recognize this.
“Every Palestinian child a ‘potential terrorist’”
“In our meetings with the various Israeli Government agencies, we found the universal stance by contrast was that the Convention has no application beyond Israel’s own [pre-1967] borders,” the authors write, noting their disagreement.
They emphasize: “[t]he population of the West Bank is within the physical power and control of Israel, and Israel has effective control of the territory. Our visit dispelled any doubts we might have had about this.”
In its conclusions, the report notes that this refusal to fulfill its international law obligations with respect to Palestinian children probably “stems from a belief, which was advanced to us by [an Israeli] military prosecutor, that every Palestinian child is a ‘potential terrorist.’”
Questions about report’s future
Renowned Palestinian writer, activist and academic Ghada Karmi was at the report’s launch on Tuesday. She asked the panel if it would be doing a follow-up visit, or monitoring implementation of the report’s recommendations.
The answer was less than conclusive, with co-author Greg Davies saying they would have to “wait and see” what the Israeli government’s response would be. He later spoke to The Electronic Intifada over the phone about the report’s future: “the format in which that follow-up work takes place, I don’t know at this stage, it’s too early to tell … I’m committed to seeing as far as it’s possible these recommendations coming into effect. If that requires further work I’m prepared to organize that.”
Karmi later told The Electronic Intifada that the report is “toothless in the end” because there is no way to compel Israel to comply.
“Palestinians are fed up of being studied,” she said. What they really want to know is “how will I get help to end” the abuses of the military occupation. Karmi did however conclude the report was a good thing and the delegation was a “very interesting mission” because it was backed by the foreign office, who could not be accused of anti-Israel bias in the same way that Israel has managed to taint UN missions with “the usual slanders.”
UK government approached report’s authors
Lawyer Greg Davies was responsible for putting the ad hoc delegation together. He told The Electronic Intifada that while he was doing so, he was approached by the British Consulate in Jerusalem, who offered government funding. Davies replied in the affirmative, but on condition that the group be independent.
In response to such criticisms as Karmi’s, Davies said: “there have been a number of [such] reports submitted… those reports have largely gone unanswered [by Israel] … it was that lack of response that prompted this.”
“There isn’t an enforceability as such without the political will, and that’s where our remit stops,” he said, pointing to an Early Day Motion on the report tabled in parliament Wednesday. EDM 280 welcomes the report and “asks the Foreign Secretary to make a statement to the House [of Commons] setting out his proposals for persuading Israel to comply in practice with international law relating to the treatment of children.” Davies said of the EDM “we welcome that and are hugely encouraged by that.”
Advancing the debate
The Palestine section of Defence for Children International, through its reports and its meetings with the delegation, is one of the most quoted sources in the report. DCI-PS spokesperson Gerard Horton admitted to The Electronic Intifada that the report’s recommendations “won’t end the abuse,” but argued that some of them “will make it very difficult for the military court system to function effectively” if they were implemented.
He wrote in an email that the report’s list of forty recommendations include those DCI-PS have been demanding for years (parents present during interrogation; prompt access to a lawyer; audio-visual recording of interrogations; and an end to forcible transfer of children to prisons inside Israel in violation of the Fourth Geneva Convention).
Horton also highlighted the high profile of the report’s authors and backers: “the importance of this report is who wrote it … before real change can occur the debate has to become mainstream. People in the center and center-right have to start taking an interest and expressing a concern. To my mind this report goes some way to advancing that by helping to shift the debate to the center.”
“Justice is not a negotiable commodity”
Among the report’s forty specific recommendations are: an end to night arrests, an end to blindfolding and shackling, observing the prohibition on “violent, threatening or coercive” conduct, the presence of a parent during interrogation and “[c]hildren should not be required to sign confessions” in Hebrew, since they do not understand it.
The report notes that since the delegation’s visit, a new military order has upped to 18 the age at which Palestinian children can be tried as adults. Previously, it had been 16 (then another inequality with Israeli children who are treated as children until 18).
But there are concerns this change has been rendered void in practice. While welcoming the change, the report expresses concern “that the change does not appear to apply to sentencing provisions.”
Seemingly deliberate loopholes in the law means that “adult sentencing provisions still apply to 16 [and] 17 year olds” and that children 14-17 years old can be sentenced as adults when the maximum penalty for the offense is five years or more. The maximum penalty for throwing stones (the most common offense) ranges from 10 to 20 years,
Asked by The Electronic Intifada at the Tuesday launch why there were no specific recommendations in the report to end this inequality, Judy Khan QC said it was covered by core recommendation three, which calls for an end to the current inequalities between Israeli and Palestinian child detainees.
In their meetings with the delegation, the Israeli Ministry of Justice “described [such changes] as conditional on there being no significant unrest or ‘third intifada.’” The report objects: “[a] major cause of future unrest may well be the resentment of continuing injustice … justice is not a negotiable commodity but a fundamental human right.”
Sharp rise in child detainees
Sir Stephen Sedley, a former Lord Justice — senior appeal judge — underlined at Tuesday’s launch that there has been a 40 percent rise in child detainees since their visit in September, so the problem has only got worse since they returned to the UK.
While the report seems to have received some media coverage in the UK, it yet remains to be seen what practical impact it will have. More fundamentally, it does not call for an end to the occupation, considering political solutions beyond the authors’ mandate. It does note however that: “We have no reason to differ from the view of Her Majesty’s Government and the international community that these [Israeli] settlements [in the West Bank] are illegal. For the purposes of this report however we treat them, like the occupation, as a fact.”
But the question remains: a fact for how much longer?
Asa Winstanley is an investigative journalist from London who has lived and reported from occupied Palestine. His website is www.winstanleys.org.
Today we have arrived at 16 deaths, including a child of 5 and a half years, and over 60 injured individuals. This morning in Khan Younis of the southern Gaza Strip an Israeli tank fired an artillery shell and killed a child of 5 and a half years, and wounding his father and 3 other people. I went to the morgue of the hospital and I saw the lifeless body of a child.
Ali Al Moutaz Shawat was 5 and a half years old.
5 and a half year old Ali Moutaz al Shawaf was killed by an Israeli shell – click to see more photos
Ali’s father was in the operating room. I went to visit other people injured in this attack, a number of whom were hospitalized at the European Hospital in Khan Younis.
Msabah Zaki, 53, was wounded in the shoulder. I met him at his home. Zaki began to tell me what happened.
Young people and families usually gather in the location that was attacked by the Israeli tank on June 23. There is a soccer field where young people have a league, there are ping pong tables, and a television to watch the game on. Today there was supposed to be a football match between some young groups. Zaki worked there and arrived early in the morning to clean and prepare everything. Some friends joined him to help. Two men with two kids asked him to open the room so they could play ping pong. Suddenly, at about 10:15 a.m., Zaki heard a huge explosion from the direction of the ping pong room.
“I flew a few yards away,” says Zaki. There were no warning shots before the attack. The situation was calm, quiet.
In the hospital I met the 2 men who entered the ping pong room, Omar Tabash, 28, and Yosif Abu Tair, 24.
Omar was wounded in the arms and in his right leg. He says that he went to play ping pong, and brought his son Ayoub, a month and a half old. His friend Moutaz Shawat joined them with his 5 year old son Ali.
“Ali was speaking on the phone with his mom,” says Omar. Young Ali was saying into the phone, “mom, I want to see you,” to which his mother replied, “now I am at work, I will see you later at home.”
Ali’s father wanted to go home to change into sports clothing. He went outside and yelled suddenly as an explosion went off.
Moutaz called for Omar to come, but Omar, wounded, could not. Omar called some friends and the ambulance. “Ali died while hugging his father,” says Omar.
On the same day, June 23, 2012, the Israeli Air Force attacked several areas in the Gaza Strip. A first attack, at about 11:00 a.m., occurred east of Shjayah, in the center of Gaza City. The bomb did not explode.
The Israeli Air Force then attacked the area of Jabalia in northern Gaza. One person was killed. He was an activist with the Popular Resistance Committee. His name is Khalid al-Burei and he was 25 years old.
On Saturday morning, Israel also carried out 3 air strikes against Hamas security sites in which at least 17 people were injured.
In the afternoon, one was killed and 9 others injured in an Israeli attack on the center of Gaza City, in the Nasser arrea which is very crowded during the day.
Parents and friends of Osama Ali outside the morgue – click to see more photos
I visited Shifa hospital after the attack. The civilian who was killed is Osama Ali who was 34. He was crossing the road at the time of the attack.
In the same attack, 9 civilians were wounded. Among them:
Hassan Oda, 24, who was in front of his home at the time of the attack.
Hassan Oda, 24
Imad Abu Nahl, 29, who was driving at the time of the attack.
Imad Abu Nahl
Hassan Yassin, 28, who was crossing the street at the time of the attack.
Hassan Yassin, 28
Yesterday, on Friday, June 22, a boy was killed in an Israeli attack east of Al-Bureij camp. Qassem Abdullah Ahmed was 24 years old. Two civilians were injured and were transported to the ‘Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital in Deir al-Balah.
On the evening of Friday, June 22, an Israeli strike in northern Gaza killed Jamal Abu Humam Qadoos, 20.
On that same day, the Israeli Air Force conducted several more raids in different areas of the Gaza Strip. In the night between Friday and Saturday, Gaza City was shaken by a tremendous explosion. A Hamas military complex near Saraya, in the center of Gaza City was struck.
I visited the site during the night immediately after the attack. Many homes were damaged. Among the wounded, Hamas security members and 4 civilians.
Gaza City that night could not sleep. I lay awake in a Palestinian family’s house in the affected area. We were neighbors, telling each other about the fright. Sharing our fear brought us together in that dark night, punctuated only by the sound of sirens and lit only by the fire that remained alive after the bombing.
16 Palestinians killed and over 60 injured since Israel’s military offensive on Gaza, which began Monday, June 18, 2012.
Some people think that the situation will worsen in the coming days. The hope is that the horror of this massacre stops.
2 July 2012 | International Solidarity Movement, West Bank
On Friday, June 29th, dozens of residents of the Palestinian village, Ni’lin demonstrated in opposition to the ongoing apartheid carried out by the Israeli Occupation Forces (IOF). The village of Ni’lin is located near the 1967 Green Line and has been a center of popular resistance throughout the history of the Israel occupation of Palestine.
Following the Friday prayers, Palestinians, along with approximately a dozen internationals, marched to the recently completed apartheid wall. There they were met with a heavy dousing of a foul-smelling liquid fired out of a truck mounted water canon commonly referred to as the ‘skunk truck’.
In true Ni’lin spirit, the protestors were not deterred and continued expressing their steadfast opposition. Following the skunk truck, the IOF shot close to 100 tear gas canisters into the hills and fired upon protestors with rubber-coated steel bullets from the safety of their perch on a ridge and from the security of their armored jeeps.
Despite the use of such weapons, no protestors needed to be taken to the hospital although many were treated, sometimes multiple times, for tear gas inhalation.
After the demonstration had come to an end, the international visitors were treated to an educational presentation in the newly reopened Center for the Ni’lin Popular Resistance.
Ni’lin resident Saeed Amireh explained the history of both the apartheid and the popular resistance in Ni’lin. More information can be found here.
Saeed himself has grown up with the aggressions of an apartheid state on a daily basis. Life has been difficult during the 22 years of his existence. In the last 10 years alone, the village has experienced a reign of terror and oppression. As the nearby illegal settlements grew in size, they began occupying the agricultural lands upon which the residents of Ni’lin depend for their livelihood. Since 1967, the village’s lands have decreased from the 58,000 dunums to only 7,000 remaining dunums. Five Israeli colonies have been built around Ni’lin. With the settlers came increased oppression and violence from the IOF.
When the order came to build the apartheid wall in between the illegal Israeli settlements and the long standing village of Ni’lin, the resistance from the Palestinians took on a new life. Through unending protests and refusals to cooperate, they were able to force the Israelis to change the location of the wall, saving 1500 dunums from confiscation.
Despite the adjustment, the route of the wall still annexes a great deal of Ni’lin’s agricultural land. The residents continue to demonstrate against this apartheid structure. Saeed captured the sentiment of
the village saying that, “everybody deserves freedom and peace.”
The struggle for peace, however, has been faced with a violent response from the IOF. As Saeed stated, “there is no freedom without a price.”
Since beginning the popular protests in 2007, Ni’lin has suffered over 350 arrests, 5 deaths, multiple injuries from the use of live ammunition, and at least 15 people with bones broken from the firing of tear gas.
Saeed embodies the resistance spirit of Ni’lin. He has no memories of life without occupation. He dreams of being able to visit the sea, which he can glimpse from his rooftop on a clear day, but like other Palestinians in the West Bank, is unable to access without a difficult to receive permission.
“Daily life is a resistance,” Saeed says. The fact that Ni’lin continues to exist despite the efforts to make life unbearable, is a resistance to the ongoing apartheid. Israel has not only cut the village from much of its agricultural lands but also from their water resources. Thus, Ni’lin has been cut from its main sources of income.
“The occupation is not only shooting the people…the occupation in our lives is like a cancer in the body. [It affects] everything in our life,” says Saeed.
Saeed wants visibility and international attention for his village. “I want people to see our existence… people have no work, no jobs, no land. By coming here people can stand [by us] and see [what is happening].”
As for the the Palestinians of Ni’lin, their struggle is far from over. They are fighting for survival. As Saeed puts it, “we will not stop the fight, even though we are tired, we will not stop the fight.”
Steve Plaank is a volunteer with the International Solidarity Movement (name has been changed).
28 June 2012 | International Solidarity Movement, West Bank
On Sunday, June 24 in Aqaba, Muhammed and Nassa Al-Jabba received a demolition order by Israeli authorities demanding that they evacuate the premises of their home within the next 3 days. The Al-Jabba family have not evacuated the home as it is the sole residence for their family of 10 children. The Israeli military may arrive at any time to demolish the building in the Area C (Israeli civil and security control) village.
Muhammed Al-Jabbar holds a demolition order for his family’s home
Upon arriving in the village of Aqaba, International Solidarity Movement (ISM) volunteers spoke with the mayor, Haj Sami, an older man left wheelchair bound after suffering 3 gunshots from Israeli soldiers while working on his farm in 1971. He was only 16 years old at the time and fortunate to survive.
Haj Sami introduced ISM volunteers to Nassa Al-Jabbar, the mother of 10 who has been faced with a demolition order, giving her only 3 days to abandon the premises before the Israeli army is able to arrive with bulldozers and raze her home.
Nassa and her husband Muhammed have spent 10 years building their home. When asked why it took them so long, Nassa replied that because a permit to build on their own land is impossible to attain from Israel, the house was built in 7 different stages in order to avoid the soldiers attention.
Nassa says that if Israeli forces demolish her home, she, her husband, and her 10 young sons and daughters will have no other place to go. They do not have the funds to build another home.
Muhammed states that regardless of the outcome, he will not leave his home. If demolished, their house will join the over 24,000 Palestinian homes that have been demolished since 1967.
Nassa and Muhammed’s home is not the only building that faces demolition. Four other shelters and a concrete factory have received orders as well.
The village of Aqaba has suffered extensively from the Israeli occupation. Of a population of 1000, 700 residents are internal refugees. The villagers live in constant threat of home demolition.
On September 15, 2011, two animal shelters and a home were demolished. There was no advance warning, not even a demolition order. The roads that provide easy access into the village was also destroyed by Israeli forces. On a weekly basis, Israeli forces hold military training near the village, subjecting Aqaba to the sound of gun shots. On Tuesday morning however, the Israeli military began also training with tanks. The explosions are resulting in stress and trauma for the villagers.
If allowed to happen, Nassa and Muhammed’s home will join the list of thousands of demolitions inflicted on Palestinians by the Israeli military occupation.
Sunny is a volunteer with the International Solidarity Movement (name has been changed).
