PNN: Um Kamal Al Kurd taking the Right of Return

To view original article, published by the Palestinian News Network on the 3rd November, click here

The Kurd family is again making news after being forcibly expelled from their home in East Jerusalem’s Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood. Now Um Kamal Al Kurd intends to return to her original home in West Jerusalem with a massive nonviolent action planned for Thursday.

Last month the family moved to a tent nearby which Israeli forces destroyed three times. It became a beacon of popular resistance with hundreds of people sitting-in in solidarity.

The father, Abu Kamal, died in a Jerusalem hospital after being evicted from the home he lived in since the 1950s when Jordan and the United Nations Relief and Works Agency created the neighborhood housing. The Kurd family was among thousands of East Jerusalem residents driven from their West Jerusalem homes by Zionists in 1948.

Um Kamal is working to return to her original home in West Jerusalem with the support of a group of activists from civil society and human rights organizations. On Thursday the Coalition for Jerusalem will demand her full return.

Today Um Kamal said that she has been expelled twice, and as such will return to her original home. The Coalition for Jerusalem wrote in a statement Wednesday, “Um Kamal Al Kurd was expelled by the Israeli occupying authorities for the second time at dawn on Thursday, 9 November 2008. The Israeli occupying forces were heavily armed and surrounded the Kurd family home in Sheikh Jarrah. They expelled the family from their home and this is the second time to expel the entire family. The first time was in 1948.”

The Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood houses were built by the Jordan authority and the UNRWA to accommodate until return the 28 families who were taken from their homes in 1948. Among them are original residents of Jaffa, Ramle and West Jerusalem. Um Kamal Al Kurd says she will no longer wait for the implementation of United Nations Resolution 194, the Right of Return. She will go home now.

Maan: Blockade-busting voyages to Gaza planned from Qatar, Israel, Yemen, Cyprus, Jordan

To view original article, published by Maan News Agency on the 3rd November, click here

Gaza – A series of ships sailing Qatar, Israel, Yemen, and Cyprus, and Jordan will challenge the Israeli blockade of the Gaza Strip over the next two months, said Member of the Palestinian Legislative Council (PLC) Jamal Al-Khudari on Tuesday.

On Friday a ship sailing from Qatar is scheduled to make landfall in Gaza. On Saturday, a ship sailing from Haifa, in northern Israel will reach Gaza carrying five tons of humanitarian aid, including medicine, said Al-Khudari, who is the leader of the Popular Committee Against the Siege of Gaza.

The ships will further test Israel’s willingness to block shipments of vital goods to the coastal territory. After allowing a group of international and Palestinian activists to sail to Gaza three times since August, Israel gunboats forced a Libyan ship carrying 3,000 tons of aid to turn back on Tuesday.

On 18 December the Islamic Parliamentary Union will dispatch a ship from Larnaca, Cyprus. Two days later, Jordanian activists will send a boat from the Red Sea port of Aqaba.

A Yemeni vessel will set sail in January.

Al-Khudari said, in a statement that the Israeli blockade of Gaza has left 70% Gaza residents without electricity.

After nearly a year and a half of closure, Israel imposed a total blockade on Gaza on 4 November, preventing deliveries of aid by land, sea, and air. The territory’s sole power plant has frequently shut down, and the United Nations was forced to suspend a food aid program that feeds 750,000 Palestinians.

Israeli authorities announce that Azzun is to be walled in

Azzun villagers’ fears were confirmed when they were delivered a notice that Israeli authorities intend to build a wall between their village and the main road that runs along its northern edge – Road 55.

At 6:30pm on Friday 28th November Israeli military vehicles entered the village, with personnel delivering the notice of the planned wall to the Sheikh at the central mosque, asking him to pass it on to the municipality. The documents give “prevention of stone throwing at Road 55” as the official reason for the construction of the wall, with maps showing the route of the wall extending along the southern side of Road 55 from Izbit at Tabib to the illegal Israeli settlement of Maale Shomeron.

Residents inform that a high-ranking member of the Israeli Civil Administration visited the villagers and farmers on 30th November advising them that the wall will be made from wire, but would not say how tall or how far from the road the wall would be. He also advised residents that the wall will not block the main entrance to the village. The maps provided to the villagers, however, show that the planned wall will completely close the main entrance of Azzun – preventing villagers from directly accessing the main road to Nablus and Qalqiliya. This entrance is regularly closed by Israeli military forces by roadblocks and razorwire – part of the collective punishment frequently visited upon the villagers during Israeli military incursions.

Residents have been given just one week to lodge complaints against the impending wall construction – complaints that need to be accompanied by current ownership documents. Any residents wishing to make a complaint must first then request new proof of ownership papers from Israeli authorities. Many in the village are cynical that the complaint system will have any effect at all. “For sure this [complaint] route will not work. Always they say ‘you can complain’, but this is just to make it legal. They will make it [the wall] and they will say it is for security reasons”.

Villagers have good reason to by cynical. When the Apartheid Wall was first planned to the East of Azzun, residents were told they had two weeks to lodge their complaints. Before the two weeks were up, construction on the Wall was started, under the pretext that if the court decision was against the Wall, then the work would be reversed.

Israeli authorities have advised villagers that the new wall will confiscate 7 dounums of village land. Many in the village are also suspicious of this figure, as the original plans given for the Eastern Wall were for 25 metres in length. Once bulldozing began the Wall spanned more than 100 metres.

While authorities are claiming the new wall is to prevent stones being thrown on the Israeli-controlled road, no such measures have been taken against illegal Israeli settlements where stones thrown at Palestinian cars cause many injuries. Also, note residents, a wire wall, such as those imposed on Marda and Haris in the Salfit region, would do nothing to prevent stones being thrown.

The new wall will, however, prevent farmers from easily reaching their lands that lie on the north side of Road 55, while with the main road to Nablus destroyed by Israeli forces years ago, transportation and travel will become increasingly difficult and expensive.

Maan: House set ablaze as settlers continue Hebron riots

To view original article, published by Maan News Agency on the 3rd November, click here

Hebron – Israeli settlers set fire to a Palestinian house in the West Bank city of Hebron on Wednesday, continuing two weeks of violence.

On Tuesday, hundreds of Israeli settlers attacked Palestinians in the West Bank city of Hebron on Monday night and Tuesday, throwing stones and beating residents with clubs while Israeli soldiers and police looked on.

Palestinians and their property were attacked in the Ar-Ras, Wadi Al-Hussain and Al-Ja’bari neighborhoods. Settlers also released dogs to attack the Palestinians. Israeli soldiers also fired tear gas and sonic bombs towards Palestinian houses.

Dozens of Palestinian citizens were injured. Witnesses reported that the settler mob numbered in the hundreds.

Settlers groups have descended upon Hebron over the last two weeks since Israel’s High Court of Justice ordered 13 settler families to leave the Palestinian-owned Ar-Rajabi house, which the Israelis have occupied since 2007. Rumors spread on Monday that the Israeli military was preparing to implement the order.

“It is not about Ar-Rajabi building. Settlers want to occupy Al-Ja’bari and As-Salayma neighborhoods as well as Wadi Al-Hussain, Ar-Ras and the Christian neighborhoods in order to connect Kiryat Arba’ and Kiryat Kharsina settlements with other outposts,” said Munawwar Ja’bary, an elderly woman from Ja’bari neighborhood.

She added, “Men, women and children have been attacked and injured. Our houses have been damaged. We have been prevented from leaving our homes. Our cemeteries and mosques have been desecrated in order to force us to leave, yet we will steadfast whatever they do.”

Several houses and shops were also attacked, especially water reservoirs on tops of the houses. Settlers also attempted to force shops’ doors open using crowbars and hammers. Two houses were partially torched. The windows of four cars were shattered and fire was set to two others.

The violence continued all of Monday night. On Tuesday morning settlers resumed their attacks, pelting Palestinians with with stones from the roof of the Ar-Rajabi building.

Witnesses said Israeli police and soldiers stationed in the city did nothing to prevent the attacks, and in some cases facilitated them.

More than 200 protest Israeli waste dump at Deir Sharaf

On 2nd December, more than 200 Palestinian, international and Israeli activists marched to the Palestinian lands on which Israeli settlers are preparing to dump solid waste.

Organised jointly by the Palestinian Ministry for Environment; the Nablus coalition of political parties; Nablus governorate together with the villages of Deir Sharaf and Qusin, the demonstration called for an end to plans of Israeli settlers from nearby Qedumim settlement to construct a waste dump on Palestinian land.

Children carried placards stating “We Want Freedom and a Pure Environment” – outlining the two main political objections to the nascent waste dump. The first is the refusal to tolerate the attempted land-grab by the settlement, with the municipalities from Qusin and Deir Sharaf affirming that the land in question has not been sold to Qedumim council – a claim currently being made by the council.

The second objection is to the existence of a waste dump on the site, which lies just 100 metres above the Deir Sharaf aquifer – the source of 40 percent of Nablus’ drinking water. Whilst the settler groups in question claim the dump will be for “sanitary landfill”, which will not pollute the water below, the same claim was made in 2005 when Qedumim council first dumped waste on the site, but the reality was that a whole range of waste, from paper to foodstuffs to tyres, was dumped there. “The type of rock here is very porous”, said Amjad Ibrahim of the Palestinian Ministry of Environment. “The water will leech through very quickly”.

20 dounums of the land have been prepared by work crews employed by the settlement, but the grand scheme is to eventually take 400 dounums (100 acres) for the landfill site, with waste to be dumped there for 20 years. No waste has been dumped on the site since April 2005, when in just two days of dumping, mountains of waste were created. “Can you imagine what it will be like after 20 years?”, asks Mr Ibrahim.

Whilst the dumping of waste on the site in 2005 was stopped very quickly as a result of media and political pressure, residents are worried that this time won’t be so easy. Whilst under international law, it is illegal for an occupying power to dump its waste in occupied lands, (much as it is illegal to settle population in occupied lands), settler groups have negotiated around this obstacle by claiming the site is also for Palestinian waste – a claim that all Palestinian authorities refute. It is through this fabrication, however, that the settlers have supposedly been granted a license to dump waste at the site – a license that, along with land ownership papers, they have failed to produce. Nonetheless, concern over the possibility that Israeli authorities have granted settlers license to dump waste in Deir Sharaf has led to the issue being included in the articles of concern for the Palestinian peace-talks negotiations team.

Villagers, moreover, have vowed to continue to take action against the waste dump – refusing to allow their land to be stolen and their water supplies polluted.