One arrested at demonstration against land destruction in Artas, Bethlehem
UPDATE 26 May 2007, Gaby Lasky, George’s lawyer, relayed the news that George has been released from Israeli police custody in Hebron.
George was scheduled to appear for trial in 5 hours, around 20:00, this evening at the Russian compound in Jerusalem. Gaby stated that the Greek consulate was very active, which may have pressured the police to release George before the trial.
Greek consulate representatives and solidarity activists were planning to bring video evidence of George’s innocence to the court. George was being faced with trumped-up charges of “assaulting an office leading to injury” and “disrupting soldier’s work.” The video, to the contrary, shows George and other activists being assaulted by the soldiers immediately prior to George’s arrest.
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Today, May 25th, the residents of the south of Bethlehem area held a large demonstration against Israel’s Apartheid Wall which separates them from Bethlehem and steals their lands. The demonstration started in the village of Umm Salamuna, where Palestinians, Israelis, and internationals held a soccer game on the path of the Wall.
From there, at least 150 activists made their way to the village of Artas to protest Israel’s land destruction. This was a non-violent demonstration, aimed at reaching the land of the Abu Swai family, which soldiers claimed today was a “closed military zone.” After Friday prayers on the land, the non-violent demonstrators attempted to cross the barricade of Israeli soldiers. The army responded with force. George, an activist from Greece, was arrested and is currently being held in an Israeli jail in Hebron.
Martinez described the incident: “The demonstrators were completely non-violent. Not a single stone was thrown. But the soldiers started to beat and kick people. I saw at least two people being choked by soldiers. Then they went after George. He wasn’t doing anything but they arrested him anyways.”
An Israeli activist heard one of the detaining officers say that George was being arrested for “assault.”
After half an hour, the demonstrators sat on the ground affront the soldiers, refusing to leave the area. The demonstrators all then began shouting, “We want George! We want George!” The army, however, placed George in a police jeep and escorted him to an unknown destination, though it is believed that George is in one of the police stations in the Hebron area.
Earlier this week, the struggle reached the village of Artas, near Al Hader. It happened when Israeli construction crews reached the fertile lands of the village. The reason for the planned route of the wall is for the construction of two new neighborhoods in the illegal settlement of Efrata, stretching from it’s current border to the route of the wall.
Early Sunday morning, an Israeli bulldozer destroyed an entire orchard of apricot trees in spite of attempts by villagers and other activists who slept on the land to stop it. Occupation soldiers continued their work and ate sandwiches as farmers wept at the site of their ancestral land being ripped apart. Three Palestinians were arrested the following day for continuing to protest the land destruction. They have all recently been relased.
(Video and photos of land destruction here:
https://www.palsolidarity.org/main/2007/05/21/in-the-belly-of-the-wailing-democracy-called-israel/)
Video of today’s action available upon request.
For more information, contact:
ISM Media Office, 0599-943-157, 0542-103-657
Dr. Barghouthi condemned the Israeli government aggression against a number of offices for the PLC and other West Bank charities
Press Statement, 23-05-2007
Ramallah – Minister of Information and Government spokesperson Dr. Mustafa Barghouthi condemned the Israeli storming of a number of offices for the Legislative Council and other organizations and charitable societies in Jenin, Jericho, Hebron and Bethlehem in addition to confiscating and vanadalizing their property.
Dr. Barghouthi said that the Israeli army targeted the Nafha society for the defense of prisoners in Jenin, where these forces destroyed the doors and confiscated computers and files for the prisoners from the society. The Minister of Information added that the Israeli occupation forces also stormed the PLC office in Tubas and confiscated office property and computers, in addition to storming the Naqa Women Society in Bethlehem, Isra’ charitable society in Jericho and the Haj Musbah abu Hanak school in Hebron where the invading forces confiscated two computers and other school records.
Dr. Barghouthi described the Israeli targeting of Palestinian institutions as another crime committed by Israel against the Palestinian people. He pointed out that Israel has gone out of control in violating all rights by targeting and destroying the Palestinian institutions; especially the humanitarian and educational institutions. The Minister of Information expressed dismay over the Israeli targeting to the Natsheh school run by Muslim Youth society in Hebron where 450 student study.
Dr. Barghouthi explained that Israel is perpetrates war crimes and violates the international law by bombarding Gaza and destroying Palestinian institutions and resources in the West Bank and by building the apartheid wall.
Dr. Barghouthi said that the international community is expected, more than ever, to take up its responsibilities and to impose sanctions against Israel to deter it from continuing with its crimes in the Palestinian territories.
The bulldozing of the land in Artas village near Bethlehem has temporary stopped after an Israeli court ruled a preemptive halt of work in the village on Wednesday and Thursday.
The court ruling was made after the villagers filed a complaint against the Israeli company which is building a sewer in the villagers land for the settlement of Efrat without their permission, Mr. Khaled Al-Azza head of the popular committee against the wall and settlements told IMEMC.
Samer Jaber, coordinator of the “Stop the Bleeding of Bethlehem” campaign who has been very active in Artas case, said this is an achievement for the nonviolent resistance, although small.
On Sunday Israeli troops assaulted farmers and other Palestinians who came in solidarity with Artas village including Dr. Mustafa Barghouthi, Minister of Information.
The Israeli s security guards who accompany the bulldozers at work opened fire on Monday at a group of villagers who attempted to enter their land. The villagers were accompanied by a number of other Palestinian and International activists.
The guards also opened fire at the journalists who were there to cover the nonviolent protest, however, no injuries were reported.
Troops arrived and arrested three Palestinians from the village and took them to Ofer detention center pending a court hearing on Sunday. The three have been charged with throwing rocks at the security guards.
IMEMC reporter Ghassan Bannoura, who was in Artas covering the incident, confirmed that no stones were thrown at anybody. “The security guards opened unprovoked fire at the villagers and at us, no one threw any stones at them,” Bannoura said.
Israel is planning to run the Settlement sewage system through the lands of the villagers.
Memorial posters decorate the walls of the Rafidiya government hospital in Nablus, covering earlier posters of countless young people who have been killed. But this poster is like nothing we have seen before: a fetus covered in its own blood, its tiny head blown up by the bullet that struck its mother, and the caption – “Who gave you the right to steal his life?”
The killing of the unborn child, Daoud, by Israel Defense Forces troops raises a series of moral, legal and philosophical questions. Is the killing of a fetus manslaughter? Is it murder? And how old is the victim? But all these questions are dwarfed by the woman lying stunned and injured in the maternity ward of the hospital in Nablus, in agony, with all kinds of tubes attached to her, refusing to answer a single question.
It is obvious that Maha Katouni is still in a state of trauma. Wounded in the abdomen, she lies in bed, her elderly mother by her side. The tube in her nose makes it hard for her to speak. She is 30 years old and was in the seventh month of pregnancy, a mother who got up in the middle of the night to protect her three small children, sleeping in the other room, from the bullets that were whistling by outside. As soon as she got out of bed, the bullet struck her. Bleeding, she fell on the nightstand by her bed. Maha survived, but Daoud – as she and her husband planned to name their son – was removed from her womb with a bullet wound to the head.
“And babies?” a reporter once asked an American soldier who had taken part in the My Lai massacre in the Vietnam War. His succinct answer was just as chilling as the question. “Babies.” And now, a fetus.
The day before, I had been in Soweto, near Johannesburg, South Africa, accompanied by the Palestinian ambassador to the UN, Riyad Mansour, comparing the horrors of apartheid to the Israeli occupation in the territories. The next afternoon I was here, in the Rafidiya maternity ward, standing before the bed of the wounded Maha, who had lost her baby.
The biggest hospital in the territories is practically deserted, barely functioning. It has been this way for two months now. Like the other hospitals in the West Bank, Rafidiya accepts only emergency cases, because of the economic boycott of the Palestinian Authority, which also prevents the workers here from being paid. Only 20 of the hospital’s 168 beds are currently occupied, and only about a third of the hospital’s 380 staff members show up for work. In the emergency room we saw just one patient, who had arrived that morning. The rest of the beds were empty. In the past two and a half months, the workers have received just NIS 1,500 per person, from funds provided by the European Union.
Hospital director Dr. Khaled Salah says that the staff and patients don’t come to the hospital because of the difficulties in getting to Nablus and the cost of the trip, which has risen significantly because of the checkpoints. The Hawara checkpoint and the Beit Iba checkpoint, the two checkpoints on the city’s outskirts, are relatively deserted, because of the difficulty in getting past them.
Maha lies in bed, her eyes closed. A green headscarf covers her head. Her skin is ashen. Every once in a while she opens her eyes but then quickly closes them again. Once in a while she also murmurs a few words in a feeble voice and then goes quiet again. How are you? Silence. Maha is a resident of the Ein Beit Ilma refugee camp on the outskirts of Nablus. She is married to Rifat, a 36-year-old school janitor, and the couple have three children: Jihad, 10; Jawad, 7; and Jad, 3. Two uncles and her mother watch over her, not budging from her bedside. For the father of the family, it’s too hard to be here. He’s still in shock.
Last Wednesday was an ordinary day in the Katouni household. The father went to work, the kids went to school, and in the evening everyone went to bed – the parents in their bedroom and the three children in their room in the third-floor apartment. Shortly after two in the morning, Maha was startled awake by the loud sounds of gunfire from the street. She didn’t even manage to turn on the light when she got up to run to the kids’ room next door, to reassure her three little boys and keep them from getting scared. The gunfire was very heavy. The window of her room was open and her bed was close to the window.
Maha got out of bed, took one step, and then the bullet struck her in the lower back. She fell onto the nightstand. Another bullet struck the nightstand. Soldiers from the Nahal patrol battalion were standing on the roofs of the surrounding buildings. “Wherever we are sent – to there we go,” the poet Yaakov Orland once wrote in “The Nahal Anthem,” sung by the Nahal entertainment troupe, which also sang “The Song of Peace.”
Rifat rushed to call an ambulance. The children, who had awakened, were hysterical, especially the youngest, 3-year-old Jad, at the sight of the blood trickling from the front and back of their pregnant mother, who lay wounded on the floor. The bullet had struck her from behind, passed through the fetus’ head and the mother’s intestines and exited through the abdomen.
Family members say that about 45 minutes went by before the ambulance from the Medical Relief organization was permitted to approach. In the meantime, Maha’s mother, Umm Ibrahim, tried to leave her home nearby to come to her daughter’s aid. Umm Ibrahim says that when she tried to leave her house there was gunfire; she hurried back inside. “It’s a miracle that I was saved,” says the woman in the white headscarf. She could not reach her injured daughter and would not see her until two hours later, in the hospital.
The pain is written all over Maha’s face. One of her brothers somehow managed to cross the line of fire and get to her house; he tried to stanch the gaping wound in her stomach with a towel. Her husband, Rifat, was paralyzed with shock. Umm Ibrahim says that her son, who tended to Maha, could see through the hole in her abdomen that the fetus had been wounded in the head and was dead.
The gunfire finally subsided at around three in the morning and they were able to take Maha out to the street, carried by her brother and the paramedic from the ambulance that had parked in the nearby alley. The brother says that on the way to the hospital they were stopped twice by soldiers, who wanted to check the wounded woman’s identity and to make sure there were no wanted men hiding in the ambulance. Maha was barely conscious when she reached the hospital, but her mother says she understood right away that she had lost the baby.
The family says the IDF enters the camp nearly every night and that there is almost always gunfire. Umm Ibrahim managed to get to the hospital at four in the morning, when her daughter was in the operating room and the dead fetus had already been removed.
Dr. Ihab Shareideh was the surgeon who was summoned to the hospital in the middle of the night to operate on Maha. He says that her recovery has been more difficult and slower than usual, not only because of her injuries, but because of her traumatized mental state. Fortunately, not many blood vessels were injured, so the delay in getting her to the hospital did not cause further damage. It is too soon to gauge the extent of the damage to her digestive system, or to say whether she will be able to get pregnant again. The fetus died as a result of the bullet that penetrated its brain on the way to the mother’s intestines.
The anesthesiologist, Dr. Iyad Salim, a resident of nearby Hawara, roams the hospital corridors. On his cell phone camera is a video of the operation and the removal of the fetus. So close to being a fully developed baby, with a bullet wound to the head. The memorial poster shows the etus bleeding from the head. The image is unbearable.
They were going to call him Daoud, after an uncle, and also after a resident of the camp who was killed. At home they had everything ready: new clothes, diapers and a crib passed down from his older brothers. Daoud was buried in the camp cemetery. Only a few close family members attended the funeral of the unborn baby.
At press time, no response had been received from the IDF Spokesperson’s Office.
Gaza today -lawless embargo , sanctions and occupation by Dr. Mona El-Farra, 23 May 2007
A few days ago, a ceasefire has been signed again between the two Palestinian fighting parties, Fatah and Hamas. And children are back at school. My daughter started her end of the year exams early. All the schools had to squeeze the schedule of the examination, so they end as soon as possible before new violence erupts.
I believe it is a fragile ceasefire. The armed men are still in the streets of Gaza, some of them occupy the roofs of some of the multi-story buildings. Israel has intensified its air strike attacks against Gaza, north east and some areas in the south. Many people have been killed. Eight members of one family were killed, when airoplanes launched an air strike against the home of a Hamas leaders in Gaza. He wasn’t at home, he escaped the attack. Hospitals, including Al Awda , are overwhelmed with increasing number of casualties, with inadequate medical supplies and medications .
We all fear a large Israeli attack against Gaza.
From my apartment by the seaside, I can clearly hear and see the Israeli gunboats patrolling the sea of Gaza, and the Palestinian Authority armed men in their new base. It used to be a family resort. It is not any more, it is military place for security guards of the president. The smell of the death is strong, stronger than watching the lovely sea, or listening to the singing birds if there are any. Shooting sounds is prevalent, poverty too, and lawlessness.
My friend Mansour, whom I mentioned in one of my previous entries, and who needs urgent cytotoxic treatment , in Israel or abroad, after 45 of long waiting days, he got the referral to one of the hospitals inside Israel. But the Gaza borders are closed both north and south, and he has to wait again for its unpredictable opening. His story is the same daily story of many patients in Gaza, who are dying slowly because of the closure,
Where are we going, I don’t know, but I know very well, that the whole population suffers of the dreadful consequences of the Israeli Occupation, which is fully supported by the USA, I know also very well that women and children suffer the most. And that me and my colleagues, who work in different fields of the Palestinian civil society different fields, work hard to alleviate this suffering.
