International Solidarity Movement - Page 30 - Nonviolence. Justice. Freedom.

Israeli occupation forces arrest Ahed Tamimi

6 November 2023 | International Solidarity Movement | International Women’s Peace Service

Prominent Palestinian activist, Ahed Tamimi, was arrested in her home in the village of Nabi Saleh near Ramallah, in the early hours of today, November 6.

Following the 22-year-old’s arrest, right-wing Israeli media allied with occupation forces and Israeli far-right politicians issued violent calls for her to be punished and her home demolished.

According to initial reports, she was arrested for incitement after her phone was hacked. Her house was ransacked during the arrest, and it is alleged that the soldiers threatened to come back and arrest the rest of her family.

Ahed’s father Bassem was arrested over a week ago at the checkpoint between Ramallah and Nabi Saleh while he was returning home from work. The grounds for his arrest and his location are still not known.

Israel’s far-right Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir, posted on Twitter this morning praising the soldiers who carried out the arrest. He accused Ahed of having published a social media post supporting the Nazis, sparking a deluge of hateful calls for her assassination and torture.

Ahed’s mother has denied that her daughter wrote the post she is accused of writing. The soldiers who invaded her home, shared a photo of Ahed as she was taken from her bed, accompanied by deriding comments.

Ahed became well known in 2017 after she was detained for slapping a soldier in a video that went viral. The then 16-year-old said she had hit the soldier after seeing her young cousin shot in the head with a rubber coated steel bullet earlier that day. Ahed was freed in July 2018 after serving eight months in Israeli jail.

Nabi Saleh is a small village of about 600 inhabitants, who have become famous for their peaceful weekly protests against the usurpation of springs on their land by the nearby illegal Halamish settlers.

The protests started in 2010 and were banned by the occupation military in 2016. International Women’s Peace Service (IWPS) teams regularly attended and reported from Nabi Saleh protests over the years together with other international and Israeli activists.

Nabi Saleh is to this day a symbol of brave and uncompromising resistance to the occupation and they have paid a heavy price for that. Six of their young men had their lives cut short by the Israeli occupiers including a two-year-old Mohammad Tamimi (picture below) who was killed in June this year by the spray of Israeli soldiers’ bullets, which also injured his father.

What happened this morning in Nabi Saleh is a part of Israel’s brutal campaign against Palestinians, including a genocidal attack on the population of Gaza and the reign of terror across the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem.

Since 7 October, Israeli soldiers and settlers have killed more than 150 Palestinians, made daily arrests of around 100 people and put the West Bank into a near-total lockdown, severely restricting peoples’ movements.

Waiting for the sunrise in Susiya: messages from Masafer Yatta

This is a story based on texts exchanged over recent days with an international activist part of a group staying in Masafer Yatta, in occupied Palestine.

They arrived recently in Susiya and they are staying in a homestead which is some distance away from other families living in the area.

About 40 families with 100 people in total live in Susiya spread out over an area of 3km2 (3000 dunum).

I asked her what was going on and she wrote: ‘In Susiya nobody is now able to go out and get food because the roads are closed and if people leave, the settlers will attack. So the Israeli activists have started bringing food parcels.’

As in other villages, inhabitants cannot take animals to pasture and extra food has to be brought in to feed the flock. She sent me a picture of a woman form the host family doing exactly that, as we spoke.

‘Can’t take the sheep out because army and settlers restrict the people to a small area and the settlements are too near. It is not a ‘formal rule’ but the settlers have taken law into their own hands and if people take their sheep outside the narrow area around their homes, settlers will attack. They have done it here. They have beaten our host and his brother who came to visit from Yatta. Army comes while the setters are attacking but they just stand around and do nothing.’

‘We are very close to a dangerous settler road, it is 200 -300 meters away’, she said. I asked her to send me a picture of the road and she responded with the smiley and ‘Do you want me to get killed?’. She sent me a picture and explained ‘We were asked not to go on the road. There are two soldiers watching, so I better not go any closer. Palestinians are now not allowed on this road at all and again, that is the rule the settlers have created and they are enforcing it by beating up people. ’

I asked if settlers were coming to their hosts’ homestead and she responded that both settlers and the soldiers go nearby constantly.

They don’t seem to come on the property when foreign or Israeli activists are around, but one can never be sure.

This morning my friend wrote at 5am and I asked what she was doing up that early. ‘Watching sun rising above Susiya’, she said with a smiley. ‘A woman we are staying with looks at me with haggard face and swollen eyes and says “I haven’t slept since the war started”, so we decided to stay awake overnight in shifts so that the family could get some sleep.’

The family sent their two little girls to stay with relatives in Yatta to keep them safe.

This morning my friend was just finishing her ‘night guard shift’ and was looking forward to a hot taboon bread the hostess was to make and the food brought by the Israeli activists. She sent me the picture of the woman carrying a tray with dough to the taboon oven.

‘The night was OK, I think… a guy checked the place out from a distance at 3am and there were no problems. Haven’t heard bad news from other international teams. From across the valley, they kept an eye on us, to ensure we didn’t stray out of the patch of ground they have decreed is all the pasture this family is entitled to’, and she added ‘I think there are more watchers than sheep’.

Eradicating people from Gaza

The damages after a convoy of ambulances was hit at the entrance of al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza City. From: Palestinian media

The onslaught on Gaza is non-stopping and gaining pace. In the last few days, the attacks from the air, ground and sea have claimed hundreds of lives.

The majority of dead and wounded are women and children. As of November 4, the number of those killed was 9,485 of which 3,900 were children and so were 7,000 of more than 24,000 injured.

It is not hard to imagine that this is just the tip of the iceberg and that many more are buried under the mountains of rubbles of destroyed homes.

Recently the world has witnessed a mass slaughter of people in Jabaliya refugee camp whose ruins continue to be pounded causing more death and injury. On Nov 4, a UN school in Jabaliya camp was bombed, where hundreds were taking shelter hoping to find some safety.

The lack of staff, equipment, medicines and basics like fuel (which Israel is banning from entering the strip), electricity and water, which Israel has disabled and damaged, has led to closure of 16 of 35 Gaza hospitals. In this time of extraordinary demand for medical services, those hospitals which are still operating are on the brink of collapse.

The Nov 4 bombing of the outside areas of Al Quds and Al Naser Children’s’ hospitals will certainly speed up the process of eliminating medical services. On Nov 3 we had a major carnage and bombing of people and ambulances at the gates of the largest Gaza’s hospital Al Shifa, as well as bombings near Al-Quds Hospital and the Indonesian Hospital in Gaza City and North Gaza governorates.

The Israeli occupation is also starving and denying water to the population of Gaza, an action murderous no less than dropping bombs. The lack of fuel also means lack of communication as people cannot charge their phones.

The Israeli government is carrying out a genocide, as many experts and organisations have called (see Raz Segal intervention, JVP appeal), sometimes under the pretext of destroying Hamas, when it is clear that the aim is to destroy the community and “clear” Gaza from its inhabitants (as the calls to nuke Gaza, and the leaked plan to expel all Palestinians from Gaza have proven).

There is no lack of outcries and reminders that attacking schools and hospitals is a war crime but those who have power to stop them and make them account for their deeds, have so far failed to do so.

One day in Masafer Yatta

2 November 2023 | Masafer Yatta| International Solidarity Movement

The testimony from a volunteer in Masafer Yatta, October 28.

One day in the life of …

… three villages in the South Hebron Hills ; Tuwani, Shi’b Al Batin and Khalet Al Dabaa.

Villages that I’ve come to know over the past fortnight and where events on just one day last week (Wednesday) showed the brutality and lawlessness of the occupation.

Next to Tuwani village, where I’m based, is the illegal settlement of Maon and its “outpost” of Havat Maon. Built on stolen village land, it has some of the most extreme “ideological” and violent settlers in the area.

On the Wednesday morning, a bulldozer accompanied by a heavily armed settler and three Israeli soldiers, trashed land belonging to the Huraini’s family. The family’s vegetable plot and fruit trees destroyed on a vindictive settler’s whim.

When we tried to get close to film and document what was happening, the settler and soldiers fired warning shots of live ammo at us. And made it clear we would be shot for real if we did not back off.

Around 10km away, the small village of Shi’ib Al Batin is threatened by the same settlement. During the day, an isolated homestead was attacked by settlers who ransacked the house, trashed the domestic and irrigation water systems (and poisoned the well), destroyed crops and stole anything of value.

They also fired a live bullet. This came with the message move out or this is for you. Not an idle threat, the family has been forced to leave. Their land will soon be taken over by the settlers.

On the Wednesday evening, just after dark, the village itself was raided by the army. I was there with a solidarity comrade and, along with the senior men in the village, we were forced by aggressive soldiers to kneel at gunpoint, hands on head for an hour or so.

The sole purpose of this – which happens on a regular basis – is to intimidate and harass. All part of the coordinated effort to forcibly displace the Palestinian population.

In a remote but beautiful hilltop location looking to the Jordan Valley and the 1949 Green Line is the village of Khalet Al Dabaa. It also has some of the best political murals I’ve ever seen.

Since the start of the war in Gaza, attacks on the village by settlers have become more frequent and violent with Israeli soldiers taking a leading role in the violence.

The attack which took place on Wednesday resulted in two village men being hospitalized, children traumatized, essential infrastructure trashed and valuable equipment stolen.

This is just a snapshot from one day, in three villages. It is happening every day and all thirty villages in the South Hebron Hills are being terrorized.

Israeli forces bulldoze Jenin monument in deadly night raid

1 November 2023 | Jenin | International Solidarity Movement

By Diana Khwaelid

On Sunday, October 29, a huge column of military vehicles stormed the city of Jenin in an overnight raid, killing four Palestinians, and destroying a monument for Jenin’s martyrs.

Israeli soldiers invaded the city’s Jenin camp at 12.30am, accompanied by an armed Caterpiller bulldozer (D), as part of the occupation army’s ongoing campaign of arrests of young Palestinians in the camp.

After failing to make arrests, the occupation forces destroyed and demolished the memorial monument of the camp, bearing photos and names of Palestinian martyrs killed by Israeli soldiers in Jenin.

According to the Palestinian Ministry of Health, four Palestinians were killed during the invasion of the camp, and five other young people were injured. Two are in serious and unstable conditions.

We report the name of three of the martyrs: Amir Shabrawi, 25, Nourse Bejawi, 27, Musa Jabarna, 23.

During the raid, the Israeli Occupation Forces (IOF) also bulldozed and destroyed all the main roads leading to the camp.

The floor of a residential building was blown to pieces and set on fire. The Grand Mosque in Jenin camp was also invaded and vandalised.

Eyewitnesses said that the occupation forces, especially Israeli snipers, were firing indiscriminately at civilian cars in the camp and at buildings, residential houses, and the mosque.

Mahmoud Abu Issam – one of the camp residents – said that the destruction witnessed by the residents of the Jenin camp is only a fraction of that experienced by Palestinians in Gaza. “No matter what happens, we will remain strong and steadfast and we will not give up,” he said.

Hundreds of Palestinians have been burying the bodies of the four Palestinian martyrs since Sunday morning.

The death toll of martyrs in the West Bank keeps rising, and it has now reached more than 120 since the start of the war on Gaza.