26th October 2015 | International Solidarity Movement, al-Khalil team| Hebron, occupied Palestine
This afternoon, Israeli forces executed a Palestinian young man in occupied al-Khalil (Hebron).
According to eye-witnesses at the scene, the man was walking towards a checkpoint in the vicinity of the Ibrahimi mosque. Israeli forces did not ask him to show his ID or even ask him to stop. Instead they just started shooting him when he was a few meters away from him. ‘There was no knife’, explains an eyewitness that does not want to be identified, ‘I heard four to five shots’. Even though an Israeli ambulance arrived at the scene shortly after, no medical attention was given to the youth. More ambulances kept coming to the scene, but still no first aid was administered. He was identified as 19-year old Saad Muhammad Youssef al-Atrash.
This is the second cold-blooded murder in the neighbourhood of the Ibrahimi mosque, after 17-year old Dania Arshid was gunned down by Israeli forces yesterday.
26th October 2015 | International Solidarity Movement, al-Khalil team| Hebron, occupied Palestine
Yesterday afternoon, Dania Arsheid, 17, was gunned down in cold blood and killed by Israeli forces in occupied al-Khalil (Hebron).
Dania was still wearing her school-uniform and school-bag, coming from school in the afternoon. Just twenty minutes before the incident, at a checkpoint leading to the Ibrahimi mosque, a female soldier was heard on the army-radio by passers-by announcing that she wanted “to kill a Palestinian person that day’.
Dania passed through the checkpoint leading from the Palestinian market to the Ibrahimi mosque, and a few meters further to the next checkpoint. She passed through the metal detector and gave her bag to the soldiers at the checkpoint. An eyewitness explains: “I saw with my own eyes, there was no knife – nothing.” According to eye-witnesses, soldiers then shot at her feet – at which point she immediately stepped back and raised her hands. That is when soldiers started shot her, according to witnesses, seven to eight times. While she lay on the ground bleeding from her neck, no first aid was given, not even the Israeli ambulance that arrived after about twenty minutes gave any medical help. A Palestinian Red Crescent ambulance was denied entry to the scene and ordered by soldiers to leave.
Palestinian ambulance denied access to critically injured Dania
While the Israeli army claims that Dania had a knife and was thus a threat to the Israeli soldiers at the checkpoint, all eye-witness accounts refute this. Regardless of that claim, shooting a child numerous times into the upper body and neck, while she is moving back with her hands in the air, clearly scared and not a threat, will never be justifiable under any circumstances. Denying first aid and access of medical personnel to critically injured persons can not be excused.
Sadly, episodes where Palestinian youth are extra-judicially executed by Israeli forces and then denied medical aid are not an exception anymore. Dania is already the third girl killed by Israeli soldiers in al-Khalil within a month. It is hard to imagine the pain of the parents and the family of these victims learning about the pointless, tragic death of their loved ones. A witness to already more than one of the heinous murders states: “What can we do? They are not human!”
26th October 2015 | International Solidarity Movement, al-Khalil team| Hebron, occupied Palestine
On October 25th, around 2am, strange noises could be heard through the window of an apartment in Tel Rumeida where nine international human rights activists are currently living. Upon further inspection, four adult male settlers were identified, trespassing on the property. In full view of the soldiers who are constantly posted on the street directly in front of the house, two of the settlers ascended the staircase and attempted for several minutes to open the locked, latched door. They stopped and went back down the stairs, screaming “f*** you!” and making obscene gestures when the two at the bottom realized the scene was being filmed, and warned the others.
When the three soldiers at the bottom of the stairs were immediately approached by the internationals about the incident, their reactions were flippant and vaguely threatening, including laughter, repeating that “everything is fine”, and the flat out denial that any of them had seen any of the settlers, with the caveat that “though [they] didnt see any settlers, [they] told them to get down”. Soldiers reiterated to the shaken internationals that “Palestinians want to kill us all”, and referenced the ‘arab threat’ posed by all the alleged perpetrators of stabbing attacks, almost none of whom have been convicted though almost all have been executed. Soldiers reiterated that the settlers were gone and that internationals would be protected, despite repeated questions about why these heavily armed soldiers didn’t manage to detain or even address or perhaps even see the trespassing illegal settlers. When the soldiers were asked to produce their commander, one of the soldiers named himself, Yonaton Zair. He wore no standard markings of an officer, and when asked the number of their battalion, he simply said Tzahar. Neither he nor any other soldier would produce any other information.
Unfortunately, this is fairly standard operating procedure in Hebron, where soldiers effectively work at the command of the settlers.
23rd October, 2015 |International Solidarity Movement, Al-Khalil Team | West Bank, occupied Palestine
We are remembering our great friend & the great friend of Hebron, Hashem al-Azzeh, who gave this interview with ISM last year before his tragic passing earlier this week.
22nd October 2015 | International Solidarity Movement, Al-Khalil team | Hebron, occupied Palestine
Today in the morning, Israeli forces harassed international human rights observers monitoring a checkpoint in occupied al-Khalil (Hebron) on settlers orders.
Two internationals were monitoring the stairs leading up to two schools from segregated Shuhada street. Palestinians are forced to take the stairs as the small stretch of Shuhada Street where they are allowed to walk, before Shuhada Street – once the major Palestinian market – continues on as a ghost stretch, completely emptied off any Palestinians, who are not allowed to even walk there. Checkpoint 55, which marks the line from where Palestinian freedom of movement is completely denied is often the scene of ID-checks, body-searches, detentions and arrests of Palestinians.
During the last few weeks, this has also been the choice venue for large groups of settlers from the illegal settlement of Beit Hadassah and many of the other illegal al-Khalil settlements for staging protests, such as executing a Palestinian and celebrating his death with trays of sweets. The Palestinian residents in this neighbourhood are constantly harassed by the soldiers and settlers, who in turn enjoy the unconditional protection of the Israeli forces – even to the extent that a knife can be planted on a dead Palestinian by Israeli police, as seen in this video filmed by the activist group Youth Against Settlement.
With the recent escalation of soldiers’ and settlers’ violence against Palestinians and the extrajudicial executions of Palestinians, not only in al-Khalil, but beyond that throughout the occupied West Bank and Gaza, teachers and parents are worried about school-children’s safety on the way to school. International human rights observers are monitoring most of the innumerable checkpoints children are forced to pass through on their way to school.
On Thursday morning, two internationals were standing at checkpoint 55, monitoring Palestinian school-children on their way up the stairs to Qurtuba school when a settler from the Beit Hadassah settlement spotted the internationals, immediately walked up to the soldiers seeming upset, pointing towards the internationals and down the road. Just a few seconds later, soldiers came up to the human rights observers asking for their passports and visas and ordering them to move further away down the road, out of sight of the staircase leading to the school. When questioned about reasons for this, soldiers admitted that ‘someone’ did not feel safe and wanted them to leave the area. A few minutes later, more soldiers arrived at the checkpoints and requested the two internationals to be body-searched. The female human rights observer refused as there were no female soldiers, but the male was human rights observer was forced to lift up his shirt and trousers and have a soldier body-search him. The reason soldiers gave to internationals was ‘security’, though soldiers almost never bother to check the internationals’ bags. This comes just as illegal settlers in al-Khalil put up posters asking for soldiers and settlers to ‘take action’ against these ‘hostile anarchists trying to harm Israelis for anti-semitic reasons’, openly inciting violence toward these third party observers.
This kind of harassment, for Palestinians, is a daily occurrence, completely leaving their lives at the soldiers’ every whim.
