Tag: Cast Lead - Page 36 - International Solidarity Movement

European Union failing its obligations to protect human rights in the Occupied Palestinian Territory

28 January 2009 | Palestinian Centre for Human Rights

The Palestinian Centre for Human Rights (PCHR) demands that the European Union (EU) immediately takes action in order to protect human rights in the Occupied Palestinian Territory. The EU is currently failing in its obligations to effectively intervene in order to protect the lives of civilians in the Occupied Palestinian Territory (OPT), especially civilians in the Gaza Strip, whose human rights are being massively violated by the Israeli Occupation Forces (IOF). PCHR is dismayed by recent statements made by, and actions taken by, EU states regarding human rights violations in the OPT.

Since launching its widespread military offensive against the population of the Gaza Strip on 27 December, 2008, the Israeli Occupation Forces (IOF) have killed 1,285 Palestinians in Gaza, and injured at least 4,336 others. Thousands of bereaved and traumatized survivors are now also homeless, as IOF have completely destroyed at least 2,400 homes across the Gaza Strip. Ongoing PCHR investigations indicate that 82.6% of the total IOF victims were civilians, including at least 280 children.

Despite the overwhelming number of Palestinian civilians killed by the IOF during its offensive in the Gaza Strip, the 27 EU member states abstained from a United Nations Human Rights Council resolution on 12 January, 2009, which condemned the IOF military offensive in the Gaza Strip because of IOF “massive violations of the human rights of the Palestinian people.” A week later, on 20 January, the Czech Foreign Minister and President-in-Office of the EU Council, Karl Schwarzenberg, claimed that the EU presidency, which is currently held by the Czech Republic, “should not act as a judge” of IOF violations of humanitarian law during its offensive in Gaza. “I have never seen a war were humanitarian law was completely respected” added Schwarzenberg.

On 26 January, Louis Michel, the EU Commissioner for Development and Humanitarian Aid, visited the Gaza Strip, where he claimed that Hamas bore “overwhelming responsibility” for the Israeli offensive in the Gaza Strip.

The EU abstentions from the UN Human Rights Council resolution, and these statements issued by senior EU officials, highlight that the 27 EU member states are blatantly failing in their obligations as High Contracting Parties to the (1949) Fourth Geneva Convention to protect the lives of Palestinian civilians in the Gaza Strip. The shameful silence of the entire international community, including the EU member states, illustrates its utter failure to hold Israel accountable for its masse violations of human rights across the OPT and especially in the Gaza Strip. According to the principles of international law, Israel must be held responsible for its actions.

In light of the scale of the 22 day IOF military offensive in the Gaza Strip, PCHR demands that the international community, including all EU member states, act immediately in order to protect the lives and property of all Palestinians, especially the 1.5 million civilians who continue to be imprisoned under siege inside the Gaza Strip.

The Centre reiterates that the root of the continuing violence in the OPT is the continuing IOF belligerent military occupation of the Gaza Strip and the West Bank, including occupied East Jerusalem. International silence in the face of IOF human rights violations across the OPT, including the deliberate targeting of civilians and their property, is encouraging Israel to continue to use excessive lethal force against civilians, including the widespread use of bombs believed to contain white phosphorous, and to act with utter impunity.

The Centre demands that the international community, including the 27 EU member states, hold Israel to account for its masse violations of international human rights and humanitarian law, and forcefully and effectively demand that Israel begin to respect international human rights and humanitarian law. PCHR also demands that the EU does not upgrade its political and economic relationship with Israel vis a vis the EU-Israel Association Agreement. The Agreement is conditional on Israel’s respect for human rights. Rewarding Israel with an upgrade on the basis of “shared values’ whilst Israel blatantly continues to systematically violate Palestinian human rights in the OPT will only further encourage Israel to act as though it is completely above the law.

The EU has a vital role to play regarding Israel’s accountability, and the 27 member states must all meet their obligations regarding independent investigations into the crimes that PCHR believes have been committed against the civilians of the Gaza Strip. All Palestinians in the Gaza Strip deserve justice, and the EU member states must finally make a stand for the respect of law, and the protection of civilian lives.

Ezbet Abed Rabbo area: Remnants of houses and soldiers’ presence

Eva Bartlett | In Gaza

January 28, 2009

Two of her boys worked to pull pieces of clothing, books, and anything reachable from under the toppled cupboard. Every item is sacred. She led me through her house, pointing out the many violations against their existence, every graffitied wall, each shattered window and glass and plate, slit flour bags –when the wheat is so precious –and the same revolting array of soldiers’ left-overs:spoiled packaged food, feces everywhere but the toilet, clothes used as toilet paper. The same stench.

“They broke everything, broke our lives. That was the boys room,” we continue through the wreckage. “Look, look here. See that?! Look at this!” This is to be the refrain as we step over destroyed belongings into destroyed rooms.

It isn’t only the destruction, defiling, vandalizing, waste… it’s also the interruption of life, a life already interrupted by the siege. She held out school books, torn, ruined, and asked how her children were supposed to study: when they have no books, no power, had to flee their home, are living in constant fear of another bombardment of missiles (from the world’s 4th most powerful and most abundantly-equipped military).

Some of the graffiti reads:

“We don’t hate Arabs, but will kill every Hamas.”

and

“IDF was here! We know you are here. We won’t kill you, you will live in fear and run all your lives!”

For people in families like hers, the surviving members, this psychological terror is real. For those who have been killed already, the “we won’t kill you,” is a lie. Ask the surviving fathers, mothers, siblings, children.

From the rooftop, we see neighbouring houses inflicted with the wrath of the Israeli military machine. And great swathes of land which once held homes and trees, now naked, stubbled with pillar fragments at painful angles, rubble, stumps, and tank tracks.

“Here, here, come look over here, over here.”

“That was all our land: clementines, lemons, olives…”

“That’s my brother’s house over there, its all broken…”

The drones were still overhead, the words too urgent, too many, too fast, too dizzying.

Down to ground zero and on to more newly wrecked houses and lives. Past a water pump which served at least 10 houses in the area, hit by missiles, ruined.

Passing more shells of houses, I meet Yasser abu Ali, co-owner of a paint and tools supply shop bombed to the ground by 2 F-16 missiles. Seventeen people were immediately dependent on the revenue from the business, not accounting for indirect dependents (suppliers, buyers). As abu Ali tells of he and his brothers’ $200,000 loss, it comes out that he is a cousin of Dr. Ezz-El-Din Abu El-Eish, the doctor whose 3 daughters and neice were killed by Israeli shelling on his house in Jabaliya. Everyone has their own story, and stories overlap, tragedies overlap and compound.

At Samir Abed Rabbo’s, the tour begins as with the others: everything is broken and upside down, there are Israeli soldiers’ leavings (food, playing cards, feces…) and graffiti: “Join the Israeli army today!” and other slogans from the patriotic invading and occupying forces.

The house is more holes than walls, from multiple tank shells to automatic gunfire shots from the tanks. Seeing so many intentionally & deviously-ruined houses dulls the concept of damage. But strangely some things stand out as odd or notable amidst the whole-scale destruction. Entrails of ceilings and support beams hang in threads. A chair sits gutted.

And there are the sniper holes. I look out the hole facing Salah el Din street, the Dawwar Zimmo crossroads, and I realize that it was from one of these very holes that Hassan would have been shot, thankfully not killed (unlike the 13 other emergency medical workers), thankfully we also weren’t shot dead. These sniper holes litter house walls in homes all over Jabaliya, Attatra, Zaitoun…Gaza.

The baby’s bedroom, not saved from the attacks. A wall of cheerful cartoons and cute baby posters contrasts the ugliness of the gaping shelling wounds, reminding that nothing is sacred to an army that will shoot children point-blank [i will tell of this in a later post].

The rotting donkey out back explains the stink, a stench different than that of the army’s usual odor.

Leaving Samir Abed Rabbo’s ruins, I see a newly-homeless family making tea over a fire, behind the rubble of their former home.

Saed Azzat Abed Rabbo stands under a missile hole in his bedroom ceiling, explaining that on the first day of the land invasion, he and family had been in the house when a missile struck it. They frantically evacuated to a school in Jabaliya, Feluja, and only learned of their house’s post-occupation demise upon returning after the Israeli soldiers left.

It is like the others: ravaged, left with soldiers’ waste and wine bottles–Hebrew writing on the label (wine isn’t available here anyway, so there’s no question who drank the wine) –rooftop water tank blown apart, and rooftop views affording more sights of neighbourhood destruction and of the lemon trees that once stood near Saed Abed Rabbo’s home.

I left Abed Rabbo that day, weaving amongst taxis, motorbikes, trucks, and carts packed with belongings, people who had no home to stay in, who’d only come to retrieve what they could from their former lives. I’d seen more than I felt I could internalize or reproduce for others, but knew I’d go back for more stories because I knew there are more. More than I can possibly hear or pass on.

At Al Wafa – Saja and Ceasefiring

Sharon Lock | Tales to Tell

Yesterday E and I went back to see Amer at his Zaytoun house. He told us his brother Abdullah is back home from the Egyptian hospital, and showed us his hospital records; his wounds (two shots to abdomen, one to arm), are healing ok. He was worried about Saja, his 6 year old, though, it seemed he thought the gunshot wound to her arm wasn’t healing properly, and he wasn’t sure if he could get an overworked doctor’s attention under current circumstances. E already had some links with doctors at Al Wafa hospital in Shayjaiee, where the Al Helou family are staying with Shireen’s sister’s family, so she called Dr Tariq and asked if he would see Saja the next day.

Amer has a lot of friends dropping by when he is at his Zaytoun house, they don’t want him to be alone. One of the young men here lost his brother, as Amer lost Mohammed. Amer told us Mohammed’s wife is 4 months pregnant.

One of the friend made us a wonderful makluba dish for lunch, with virtually no facilities. E told us how she thought this was solely the name of this chicken and rice dish, and couldn’t understand what it meant when someone said his room was all maklubah. It actually just means “upside down.” Luckily while we ate, the wind was blowing the right way. When it’s blowing the wrong way, everyone still trying to live in a semi-rural area like this has to deal with the aroma of rotting chickens, cows, and sheep, killed or starved during the attacks.

Today E and I met Amer and Saja in the Shayjaiee market to go to Al Wafa Rehabilitation Hospital. Saja is a finely boned child with a solemn face, who kept close to her dad, even sitting as far forward on the taxi back seat as she could in order to be near him in the front seat. When you remember she saw her grandad and baby sister killed, it’s not surprising. She was sucking a lollipop and wasn’t willing to open her mouth to say a word for some time. When we got back to her home later and she was with her relatives and her little brother Mohammed (her other brother Foad was at kindergarten) she relaxed and drew some pictures for us.

Dr Tariq is a kind man, but Saja (as you can see in the above photo) was suspicious, and she had reason, as the examination unavoidably had her crying in a lot of pain. The wound has healed on the outside, but there do seem to be some internal problems, and a further operation might be required.

I learnt in my early visits to Palestine not to admire anything that Palestinians have that they could physically give to you, because they will. I try to limit my compliments to things that are bolted down, and children. But I slipped up today… when Shireen arrived, E and I both commented on how much we like her clothes, and that we’d like her to show us where she finds them. She immediately went into the back of the house and came back with two of her shirts, one for us each, for which she would accept no refusal.

By the end of the visit, we’d also collected a commemorative Palestine sash from one of her friendly family members, and some High Energy Biscuits from the World Food Programme, which were apparently a Gift of Norway before they were a gift of Shireen. I felt that I wasn’t really keeping up my end of things with the halva I’d brought them, but it made Shireen smile, because Amer had yesterday joked that my bag had a supermarket in it, after I’d pulled out cashew nuts followed by maramaya (sage) for the tea, yesterday. (These things are, by the way, funded by you, my kind donators.)

We asked Amer about work, he said before the attacks he delivered bread in his van, but now he couldn’t do this job

Shelled Al Helou house and shelled delivery van

anymore. You’ll see why in this picture of house and van.

E and I said that we would let folks who read our blogs know they can make donations to go towards medical treatment Saja might need, if they would like. She’ll be assessed on Thursday and then we’ll let you know, and we’ll try to sort out Paypal if we can. I *think* we can convince Amer and Shireen to accept this, after several battles over several days I managed to pay for our taxi today by saying “it’s not my money, but donations from people outside that I’m paying with”. (It’s actually a bit of both. I hope Amer doesn’t read that. He has a sneaky way of shaking hands with the driver and simultaneously passing shekels over when we’re not looking.)

While we were at Al Wafa, there was gunfire about every 5 minutes. Apparently the army constantly firing over the border is normal there. This is another hospital that was attacked – as you see. There were normally three patients in this room, but luckily they had evacuated this side of the building and moved everyone to the other side when the rocket went in one wall, through the room, and out the other. I believe there were other hits too.

While we were there, E took me to meet Abd, whose case she took up when she was in Egypt. He’s 18 now, and he was shot by a sniper in the March 2008 invasion. He had gone up on the house roof to find out why there was no water from their tank (that was also because of sniper shot it turned out.) He was shot in the spine, and it was a little while before his family realised he was missing. He was sent out to Egypt for treatment, and was in a pretty bad way when E met him, emaciated, with bed sores, cut off from his family, and having been shifted round 5 Egyptian hospitals.

The advice E was given was to try to arrange his removal back to Gaza, which surprised her because of the siege conditions, but then she learnt about the good quality long term care available at Al Wafa.

She was a key part of getting Abd home, and he is now greatly improved physically and has had some visits home. However the 3 solicitous doctors clustered round his bed were telling us that he is very dispirited.

It seems to have hit him he will never walk, and he is grieving for the life he won’t have. Al Wafa staff are doing their best to show him the life he can have. How many more young people there are like him after these last weeks, with so much lost. We wondered if we could ask E’s friend AK to visit Abd. AK lost both his legs, but he is a very strong, positive, and witty man.

It’s a ceasefire…just not on the beach, not in your home

Eva Bartlett | In Gaza

Ahmed Hassanin, 7, shot in the head outside his home by Israeli soldiers from Gaza’s eastern border on January 22nd.

On the 5^th morning after Israel declared a ‘ceasefire’, Israeli gunboats began shelling, as they had on several mornings since halting the 22 day air and land bombardment of Gaza. The shelling, which began just after 7:30 am off Gaza city’s coast, injured at least 6, including one boy with shrapnel in his head.

Yasser Abed, 15, came out from his home in Gaza’s Beach camp, on the coast, to see where the shelling was occurring. A shard of shrapnel lodged in his forehead.

Nisreen al Quqa, 11, was out earlier, before the navy began to fire towards Palestinian fishermen. She and her brother were walking on the beach when the firing started. A piece of shrapnel lodged in her right calf muscle.

Other injuries included a 14 year old male who was hit in the thigh by one of the shrapnel fragments, a 35 year old male also with a shrapnel injury, and a 4 year old girl with a head wound from flying shrapnel.

To the east of Gaza city, in the Sheyjaiee district close to the eastern border, also on the same day, 7 year old Ahmed Hassanian was outside his house with friends around 9:45 am. He lies now in critical condition in Shifa hospital’s ICU, a bullet still lodged in his brain and with such brain hemorrhaging and damage that he is expected to die shortly.

Mu’awiyah Hassanain, the director of Ambulance and Emergency Services, reports shelling in the northwestern coastal area of As Sudaniya on the same morning, saying five fishermen were injured in the attacks.

Israeli warplanes, on the first day of the ceasefire, flew extremely low and loudly over areas of Gaza, leaving residents expecting the worst. Drones capable of photographing and of dropping lethal, targeted missiles, continued to circle in Gaza’s skies for the first 3 days after the tanks retreated and the air-bombing ceased. At 8:30 am, one of these drones dropped 2 missiles in the Amal area east of Beit Hanoun, wounding a woman and an 11 year old child, who later died of her injuries.

Mohammed Jarboua, 21, clinically brain-dead

The Palestinian Centre for Human Rights (PCHR) reports further violations of the cease-fire.

At 10:40, Israeli troops killed Maher abu Rjaila, 23, shooting him in the chest as he walked on his land east of Khan Younis city.

Two days later, at 1:00pm, Israeli soldiers fired on residents of Al Qarara, near Khan Younis, shooting Waleed al-Astal, 42, in his right foot.

Israel’s assault on Gaza has killed at least 1,330, with as many as 200 more bodies expected to be recovered from under the rubble of the over 5,000 destroyed houses and 20,000 buildings.

Dr. Fawzi Nablusi, director of Shifa’s ICU, said that of the cases in Shifa’s ICU, 90% were civilian, of these 50% were women and children. One of those civilians injured the day before Israel’s ceasefire was Mohammed Jarboua. Also from the Beach camp, the 21 year old is clinically brain dead, surviving only on mechanical life-support, after being shot in the head by Israeli naval forces.

The Director of Shifa hospital, Dr. Hassan Khalaf, and Mu’awiyah Hassanain confirmed that since the ceasefire began on January 18, three more Palestinians have been killed, and 15 more injured, 10 of those injured on January 22^nd.

These ceasefire violations are not a new precedent, as during the 6 month ceasefire which began on June 19^th, Israeli forces routinely targeted and fired upon fishermen and farmers along Gaza’s eastern and northern borders, injuring 62, according to Palestinian sources. During this period, 22 Palestinians were also killed, many of them members of resistance groups, and 38 fishermen and farmers were abducted. The truce period saw border crossings mainly closed, completely sealed them from November 4, 2008 with only the briefest of openings.

As the dust settles and noxious chemical fires continue to smolder, Gazans focus on their immediate needs: housing, food, and in many cases locating lost family members still under the rubble.

The root of the problem continues: the nearly 2 year old siege on Gaza, not relaxed under the 6 month ceasefire as agreed, and which had already decimated Gaza’s health and sanitation infrastructures, and had shattered the economy. From the ruins of Gaza, any signs of an end to the siege are far beyond the broken horizon.

Amid destruction, school resumes

Tara Jensen is an Australian Human Rights Volunteer in Gaza

“We have no bathroom, how can we wash ourselves? How can we go to school looking like this?”, implored 13 year-old Shaima al Samouni. It’s a pertinent question, given that schools reopened two days ago for the first time since the Israeli attacks on Gaza started.

With 29 family members killed during the attacks on the Zaytoun neighbourhood in Gaza City, however, it seems a strange concern. But life marches on, and the other children have gone back to school. Tugging at the clothes they were wearing, the children explain that, now, three weeks after their homes were destroyed, what they’re wearing is all they have. And, it seems, they’re not going to school wearing that.

They take us across the dirt, to a half-bombed house. On the way, we walk over the foundations of what used to be the house of Majid al Samouni and his family. The children stop to show us a drum of olives (zaytoun) that was destroyed. We pass by the carcass of a large sheep. Shot by the Israeli army. They show us their two pretty donkeys. “Donkeys quais”, I say in broken Arabic, relieved that they’re not taking us to more animal corpses. There used to be nine donkeys, they explain. But the Israeli soldiers shot seven of them. Then my colleague points out the gaping hole in the shoulder of the brown donkey – also shot by the Israeli army. Donkey mish quais.

One of the young girls, who is nine years old, is desperate for me to understand the extent to which their lives were destroyed. Not in terms of life lost, but livelihood. “Bas al shugul – al ard. Bas” (The land is the only work we have), and the land is totally destroyed. The children catalogue the types of fruit trees they had – lemon, guava, orange, mandarin, and the ubiquitous olive. They don’t talk about the battery-chicken shed that is crushed, chickens still in cages. When I finally ask just how many chickens there were, I find it difficult to believe the answer – two thousand chickens.

Her older cousin goes to great lengths to tell me repeatedly, at every opportunity, that they were just farmers, not Hamas. I know, I reply.

Inside the half-destroyed house, there is a clamour to show all of the atrocities crowded into one small space. Some of the children explain that their mother had given birth during the bombing, how they had to burn a knife over a candle to cut the umbilical cord. And about how their two-year-old sister was wounded on her face – lacerations from her eye across and down her cheek. Others point to where shells entered the house, some still stuck in the walls. They tell us how the soldiers had occupied the house, after the family had evacuated it. How they came back to find everything on the ground, including the Qu’ran. Then, worse, how one Qu’ran had been defecated on. Haram, was all I could say. I took photos somewhat helplessly, of everything they showed me. I’m well-practiced at documenting damage Israeli soldiers have done to Palestinian homes. And the families always seem to feel better if you take photos of everything. But the ridiculousness of what I was doing – taking photos of small holes in walls when half of the house was missing – hit, and I put the camera down.

A couple of the children – the ones who had been telling me that they were all farmers, and just farmers – led me around the corner to a house they said belonged to Arafat al Samouni. The house was leveled, just a small tarp erected in the middle of the debris. “Sleep here” one of the children informed. 10 people killed in that house. Just one left, seemingly. Haram.

I wanted to ask the children about their parents. I know at least some of them have surviving parents, saw them with their mother. Heard them talk about her. But I’m too scared to ask. I don’t want to hear a small child have to tell me that its parent or parents are dead. There’s so much I can’t bring myself to ask. I’ve taken a lot of reports in Palestine. I know how it goes. What you need to ask. What information is vital. I know it so well I don’t even need to think about it. I can ask with sympathy about how Israeli soldiers invaded a family home; beat people; abducted their children. But this is something else entirely. Here and now, such questions seem vile. I just want to hang out with the children. Let them show me what they want to show me. Listen to them talk.

While we’re hanging out with these kids, our friends encounter one of their cousins who watched both of her parents die when Israeli soldiers bombed a house that they had told everyone from neighbouring houses to shelter in. Later, watching the video they took, we’re all shocked by the confident way Mona talks about the night when so many from her extended family were killed. About how she watched her parents die, before the rest of the family ran from the house, in all directions, whilst they were being fired upon by the soldiers. How composed she is as she recalls how they ran to her school, which she had previously believed was a long way from here house. How she couldn’t believe she had walked all that way. How it didn’t seem like a long distance. And about how here grandparents told her that it was because they were scared and running that she didn’t notice the distance.

We’re not the only foreigners visiting this area – the al Samouni family have become famous for the tragedy they’ve endured. Teams of international journalists traipse around the dirt mounds and debris, making it seem like a macabre tourist attraction. “This is why the children don’t seem sad”, a local friend suggests later, while we watch Mona’s video. “When all the journalists leave, then they will feel sad”.

Driving back down the road towards Gaza city, we pass building after building bearing signs of shelling and bombing. Metre-wide holes punched through walls – some covered in plastic; a few already bricked in; most still open wounds in the masonry. It looks to me as though tanks drove down the street we now drive on, pausing to shell every apartment block and house they passed. As though for fun. It’s an idea I can’t get out of my mind. The possibility, that a large proportion of what the al Samounis and other families in Gaza have endured over the past month was done for kicks, haunts me.