Settler attack and occupation of Abu Heikel garden in Tel Rumeida

by ISM Hebron, February 15th

On Monday 12th February at 3:45pm, a settler women with about 8 children went to the Tel Rumeida hill. The settler children, aged 8-10 years old, started to throw stones at Palestinian children who were playing football underneath the hill. A settler women started to cut the fence of the Abu Heikel garden and got inside with a few children.

Members of the Abu Heikel family called the police but were afraid of having a confontation with the settlers and so they left the occupiers in the garden until the arrival of the police. Some of the settler children went to the Wad Alhareya street next to the Jabal Alrahmah mosque, where they attacked the Al Saafeen local shop with stones.

Meanwhile, one of the soldiers approached the settlers occupying the garden and soon spoke with the settler women who were still in the garden. He didn’t take any action against them and left.

A police jeep arrived 40 minutes later and after long discussions with the settlers, the family left and went to the Wad Alhareya street where already many settlers, soldiers and police had gathered.

After the arrival of the police in this street which is under Palestinian control (H1), the group of young settlers who attacked the local shop blamed two Palestinian children, Amjad Amro and a boy of the Hadad family, both around 14-years old, for attacking them with stones.

The same women and the child who were in the Abu Heikel garden were walking in the street. One of the local Palestinian boys walked passed them, then the settler child pointed at him and said that he had attacked him. Safwat Shweikee, about 13-years old, was subsequently arrested and started crying as the soldier took him away. All three Palestinian children were arrested and spent 5 hours at Kiryat Arba police station.

Then the soldiers aggressively forced all the local shops to close although most of them are in Palestinian controlled H1. About 5:15pm the settlers, police and soldiers left the street.

During the incident a HRW was attacked by a settler child while he was taking pictures of the scene. A police man who stood next to them didn’t react.

Haaretz: “Security forces demolish 7 houses in Mt. Hebron villages”

by Mijal Grinberg, February 14th


photo by Reuters

Security forces destroyed seven houses and 13 other structures Wednesday on the southern slope of Mount Hebron in the southern West Bank.


photo by Reuters

The demolitions took place in the villages of Manzal, Umm al-Khir and Gawawis.

Abdullah Harizat, a resident of Manzal, said that police forces, Border Police and Israel Defense Forces troops arrived in the village Wednesday morning, accompanied by the Engineering Corps.

Harizat said the forces demolished a house belonging to a family with eight children.

“During the demolition, the wall of a house of another family was also destroyed,” he said.

The area is located in Area C, subject to civil administration.

Harizat said the residents of the village are not allowed to receive construction permits.

“We ask, but they never give them to us. They say, ‘this is state land.'”

Harizat said the forces that destroyed the houses did not attend to the needs of residents left without a roof during the night. Relatives brought the family a tent in which to sleep, he said.

One woman was admitted for medical treatment after losing consciousness during the demolitions.

Israeli leftist activists also arrived at the scene, one of whom was detained.

The Committee Against House Demolitions said a petition filed by a residents of one of the villages was rejected.

The committee added that the residents’ legal situation remains untenable.

“A building permit is unavailable there,” it said.

The civil administration said, “20 illegal structures were destroyed after demolition orders were issued, and offers were made to the owners to pursue the available options before the planning organizations. The supervisory unit of the civil administration will continue to operate against illegal building activity in the area, and to implement the steps mandated by law against this illegal activity.”

photos by Reuters:

Uncovering the lies of the Civil Administration in the lands of Bil’in

from Anarchists against the Wall, February 11th

On February 11th 2007, the Civil Administration’s Planning Board published an ad in Ha’aretz to notify the public that it decided to approve the new scheme for the Matityahu East neighborhood in the settlement Modi’in Illit, on the lands of Bil’in west of the wall. Under the Planning Law applicable in the West Bank, the scheme will be valid 15 days after the publication of the ad.

On that very day, a group of Palestinians, Israelis and internationals decided to provide solid proof that the Planning Board approved a scheme although the conditions that very board stipulated were not yet met . And such proof was indeed provided.


an exposed sewage pipe, a meter and a half underground

One of the paragraphs in the new 210/8/1 scheme for Matityahu East says that a pre-condition for the very approval of the scheme is the restoration of enclaves owned, even according to the Civil Administration, by Palestinians from Bil’in. During the illegal construction activities in the compound, two of the enclaves were practically destroyed: on one of them, Green Park, one of the construction companies, built a house. On the second enclave, the companies paved the main road of the neighborhood, its width being 30 meters. Other enclaves were also damaged, but to a lesser extent, since they are located further away from the first-stage development area.

The scheme further demands that all building in the enclave should be destroyed, and that all ruins should be removed completely. This is also a pre-condition for the approval of the scheme itself.

On January 17th the Planning Board assembled to approve the scheme. Its members were presented with photographic evidence showing that the two enclaves were not properly restored. In both infrastructure remained buried underground, making any future agricultural use of the land unlikely. In any case, the representative of Bil’in argued, the fact that infrastructure remained there contradicts the specific requirement to restore the enclaves, and since this pre-condition was not met, the Board should not approve the scheme.

But as can be expected from the highest planning institution of the occupation, the scheme was approved on that very day – with the vague excuse that it was not proven that building or building ruins remained in the enclaves.

This conclusion was exactly what we went to contradict last Sunday. At around 11:00 am, we moved pass the fence of Matityahu East and into one of the enclaves. Later on we moved further to the most western enclave, not far away. On that western enclave we managed to uncover a concrete plate buried under the dirt, not before the security inspector of Modi’in Illit called the army and police and we were shortly chased away from there.

In the meantime some of us continued digging in the much larger first enclave. There we discovered many surprises: a complete telephone network box buried under the ground, leading telephone lines through the enclave and to the houses further east; a huge sewage pipe going from the houses through the enclave to the local sewage factory down the road; and a segment of the asphalt road and pavement which the construction companies left untouched buried under a thin layer of dirt.

All this hard-evidence will be put shortly to legal use in the upcoming new Court petition against the approval of the scheme. Our joint action proved once again that the Civil Administration’s Planning Board is working hand in hand with the settlers’ construction companies to promote the settlements enterprise – even when the conditions this very Board stipulated are not met.

Haaretz: “A mother’s resistance”

by Ofri Ilani, February 14th

Laila El-Haddad’s blog took shape in a very unusual way. Her son, Yousuf, was less than a year old when she returned to her Gaza home from a visit to the United States, where her husband, Yassine, lives. The blog, “Raising Yousuf” (a-mother-from-gaza.blogspot.com), had just begun, and it dealt with common child-raising experiences, mainly first syllables and words.

“It was initially purely about Yousuf and his milestones and shenanigans … Then one day, I think it was December 2004, on my way back to Gaza via Egypt, Rafah Crossing was shut down, rendering Yousuf and I refugees in Egypt. We ended up waiting a total of 55 days for the border to open, never knowing whether that day would be tomorrow or the next day or one month or one year. It was a very stressful time for us, and we hardly knew anyone in Cairo. So I began to write about our experiences waiting together on my blog.”

“Gradually,” she says, “the blog was transformed into reflections about how the occupation has become very personal for Palestinians. How it affects us not only as Palestinians or doctors or journalists, but also as mothers and fathers and children, to the very last mundane detail of how we live our lives.”

The details of Yousuf’s first months became a diary describing life in Gaza from the inside, one of the few being written in Gaza in English.

“Dear Mr. Peretz,” she wrote in an open letter to Defense Minister Amir Peretz in November 2006, “My son Yousuf, 2 years and 9 months, would like me to inform you that he wants to enter Gaza. He has asked me to tell whoever it is who is keeping it closed to open the border for him immediately.”

For three weeks they waited in El Arish, Egypt, in an apartment they rented, along with thousands of other waiting Palestinians. “How is it that when waiting for passage through borders, time is suspended, yet somehow the rest of the world goes on living?” she writes. “How is it that all sense of time and belonging and life comes to a standstill here I cannot understand. We’ve packed and unpacked our bags a dozen times … sometimes things work in reverse here: last time we were stuck for 55 days in Egypt; the day we decided to buy more than a daily portion of food, the border opened.”

To crouch or run

Al-Haddad, 29, was born in Kuwait to parents from Gaza City and Khan Yunis. After a few years in Kuwait and Saudi Arabia, where her parents worked as doctors, the family returned to Gaza. When she finished high school, she moved to the U.S. and completed a master’s degree in public policy. There she met Yassine, who became her husband. In 2003, at the height of the second intifada, she returned to Gaza and started freelancing for several newspapers, and later for the Al Jazeera English Web site.

In the meantime, she says in an interview conducted via e-mail, it turned out that “I had access to a place that gradually became one of the world’s most isolated – now even off-limits to veteran Israeli journalists. So I realized I was in a unique niche and tried to make the most of it … it also entailed enormous risk. I was newly pregnant with Yousuf, and I worried about working as a journalist in a dangerous environment that also happened to be my home, and also about the quality of health care should, God forbid, something happen … And on more than one occasion, I found myself in the line of Israeli fire, having either to crouch for cover until the shooting stopped, or run.

“You want to shelter your children as long as possible – but at a certain point, you can no longer do that,” she says. “For Yousuf, some of his first words were ‘infijar’ (explosion) – and even ‘Hamas’ (when he would see rallies and came to recognize the green flag) – when he was only 18 months. In the end, though undeniably tasking and torturous, being able to live between two vastly different societies has been ultimately rewarding.”

The main reason why she repeatedly had to pass through the Rafah crossing is that her husband, Yassine, cannot enter Gaza. “Yassine is a Palestinian refugee; his family is originally from Haifa. In today’s world and especially I think within mainstream Israeli circles, that title is like the plague. This meant of course that not only was he denied a right of return to his native land, but also that he was denied entry with Yousuf and me into Gaza if he ever had a break and wanted to visit us. This is because Israel has stopped issuing family reunification and residency cards/ID cards to Palestinians for several years now, prior to the second intifada. We had hoped this would change after they ‘disengaged’ from Gaza, but in fact they continue to control the population registry there and therefore our ability to live and travel together as a family.”

Refugee chats

The restriction on movement makes online communication especially vital. “If I can’t reach people in the West Bank, Jerusalem or Israel, then I can reach them through my blog,” she says.

She says Gaza Web users face considerable infrastructure problems. However, the Internet helps unify the dispersed people. “Accessibility is not as far-reaching … But local calls add up … The youth use it a lot to chat in local forums and on more global messenger programs.”

Several refugee camps have Internet cafes, some of them sponsored by projects where youth connect with one another online, such as the Across Borders project. Established by Birzeit University, it aims to connect refugees.

“But it also does more than that,” says El-Haddad. “It creates a psychological connection between members of a nation that would otherwise never see each other or know each other’s parallel – but completely remote – experiences.”

Al-Haddad says her blog is a form of “virtual resistance” to the occupation. She says she receives many responses, including from Israelis.

“Some have been very vitriolic and hateful, to the point where I’ve had to initiate comment moderation. I’ve had people say: ‘Yousuf’s a beautiful boy; it’s too bad he has such a horrible mother who is raising him to become a suicide bomber like all other Palestinians.’ It makes you realize you are throwing yourself out there as cannon fodder, and you have to learn to live with the consequences of putting yourself out there like that. That is the price you pay for opening your door to the world.”

Palestinians ethnically cleansed from the road

by the ISM media team, February 13th

In recent months Occupation authorities have escalated their policy of issuing fines to Palestinian drivers at certain checkpoints without reason. At Za’atara checkpoint near Salfit today, as well as preventing drivers with Nablus ID from passing and meticulously searching them, the IOF issued fines to some Palestinian drivers.

The issuing of fines has been practiced extensively in the Jordan Valley region. At Taysir checkpoint between Tubas and the Jordan Valley soldiers were observed handing out NIS 100 fines to Palestinian drivers for not wearing seatbelts when they were wearing them. On a trip through the Jordan Valley last month an international volunteer witnessed his Palestinian driver being similarly targetted, this time for not wearing a seatbelt and for not “driving quietly”, incurring a NIS 250 fine.

This practise is clearly designed to discourage Palestinian drivers from using certain key routes. Za’atara is the main checkpoint between the north of the West Bank and the central Ramallah region whilst the Jordan Valley is an area of key strategic interest for the Occupation due to its fertile agricultural land and water resources, 96% of which has already been annexed. The Occupation tightened the already strict movement restricitions for Palestinians last October.

The issuing of fines to Palestinian drivers is the latest form of economic warfare being waged against Palestinians in the Occupation drive to ethnically cleanse them from their land.