24th November 2016 | International Solidarity Movement, al-Khalil team | Ramallah, occupied Palestine
It has been confirmed that Jihad Mohammad Khalil, 48, was shot and killed by Israeli soldiers at Qalandia checkpoint early Tuesday morning, 22nd November. Khalil is from Beit Wazan village, west of Nablus in the northern part of the West Bank. He was shot on the spot by an Israeli soldier, according to the Palestinian Health Ministry. A spokeswoman from the Israeli Police claims that the man was approaching a security guard welding a knife and so he was neutralized, while another spokesperson says that he was attempting to stab Israeli security forces.
So far there has been absolutely no evidence shown to prove these claims. No soldiers were hurt during the incident and no other injuries reported. After he got shot, Jihad Khalil was left to bleed to death by the soldiers, as they would deny access to the medics rushing to give first aid. After the killing, the soldiers shot down the checkpoint and prevented the Palestinians from crossing into illegally annexxed al Quds (Jerusalem).
27th October 2016 | International Solidarity Movement, al-Khalil team | Hebron, occupied Palestine
Acts of injustice done
between the setting and the rising sun
In history lie like bones,
each one. – W. H. Auden, from “The Ascent of F6″
Today marks one year since the murder of a young man outside the ISM apartment in Tel Rumeida, occupied al-Khalil (Hebron).
The shooting of the 23-year-old at 10:30 at night was followed less than 24 hours later by another blast of gun fire, when a young man was shot by Israeli army personnel beneath our lounge room windows, in full sight of my colleague. The two men, it was identified in the following hours, were Hummam Adnan al-Saeed and Islam Rafiq Hammad Ibeido.
At the time, I was among the nine or so internationals working with ISM in the face of increasingly targeted restrictions on our solidarity work in the H2 areas of al-Khalil (under full Israeli control). This was to be exacerbated just days after the murders by the declaration of the Closed Military Zone across Tel Rumeida and the surrounding district, which culminated in our eviction from the neighbourhood and a series of impossible, arbitrarily renewed military orders upon the Palestinian residents, which have continued to this day.
—A historical irony of numbered identities
The deaths of these two young men were among 70 extrajudicial executions of Palestinians across the occupied territories and 1948 historical Palestine which occurred during my short two months’ stay, the overwhelming majority of which were of men and women in their late teens or early twenties, and in circumstances where the evidence against their alleged attacks were so insurmountable, it would be laughable if it weren’t so tragic.
Since leaving the West Bank, I have watched the occurrences of these executions only sky-rocket. In the customary fashion of geopolitics with regard to Palestine, this has been met with: persistent outrage, suffering and at once steadfast and tired resistance by Palestinians; ongoing condemnation by rights organisations across the world; meagre intermittent mention by the UN; and velvet-gloved, rare, tokenistic slap-on-the-wrist rhetoric by the USA, followed by a fistful of $38bn in support. The situation hasn’t changed.
The current estimates of Palestinians to be killed in this way now number over 200, with more than 230 Palestinians being killed in total and at least 18, 000 injured in the past year. Meanwhile, the “Third Intifada” outpouring of frustration and rage through mass demonstrations and actual stabbing and car attacks, taking the lives of 34 Israelis – the supposed excuse for such blatant disregard for due process of law – are decreasing.
What remains are socialised, cultural and new legal precedents of emboldening Israeli military, civilian and illegal settler populations to act as judge, jury and executioner, with the horrifying consequence of both hysterical and calculated instances of murder with complete impunity. On the rare occasions when there has been a Palestinian witness able and willing to face the very real danger of publicly disputing the discourse of a “pre-emptive” “neutralisation” of a “terrorist,” [from an Israeli police spokesperson in regard to the murder of 17-year-old Dania Irsheid] their voices very rarely make it into the mass media.
This is what foreign conflicts look like:
Remote.
When the terms ethnic cleansing and genocide are used by ISM to relay internationals’ interpretation of Israeli policy and the tenets of popular Zionism, it is often met with criticism, abuse, and scepticism, even amongst supporters of Palestine. I’ve found a distance between my interpretations and many would-be supporters, finding it near impossible to capture the ubiquitousness of the occupation and the dynamics of apartheid, shy of having actually being there or in a comparable situation. To use a word so historically associated with the holocaust, in which millions of Jewish people were murdered, is considered inappropriate, disproportionate and insensitive. Yet, the brazen murders of Hummam and Islam stand out to me as an iceberg tip symptom of contemporary Israeli state-sanctioned racism, and the extent to which the lived experience of ethnic cleansing has come to be normalised if not expected of the region.
They were part of a generation who have grown up entirely under the gunpoint of Zionism and their deaths are treated like history’s collateral.
On the ground, what one comes to both expect and desensitise to is a rigorous psychological warfare of oppression, humiliation and state-sanctioned terrorism. This predominantly presents itself in the physicality of checkpoints, the vast concrete wall and settlers with M-16’s. However, more insidiously and equally damaging is also the stop-and-spread body searches, the crippling bureaucracy of arbitrary permits to access food crops, night raids where children viscerally learn the meaning of insecurity, and superhero fathers are emasculated by teenage soldiers emboldened with righteousness and immunity. And then what of the psychology of the kindergartners who anticipate tear gas en route to school and are excluded from streets where metres away, settler children live illegally in stolen houses backed up by the full weight of an internationally supported state? These things which are happening in Palestine, when “nothing is happening” (From a speech by Steven Salaita at the Israeli Apartheid Week opening event, London, 2016): ethnic cleansing and genocide in slow motion.
This period of “increased tensions,” beginning around the stabbing attacks by Muhannad Halabi and the shooting of unarmed 18 year old Hadeel al-Hashlamon, only a few hundred meters from where Islam and Hummam would perish a month later, marks but moments where these policies become visible. Moments where the applicability of the 2nd Article of the United Nations Convention on Genocide: “(a) Killing…with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group” cannot be denied. Islam and Hummam’s deaths were among five days of executions in a row that we reached in the H2 suburbs of Hebron. For the other three, Dania Irsheid, 17, murdered at the Ibrahimi mosque checkpoint, Saad Youssef al-Atrash, 19, murdered many metres from a checkpoint, searching for his Identity Card, and Mahdi Ramadan al-Muhtasib, 23, shot from close range whilst incapacitated near Salaymeh Checkpoint, whilst Palestinian voices testified to their innocence, Israeli forces wrote a historical record of benign, thinly defended silences and double-speak. All medical treatment was denied.
These deaths make visible the current expansionist Zionist agenda – to follow with the UN definition: “(b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; (c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part…” Where perhaps for a minute the international community pays attention to the fact that a modern colonial state feels emboldened enough to shoot at ambulances and beat medical staff in the full light of day.
When these realities were brought to a place we had slept in and worked from, the soldiers, the same men who checked our passports and performed countless body searches in front of us, we tasted the sharp edge of genocide up close: ugly. Terrifying. A science-fiction like erasure of lives followed by settlers playing festive music on the site. Maybe you won’t believe me. It happened. I haven’t found a place for it.
These are the bones of history. They have names and dates of birth, and classmates who keep an empty seat for them.
It is not lost on me that the death of a man named Islam did not make it onto the news in my home country. It is not lost on me that Islam and Hummam have been written into the dominant record as terrorists while the men who murdered them have returned to their families. It is not lost that the streets of al-Khalil have the words “Gas the Arabs” graffitied on its walls, or that the Convention on Genocide was written in 1948 in the dying spectre of WWII, and only became accessible for accession by Palestine in 2014, along with Palestinians’ first official, theoretical access to the protections of international law.
“Gas the Arabs” spray-painted by settlers from the illegal settlements
“I am 100% sure he was unarmed. I saw the two soldiers creeping slowly along the road outside our apartment window with their guns cocked, so I looked down the street to see why. I saw an unarmed man walking normally towards the soldiers and suddenly they shot.” – Orion, the ISM activist who witnessed Islam’s shooting.
And for the families of these victims, people I never got to meet, people who were not able to bury their children until 2 months later, when their bodies were “released” by Israeli authorities amid 21 others bodies, they are still there. And I cannot imagine the insurmountable suffering of their past year, or their compounded grief of life under occupation.
May their lives be remembered for who they really were, and their deaths be called for what they were.
29th September 2016 | International Solidarity Movement, al-Khalil team | Gaza, occupied Palestine
Mere days ago, on the 22nd of September, the city of occupied al-Khalil (Hebron) remembered and mourned the murder of 18 year old Hadeel al-Hashlamoun, another Palestinian youth executed in cold blood by Israeli forces outside the Shuhada Street checkpoint one year ago. Today, on the 30th of September, all of occupied Palestine bows its head in mourning and raises its fist in resistance on the 16th anniversary of the deaths of Jamal al-Durrah and his 12 year old son Muhammad.
On this day 16 years ago, Israeli forces unleashed their militarized terror upon the streets of occupied Gaza, firing indiscriminately upon anything seen as a threat, which at this time was any Palestinian within sight. Even Palestinian medics were forced to run for cover as bodies lay bleeding on the ground. On this day, every Palestinian person was reduced to just that in the eyes of the Israeli occupying forces: a body to be targeted. Two of these bodies were Jamal and young Muhammad.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=arRgkXDLwlM
16 years ago, the world was presented with a French journalist’s video documenting in incriminating clarity the final moments of a young, frightened, innocent boy who had not even reached his teenaged years. As Palestinians run frantically for cover, the camera focuses in on Muhammad as his father attempts to shield him behind a concrete cylinder. In what seems like an instant, gunfire rains down upon the two of them and the entire scene is covered in smoke. As the smoke clears, young Muhammad’s body is seen slumped over his father’s lap. Jamal musters his last remaining strength to sit his upper body up. He wavers back and forth for a few moments, the body of his son laid across his legs, before the spark of life leaves his body as well.
In the 16 years since Muhammad’s execution, Palestine has never ceased to live under the iron grip of Israeli state terrorism. 16 years has brought military crackdowns, arbitrary arrests, fear and intimidation across the West Bank, Gaza, and East Jerusalem. 16 years has brought countless land grabs in the expansion of illegal checkpoints and illegal Israeli settlements. 16 years has seen Israeli forces and settlements “pulled out” of Gaza, only to be replaced by a complete economic blockade as Israel surrounded its borders on land, sea, and even the militarized sky above. 16 years has brought multiple genocidal assaults on Gaza, the latest, dubbed “Operation Protective Edge”, slaughtering over 2,000 Palestinian lives. Over the course of the last 16 years, the land that Muhammad al-Durrah lived, played, and dreamed on has continued to live under the sledgehammer of an illegal military occupation attempting to erase Palestinian bodies and memories from existence in order to lay claim to a stolen nation.
There is much to remember from these past 16 years, and each day brings more horrors for the people of Palestine. Yet today, let us remember the death of an innocent boy whose only crime was living in the land of his birth. May his unknown, yet forever present dreams shine a light on the entire land of Palestine today and remind us that all we struggle for is life itself.
22nd September 2016 | International Solidarity Movement, al-Khalil team | Hebron, occupied Palestine
One year has passed since the extrajudicial execution of the Palestinian student Hadeel al-Hashlamoun by Israeli forces at Shuhada checkpoint in occupied al-Khalil (Hebron). One year without justice for the family of the slain teen – one year of complete lack of consequences and continous impunity for the soldier who executed Hadeel in cold-blood despite her not posing any threat, and despite photo and video-evidence. But also one year, in which this culture of impunity for the cold-blooded murder of Palestinians has been fostered further and emboldened the Israeli forces to continue gunning down Palestinians – a crime that in Israeli society is no longer considered a crime.
18-year old Hadeel al-Hashlamoun, on the 22nd September 2015 crossed the then not yet highly-militarized and fenced-off Shuhada checkpoint. Israeli forces at the checkpoint were yelling at her – in Hebrew – the language of the occupying soldiers, that most Palestinians do not understand or speak. Despite a Palestinian bystander translating between the girl and the soldiers, Hadeel was shot several times with live ammunition in her upper body – at a point where she was at a 5 meter distance from the soldiers behind a metal-fence and could under no circumstances have posed any kind of threat to the soldiers. Israeli authorities claim that Hadeel was holding a knife. Whether or not this is the case video- and photo-evidence clearly shows, she was far away from the soldiers, and not approaching or moving towards any of them.
As in most of these kind of incidents, after Israeli forces gun down Palestinians, she was left to bleed to death on the ground, while Israeli forces threw stun grenades at a Palestinian Red Crescent ambulance outside the checkpoint in order to prevent any medical treatment. Instead, in a video she can be seen pulled by her feet on the ground, seemingly in order to prevent any journalists attempting to take photos despite the stun grenades to get a shot of the dying, slowly bleeding to death, teenager. At the same time, settlers were gathering and looking on, taking their own photos and videos. At a later point, she was kidnapped to an Israeli hospital in far-away Jerusalem, whereas the Palestinian medical crew prevented from reaching the seriously injured girl would have been able to evacuate her to the nearby at only 5-minutes distance Palestinian hospital in al-Khalil. In contrast to the majority of Palestinians gunned down, her family was “granted” the right to bury their daughter, a right Israeli forces now tend to deny to families by kidnapping the bodies and refusing to hand them over to their families.
As has become all to common, the executioner of Hadeel has not had to face any consequences for the cold-blooded killing caught on camera. In the recent weeks, Israeli forces have again increased the use of lethal force against Palestinians, gunning down 10 Palestinians in only 6 days.
20th September 2016 | International Solidarity Movement, al-Khalil team | Hebron, occupied Palestine
Israeli forces in occupied al-Khalil (Hebron) are increasing their efforts to slowly annex even more of the tiny part of Shuhada Street where Palestinians are still allowed to walk.
The majority of Shuhada Street, once the main Palestinian market and connection between the south and north of the city, has been ethnically cleansed of Palestinians after the Ibrahimi Mosque massacre in 1994. More than 1800 shops on Shuhada Street were forced closed and their doors welded shut, and more than 600 families were forcibly displaced by the occupation army, creating a ‘sterile zone’ free of Palestinians, who’s mere presence in this area has been ruled illegal by the occupation. Out of the four settlements in the heart of the Old City of al-Khalil, three are located on Shuhada Street, and one is nearby in Tel Rumeida, conveniently connected with a road only settlers are allowed to drive on. This road extends further in the opposite direction all the way to the biggest illegal settlement on the outskirts of al-Khalil, Kiryat Arba.
The only few hundred meter of Shuhada Street, located between Shuhada and Daboya checkpoint, that are still accessible to Palestinian pedestrians, since October 2015 has been declared a ‘closed military zone’, covering the whole Tel Rumeida neighborhood; thus limiting the number of Palestinians able to use this street to registered – that is numbered – residents. Near Daboya checkpoint, which marks the ‘end’ of Shuhada Street for Palestinian residents, the spot where they’re not allowed to pass any further by the discriminatory legal system of the Israeli occupation based on racial discrimination, used to be the spot to reach Qurtuba school and the surrounding neighborhood – before these stairs have been permanently closed. Again, this closure is based on racial discrimination and only affects Palestinians, whereas settlers are free to use the stairs without any hassle. This closure effectively turned the small strip of Shuhada Street into a dead-end for Palestinians, as the rest of the Street is a no-go zone for Palestinians, and the only other option, the stairs, included in the ethnically cleansed area ‘free’ of Palestinians.
Sunday night, after Israeli forces gunned down 4 Palestinians in occupied al-Khalil in just two days, killing 3; the end of Shuhada Street leading into the ethnically cleansed part was marked with white lines, indicating a new limit for Palestinians till where they’re allowed to walk. Immediately after passing the first line – which is placed about 20 meteres from the checkpoint – Israeli forces will approach any Palestinian for the usual checks and humiliation all too common at checkpoints. The line was placed just few meters in front of the entrance to the house closest to Daboya checkpoint still inhabitet by Palestinians. Effectively, this means that whenever coming home, the residents are forced to cross this line, resulting in soldiers approaching them expecting them to try to pass further down the street. A second smaller line is marked with the Arabic word for ‘stop’, clearly illustrating that this command is deliberately only intended to affect the Palestinians. Therefore, the part of the street past the first line towards the ethnically cleansed part of the street has now become part of the ever-more expanding ‘sterile’ no-go zone for Palestinians.
Marking indicating in Arabic for Palestinians to stop. Shuhada Street.
The continuous annexation-efforts of the Israeli forces thus are going slowly, but steady, and so far have gone unnoticed by the media and the international community. With the closure of the Qurtuba stairs, the implementation of the closed military zone, and the now new restrictions though, the maze of areas effectively ethnically cleansed of Palestinian residents are increasing steadily, exacerbating the already almost impossible to navigate maze of checkpoints, restrictions, no-go zones, areas and arbitrarily declared closures, curfews, denials of passage and constant threat of injury or even death. All solely based on one distinct feature – being born Palestinian.
