A German national and an Italian national were taken by Israeli forces while accompanying farmers at 11am. Both individuals have been taken to the police station at Kyrat Arba. Palestinian farmers in At-Tuwani rely on the presence of International and Israeli human rights workers to mitigate violence from settlers.
As soldiers in the area frequently ignore settler violence and rarely interfere to protect the farmers, international volunteers provide support for the Palestinians. The grazing action began around 8.30 am, and the German and Italian nationals were arrested at 11am.
At-Tuwani is a village of 300 Palestinians located in South Hebron Hills. Residents make their living through farming, primarily wheat, barley, olives and grazing sheep. At-Tuwani is also one of several villages under daily threat from extremist settlers living in the area. Palestinians in the South Hebron Hills are daily nonviolently resisting settlement expansion and violence at the hands of settlers and soldiers.
Internationals accompany Palestinians as they perform agricultural work on their land and in other nonviolent demonstrations. Internationals accompany Palestinians as they work their land, use video to document settlers, soldiers, and police, and intervene as Palestinians request.
Saffa, a village sandwiched between Sourif and Beit Ommar and home to just over 2000 residents, has been the site of overwhelming Israeli military and now settler violence in the last week. Using the death of a teenaged settler on April 2 as a precursor (there has been no evidence that he was killed by someone from Saffa or the nearby villages) the Israeli military has been invading Saffa, declaring curfews, searching homes and otherwise harassing the residents of the entire village in acts of blatant collective punishment for several days. Roadblocks were erected in several different places on April 3 and three homes were taken over by Israeli soldiers, allegedly to ‘protect’ the Palestinian residents from anticipated violence from right-wing extremist settlers from nearby Beit ‘Ayn.
These soldiers left a few days later and shortly after, on April 6, approximately 1 dozen settlers walked down from Beit ‘Ayn onto the agricultural land of Saffa and Beit Ommar. Residents from both villages went out to the land and the settlers quickly retreated back to the settlement. Soldiers arrived en masse, and, as was expected, they began to shoot tear gas and rubber-coated steel bullets at the Palestinian residents who had come to protect their land. No one was injured at the time, but settlers were expected to return.
Today, April 8, just after 6am, more than 50 settlers, some of them armed, again entered the land of Saffa and began shooting and throwing stones at nearby Palestinian homes. Though soldiers are stationed next door in Eztion settlement, they did nothing to stop the attacks for quite some time. When they finally did arrive on the scene, they stood and watched as Israeli settlers continued to fire on the homes of Palestinians. A call over the local mosques in Beit Ommar and Sourif, both home to over 15,000 Palestinians, brought thousands of Palestinians out into the land to protect the residents of Saffa. Residents approached the edge of the settlement and began by sitting on the land facing the soldiers, preventing them from entering the village.
Soldiers then began attacking the Palestinians indiscriminately, shooting 11 with live ammunition, including one, Tha’er ‘Aadi, in the neck. He is currently in critical condition in a hospital in Ramallah. The other 10 were shot in the legs and arms and were treated in the hospital in Hebron. Additionally, more than a dozen were shot with rubber-coated steel bullets throughout the 10 hours of military incursion. The use of live ammunition, even when less lethal forms of weaponry was available, against unarmed Palestinians has been an ever increasing concern for the residents of Beit Ommar, who had seen two teenagers killed and two teens in critical condition in the last year after being shot with live ammunition.
This morning, the farmers from Al-Faraheen in the Gaza Strip persisted with their efforts to harvest the year’s crop of lentils. Volunteers with the International Solidarity Movement, and a camera crew from Press TV accompanied the farmers as they set out to work in a field about 300m from the border.
Before the farmers reached the field, an Israeli jeep stopped next to the border fence several hundred metres away. A number of shots were fired in the direction of the farmers before the jeep drove away.
After an hour as the farmers were about to finish their work, another jeep stopped at the border. Soldiers got out and took up firing positions. An ISM volunteer then spoke to them with a megaphone – informing the soldiers that they were all civilians, and requesting that the soldiers did not open fire.
The soldiers then fired several shots at the farming group. The proximity of some of these shots to the farmers was marked by an audible hiss and crack as they ripped through the air past their heads. At this point the farmers decided to leave.
Caoimhe Butterly from the ISM and the Free Gaza Movement said “Today’s action was further evidence of the systematic attacks that border farming communities face. Yet despite this, to sustain their families, farmers must put their lives at risk every day in order to cultivate their land. These acts of popular resistance demand our support. There needs to be continual support in the form of sustained campaigning and action on the issue.”
The Israeli military is attempting to enforce a no-go zone on the Palestinian side of the border. As part of this ongoing project, and in addition to shooting at the communities that live and work in the area, the Israeli military has destroyed large swathes of olive groves, orchards, and other arable land, and hundreds of homes.
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.
