Category: Gaza

Israeli navy kidnaps two Palestinian children and uncle fishing in Gazan waters

by Radhika S.

12 November 2011 | International Solidarity Movement, Gaza

Mohamed and Abdul Qader Baker – Click here for more images

Seventeen-year-old Abdul Qader Baker still has no idea why the Israeli navy surrounded his small fishing boat at 4 a.m. Thursday morning, ordered him, his 17-year-old cousin Mohamed Baker, and his uncle, Arafat Baker, to strip off their clothes, stand shivering in their underwear for an hour and a half and ultimately forced the group to Ashod.  The two high school students were released approximately twelve hours later, but their uncle remains in Israeli detention.

“I was so scared and it was so cold,” Abdul Qader reported.  After the Israeli navy ordered the group to take off their clothes, Abdul Qader stated that “for two hours I had to stand, not moving, while [Israeli] snipers pointed their guns at me.”

Abdul Qader and Mohamed are in the twelfth grade, and often help their families fish when there’s a school holiday, as was the case on Thursday.  According to Abdul Qader,“[w]e went to retrieve the nets we had dropped and then suddenly I saw the Israeli gun boat in front of us, shining a big light into our boat.”

While the Israeli navy forced Mohamed and Arafat to jump into the sea, and swim towards the warship, Abdul Qader was told he could retrieve his fishing net and go home.  “But when I started taking up the net, the Israelis opened fire and told me to leave the net and jump in the water.”

On the gunboat, Mohamed and Abdul Qader reported being blindfolded until they reached the port of Ashdod.   “They took me to the harbor and when they removed my blindfold, I saw 40 soldiers. I was afraid and terrified,” added Mohamed. At Ashod, Mohamed was examined by a doctor, while an Israeli soldier photographed him.

Israeli authorities subsequently placed metal cuffs on the hands and feet of the two boys and eventually transferred them to Erez where they interrogated them for several hours.

At Erez, Israeli soldiers placed Mohamed and Abdul Qader in separate rooms and showed them various maps of Gaza, asking them to identify their houses and the names of their uncles and brothers.  The Israelis also asked both boys to identify Hamas training locations, where Hamas people lived, were asked about a monument to the 9 Turks killed by the Israeli navy on the Mavi Marmara in 2010, whether the prisoners released in the recent exchange were staying at a particular hotel in Gaza City, and about open spaces used for a playground and a fish farm.

Israeli authorities released the boys at around 5 p.m. Their uncle, 28-year-old Arafat Baker, is still detained.  “I have no idea why they arrested me,” said Abdul Qader. “I didn’t cross the 3-mile line,” he added referring to the fishing limit Israel has imposed on Palestinian fishermen in Gaza.  “The Israelis are criminals. This is no way to treat human beings. It took me hours to stand on my feet [because of the cold], I couldn’t move my leg.”  Abdul Qader added,“I don’t know yet if I will go fishing again. I need time to mentally recover from this.”

Abdul Qader’s right side and chest still hurt due to hours of standing in the cold and being forced into the sea. Israeli authorities did not permit the boys to call their families or an attorney, nor did they ever tell the boys why they had been detained or what laws they were alleged to have violated.

Palestinian Scouts welcome exiled prisoner to Gaza

by Joe Catron

12 November 2011 | International Solidarity Movement, Gaza

Christian al-Bandak – Click here for more images

Palestinian Scouts and their families rallied in the Gaza YMCA Friday afternoon to honor former political prisoner Christian Al-Bandak and welcome him to Gaza.

Al-Bandak, who donned a Scout neckerchief to receive a commemorative plaque, is one of 477 prisoners already released by Israel in its ongoing exchange of prisoners with the Palestinian government in Gaza.

After sentencing Al-Bandak to four lifetimes in its occupation prisons in 2003, Israel illegally exiled him to the Gaza Strip from his home in Bethlehem following his release, along with over 160 other West Bank residents.

The only Christian among the released prisoners, he had remained behind in Gaza while most others traveled from it, the West Bank, Israel, or foreign exile to Mecca, Saudi Arabia for the Muslim Hajj.

“People were here of different ages, religions, and parties,” Al-Bandak said after the event. “This illustrates the unity and patriotism of the Palestinian people. My welcome in Gaza has been excellent.”

Remembrance in Beit Hanoun

by Nathan Stuckey

9 November 2011 | International Solidarity Movement, Gaza

It is Tuesday, the third day of Eid, the Eid of the Sacrifice.  We, the Beit Hanoun Local Initiative and the International Solidarity Movement, have gathered near the bombed remains of the Beit Hanoun Agricultural College like we do every Tuesday in preparation for our march into the no go zone.  This Tuesday is different though, we are not gathered on the road that leads into the no go zone, but behind the bombed buildings of the College.  Like much of Palestine, history is densely packed, every place has a story, today, we would learn the story of this small area.   Today marks the five year anniversary of the Beit Hanoun massacre.  Before us, lie the graves of its victims.

On November 8, 2006 at six in the morning the Israeli army began shelling Beit Hanoun.  The shells landed on the houses of the A’athamnah and the Kafarnah families.  Not just one shell, the shelling continued for fifteen minutes.  Round after round fell on their houses.  Nineteen people were killed, nine children, four women and six men.  The youngest was only a baby of a couple of months, the oldest a 73 year old woman.  Forty more people were injured.  They were all civilians, not even the Israeli army bothers to claim that they were armed; they were sleeping in their beds.

The graves are just off the road, just behind the Agricultural College.  They are large; each of them contains several bodies, large gray slabs of concrete with names and prayers inscribed on them.  Abu Issa, from the Beit Hanoun Local Initiative speaks; he prays for the dead and asks us to remember the past.  This massacre is barely the past though; it is almost the present, even if forgotten in so much of the world.  His words end, as they must, on the present, “we did not ask for the occupation, we have always lived here, it came to us, but we cannot accept it, we must continue the struggle until the occupation ends.”   We hang a wreath next to the first grave.

We walk slowly down the row of graves; Abu Issa reads us the names of the dead.  We reach the grave of Maisa, age six.  I cannot help but look away, for I have my own Maisa, who was also six in 2006.  She isn’t my daughter, she is my English student.  He name is Maisa Samouni.  Twenty nine members of her extended family were murdered in much the same way by the Israeli army, herded into a house by soldiers, and then the house was shelled by the IDF.  I wonder what this Miaisa would look like today, would she be as smart and kind and beautiful as my Maisa?  As we reach the end of the graves we come to the graves that have been destroyed, destroyed by Israeli bulldozers in subsequent invasions of Gaza.

We turn away from the graves and look toward the border.  At the concrete towers which line it, full of snipers and computer controlled guns which kill at will.  Abu Issa begins to tell us about the area that we see in front of us.  It was here that the men of Beit Hanoun were imprisoned during the first week of November 2006.  Israeli forces had invaded Beit Hanoun; all males between the ages of 14 and 60 were rounded up and brought here.  For six days the slept in the open, in the cold, while the Israeli army took them for questioning.  Fifty three people were killed and over 200 injured during the invasion.  The day after Israeli forces withdrew; they fired the shells which would kill nineteen more, including Maisa.

After the memorial service we piled into the van and went to the east of Beit Hanoun to visit the Al Jareema family.  The Al Jareema’s are Bedouin family that lives right next to the no go zone.  They have not always lived there, the used to live in 1948, but they were expelled by the Zionists during the Nakba, them and 750,000 other Palestinians.  They settled in Gaza.  They lived right next to the border, their houses used to be 50 meters from the border.  Then, the Israeli’s decided to impose the buffer zone on Gaza, the family received a notice that they must move.  There was no appeal.  Israeli bulldozers came and destroyed their houses.  They destroyed the pens for the animals.  They destroyed the groves of trees that used to thrive in the no go zone.

Now, the family lives in a collection of tents and shacks about 500 meters from the border.  As you look toward the border you see a particularly large gray tower, it is from this tower that the Israeli army shoots at them.  They have nowhere to go, so they stay living here, surviving as best they can on the land that Israel has not seized.  We bring them sweets to celebrate Eid, they serve us tea and freshly made bread.  They ask us to stay for lunch, but we must go, there is a wedding going on in Beit Hanoun.  Life continues.  I pray that the children of the new couple grow up in a more just world, in a free Palestine.  This is what we struggle for.

Freedom Waves prisoners abused and imprisoned; ‘Anonymous’ hackers strike back

by Ben Lorber

7 November 2011 | Mondoweiss

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QNxi2lV0UM0

In the immediate aftermath of the illegal capture of the Freedom Waves flotillas, Israel’s public image has been tarnished, as reports of violence at sea surface to counteract its claims of a peaceful takeover, and as human rights cyber-resistance group Anonymous retaliates by shutting down Israeli government web sites.

As Israeli naval soldiers boarded the Tahrir and Saoirse Friday afternoon, the IDF released a statement saying that the ships were intercepted peacefully, and that no activists were harmed in the takeover. In addition, in an attempt to portray its own reasonable benevolence, the IDF released a video of soldiers contacting the ship and offering to reroute its humanitarian aid by land or through Ashdod, shortly before releasing another video which seemed to show Israeli soldiers peacefully and non-threateningly boarding one of the flotillas.

When Egyptian journalist Lina Attalah, an activist aboard the Tahrir, wrote an account of Israel’s seizure of the boats after her release on Saturday, however, the world began to see a different picture.  “Towards the early afternoon,” she said, “we saw three Israeli warships in the horizon… Soon after, the Israeli presence in the waters around us intensified. We counted at least 15 ships, four of which were warships, and the rest a mix of smaller boats and water cannons. From inside the smaller boats, dozens of Israeli soldiers pointed their machines guns at us. This is when our communications system was jammed and we lost contact with the world…the Israelis sent radio messages to our boat, asking us to stop sailing because they would board the boat and take us to the Israeli port of Ashdod. When our boat refused to surrender, they aimed their canons at us, showering us with salty water. The boat had become highly unstable and panic was in the air… Israeli ships hit our boat and soldiers started boarding. Dozens of masked soldiers screamed “on your knees,” and “hands up.””

The violent nature of Israel’s takeover of the Tahrir and Saoirse became more apparent with a statement released mid-Sunday by Fintan Lane, the National Coordinator of the Irish Ship Saoirse, in a hurried phone call made from an Israeli prison. “The whole takeover [of the Saoirse by Israeli naval authorities] took about three hours”, claims Lane. “It began with Israeli forces hosing down the boats with high pressure hoses and pointing guns at the passengers through the windows. I was hosed down the stairs of the boat. Windows were smashed and the bridge of the boat nearly caught fire. The boats were corralled to such an extent that the two boats, the Saoirse and the Tahrir, collided with each other and were damaged, with most of the damage happening to the MV Saoirse.  The boats nearly sank. The method used in the takeover was dangerous to human life.”

The same day, Saoirse activist Paul Murphy, Socialist Party and United Left Alliance MEP for Dublin, related in a 3-minute phone call, monitored by Israeli prison authorities, that “our boat was almost sunk by the manner in which it was approached and boarded by the Israeli navy. People were shackled and deprived of all personal belongings. In Givon  prison the authorities tried to disorientate us through sleep deprivation and the removal of our watches and the prison clock recording the wrong time. We have been given no time frame as to how long we will be kept here before the deportation trial. We were denied our right by Israeli law to contact our families within 24 hours of our arrest.”

Also on Sunday, Greek captain of the Tahrir Giorgos Klontzas, after his release from jail, told Greek Omnia TV that during interrogation, Israeli forces handcuffed him tightly and stuck fingers in his eyes.

The clearest testament to the abuse suffered by the activists at the hands of the Israeli military has come from Canadian activist David Heap, in a letter smuggled out of his prison cell.  “I write to you from cell 9, block 59 Givon Prison near Ramla in Occupied Palestine”, the letter stated. “Although I was tasered during the assault on the Tahrir, and bruised during forcible removal dockside (I am limping slightly as a result) I am basically ok… [we] were transported in handcuffs and leg shackles…[we have created] a political prisoners’ committee in order to press our collective demands- association in the block, i.e. open cells; adequate writing and reading material; free communication with outside world- i.e. regular phone calls; [and] information about shipmate women held at same prison”. In response to the shortage of information regarding the female activists currently behind bars, the Women’s Organisation for Political Prisoners (WOFPP) offered Sunday night to send a lawyer free of charge to visit the female prisoners.

As reports of Israeli military violence leaked throughout the weekend, an international group of hackers named Anonymous released a video threatening retaliation against “a clear sign of piracy on the high seas.” The ‘Open Letter from Anonymous to the Government of Israel’ was pointed in its critique- “your actions”, it claimed, “are illegal, against democracy, human rights, international and maritime laws”, and an example of “justifying war, murder, illegal interception and pirate-like activities under an illegal cover of defense” which “will not go unnoticed by us or the people of the world”. Anonymous, which has temporarily disabled many web sites in past publicized acts of moral retribution, further threatened that “if you continue blocking humanitarian vessels to Gaza or repeat the dreadful actions of May 31st 2010 against any Gaza Freedom Flotillas, you will leave us no choice but to strike back, again and again, until you stop….we do not forget, we do not forgive. Expect us.”

A day later, Haaretz reported that “the websites of the IDF, Mossad and the Shin Bet security services were down”, likely due to an Anonymous cyber-attack. Hours later, however, the Israeli government released a statement on Facebook claiming that the websites were down “due to a systematic malfunction of the servers”, denying that Anonymous was behind the crash1. It is highly unlikely, however, for this shutdown to follow so soon after Anonymous’s threat as a matter of pure coincidence.

As the international community rises in condemnation of Israel’s illegal takeover of a ship in international waters, 21 of the 27 activists captured by Israel remain in prison awaiting deportation, and the whereabouts of one, PressTV journalist Hassan Ghani, remains unknown. The Irish activists have refused representation by a lawyer in the Israeli court system, on the grounds that they do not acknowledge the legitimacy of Israel’s legal system. In addition, they refuse to sign a waiver which would forfeit their claim to legal representation before a judge and allow for their immediate deportation, because the offered waiver claims that they came to Israel voluntarily and entered illegally, statements which are patently untrue in light of the fact that Israeli naval boats seized the activists from the Tahrir and Saoirse, and forcibly transported them to Ashdod. They will therefore, according to Israeli law, be detained for 72 hours and then brought to court, where they will almost certainly be deported- though, because they refused to sign the waiver, the deportation will occur without their consent.

As Israel unsuccessfully attempts to save face in the aftermath of its illegal and violent seizure of innocent civilians on a humanitarian aid mission in international waters, the international community once again bears witness to the fact that, in the words of a Saturday press release by the Canada Boat to Gaza team, “there is no legal justification for stopping or in any way impeding the passage of the totally peaceful Freedom Waves boats from the international solidarity movement with Palestinian people”. What is clear to all, in spite of Israeli repression, is that the recent aid mission is only the first of many Freedom Waves bound for Gaza’s shore. “Whatever the Israeli Occupation Forces do to us,” said David Heap and Ehab Lotayef, steering committee members of the Tahrir, from behind Israeli prison bars, “this flotilla marks the launching of the Freedom Waves. It is the continuation of many efforts over the years to bring the plight of Gaza and Palestine to the world’s attention. We will keep coming again and again, until the closure of Gaza is ended and Palestinians have been able to achieve liberation and justice… Expect us. Again and again. The Freedom Waves are just beginning.”

Ben Lorber is an activist with the International Solidarity Movement in Nablus. He is also a journalist with the Alternative Information Center in Bethlehem. He blogs at freepaly.wordpress.com.

Nasr Ibrahim Alean was murdered by Israel Thursday

by Nathan Stuckey

7 November 2011 | International Solidarity Movement, Gaza

Nasr Ibrahim Alean

Nasr Ibrahim Alean was a 23 year old farmer from Beit Lahia.  He was murdered on November 3, 2011.  He was picking strawberries in his field when he was shot in the leg by the Israeli army.  He called his friend Muhammad Abu Helmeyyah, 22 years old, to help him.  Muhammed tried to take him to safety, but they were both killed by a missile from an Apache helicopter.  Nasr was not the first farmer in Gaza murdered by the IDF, and he will probably not be the last.

When Nasr was killed he was working in a field 500 meters from the border.  Outside of the Israeli imposed “buffer zone” which is in reality a 300 meter zone of death that surrounds Gaza.  This isn’t uncommon; the high risk area around the border extends as far as one or two kilometers according to the UN.  Nasr knew that he risked his life when he went to work, but he had no choice.  He needed money to get married, and working on the land was the only work that he could find.  Gaza is under siege, and unemployment is rife.  Not only are many imports banned, but most exports are banned as well.

We set in the mourning tent talking with Nasr’s family, hearing their stories, seeing their pictures of Nasser.  A cousin showed us a video of them picking up the body.  There was a giant hole in his head.  They tell us that Israel did not allow the Red Cross to pick up the body immediately; it sat for several hours, until finally the ambulances came.  Too late, Nasr was already dead.  Muhammad was already dead.  They told us worse stories, of bodies that no one was allowed to pick up for ups, bodies that the IDF left to rot, everyone forbidden to claim them.

Nasr’s brother was getting married in two days.  One of his aunt’s heard the story as she had her eyebrows done in preparation for the wedding.  She says of him, “He wasn’t in the resistance, he was just trying to work,” and continues “They don’t even want us to work. If it wasn’t for the United Nations, I don’t know what we would do.”  His uncle tells us about how he used to work in Israel.  He worked as a driver.  One day a woman got in with her young child.  She abused him in front of the child.  He asks, “How can people who abuse you in front of their children teach their children about peace?”  He doesn’t seem to have much hope.  They talk of going to human rights organizations to complain about Nasr’s murder, but they do not really believe that they will help.   Nasr hadn’t given up though, he went to pick strawberries on Thursday because he wanted to live, because he wanted to get married and have children and a house of his own.