29th March 2016 | International Solidarity Movement, al-Khalil team | Hebron, occupied Palestine
On Sunday, the new team of Youth Against Apartheid was honored to meet with each other for the first time. The wonderful youth of al-Khalil city (Hebron) who have dedicated their time during the past few years doing voluntary work and activities to help their community, mainly in Tel Rumeida neighbourhood and Shuhada Street of al-Khalil City (Hebron).
Youth against apartheid
The members have never before been part of any group, but have happily volunteered with all groups and entities that have asked for their activism. Just a few days ago they decided to form and establish an organized group (popular committee) and officially named themselves, Hebron Youth against Apartheid.
Youth against apartheid
The group is filled with a mixture of very intelligent, energetic and enthusiastic youth while all of them are strongly attached to their people and land, all of who are hopeful for a better tomorrow. The group wishes show to the world what daily life is like under the zionist regimes occupation, the daily attacks and violations of human rights towards the Palestinian people, along with organising voluntary activities in their areas, nonviolent protests against zionist occupation, working for justice and human rights for their people at all levels and providing legal aid to the community. They are based in the old town of al-Khalil city (Hebron), mainly Tel Rumeida and Shuhada Street areas.
This new team would appreciate your support and solidarity at all levels. Please share the word of the great work these young youth are doing and let the world know who they are.
26th March 2016 | International Solidarity Movement, al-Khalil team | Hebron, West Bank, occupied Palestine
After completely closing Shuhada checkpoint to Palestinians in occupied al-Khalil (Hebron) on Thursday, 24th March 2016, Israeli forces have now returned to the practice of ‘numbering’ Palestinian residents in order to restrict access to the adjacent neighborhoods. Soldiers are now barring all Palestinians without numbers, and sometimes even those already registered as residents, from entry into the closed military zone.
The neighbourhood of Tel Rumeida and the tiny strip of Shuhada Street that remains accessible for Palestinians after the closure of the rest of the street following the 1994 Ibrahimi Mosque massacre have been declared a closed military zone since November 1st, 2015. Palestinian residents – in contrast to the Zionist extremist settlers living in the illegal settlements nearby – were forced to register with the Israeli forces as residents, and each given a number used to identify them. The closed military zone was designed deliberately to include the Palestinian neighbourhoods while excluding illegal settlements, thus facilitating settler movement on roads that connect the settlements inside the city center of al-Khalil with the Kiryat Arba illegal settlement on the outskirts of the city, roads that only settlers and Israeli forces are allowed to drive on.
Israeli forces completely closed the checkpoint on March 24th, barring any Palestinian from entering, after soldiers gunned down and killed Abed al-Fattah Yusri al-Sharif and Ramzi Aziz al-Qasrawi, both 21 years old, summarily executing al-Sharif with a shot to the head after he was already lying incapacitated (warning: graphic footage including execution in video captured by Palestinian B’Tselem volunteer). Throughout the day, Palestinians trying to go back to their homes were denied passage through the checkpoint and Israeli forces at times forced people to wait for more than twenty minutes only to tell them that they would not be allowed in – even though they were officially registered, numbered residents. An elderly woman was repeatedly told by Israeli forces to ‘wait’ when trying to walk to her home through the checkpoint; only after waiting for more than twenty minutes was she finally told that no-one would be allowed to pass that day. She had to turn around and leave after standing outside the checkpoint for close to half an hour. Watch this video taken by the local activist group Youth Against Settlements of the old lady denied access.
As of Saturday, 25th March, Israeli forces entirely returned to the practice of ‘numbering’ Palestinians, checking the numbers of anyone attempting to cross the checkpoint against a list of numbers of residents that have previously been registered. Many Palestinians were forced to wait for hours outside the checkpoint, only to be denied to go to their homes – even though they had registered and thus did appear as a number on the soldiers’ lists. The soldiers were extremely aggressive, yelling at Palestinians in the closed-off ‘room’ inside the checkpoint loudly enough to be clearly audible to anyone waiting outside. When Palestinians tried to seek shelter from the pouring rain in the vicinity of the checkpoint, soldiers exited the checkpoint, yelling and screaming at them to move back. All of the soldiers had removed the orange pin that acts as a safety on their Israeli-government-issued assault rifles – a practice that seems to have become common policy throughout occupied al-Khalil.
Shuhada checkpoint gate
When a woman and her four children tried to pass Shuhada checkpoint, the three smallest children were initially allowed through. When Israeli soldiers delayed the mother and older daughter inside the checkpoint, continuously yelling at them, the young girl on the other side of the checkpoint started crying as she was waiting in the rain for her mother to be allowed to go home with them. After an ordeal of more than ten minutes, soldiers arbitrarily decided that the mother would not be allowed to pass – even though she is registered and numbered – and yelled at her till she finally left. Her children that had been allowed to pass earlier came back to be with their mother, the girl still crying. With many extremist settlers gathering and walking freely on Shuhada Street, the children were too terrified to go home without their mother.
The number 230 on the outside of this Palestinian ID has faded with age. It denotes that Israeli forces should theoretically allow its holder to pass into the Tel Rumeida and Shuhada Street neighborhoods, but provides no protection against harassment, threats, abuse and being arbitrarily denied passage through Shuhada checkpoint
This practice of assigning numbers to Palestinians clearly demonstrates the intent to dehumanize them, to make them solely into ‘numbers’ as if they were not human beings. For the Israeli forces – and thus the government supporting and commanding them – this is precisely the case: Palestinians are not considered as human beings, but rather solely as ‘terrorists’ and potential threats. How this influences the behaviour of the Israeli forces was clearly demonstrated when on March 24th soldiers gunned down two Palestinian youths in Tel Rumeida and then executed one of them with a shot to the head at point blank range. A shot in the head of an unarmed man, struggling for his life and being denied any medical assistance, did not cause so much as a twitch from the soldiers looking on.
This practice of ‘numbering’ Palestinians in Tel Rumeida and Shuhada street, and of dehumanizing the entire Palestinian population, is a government policy that intends to force Palestinians out of the area declared a ‘closed military zone’ in particular and ultimately the whole of the occupied West Bank. These policies pave the way for the brutal actions must recently exemplified by the killings in Tel Rumeida, practices falling under the internationally recognized definition of ethnic cleansing which the Final Report of the Commission of Experts established pursuant to UN Security Council Resolution 780 defines as “a purposeful policy designed by one ethnic or religious group to remove by violent and terror-inspiring means the civilian population of another ethnic or religious group from certain geographic areas.”
24th March 2016 | International Solidarity Movement, al-Khalil team | Hebron, occupied West Bank
On the 24th March, Israeli settlers from the illegal settlements in occupied al-Khalil (Hebron) celebrated the holiday of ‘Purim’. The settlers marched through the Old City of al-Khalil, starting off from the spot where just a few hours before, Israeli forces gunned down two Palestinian youth and then executed one of them in cold blood.
In the morning, Israeli forces shot and severely injured two Palestinian youth in the Tel Rumeida neighbourhood and then left them lying on the ground seriously injured while Israeli medics were attending to a slightly injured Israeli soldier. Palestinian ambulances, that are not allowed to drive on this road that is only for settlers use, were prevented by Israeli forces from reaching the injured Palestinian youth. In a video published by B’Tselem, a soldier can clearly be seen shooting one of the youth in the head at point-blank range even though he is lying on the ground and is not posing a threat to anyone.
Only a few hours after this extrajudical execution, settlers started their joyous march, dressed up in costumes, with music blasting from a bus, dancing in the same spot where the two Palestinians were murdered in cold blood.
Illegal settlers celebrating in the exact spot where two Palestinians were murdered in cold-blood Photo credit: Youth Against Settlements
The procession of settlers then proceeded down Shuhada Street, where the main illegal Israeli settlements in the heart of the city are located, before turning towards the Ibrahimi mosque. Shuhada Street, except for a tiny strip, has been completely closed for Palestinians, who are not allowed to even walk there – unlike the illegal settlers who can walk and drive. When the march reached the vicinity of Ibrahimi mosque, Israeli forces started closing off the area to all Palestinians, physically pushing back children behind barriers and preventing Palestinians from accessing the area, even if they were residents, in order to create a space free of Palestinians for the celebrations of the settlers to take place.
Settler children. One drinking wine, one holstering a machine gun and another aiming a pistol at onlookersIsraeli settlers celebrating while Palestinians are denied walking down the streetPalestinians and Internationals are not allowed to pass
One of the settlers, of which many were dressed up in costumes, was seen in a shirt flashing a raised fist on a yellow background, which is the symbol of the ‘Kach’, a party of extremist Israeli fundamentalist settlers, deemed a terrorist group even by the Israeli government. The party was founded by Meir Kahane, who publicly called for the expulsion of Palestinians and to end culture relations between Jewish and Palestinian students. On Tuesday, two days before, during celebrations for the same holiday, the loudspeakers of the Ibrahimi mosque were mis-used to broadcast hate-speech calling for the expulsion of Palestinians from al-Khalil.
Israeli settlers with a Kahane-shirt (settler in the middle)
One of the settler children dancing on top of a bus was playing with a pistol. Even though the police realized this, they merely took the weapon from him – but then gave it back shortly adfter. If a Palestinian of any age had been seen with anything resembling a weapon, the person would likely be shot immediately.
The settlers’ celebrations kept going uninterrupted with Israeli forces ensuring that Palestinians would not cross the way of the settlers, forcing them to stay back, and even closing Ibrahimi mosque checkpoint to ensure no one would even come close.
Palestinian civilians stopped by Israeli forces after they opened the street for Palestinians again while settlers freely pass the checkpointhttps://youtu.be/tvXD1LM5P8k
Israeli forces also used the roof of a Palestinian family home in the vicinity of the mosque as a look-out point. This is just another small example of the impunity and supremacy settlers enjoy with the active support of the Israeli forces, while Palestinians are systematically humiliated, oppressed and killed in cold blood under the Israeli military occupation.
23rd March 2016 | International Solidarity Movement, al-Khalil team | Hebron, occupied West Bank
I’ve wanted to find out more about Laila since I met her on my first day here. She is the only woman storekeeper in the souk and she has a bed and breakfast here. One evening I saw her standing up to soldiers who did not want to let her pass to go home. I have seen nobody else with that firmness and confidence. Everything about her is unusual here (or indeed anywhere). When I do talk with her for this interview, I realise just how unusual.
Laila
Laila’s store sells the same beautiful traditional Palestinian products as many others in the souk but hers are the produce of a rural womens’ cooperative run by her sister Nawal. Laila serves tea and we settle down to talk. Next to me are boxes of beads, silver and stone that I rummage in idly as I sit with her.
Laila doesn’t come from a Hebron family: she was brought up in one of the hill villages and she is lyrical about her childhood there, in what must have been a tough upbringing. In winters they lived in the village, in a cave with the animals, and in summer in a tent near the summer crops: by the time she was a child her family were living on a tiny vestige of the land they had owned before 1948 and the Nakba. ‘If you think about our lives you never believe how we survive. We survive for little things. I remember when we are young our food is from the garden. We can have vegetables from the garden, we can cook, we can catch birds. It’s a simple life. We have a fire to cook, we have water from the wells or a spring. Its very hard for people but for us we like it, we enjoy it much, much better [than in the city].’
Then after 1967 with the coming of illegal settlements came the fear, and the fear was justified: over the years, either settlers or soldiers have burned down the majority of the village’s olive trees. They lost even more land in the last decade when the separation wall sliced away further areas ‘to make the road straight’ and they could no longer get to their own olive trees to crop. ‘In the beginning they let a few people, not many, enter in so they can pick olives but after they burned the trees. Now the land is empty and they took it and they use it for agriculture and they have a lot of cows in that [settler] village.’ Recently too, settlers who had been evacuated from Gaza in 2005 were resettled in new houses built near their village (so much for the munificence of the Israeli government in returning Gazan land to Palestinians). ‘It makes you very nervous and sad; you can see how they take your land. They have everything; at the same time you cannot buy even 200 metres of land to build a house for your child.’
Now Laila lives in the heart of a complex and dangerous city but it is not how she wants to live: ‘Now its more complicated the life, you have to buy everything; you have to buy the water, you have to buy the food, everything is modern and it costs more than we can pay. I miss the life before, I want my children to have the same life I had.’
The need to make a living drove Laila and her husband for three years to Jordan but she hated it so much they had to come back. Then she worked for many years for a women’s cooperative in Jerusalem until the Israeli government built the separation wall and she was unable to cross to work. That is when her new life in Hebron began: her sister Nawal asked her to take on the shop in the souk from her women’s rural cooperative, and despite Laila’s pleas that she did not speak English, Nawal left her for longer and longer periods until she was in full charge.
‘ISM, they have a girl, I never forget her, she came to the shop every day. She want to learn Arabic, I want to learn English. We start to write for each other and by her she encourage me to talk a little bit and I started to listen to people when they talk. I still learn day by day.’ Now her English is good if idiosyncratic and her entrepreneurial skills are considerable: she never pressures customers (unlike many who are desperate in these difficult times) and people like and return to her to buy.
She has recently branched out into operating a bed and breakfast in the souk (if you are ever in Hebron: https://www.airbnb.com/rooms/2148561?s=LVjE97o5). Again she had the help of ISM. When their Tel Rumeida apartment became a closed military zone some time ago, Laila put them up. ‘Then I have a friend who help me put it on airbnb. People who stay with me teach me how to use it. And after [that] I started to make lunch for people, for groups. Friend by friend they know about me and they like it and they tell other people.’This degree of independence and initiative is surprising in the very masculine environment of the souk. But then Laila volunteers something that I really wasn’t expecting: she says, ‘I like to do some thing women they cannot do it, just for man. I like to put myself in [a] place I can be strong in.’ Why is that, I ask?
‘I don’t know, she says. ‘Because maybe when I grew up with my father, always he taught me how to be strong: when you have problems, talk about them. He was really clear with me. Really, he loves me more than the boys. And all the people in the village they never say I am a girl. I am look like boy, not girl. And I continue with this. I respect the men but I never feel shy to be in places where the men have to be. Allah he cannot give them things more than he give me. He give the same. I am nine months, they are nine months. I am female is just from Allah, but I feel I can do what they do. I like it.’
Then we talk about life now in Hebron and that is when she nearly makes me cry, and when she tells me that ‘we have not to cry, we have to be patient’. Her two sons have been arrested several times. One threw stones at soldiers when he was fifteen and went to prison. The other attempted to work in Israel without a permit and was imprisoned three times, for 45 days, for three months and then for six months. Both are still unemployed but she would never want them to go abroad to work.‘When my son was arrested I feel as mothers feel and from that time I start to fight: if I see they stopped any boys or children, I have to ask: ‘why you search them? be nice with them, do it in a nice way’. Some are aggressive with me. They are very scary for us and we don’t know what they can do to us but I never care if they want to kill me: if Allah he want to take my soul, its not by their hand. It should be your time is finish. Allah he decide. This is how the mothers of children [who] got killed by the soldiers they believe their time is finish: I cannot say ‘it is haram* he has died’ because it is the will of Allah. This is how we continue. Allah gives the patience. You never believe your children will die, when you start to think you will become crazy. You never believe you can continue.’‘We have to continue by good food, by water, by air, we have to continue: its enough for us.’
23rd March 2016 | B’Tselem | South Hebron Hills, occupied Palestine
This morning, the Israeli Civil Administration demolished a home, shed and an animal enclosure in Khirbet Jenbah, in the Masafer Yatta area of the southern Hebron Hills. The authorities also confiscated solar panels donated by an international aid agency.
Residents view this move as a message from the state ahead of a High Court hearing tomorrow, 23 March 2016, at 11:30am, when Israel’s High Court of Justice will hold a hearing on a petition filed by the residents of Masafer Yatta against the Israeli Authorities’ intention to expel them from their homes due to the establishment of “Firing Zone 918.”
The hearing will be the first held in the case since the two-year mediation process between the parties failed. Immediately after the mediation attempts ended, Israel destroyed 22 homes in the communities of Khirbet Jenbah and Khirbet al-Halawah.
Please note B’Tselem is not part of the proceedings but we will be able to assist visitors with interpretation. Please contact me by SMS for further details.
Photo blog: Visit to Masafer Yatta, as the efforts to expel its residents escalate
