Tag: Christian Peacemaker Team - Page 5 - International Solidarity Movement

Israeli soldiers detain five Palestinian Schoolboys in South Hebron Hills

21 November 2010 | Christian Peacemaker Team

At-Tuwani – Claiming that the children were throwing stones, Israeli soldiers detained five Palestinian schoolboys.

Since the beginning of 2005, the children from the village of Tuba wait every morning for an Israeli army escort to accompany them to the school in At-Tuwani, along the shortest road that goes through the Israeli settlement of Ma’on and the illegal outpost of Havat Ma’on. The escort’s task is to protect the children from the violence of the Israeli settlers of Havat Ma’on.

On the morning of November 21st, Palestinian schoolchildren had been waiting for over an hour near the settlement chicken barns when, at about 8:50 am, the soldiers arrived to escort the children to school past Havat Ma’on. Instead of escorting the children, however, the soldiers stopped and talked with the settlement security guard while the children waited on the road nearby. While the soldiers and the security guard were talking, two settlers passed the children.

After waiting for 15 minutes, two of the schoolchildren left for school on their own, unaccompanied. The other 13 children waited for another five minutes, then turned around and left to head back home. The soldiers remained with the security guard.

As the children were arriving at their villages of Tuba and Maghayir Al-Abeed, the same soldiers drove up, and, shoving away two internationals from Christian Peacemaker Teams, grabbed five boys and put them in the army vehicle. The soldiers took the boys back to the settlement barns, where, according to the children, they asked them no questions, but made them sit against a barn. After holding them for 15 minutes, the soldiers released the boys.

As the boys were leaving, the captain told the internationals “tell the children’s parents that if the boys throw stones again, it won’t be like this time. There will be problems.”

“I was waiting with the kids for over an hour, and I never saw them throw stones” said Joe Yoder, member of CPT. “Even if they were throwing stones while they were playing around, I don’t see how that’s an offense that merits soldiers coming into their home and carrying them off like criminals. If the army would just arrive on time, then there wouldn’t be a problem in the first place.”

Schoolchildren from Tuba and Maghayir al Abeed rely on the Israeli army to escort them past the settlement of Ma’on and the illegal outpost of Havat Ma’on, where Israeli settlers have committed acts of violence against the schoolchildren in the past.

These kinds of incidents are the evidence of the Israeli military escort’s failure to protect the children from settler’s violence. In the last school year, the children were attacked 19 times, they waited for the escort 53 hours and they missed almost 27 hours of classes.

CPT: Livelihood of Hebron shepherd threatened

20 October 2010 | Christian Peacemakers Team

Noah El-Rajabi is a shepherd, with two hundred sheep and goats. He lives in Bani Na’im, 17 kilometres from Hebron. He is married, and has seven children.

Ten weeks ago the Israeli military demolished his house. His wife and younger children now live in two rented rooms in Hebron. Noah and his oldest son lived in a tent supplied by the Red Cross, so that Noah could continue to work with his flock.

On Monday 11th October, at 8.00 a.m. the Israeli military arrived without warning and destroyed his water cistern, his tent, and a small wooden structure Noah used for cooking and storage.

His oldest son, aged 14, who was with Noah, protested at the soldiers’ action, and was arrested. His son is accused of assaulting two soldiers. Noah reports that soldiers kicked and beat some of the animals and that one pregnant ewe aborted.

ISM activits, along with members from the Christian Peacemaker Team (CPT) met Noah in Hebron on Tuesday morning 12th October. He did not know where his son was being held, and where he could get water for his animals.

CPTers accompanied Noah to three Israeli police stations. The only information Israeli police gave was that his son was being held in Ofer military prison. They refused to accept a complaint against the Israeli soldiers for their behavior.

ISM and CPTers also visited Noah’s rented accommodation in Hebron. They met his wife and some of his younger children. ‘Please bring my son home’, his wife pleaded.

The animals are being looked after by Noah’s brother, and have been moved to another hillside, where there is water. Agencies in Hebron are trying to reconnect Noah’s water supply, but the cistern will have to be restored, and will run the risk of further demolition orders in the future.

It took Noah a week to track down his son, and he still has not been able to see him.

This incident illustrates the Israeli government’s continued intimidation and harassment techniques aimed at forcing Palestinians off of their ancestral lands in order to expand settlements, and further control the main West Bank mountain aquifer.

A recent study by the World Bank found that Israel is taking four times as much water as the Palestinians. Israelis use 240 cubic meters of water a person each year, against 75 cubic meters for West Bank Palestinians and 125 for Gazans. Palestinians have not been able to develop any new production wells in the West Bank since the 1967 war. Noah’s case is a clear example of the inequities surrounding water distribution, and a reflection of the wider apartheid system.

CPT: Keeping the quiet (when there’s no peace to be kept) on Shuhada Street

Sarah M, Christian Peacemaker Team – Hebron

“Excuse me!” the Israeli soldier called to us. “You can’t walk down that street.”

Elizabeth and I turned toward him, questioning. “We can’t? But the German tourists here earlier walked this way,” Elizabeth recalled.

“I walked down the street three days ago,” I added. “No one stopped me then.”

The soldier shrugged. “We can’t let CPTers walk on this street. That’s the order we’ve been given.”

The street in question was Shuhada Street, once a central route and thriving marketplace for the Palestinian community in Hebron. Since 1979, ideologically radical Israeli settlements have grown along the street. Often the settlers have harassed and attacked their Palestinian neighbors.

In November 1999, the Israeli military closed Shuhada Street to Palestinians. They locked or welded shut the doors of Palestinians shops. Even the Palestinian residents who still live on Shuhada Street can no longer use their front entrances. Instead they must take back exits and circuitous routes to stay off the street, sometimes even climbing ladders or ropes and crossing rooftops to get in and out of their homes.

In 2004 U.S. Aid renovated Shuhada Street with the intention of opening the street to all Hebron residents. Yet to date the street remains closed to Palestinians, while Israeli settlers freely walk and drive along it. Palestinians, supported by Israeli and international activists, have launched a campaign to “Open Shuhada Street” and end this example of what they consider “Israeli apartheid.”

Usually internationals are allowed to walk the street. But CPTers, apparently, fall into a different category, with our recognizable bright red caps and our known support of Palestinian nonviolent resistance to the occupation.

“The order is specific to CPT?” Elizabeth questioned the soldier. “So if I take off my CPT hat, I could walk down the street?”

“You could,” he acknowledged, “because then I wouldn’t know you’re with CPT.”

Elizabeth and I didn’t need to walk Shuhada Street that day. We could—as Palestinians habitually must—take a longer route to our destination. But we wanted to challenge even this small cog in the machinery of the Israeli occupation of Hebron.

So we pressed the soldier to explain the rationale for the order. “It’s to keep the peace,” he finally told us. “We don’t want any trouble with the settlers who live here.”

“I wouldn’t call that peace,” I objected. “Your order seems more about keeping things quiet.”

To my surprise, the soldier agreed with my shift in words. “Yes, it’s about keeping the quiet.”

“I know you’re only following the orders you’ve been given,” I continued. “But isn’t there something wrong in this order? If you’re worried that we will make trouble, then it’s appropriate to keep us off the street—”

The soldier shook his head, even grinned: he wasn’t worried about trouble from CPTers.

“But if you’re concerned that settlers might give us trouble, then there’s something upside down in us being the ones barred from the street,” I concluded.

“Of course it’s upside down,” the soldier admitted. “Everything here in Hebron is upside down. The system is wrong—I know that, you know that—but what can we do? We have to follow orders. There’s nothing we can do, except keep the quiet as much as possible while we work toward a solution.”

Yet keeping quiet rarely moves us toward genuine peace. As Martin Luther King, Jr. noted in his 1963 “Letter from a Birmingham Jail,” the real obstacles in a liberation struggle are the moderate people “more devoted to ‘order’ than to justice,” those who prefer “a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice.”

Someday, I believe, Palestinians will again walk down Shuhada Street. In this and many other ways, they will experience the equality and dignity rightfully theirs. But the journey to reach that day of justice will not be quiet.

CPT: Settlers Heat Up the Air in Al Bweireh

Christian Peacemaker Team – Hebron

Since approximately 2000, the Israeli Military and nearby settlers have set in place an iron gate across the road leading to Al Bweireh. They have also positioned a huge several-ton rock perhaps 25 meters from the barrier gate on the same road and another gigantic heap of rock and earth 100 meters up from the second blockade. Three roadblocks and a huge settlement, plus Outpost Hill 86 have all but destroyed the “heaven” these villagers once enjoyed on their beautiful land.

Fifty six families representing 560 people no longer have the “luxury” of carrying their groceries to their home by car, of driving their children from school in rain and storm to their homes, or of shipping grain and grapes to market without passing a settlement and military tower. Now, if these Palestinians are going to use a car, they need to go an extra six or seven kilometers on a very bumpy detour road to get to their destination..

In Nov. 2009 CPT was invited to accompany the children of the village on their way home from their schools. The children had experienced stone throwing, cursing, and chasing by the settlers. At times they also had their bicycles stolen. Some of the villagers therefore invited CPT to accompany their children from the eight schools they now attend, past the settlement and outpost to their homes.

Within the last six months, the settlers from the Outpost and Harsina Settlement have begun to “heat up the air” in Al Bweireh with their violent provocative activities toward the Palestinians. Every Friday the settlers enter the village to reach a lone tree on the hill opposite from Outpost Hill 86. They say their leader, Neti, was killed some years ago on this hill. According to the Palestinian residents, as the settlers walk through the Al Bweireh village, they try to pick a fight with some of the Palestinians.

During the week of July 11 the settlers broke two Palestinian car windows and started a fire in a Palestinian neighbor’s lawn. They also threw stones at the farmers and cut the water pipes in one of the grape fields. Prior to these activities, at the beginning of planting season, settlers stole a horse from one of the families. This put the farmer behind in his plowing and also forced him to borrow money to buy a new horse to use until the settlers returned his former horse one month later for the ransom price of 1200 shekels.

During the week of July 18 “about 200 settlers” gathered on the Palestinian road leading through the village. A local Palestinian called CPT to come, to see, to document what was happening. Two CPTers responded, but when they saw the settlers on Outpost Hill 86, they feared something was happening to one of the Palestinians. They approached the settlers at the Outpost and were told to leave. When they began to leave the Outpost, the settlers kicked the CPTers and attempted to steal one of their cameras.

In response to all these provocations, members of CPT or ISM (International Solidarity Movement) are present for some hours in the village every possible day of the week. Also, every Sunday CPT plus their translator Hani Abuhaekel visit the families, build relationships, ask for a review of the past week, and check any further growth of the Outpost. On one Sunday the former Sheik spoke so poignantly: “Why do they (the settlers) come here and do this to us? We all – Jews and Muslims – lived as one family before 1928.”

CPTer Paul Rehm presented a proposal to the “U.S. Campaign to End the Occupation” to help the village of Al Bweireh remove the road blockades to their village. The organization accepted his proposal unanimously and will send it to all 300+ organizations of the Campaign in hopes that each sub group will work creatively in their context on this proposal for the next year.

Though it is not clear what will result from this action, soldiers and police arrived in Al Bweireh at 3:00am Thursday Aug. 5 to dismantle the Outpost. A neighbor said the soldiers found the settlers asleep and had to forcibly carry some of the settlers out of the Outpost. By the time CPT was alerted and was able to arrive in Bweireh, there was evidence of settler reaction to their removal: huge rocks and glass on the Palestinian road and a part of a grape field burned. The military had built a huge earthen mound on the road to the Outpost, making it inaccessible to the settlers. Typically, the settlers begin rebuilding almost immediately. Time will tell.

CPT: Palestinian fence damaged in village in At-Tuwani area

Christian Peacemaker Team – At-Tuwani & Operation Dove

On the morning of Wednesday, 4 August, Palestinians from At-Tuwani found that their fence built between the village and the nearby Havat Ma’on settler outpost had been partially destroyed during the night. The fence, made from cemented metal supports and barbed wire, was funded by European Commission for Humanitarian Aid, Union of Agricultural Work Committee, and Save the Children UK. At-Tuwani villagers built the fence in March 2010 with the aim of protecting crops planted in the area, defining the borders of the agricultural land belonging to Palestinians, and as a response to the ongoing and rapid expansion of the nearby Ma’on settlement and Havat Ma’on outpost. The villagers also constructed the fence to help protect the village from Israeli settler raids (such as the events of 26 January, see press release “Israeli settlers and soldiers invade At-Tuwani, attack and injure villagers” and 12 June, see press release “Israeli masked settlers attack At-Tuwani Palestinian village”).

The morning of August 4, Palestinian villagers found 17 poles supporting the fence pulled up and about 100m of barb wire fencing cut in pieces. They suspect that the perpetrators of this action are the Israeli settlers from the outpost. During this year the same fence had already been damaged on 11 May (see press release “Palestinian fence vandalized in At-Tuwani village”). After that incident, the owner of the land filed a complaint to the Israeli police but he never received any update from them concerning the progress of the investigation.

This property damage is just the last of several ongoing provocations carried out by the Israeli army and Israeli settlers which Palestinian communities in the South Hebron Hills have committed to respond to with nonviolent resistance.

Pictures of the incident:

For further information:
Operation Dove, 054 992 5773
Christian Peacemaker Teams 054 253 1323

[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.]