Head injury after assault by Israeli soldiersSeveral teenage boys were arrested after the 15 May Nakba Day demonstration in Hebron. On May 24 the International Solidarity Movement met one 16 year old boy and his father to hear his story.
The boy had been on his way home from work at around 6 pm on May 15 when he was stopped by Israeli soldiers near the old city of Hebron. Suddenly and without reason, two soldiers jumped on him and without saying anything started to beat him in his head and chest with the stocks of their guns. The boy was then dragged into a military jeep where there were other arrested Palestinian boys and was handcuffed and blindfolded. The soldiers kept on beating the boys as they drove them to the police station. The boy ISM met was bleeding heavily from a cut in his head, for which he did not receive medical care until the day after the arrest. The boy required three stitches for his wound.
In the police station, the boy saw 15 other young boys who had been arrested the same day. After nine hours of arrest, the boy was told that he was accused of throwing stones at Israeli soldiers. Throughout his arrest and detention, the soldiers and police humiliated the boy, calling him a donkey and making him stand for hours facing a wall. They also asked him continuously which Palestinian party he was part of.
That night the boy was taken to a different jail which is used for longer detentions, where he was kept for four days. He was eventually released from prison after being made to sign a paper in Hebrew which he didn’t understand. He later discovered that the paper said that if he gets arrested again he has to pay 2000 shekels.
At the time of writing, several boys who were arrested on Nakba day were still being held without charge. ISM does not have any information about the number of arrested boys.
The right to return is a core goal of the Palestinian liberation struggle. Since 1947-1948, when over 750,000 Palestinians were forcibly expelled from their homes – and more than 700,000 were ethnically cleansed from their country altogether – they and their descendants have organized to demand the rectification of this historic injustice. The refugees of the Six-Day War in 1967 (after which Israeli forces drove 300,000 Palestinians out of the occupied Gaza Strip and West Bank ), the 1967-1994 Israeli administration of the occupied territories (during which Israel stripped 140,000 Palestinians of their residency rights), and the ongoing colonization of Palestine and displacement of its indigenous inhabitants, have added their voices to the growing global movement for return.
In recent years, the right to return has also emerged as a key demand of international solidarity activists supporting Palestinian aspirations for freedom. On July 9, 2005, for example, the Palestinian Civil Society Call for Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) – the founding document of a Palestinian-led global movement for justice in Palestine – stated that “non-violent punitive measures should be maintained until Israel meets its obligation to recognize the Palestinian people’s inalienable right to self-determination and fully complies with the precepts of international law by … respecting, protecting and promoting the rights of Palestinian refugees to return to their homes and properties.”
Today the seven million Palestinian refugees are the world’s largest group of refugees, comprising one-third of the total refugee population. Their right to return to their homes, and to receive compensation for the damages inflicted on them, are enshrined in international law. Resolution 194, which the United Nations General Assembly adopted on 11 December 1948 and Israel agreed to implement as a condition of its subsequent admission to the United Nations,
resolves that the refugees wishing to return to their homes and live at peace with their neighbours should be permitted to do so at the earliest practicable date, and that compensation should be paid for the property of those choosing not to return and for loss of or damage to property which, under principles of international law or in equity, should be made good by the Governments or authorities responsible.
Additionally, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, adopted by the General Assembly on December 10, 1948, states that “everyone has the right to leave any country, including his own, and to return to his country.” And Resolution 3236, which the General Assembly adopted on November 22, 1974, “reaffirms … the inalienable right of the Palestinians to return to the homes and property from which they have been displaced and uprooted, and calls for their return.”
Despite its clear obligations under international law, Israel continues to resist demands by Palestinian refugees that they are allowed to return to their homes. Most recently, on Sunday, May 15, the 63rd commemoration of the Nakba, or “catastrophe,” of the 1947-1948 ethnic cleansing of Palestine, Israeli troops responded to demonstrations by unarmed refugees marching towards their homes with lethal force.
Israeli forces killed at least 15 demonstrators on three borders (with occupied Gaza, Lebanon, and between Syria and the occupied Golan Heights), wounded hundreds more with live gunfire, artillery shells, and tear gas, and unleashed a wave of arrests and repression in the occupied West Bank. This massive violence could only have been planned as a show of brute force, intended, along with Benjamin Netanyahu’s repeated assertions that “it’s not going to happen,” to dissuade Palestinian refugees from asserting their historic rights and the global consensus for the right of return.
Yet the most enduring story from May 15 may be that of Hassan Hijazi. A 28-year old Palestinian refugee living in Syria, he braved the gunfire that killed four others along the border with the occupied Golan Heights, then hitchhiked, and finally took a bus, to his family’s home in Jaffa. Before turning himself in to Tel Aviv police, he told Israeli reporters, “I wasn’t afraid and I’m not afraid. On the bus to Jaffa, I sat next to Israeli soldiers. I realized that they were more afraid than I was.”
Millions more are resolved to follow Hijazi’s path. On Sunday, June 5, the 44th commemoration of the Naksa, or setback, Israel’s 1967 expulsion of 300,000 Palestinians following the Six-Day War, Palestinian refugees will return en masse to the borders. Announcing the mobilization on May 18, the Third Intifada Youth Coalition said, “The last few days proved that the liberation of Palestine is possible and very achievable even with an unarmed massive march if the nation decides it is ready to pay all at once for the liberation of Palestine.”
The Preparatory Commission for the Right to Return, a nonpartisan coordinating body, has requested that supporters of the Palestinian liberation struggle also take action on June 5, by staging rallies, marches, and protests throughout the world demanding Palestinian refugees’ right to return. Appropriate venues could include Israeli embassies, consulates, and missions, BDS campaign targets, and foreign governments and international organizations that enable Israeli crimes.
”The May 15 marches were not an isolated incident, but were rather a declaration of the foundation of a new stage of struggle in the history of the Palestinian cause, entitled: ‘The refugees’ right to return to their homes,’” a statement by the Commission says.
For the first time ever, the Palestinians have switched from commemorating their displacement with statements, festivals, and speeches, to actual attempts to return to their homes.
The scene of refugees marching from all directions towards their homeland of Palestine sent a powerful message to the entire world that the refugees are determined to return to their homes however long it may take; and that 63 years were not enough to kill their dream of return; and that the new generations born in forced exile who have never seen their homeland are no less attached than their grandparents and fathers who witnessed the Nakba.
What happened on May 15 was only a microcosm of the larger march soon to come, a march that will be made by Palestinian refugees and those who support them. They will pass the barbed wire and return to their occupied villages and cities.
The crowds will head out from everywhere there are Palestinian refugees toward the West Bank, the Gaza Strip, and occupied Palestine’s borders with Jordan, Syria, and Lebanon, in peaceful marches raising the Palestinian flag and the names of their villages and towns, the keys to their homes, and certification papers.
The Arab Spring’s “winds of change” are blowing through the refugee camps, no less than the Arab capitals, toward Palestine. And they show no signs of stopping.
Palestinians planting a tree to mark one of the villages wiped out in 1948With the creation of Israel in 1948, four hundred and eighteen Palestinian villages were wiped out and destroyed, displacing hundreds of thousands of Palestinian people from homes they had lived in for generations. This year on May 17, in further commemoration of the Nakba (the Catastrophe), the ISM joined the Palestinian organisation Green Palestine in planting olive trees in the village of Al Tayba, near Jenin in the north of the West Bank. After each tree was planted a laminated tag with the name of each individual village was tied to a branch.
Arwad and Fakreh Adiri, two Palestinian activists for the Green Palestine, put together a schedule of events over the Nakba period, which included 63 horses (standing for 63 years of exile) riding to Jenin, 418 bicyclists wearing the names of the 418 villages cycling for 3 kilometres to the centre of Jenin and an Ambulance alarm sounding during a 63 second silence in which the whole of Jenin observed.
ISM talked with Arwad, one of the organizers of the event.
What has been the aim of today?
To tell the young people that these 418 villages existed. The Palestinian people are patient enough to wait to go back home. We chose Al Tayba as it is next to the 1948 border, the wall has split this village so half of it is in Palestine and the other half is in Israel, leaving families cut off from each other.
This is just the beginning, we are planning to turn this into Haifa’s garden, we will invite other districts in Palestine to come and visit and also put an information board in French, German and English to tell this story so that we raise awareness in the international community.
What is the significance of planting trees?
Olive trees are the strongest trees in Palestine, they last for hundreds of years. This is to indicate that our roots will remain in Palestine, we are going deep in the ground and we will stand tall.
What do you think the future of Palestine will be?
That’s a very hard question but I will be honest… as long as we have internationals coming to Palestine, we see the light coming close. And I don’t mean governments I mean regular people like you. We feel like we have solidarity which is more important to us, it will take longer this way ´[to bring about change] but finally I’m sure we can and we will have change, Inshallah.
I am for having Israel as a state, but living all together. Don’t steal my stuff, let’s share it or leave it alone. Look at this water issue, settlers use 80% of the water available to Palestine and the rest of us have just 20% because they dig their wells deeper. They are stealing. It is not fair.
18 May 2011 | International Solidarity Movement, Gaza
Nakba Day. The day of the Catastrophe. A day to mark the ethnic cleansing of 800,000 Palestinians from their homes. A day to remind themselves and the world, that one day, they will return to their homes, that they have not forgotten their land. Today marked 63 years of dispossession, 63 years of ethnic cleansing. Thousands of Palestinians marched north from Beit Hanoun to the wall; thousands of Palestinians marched toward their homes.
As we approached the wall the Israeli army barked out its hello. A tank began to fire over the crowd and into the sand dunes lining the road. The Israeli bulldozers had already thoroughly destroyed anything that was once on this land, outside of threatening the crowd there was nothing to accomplish by this shooting. It is a strange thing to be fired at with a cannon from a tank; you can almost feel the air shake when the shell explodes. The crowd did not stop, it continued forward, chanting against the occupation, chanting their love of their land.
Soon the stream of wounded began. From the front of the crowd men and boys carried by their friends, by whoever was standing near them when they were shot. They came in a steady stream; you could hear the tak tak tak of the Israeli rifles echo against the calm sky. In the West Bank, the soldiers are usually stationed on a hill, first comes the tear gas, and then come the bullets, usually rubber at first, later the live ammunition. In Gaza there are no pretenses, first the tanks fire their cannons, then the soldiers safe in their concrete tower start to shoot live ammunition into the crowd.
The crowd, maybe a thousand strong by now, is strung out along the street. Their only cover the concrete lane separators. Above them, Apaches hover, not for the whole protest, but they come and go; perhaps they will fire missiles into the crowd. It is pretty hard to imagine what possible use an Apache has in crowd control. Then again it is hard to imagine the possible uses of a tank for crowd control, yet off to the right of the crowd an Israeli tank shelters behind an earth berm. In front of them is a giant concrete tower manned by soldiers who shoot into the crowd. Underneath this tower there is some sort of room, apparently for people crossing the terminal. Occasionally you see soldiers there; they seem to be playing with a luggage cart. It is hard to imagine that they are afraid for their safety. Off to their left is another giant concrete tower, this one has a very large gun mounted on top of it.
Saber says: “On the tower in front of us there is a sniper, he does not miss a shot fired: every bullet achieves exactly the target. The tower on the left is fitted with a remote control machine that shoots projectiles with a caliber much bigger, those are illegal under international law.” The danger is increased by the fact that the direct line between the remote control gun and the protesters is obstructed by bushes, which obscures visibility and makes accurate aim less likely. None of the Palestinians are carrying weapons, none are a real threat to Israel. This is the first event since the agreements were signed for national unity: there are those who bare obvious signs of Fatah, Hamas and the PFLP. All sectors of the population are represented including women and children. Nalan a girl of twenty-one years, says “I wanted to go further in the front row, because is my land, and I wanted to go further. But my friends pulled me back and wanted to keep me safer …”.
The hours pass, the soldiers continue to shoot into the crowd. The wounded trickle to the back, shot one by one. The soldiers sit safely in their concrete tower firing into a crowd a hundred meters away. You can only imagine how they decide who to shoot. They can’t possibly feel any threat; they young men barely even bother to throw stones. The wall, the tower, are too far away for a stone to even reach them. The stones that are thrown are thrown almost on principle, if you are going to stand in an open street while soldiers shoot you from their concrete tower, surely you should do something.
Three young men try to put a flag up on a light pole. The soldiers start to shoot at them. They hide in a jumble of concrete blocks at the base of the light pole. When the shooting pauses, they try again to put up their flag. As soon as they emerge the firing begins again. This pattern is repeated several times. Finally the soldiers start firing some sort of heavy machine gun at the boys; everyone realizes that the situation has become much more serious. Soon, the boys will be killed. A young man from the crowd joins them, and tries to convince them to make a run for it, to leave the shelter of the rocks for the shelter of the crowd. He fails. Men from the crowd try to convince people to walk over en mass and take the boys out, they can’t convince enough people, people are too afraid that the soldiers will shoot them. Finally, the boys realize that they have to move; one by one they make a run for the crowd. Thank god they all make it.
The soldiers start shooting again; I feel a punch in the chest. Probably just a ricocheting piece of stone, the young boy next to me was not so lucky. When I look over he is being helped away, his face streaming blood. It looks like he has a hole in his cheek, like he was shot in the face. I never see him again, surely he wasn’t shot in the face, it is hard to imagine him living through that.
A boy next to me is shot in the leg. You can see that his leg is shattered even through his pants. When they pick him up to carry him to ambulance his leg hangs as if in two pieces. He doesn’t scream, he doesn’t say anything, but you can see the fear and pain in
his face. He seems to be about 14. What were the soldiers thinking? That this young boy, 100 meters from their concrete tower was somehow a threat to them? It is strange, none of the wounded seem to scream, perhaps you just don’t notice, I don’t know, but I don’t remember any screams of pain, just the look of fear and pain on young faces.
After about three hours of shooting live ammunition into the crowd the soldiers decide to try something new, well, new for the day, but familiar to all Palestinians. They begin to fire tear gas into the crowd. The crowd surges back to escape the tear gas. The soldiers aren’t very committed though, after one volley of tear gas they return to shooting live ammunition into the defenseless crowd. If this were Libya, Syria, the world would denounce the use of live ammunition on a crowd of unarmed people who pose zero threat to anyone, but this is Gaza, shooting unarmed demonstrators is a given.
A young man walks forward alone. He keeps walking toward the wall, you can feel the tension, the crowd is worried that he walks toward his death, brave but suicidal. The soldiers don’t shoot; he comes closer to the wall than anyone has in hours. He takes a Palestinian flag that has been left there; he walks slowly back to the crowd. He is greeted like a hero. The soldiers go back to shooting random young people from the crowd.
After leaving the protest we went to visit some of the wounded in the hospital. They were
already out of the emergency, resting in beds, six to a room surrounded by their families.
Ahmed Gomaa Abd Al Malik is 17 years old. His family lives in Beach Camp, but they are from Deir Sneid where they were expelled in 1948. He was one of the first injured in the protest, shot at 11 am. He went to today’s protest to return to his home, to return to Deir Sneid, the village of his forefathers, his land. He says that he will not forgot his land, Israel should know this, he will return.
Mustafa Saif Abu Saif lies nearby. He is pale, he looks tired. He is only 14 years old, one of the many kids shot today. His family are refugees from Jaffa, now they live in Jabalia Camp. He was shot near the wall. He had found an Israeli flag and brought it to be burned, while he and his friends were trying to burn the flag the soldiers shot him. He asks that the world wake up to what Israel is doing in Palestine, that they assist the Palestinians in any way that they can.
Yehia Adel Al Shareef is the oldest person we meet today who was shot. He is 23. His family lives in Beach Camp. He has no idea why he was shot, they just shot him.
Shadi Rayan is 19 years old. He wants to return to his homeland, to the village which his family was expelled from in 1948. He doesn’t want the world to forget that 63 years later, his family is still refugees; their right to return to their land is still being denied. He was shot at 3:30 while he tried to hang a Palestinian flag.
These are only some of the casualties. According to the Palestinian Center for Human Rights, one 18 year old boy is dead and the total number of wounded is 105, including 31 children, three women and three journalists. The injured were taken to three different hospitals in the Gaza strip, and incredibly, some of those with minor injuries returned to the demonstration after being treated at the hospital. Others preferred to stay at the demonstration rather than be taken to the hospital; for example a man with a wounded leg, his trousers torn and stained with blood, tied a flag around his bleeding leg and continued demonstrating.
The shooting continued for over 5 hours. The Nakba has continued for 63 years. Hopefully we will not have mourn the 64th anniversary of the Nakba.
Approximately one thousand people demonstrated in Hebron during the weekend to commemorate the Nakba day. Several protesters were injured after violent responses from the Israeli army.
On Sunday the 15th May around a thousand Palestinians joined in a demonstration to commemorate the Nakba, (in English literally “the catastrophe”) which occurred in 1948 when hundreds of thousands of Palestinians were expelled from their homes as the Israeli state was created. The demonstration, in which the International Solidarity Movement as well as all major political parties and the Mayor of Hebron took part, started at the Hebron Municipality building in the H1 area (the area of the city controlled by the Palestinian authority) and stopped at the UNRWA (The UN Agency for Palestine Refugees) office, where speeches were held. The chants of the demonstrators and the speeches highlighted the right of the 1948 refugees to return and the unity of the Palestinian people.
Protesters also marched towards the Old City of Hebron. Here the Israeli military advanced into the H1 area and attacked protesters with tear gas, sound bombs and rubber coated steel bullets. Other protesters were prevented from entering the Old City by Palestinian police forces. A group of young women in the front line of the demonstration managed to break through the police line and for a while managed to continue the protest behind the police forces. Protesters responded to the violence of the Israeli military by throwing stones. At 4pm a member of an ambulance crew told the ISM that 20 people so far had been injured by the Israeli military, four were injured by rubber coated steel bullets and the remaining by inhaling tear gas. According to Ma’an News Agency, an additional five demonstrators were later treated for wounds caused by rubber coated steel bullets, four for tear gas inhalation and one for fractures caused by being beaten by the Israeli military.
Nakba Day protests in Hebron
Nakba Day protests in Hebron
Nakba Day protests in Hebron
Nakba Day protests in Hebron
Nakba Day protests in Hebron
On Saturday the 14th of May during the evening a march took place involving around 300 Palestinians, they carried fire torches and marched from the Municipality to the nearby square where speeches were made. They also carried keys which represent the loss of their homes in the Nakba. The march took place within the Palestinian controlled part of Hebron and there were no difficulties with the Israeli military although a sizable Palestinian police force was on call to watch the protest.
On Sunday the 15th during the evening after the main protests marking the Nakba, the ISM were asked to attend a protest by Youth Against Settlements, a Palestinian activist group. The demonstration was held in Wadi al Hadya. Though all of the street lights had been inexplicably turned off, the ISM members reported 30 youths gathered at the base of the hill and were blocking the road with a large skip, which was set on fire. This was to stop the advance of Israeli soldiers who had gathered at the top of the hill. The soldiers were using their laser sights which could be clearly seen moving over the young men gathered at the protest. The soldiers then fired tear gas and sound bombs in order to disperse the gathered youths. As far as the ISM members were able to tell nobody was injured by this unprovoked fire but this is as yet unconfirmed.
