Soldiers Beat Palestinians and Human Rights Workers in Tel Rumeida by ISM Hebron
On Tuesday, March 20th, at 6 pm the Israeli army took a shepherd, Gandi Badder, to their military base. They claimed that they had called him down from the hillside but he did not respond. He says he did not hear anyone call him. The army charged him for failing to respond to an army order, and held him for an hour. He was beaten and threatened with knifes. Badder claims the army threatened to slit his throat and kill him.
At 7 pm, Badder was released and the soldiers went out and ordered ten families to leave their homes and stand in the street. The army claimed that someone was throwing stones from the roof. All the Palestinians involved deny that any stones were ever thrown. At 8:30 the soldiers again claimed that stones were being thrown, even though all the Palestinians were on the street and that it was clearly not possible for them to throw stones.
The following day, Wednesday, the soldiers came back to the same houses and yelled for the Palestinians to open the door. Yousef opened the door but the soldiers proceeded to smash the window on the door.
Soldiers demanded all four families in the building to leave, including women and children. One of the soldiers hit Yousef in the chest with the butt of his rifle. Three soldiers hit Idries, forced him against the wall and the Israeli soldier, named Nachir, kicked him on the leg. Idries told them that he was sick and showed them his bandages. They said, “You die !” They were very abusive to Idries, shouting, “FUCK YOUR MOTHER !”
They demanded that Yousef open the workshop door. He asked for a minute to get the key and they immediately began pounding on the door.
Two Human Rights Workers (HRW’s) arrived and started filming from Qorduba school. About 6 or 7 Palestinian men and boys were standing against a wall opposite their houses. Six soldiers were standing, holding them there. They asked the HRW’s where they were going and if someone had called them. After a few minutes they told the HRW’s to stop filming and took their camera.
Two additional HRW’s arrived from the other direction and began filming. Two soldiers started moving towards them and ordered them to stop filming. They started pushing and shoving them, shouting, “YOU DON’T FUCK WITH THE ARMY!” They pushed them against a wall, forced them to the ground and began kicking them. They cocked their rifles, pointed them at the HRW’s and demanded that they hand over the camera. The HRW’s huddled together to protect each other.
The soldiers forced them to lay face down on the ground and handcuffed them with plastic ties. They continued to kick them, slapped one of them on the back of the head and pulled his hair. While doing this they continued to abuse the HRW’s , and were shouting, “YOU DON’T FUCK WITH THE PARACHUTE REGIMENT !” During the abuse, one of the HRWs was struck on the forehead, possibly with the butt of the soldier’s gun.
The Israeli army took the HRWs’ passports. A few minutes later, when the HRW’s were sat against the wall, the soldiers cut the ties and told them to leave or else they would get arrested for the night. When asked for what charge the soldiers replied, “for hitting a soldier,” which was a complete fabrication. The HRW’s moved away towards Shuhada street but continued to monitor the scene.
A little while later an officer came out of the army depot and questioned them about their names and nationalities. He asked them whether everything was OK. The HRWs replied that they had just been attacked by soldiers who were continuing to harass Palestinian families. The officer asked the HRWs to accompany him back to the houses. The officer questioned the soldiers and Palestinians as to what was going on. The four HRW’s demanded that their cameras and films be returned and they were.
The officer, whose name is Itomasi (Itomar?), questioned each of the HRW’s in turn as to whether they were OK. He apologized for the behavior of the soldiers and said that he was angry with them. The officer who had been in charge of the squad came over, introduced himself as Nachir and apologized for the behavior of his men. He offered to take the HRW’s back to the army depot for coffee but they declined. Both the officers apologized to the Palestinians and tried to calm them down.
The officers claimed that the incident began because they saw a laser light from a window and suspected that there might be a gun there. Nachir pointed to the window where he claimed to have seen the laser light. It was above the large workshop door and very high from the floor, making it nearly impossible for someone to stand there.
Nachir had told the HRW’s that his men would be punished. The HRWs asked the officer how they would be punished.
Itomasi replied that they would be denied leave and detained.
For more info, contact:
ISM Hebron (Daood): 0543127253
ISM Media Office: 022971824
House Demolition in Halhul and House Invasion in Hebron by ISM Hebron
House Demolition in Halhoul
At 8am, Human Rights Workers (HRWs) received a call from Rabbis for Human Rights to say that the Israeli army had already begun a house demolition on the edge of Halhoul with a possibility that more houses would be destroyed. Three HRW’s set off for Halhoul immediately. When they arrived, they discovered that the demolition had begun at 7 am and there was not much left of the house. A large crowd of Palestinians had gathered and Israeli Border Police were keeping everyone well back from the 2 Caterpillar diggers (back hoes).
The house was still under construction and was owned by Ahmed Ibrahim Assouni Abu Yousef. He did have the correct permits from the municipality of Halhoul but the army said it was too close to the main road to Bethlehem. In fact it was more than 400 metres from the road.
The owner asked the Shabbab ( Palestinian youths) not to throw stones and for everyone to move back from the army. Human Rights Workers positioned themselves in the next house which has been threatened with demolition and filmed from there. This house is owned by Sayeed Abu Yousef. The army ordered him to stop construction a month ago. There are at least two other houses under construction which have received warnings from the army.
Palestinian youth set up a road block to slow the army from leaving. The army made no attempt to demolish any other houses this day but attempted to leave. They were showered with stones and returned fire with live ammunition, rubber bullets and a machine gun. One of the journalist’s cars got stuck on the road preventing the diggers from leaving. They had great difficulty in moving it.
Two Palestinians were injured and taken away in ambulances. One was hit twice with rubber bullets, once in the forehead, which was bleeding profusely and also in the leg. The other collapsed from shock.
Rabbis for Human Rights have lawyers working to appeal these demolition orders but in this first case it was too late.
Settlers Invade and Occupy Palestinian Home Near Ibrahimi Mosque
On their way back from the home demolition in Halhul, the Human Rights Workers arrived at the house that 200 Israeli settlers invaded the previous night, settlers whom were backed up by the Israeli army. The Palestinian home is located near the Jewish settlement of Kiryat Arba.
The settlers claim they legally purchased the house but Palestinian owner Bayez Rajabe denies this.
HRW’s arrived around 11 am. There were many journalists and film crews present. Bayez Rajabe gave an interview and held up the documents which prove he is the legal owner.
A Palestinian HRW interviewed him extensively. Local Palestinian residents are very angry that the army has sealed the road in front of the occupied house so that children cannot easily get to school and worshippers cannot reach the next door mosque and cemetary. Soldiers and settlers were observed in the Muslim cemetery walking, eating and drinking disrespectfully on the graves. An elderly lady, family of the owner, yelled at the settlers to leave the cemetery and they did.
Umm Salamuna Anti-Apartheid Wall Demo on Mother’s Day & the International Day for the Elimination of Racial Discrimination
Umm Salamuna– Tomorrow, March 21, at 1:00 PM, on Mother’s Day & the International Day for the Elimination of Racial Discrimination, Umm Salamuna– Tomorrow, March 21, at 1:30 PM, on Mother’s Day & the International Day for the Elimination of Racial Discrimination, Palestinians from the souther Bethlehem village of Umm Salamuna and neighboring villages will protest against the Israeli bulldozers which are currently razing their land for the Apartheid Wall. In honor of Mother’s Day, Palestinian and international women will march in solidarity on the frontlines during the demonstration.
Previously, villagers held a rally and blocked an Israeli settler road in protest at the Wall which will annex 700 dunums to the Israeli settlement of Efrat and destroy 270 dunums. Unless the Israeli army intervenes, the villagers plan to march from the village to the Wall and stop the bulldozers from continuing the destruction of the land. Local representatives will give speeches focusing on the effects of the destruction of their fields, trees, and land.
Palestinian, Israeli, and international solidarity activists will join in the struggle against Israel’s apartheid laws and the destruction and theft of land in this region.
The International Day for the Elimination of Racial Discrimination is observed annually on March 21st. It was first established in 1966, following a tragic event that shocks the conscience: the massacre of young students peacefully protesting against apartheid laws, adopted by the South African government, a brutal regime that applied the theory of inequality between races, regardless of humanity’s moral and ethical advances. Proclaiming the International Day, the United Nations General Assembly called upon the international community to redouble its efforts to eliminate all forms of racial discrimination.
For more information, contact:
Mahmoud (Umm Salamuna): 0599586004
ISM Media Office: 022971824
One week after I left Nablus I found myself again looking out across the city’s majestic sunlit hills, this time from one of the highest mountains in the West Bank. In all my reporting on Israel’s invasion and human rights violations, I never mentioned how beautiful the ancient city is, from the surrounding mountains to the enchanting Old City, so easy to get lost in. Both remind me of Damascus (one pessimistic Palestinian pointed out the comparison early during my stay, claiming that the Nablus invasion was practice for an attack against Syria). My last day in Nablus I got to discover another one of the city’s gems: Al Najaa University. I immediately took to the old architecture mixed with modern sculptures on the main campus, but what inspired me most was watching thousands of students return to the frantic bustle of daily university life so soon after soldiers had released the city from hostage. Resilience is a defining character of Palestinian identity in my experience, and I was more impressed than surprised to see Palestinians asserting their determination to get an education even in the most difficult circumstances. Just another example of the ever-pervasive Palestinian nonviolent resistance.
The night before visiting I had passed by the empty campus–abandoned since the Army took over and classes were cancelled–in a taxi driving home with the family that was hosting me. I had grown quite close to the warm family with Leninist communist leanings, and felt happy and comfortable in their home covered with posters of Che Guevara, David Beckham, Shakira, and others idolized by the three teenage daughters. As we were driving and chatting after having visited some friends, we were suddenly surrounded with jeeps driving through the city to and from seemingly every direction. We panicked. Was there curfew? Would we be shot for being outside? Screeching to a halt, we tried to back up to the neighborhood we’d come from, but jeeps were swarming in that direction as well. Where were we supposed to go?
The jeeps left as quickly as they had come. Apparently they were doing a practice invasion, presumably to train new soldiers, as they’ve been doing a lot recently in a village called Beit Lid near Tulkarem (even though nobody in the village has been accused of threatening Israel’s security). I will never forget that feeling of being suddenly surrounded, the confusion and panic, the helplessness. There was something about sitting together to a cheerful family breakfast the next morning that felt like a kind of nonviolent resistance too: the insistence on ordinary life and pleasures no matter what havoc Occupation Forces are wreaking just outside.
I returned to the Nablus region a week later to accompany a teacher named Addawiya and her family to plow land they haven’t been able to work for six years due to soldier harassment. The next plot over hasn’t been plowed in 26 years for the same reason. There are Israeli military posts on all the highest West Bank peaks, among them the mountain where Addawiya’s land lies. As we cleared away stones that had overrun the land over the last half dozen years, Addawiya told me about the day she was picking olives with her brother when the soldiers came and threatened to shoot her brother if he didn’t leave the land immediately. He persisted in picking olives until the soldiers began shooting into the air to show that they were serious, at which point he ran off terrified. Addawiya was left alone, and on her hands and knees pleaded for her life, all along sure she was going to die. Her fear was not unjustified. Three years ago, Addawiya’s sister was taking a walk on the family’s land near the village with her husband when a group of soldiers popped out from the foliage and open-fired on him. The 33-year-old teacher died instantly
The Israeli Army came and apologized to Addawiya’s family. Apparently they were intending to assassinate a wanted man and shot the wrong guy. Addawiya’s sister, who was 23 and pregnant at the time, is now a 26-year-old going on 60. With nobody to support her and two young children to raise, she had to move back in with her mother. Incidentally, the mother invited me to move in too when we returned from plowing (as an unmarried, childless 27-year-old woman, I’m practically an old maid around here). I declined politely, and we began the journey back to Haris.
Our first stop along the way was Huwwara, the southern checkpoint out of Nablus city, where as usual hundreds of students from Al Najaa and other universities were waiting unhappily, squished together like cattle as it began to rain and everyone squeezed under the roof to wait behind metal detectors and turnstiles to leave the city.
I remembered passing through Huwwara a few days earlier on a trip accompanying other farmers in the area. Since the solidarity effort was organized by the Israeli group Rabbis for Human Rights, we were driving in an Israeli car with yellow license plates, so we didn’t even slow down as we breezed through on the Israeli-only road parallel to the one where Palestinians had been waiting for hours if not days.
On the way back from Addawiya’s land, a colleague and I decided to stay at Huwarra to do Checkpoint Watch, i.e. witness and document any human rights violations. There was already one sick man whom the Army had refused to let pass and we took his story. At first the soldiers didn’t seem to mind our presence, but after some time one soldier told us we weren’t allowed to stand where we were. He pointed to a line drawn on the floor nearby and said we could stand behind it. We began to protest, but quickly realized a fight would translate into longer waiting time for the Palestinians being processed by the same soldier, so we walked a few paces to the other side of the line. Ten minutes later, a different soldier informed us it was illegal to be observing the checkpoint at all, so we would have to leave immediately. We didn’t even dignify his absurd claim with a response. He stood next to us awkwardly repeating himself a few times and then eventually went away.
We were approached by a third soldier, speaking only Hebrew. When we said we couldn’t understand, he told us in broken English that it was illegal to be there if you didn’t speak Hebrew. This was a new one. Another soldier showed up to translate the soldier’s original message, namely that in fact we could look but not take pictures. The soldier regretted to inform us that he would have to delete my photographs. At that point we decided we preferred to leave rather than lose the photos, so we began to walk away. As expected, the soldier didn’t chase after the supposedly “illegal”� pictures. Just before we left, we saw the sick man previously denied passage try his luck with a different soldier at a different machine and get through.
Israel claims that its checkpoints are for the security and safety of its citizens. What makes this claim so difficult to believe for those observing the institutions is how inconsistent and seemingly arbitrary the Army’s actions and “laws”� so frequently are. The sick man got through on his second try. Had that failed, he could have sprung for an expensive taxi ride to an alternative checkpoint 10 miles north that is scarcely monitored at all (when we passed through on the way to Addawiya’s land there were no soldiers in sight). The whole trip north and then around again would cost him several hours and paychecks, but he could exit his city with relative certainty. Anyone who’s spent time in the West Bank knows that if you’re desperate, you can get anywhere. There is always an alternative road, even into Israel, even with the Wall, which is full of holes so as not to disturb settlers commuting to Israel. Israel is not stupid. It knows that Palestinians can get around the Army’s blockades if they just drain enough energy and resources to do so. So why does Israel do it?
As our shared taxi from Huwwara to Haris left the checkpoint, the driver pulled up next to several drivers to ask how Zatara was. Zatara is a permanent checkpoint between Huwwara and Haris, but there’s an alternative road through Jama’iin village, which drivers take when the checkpoint line is too long or slow. The ride takes much longer, and is painfully bumpy and curvy. When our driver chose the detour, the woman next to me grimaced and took out some plastic bags, which she spent the ride vomiting into. I rubbed her back, not knowing what else to do, thinking about the short, straight, paved road that could have eased her suffering if it were not rendered so endless for non-Jews.
The taxi eventually dropped us off near the Haris bus stop, which soldiers have surrounded with large concrete cubes leftover from the roadblock that used to block our village. The blocks mean that waiting Palestinians cannot easily get from the sheltered bus stop to the road, so at least one traveler must wait always wait on the road to spot and flag down cars, even when it’s raining. Each time I’m forced to drench my backpack and jeans waiting to start a day’s journey, I think about what Israel has to gain by making even a bus stop inaccessible without struggle, by rendering what could be a smooth drive home into a nauseating miserable ride. I think about why the roadblocks were set up to begin with outside Haris, when villagers either had to drive their cars to the entrance, park, walk around, and take a taxi the rest of the way to work or university, or they had to take their cars along a strenuous unpaved detour through the countryside to reach the same outside road. What’s the point of making life so frustrating that people reconsider even going to work or school? What happens when daily life in Palestine becomes just too unbearable?
My questions are answered almost every day when strangers call or approach us desperate for help getting a visa to Europe or North America. They say they can’t take it anymore: First Israel took their land, then their sons, and now their dignity. What Israel wants more than anything isn’t to harm Palestinians; it wants for Palestinians to leave. Israel is the first to admit that the “demographic problem”� of too many Palestinians in an exclusively Jewish state threatens Israel more than any suicide bomber ever could.
Addawiya told me she wanted to leave as we were walking back from her groves. I asked her where, and she told me it didnt matter–she wasn’t going anywhere. “Because no country will give you a visa?”� I asked, and she shook her head. “Because that’s what they want us to do. They want us to flee as we did in 1948, so that the Jewish National Fund can again expropriate our land and reserve it for Jews only. But I won’t leave. I will stay here because it’s my right and it’s my duty, to myself and to my children.”� For Addawiya, even staying in her village and working her land is nonviolent resistance, the kind almost every Palestinian partakes in. It’s not the type of resistance that will make it onto headlines or the six o’clock news, but it is there, it is strong, and it is not going away.
After her son’s quest for answers led to his being gunned down, Jocelyn Hurndall faced a bitter battle with the Israeli army to get at the truth
It was the last day of term when Sophie, my daughter, called me at school. “Mum,” she said, “Tom’s been shot . . . The phone keeps on ringing . . . The Foreign Office called and they’re going to phone back . . . I think they said he was shot in a place called Rafah, in the Gaza Strip.”
I had been dreading such news since my 21-year-old son had left for Iraq two months before. That was February 2003, and the Iraq war had been about to start.
I dialled a number Sophie had given me, thinking it was the Foreign Office, but it was the Sunday Times news desk. I could hear a change in the voice of the journalist at the other end as he began to grasp who he was talking to.
“Look,” he said, “I’m terribly sorry. I’ll look on Reuters for you. But just be aware — when things first come through they’re not always accurate.”
I heard the click of the computer keys.
“What’s coming up,” he said slowly, “is that peace activist Tom Hurndall has been shot, and that he’s brain dead . . . But as I said, you really mustn’t believe everything you first hear.”
Heading home, I had driven barely 200 yards when my mobile rang. It was the journalist from The Sunday Times.
“Are you all right?” he said. “Please do drive carefully. How far do you have to go? Look, I live just near you, in Tufnell Park. Please let me know if there’s anything I can do to help.”
He was no longer wearing his journalist’s hat but speaking simply as one human being to another, and I could hear that he was genuinely concerned.
I tried to get hold of Anthony, my former husband, who was visiting Moscow. It was 3am Russian time before we had a desperate conversation. What had Tom been doing in the Gaza Strip? What had happened? We were determined to find out.
The first official Israeli version was that a Palestinian gunman wearing fatigues had been shooting at a watchtower and had been targeted by a member of the Israeli Defence Forces (IDF). But the story now coming to us was that Tom, unarmed and wearing a peaceworker’s fluorescent jacket, had been rescuing some Palestinian children from Israeli sniper fire and had been gunned down himself.
Around midnight I began phoning Israeli hospitals until finally the main hospital in Jerusalem suggested I call the Soroka in Beer-sheba. I was put through to its director.
“It’s not good news, I’m afraid,” he said. “He has a very, very serious head wound . . . He could last until tomorrow, or he could go in half an hour.”
“I’m coming. I’ll be on a plane in the morning.”
“Really,” he said, “I must emphasise how serious his condition is, Mrs Hurndall. Is it really necessary for you to come? If Tom dies your journey may be for nothing . . . And you know, he can be sent back.” I DOZED uneasily as the plane approached Tel Aviv. My head was filled with images of Tom lying injured; Tom as a baby, full of curiosity; six-year-old Tom, running naked round his grandmother’s croquet lawn in the pouring rain; Tom, single-minded and full of verve and mischief.
At 21, he was now the same age as I had been when I first went to Israel. I tried to reconcile this place where he was at death’s door with the place in which my father had developed a passionate interest and where I had spent two months of carefree work and travel.
My father had been a scientist with a mission — the generation of energy from wave power. He once told me how, when he was walking beside the Dead Sea, King Hussein of Jordan’s helicopter had landed nearby. My father had strolled over and struck up a conversation about alternative energy.
Just like Tom, I thought. Not much regard for formalities — just straight to the matter in hand. I knew, too, how painfully my father had struggled to reconcile his passionate interest in engineering with his Christian beliefs. That seemed like Tom, too — the idealism, the questioning, the independence — and the aloneness.
People didn’t always understand Tom’s thinking, and this was certainly true when he made up his mind to go to Iraq as a human shield in the war. Sophie, the first of my children, was protective of her three brothers. She had tried to dissuade him from going.
His journey to Baghdad didn’t — couldn’t — have my blessing, though I understood why he felt he must go. I was shocked, yet somehow resigned. When I hugged him as he left, all I could do was say, over and over: “Take care, Tom. Take care. Keep safe.”
We’d been here before — Tom was always challenging, always questioning. He wasn’t offering himself simply as a human shield. The reporter in him wanted to photograph and record for himself what the human shields were doing. He’d recently changed his course at Manchester Metropolitan University from criminology to photography. Tom photographed wherever he went.
We knew that he had left Iraq after it became clear that the authorities intended to use the volunteers to protect power stations rather than schools and hospitals. Tom wanted to prevent loss of life, but he wasn’t prepared to be a sitting target. The last we had heard he was helping in a refugee camp in Jordan.
MY hand was taken in a firm and reassuring grasp by a rather military-looking man with a kind and humorous expression.
“Mrs Hurndall? Tom Fitzalan-Howard. I’m the defence attaché, British embassy. Extremely good to meet you, but I’m sorry it’s in these circumstances. I hope you had a reasonable flight.”
Colonel Fitzalan-Howard, known as TFH, ushered me into a Range Rover. As we drove, we found we had acquaintances in common, including an old friend of mine now a general in the Royal Green Jackets.
I sensed that here was someone I could trust, a straight talker who was wholly unafraid to challenge immorality and untruth — someone who would want to do the right thing for the greater good and not just for his own country. As defence attaché, he said, he was the point of contact for all British diplomatic and consular matters involving the Israeli Defence Forces.
“You realise, don’t you,” he said, looking at me very directly, “that we’re not going to get anywhere with the Israelis.”
At first I didn’t understand. “All we want is to get at the truth. Doesn’t everyone?”
“It’s not quite as simple as that. They’re a hard-bitten lot. They’re not going to admit to anything. A lot of people have tried to call them to account, but I’m afraid they haven’t succeeded.”
To have this stated so starkly by someone so well informed was a shock.
“You know an Israeli soldier is not like a British soldier,” said TFH. “The concept of minimum force is central to a British soldier, who is trained, absolutely, to be accountable for his actions. The British rules of engagement are very strict on this, and they are always applied. It’s quite different with the IDF.
“For a start their soldiers are very young — conscripts mainly, though there are professional soldiers. The soldiers are invariably backed up by their commander and the chain of command.
“Jocelyn, I have to tell you” — here he spoke slowly as if for emphasis — “that the investigations are invariably a sham. This will be difficult for you and Anthony to deal with. A soldier is rarely held to account, and whatever he’s done he would never face a murder or manslaughter charge — he’d only be on a lesser charge, perhaps failing to carry out the correct drills. I really don’t want you to expect too much.”
He went on: “You also need to know that it’s only with political support at the highest level that we’ve achieved anything with any IDF investigations. Problem is that with media pressure alone they hunker down under the antisemitic charge, which they level against anyone who dares to criticise.”
This last comment hit home. The colonel’s words reminded me acutely of Tom’s Jewish friends and of the many Jewish people we knew in London. The present situation was not about race, religion, or getting sucked into any propaganda or political agenda. We wanted nothing but an objective search for truth, even if it meant believing that my pacifist son, Tom, really had dressed in army fatigues and been foolish enough to shoot at a watchtower, which was what the first absurd broadcast in Israel had stated.
I knew we were going to use every possible means to get at the truth, and I was sure the family would want to keep an open mind until we’d seen everything for ourselves. Anthony, as a lawyer, would be adamant about retaining objectivity and I knew he would not be hurried. IT was still not yet 8am when we reached the hospital and joined Anthony, who had flown in earlier and had already spoken to the doctors. We went up to the ward together.
I approached your bed and recognised your face in spite of the bandages round your dreadfully swollen head, covering your eyes . . . I was filled with terror at your absolute fragility and your uncertain future. I could not even pray.
Some of what Anthony was telling me as I stood there was hard to absorb. One senior doctor had suggested that Tom’s wound was “commensurate with a blow from a baseball bat”. Could any sane person connect these terrible injuries with a blow from a baseball bat? The notes at the foot of Tom’s bed clearly stated that he had suffered a “gunshot wound”.
Anthony had gathered that the consultant in charge had asked for an IDF doctor to visit Tom. What could all this mean? Uneasy already about the possibility of a cover-up, I began to feel the ground shifting under me. It seemed Tom was receiving the best medical care, but when it came to the medical evidence, to the politics of this situation, we both began to wonder who we could trust.
TFH said it was time to start for Rafah, which lay in the south of the Gaza Strip on the border with Egypt. Andy Whittaker, a British diplomat, led the way in another Range Rover: it was embassy policy always to go into the occupied territories in pairs.
“You never quite know what you’ll come up against,” TFH said with a laugh. “And by that I don’t mean any threat from the Palestinians. I’m much more worried by the IDF. I’m not saying it’s anything deliberate. More to do with lack of accountability and loose rules of engagement. It’s easy to be mistaken for someone else — even in an embassy Range Rover.”
Our first sight of Rafah was a dense cluster of watchtowers on the skyline. It seemed to be a ghost town. Whole streets had been demolished We were heading for the headquarters of an organisation TFH kept referring to as the ISM. The Range Rovers pulled up on a piece of waste ground. “Park round so we’re facing outwards,” I heard TFH say.
He shepherded us up some stairs into an almost bare room where people were waiting. I found it impossible to take in their names or much of what they were saying until a tall young man told me: “I am Mohammed. I was with Tom when he was shot . . . I met him first when he came here to the ISM headquarters.”
He said ISM was the International Solidarity Movement — “a peaceful movement, though the Israeli army and the Israeli press will tell you many lies about us. We try to stop the destruction of Palestinian homes, to monitor and bring attention to what is happening here”.
Mohammed said Tom had come to Rafah to find out what was happening after hearing about the death here of Rachel Corrie, an American student run over by an army bulldozer as she tried to stop it destroying a Palestinian house.
On the day of Tom’s shooting, said Mohammed, the ISM had intended to stage a peaceful protest by pitching a tent in the square outside the Rafah mosque, which was in an Israeli security zone and scheduled for demolition. They had cancelled the demonstration because of gunfire, which came either from one of the IDF watchtowers overlooking the square or from a tank parked outside the mosque.
They could see bullets ricocheting off a building beside a mound of rubble on which a group of about 20 or 30 children were playing, apparently accustomed to the danger.
Gradually the shots hit lower and lower, flying close over the children’s heads, and when they began scuffing up the sand, most of the children ran away. Only a boy and two little girls stayed rooted to the spot, crying for help.
Tom beckoned to the boy, holding out his arms, lifted him off the mound and carried him out of range of the shooting. Then he went back for the two little girls, bent down and put his arm round one of them.
“They shot him,” said Alice, an ISM member. “Right there. When he was rescuing those two children. The IDF shot him.”
She added: “He was wearing an orange jacket. We were all wearing orange jackets. Everyone recognises that means you’re a noncombatant.”
“Do you think it could have been a mistake?” I asked.
“A mistake? You don’t make mistakes with telescopic sights like the IDF have got. You could shoot the buttons off someone’s coat with those.”
“Was there any other shooting going on? Was there crossfire?”
“None. Absolutely none. There were no Palestinian gunmen in the area that day.”
It was time to see where Tom had been shot. The Palestinian Authority’s military police drove in front of us, tightly packed into a rickety-looking Jeep or hanging perilously off the sides and back. Dressed in black and heavily armed, they looked ominous.
“They shouldn’t have come,” Mohammed said. “They make the Israelis jittery.”
We got out near a square containing a crumbling mosque. Overlooking the square we could see the IDF watchtowers. In the middle of the street was a mound of sand-covered rubble and tangled iron girders, the customary IDF barrier made from the ruins of demolished houses. This was where the children had been playing.
There was blood on the ground and on a wall nearby. Anthony and I stood silently, utterly bereft. I pray that you suffered no pain, that the shot which entered your head and shattered your quick brain did so too swiftly for you to feel anything. Alice was silent and pale. I now knew from Mohammed that she had also been with Rachel Corrie when she died.
At our hotel later TFH handed me a black plastic bin-liner. “Tom’s clothes,” he said. “You’ll need to keep them as evidence.”
I began to remove the contents: first Tom’s cotton trousers, slashed up the sides where they must have been cut off him; his T-shirt, similarly cut; his orange fluorescent noncombatant’s jacket; his black photographer’s waistcoat with its many pockets. Everything stiff with blood.
I felt in the waistcoat pockets and pulled out the familiar cigarette lighter and a packet of Camels. How many hundreds of times in the past had I pulled mud-caked clothing out of plastic bags, felt in the pockets before putting them in the washing machine? It’s what mothers do, I thought. Yet now it was not mud.
I upended the bin-liner to make sure there was nothing left, and Tom’s watch fell out. A pang of the sharpest grief shot through me. I could see it on his wrist. He was never without it. DURING our second week in Israel, the British ambassador, Sherard Cowper-Coles, and his wife Bridget visited Tom. They had five teenage children of their own, all away at boarding school in England, and I could see that they were both deeply affected by the sight of Tom. Sherard stood at the foot of the bed with Anthony, silent and appalled.
Afterwards they invited us to dinner at a Chinese restaurant, where we relaxed a little. We told them we were getting nowhere in our attempts to meet the IDF, which had announced it was conducting an internal inquiry — a similar inquiry, we presumed, to the one that had completely exonerated the army over the death of Rachel Corrie.
Sherard’s manner was more measured and less forthright than TFH’s, but what he had to say about the IDF was hardly more encouraging.
“I’m afraid I really hold out very little hope of ever extracting a fully satisfactory account of what happened from them,” he said. “We may end up with some mild general admission of a mistake having been made. But that would be set in the context of the ISM being hostile to Israel and having no right to be there in the first place, plus the threat to the IDF in Rafah.
“However,” Sherard went on, “it doesn’t follow that we shouldn’t keep up the pressure for an account of what happened.”
He spoke with obvious sincerity, yet I had an uncomfortable feeling that, as far as the Foreign Office was concerned, the pass had already been sold. It seemed to be accepted that the Israeli army was a law unto itself.
Jack Straw, the foreign secretary, had metaphorically shrugged his shoulders in his first statement after Tom was shot, observing that the Foreign Office had been telling British nationals not to enter Gaza. While I recognised the need to discourage teams of people from entering the occupied territories and putting themselves and British diplomats at risk, it had seemed an inappropriate kind of statement to make directly after the shooting of a young man — and especially cold for someone with a son of almost the same age.
Bridget invited me to spend a few days at the ambassador’s residence in Tel Aviv, tactfully leaving me alone for most of the time to lie in the shade on the terrace outside my room. It was here I learnt of the death of a young British cameraman called James Miller, shot by the IDF as he filmed for a television documentary on the children of Rafah. According to Haaretz, the newspaper, James and his team had been carrying a white flag.
One evening Bridget and Sherard suggested going to a local bar to hear a well-known Israeli singer. I couldn’t do it. Just as well: a young British Muslim walked into a bar a few doors away from the one we would have visited and blew himself up, killing three people.
The British government was swift in its public condemnation. Yet it had not seen fit to make a public statement or put pressure of any kind on the Israeli government over its shooting of young British citizens. We made our outraged feelings clear to Sherard.
Only then did we receive a communication from Jack Straw, offering a meeting. The Foreign Office belatedly stated, almost a month after the incident, that it was “shocked and saddened” by Tom’s shooting and was “pressing the Israeli army for an investigation”.
Towards the end of May, Sherard received a copy of the Israelis’ field report into the shooting. It concluded: “It is impossible to establish with certainty the cause of the injuries sustained by Mr Hurndall . . . It is likely that Mr Hurndall was hit by IDF fire . . . The commander of the outpost acted according to the rules of engagement for the area: an armed Palestinian fired at an IDF soldier who felt an immediate danger and therefore he shot a single bullet in response.”
The document was accompanied by a “location map” that mistook the point where Tom was shot by about 80 yards. Did they really think we would be content with this level of investigation?
At a meeting with the IDF, we were confronted with massive evasions. When Anthony suggested that the field inquiry was a “cover-up”, the word went through the meeting like an electric shock.
The mood in Israel was changing, however. At hearings of the Israeli parliament’s law committee, Michael Eitan, an MP in Ariel Sharon’s Likud party, accused IDF soldiers of “gross violations of human rights” in the occupied territories. This, from a former army officer, caused a stir and focused new interest on Tom’s case.
Reporters surrounded us at Tel Aviv airport as we left to bring Tom home to London, unconscious on a stretcher, on May 29 — seven weeks after he was shot.
A young soldier in the security section pointed to our luggage. “We need to open your bags,” he said. I felt outraged. These soldiers knew what we’d been through, and they could see that we had embassy staff with us. The young soldier picked up a black bin-liner. Inside it was another bin-liner. He peered in but quickly closed it again.
It contained Tom’s bloodstained clothes. There had been no cool place to store them and by now the smell was horrific.
“What is in that bag?” he said. “Those are clothes belonging to my son, who was shot by one of your soldiers,” I said, looking at him with burning eyes. STRAW seemed disconnected when we met him in London; but he passed us on to Baroness Symons, minister of state at the Foreign Office. This was a very different kind of encounter.
Professional but extremely approachable, she was visibly moved by the details of Tom’s story. He was now in the Royal Free, our local north London hospital.
She wrote a letter to Silvan Shalom, the Israeli foreign minister, describing the evidence that Anthony had gathered about the shooting as “powerful and disturbing” and urging the need for the Israeli judge advocate general to institute a military police inquiry.
“You will know that this case continues to receive a great deal of media and parliamentary attention in the UK,” she wrote. “I know you will agree that the family deserve full answers to their questions. Our defence attaché in Tel Aviv will be presenting the Hurndalls’ evidence to the judge advocate general. I have agreed to see the family again when the judge advocate general has issued his report.” In other words — “What your army has done is still under the spotlight here, and this family is not going to go away.”
In Baroness Symons we felt we’d found a real ally, but our fight for the truth had a long way to run. And we faced a harrowing dilemma over Tom: how long could we leave him lying in limbo in a hospital bed, his eyes open but seeing nothing?
Extracted from Defy the Stars by Jocelyn Hurndall, to be published by Bloomsbury on April 2 at £16.99. Copies can be ordered for £15.29 including postage from The Sunday Times BooksFirst on 0870 165 8585
