Category: Features

Dismantling Impunity: Campaign to help Palestinian victims of army abuse

9 February 2011 | Popular Struggle Coordination Committee

The Popular Struggle Coordination Committee is proud to announce a new campaign, the “Dismantling Impunity Fund”. This fund will directly challenge Israel’s culture of impunity surrounding the murder and maiming of Palestinians. The fund will be managed by a committee that will include representatives of Popular Committees and Palestinian human rights organizations.

The Abu Rahmah family will be the fund’s first recipient. The family has lost two of their children, Bassem and Jawaher, to Israeli military violence. Both were murdered while nonviolently protesting Israel’s separation wall, built on their village’s land. The family has filed a civil suit in Israeli courts demanding compensation for Bassem Abu Rahmah’s 2009 murder, in which he was shot in the chest from 40 meters with a high-velocity tear gas canister.

The court is demanding 25,000 shekels ($6,700) as a deposit from the Abu Rahmah family. According to a loophole in Israeli law, Palestinians can be considered “foreigners”. This enables the court to demand an upfront deposit large enough to cover the defense’s legal fees, should the prosecution lose the case. If the family does not submit the money, the court will close the case without hearing it.

Through this loophole, Israel has supported its culture of impunity. Palestinians from the occupied Palestinian territories are effectively prohibited from filing civil suits against Israel, the Israeli army or individual soldiers. Financial resources are needed to combat this loophole and enable Palestinians to seek legal redress.

Bassem Abu Rahmah was shot in the chest with the same type of canister that critically injured US citizen Tristan Anderson one month prior.After conducting an extensive investigation into Abu Rahmah’s death, the Israeli human rights group B’Tselem demanded a criminal investigation be launched. B’Tselem’s findings proved that Abu Rahmah was shot in direct violation of open-fire regulations while acting in a nonviolent manner. Despite video footage and expert testimony to corroborate this, no one has yet been punished or even charged with Bassem’s killing. A civil case is now the option left for the Abu Rahmah family to seek legal redress.

Mohammed Khatib, Coordinator, Popular Struggle Coordination Committee: “From our experience with the Israeli legal system, we do not expect justice from the occupier’s courts. But we do know that a court case brings to light things that the occupation would rather keep in the shadows. By suing, victims of Israeli violence would be extracting both a monetary and political price for the crimes that Israel has committed against them. It is essential to challenge the prevailing culture of impunity, in which Israeli soldiers and settlers murder and maim Palestinians while going unpunished and unquestioned.”

Donate Electronically to the “Dismantling Impunity Fund” by following the link and checking the “Dismantling Impunity Fund” box.

Donate by check: Write checks to “Alliance for Global Justice”, with “CfJS-Dismantling Impunity Fund” in the memo line. Mail checks to:
Alliance for Global Justice
1247 “E” Street,SE
Washington, DC 20003

Action Alert: End US tear gas & military aid to Egypt, Tunisia & Israel

6 February 2011 | Adalah NY

Egyptians, Americans and people worldwide have been outraged in the last days by the photos, twitter messages and news articles showing that the tear gas canisters fired by Egyptian police at peaceful, pro-democracy protesters in Egypt are “Made in USA.” While we are seeing these pictures now from Egypt, we have seen similar ones in recent months from Tunisia and Palestine. All three places have had in common repressive governments, armed by US companies with tear gas and other weapons. All three have used extreme violence against unarmed protesters who were demanding basic human rights, maiming and even killing protesters with impunity.

In all three places, Combined Systems Inc., a US company based in Jamestown, Pennsylvania, is providing the tear gas – often under its brand-name CTS, an acronym for Combined Tactical Systems – that these governments are employing to crush protest, deny human rights and cling to power.

Israel, Egypt and Tunisia’s CSI tear gas may have been supplied under the US’s massive military aid to these governments, despite those governments’ clear records of severe human rights abuses. Israel receives $3 billion in US military aid annually, including $1.85 million of “tear gasses and riot control agent” from 2007-2008. Egypt receives $1.3 billion in military aid annually, and Tunisia has received an average of around $15 million annually. At a minimum the US State Department has reviewed and approved the sale of US-made tear gas to those governments.

WRITE NOW to the US State Department and tell them to stop using US tax dollars to provide tear gas and other weapons, and to stop approving military sales to repressive governments like Egypt, Israel and Tunisia that use US equipment and weapons to deny basic human rights.

WRITE NOW to executives from CSI and from their major investors Point Lookout Capital Partners and the Carlyle Group, demanding that CSI stop providing tear gas that is used by repressive governments like Egypt, Tunisia and Israel to deny the right to protest.

Egypt: As one example, Agence France Press reported on January 28th that, “Dozens of the canisters made by Combined Tactical Systems in Jamestown, Pennsylvania, were fired at crowds on one Cairo street on Friday, littering the road surface along with rubble and spent shotgun cartridges. Many protesters have been injured through tear gas inhalation and by being hit by the canisters themselves, with the security forces sometimes firing them straight at demonstrators.” Human Rights Watch staff reportedseeing dead protesters in Alexandria with “massive head wounds from tear gas canisters we [HRW staff] were told had been fired directly at their heads at close range.”

Tunisia: According to CNN, “The photograph posted in Tunisia was of a 40 mm riot CS smoke projectile, made by a company called Combined Systems Inc., which describes itself as a ‘tactical weapons company’ and is based in Jamestown, Pennsylvania…. Its warning label reads: ‘Danger: Do not fire directly at person(s). Severe injury or death may result.’ That warning is apparently not always followed. Lucas Mebrouk Dolega died in Tunisia on January 17, three days after being hit by a tear gas grenade at close range. The 32-year-old was a photographer for the European PressPhoto Agency.

Palestine: In the Israeli-occupied West Bank, in 2009 Israeli soldiers fired extended range CSI canisters directly at Bassem Abu Rahmah from the West Bank village of Bil’in, killing him, and directly at US citizen Tristan Anderson in the village of Ni’ilin, seriously inuring him. Bassem’s sister Jawaher Abu Rahmah died on January 1, 2011 after she was overcome by tear gas at a protest in Bil’in the day before. CSI tear gas canisters littered the ground in the village of Bil’in after the protest. In May, 2010, US citizen Emily Henochowicz was shot directly in the face by an Israeli soldier with a tear gas canister, causing the loss of her eye. For more detailed information on CSI and Israel’s use of tear gas against Palestinians, Click Here.

Email the United States Department of State and Combined Systems Inc. to demand an end to the shipments of tear-gas to be used against unarmed demonstrators.

Funeral held for Palestinian youth killed by settlers south of Nablus

29 January 2011 | International Solidarity Movement

On 27th January, 20-year old Oday Maher Hamza Qadous was killed by settlers whilst farming between the villages of Burin and Iraq Burin, just south of Nablus. According to family sources, the Palestinian youth was alone and gathering wood when settlers – most likely from the nearby, illegal settlement of Bracha – shot Qaddous once through the chest, with the bullet entering his right shoulder and remaining lodged beside his left lung. Sources say that it was over an hour before an ambulance was able to reach him, and he was pronounced dead-on-arrival at the hospital. There was evidence that he was also beaten: his face was covered in blood, and a left-rib broken. Doctors concluded he died of surgical emphysema as a result of the gun-shot wound.

The funeral for the deceased was held the following day in the village of Iraq Burin, and was attended by around 500 people from the villages and surrounding areas. A large police presence followed the procession, which lead from the Rafidia Hospital in Nablus – where the body was being held – to the village. No clashes were reported to have followed the ceremony.

This tragedy comes less than a year after his younger brother, 16-year old Mohammed Ibrahim Qadous, was killed by the Israeli Occupation Forces in the same region of the West Bank.

Photos by Wael Faqeeh

Another young stone-collector is killed in Gaza

20 January 2011 / International Solidarity Movement, Vera Macht

It had been only eight days since the last innocent was killed. People die here one after another, killed one by one, without consequences, without justice, without an outcry in the media. Innocent civilians trying to make a living amidst the stifling four-year siege. Palestinian civilians, whose lives become only an entry in the statistics: “So that’s what I can do: register it in my notebook. It is registered, and there is an empty line after Shaban’s name. That is for those who they kill tomorrow,” wrote the American writer Max Ajl after the farmer Shaban Karmout was killed. It took eight days, and the place was filled. Amjad ElZaaneen was 17 years when he was killed on Tuesday.

Amjad collected stones that morning, the 18th of January, as he did every morning with his three cousins and his brother, the youngest of whom was eleven. Five boys, children, with a horse and a cart full of stones, about 300m from the border with Israel, and near to the village of Bait Hanoun. They had just loaded their cart full as they saw Israeli tanks and bulldozers coming to invade the land for an unknown reason. A group of resistance fighters approached the area, including fighters from PFLP and the Communist Party, to push them out and prevent them from again uprooting the land. It was a symbolic action: the country has been destroyed hundreds of times before by tanks and bulldozers, and the resistance the fighters can sustain is nothing in comparison to the brutal force of the Israeli army. Amjad and the others ran for their lives and arrived safely home.

But the horse was still there in the field, along with all of the stones they had collected with such difficulty, risking their lives to have some income that day. So they returned, thinking the situation had calmed down and that the tanks and bulldozers had withdrawn from Gaza’s land after flattening it one more time. But when they reached their horse, Israeli soldiers fired a shell at them, and Sharaf Raafat Shada, 19, was hit by a piece of shrapnel in the chest. Amjad, the oldest, tried to pull him away, to lay him on the cart to somehow take him to the hospital, but Sharaf was too heavy for him. So Amjad made the decision to try to reach Bait Hanoun in order to get help. He hadn’t gone far when a shell directly hit him into his belly, leaving a wound so large that he bled to death within minutes.
The young boys broke out in panic and ran off to get to safety. Ambulances and people living nearby arrived to try to rescue the boys, waving white flags, but that didn’t stop the shooting. It was a long time before they managed to reach them.

Ismael Abd Elqader ElZaaneen, 16 years old, is now in hospital in Bait Hanoun with bandages on nearly every part of his body. “We ran in all directions, but they fired about ten artillery shells at us. I got shrapnel deep in my back and smaller pieces all over my body. But I kept running nevertheless, until I got to the main road from Bait Hanoun.” Even the injured Sharaf somehow managed to reach refuge at the main street without being hit by the shelling again. The eleven-year old Abdel Qader Oday Elzaaneeen was slightly injured by shrapnel to his cheek. He was standing in the hospital and crying, visibly in shock, his cousin is dead, and his brothers are injured severely. “I have no idea why the Israelis have done this,” he says quietly. Amjad was too young to die today, by a grenade that has torn his stomach apart.

As his mother heard what happened, she collapsed in the hospital. Even as she regained consciousness, she continued lying down silently, her eyes closed. How can the world be still there if her son is no more.

The uncle of Sharaf, who is standing next to his bed, says: “The Israelis are committing crimes every day here. None of us civilians can enter his fields anymore. The brutality is escalating dramatically in recent times—farmers, shepherds, stone collectors—we are all murdered. They don’t have mercy on anyone, neither the elderly, nor children. People out there must begin to help us, because every day, every week and every month we have to mourn new injuries and deaths. Since 1948, we are suffering and it’s getting worse and worse. We don’t get support from anyone. But we need help. All Palestinians are potential targets. All of us. No one is excluded, no one is safe.”

Each of the relatives, waiting in the hospital, could be the next victim: as a farmer on the field, as a shepherd, or collecting stones. Today Amjad ElZaaneen was the next name on the list of innocent deaths, of senseless killings. On the long list on our laptops, on all of our consciences.

Life and death in the buffer zone

16 January 2011 | International Solidarity Movement, Vera Macht

Death comes quickly at a place like this. On sunny winter days, when the smell of the night’s rain is still in the air, as if it would have brought some hope for the raped, barren land of Gaza, overrun hundreds of times by Israeli tanks and bulldozers. The land between the foothills of the village of Bait Hanoun and the Israeli border, guarded by watchtowers, soldiers, snipers, helicopters and drones is a land in which death is a regular guest.

But despite all that, the 65-year-old Shaban Karmout probably had something like hope when he woke up on that winter morning. His house is in the 300 meter wide strip of land in the so-called buffer zone. He built his house 40 years ago, in 1971, when Gaza was already occupied by Israel, and yet he thought to have a future there for himself and his family. Shaban began to plant fruits, his land was full of palms and trees, lemon, orange, clementine and almond trees were growing there. He had a good life.

But in 2003, just at the time of the almond harvest, the Israeli bulldozers came in the middle of the night. It took them three hours to raze the work of 30 years to the ground. Since the Israeli attack in 2009, he could no longer live there, the buffer zone had become too dangerous, where his home was, which has now been declared a closed combat zone by Israel. He had since lived in a small rented concrete house in the middle of the refugee camp near Bait Hanoun, in Jabalia, cramped in a tiny apartment with his large family.

He went back to his land, every morning, and worked there until the evening. He and his family had to make a living from something, after all. And so this morning, in the morning of the 10th January 2011, he woke up with hope, around 4 o’clock, and left for his fields. Full of hope he was because he and his neighbors had recently received a new well, their old one had been destroyed by an Israeli tank incursion. The Italian NGO GVC had built the well, it was financed by the Italian government.

On that day he was visited by an employee of the organization, to see how his situation had improved. She had an interview with him, and he asked her to come into the house, as it would be not safe outside. As she left, he advised her to rather take a short cut, you never know. He told her that he himself still had to go into the garden once more to tie his donkey. The NGO worker had just reached the village of Bait Hanoun, as three shots fell. One hit Shaban in the neck, two others in the upper part of his body. He was dead on the spot.
“It’s like a nightmare,” the Italian said, stunned. “I will never see him again. From here to the morgue in two hours. ”

In the interview that he gave shortly before his death, he told me about the unbearable situation in which he had been living. “It felt as if someone had ripped out my heart,” he described the night in which he lost all his land under the blades of eight bulldozers. And he told how he and the farmers from the neighbor fields had risked planting yet again, you have to make a living from something after all, and had grown wheat. When it was ready to be harvested, it was burned down by the Israeli army. And he told how he and the farmers from the neighboring fields yet again had the courage to plant, the children have to eat something after all, and tried to grow wheat. When the workers went to the field to sow, they were fired upon by Israeli soldiers.

What he now makes his living from, he was asked. “I collect stones and wood, and I grow some crops in my garden,” he replied. Crops, for which he had recently gotten water, thanks to a donation of a well from the Italian government. Shaban therefore probably looked somewhat optimistically into the future, the well could have restored the income from his garden to him. This was his only income since it had become too dangerous for him to enter his fields. “At any time the Israeli bulldozers can come again to destroy my house, you never know what they do next,” he said. Whether he isn’t afraid to be there, the employee of the NGO asked him. “No, I don’t mind the shooting too much,” he replied. “Even if something happens to me, humans can only die once. And only God knows when I am going to die.”

His nephew, Mohammed Karmout, stood a bit apart from the morgue. “The Israelis know my uncle very well,” he says quietly. “He’s there every day, and the whole area is monitored by cameras and drones. They know he lives there.”
And so it is quite doubtful that only God alone knew that Shaban would die at that day, while he was tying his donkey, by three shots in his upper body.

Shaban Karmout is the third civilian being shot dead in the buffer zone in the last month. At Christmas, the Shepherd Salama Abu Hashish, 20 years old, died by a shot in the back while he was tending his sheep. Since the beginning of last year, about a hundred workers and farmers have been shot by Israeli snipers in the buffer zone, 13 of them died.