21st January 2015 | Operation Dove | South Hebron Hills, Occupied Palestine
On January 20th, Israeli forces detained a Palestinian child near the village of Maghayir Al Abeed and demolished four structures in the Palestinian village of Ar-Rifa’iyya in the South Hebron Hills area.
Photo by Operation Dove.
At about 9.00 a.m. Israeli bulldozers started to tear down two houses and two animal shelters, belonging to the Palestinian Rabai family in Ar-Rifa’iyya. The demolitions affected a total of twenty-five people, included ten children.
Photo by Operation Dove.
The Municipality erected two tents to create temporary shelter for those effected, at least during the night. Only twenty days ago, on December 31, in the village of Ad-Deirat, close to Ar-Rifa’iyya, two settlers broke a window and threw a molotov cocktail inside a Palestinian-owned house, trying to burn it,
Ar-Rifa’iyya and Ad-Deirat villages are located in Area C, under full Israeli military and administrative control.
During the Ar-Rifa’iyya demolitions, Israeli army and police jeeps reached the area of Old Havat Ma’on Hill near the Palestinian village of Maghayir Al Abeed, where some young Palestinian shepherds were grazing their flocks. An Israeli soldier run to a Palestinian child, aged 14. The soldier chased away his flock, placed him inside the military jeep with one goat and detained him. After one hour, the Israeli army released him in a dangerous area between the illegal outpost of Havat Ma’on and the illegal settlement of Ma’on. In this place several times, Palestinians, including children, were attacked by Zionist settlers.
Palestinian Prisoners Center for Studies stated that during 2014, Israeli soldiers arrested 1200 Palestinian children, a 60% increase from 2013, when 750 children were arrested.
Despite demolitions and arrests, Palestinians from South Hebron Hills are strongly committed to nonviolent and popular resistance against the Israeli occupation.
Operation Dove has maintained an international presence in At-Tuwani and the South Hebron Hills since 2004.
[Note: According to the Fourth Geneva Convention, the Hague Regulations, the International Court of Justice, and several United Nations resolutions, all Israeli settlements and outposts in the Occupied Palestinian Territories are illegal. Most settlement outposts, including Havat Ma’on (Hill 833), are considered illegal also under Israeli law.]
19th January 2015 | International Solidarity Movement, Khalil team | Hebron, Occupied Palestine
This afternoon in occupied al-Khalil (Hebron), Israeli forces gathered on Shuhada street, surrounding the doorways to the two houses belonging to Aamal Hashem Dundes, an elderly Palestinian woman, and her family. A soldier, wielding a torch and various other equipment, welded shut the doors. Soldiers and police kept international and Palestinian observers away as the houses were sealed up.
Photo by ISM
Soldiers claimed that Molotov cocktails had been thrown from the roof of one of the houses into the Israeli Zionist settlement. No one, however, could explain why this led soldiers to punish Aamal and her family, who had done nothing wrong, by welding shut their doors. “Isn’t that collective punishment?” asked one member of Christian Peacemaker Teams present at the scene along with ISM. Israeli forces could give no satisfactory answer.
Photo by ISM
Aamal’s family were not living in the houses at the time the soldiers came to seal up the doors – they rent an apartment across the street – but she and her daughter explained to international volunteers that the family had owned the houses for hundreds of years. Aamal sat near where the soldiers were working, sometimes weeping, sometimes speaking with journalists and local activists.
Photo by ISM
As the incident progressed Israeli soldiers and police forced Palestinian and international observers back away from where the soldiers were sealing up the doors, and from where Aamal sat with her daughter arguing ineffectually with the soldiers and police. By contrast, Israeli settlers who had come up Shuhada street from the nearby settlement to observe were allowed to stay near and continue filming even as the rest of the people present were shoved first onto the sidewalk across from the houses, then to either side of the street, where they could no longer clearly see what was happening. Settlers joked and laughed with the soldiers, seeming quite pleased with the situation.
Soldiers aggressively shoved journalists, international solidarity activists, and local Palestinian activists who were attempting document the behavior and actions of the Israeli forces. When international activists attempted to ask why they were being kept back from the scene, soldiers typically responded: “because I say so.”
Photo by CPT-Palestine https://www.facebook.com/cptpalestine
By the time Israeli forces had finished welding her doors shut, Aamal, who suffers from high blood pressure and diabetes, was understandably overwhelmed. Not only had she witnessed the houses her family had owned for generations sealed up by gun-toting Israeli soldiers, she had also been pushed by soldiers when she tried to protest. She had to be taken to an ambulance, which drove her away to the hospital. As she was moving towards the ambulance she asked, as she had multiple times previously, for an international to accompany her. Then, as before, Israeli forces let no one through.
Photo by ISM
Aamal and her family live on the short portion of Shuhada street where Palestinians are still allowed to walk. Most of the street has been entirely closed off to Palestinians, as part of Israel’s campaign of repression against those living in and around the area which once served as a thriving hub of Palestinian life in al-Khalil. Shuhada street, where once markets and shops flourished, is now a ghost town. Many Palestinians have already left the area; those who remain must bar their doors and windows against violence from local settlers. The sealed off doors are just one more demonstration of the Israeli military’s repression of those Palestinians who dare to continue to live on al-Khalil’s apartheid streets.
19th January 2015 | International Solidarity Movement, Ramallah team | Ni’lin, Occupied Palestine
The soldiers surrounding Ni’lin did not wait; they began firing tear gas as soon as the villagers walked down into their olive groves. Those who had braved the cold, rainy weather to attend Ni’lin’s weekly Friday demonstration were forced to retreat, running choking from the clouds of tear gas launched at them from the hillsides. From the road overlooking Ni’lin’s fields, the tear gas looked like a layer of fog blanketing the olive groves.
Photo by ISM
“They were either straight at us or at the ambulance,” said one ISM activist as the group moved away from a tear gas canister which had landed directly behind them, on the street bordering the olive groves behind and to the side of the protest. The soldiers fired indiscriminately, launching dozens of tear gas rounds at unarmed protesters and activists attempting to film the incident.
Photo by ISM
Ni’lin residents, from the Palestinian paramedics to young boys participating in the demonstration, have been forced to grow accustomed to running, to tear gas, to the violence of the Israeli zionist forces enforcing the occupation of their land. The Palestinian, Israeli, and international activists present agreed that last week’s protest was comparatively quiet. This one week, unlike many other weeks at Ni’lin, no one was shot, no one needed to go to the hospital, and no one was arrested. Over the last few weeks, however, the village has endured a campaign of violence and arrests by Israeli forces, who engage in night raids to terrorise the Palestinian families of Ni’lin.
Saeed Amireh, Ni’lin activist, and long-time spokesperson for the plight of his village, spoke with ISM volunteers about the recent situation. Ten people were arrested in Ni’lin in the last two weeks alone, he reported, in night raids occurring nearly every other day. Twenty-five have been arrested since November 4th.
Saeed explained that under interrogation by Israeli forces in Muskubiya (the Russian Compound) prison in Jerusalem, a prisoner from Ni’lin had signed a paper implicating thirty-six people in the village. Those names now comprise a list of people wanted by the Israeli authorities – people who, if they have not already been arrested, must live in constant fear of being taken from their homes and subjected to the harsh procedures of Israel’s apartheid justice system.
Saeed spoke of the conditions suffered by Palestinians arrested by Israeli forces and taken to Israeli prisons: months of solitary confinement inside tiny cells, torture, harsh treatment from other prisoners and entrapment by Israeli spies within the prisons. All are strategies employed by interrogators attempting to trap people into admitting to things they never did. In attempts to finally be released, prisoners will often sign lists of names of other villagers, who the Israeli military will then arrest and subject to the same treatment. Over forty people from the village are currently imprisoned.
One ISM volunteer asked what people did to be put on a list of those wanted by Israeli authorities. “They go and join in the protests” Saeed replied. Even if a Palestinian is doing nothing at all violent, he explained, “They accuse you of joining illegal protests.” In yet another absurdity of the occupation, The Israelis authorities order the village to take permits from them in order to be allowed to protest against the illegal confiscation of their land.
Photo by ISM
In the night arrest raids, Israeli forces not only surround and invade houses, leaving messes of Palestinians’ personal possessions and furniture behind; they have also begun to shoot inside the village. Saeed spoke of how “Last week, the soldiers came and shot live ammunition.” He explained that people sometimes run away from their houses, fleeing arrest when the soldiers come to surround them. Israeli forces fired live ammunition at one man as he ran away from his home at night.
“When people are asleep, they come at night and start shooting tear gas, and make people suffocate.” Saeed described how the Israeli military have been entering the village with a machine that dispenses large quantities of tear gas when mounted on a military vehicle. “I don’t know how many,” he said, “It makes like a cloud on the ground. They shoot it at all houses.”
Saeed’s family live on the far south-east side of the village, beside the olive groves. These homes are the first in the line of fire for Israeli military incursions. His uncle’s house was burned, and his neighbours also suffered from the tear gas inside their home. “The neighbor’s house, they have a young baby,” Saeed told the ISM volunteers, “A one year old baby, who was suffocating . . . and they were thinking he was going to die, because tear gas entered inside the house.”
The baby had to be taken to the hospital; Palestinians injured with rubber bullets in the last few demonstrations have also had to travel to the hospital to be treated. Medical care in the village is sadly insufficient for the amount of violence its people routinely face, Saeed reported. There is not enough medical equipment, which means not enough volunteers can work alongside the two paramedics employed in the ambulance station.
Nor have medical facilities been spared in previous army incursions.
A volunteer with the Red Crescent ambulances recalled the 2013 Israeli military attack which left a bullet hole in the ambulance station’s window and a scar in the ceiling of a fourth floor room above the street. The Israeli forces had aimed their fire at the building despite the fact that the people there were clearly medical professionals, and unarmed. “They don’t care,” the volunteer explained simply.
The bullet hole in the Red Crescent building (photo by ISM).
When someone is active in demonstrations, in expressing resistance, Israeli soldiers shoot to incapacitate them, explained one of the Palestinian Red Crescent paramedics. He himself had to undergo a year of physical therapy after Israeli forces shot him in the leg. Resistance is a long and proud tradition in Ni’lin, which participated in both the first and second Intifadas, as well as playing a major role in the more recent Palestinian popular nonviolent resistance against the Israeli Apartheid wall. He said the latest Israeli military incursions are an attempt to demoralise and divide people in the village, to keep them from resisting.
The village has already endured a high toll from participating in nonviolent popular resistance against annexation of their land by the Apartheid wall and by the five Israeli Zionist settlements surrounding Ni’lin. Five people were killed between 2008 and 2009, and many more have been injured and permanently disabled by Israeli military violence. Though both the wall and the settlements are illegal under international law, it is the people of Ni’lin whose homes are assaulted and whose expressions of their legal right to protest are criminalized.
Saeed reported that the weekly demonstrations have recently been subjected to more brutality. In the last months he has seen little international and no media presence in Ni’lin, giving the army free reign to come closer to the village (often into the village itself) and use more violence against the nonviolent protesters. Israeli forces have spared no one in their campaign of repression. One Palestinian journalist, who endured both the rain and the tear gas in order to document last Friday’s action, spoke of his experience filming soldiers at a previous demonstration. A soldier had threatened him, he recalled, saying that if he did not stop filming, “I will break your hand, and I will break your camera.”
Saeed spoke of the occupation’s enormous social and economic toll. “You can’t plan anything,” he told the ISM activists, as they stood with him watching the Israeli soldiers shoot round after round of tear gas into Ni’lin’s olive trees. Studying, exams, work, family life – all are tremendously impacted by the occupation.
Saeed’s brother is engaged to be married, but his future, like that of all those attempting to continue with their lives in Ni’lin, is uncertain. Saeed’s brother is on the list of people currently targeted by Israeli authorities. “He is going to get married in two weeks, if he is not arrested.”
18th January 2015 | International Solidarity Movement, Hebron team | Beit Ummar, Occupied Palestine
Early Wednesday morning, January 14, 2015, a massive deployment of 400 Israeli occupation forces invaded the village of Beit Ummar, north of Hebron. From 2:00 – 5:00 am, the occupation forces invaded approximately 100 Palestinian homes, arresting 25 males and leaving notices for 15 additional males to meet with the Israeli intelligence.
Photo taken by Aqsa TV – http://tinyurl.com/kmklbcs
Occupation soldiers invaded the private homes with violent force, blowing open the front doors with explosions, ransacking the rooms, breaking the furniture inside, smashing windows, and attacking the residents. One of the victims of this brutal invasion was the family of 25-year-old Nidal Abu Maria.
Photo taken by Aqsa TV – http://tinyurl.com/kmklbcs
Nidal is the oldest son of Ahmed Abu Maria, who has been imprisoned for the last four months. According to the family, the occupation soldiers forcibly entered their home with large aggressive dogs, blowing the door open with explosives. Nidal’s mother, sister, and two brothers ages 6 and 7 were inside, and awoke shocked to find soldiers inside their home. The occupation forces locked Nidal’s mother in a separate room, away from her children, and took her phone, noting the family members phone numbers from it. The pregnant sister attempted to speak to the young boys, who were scared of the military invasion and their dogs, when the occupation forces violently hit her in the face and told her to keep quiet. In addition to physical violence against the family, the soldiers also ransacked the home, destroying the windows, the furniture, and the entire kitchen. Nearly 99 other houses were also invaded this same night, and experienced the same destruction.
Photo taken by Aqsa TV – http://tinyurl.com/kmklbcs
During this brutal night invasion, 25 males were taken from their homes and arrested without any official charges or explanations. According to Ma’an News, those detained were as young as sixteen years old. The youths were not known activists nor had there been any protests in Beit Ummar since the massacre in Gaza for them to take part in. Five were released the next morning, while the rest still remain in custody. Additionally, the invading soldiers left official request notices for 15 residents of Beit Ummar to report to the Israeli Intelligence at the Kfar Etzion prison in the nearby Kfar Etzion settlement the following day. Nidal Abu Maria, along with his brother and cousin, were among those that were requested to report to Kfar Etzion.
Photo taken by Aqsa TV – http://tinyurl.com/kmklbcs
Nidal decided to not comply with the occupying army’s request, and did not report to the prison at9:00 AM on Wednesday as the soldiers demanded. However, after the occupation forces called him and his mother on the phone, threatening the lives of the family, he felt he had no choice. When Nidal answered one of the many phone calls from the military and questioned why he should follow orders from an occupying military, the Secret Service member told him, “I am the state of Israel, I am the one who has power, I am the law”.
Nidal and his brother reported to the Kfar Etzion prison on Thursday morning and were interrogated for several hours by the Israeli intelligence. During the interrogation when the brothers were being questioned, they were told, “We want to make sure you guys are ok, and that you are doing the right things and not the wrong things.” Additionally, the interrogator told Nidal, “If you miss your uncle (the martyr), I will send you to him.” Nidal interprets this as a direct threat against his life.
Nidal’s family is no stranger to such violence at the hands of the Israeli occupation. Nidal’s father has been detained and imprisoned eight times for a total length of five years – once on charges of organizing peaceful protests in Beit Ummar, while the other seven times were without official charges. Additionally, Nidal’s uncle Hashem Abu Maria was executed on July 25, 2014 during a peaceful protest against the 2014 massacre in Gaza. Hashem was shot in the heart by an Israeli sniper on the main street, while encouraging the children to go home rather than risk being hurt in the demonstration. Hashem worked for the Defence For Children International documenting child-rights violation in Hebron and according to Haaretz, this was the role that Hashem played in many protests. Nidal’s aunt, the wife of Hashem, has suffered greatly since his death, and even months later she is still afraid to sleep in the house without him.
Ten days after Hashem’s assassination, the occupation forces invaded Beit Ummar and arrested Ahmed, Nidal’s father. He is currently still imprisoned and has not been officially charged with any crime. Despite not facing official charges, Nidal’s family is told that he faces three years in prison.
In the year of 2014, over 400 residents of Beit Ummar were arrested and over 120 residents are still currently imprisoned, some without official charges. Additionally, 3 residents were killed during this time. When asked why Beit Ummar experiences such frequent violence at the hands of the occupation army, Nidal explains it has a lot to do with its location. “Beit Ummar is surrounded by three settlements: Migdal Oz, Kfar Etzion and Karmei Zur. The village is located close to the main road that connects the settlements from Bethlehem to Hebron. The official explanation from the occupation forces are that these actions are taken against Beit Ummar for ‘security reasons’.” These nearby settlements have confiscated nearly one third of the village’s land which is located in Area C. Additionally, much of the military violence against Beit Ummar can be attributed to their strong commitment to resistance against the occupation. Beit Ummar was the site of nearly two protests every week during the 2014 attack on Gaza.
For residents of Beit Ummar the recent violence happens whenever there is a new commander in the area. Nidal explains that the commanders like to introduce themselves by sending a strong message to the local Palestinian population. The new commander in the Beit Ummar area goes under the name Abu Abed and is a former member of the Israeli Intelligence.
16th January 2015 | International Solidarity Movement, Ramallah team | Nabi Saleh, Occupied Palestine
For five years now, residents of Nabi Saleh have been denied access to their spring. A source of irrigation for their crops, as well as a place for recreation: al-Qaws spring was the heart of this farming community.
The illegal settlement of Halamish was established on the land of Nabi Saleh, and the neighbouring village of Deir Nidham in 1977; since then, and particularly in recent years, the settlement has been growing, stealing more land, and finally denying the villagers access to their spring.
The illegal settlement (photo by ISM).
For five years, every Friday, residents of Nabi Saleh gather with local supporters, Israeli and international activists, to protest against the theft of their land and the denial of access to the spring. Sometimes, with bravery and determination alone, these villagers have managed to reach the spring, stealing a few precious moments before the arrests and reprisals reach their climax. Most of the time, the repression from the Israeli Occupation Forces is too great to get anywhere close.
Today in Nabi Saleh the villagers gathered at the petrol station on the edge of the village; undeterred by the rain, they were ready for the weekly demonstration. The weekly show of strength and determination to fight for what is rightfully theirs.
Photo by ISM
We walked down the road, men, women, and children chanting in Arabic and English, voicing our common determination to end this occupation. The Israeli military were waiting at the bottom of the road, blockading the access to the village. As soon as we were in range the tear gas started. A peaceful march met with poisonous tear gas from the very beginning. Many attempted to throw and kick the smoking toxic canisters away, but the sheer quantity meant we had to retreat quickly.
Photo by ISM
As the smoke cleared, we tried to walk forwards once more. But then the unmistakable crack of live ammunition. We ran back. Without provocation, live ammunition was aimed at a group of peaceful protestors. Fortunately this time the bullet didn’t find a body, but the Israeli Occupation Forces lack of respect for human life is truly frightening.
Two months ago four protestors were injured at this peaceful demonstration, adding to a long list of villagers who have been hurt or killed by Israeli military bullets whilst trying to fight for their rights. The army have been using live ammunition at this group of families and demonstrators more and more frequently during the last year. So the villagers’ weekly demonstration to struggle for their most basic rights – land and water – has been reduced to a short walk to become the target of bullets. Each week villagers risk their lives because they will never accept the theft of their land. Each week they are shot at because they want access to the spring which has been the source of life for their community for generations.
