On the night of December 9th 2009, over 200 Israeli soldiers entered the northern West Bank city of Nablus. Their mission: to round up local grassroots activists, whose promotion of popular struggle Israel had no answer for. Amongst those taken was 45 year old Wa’el Al-Faqeeh. Fifty soldiers stormed his home, pointing their weapons at him and his family as though the man they had come to arrest embodied a formidable threat. But those who know Al Faqeeh know that he worked tirelessly – and on a largely voluntary basis – in defense of human rights and the promotion of the strategies and philosophy of Palestinian non-violent resistance.
Political prisoner Wa’el Al-Faqeeh has been detained without charge by Israeli authorities for over a month, and is now facing trial in a military court scheduled to begin on the 19th of January. The abduction of Al-Faqeeh from his home, along with 4 other activists in the Nablus region, marked the beginning of the recent surge in Israel’s targeting of leaders of Palestinian popular resistance.
We call on you to take effective and public action to end the arrest, detention and mistreatment of Palestinian human rights activists such as Wa’el Al-Faqeeh. Deprived of his liberty and his voice, we ask you to join us in exercising our freedom of speech where he can not by calling for the release of Wa’el Al-Faqeeh and all political prisoners inside Israel’s jails.
What you can do to help:
* Contact your representatives asking them to exert pressure on Israeli officials to release Wa’el Al-Faqeeh and to end the unlawful imprisonment of human rights defenders. Click here to send a letter to Catherine Ashton, High Representative of the Union for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy of the European Union. Click here to send a letter to the American consulate in Jerusalem, or use the sample letter here to send to your respective representative. You can find a list of embassies and their contact information here.
* Host an event, or hold a demonstration or action in your area to raise awareness, support – and even funds – for Al-Faqeeh and all political prisoners. You could organise a film night, street projection, “Free the Prisoners” party, or a demonstration outside an Israeli embassy or consulate in your country. Organisers can contact palreports@gmail.com for media support.
* Wa’el Al-Faqeeh faces military court on the January 19. His legal defence comes at a high price and contributions to his legal fund support both Al-Faqeeh and his family. You can make a donation to the Free Wa’el fund here.
You can follow updates on Al-Faqeeh’s case and get in touch with his supporters by joining the Free Wa’el Facebook group here.
Al-Faqeeh teaching youth about the BDS campaign at the Tanweer Centre, Nablus
Political prisoner Wa’el Al-Faqeeh has been detained without charge by Israeli authorities for over a month, and is now facing trial in Salim military court on the 19th of January. The abduction of Al-Faqeeh from his home, along with 4 other activists in the Nablus region, marked the beginning of the recent surge in Israel’s targeting of leaders of Palestinian popular resistance.
On the night of December 9th 2009 over 200 Israeli soldiers entered the northern West Bank city of Nablus. Their mission: to round up a list of local grassroots activists, whose promotion of popular struggle Israel had no answer for. Amongst those taken was 45 year old Wa’el Al-Faqeeh, when 50 soldiers stormed his home, pointing their weapons at him and his family as though the man they had come to arrest embodied a formidable threat. But those who know Al Faqeeh know that he worked tirelessly – and on a largely voluntary basis – in defense of human rights and the promotion of the strategies and philosophy of Palestinian non-violent resistance.
Al-Faqeeh’s membership to the Tanweer Palestinian Cultural Enlightenment Forum board of directors was a vehicle for the initiation of the BDS (Boycott, Sanctions, Divestment) campaign at An-Najah University as well as countless cultural, social and educational projects for Nablus youth, championing the belief of freedom through the fulfilment of learning and expression. His organisation of Iraq Burin’s weekly demonstrations through the months of July to September played an instrumental role in the return of 30 dunums of land to the village annexed by neighbouring settlements and Israeli military forces. Al Faqeeh enthusiastically supported the cause of Palestinian farmers working under constant threat from settler and military violence, organising the annual olive harvest in the Nablus region and working year-round to defend agricultural communities’ connection to their land and economic livelihood.
His grassroots outreach across the political spectrum inspired all those he met and worked with, but Al-Faqeeh has suffered greatly for it. On more than one occasion he was threatened by Israeli officials for his involvement in popular struggle, severely limiting his movements for fear of arrest. This fear was realised on the 9th of December, when he was arrested and imprisoned by the Israeli military, joining 8,000 other Palestinian political prisoners like him.
Upon his arrest Al-Faqeeh was taken to Huwara Detention Centre and transferred the following day to Jelemeh Prison in Haifa ,where he is now held. This is illegal under the IV Geneva Convention, which outlaws the transfer of prisoners from occupied territory to the state of the occupying force. He has been held for over a month under interrogation without charge, on the basis of Israeli officials’ alleged possession of secret evidence against him. His court date was finally announced on January 12, summoning him to appear before Salim military court in the northern West Bank on January 19.
4 other grassroots activists from seized in raids on their homes in Nablus the same night, including Mayasar Itiany and her brother Abdul-Nasser Itiany, both active in prisoners rights organisations, and Mussa Salama who is involved in the Labour Committee of Medical Relief for Workers. Abdul-Nasser Itiany has since been placed under administrative detention, a fate often reserved for Palestinian activists for whom investigators cannot gather sufficient evidence to make a specific charge.
Abdullah Abu Ramah, head of Bil’in’s Popular Committee Against the Wall & Settlements, was seized by Israeli forces the night after the arrest of Al-Faqeeh. The international exposure and support gained as a result of Bil’in’s peaceful demonstrations against the illegal Apartheid Wall have culminated in a violent backlash on the supporters of the village’s popular struggle and the arrest of several of its leaders. Several other high profile Palestinian activists have been targeted in recent months, including the arrest and detainment of Jamal Juma’, head of Stop The Wall campaign and the administrative detention of Mohammad Othman, a youth co-ordinator for Stop The Wall. Othman’s case was similar to Al-Faqeeh’s in the prelude to his trial, his interrogation period spanning a significant length (2 months) and being held on the basis of secret evidence, unaccessible to Othman or hiw lawyers. Key players in the demonstrations and popular struggle in the villages of Ni’lin and Al-Masara have been subject to night raids, arrest and detainment in recent months also.
Almost all prisoners in Israel’s jails face some form of torture or mistreament during their arrest and detention. Their conditions of detention are extremely poor, and in some cases, life-threatening. Al-Faqeeh urgently requires medical attention, his lawyer reporting that his physical condition has worsened considerably during his detention as he suffers from high blood pressure and painful mouth ulcers. Prisoners report that provision of medical treatment is often used as another form of coercion against them by the prison authorities. When administered treatment is woefully inadequate, with Acamol (the Israeli version of aspirin) generally being the only form of medicine issued to detainees.
Arbitrary detention by Israel of human rights defenders is immoral, illegal and must be stopped. Messengers of peace such as Al-Faqeeh pose no threat to Israel: his ability to mobilize and inspire oppressed Palestinians only endangers the Israeli occupation by exposing the regime’s brutal and oppressive nature.
As part of a recent surge in popular protest in the West Bank, about 300 demonstrators occupied and blocked the main road in near the Halamish settlement for over two hours. The demonstrators, twenty of which were injured by rubber-coated bullets, protested recent land grabs.
About 300 people took to the street today in the West Bank village of Nabbi Saleh, north-west of Ramallah, in protest of recent land grab by the adjacent Jewish-only settlement of Halamish. The protesters occupied and blocked the main street leading to the settlement, and amidst clouds of tear gas and whizzing rubber-coated bullets, managed to hold it for over two hours. A group of demonstrators also managed to reach the area that was recently taken over by settlers.
Settlers who came down from Halamish threw stones and shot live rounds of demonstrators. Soldiers who were present took no actions to stop them. Following the demonstration the army invaded Nabbi Salleh, where clashes ensued.
Twenty of Nabbi Saleh’s residents were struck by rubber-coated bullets, and dozens suffered from tear gas inhalation.
Bassem Tamimi, one organizers of the demonstration said that “For three weeks we have been prevented from reaching our land for because of the settlers who occupied it. In any reasonable place, we would be allowed to just drive them out by force, but they have the army on their side even though the law is on our side. Under the occupation we are not even allowed to merely protest”.
Demonstrations were also held today in N’ilin, Bil’in – where a journalist and a demonstrator were lightly injured, and in alMaasara where the army invaded the village.
Gaza Freedom Marchers approved today a declaration aimed at accelerating the global campaign for Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) against Israeli Apartheid.
Roughly 1400 activists from 43 countries converged in Cairo on their way to Gaza to join with Palestinians marching to break Israel’s illegal siege. They were prevented from entering Gaza by the Egyptian authorities.
As a result, the Freedom Marchers remained in Cairo. They staged a series of nonviolent actions aimed at pressuring the international community to end the siege as one step in the larger struggle to secure justice for Palestinians throughout historic Palestine.
This declaration arose from those actions:
End Israeli Apartheid
Cairo Declaration
January 1, 2010
We, international delegates meeting in Cairo during the Gaza Freedom March 2009 in collective response to an initiative from the South African delegation, state:
In view of:
Israel’s ongoing collective punishment of Palestinians through the illegal occupation and siege of Gaza;
the illegal occupation of the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, and the continued construction of the illegal Apartheid Wall and settlements;
the new Wall under construction by Egypt and the US which will tighten even further the siege of Gaza;
the contempt for Palestinian democracy shown by Israel, the US, Canada, the EU and others after the Palestinian elections of 2006;
the war crimes committed by Israel during the invasion of Gaza one year ago;
the continuing discrimination and repression faced by Palestinians within Israel;
and the continuing exile of millions of Palestinian refugees;
all of which oppressive acts are based ultimately on the Zionist ideology which underpins Israel;
in the knowledge that our own governments have given Israel direct economic, financial, military and diplomatic support and allowed it to behave with impunity;
and mindful of the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous People (2007)
We reaffirm our commitment to:
Palestinian Self-Determination
Ending the Occupation
Equal Rights for All within historic Palestine
The full Right of Return for Palestinian refugees
We therefore reaffirm our commitment to the United Palestinian call of July 2005 for Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) to compel Israel to comply with international law.
To that end, we call for and wish to help initiate a global mass, democratic anti-apartheid movement to work in full consultation with Palestinian civil society to implement the Palestinian call for BDS.
Mindful of the many strong similarities between apartheid Israel and the former apartheid regime in South Africa, we propose:
An international speaking tour in the first 6 months of 2010 by Palestinian and South African trade unionists and civil society activists, to be joined by trade unionists and activists committed to this programme within the countries toured, to take mass education on BDS directly to the trade union membership and wider public internationally;
Participation in the Israeli Apartheid Week in March 2010;
A systematic unified approach to the boycott of Israeli products, involving consumers, workers and their unions in the retail, warehousing, and transportation sectors;
Developing the Academic, Cultural and Sports boycott;
Campaigns to encourage divestment of trade union and other pension funds from companies directly implicated in the Occupation and/or the Israeli military industries;
Legal actions targeting the external recruitment of soldiers to serve in the Israeli military, and the prosecution of Israeli government war criminals; coordination of Citizen’s Arrest Bureaux to identify, campaign and seek to prosecute Israeli war criminals; support for the Goldstone Report and the implementation of its recommendations;
Campaigns against charitable status of the Jewish National Fund (JNF).
We appeal to organisations and individuals committed to this declaration to sign the declaration and work with us to make it a reality.
New Year's in Gaza is time to honor the dead. (Eva Bartlett)
For many survivors of the last Israeli war on Gaza, time has not healed their wounds, physical or emotional.
Halil Amal Samouni, 10, still suffers vision problems in her right eye. The shrapnel remaining in her head causes her constant pain and she is unable to concentrate at school.
Her concentration is broken, also, by memories of her martyred father and younger brother, both of whom she saw shot dead at close range by Israeli soldiers during the 2008-2009 winter war on Gaza.
The name Samouni has become well known for the high number of martyrs in the extended family, and for the brutality with which many victims were killed, the Israeli army’s prevention of medical access to the injured, and the thorough and systematic destruction of homes, farms, and civilian infrastructure in the Zeitoun district in eastern Gaza, and all throughout Gaza.
In the wake of Israeli tanks, bulldozers, warplanes and Apache helicopters, the once tree-laden area was left a muddy pitch of rutted earth and tree stumps. Chicken farms were destroyed, along with plastic greenhouses, farm equipment, water piping, and the tens of homes, agricultural buildings and the local mosque.
Many of the remaining houses were taken as military positions, sniper holes bored through walls, soldiers’ excrement, clothing, spent ammunition and food provisions were routinely left among the trashed belongings of the house. Hate graffiti was found throughout homes in the Samouni neighborhood and all over Gaza.
Most horrifying was the targeted shooting of the family — including children — and the deliberate shelling of homes they had been forced into by Israeli soldiers.
Amal Samouni was among the least fortunate of survivors.
When Israeli soldiers came to her home early on 4 January, they shot her father Atiyeh dead at close range, then fired continuously into the room full of family members. Amal’s younger brother Ahmed, 4, was seriously injured by the shooting. Denied medical care, he died the following morning, roughly ten hours after Israeli soldiers prevented medical rescuers from entering the area.
“They killed my dad and my brother. They destroyed our house,” Amal says simply. She has told her story to journalists many times. “But it hasn’t done any good, nothing has changed.”
Zeinat Samouni, Amal’s widowed mother, shows the single room her family of eight are crammed into, cracked asbestos tiling covering the roof.
“The roof leaks. We put plastic jugs on the floor to catch the water,” she says. “And because we can’t buy cooking gas, we cook over a fire instead.”
Aside from their physical discomfort, it is memories of the massacre and fear of a new attack that trouble them.
“I was terrified he would choke,” she says, gesturing to a child she holds. “He was only a few weeks old at the time.”
She recounts the trauma of having another child die in her arms, seeing him shelved in an overcrowded mortuary freezer, and all the while desperately wondering whether Amal was still alive.
“Even now, I’m still so afraid for my children, afraid that another war will come. The UAVs (unmanned drones) are always over us, and often at night the helicopters come.”
In northern Gaza’s Ezbet Beit Hanoun, families and friends of the Abd al-Dayem and Abu Jerrad families gather on 26 December, holding a candlelight vigil in remembrance of their sons, wives and husbands killed during a series of Israeli flechette (dart-bomb) attacks a year back.
The first to be killed in that area of Gaza by the razor-sharp nails was medic Arafa Abd al-Dayem, 35, on the morning of 4 January. Along with other medics, Abd al-Dayem had been on duty in the Attatra region, in Gaza’s north, retrieving wounded and martyred. As the medics loaded the ambulance, Israeli soldiers fired a flechette shell at the clearly marked vehicle, spreading thousands of darts at high velocity. Abd al-Dayem died an agonizing death, his internal organs and lungs shredded by the darts.
Khalid Abu Saada, a medic and the driver of the ambulance, testified to the Palestinian Centre for Human Rights: “The shell directly hit the ambulance and 10 civilians, including the two paramedics, were injured.”
The following morning, the Abd al-Dayem family and friends gathered at a funeral tent erected for Arafa. Israeli tanks again fired flechette shells, striking the gathering multiple times, killing five at the tent, one down the road, and injuring at least 25.
“The pain is still fresh, I still can’t move on since my sons’ murders,” said Sabbah Abd al-Dayem, mother of two martyrs in their twenties.
Jamal Abd al-Dayem, father of the young men, recalls: “It was clearly a mourning house, on the road, open and visible. Immediately after the first strike, the Israelis fired again. I lost two sons. One of them was newly married, his wife eight months pregnant.”
Said Abd al-Dayem, 29, died of dart injuries to his head one day later in hospital. Nafez Abd al-Dayem, 23, died immediately from the darts to his head.
Nahez Abd al-Dayem, 25, survived but retains two darts in his abdomen, one in his chest, with only the dart in his leg removed. Islam Abd al-Dayem, 16, a cousin, died after three days in hospital from the darts to his neck. Arafat Abd al-Dayem, 15, a cousin, died instantly.
Human rights organizations like Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, Physicians for Human Rights, and B’Tselem, among others, have criticized Israel’s use of flechette bombs in civilian areas in densely populated Gaza, where the darts have a “wide kill radius,” and indiscriminately target civilians.
Wafa Abu Jerrad, who was 21 and pregnant, lived down the street from the mourning tents. She was with her husband Muhammad, their two children, and relatives outside their house when Israeli soldiers fired the dart bombs.
Muhammad Abu Jerrad was stepping into the doorway, their two-year-old son Khalil in his arms, when the bomb hit. Wafa dropped to ground, struck by flechettes in the head, chest and back. She was killed instantly.
Sitting outside his family’s tent in the Attatra region, Saleh Abu Leila says, “Everything I worked for is gone.”
Since their two-story home was destroyed by Israeli soldiers during the war on Gaza, Abu Leila and 13 other family members have crowded into two small tents. During the summer, they sweltered in stifling heat. Now that winter is setting in, they are struggling to keep warm and dry.
Over 21,000 houses were destroyed or seriously damaged during the 23 days of Israeli attacks throughout Gaza that finally ended 18 January.
Since the end of the Israeli war on Gaza, Israeli authorities continue to block entry to cement and other necessary building materials. Glass, along with wood, piping and many other items, is considered potentially dangerous by Israeli authorities. The bomb-blasted windows of homes and buildings remain un-repaired one year later; the luckier families making due with plastic sheeting.
A small portion of Gaza’s 1.5 million people can afford to buy the overpriced, poor-quality cement smuggled in through the tunnels running between Gaza and Egypt. For those hardest hit, however, this is out of reach.
Hundreds of families, like the Attars, still remain in substandard shelters, insufficient for winter cold and rains.
Many Gazans do not welcome the New Year, they fear what it will bring.
