At 8.30am yesterday morning around fifty settlers, some masked and armed with guns, descended from Yitzhar settlement onto the Palestinian village of Assira Al Qibliya. International observers from the UK and Ireland witnessed the settlers threw rocks at homes and people on the outskirts of the village injuring one local, who is being treated in hospital.
Within thirty minutes an army jeep carrying Israeli soldiers arrived. They stood in front of the settlers on the hillside approximately one hundred metres from the Palestinian homes yet did nothing to prevent their attacks. The soldiers could be seen firing guns into the air and directly towards the Palestinians who had come out of their homes to witness and document this attack on their village.
During the attack four settlers broke away from the main group and made their way to a Palestinian quarry. Two armed with machine guns stood on a ledge while two descended onto the side of the road and set fire to a car used by the Palestinian workers.
The settlement of Yitzhar was originally established as a military outpost in 1983 but demilitarised and turned over to residential purposes a year later. Yitzhar is home to a Jewish orthodox community of over 100 who have in the past decade attacked the residents and properties of Assira Al Qibliya and neighbouring villages on numerous occasions using rocks, knives, guns and arson. These attacks often happen on Saturdays, the religious holiday of Shabbat.
Yitzhar is home to Rabbi Elitzur who published a book last November entitled “The Handbook for the Killing of Gentiles”, condoning the murder of non-Jewish babies, lest they grow to “be dangerous like their parents”. Rabbi Elitzur is vocal in his encouragement of “operations of reciprocal responsibility” such as the arson attack made on Yasuf mosque in December 2009
Despite West Banks settlements’ status as illegal under international law, Yitzhar was included in the Israeli governments’ 2009 “national priority map” as one of the settlements earmarked for financial support. Yitzhar also receives significant funding from American donations, tax-deductible under U.S. government tax breaks for ‘charitable’ institutions.
10 April 2011 | International Solidarity Movement, Gaza
On the afternoon of Thursday April 7th, Israeli forces escalated their attacks on the Gaza Strip. The murderous offensive has killed 18 people so far, the majority of them being civilians. Among the massacred are a mother, her daughter, two children, two elderly men and four members of Al Qassam Brigades. More than sixty people have been injured, some are still fighting for their lives. Since Thursday afternoon the Gaza Strip is besieged by drones, Apache helicopters, F16 and E15 fighter planes, gunboats in the south and tanks by the border.
At approximately 16:00 on Thursday, Israeli forces targeted areas surrounding the previously destroyed Gaza International Airport in the far southeast of Rafah city, in the south of the Gaza Strip. Israeli forces positioned along the border fired approximately 10 artillery shells, while Apache helicopters opened machine gun fire. A number of the artillery shells landed near three Palestinian civilians who were sitting near the airport. Two of them, Mohammed Eyada Eid el-Mahmoum (25) and Khaled Ismail Hamdan el-Dabari (17) were killed immediately and the third civilian, Saleh Jarmi Ateya al-Tarabin (38) died of his wounds in the hospital on the evening of the same day.
Israeli forces continued to fire as a number of Palestinian civilians attempted to rescue the wounded; Musaab Mohammed Ubeid Sawwaf, 20, was killed and another 14 civilians, including five children and a paramedic from the Palestinian Red Crescent Society, were wounded.
Salama El-Dabari is seated in a tent, mourning the loss of his nephew, the 17 year old Khaled Ismail Hamdan el-Dabari, while he explains to ISM volunteers what has happened.
“Khaled was following the ambulances on his motorbike, to assist the medics in evacuating the injured people. As soon as the ambulances arrived, an Apache helicopter shelled the site again. Khaled got stuck under his motorcycle, which caught fire during the shelling. The ambulances of the Palestinian Red Crescent Society were not able to evacuate him immediately. They recovered his body the next morning, covered in burns, with open head wounds, a hole in the abdomen, bullets in the legs and without hands. His father, my brother, was looking for him, but we didn’t want him to see his son in such a condition, so we sent him home before evacuating Khaled’s body.”
Salama switches to the inequality of the conflict and says the following: “Look at us, the Palestinians; we are a peaceful people who are trying to shake off the occupation to live in freedom. But we don’t have any meaningful military power: we have no drones nor F16’s, we don’t have any of Israel’s modern weaponry. There is no comparison possible. We are desperate. Nobody seems to care about the Palestinians and our struggle for justice.”
21 year old Abdel Hadi Jumma el-Sufi is one of the injured and is currently hospitalized in Shifa hospital in Gaza City. He stares at the ceiling of his hospital room while recalling the murderous event.
“One of the men was hit in the beginning of the attack, so me and my friends approached to evacuate him. We found out that the man was already dead. Tanks kept on shelling and killed another man. We managed to get the two dead bodies and one severely wounded man out of there, into the ambulance, but could not reach the fourth man as shelling prevented us. I thought he was still alive, but in the morning the ambulance recovered another dead body from the scene.” Abdel himself sustained shrapnel wounds to his legs, lungs and the back of his head and is currently awaiting surgery.
20 year old Mahdi Joma’a Abu Athra is worst of: the doctor at Europa hospital in Khan Younes describes him as a dead body kept alive by machinery. His maternal uncles are sitting around the hospital bed and are explaining that Mahdi got married a couple of months ago: his wife is pregnant. It seems unlikely that Mahdi will ever lay eyes on his firstborn.
One of the uncles bursts out: “How come the West is so interested in defending the Lybian’s human rights and is doing nothing for the Palestinians? You, who come here in solidarity with us, should send a clear message to your countries: it is not us that is attacking Israel, it is Israel that is attacking us! They are the terrorists and the criminals! Our rockets and missiles are fireworks compared to Israel’s weaponry! They have the most high-tech accurate equipment: they can target very precisely. When they kill civilians, it’s because they intend to kill civilians!”Abdel Hadi Jumma el-Suffi
Al SamraOn April 7th at 6 am the village of Al Aqaba woke up to find the Israeli Army destroying thier road and two homes. Two Caterpillar bulldozers were with the military jeeps. They demolished two concrete houses leaving two families homeless, one with 11 children, and the other with 7 children. Their animal shelters had also been destroyed.
They also destroyed about 2.5km of tarmac road that wound around the hills of the village, and the electricity columns which serve energy to the inhabitants. One of the roads is ironically named Peace Street and is a vital link with the Jordan Valley.The bulldozers also created mounds with the rubble along the road to make it impossible for any vehicle to drive along it.
95% of Al Aqaba, which is in area C, received demolition orders from the Occupation Authority in 2006. Since then they have been mounting a legal challenge, but it is apparent that the occupation army does not wish to wait for their own Israeli `law`.
700 people were forced out of their land in 2006, but the entire village was granted a freeze on their demolition orders until the end of 2011 to give the opportunity to resolve the situation peacefully. Background information about the village is available on their own website.
In the afternoon of 7th April the army also demolished three large animal shelters and a kitchen in the farming community of Al Samra in the northern Jordan Valley. Jordan Valley Solidarity arrived just after the demolitions to find the families devastated, and the grandparents visibly upset.They received demolition orders for the third time on Tuesday 29th March, and were given just three days to destroy their own buildings, making it virtually impossible for them to make an appeal through the courts. When the army did not demolish their buildings straight away they became hopeful that they would be able to get a freeze on the demolition order, but their hopes were destroyed today.
The grandmother was crying at the sight of the destruction, and that the sheep and goats were now out in the afternoon sun without any shade. The animals were all crowding under the tractors and water tanks to try to find their own shade. As well as the animal shelters, the army also destroyed the small kitchen of a family with a young baby, aged just 20 days old.
At approximately 10.00pm last night the army once again entered the village of Awarta, throwing sound-bombs into the streets and declaring it a closed military zone, putting the residents under house arrest. This time the army arrested over 200 people, amongst them women and the elderly. The arrested were marched two kilometres out of the village before being tightly packed into buses and taken to Huwwara military base. Some of the villagers were in their pyjamas and without shoes when they were taken to the base and questioned, before having their fingerprints, DNA and photographs taken. Villagers were held until 4.00 in the morning; during this time those who were ill with conditions such as asthma were denied their medication. The oldest villager taken was 80 year old Nabil Awad who was arrested with his 70 year old wife. The soldiers entered his house by breaking the door, they hit his wife and his son and daughter who asked them not to take Nabil who is sick with heart failure. Nabil’s house had been searched in the previous weeks by the army who had destroyed many of his possessions and poured oil into his sugar supply.
Huda Quwariq in her home after the army raided it.
The Qawariq family whose son and nephew where killed in 2010 by the Israeli army have been especially targeted and last night had their house searched for the 9th time before the father was again taken away to the military base. Although he was later released with the other villagers, he received a phone call from the army later in the morning demanding that he return to the base. Two sons of the Qawariq family are still being held in prison since being arrested early on in the raids. Whilst searching the house, the army again destroyed the families’ belongings, making a hole in the bathroom wall, pulling clothes and blankets out of the cupboards and pulling apart the washing machine. The army also once again brought dogs into the house who contaminated the familes’ food making it inedible.
Today the village enters its 28th day of army incursions following the killing of the Fogal family in the nearby illegal settlement of Itamar. Since the 12th March, villagers have been at the mercy of the Israeli army who have subjected them to military curfews which have left them lacking food, water and gas and have prevented ambulances and press from entering the village. ISM activists have been present in the village during some of these curfew, including the first one lasting five days, and have witnessed the army brutality first-hand. The army has arrested hundreds of villagers in the past 28 days, with 41 still imprisoned in Israel. None of the arrested have yet been charged with any crime. They have conducted numerous house searches in which they have destroyed and stolen property, and evicted families from their homes and occupied them for military purposes. Villagers have been beaten and hospitalised in acts of army brutality from which now even women and the aged are not spared. Huda Qawariq, the mother of one of the young boys killed last year, today described her and her families’ fear at the soldier attacks, telling us: ‘Soldiers have dogs and guns; all we have is God’.
During Operation Cast Lead Israel committed massive war crimes for all the world to see. Among these crimes the use of White Phosphorus in densely populated areas, use of Depleted Uranium, bombing civilian targets of all sorts without military necessity, destroying civilian infrastructure with no military justification and the infamous massacre of the Samouni family… among many other crimes.
In the aftermath of Cast Lead, Justice Richard Goldstone, a Zionist Jew, was commissioned by the United Nations to write a report on the alleged war crimes. Although the report did not go nearly far enough in exposing the brutality of all the crimes committed, crimes committed by the fourth largest military in the world against a essentially defenceless and captive population, it did allege that Israel (and Hamas) was almost undoubtedly guilty of war crimes and possibly, crimes against humanity.
