Beit Sira Demonstrates Despite Threats from Israeli Civil Administration

At 1:30 this past Friday, the Popular Committee Against the Wall and Settlements in the Palestinian village of Beit Sira, just west of Ramallah held a demonstration against the apartheid barrier being constructed on the village’s land. This was all despite recent threats from the Israeli civil administration to withdraw permits to work in Israel from villagers if demonstrations continue.

The march of about 100, was held by villagers and accompanied by Israeli and international supporters. It marched through the village and down a road adjacent to the nearby illegal Jewish settlement of Makkabim, singing and chanting. All along the road we could see olive trees that had been cut down to stumps and replanted there by the military. They had previously been uprooted from another part of the village land where they plan to build the annexation barrier.

At the head of the demonstration, Palestinian and Israeli activists symbolically chained themselves together as an illustration of the imprisonment of the villagers due to the wall and settlement. About 15 minutes after they had set off they met a solid line of Israeli Border Police in Riot Gear blocking the road and preventing the demonstration from proceeding. The Palestinians reacted to this in a completely non-violent fashion. They sat down in the road and held some speeches and some interviews with the press. Some of the border Police tried to provoke the youth of the demonstration by moving around the small peaceful crowd armed, as usual, with fully-automatic machine guns.

Their provocation failed to provoke the response that meant they would have been allowed under Israeli military rule to open fire with rubber-coated bullets. Instead, when the interviews and speeches were over, the villagers calmly ended the demonstration, walking hand-in-hand to bring the demonstration to a close without being attacked by the Israeli soldiers, as has happened in past demonstrations.

Child Captives Freed

Nablus, Occupied West Bank

Soldiers who occupied an 8th floor apartment in the Sharif residential building and held eleven children and three adults captive left at 6:30AM today. The families want to thank everyone who wrote faxes, e-mails, and letters to the Israeli authorities in protest.

The following is a testimony of the events as they happened from the families:

On 07/04/06 at 04.00AM – Seven Israeli soldiers occupy the 8th floor apartment of Abu Amare and Huda Al Hajd Hamad family in Nablus because of it’s vantage point over al Aiyn refugee camp.

Soldiers brought down their neighbours from the 9th floor: Noor who is a 5 months pregnant mother, her husband and their one and a half year old infant.

The disturbance caused the Audah family on the ground floor to send 12 yr old Mohammed up to the 8th floor neighbour’s apartment to investigate. Mohammed knocked on the door, a soldier grabs him by the neck and throws him to the floor whilst two others point guns at him. Subsequently Mohammad’s family members follow; his 14 year old brother, mother and father are all taken into the 8th floor apartment – leaving three girls in the ground floor apartment alone with the cooker on and one girl aged three in the shower. It takes the family 20 minutes before the husband can convince the soldiers to allow him to collect the children accompanied by two soldiers. There are now 17 people in one room held captive.

The soldiers insist on silence, shout “shut up” and are abusive but do not beat anyone.

Twenty-five hours later, Noor who is pregnant starts crying. Soldiers tell her to stop, her husband fears they will beat her. She can’t stop. She gets more upset and is crying loudly. She says she cant breathe. She has pain in her abdomen, is extremely scared, and hasn’t been able to eat or sleep all day.

The families plead with soldiers to let her go to hospital, but they refuse. The commander accuses her of faking her symptoms.

An Israeli military doctor is called but the families want a specialist. He arrives and prescribes drugs. Noor says they are too strong for pregnant women.

At 3PM on the 8th of April a Commander arrives and Noor is finally allowed to be driven by her husband to hospital with their infant accompanied by jeeps.

There are now 14 people in apartment

Medical relief teams and international volunteers make multiple attempts at visiting the families. The volunteers talk to the soldiers through the door but the soldiers ignore them. The adults are forbidden to speak but 4 year old Bashar speaks through the door. He requests food and asks the internationals not to leave because the families feel safer when they are present.

At 5 PM soldiers enter the room the family are captive in and point guns at youth in the street below. The children are extremely scared. Their mothers demand that the soldiers leave room demanding that the human rights of children respected. The soldiers finally leave.

At 8 PM the internationals leave food at the door and tell the soldiers that they are leaving but will return to see if the food was taken for the families. After a few minutes the soldiers take the food and pass it to the families.

At 2 AM on the ninth of April the military operation that seems to be the purpose of house occupation takes place. An APC & jeeps drive into al Aiyn refugee camp. The military demand over loudspeakers that the family of Abu Mahde Marka exit their home. The snipers in the apartment are active with night vision equipment and a soldier with a 25mm gun enters the families room. The mothers again demand that he leaves – and he does. Then 7 sniper rounds are fired. The cases are left on the apartment floor.

At 6 AM this morning the soldiers leave- they say nothing to the families and leave the apartment messed up, furniture moved, dirt on the wall, the families clothes used to clean the floor, their Koran taken out of it’s case and left in bathroom

The practice of occupying a tactically important home and holding the occupants captive and isolated is known in the Israeli Army as a “Straw Widow” operation. The army uses the occupied home as an observation post and sniper position. Such homes are often reoccupied several times.

Although the Sharif building is now unoccupied, the army occupied several more homes in Nablus during a night of sporadic gunfire and explosions in the city and the adjacent Balata refugee camp.

Pictures to follow soon at www.palsolidarity.org

Israel Denies Work Permits to Protest Villages

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

The Israeli Civil Administration has threatened to deny workers in West Bank villages permits to work in Israel if their demonstrations against the occupation continue. Workers in Bil’in, Beit Sira, Beit Likya, and Harbata have received threats, but the villages have continued their demonstrations regardless

Last week a member of the Civil Administration calling himself “Samir”, phoned Mahmud Samara Abu Ala, a 60 year-old merchant from Bil’in, and told him “not to bother” trying to renew his work permit. Mahmud asked if the Civil Administration was systematically denying permits to people in the village and Samir replied that they would continue to deny permits as long as the demonstrations continue.

Before the Friday, April 8th demonstration in Beit Sira, a member of the Civil Administration called the head of the village council, Ali Hassan Mahmud Abu Safeya, in to tell him that the Administration would stop giving permission to villagers to work in Israel. Thirty families are at least partially supported by locals who work in Israel.

This threat of systematic denial is consistent with the army’s practice of collective punishment. Israel, as an occupying power, is subject to the Geneva Convention, which states that collective punishments are a war crime. Article 33 of the Fourth Convention states that “collective penalties and likewise all measures of intimidation or of terrorism are prohibited.” By threatening the villages with the denial of work permits, Israel is attempting to intimidate the villages into stopping the demonstrations.

According to Israel’s Chief of Staff Lt. Gen. Moshe Ya’alon, the overriding goal of such permit denials is to phase out Palestinian workers from Israel. “The goal is to stop Palestinians from working in Israel by 2008” he said on March 10th 2006.

As Palestinians are increasingly being denied work permits, Israel is continuing to make it harder for a Palestinian state to be economically viable. The apartheid wall is annexing Palestinian land from farmers, making it impossible for some to access their land. Recently, Israeli banks have cut ties with Palestinian banks in a further attempt to harm the Palestinian economy.

Each month since the elections, Israel refuses to give back $50 million of Palestinian tax funds they withhold. International governments have also been cutting off funds to the Hamas led Palestinian government in what Prime Minster Ismail Haniyeh is calling “blackmail”.

Just another Gaza Friday

By Laila El-Haddad

I’ve always loved Fridays in Gaza. In the mornings, save for the lone garbage collector futilely sweeping the abandoned streets and Municipality park, littered with plastic cups, watermelon seeds, and strangled straws from the night before, the hustle and bustle of the city comes to a standstill.

It is a serene if lethargic time, an escape from the sea of chaos, uncertainty and violence that grips our lives each waking day and night. For a few hours, things seem ordinary in a place where ordinary is an illusion. And it doesn’t seem like anything can disrupt those moments, as if some force is saying to the madness that envelopes us: “come back another hour!”

Slowly, the streets come to life again as evening takes hold. This is Yousuf’s favorite time. He likes to go out to the balcony, as we did yesterday, and “people watch”-just take in the incongruent and cacophonous sites and sounds of another Friday in Gaza.

In the park in front of us, children boisterously played football, women licked ice cream cones and chatted, and wedding motorcades ( “zaffit sayyarat”), which, no matter what the season or situation, you can always except to hear on Thursday and Friday evenings like clockwork-made their way to beachside hotels and lounges. They tirelessly honked their horns in sync with live wedding dabke music, blaring out from portable speakers or played by live for-hire bands seated in the back of rented pick-up trucks decorated with carnations.

Boys and relatives clamored for a standing space in the back of the trucks, dancing and clapping feverishly along with the music. Young children chase them down the street to join in the fun. If the wind is just right, the sky becomes a showcase of homemade kites, dancing and flirting with each other, challenging the physical bounds imposed upon this battered area’s residents, reaching to places they can only dream about, allowing them to navigate freedom, no matter how purposeless, for just a little bit.

In the distance, the ubiquitous double-thuds of artillery fire could be heard exploding a few kilometers away, increasing in number and intensity, it seemed, as the evening progressed, only to be drowned out ever-so-slightly by the cacophonous symphony of Friday blitheness, as if to say-“not today! Today, you will not steal our moment.”

The evening passes, the clock strikes midnight, and suddenly, the carriage tranforms into a pumpkin again. The magic dissipates. And 6 people are dead.

Just another Gaza Friday.

posted by Lailaumyousuf @ Saturday, April 08, 2006

ACTION ALERT: Demand Israeli Army Release Children Captives

URGENT ACTION NEEDED

Nablus, Occupied West Bank

Forty hours after capture, eleven children remain captives of the Israeli army. They have been confined and isolated for nearly two days now. Since 5am yesterday morning they have been held in an 8th floor room in an apartment the army has turned into a sniper nest.

The families have been forbidden to speak, but four year-old Bashar has risked running to the door to whisper to international volunteers. He has been saying since this morning that the families are hungry and scared. Other children can be heard crying. The soldiers are not responding to calls from the volunteers, but can be heard laughing.

The army forced Amjad Aodah’s family from their apartment on a lower floor of the building yesterday morning and are holding them and the family of Abu Amare Al Hajd Hamd together. The fourteen people, aged between three and seventy, are being held in a single room. Internationals and medics have attempted to gain access, but have repeatedly been denied.

Please call or fax the following officials to demand the captives release:

Shlomo Dror
Coordinator of Activities in the Territories
Phone 50 623 4053
Fax 03 697 5177

DCO Nablus
Phone 02 548 6214 or 02 548 6217
Fax 02-5486218

Ehud Olmert
Prime Minister
Fax 02 670 5475 or 02 566 4838
Telex 25279 MPRES IL

Below is an example fax:
To: Shlomo Dror
Coordinator of Activities in the Territories
Fax 03 697 5177

RE: Israeli Army Captives in Nablus

I am writing to urge you to secure the release of the fourteen people being held captive by the Israeli Army in the Sharif Building in Nablus. Amjad Aodah, Abu Amare Al Hajd Hamd, and their families have been held in one room on the 8th floor since 5am on April 7.

For over forty hours, the families, eleven children and three adults, have been held in isolation, and international medics have been prevented from seeing them. A four year-old boy has communicated to volunteers through the closed door of the apartment that they are hungry and not being told when they will be allowed to leave.

It is urgent that these families be released and that the military be required to leave. I also urge you to require the Israeli Army to cease this general practice of arbitrarily detaining civilians incommunicado.

It is incredibly troubling that Israel is allowing children as young as four to be held captive. It is increasingly disturbing that Israel is allowing the army to isolate eleven children for this period of time.

I strongly urge you to take action for the families’ release immediately.

Sincerely,