Israeli police today shot dead a Palestinian driver they said had tried to attack them during the demolition of a Palestinian home in Jerusalem.
The driver was shot at a roadblock set up by border police in Sur Bahir, a district on the city’s Arab eastern side. A police spokesman described him as a “terrorist”. Three officers were injured.
The incident came after police had begun the partial demolition of a house belonging to Husam Dweiyat, a Palestinian who drove a bulldozer down a busy Jerusalem road last July, ramming a bus and crushing cars, and killing three Israelis, before he was shot dead.
At the time police described it as a terrorist attack, although the man’s lawyer later said the bulldozer driver had been mentally ill. Dweiyat did not appear to have belonged to any armed Palestinian groups.
There have since been two similar bulldozer attacks in Jerusalem.
Last month, Israel’s supreme court rejected an appeal against the proposed demolition of the house and said it could go ahead. Israeli authorities had long argued that demolishing the homes of attackers discouraged further attacks, although the policy changed in 2005 when a military commission argued that it caused more harm than benefit. This demolition was the first since.
Armed police watched as the top floors of the stone house were knocked to the ground. Parts of the house were left standing but sealed with concrete.
Israel’s leading human rights group, B’Tselem, said the demolitions were forbidden by international humanitarian law and constituted “collective punishment”. It said between October 2001 and January 2005 – at the height of the second intifada or Palestinian uprising – Israel demolished 664 houses under the deterrent policy, leaving 4,182 Palestinians homeless.
Israeli forces imposed collective punishment on the village of Saffa, following an axe attack in a nearby settlement that left a Settler child dead and another injured. At around 1:30pm, dozens of soldiers entered the village, declaring a 24-hour curfew and preventing residents from leaving their homes. Israeli authorities have said that the military operation was in response to the attack on the settler children, which occurred in the settlement of Bet Ayn, located adjacent to Saffa. However, the Fourth Geneva Convention prohibits acts of collective punishment against civilian populations.
After the curfew was declared in Saffa, Israeli forces began conducting several house-to-house searches. Hundreds of men, and boys over the age of 15, were forced into the village mosque where they were questioned by Israeli intelligence officers and had their ID cards checked. At this time, at least three villagers were placed under formal arrest and taken away in army jeeps. Several of the men detained in the mosque also had parts of their identification papers confiscated by soldiers, who never returned the documents. Israeli jeeps periodically drove through Saffa and the nearby village of Beit Omar, firing tear gas and rubber bullets. Dozens of Palestinian youth resisted the army incursion, at times responding to the invasion by throwing stones at the jeeps.
Military bulldozer builds roadblock on road to Saffa
Soldiers occupy residences
Roadblock on Saffa road
Soldiers patrol the streets
Army jeeps enforce curfew
Soldiers occupy Palestinian homes
The army also took up position in three village residences, in two cases forcing their inhabitants to leave the house altogether without their possessions. Israeli flags were planted on the roofs of these houses. Several interiors of houses were damaged during the house searches. Soldiers occupying the houses told residents that they were positioning themselves in the village to protect Saffa from settler reprisals. Yet the curfew, road closures, arrests, house occupations, and military presence were clearly meant to punish the entire village for what happened to the two settler boys.
The Israeli army also used military bulldozers to close the roads leading into Saffa in at least three places. The villages of Beit Omar and Surif also experienced closures on their main roads in the form of earth mounds. The military gate at the entrance to Beit Omar remained closed for more than 24 hours. The closing of roads in these three villages affected around 30,000 residents. Additionally, several hours after the attack on the settlement, a checkpoint was installed on the main road between Bethlehem and Hebron, just in front of the village of Halhul. Traffic quickly backed up as hundreds of cars had to undergo security checks.
On the following day of 3 April, a large military presence still remained in Saffa, and most roads in the area continue to be closed. At around 9am, villagers removed an army earth mound between Beit Omar and Saffa. The army returned to build the roadblock again, only to clear the road a few hours later and build a new roadblock on another street. All three houses continued to be occupied by soldiers, though the residents who have been forced to leave their homes have been allowed to retrieve some of their personal belongings. Two taxi drivers in Beit Omar also had the keys to their cars taken by the military and not returned.
Tristan (38), is currently in Tel Hashomer hospital near Tel Aviv. To date, he has undergone 3 brain surgeries. During the first operation, part of Tristan’s right frontal lobe had to be removed, as it was penetrated by bone fragments. A brain fluid leakage was sealed using a tendon from his thigh, and his right eye suffered extensive damage. The long-term scope of Tristan’s injuries is yet unknown.
Tristan has been a social justice activist for many years. He grew up in Oakland, California, where he was introduced to activism at a young age. Over the past years, Tristan has been involved in numerous projects, including Food Not Bombs, a group that cooks for the homeless, and an operation committed to stopping the destruction of tree groves in Berkley California through sit-in demonstrations. He recently traveled to the West Bank to show solidarity with the Palestinian people.
As Tristan has been in intensive care for three weeks, it is certain that his recovery process is accompanied by mounting medical expenses. We ask that supporters around the world donate what they can to help pay for Tristan’s care. He is without medical insurance in the United States and will need substantial financial assistance to continue the long-term treatment that his injuries will require.
I don’t know if I met Tom Hurndall. He was one of a bunch of “human Tom Hurndallshields” who turned up in Baghdad just before the Anglo-American invasion in 2003, the kind of folk we professional reporters make fun of. Tree huggers, that kind of thing. Now I wish I had met him because – looking back over the history of that terrible war – Hurndall’s journals (soon to be published) show a remarkable man of remarkable principle. “I may not be a human shield,” he wrote at 10.26 on 17 March from his Amman hotel. “And I may not adhere to the beliefs of those I have travelled with, but the way Britain and America plan to take Iraq is unnecessary and puts soldiers’ lives above those of civilians. For that I hope that Bush and Blair stand trial for war crimes.”
Hurndall got it about right, didn’t he? It wasn’t so simple as war/no war, black and white, he wrote. “Things I’ve heard and seen over the last few weeks proves what I already knew; neither the Iraqi regime, nor the American or British, are clean. Maybe Saddam needs to go but … the air war that’s proposed is largely unnecessary and doesn’t discriminate between civilians and armed soldiers. Tens of thousands will die, maybe hundreds of thousands, just to save thousands of American soldiers having to fight honestly, hand to hand. It is wrong.” Oh, how many of my professional colleagues wrote like this on the eve of war? Not many.
We pooh-poohed the Hurndalls and their friends as groupies even when they did briefly enter the South Baghdad electricity station and met one engineer, Attiah Bakir, who had been horrifyingly wounded 11 years earlier when an American bomb blew a fragment of metal into his brain. “You can see now where it struck,” Hurndall wrote in an email from Baghdad, “caving in the central third of his forehead and removing the bone totally. Above the bridge of his broken nose, there is only a cavity with scarred skin covering the prominent gap…”
A picture of Attiah Bakir stares out of the book, a distinguished, brave man who refused to leave his place of work as the next war approached. He was silenced only when one of Hurndall’s friends made the mistake of asking what he thought of Saddam’s government. I cringed for the poor man. “Minders” were everywhere in those early days. Talking to any civilian was almost criminally foolish. Iraqis were forbidden from talking to foreigners. Hence all those bloody “minders” (many of whom, of course, ended up working for Baghdad journalists after Saddam’s overthrow).
Hurndall had a dispassionate eye. “Nowhere in the world have I ever seen so many stars as now in the western deserts of Iraq,” he wrote on 22 February. “How can somewhere so beautiful be so wrought with terror and war as it is soon to be?” In answer to the questions asked of them by the BBC, ITV, WBO, CNN, al-Jazeera and others, Hurndall had no single reply. “I don’t think there could be one, two or 100 responses,” he wrote. “To each of us our own, but not one of us wants to die.” Prophetic words for Tom to have written.
You can see him smiling selflessly in several snapshots. He went to cover the refugee complex at Al-Rowaishid and moved inexorably towards Gaza where he was confronted by the massive tragedy of the Palestinians. “I woke up at about eight in my bed in Jerusalem and lay in until 9.30,” he wrote. “We left at 10.00… Since then, I have been shot at, gassed, chased by soldiers, had sound grenades thrown within metres of me, been hit by falling debris…”
Hurndall was trying to save Palestinian homes and infrastructure but frequently came under Israeli fire and seemed to have lost his fear of death. “While approaching the area, they (the Israelis) continually fired one- to two-second bursts from what I could see was a Bradley fighting vehicle… It was strange that as we approached and the guns were firing, it sent shivers down my spine, but nothing more than that. We walked down the middle of the street, wearing bright orange, and one of us shouted through a loudspeaker, ‘We are International volunteers. Don’t shoot!’ That was followed by another volley of fire, though I can’t be sure where from…”
Tom Hurndall had stayed in Rafah. He was only 21 where – in his mother’s words – he lost his life through a single, selfless, human act. “Tom was shot in the head as he carried a single Palestinian child out of the range of an Israeli army sniper.” Mrs Hurndall asked me to write a preface to Tom’s book and this article is his preface, for a brave man who stood alone and showed more courage than most if us dreamed of. Forget tree huggers. Hurndall was one good man and true.
11:30am on Saturday, the 28th of March, Israeli forces violently dispersed a Hebron demonstration, firing tear gas and sound bombs and arresting one German solidarity activist.
More than 50 Palestinian residents of Hebron, supported by international and Israeli solidarity activists, were nonviolently rallying against the illegal Israeli settlements inside of Hebron’s old city. The demonstrators gathered near Beit Romano settlement, holding signs against the occupation and chanting, “free, free Palestine!”
Israeli soldiers and police responded by firing sound bombs and tear gas. At this time, the German solidarity activist was arrested and taken to the police station in Kiryat Arba. He was brought to court and released with conditions.
Knesset member Mohammad Barakeh was also present to speak in support of the demonstration, which was organized by the Youth Against Settlements group. Barakeh was tear gassed and pushed by Israeli forces as the rally was dispersed.
The Hebron demonstration also marked Land Day, which commemorates the massacre of six Palestinian citizens of Israel by Israeli authorities during demonstrations in the Galilee on March 30, 1976. Every year, Land Day is remembered all over Palestine with protests against the Israeli occupation.
Hundreds of illegal settlers are living in Hebron’s old city. Israeli road closures prevent Palestinian residents from accessing large areas of the old city, which remain under the direct control of the Israeli military.
