At-Tuwani – On Friday 30 October, the Israeli army forcibly stopped the electrical work of the village of At-Tuwani, located in the South Hebron hills. Officers from the Israeli District Coordinating Office (DCO), the branch of the Israeli army responsible for the administration of Palestinian civilian affairs in the occupied Palestinian territories, detained Mohammed Awayesa, a Palestinian worker from Ad-Dhahiriya and confiscated materials and tools being used for the electrical work. The items confiscated included a truck, a mechanized lift, and a large spool of electrical wire. No written orders were produced for the detention, confiscations, or work stoppage.
Even though the army has given verbal permission to the community leaders to carry on the work, the DCO told the Palestinian workers and villagers that continued work on the electrical lines was illegal without a written permission from the DCO. The DCO took Awayesa and the materials to an Israeli DCO office near Al Fahs, south of Hebron. The DCO released the man but is still holding the confiscated material. .
Despite a recent visit by Tony Blair, special middle east envoy of the Quartet, where the former Prime Minister assured villagers from At-Tuwani that the DCO gave oral permission to carry out the electricity construction work , the community struggle to bring electricity to the area has been met with ongoing interruptions by the DCO. (see AT-TUWANI: At-Tuwani hosts former U.K. Prime Minister Tony Blair to address Israeli occupation and violence in the southern West Bank)
On 28 July 2009, members of the DCO issued a demolition order for six newly constructed electricity pylons in the village of At-Tuwani (see AT-TUWANI URGENT ACTION: Demand that Quartet pressure Israel to revoke demolition order for electricity pylons).
On 25 May 2009, the DCO entered the village of At-Tuwani and ordered villagers to halt construction work on new electricity pylons in the village. No written orders were delivered. (see AT-TUWANI URGENT ACTION: Demand that Israeli occupying forces allow At-Tuwani to bring electricity into their village).
TUBA – On Tuesday 27 October 2009, Palestinian school children from the villages of Tuba and Maghayir Al Abeed did not attend school in At-Tuwani due to threat of violence from Israeli settlers from the Israeli settlement of Ma’on and the illegal Israeli outpost of Havat Ma’on.
Internationals from Christian Peacemaker Teams and Operation Dove made repeated calls to the Israeli military, who were mandated by the Israeli Knesset to escort the children from Tuba and Maghayir Al Abeed to the area school in At-Tuwani. After waiting forty five minutes for the Israeli military to arrive, the children and the internationals began walking a longer route to school at 8:15 am, fifteen minutes after the start of the school day. However, four adult Israeli settlers, one masked and armed with a slingshot, in addition to settlers in a pickup truck, blocked their way. The internationals ran with the children back to Tuba. As a result, sixteen children missed a day’s education.
Later, at 8:47, after the children returned to Tuba, an Israeli military jeep came to the area in which the settlers had threatened the children. Soldiers from the jeep spoke with members of Operation Dove who were in the area. The soldiers claimed they were new and did not know where to meet the children for the escort, though at no point previously did international volunteers see a jeep driving in the area.
This is the second consecutive day in which the Israeli military has failed to arrive to escort the Palestinian children to and from school, forcing them to take a longer path on which they have been attacked by Israeli settlers on numerous occasions.
In 2004, following a series of attacks by Israeli settlers on the young Palestinian schoolchildren and also on international volunteers, the Israeli Knesset mandated the Israeli military to provide daily accompaniment for the children on the shortest possible route to and from school. The Israeli military have repeatedly failed to carry out this task adequately, resulting in children being late for school and subject to unnecessary anxiety and risk.
Background information
During the 2008-2009 school year, settlers used violence against the children ten times; two of these times the settlers threw rocks at the children.
Amnesty International has accused Israel of denying Palestinians the right to access adequate water by maintaining total control over the shared water resources and pursuing discriminatory policies.
These unreasonably restrict the availability of water in the Occupied Palestinian Territories (OPT) and prevent the Palestinians developing an effective water infrastructure there.
“Israel allows the Palestinians access to only a fraction of the shared water resources, which lie mostly in the occupied West Bank, while the unlawful Israeli settlements there receive virtually unlimited supplies. In Gaza the Israeli blockade has made an already dire situation worse,” said Donatella Rovera, Amnesty International’s researcher on Israel and the OPT.
In a new extensive report, Amnesty International revealed the extent to which Israel’s discriminatory water policies and practices are denying Palestinians their right to access to water.
Israel uses more than 80 per cent of the water from the Mountain Aquifer, the main source of underground water in Israel and the OPT, while restricting Palestinian access to a mere 20 per cent.
The Mountain Aquifer is the only source for water for Palestinians in the West Bank, but only one of several for Israel, which also takes for itself all the water available from the Jordan River.
While Palestinian daily water consumption barely reaches 70 litres a day per person, Israeli daily consumption is more than 300 litres per day, four times as much.
In some rural communities Palestinians survive on barely 20 litres per day, the minimum amount recommended for domestic use in emergency situations.
Some 180,000-200,000 Palestinians living in rural communities have no access to running water and the Israeli army often prevents them from even collecting rainwater.
In contrast, Israeli settlers, who live in the West Bank in violation of international law, have intensive-irrigation farms, lush gardens and swimming pools.
Numbering about 450,000, the settlers use as much or more water than the Palestinian population of some 2.3 million.
In the Gaza Strip, 90 to 95 per cent of the water from its only water resource, the Coastal Aquifer, is contaminated and unfit for human consumption. Yet, Israel does not allow the transfer of water from the Mountain Aquifer in the West Bank to Gaza.
Stringent restrictions imposed in recent years by Israel on the entry into Gaza of material and equipment necessary for the development and repair of infrastructure have caused further deterioration of the water and sanitation situation in Gaza, which has reached crisis point.
To cope with water shortages and lack of network supplies many Palestinians have to purchase water, of often dubious quality, from mobile water tankers at a much higher price.
Others resort to water-saving measures which are detrimental to their and their families’ health and which hinder socio-economic development.
“Over more than 40 years of occupation, restrictions imposed by Israel on the Palestinians’ access to water have prevented the development of water infrastructure and facilities in the OPT, consequently denying hundreds of thousand of Palestinians the right to live a normal life, to have adequate food, housing, or health, and to economic development,” said Donatella Rovera.
Israel has appropriated large areas of the water-rich Palestinian land it occupies and barred Palestinians from accessing them.
It has also imposed a complex system of permits which the Palestinians must obtain from the Israeli army and other authorities in order to carry out water-related projects in the OPT. Applications for such permits are often rejected or subject to long delays.
Restrictions imposed by Israel on the movement of people and goods in the OPT further compound the difficulties Palestinians face when trying to carry out water and sanitation projects, or even just to distribute small quantities of water.
Water tankers are forced to take long detours to avoid Israeli military checkpoints and roads which are out of bounds to Palestinians, resulting in steep increases in the price of water.
In rural areas, Palestinian villagers are continuously struggling to find enough water for their basic needs, as the Israeli army often destroys their rainwater harvesting cisterns and confiscates their water tankers.
In comparison, irrigation sprinklers water the fields in the midday sun in nearby Israeli settlements, where much water is wasted as it evaporates before even reaching the ground.
In some Palestinian villages, because their access to water has been so severely restricted, farmers are unable to cultivate the land, or even to grow small amounts of food for their personal consumption or for animal fodder, and have thus been forced to reduce the size of their herds.
“Water is a basic need and a right, but for many Palestinians obtaining even poor-quality subsistence-level quantities of water has become a luxury that they can barely afford,” said Donatella Rovera.
“Israel must end its discriminatory policies, immediately lift all the restrictions it imposes on Palestinians’ access to water, and take responsibility for addressing the problems it created by allowing Palestinians a fair share of the shared water resources.”
The day the bulldozers came…
West Bank farmer Mahmoud al-‘Alam won’t forget the day Israeli army bulldozers cut off his water supply… and destroyed his livelihood.
The village of Beit Ula, where Mahmoud lives, is not connected to the Palestinian water network. Instead the community, located north-west of Hebron, relies on rainwater, which it collects and stores in pots dug in the ground, known as cisterns.
The nine new cisterns built in 2006 as part of a European Union-funded project to improve food security became the pride of the village. The cisterns were vital to the survival of the nine families that used them… until the bulldozers arrived.
“[The Israeli army] destroyed everything; they went up and down several times
with the bulldozer and uprooted everything,” recalls Mahmoud al-‘Alam.
In a few hours, years of hard work had been undone. The cisterns had been built with the help of two local nongovernmental organizations, the Palestinian Agricultural Relief Committees and the Palestinian Hydrology Group.
The cisterns provided water for 3,200 newly planted trees including olive, almond, lemon and fig trees. The farmers had also contributed a significant portion of the overall cost of the project.
“We invested a lot of money and worked very hard,” said Mahmoud al-‘Alam. “This is good land and it was a very good project. We put a lot of thought into how to shape the terraces and build the cisterns in the best way, to make the best use of the land, and we planted trees which need little water… the saplings were growing well…”
The story of Beit Ula is one of many cases where Israeli forces have targeted Palestinian communities in the region.
On 4 June 2009, the Israeli army destroyed the homes and livestock pens of 18
Palestinian families in Ras al-Ahmar, a hamlet in the Jordan Valley area of the West Bank.
More than 130 people were affected, many of them children. Crucially, the soldiers
confiscated the water tank, tractor and trailer used by the villagers to bring in water. They were left without shelter or a water supply at the hottest time of the year.
On 28 July 2007, Israeli soldiers at a military checkpoint confiscated the tractor and water tanker of Ahmad Abdallah Bani Odeh, a villager from the hamlet of Humsa.
An Israeli army official told Amnesty International that the vital items were being confiscated in an attempt to force the villagers from the area, which the army had declared a “closed military area”.
In another village, a rainwater harvesting cistern belonging to Palestinian villagers was destroyed by the Israeli army under the pretext that it was built without a permit. Permits for water projects have to be obtained from the Israeli authorities but are rarely granted to Palestinians.
In recent years the homes of Palestinians living in the Jordan Valley have been repeatedly destroyed and their water tankers confiscated.
Each time, the homes – tents and simple shacks made of metal and plastic sheets – are rebuilt. Because of the villagers’ determination to remain on their land despite extremely harsh living conditions, the Israeli army has increasingly restricted their access to water as a way of forcing them to abandon the area.
In’am Bisharat, a mother of seven from the village of Hadidiya, told Amnesty International: “We live in the harshest conditions, without water, electricity or any services.
“The lack of water is the biggest problem. The men spend most of the day…[going] to get water and they can’t always bring it. But we have no choice. We need a little bit of water to survive and to keep the sheep alive. Without water there is no life.
“The [Israeli] army has cut us off from everywhere…We don’t choose to live like this; we would also like to have beautiful homes and gardens and farms, but these privileges are only for the Israeli settlers… we are not even allowed basic services.”
The lack of water has already forced many Palestinians to leave the Jordan Valley and the survival of the communities is increasingly threatened. In Beit Ula, Mahmoud al-‘Alam’s livelihood is similarly at risk.
“It is very painful for me every time to come here and see the destruction; everything we worked for is gone. Why would anyone want to do this? What good can come from [it]?” he asks.
The village of Iraq Burin came under attack from the nearby settlement Bracha on Saturday, 24 October. Approximately 50 settlers clashed with 50 young men of the village, followed by violent intervention of Israeli Occupation Forces. Three Palestinian boys were taken to hospital following the attack.
At 1pm approximately 50 settlers were seen approaching Iraq Burin. They then surrounded a now-defunct well approximately 200m from the edge of the village. Eyewitnesses report them sitting on the land around the well, watching the village from across the small valley that divided them. Taking up rocks in their hands they began to attack, as the boys and young men gathered to face the settlers were showered with hundreds of stones. The Palestinians ran in to the valley to fight back, hurling rocks at their invaders. Three Palestinians sustained injuries in the clash; one to the arm, one his shoulder and one his hands.
Abu Haisan, mayor of Iraq Burin, called the District Co-ordination Office to alert the military who arrived at 2pm. 40 Israeli soldiers arrived in 7 jeeps and immediately pushed the settlers and Palestinians apart, only to turn and begin firing tear gas and sound bombs on the villagers as they retreated. The settlers, now driven back to the opposing hill top, splintered in to groups – some moving back towards the settlement, others hiding in the olive groves at the top of the hill, attempting to move forwards but being held at bay by the soldiers.
The gas cleared to see Palestinians and settlers withdrawn to the opposite sides of the valley, divided by Israeli Occupation Forces maintaining a close watch. It was at this stage international activists arrived on the scene, to witness a group of six settlers attempt to move down through the olive groves again to attack, but held back by the military. A Red Crescent ambulance was able to transport the three injured to Rafidiya Hospital in Nablus for medical attention.
The clash took place on land annexed by Bracha, 30 dunums of which the DCO announced two weeks ago it will return to the rightful owners of the village. Izad Qadous, a farmer owning 20 dunums of the contested land has stated however that so far the majority of the land still remains de facto property of the settlement, as when the farmers have attempted to reach the lands they have been prevented by the military.
The settlers retain their presence on the land as well. A tent, heralding the potential construction of a new outpost, lies on the hill facing the village which the DCO has stated it would remove since its appearance at the beginning of the summer but thus far has failed to do so. Settlers are sighted often in the area of the tent and also the aforementioned well, rendered unusable when explosives were thrown in it by the IOF several years ago. Qadous states that settler violence in the area has seen a sharp increase this year, the village experiencing only isolated cases prior to 2009. Attacks occur frequently, as in other areas of the West Bank, on Saturdays, or Sabbat, traditionally the Jewish holy day and day of rest.
In addition to the 100 dunums of land lost to construction and agricultural expansion of Bracha there is a further 500 dunums of land surrounding the settlement lost by farmers of Iraq Burin, merely by proximity to the illegal settlement and rendering it impossible to reach for fear of settler or military incursion.
On October 26 – 29, 2009 two women will be put on trial in the United Kingdom for taking part in a blockade of Carmel Agrexco’s produce warehouse during the Bloody Valentine Week of Action. They are accused of obstructing police officers and assaulting a police officer during the women only action. This is only the second time that people have been brought to court for actions against Carmel Agrexco in over 5 years of sustained direct action at the London depot.
The action was taken in solidarity with the Palestinian people on whose land the flowers, fruits and vegetables are grown and harvested. The action came in the aftermath of the 3-week Israeli invasion of Gaza in which more than 1,400 Palestinians were killed. Carmel-Agrexco is the Israeli national exporter of fruit and vegetables and imports large quantities of goods from illegal Israeli settlements on occupied Palestinian land. As feminists and as Palestinian solidarity activists, the women blockading Agrexco aimed to challenge the oppression of Palestinians by targeting a tool of the occupation.
According to a statement the activists released prior to their trial:
Carmel Agrexco directly profits from the Israeli occupation, which colonises Palestine. These goods are grown in the rich soils of the Jordan Valley where the indigenous people are prevented from building houses, schools, accessing water. Palestinians, including many children, work and are exploited in Agrexco-owned settlement packing houses. The sale and distribution of goods produced in settlements must be resisted in the countries which receive them as exports. The UK is the most important export market for Agrexco and so we think that challenging and disrupting their business here is important.
During previous direct actions the police have been reluctant to arrest any protestors – even when they have invaded the warehouses, destroyed goods and locked on to the gates for over 10 hours. Evidence strongly suggests that this is a result of collusion between Agrexco and the local police. In the first (and until now, only) trial of direct action activists at the depot in 2006, the case collapsed after evidence of Carmel-Agrexco’s dealings with illegal settlements was disclosed. The charges were dropped and subsequent actions no longer lead to court cases.
This action, undeniably feminist in spirit, has resulted in the first people being brought to trial for activities against Agrexco since 2006. The systematic and entrenched sexism we know exists within the police force was clearly reflected in the misogynistic comments and treatment these women received during the action. In this gendered context, we ask ourselves why the police and CPS have decided to try this case, rather than the 30+ others preceding it.
This case is crucial in the continuing campaign against Carmel Agrexco. Please spread the word about the trial, post the defendants’ statement widely and take action against Carmel Agrexco.
