8 March 2012 | International Solidarity Movement, West Bank
On International Women’s day, March 8th, hundreds of demonstrators rallied in Qalandia in solidarity with hunger striker Hana Shalabi and calling for Israel to end the occupation.
The demonstrators marched marched down the street next to the separation wall to Qalandia checkpoint, carrying placards and chanting slogans . In the crowd empowered women were carrying Palestinian flags and placards saying “Women break barriers,” “Raise your voices against all oppression,” and “Feminist resistance against the occupation.”
Close to the checkpoint the non-violent demonstrators were greeted by the Israeli army with sound bombs and skunk water before trying to disperse the crowd by excessive use of the American made LRAD device, “The Scream,” which projects a high pitched siren that can cause dizziness and disorientation. Finally tear gas was canisters were fired at demonstrators.
Currently seven palestinian women are detained in Israel including Hana Shalabi, who is being detained without a charge or trial and has been on hunger strike since 16 February.
Satu is a volunteer with International Solidarity Movement (name has been changed).
8 March 2012 | International Solidarity Movement, Gaza
Thaer Abed Al Hameed Mahdi died on Saturday, March 3rd, 2012. He was 23 years old. A rope snapped and he plunged down a shaft to his death. He died instantly. His coworkers Jamal Kamel Mahdi and Raed Jaber Mahdi survived, they are still in the hospital. Jamal is in the European Hospital with two broken legs and a broken arm. Raed is in Shifa Hospital. His back is broken. Three years ago Israel slaughtered almost 1,500 Gazans, and nobody was held accountable for that massacre, and no one even talks of the hundreds or thousands that have been killed and injured in the tunnels since the beginning of the siege. The tunnels that are Gaza’s only link to things like cement, whose import into Gaza is forbidden by Israel.
Thaer was just a normal young man; he wanted what all young men in Gaza want, to get married, to have a family. Those are things that he will never have. Marriage and family of his own were always a dream for him, but a distant dream. The money he earned from his job working in the tunnels went to help his own parents and his eight younger brothers and sisters. He started working in the tunnels six months ago; there was no other work to be found. His family needed the money; their only income was his father’s job as a doorman at Al Aqsa University. Money was tight. He went with his two friends, Raed and Jamal, and got a job in the place they could find one, the tunnels.
Even this job was only three or four days a week, when he got the call, he went to work. He never knew what he would be doing, unloading the cement his tunnel imported into Gaza, or working underground in the hot airless tunnel. On Saturday, the three of them went to work, they got on the seat that they rode down into the tunnel and started the descent, the rope broke, they fell. Thaer will never get married; he will never see his own children.
This is what we heard as we sat in the mourning tent with Thaer’s uncle. This was the story of Thaer’s life and death. Thaer died when a rope broke, but he was killed by the siege that strangles Gaza. His uncle said to us, “The main reason for the siege is the division between Fatah and Hamas, the division must end. The youth must be given a chance to live a normal life.”
Nathan Stuckey is a volunteer with International Solidarity Movement.
7 March 2012 | International Solidarity Movement, West Bank
The illegal settlement of Itamar, constructed illegally on the land of Aqraba, Awarta, and Beit Furik, has taken a provocative step of incitement in the village of Yanoun, from which Zionists have also stolen land. On 7 March 2o12 illegal settlers entered the village of Yanoun and rose the flag of Israel over the home of village elder Abu Muhmad al Ajoori, who resides in the lower part of the village. Another flag was suspended over a water reservoir in the upper part of the village. The settlers were then seen by locals, wandering off into the hills.
Yousef Deria, a local activist against the wall and settlements, said locals contacted him following the incident, avoiding any conflict with the settlers who tend to have violent tendencies against Palestinians through their declared “Price Tag Campaign” which violently targets Palestinian villagers.
Deria was accompanied by peace activists and locals as they removed these flags.
Residents of Yanoun have suffered many years of terrifying violence at the hands of Itamar settlers – the murder of villagers, slaughter of their livestock, desecration of crops, property destruction and daily invasions and intimidation by armed settlers. The increasing brutality climaxed in 2002, as settlers rampaged the village, cutting down over 1000 olive trees, killing dozens of sheep, beating Palestinians in their homes with rifle butts, and gouging out one man’s eye. Unable to stand the fear – and indeed reality – of terrorism any longer, the entire village evacuated at the time, mostly families fleeing to the nearby village of Aqraba.
An international and Israeli activist campaign was launched immediately to allow the residents of Yanoun to return to their lands. A permanent international presence was established in the village by EAPPI which has assisted in encouraging people of Yanoun to return home, and has remained instrumental in what little peace of mind the people of Yanoun have salvaged since they were uprooted from their land. One by one, they boldly returned.
Over the 2002-06 period the entirety of the village’s families eventually came back to their homes and attempted to start their life in the shadow of Itamar’s ever-increasing outposts that dot the hills surrounding the village. Approximately 100 people remain in the village – 40 in “lower Yanoun” in the valley, and 60 in “upper Yanoun”, whose houses ascend the hill to where just a few hundred meters away lie dozens of settlement houses and agricultural complexes.
Although the entire village is located in Area C – under full Israeli civilian and military control – and stands at risk of being slated for demolition, residents believe that the settlement’s – and Israeli government’s – strategy is what may already be underway – a gradual exodus of families and individuals as they are confined to an ever-shrinking amount of land, engulfed by the expanding settlement and its violent inhabitants.
There are some who remain though, who are determined to stay – many families steadfastly refusing to relinquish the connection to the land that is rightfully theirs. The very existence of Yanoun today bespeaks its fighting spirit, one that will hopefully continue despite the collective punishment waged on the village.
7 March 2012 | International Solidarity Movement, Gaza
Today, like ever Tuesday, we marched into the no go zone north of Beit Hanoun. We gathered by the half destroyed Beit Hanoun Agricultural College and marched north, towards Jerusalem. A Jerusalem that few of the protesters have ever seen, they have never been allowed to go to Jerusalem, it is forbidden to them, just as the land in the no go zone is forbidden to them. Jerusalem and Al Aqsa are unseen. We demonstrated for Al Aqsa and the prisoners. The prisoners too are unseen; Gazans are not allowed to visit their sons and brothers and held in the prisons of the occupation. As we walked down the road toward the no go zone a giant balloon rose over the wall. We are the seen, watched from giant balloons, watched from soldiers in the towers that line the wall, seen from the sights of guns, an Apache helicopter roars in the distance. Local herders tell us that there are tanks behind the wall. For us, the soldiers who look at us through rifle scopes are yet unseen. Later, they will make their appearance. In the sky floats the black flag which flies over the occupation, most of the world refuses to see it, they refuse to recognize it for what it is, but for the people of Palestine it always floats in the sky, like the second moon in a Murakami novel.
We enter the no go zone and walk toward the flags that we have left during previous demonstrations. There are about forty of us, we have no guns, only our voices and our flags. We stop by row of flags we left last week. Sabur Zaaneen from the Local Initiative of Beit Hanoun starts to speak, “Khader Adnan told us that honor is more important than food, Hana Shalabi reminds us that freedom is more important than food, we will continue the struggle.” Both of them are held in Israeli prisons, neither of them have been charges with any crime. Three months ago few people knew who either of them were, they were unseen, but they still existed, within them both was a great power and a great determination. Both of them refuse to be oppressed in silence, their hunger strikes are calls for justice, for honor. They are inspirations to us all.
We sit down under the flags. Our goal is to spend twenty minutes in the no go zone. After only a couple of minutes the unseen Israeli soldiers start to shoot at us. Bullets whistle over our heads, thirty maybe forty of them. We stand up, retreat down a small hill and stop. The young men begin to chant, against the occupation, pledging their lives to defend Al Aqsa, an Al Aqsa that few of them have ever seen, in support of Hana Shalabi, a woman none of us has ever seen. It doesn’t matter that most of them have never seen Al Aqsa, or Jenin, or Hebron, or Jaffa, that they have never seen the homes from which their grandfathers were driven, the orange trees that fed their grandmothers, those things are still theirs, they are still inside of them. Theft does not change possession.
We leave the no go zone when we want, we are not driven out by the Israeli bullets which whistle over our heads. As we leave the no go zone the soldiers come out of hiding and watch us from atop their tower, we see them with our bare eyes, they see us through rifle sights. We have done what we set out to do today, we have tried in our small way to remind people that closing your eyes and saying that you don’t see something does not make it disappear. What is unseen is often more important than what is seen. Food we can all see, honor, none of us can see, but honor is more important than food. Al Aqsa is something that many of the people here have never seen, but it is something for which we are willing to give our lives. Justice cannot be seen, but all of us are willing to fight for it. The struggle will go on, a struggle mostly for unseen things, often unseeable things. It is a struggle for the only things really worth fighting for, justice, freedom, and peace. I have never seen Khader Adnan or Hana Shalabi but I would like to thank them both, for showing us what heroism looks like. Even those that have never seen Al Aqsa know that it is beautiful, that it is worth dying for.
Nathan Stuckey is a volunteer with International Solidarity Movement.
Hundreds of Palestinians, mainly from the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), the Palestinian People’s Party (PPP), the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine (DFLP), and other leftist factions, rallied for administrative detainee Hana Shalabi, now on her 19th day of an open hunger strike, outside Gaza’s International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) this morning, ahead of International Women’s Day Thursday.
Photo courtesy Joe Catron, 2012
Their presence bolstered the numbers of a protest tent already erected at the ICRC entrance, and maintaining a continuous presence there, to support Shalabi.
Among the crowd, different kinds of red flags mixed easily with the black and yellow ones of Shalabi’s Islamic Jihad Movement in Palestine.
Meanwhile dozens of Palestinians continued their weekly vigil for family members imprisoned by Israel, demanding that the ICRC fulfill its obligations to protect their rights.
