Tag: Huwwara

Amani al Khandaqja released following hunger strike

Amani al Khandaqja with her father, pose following her release

by Lydia 

6 April 2012 | International Solidarity Movement, West Bank

“You are a very clever woman Amani, you are the first free woman from Ashkalan, this brings me great frustration.”

These are the words of the Chief of Intelligence at Huwarra Camp where Amani al Khandaqja was forced to go during her first Sunday of freedom after her 10 days of imprisonment. On the 20th of March, al Khandaqja was taken from her home, Nablus City, in a 2AM night raid, shackled, handcuffed and blindfolded, her 10 days of imprisonment were as follows:

On entering the Ashkelon interrogation prison, al Khandaqja made the decision to begin an open ended hunger strike, bringing her to the immediate decision of the military to be held in solitary confinement. Her days started with fierce determination to show that she is not and will not be intimidated by the interrogators or the prison.

When taken for the routine strip search, al Khandaqja simply but vehemently refused anything of the sort. She spent her days in a room too small for any comfort, the light was on day and night, and food was used as a constant temptation out of her hunger strike.

The military used low, pathetic tactics including sitting her in front of a table with chicken, burgers, chips and rice. On refusal of the food soldiers asked al Khandaqja , “Why do you not like food?” al Khandaqja was quick to reassure them that she is in fact very fond of food but she “like [her] mother’s food, [her] sisters’ food, even [her] brother’s food, but [she] will not eat [their] food.”

Tactics quickly became even more personal by offering Amani an opportunity to see her brother Bassam. Bassam is a political prisoner in Ashkelon’s mixed sex prison, who is 9 years into his life sentence. The terms of the negotiation were to stop the hunger strike for a short visit. The negotiation was rejected by al Khandaqja.

As the days and nights passed and interrogation continued, the military became weaker and weaker. “All they had to say was that I was too active on Facebook.” Amani explained how the interrogator informed her, “I know your words have power” but this simply was not enough to keep Amani captured.

The Israeli military often offers monetary rewards for those it convinces to become collaborators against the Palestinian people, and with Amani the offers came thick and fast. Having studied psychology at university, and one who has traveled to Europe working with women groups in campaigns addressing issues such as domestic violence, she is a woman who is not easily scared or intimidated. This was evident to the Israeli military.

It is true that al Khandaqja is a threat to Israel’s apartheid, but not because of their usual rhetoric of her being a “violent Palestinian,” but because Amani is a clever, determined, educated, and passionate young woman who, it seems, will stop at nothing in her struggle for human rights. When asked if and when she will return back to work, Amani replied “I am always working. I will not stop. I write everyday about the conditions of the prisoners. I am only writing for peace, and I do not want to see anymore violence”

Amani, who is from Nablus City was releasd at Turkoomia checkpoint in Al Khalil (Hebron), 77 kilometer from Nablus. She was left with no phone or money. Fortunately she was able track down her father and have a car sent to her, not before visiting friends in Al Khalil as word had gotten out about her release. That night, the 30th March, Amani returned home split with emotion. The prospect of seeing her family filled her with happiness but to have left her brother Bassam and personal friend Masser Halabi behind brought an overwhelming sadness, a sadness that is sure to inspire and motivate Amani to continue the struggle with more passion and determination than ever before.

Lydia is a volunteer with International Solidarity Movement (name has been changed).

Nablus: 2 youth arrested during night raids into Burin

by Lydia

13 March 2012 | International Solidarity Movement, West Bank

On Monday, 12 March at 9pm, the soldiers were making themselves comfortable yet again in the village of Burin.  Around 6 jeeps entered  and 10 jeeps surrounded the village.

It seemed for a while it was just another evening of playground antics with the soldiers occupying the village and enjoying an evening of military training,  as this often happens and is expected throughout the nights when the village no longer belongs to the residents but instead becomes the soldiers training field.

There is a military compound very close to Huwarra which makes Burin and surrounding villages, such as Madama  and Assira al Qablia, very convenient places for the soldiers to embark on such antics.

This evening however, the tactics took a turn for the worse when the soldiers began to raid the homes of residents. It started with the homes of Ahmad Samir Najjar, 16, and Mahmoud Nasser Asasus  also 16. They are both now being held in Peta Tikva interrogation center.

After the completion of the interrogation they will either be released or moved to a prison.

Later raids were made into three more homes, with all three receiving threats from the soldiers that they would be the next to be arrested.

The raids consisted of the soldiers evacuating the families outside while they searched their home thoroughly, turning cupboards, bedrooms, and living areas upside down.  Leaving a family outside, with their young waiting for the soldiers to finish in order to be allowed back into their homes, leaves the next day spent on  putting their homes back together.

Members of the village went to visit the families of the young men arrested to offer their support and solidarity. Despite the problems the morale is high within the families.

Lydia is a volunteer with International Solidarity Movement (name has been changed).

Burin: Youth football surrounded by monuments to Israeli occupation

by Ben Lorber

12 December 2011 | International Solidarity Movement, West Bank

On the 7th of December, a windy Wednesday morning behind the boys’ school in the Palestinian village of Burin, 15 teenagers, dressed in red uniform, took to the football field under the coach’s whistle. As the team began its warm-up exercises, another youth team arrived from the neighboring village of Huwwara, led by its determined coach. Under the morning sun, the football game began. As fans, coaches and players cheered and yelled from the sidelines, a Burin teenager scored a goal in the first ten seconds, setting the tone for the rest of the match. Two hours and two injuries later, Burin came out on top 4-0 against Huwwara, bringing the season’s record to 8 wins for Burin, 1 win for Huwwara, and 2 draws. As the boys walked away sweaty and satisfied, the school bell rang and children poured outside for recess.

In occupied Palestine, the youth football league becomes, not a routine taken for granted, but a rare blessing. “We love to practice and to play,” said the Burin goalie, “but usually we cannot play on this field, because we are afraid of the settlers or the army. And there is nowhere else to play.” Overlooking the boy’s football field on all hilltops, the illegal Israeli settlements of Yitzhar (birthplace of the extremist “price-tag campaign” of violence), Bracha, and a Bracha outpost loom menacingly.

A match to escape Occupation - Click here for more images

“When times are good”, says Ghassan Najjar, co-coach and former Burin football player, “when there are no attacks, we can play. When times are bad, we cannot get together and have games.”

At 21 years old, Najjar’s memories of his own days on the field are still fresh in his mind. “Children here have no outlet. They are lost. They cannot play on the streets because it is too violent, but they do not want to sit at home…my outlet, when I could play, was football.”

Though the last month has spared the village of settler attacks, Israeli soldiers arrive at the school almost on a daily basis.

“The boys’ school,” says Ghassan, “is right by a settler military road that heads up to the settlement. Sometimes the army comes into the principal’s office and says that he cannot let the boys outside of the school to play, for no reason. There is a 24 hour presence of the army outside the school, and the boys are frequently forbidden from leaving.” A football game, like outdoor recess, is a precious window of opportunity for children accustomed to living in fear.

Football- of which the Algerian philosopher Albert Camus, a devoted football goalkeeper before turning to intellectual pursuits, once said “all I know most surely about morality and obligations, I owe to football”- has long cemented Palestinian culture and spirit. Time and again, it appears on the scene as a potent weapon in the resistance struggle, as on October 11, when a football game erupted on the front lines of a hunger strike solidarity protest outside of Ofer Prison in Ramallah.

Once a locus of national consciousness, Palestinian football was deliberately denied international recognition by the Zionist enterprise until the Palestine Football Association was recognized by FIFA in 1998. “Prior to 1948”, says Issam Khalidi in ‘Body and Ideology- Early Athletics in Palestine (1900-1948)’, an excellent study of the politics of sport in Palestine,

There were some 65 athletic clubs in Palestine…these clubs had a tremendous impact on the lives of Palestinian young people, shaping their character and preparing them for social and political involvement…these athletics teams provided a social, national and institutional base for Palestine’s political organization in the first half of the twenty-first century. They developed alongside and in response to Jewish immigration and the Arab-Zionist confrontation. Athletic clubs were important in evoking the Palestinian national consciousness, [and] sustaining connections between villages and cities…the advancement of organized sports in Palestine was closely linked to the development of education. Even though education officials did not emphasize physical education programs in schools, most institutions had competitive football teams.

In 1998, the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben, in his book Remnants of Auschwitz, recounts Holocaust survivor Primo Levi’s tale of a football match in Auschwitz concentration camp, held between members of the SS and members of the Sonderkommando, a Jewish unit forced by the Nazis to aid with the disposal of gas chamber victims. The match was improvised at Auschwitz, during a brief respite from the work of death.

“Members of the SS,” remembers Levi, “and the rest of the [Sommerkomando] squad are present at the game; they take sides, bet, applaud, urge the players on as if, rather than at the gates of hell, the game were taking place on the village green.”

Agamben comments that this moment of apparent normalcy is “the true horror of the camp…for we can perhaps think [now] that the massacres are over- even if here or there they are repeated, not so far away from us.  But that match is never over; it continues as if uninterrupted. It is the perfect and eternal cipher of the ‘gray zone’, which knows no time and is in every place.”

Agamben was drawn to the simple normalcy of this football match, chillingly suspended in the furnace of utter moral depravity. The “everydayness,” the banality of Levi’s football match reappears in the timeless normalcy of this Wednesday morning football match in Burin. In the heat of the game, oblivious to its surroundings, football is football. In Burin, however, everyday life is juxtaposed, in the football match, not with, as in Auschwitz, the barbaric evil of the oppressor, but with the resilient spirit of the oppressed. Even in Auschwitz, a mundane game of football, suffused with the smell of burning flesh- a testament to the normalcy of evil; even in Burin¸ a mundane game of football, surrounded by the foreboding faces of illegal, violent settlements- a testament to the strength of a people’s right to exist.

In each case, the ‘match is never over’, the struggle ‘continues as if uninterrupted’, and we are reminded and warned of the constant reality of oppression. In Auschwitz, the oppressors were there on the field, and the football game thereby showed itself as a sadistic, macabre dance of death; in Burin, the oppressors sit silently on the hilltops, and the football game thereby shows itself as a spark of resistance, feeding a flame of survival.

 Ben Lorber is a volunteer with International Solidarity Movement.

Israeli soldiers “are the law:” The detainment of children

by Emma and Becka

29 October 2011 | International Solidarity Movement, West Bank

On Thursday October 29, in Huwarra, around 3:00PM, soldiers detained busses and services for no apparent reasons.

The busses that were stopped were filled with children going home from school. The passengers passports were taken from them, without any explanation, and held for about 45 minutes. Two internationals on their way back from olive harvesting in the area saw what was happening and made an attempt to ease the situation.

They were met with an aggressive appearance and threatend with arrest. The soldiers showed no concern that the detained were mostly young children. They said, “This is our job. We are the law, we only protect our country from people like them” and pointed at the children.

The internationals sat down and observed from a close distance after being threatened and insulted by the soldiers.

Soon after, the detained were given back their passports and were allowed to leave and the soldiers left as well.

Another group of soldiers placed a spike carpet at a near by road, to make it difficult for cars to pass,  and randomly stopped cars.

When questioned about their presence the answer was ,”This is a dangerous area, we can´t talk about it.”

Emma and Becka are volunteers with International Solidarity Movement (names changed).

 

In recovery: Hit and run victim’s will is stronger than ever

22 October 2011 | International Solidarity Movement, West Bank

Sajah Bilal Abd el Raouf Jum’a, 19, who was seriously injured in a hit and run attack by an Israeli settler is still in need of treatment for her injuries. After ten days in the hospital she is now back in her home in Kufr Qaddoum. She will need to stay two more weeks in bed before she is able to walk. This Sunday her 20 days off from university will expire, and she will continue her studies from her home.

Her father will take her to school once a week in a wheelchair. Sajah’s sister, Ahlam, 18, who was also injured in the accident, stayed one night in the hospital following the incident and is now doing well.

The incident took place the morning of October 4th when the sisters were on their way to university. Eliyaho Miller, a settler from one of the nearby illegal settlements, was driving his car at  a very high speed on the main road in Huwarra when he hit the girls. He tried to escape from the scene but was stopped by locals from the village of Huwarra until israeli police and military reached the location.

Visit Al Haq's interactive map of settler violence - Click here

Locals called an ambulance that helped the girls to the Rafidya Hospital in Nablus where they received treatment. Sajah got her shoulder treated with laser technology, which showed up to be problematic.

“The doctors are really bad. I am worried for her future. I will try take her to Jerusalem to find her a better doctor.” says the girls’ father, Bilal Jum’a. Access to medical treatment is most times obstructed by Israeli military between villages, especially since Kufr Qaddoum’s main road is blocked by the Israeli military, forcing villagers to take a longer route that weaves around illegal settlements. Because of the implications of the illegal Israeli occupation of the West Bank, and its monopoly of borders, checkpoints, and entry points, medical equipment and skills are limited.

Attaining access to Jerusalem for medical care is also a tedious process, with Palestinians often waiting for permission by military run District Coordination Offices that determine access to such services.

The family still has to pay more than 1,000 dollars for treatment in the hospital, which they have not paid because they want to hold the driver responsible for medical costs as legal costs mount.

Israeli authorities have labeled the event an “accident” without trying the case and that they will  not charge the driver. This comes following similar hit and run attack the previous day, which injured 20 year old Nasser Abu Al-Kabbash.  And just over a week before these two incidents in the Nablus region, an 8 year old boy was hit by an illegal settler in Al Buqaa. As the Israeli-plated car fled the scene near, Taleb Jaber was left to bleed.

The Jum’a family will keep defending the case of Sajah until they find justice in the mangled laws of Israeli occupation. Sajah confidently stated that she will win the case.

“He admitted that he hit me. It is clear. There were a lot of witnesses.”