ISM London offers support and solidarity to the numerous student occupations and sit-ins around the UK in recent weeks. This response to the most recent Israeli onslaught on Gaza has been one of the most important initiatives in the movement. Generating pressure on our higher education establishments to take a stand against Israel and the war crimes it commits is vital. We stand in solidarity with the many Palestinians, students, activists, academics and members of the public who are now being more and more vocal about the boycott of Israel as a means of both exerting international
Photo from http://www.flickr.com/photos/solomonsmfield/
pressure on the Israeli apartheid system, and standing in solidarity with the resistant Palestinian people.
ISM activists all around the UK are available to speak about their experiences on the ground in Palestine and are contactable via ISM London (info@ism-london.org.uk) An ISM speaker will be at the Warwick sit-in tonight. For those interested in visiting Palestine, we can also organise training events around the UK if you can organise a group large enough (usually 10 or 15). Email training@ism-london.org.uk for more details.
Current or recent UK student occupations we know of:
Today I met with my friend Reem. She is 21 and works with Mercycorps, and we met when she came to interview me after I arrived on the initial FreeGaza trip. She was so bright and sparkly then, and I know that is still in her somewhere, but right now she is very fragile. She didn’t realise I was back in the country until last Wednesday, when her family was one of the many fleeing attack to Al Quds hospital, and we collided amidst the chaos. Today she told me about what happened to them.
Tuesday night, we had stayed with my uncle elsewhere, because the attacks were so bad. But Wednesday we went home, because it was home. Also we heard that the bombs Israel was using (phosphorous bombs) set things on fire, and we thought if we were in our home we could put out small fires before they burnt everything. We just didn’t realise how bad it was going to get.
Wednesday night was terrifying. The bombing, the shelling – my mother was shaking and reading prayers. We realised how dangerous it was there on the 5th floor, but we were too scared to go downstairs because there were windows all the way and we were afraid the Israeli soldiers or the planes would see us and shoot. My uncle lives on the ground floor, he has two daughters of 6 and 1 1/2, my grandmother lives with him also. He called us and said, come downstairs, but we said we just can’t. Next thing we knew, he’d come upstairs to get us. He actually went all the way up to the 7th floor by accident, and had to come back down to us to bang on our door. So we took blankets and went downstairs with him. We kept thinking – at 4am it will stop. Maybe at 6am it will stop. Because usually the army withdrew by then. We didn’t realise they were just continuing to move towards us this time.
Some hours later, my aunt looked out the window and saw a tank; it was pointing directly at our windows. That’s it, in a moment the shells will hit us directly, we’re dead, we thought. But something happened and it turned away from us. I called Mercycorps and asked them to call the Red Cross and ask for help. But we realised we had to escape immediately, to try to get to the hospital because maybe it was safe. We couldn’t go back to the 5th floor for our day clothes or our passports or IDs. My brother was so worried because if the soldiers got him with no ID, they would shoot him. But everyone in our building said, we have to go NOW. But some of them knew the snipers had just shot a man and his daughter (Haneen Al Batran and her father).
We went outside, we had small children with us – some of the little ones could barely walk but they had to if there wasn’t anyone to carry them. Then I saw you, and the other Red Crescent people coming; my brother was helping my grandmother but she can’t walk, she fell, and he stopped with her though he was sure he would be shot. Then you went to help them, so me and the rest of the family went on into the hospital. But inside, we waited for 10 mins and my uncle and my brother and my grandmother didn’t arrive, and we were sure they were dead. We checked the basement but we didn’t know it had two sides. I started to cry. Mum was shouting at everyone – did you see them, did you see them?
Then I saw my brother and I shouted “where the hell have you been!”
After some hours they said everyone would evacuate from the hospital and go to the UNWRA school, but we had to walk and Israel only gave permission for two ambulances to go with the hundreds of people. It’s a long way and my grandmother can’t walk. I didn’t know what we could do, if she had to stay we wouldn’t leave her. But then we got a wheelchair for her so we could push her. I was carrying someone else’s child because her parents had their other children, she was afraid not to be with them so she cried all the way; she could see how scared we all were. I realised how empty this area of the city was, everything was burning, it was a city of ghosts. I believed they would drop a bomb on us as we walked. But we arrived to the school.
From the UNWRA school, we went to very distant relatives – my uncle’s wife’s relatives. We had nowhere else to go; we stayed three days. We wanted to go home, but we expected after people had left, the army would shell the whole of Tela Howa. After the army withdrew, my father and brother went to check our home and bring our passports and ID. After the ceasefire we went home. But we can still hear shelling from the sea. We think it’s not really a truce, it’s more just a break.
I lost my friend from the WhyNot project – Christine Al Tork. She was really dear to me, she was one of the sweetest girls, kind of smooth and soft. Her parents only had her and her brother, so they took such care of her, and gave her so many opportunities, she took lots of classes and things…she was literally scared to death. She got asthma and then a heart attack, from fear. It was Friday, the day she died. I began to think it would happen to me too, because I was scared to death too. I was so affected by that, my family tried to be very close to me to help me. I looked on Facebook, her friends made an online group for her, and the photos of her after she died affected me so much; one of her father kissing her goodbye for the last time. I couldn’t believe she would never be back.
Then I heard my friend from college, Bissam – her name means spring – was dead. This shock was even worse. I was as pale as Christine after she died. I couldn’t eat or talk. My uncle wanted to wake me out of my shock. He shouted at me – it’s not the time for this – any of us might die at any moment, but we have to try to survive – show some care for yourself, for your family, wake up! I realised I had to find some strength, so I started to eat.
Some of my relatives live in Tuam. Their building was destroyed; six families lived there. My friend’s home was destroyed by shells. Some other relatives had their home burnt, so did another friend. Then yesterday I went to Mercycorps, and I found out my friend Jihan, who worked at Sharek, is dead. I was listening to everyone’s stories and I wanted to escape from reality but it was chasing me. During the attacks, I was calling all my friends every night to say goodbye, I was saying to all of them, please forgive me for any bad things I did. And they would say, Reem, please shut up!
My friends always used to say I was like a character out of a fairy tale, like Snow White or someone, not really living in the real world. After these days, I guess I am in the real world. I can’t watch the news, because the news was us, my life, my friends. All me and family are thinking about now is leaving Gaza.
Those minutes or hours – I literally couldn’t tell you which – when I went out into the street with the amazing Red Crescent medics to meet all the families like Reem’s, who were fleeing for their lives, were a strangely calm time. One of the guys paired up with me, and would quietly say my name and “come” to direct me where we needed to go, firstly with hands in the air but soon holding children and blankets and old people. I saw men crying, children wanting to run from sheer terror and their parents gripping them tight, women clutching babies buried in blankets. We carried several people on stretchers, stopping to bandage the sniper wound of one man on the way.
Towards the end my Red Crescent comrade B realised that we didn’t have his best friend A. He wasn’t answering his phone, and that his building was closest to where the tanks were. He asked me to come and get him (I have this trick of untying my long hair to be clearly visible as a woman, in case it discourages shooting, though in the circumstances I wasn’t convinced it would help) and after an eerie walk through emptiness, we found ourselves within a hundred yards of the tanks. From the next building we called across and discovered several families remained in it but wanted to leave. First they couldn’t find A, but then they did – and I swear he’d slept through the whole thing, with a tank nearly under his window and deafening shelling going on. And we all got back safe.
In these last days, whenever Red Crescent folks from other places turned up on ambulance runs, the greetings were much closer to reunions. Big hugs and 5 or 6 smacking kisses on each cheek. The subtext: “you’re still alive. It’s a miracle, you’re still alive.” E heard today of a third friend who is dead. She has had a hard time. I have lost no-one personal to me.
I have three hangovers that I’m aware of from these days. One, I hate to sleep alone at my flat; the two nights I did during the attacks, it felt too far from the hospital where my work and my friends were and I was worried I would be cut off from them. It still somehow feels like being in the wrong place. Two, I feel happiest when my 3 best Red Crescent friends are all present and within my sight. Three, in the dark when I see bags of rubbish on the street I think they are bodies. This is because I found, when we went to pick up bodies lying in the dark, that they looked more like crumpled bags of rubbish than the people they had been.
The strength of Gaza people astounds me. Everyone was out today fixing things. Re-laying water pipes, clearing rubble. Putting aside the thoughts of the children who are dead, to smile for the children who are still alive. How is it done? Where do they find the courage? And what will be their reward for getting up and going on, one more time?
I forgot to tell you that today again I woke to the sound of shelling from Israeli ships in the Gaza sea.
Jabalia children on a wagonload of destroyed trees
On January 18, the first day that Israel stopped most of the bombing all over Gaza (navy shelling continues to this moment), after
No choice but to leave with all belongings
learning that my friend’s father was alive in eastern Jabaliya, I went on to Attatra, the northwest region, which had been cut off since Israeli troops invaded. As expected, the destruction was great, the death toll high and still unknown. People streamed in both directions: going to see how their homes had fared or leaving from the wreckage and bringing as many surviving possessions as possible.
“This is our main road,” Yusef said dryly, gesturing at the undulating pavement and sand that served the towns in this region. “There should be houses here. Now there is nothing,” he added, seemingly more to himself than to me.
I’d noticed the road right off: torn through the centre, ripped up by a bulldozer’s claw or a tank’s tools, a theme that re-surfaced on various main streets. There were the horse or donkey carts, piled as high as possible with mattresses, blankets, clothing, and furniture, trying to maneuver on these newly-rutted, overcrowded streets, or around earth plowed into peaks.
I’d met my friend Yusef at the main crossroad. He’d come from Gaza city much earlier, to confirm that his own house was devastated: “There is nothing left. They gutted it. I took two pairs of pants, that’s all,” he said. “I was expecting it. There’s no house the Israeli soldiers didn’t enter, damage or destroy. We couldn’t get here to see it until today,” he had told me, Israeli troops’ fire and shelling preventing all from entering, wounded from leaving, ambulances from arriving. This point must be mentioned again and again.
We came to Anis, another Ramattan media employee, standing in front of his destroyed home. “It was hit in the first days of the land invasion,” he said. “F-16. We had evacuated, thank God. When the shelling started, I was crying. I just wanted to get my kids out of here,” he confessed. “Anyway, thank God none were killed. My mother, father, and children, we’re all okay,” he said.
“But nothing is left,” he added. “Walla ishi,”–nothing at all.
Two more videos shot by the International Solidarity Movement taken by The Guardian as proof of use of banned weapons by Israeli forces in Gaza.
Robert Booth | The Guardian
Ayman al Najar, 13, tells how he lost his sister, grandfather and cousin in a bomb attack
The Guardian has obtained vivid footage of the effect of white phosphorus allegedly used by Israel during a bomb attack on Gaza last week.
The film was made by Fida Qishta, a camerawoman working for the International Solidarity Movement, a non-governmental organization operating in Gaza. It was shot on Wednesday 14 January in Khoza’a, east of Khan Younis in the south of the Gaza Strip.
It shows clumps of the burning chemical on the ground as locals try to put it out by covering it with dust, mud and grass. The chemical, which locals describe as phosphorus, fails to go out and continues to burn through the debris piled upon it. As they kick it about, it subdivides into smaller lumps and continues to burn.
The use of white phosphorus as a weapon – as opposed to its use as an obscurant and infrared blocking smoke screen – is banned by the United Nation’s third convention on conventional weapons, which covers the use of incendiary devices. Though Israel is not a signatory to the convention, its military manuals reflect the restrictions on its use in that convention.
A second film reveals the impact of the white phosphorus on the human body. A 15-year-old boy is shown in a Gaza hospital receiving treatment for burns to his back and right arm which a doctor explains were caused by the chemical, which appears to have eaten into his flesh in several places.
Palestinians try to put out burning chemical banned as a weapon under United Nations convention
Lying on his hospital bed, the boy tells how he was sitting with his family in their four-story house when an Israeli bomb hit, killing his sister with shrapnel.
His testimony follows an earlier film by Qishta which contains graphic descriptions of attacks by Israeli forces in the same area.
Amnesty International said today that Israel has committed a war crime by using phosphorous over Gaza’s densely populated residential neighborhoods. The human rights organization also said they had fresh evidence of its use.
“Yesterday, we saw streets and alleyways littered with evidence of the use of white phosphorus, including still burning wedges and the remnants of the shells and canisters fired by the Israeli army,” said Christopher Cobb-Smith, a weapons expert who is in Gaza as part of a four-person Amnesty International fact-finding team. “White phosphorus is a weapon intended to provide a smokescreen for troop movements on the battlefield. It is highly incendiary, air burst and its spread effect is such that it that should never be used on civilian areas.”
Israel has admitted – after mounting pressure – that its troops may have used white phosphorus shells in contravention of international law, during its three-week offensive in the Gaza Strip.
One of the places most seriously affected by the use of white phosphorus was the main UN compound in Gaza City, which was hit by three shells on 15 January. The same munition was used in a strike on the al-Quds hospital in Gaza City the same day.
Under review by Colonel Shai Alkalai is the use of white phosphorus by a reserve paratroop brigade in northern Israel.
According to army sources the brigade fired up to 20 phosphorus shells in a heavily built-up area around the Gaza township of Beit Lahiya, one of the worst hit areas of Gaza.
The internal inquiry – which the army says does not have the status of the full investigation demanded by human rights groups including Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch – follows weeks of fighting in which Israel either denied outright that it was using phosphorus-based weapons, or insisted that what weapons it was using “were in line with international law”.
Dr Ahmed Almi from the al-Nasser hospital in Khan Yunis describes serious injuries and chemical burns, with victims covered in a white powder that continues to burn long after initial exposure.
Phosphorus is a toxic chemical agent that burns on contact with air and creates thick white smokes in order to hide troop movements. However phosphorus shells are largely indiscriminate scattering large numbers of fragments over a large area, which can cause severe damage to both human tissue and property.
As the Guardian reported yesterday, Palestinian doctors have reported treating dozens of cases of suspected phosphorus burns.
According to senior IDF officers, quoted today in the Ha’aretz newspaper, the Israeli military made use of two different types of phosphorus munitions.
The first, they insisted, was contained in 155mm artillery shells, and contained “almost no phosphorus” except for a trace to ignite the smoke screen.
The second munitions, at the centre of the inquiry by Col Alkalai, are standard phosphorus shells – both 88mm and 120mm – fired from mortars.
About 200 of these shells were fired during Israel’s Operation Cast Lead in Gaza, and of these – say the IDF – 180 were fired on Hamas fighters and rocket launch crews in northern Gaza.
Alkalai is investigating the circumstances in which the remaining 20 shells were fired, amid compelling evidence on the ground that phosphorus munitions were involved in the attack on a UN warehouse and a UN school.
The mortar system is guided by GPS and according to Israel a failure of the targeting system may have been responsible for civilian deaths. However, critics point out the same explanation was used for mis-targeting deaths in Beit Hanoun in Gaza in 2006.
The brigade’s officers, however, added that the shells were fired only at places that had been positively identified as sources of enemy fire.
The use of phosphorus as an incendiary weapon as it now appears to have been used against Hamas fighters – as opposed to a smoke screen – is covered by the Convention of Certain Conventional Weapons to which Israel in not a signatory.
However, Israel also is obliged under the Geneva Conventions and customary international humanitarian law to give due care to protecting the civilian population when deciding on appropriate military targeting and response to hostile fire, particularly in heavily built up areas with a strict prohibition on the use of indiscriminate force.
“They obviously could not have gone on denying the use of phosphorus,” Donatella Rovera, Amnesty researcher for Israel and the Occupied Territories, told the Guardian yesterday. “There are still phosphorus wedges burning all over Gaza including at the UN compound and at the school.
“It is clear they are not using it as smoke screen as they claimed. They used it in areas where they had no forces, and there are much less problematic smoke screens that they could have used.”
Amnesty on Monday warned that Israel could be guilty of war crimes, saying the use of the shells in a civilian areas was “clear and undeniable”.
Rovera demanded too that Israel produce clear evidence that there were fighters in the areas it says its troops were fired upon when the phosphorus munitions were fired.
The admission that the shells may have been used improperly follows yesterday’s demand by the UN secretary general Ban Ki-moon for an investigation into the targeting of UN facilities – including by phosphorus weapons.
It also follows the decision by the IDF to protect the names of battalion and brigade commanders who participated in Operation Cast Lead.
According to Israel Army Radio on Wednesday the decision – ordered by defence minister Ehud Barak – was made in anticipation that war crimes charges may be filed against IDF officers, who could face prosecution when they travel overseas.
