Category: In the Media

Al Jazeera: “Israel introduces new travel restrictions”

by Khalid Amayreh in the West Bank for Al Jazeera.net, Sunday 11 June 2006

Palestinian families have accused Israel of taking draconian measures, further restricting their freedom of movement.

According to Palestinian human rights organisations, the new restrictions involve barring Palestinians carrying foreign passports, including those married to a Palestinian spouse, from re-entering the West Bank after leaving for their adopted country of citizenship, even for a brief visit.

The new measures also affect long-time foreigners residing in the West Bank such as college professors, NGO employees, religious figures and naturalised spouses of Palestinian residents in the West Bank.

Adel Samara is a noted Palestinian economist residing in Ramallah. His American wife wants to go the US for a visit. However, because she is married to a Palestinian, she is worried that the Israeli authorities wouldn’t allow her to return to her family once she left the West Bank.

“I really dont know why they are doing this to us. I am sure there is a special think-tank in Israel specialised in devising and inventing creative ways to make us suffer,” said Samara.

Right to bar

Samara believes Israeli military authorities were targeting ordinary people, most of whom are not politicised and leading a normal lives with their families and friends.

“There are hundreds of cases. You see, I am barred from travelling abroad for so-called security reasons and my wife won’t be allowed to return to Ramallah if she left the West Bank even for a brief visit to Jordan next door.”


Even spouses of Palestinian residents are feeling the heat

Aljazeera.net tried repeatedly to get the Israeli army spokespersons to clarify policy with regard to foreigners staying in or wanting to enter the West Bank.

A spokeswoman for the Israeli interior ministry said Israel had the right to bar whoever it wanted from entering the “territories”.

She said: “Those wishing to enter must apply for a permit and their application could be either accepted or rejected.”

Academics targeted

According to sources at the Bir Zeit University (BZU) in the West Bank, Israeli measures are also targeting academics and lecturers working at Palestinian universities, whether foreigners or Palestinians carrying foreign passports.

At least two professors and an administration official at BZU have been barred from returning to the West Bank without any explanation.

One of the three is Sumaydi Abbas, who holds Swedish citizenship. Aljazeera.net could not locate Abbas, but Ghassan Andouni, public relations officer at BZU, said the Israeli military authorities refused to allow the Palestinian professor to return “because he didn’t have residency rights”.

“You see, they wouldn’t even give him a tourist visa to enter his own country, his own homeland. They view Palestine, including the West Bank, as Israeli territory and us as foreigners.”

Bahjat Tayyem, who holds US citizenship and teaches at the BZU political science department, was recently turned back at the Jordan border while trying to enter the West Bank at the Allenby Border crossing.

“I think Israel wants to effect a total siege on us, a total isolation. They are not content with physical isolation which this evil concrete wall embodies,” said Anduni.

Andouni accused the Israeli military administration of trying to “empty the West Bank of foreigners”, especially those working at NGOs as well as peace activists.

“They want to reduce our towns and villages to inaccessible detention camps and large open-air prisons until we succumb to their bullying or implode from within.”

Israeli authorities have also barred international peace activists which they consider sympathetic to the Palestinians from entering the West Bank.

Peace activists

The International Solidarity Movement (ISM), which brings to the West Bank peace activists from around the world to encourage Palestinians to adopt non-violent means in their struggle against the Israeli occupation, seems to have been blacklisted.

ISM activists have been for years holding peaceful demonstrations and sit-ins against Israeli repression of Palestinians, including the construction of the separation wall and the bulldozing of Palestinian groves and farms.

Some Israeli officials, especially within the foreign ministry, believe ISM activities have been instrumental in getting a British union of university teachers and a Canadian workers’ union to boycott Israel.


Activists of the ISM are thought to be in Israeli officials’ sights

Last week, Israeli interior ministry authorities at the Ben Gurion Airport near Tel Aviv incarcerated Paul Larudee, an American peace activist, barring him from entering Israel and the Occupied Palestinian territories.

According to Larudee’s lawyer, Gabi Lasky, the Israeli authorities gave no explanation why her client was incarcerated.

However, according to the Jerusalem Post, Larudee’s name appeared on a Shin Bet [Israel’s main domestic intelligence agency]-compiled blacklist of foreigners identifying with the Palestinian struggle.

Danger to state

The paper quoted unnamed Israeli security officials as saying that Larudee was an ISM leader who took part in anti-Israeli demonstrations during the Israeli army assault on the West Bank between 2002 and 2004.

“This person is a danger to the state. He is one of the ISM leaders who had been involved in anti-Israeli activities and therefore will not be allowed into the country,” the security official was quoted as saying.

Lasky said Larudee visited Israel and the occupied territories four times and had never been arrested. She dismissed the security official’s explanation as “dubious”.

“To blacklist non-violent peace activists as ‘person non grata’ raises questions regarding the sincerity of Israel’s intentions to resolve the conflict with the Palestinians through dialogue and non-violence,” an ISM statement given to Aljazeera.net said.

Ha’aretz: “20 Hebron settlers arrested for violently harassing Palestinians”

by Amos Harel, Eli Ashkenzi, Haaretz Correspondent and Itim. 13/06/2006

Police on Tuesday detained 20 settlers in the West Bank city of Hebron after they hurled rocks, bricks and glass bottles at Israel Defense Forces soldiers and police. A policeman was lightly wounded in the riot.

The rioting took place next to a Palestinian house where the IDF was securing the construction of a wall to protect its inhabitants from settlers.

The Palestinian inhabitants, living in proximity with Jewish houses, were forced to leave their home due to unrelenting attacks by settlers. The IDF recently began securing the Palestinian house in order to allow the inhabitants to return to their home.

The settlers say that a Palestinian house in their neighborhood poses a threat to their personal security. The police said it will “exercise determination and zero tolerance against lawbreakers and anyone who harms police or soldiers.”

Later on Tuesday the High Court of Justice rejected a request by the Jewish community of Hebron to issue an injunction against the construction of a wall around the Palestinian house.

Farmers suspect settlers cut down olive trees

Palestinian farmers suspect that settlers are behind the vandalizing of some 45 olive trees in the Palestinian village of Salem near the West Bank city of Nablus.

A farmer working in a field adjacent to the groves on Saturday discovered that many trees in the grove had been cut down. The grove owner filed a complaint with Ariel police.

In recent months Israeli volunteers have been assisting Salem farmers in tilling their fields while suffering from ongoing sabotage by settlers. Buma Inbar who visited the vandalized grove said “the site was horrifying – it’s hard to see dozens of old trees broken down so brutally, this is sheer vandalism.”

Ha’aretz: “Arrest of the Piano Tuner”

By No’am Ben Ze’ev, Ha’aretz Gallery, 12th June 2006. Translation by Rann.

Paul Larudee, an American who came to tune pianos in Ramallah and Jenin, refused to board a plane against his will and is now waiting for a court decision regarding him.

For a week now, the American piano tuner Paul Larudee has been sitting in a jail cell in Ben-Gurion airport and waiting for a court decision in his case. On his way to tune pianos in Ramallah and Jenin, his entrance to Israel was prevented and a deportation order was issued against him. Larudee, 60, has a PhD in linguistics from Georgetown University and has been coming to the Israel and the OPT regularly for the last 40 years. He is a peace activist and a member of ISM – the International Solidarity Movement – that promotes non-violent resistance to the occupation.

“I came to bring harmony to the region, and I have no idea why they arrested me,” says Larudee in a telephone call from his cell, “if I committed some crime I surely would know about it.” Despite his cell phone being confiscated, he managed to discretely talk using his cellmate’s phone.

Were you surprised? “Not at all. I expected it. People connected to ISM get entrance-prevention and deportation orders all the time, so I knew that sooner or later this would happen. Thus it is not the details of the case that interest me, but rather the principle behind such a policy. If the reasons behind [the policy] are security-related, I would like to engage in a debate on the nature of a threat to security and what constitutes such a threat. Maybe that way it would be possible to prevent others from being deported.”

Activists in the organization in the OPT verify his words, and testify to a increasing number of cases of activists with foreign passports being prevented from returning to the OPT, including some who have made their home there.

Larudee refused to board the plane leaving Israel against his will and called lawyer Gabi Laski, who obtained a temporary staying order against his deportation until the state responds. As of now, the order has become permanent and valid until a verdict is reached. “We are asking the court for the soonest possible date for a trial,” says Laski. “It’s absurd. Despite the fact that the responsibility for entrance to and exit from Israel lies with the Ministry of the Interior, the security authorities decide these matters and the Ministry remains a rubber stamp of the GSS. No one doubts its recommendations until the matter arrives in court.”

Sabin Hadad, a spokeswoman for the Population Administration in the Ministry of the Interior, confirms that the prevention of enterance was done due to security considerations. “When the GSS gives a negative recommendation we don’t get involved,” she says “a person entering Israel first passes through the border authorities, and if they become suspicious they contact GSS
directly. It has nothing to do with us.”

The Prime Minister’s office responded: the Ministry of the Interior denied Larudee, one of the leaders of ISM, entry to Israel, on the recommendation of security bodies. “He participated in illegal activities as a representative of the organization, stayed in a suicide bomber’s house and participated in a violent demonstration against the separation fence.”

Amnesty International: “Israel must end unlawful killings of Palestinians and stop reckless shelling”

Public Statement, 12 June 2006

Amnesty International is calling on Israel to end immediately its reckless shelling and air strikes against the Gaza Strip, which have killed and injured scores of unarmed Palestinians, including several women and children, in recent months.

In the latest such attack on the afternoon of 9 June 2006, seven members of the same Palestinian family were killed and ten of other civilians were injured when Israeli forces fired several artillery shells at a beach in the North of the Gaza Strip. The beach was crowded with Palestinian families enjoying the first week-end of the school holidays.

Ali Issa Ghalia, his wife Raissa and their five children – a one-year-old son and four daughters aged two, four, 15 and 17 – were killed and other members of their family, including two children, were injured when an Israeli shell landed where they were sitting. Some 30 other civilians, including a dozen children, sitting nearby were also injured in the blast.

Amnesty International urges the Israeli authorities to ensure that the investigation they have reportedly launched is thorough and impartial, that the findings are made public, that those responsible for the lethal shelling of unarmed civilians are brought to justice, and that measures are put in place without delay to prevent any recurrence of such killings.

The seven members of the Ghalia family were the most recent among a growing number of victims of increasingly frequent and disproportionate Israeli attacks against the Gaza Strip.

Seven-year-old Hadeel Ghaben was killed when an Israeli artillery shell landed on her house in the northern Gaza Strip town of Beit Lahia on 10 April. Her mother and her eight brothers and sisters, all of them children, and two other children from the neighbourhood were also injured in the attack.

In another attack, on 19 May, a missile fired by Israeli forces at a vehicle travelling on a busy street in Gaza City killed and injured six members of the Aman family. Seven-year-old Muhand, his mother Na’ima and his grandmother Hanan were killed and his four-year-old sister Mariya and his uncle Nahed were left paralysed.

Since the end of March, Israeli forces have fired some 6,000 artillery shells and more than 80 missiles into the Gaza Strip, one of the most densely populated places in the world.

According to Israeli officials the intensive shelling and air strikes are in response to the firing of more than 200 home-made rockets (qassams) into the South of Israel by Palestinian armed groups operating within the Gaza Strip. These rockets, which Palestinian armed groups claim are fired in response to Israeli attacks, are indiscriminate and endanger civilian life. Although, in practice, such rockets have almost always fallen into open spaces, one rocket fired on 11 June injured three Israeli civilians. Amnesty International reiterates its call on the Palestinian Authority to prevent further such rocket or other attacks by Palestinian armed groups against Israeli civilians.

Since the beginning of 2006 Israeli forces have killed more than 130 Palestinians, many of them unarmed and including more than 20 children. In the same period 16 Israelis, two of them children, have been killed by Palestinian armed groups.

While Israeli officials contend that soldiers only open fire when their lives are at risk and only respond to the source of Palestinian fire, the large number of unarmed Palestinians, including more than 600 children, killed by Israeli forces in the past five and a half years indicates otherwise.

Israeli authorities have expressed regret for some of the killings of Palestinian civilians – usually in cases which attract international media attention – claiming they occurred as a result of mistakes. Yet the Israeli authorities, who are responsible for the conduct of their armed forces, are fully aware that the use of certain weapons and munitions in such situations invariably results in the killing or injuring of bystanders, including children.

Many killings of Palestinians in reckless shootings, tank shelling and air strikes by Israeli forces have been unlawful. They have been carried out by Israeli forces pursuant to government policy, evidenced by the knowledge and approval of government authorities who are fully aware of the consequences of such practices.

Expressions of regret by the Israeli authorities ring hollow in the face of their continued failure to change their forces’ practices and to put in place the necessary safeguards to prevent such killings.

Amnesty International reiterates its call on the Israeli authorities to:

– take concrete measures to put an immediate end to reckless, random and disproportionate fire by Israeli forces;

– ensure that all killings of Palestinians by Israeli forces are promptly and independently investigated and that anyone found to be responsible for the unlawful killing of civilians is brought to justice.

Al-Jazeera: “Protests against Gaza beach killings”

By Khaled Amayreh, Al-Jazeera, Sunday 11 June 2006


Credit: ISM

Hundreds of Palestinians, Israeli and international peace activists have protested against the killing of eight Palestinians while they picnicked on a Gaza beach. Wearing white T-shirts dyed in red to signify Friday’s killings, protesters lay on the ground at an Israeli checkpoint at Kalandia, 10km north of Jerusalem, on Sunday. Abdullah Abu Rahma, head of the Committee against the Separation Wall in Ramallah said: “We are Israelis, Palestinians and internationals united against the oppression of the occupation.

Continue reading Al-Jazeera: “Protests against Gaza beach killings”