12th July 2016 | International Solidarity Movement, al-Quds team | Kufr Malik, occupied Palestine
On July 9th at 4:00 in the morning, the Be’rat family awoke to find Israeli soldiers pounding on the door of their home in Kufr Malik, demanding that Jihad, the son of Mohammed Tawfik and Nadia Mustafa, report for interrogation. Jihad, however, passed away twenty two years ago, before reaching the age of fifteen days.
Israeli forces demanded that everyone in the house show some form of identification, including the children, and continued to ask for Jihad. After explaining the situation to the soldiers, Jihad’s mother was asked to present her son’s death certificate as proof. “They pulled open my heart and made me remember my son,” Nadia said of the experience. The soldiers did not return the death certificate. The children, though quite used to Israeli incursions into the village, were also traumatized by the event.
This particular event serves as an example of the Israeli military’s arbitrary and indiscriminate methods in their selection and targeting of “suspects.” The case also highlights the absolute lack of legal rights those living under Occupation have, as Palestinians are always considered guilty until proven innocent, and accusations are filed regardless of whether or not one is already dead or imprisoned.
According to the Palestinian prisoners rights group Adameer, there are currently at least seven thousand political prisoners in Israeli jails. Over 400 of these prisoners are children. Of those arrested, few are immediately notified of the crime they are being accused of committing, and many are never informed of the specific allegations. Israel’s policy of administrative detention allows Occupation forces to arrest Palestinians without charge and hold them for an infinitely renewable period of six months. Over seven hundred Palestinians are currently being held without charge in administrative detention.
Delivered at 4:00 in the morning, the Israeli document demands that the deceased member of the Be’rat family report for interrogation
8th July 2016 | International Solidarity Movement, al-Khalil team | Hebron, occupied Palestine
Israeli forces during the last week of the Islamic holy month of Ramadan have increased and stepped up restrictions for Palestinians in occupied al-Khalil (Hebron). Thus they are severely limiting Palestinians possibilities to exercise their religion during this most important month in the Muslim calendar, and on a large scale to celebrate the second most important feast, Id il-Fiter, marking the end of Ramadan.
Despite most of the checkpoints in the old city of al-Khalil a maze of restrictions, harassment and intimidation by Israeli forces on daily basis, the restrictions were stepped up even more at the end of Ramadan, enforcing age limit barring any Palestinian between 15-30 from accessing the area around the Ibrahimi Mosque. But it is not just the actual physical occupation, but even more the psychological occupation imposed by the Israeli forces. Whereas the age-restriction in theory is implemented at all three checkpoints allowing to access the Ibrahimi Mosque area, it was only implemented on some days, at some hours, by some soldiers. Thus, trying to reach the mosque for prayer during Ramadan, or visiting family during Eid, no Palestinian would ever be able to tell whether or not they would be allowed. Is the trip to the checkpoint even worth trying, or would Israeli forces deny a person in that age-group anyways? Or would they let a youth within this age-group pass anyways, but then arbitrarily decide to deny another person? Even worse, as a Palestinian, one can never tell whether, even if just on the way to quickly buy groceries from the store close-by, one would ever come back home, as arbitrary arrests are common, as are attacks by settlers. Due to this arbitrariness and the Israeli forces’ complete impunity, one would never be able to tell, whether or not one is be allowed to pass one single checkpoint – and coming from most directions to reach Ibrahimi Mosque at least three different checkpoints have to be navigated.
Similarly, the complete closure of most of the entries and exits of al-Khalil, has been arbitrarily imposed in the first place, and then arbitrarily managed, opening some of the checkpoints for maybe a few hours, but then closing it again, denying anyone from passing. South Hebron suddenly, the last night of Ramadan, and thus the beginning of the 3-day festival of Eid, was declared a ‘closed military zone’, denying any Palestinian to leave or access the area. This happened on the night, where most people were out, celebrating the start of Eid after 30 days of fasting during Ramadan, doing shopping.
On the morning of Wednesday 6th July, the first day of Eid, where Palestinians traditionally go and visit all their family, Israeli forces set up additional checkpoints at most exits of al-Khalil and the surrounding villages, deliberately slowing down the holiday-traffic. In the Tel Rumeida neighborhood, that was entirely closed as a closed military zone for more than six months, families marked a sharp increase in visitors as Israeli forces seemed to have managed to create an atmosphere of fear that stopped Palestinians from visiting their families even during this important holiday. Especially young men – a common target of extrajudicial executions by Israeli forces during the last months – simply didn’t want to risk crossing Shuhada checkpoint, with their family stating that they don’t want yet another Palestinian, a family member, gunned down by Israeli forces without a reason, but with complete impunity.
Additionally to the physical obstacles, that with no doubt are manifold and literally create a maze at times impossible to navigate for any Palestinian, the psychological occupation, the technique of wearing people down, trying to break their will, needs to be taken into consideration. Can you imagine not ever being able to know what will happen, whether you’ll come back home, even if just out for five minutes? This daily insecurity, the inability to ever plan, or even feel safe inside one’s own home, is deliberately forced on Palestinians by the Israeli forces. Rather than a by-product of the occupation, it is a deliberate strategy that amounts to psychological torture in the every-day lives of Palestinians. Despite the ongoing and intensified attempts by Israeli forces to step up on either of these two forms of apartheid-measures and collective punishment of the Palestinian population in attempts to create a coercive environment that in the end would lead to a forced displacement of Palestinians, the Palestinians remain steadfast and defy these attempts at ethnic cleansing.
7th July 2016 | International Solidarity Movement, al-Khalil team | West Bank, occupied Palestine
Monday the 6th of June marked the beginning of the Ramadan; the holiest holiday in Islam. The Ramadan is a sacred month in the Islamic calendar, where Muslims celebrate when the Qu’ran was revealed for the first time to the Prophet Muhammad.
For Muslims all over the world who celebrate the Ramadan, it’s a month of prayers and celebrations, with the intention to improve morality and character as well as strengthening ones relationship with Allah.
However, for Palestinians living in the occupied West Bank under illegal Israeli military occupation, the Ramadan is also a month filled with uncertainties and harassment.
Israeli discrimination and aggression has especially been intense in and around occupied East Jerusalem, where thousands of Palestinians from in and outside East Jerusalem go to visit and pray at the Al-Aqsa compound and mosque, the third most religious site in all of Islam.
The Al-Aqsa compound in East Jerusalem was annexed in 1967 as a part of Israel’s illegal occupation of the West Bank – this annexation was never recognised by the international community.
On Sunday 26 of June, Israeli soldiers broke in and raided the Al-Aqsa Mosque, harassing and disturbing peaceful Palestinians during prayer. Israeli forces also escorted a group of approximately 200 settlers into the mosque, shouting and harassing Palestinians praying. This action was in contravention of a long running tradition that only Muslims would enter the mosque during the final 10 days of Ramadan.
As a result of the clashes, Israeli authorities enforced the understanding to restrict access to Muslim worshippers although also placed punitive restrictions on Palestinians; refusing access to all males under 45 years old, breaching their right to exercise freedom of religion.
On Friday 30 June, Israeli soldiers shut down the Qalandiya checkpoint, preventing thousands of Palestinians, including males younger than 45 years old, to pass in order to reach the Al-Aqsa Mosque. The Israeli forces then proceeded to attack Palestinians at Qalandiya checkpoint with live ammunition, rubber coated steel bullets and teargas, wounding 40 Palestinians as well as killing a 63 year old Palestinian man due to massive teargas inhalation.
Collective punishment and settlement expansion during the Ramadan
After an attack at a market in Tel Aviv, where four Israeli citizens where killed, Israel has conducted a large collective punishment strategy, suspending entry permits for more than 83,000 Palestinians from the West Bank. The 83,000 people impacted had nothing to do with the crime committed, and thereby preventing them from going to Al-Aqsa in the annexed East Jerusalem is another clear example of Israel enforcing illegal collective punishment.
To further ignite the situation, Benjamin Netanyahu announced a large-scale settlement expansion, consisting of a total of 800 housing units in East Jerusalem. The scheme contains of 560 housing units in the settlement Ma’Ale Adumim, 140 in Ramot and 100 in Har Homar and Pisgat Zeev.
Following a Palestinian attack on a 13-year old American-Israeli settler, Netanyahu has also approved construction of 42 new housing units in the settlement of Kiryat Arba near Hebron. The settlements are illegal according to international law, and the UN and EU leaders have denounced the expansion, urging Netanyahu to reverse the decision.
Netanyahu’s actions continue to escalate the situation in the West Bank and completely disregard the recently released Quartet report, which has resulted in the U.N. chief Ban Ki-moon condemning Israel for this continued expansion of illegal settlements.
7th July 2016 | International Solidarity Movement, al-Khalil team | Qalandia Refugee Camp, occupied Palestine
The holy month of Ramadan has come to an end. But in Palestine, as in Iraq, Syria, Turkey and too many other places, Muslim families are not able to enjoy this special time of the year in peace and comfort. On Sunday night at 11pm, more than 1000 Israeli soldiers, according to locals’ estimations, entered Qalandia Refugee Camp in the Occupied West Bank. The huge military incursion sparked clashes in which 15 Palestinians were shot. Occupation Forces used live ammunition and rubber coated steel bullets on civilians while firing tear gas and stun grenades at approaching ambulances, preventing Palestinian Red Crescent medics from reaching the wounded.
Red Crescent ambulance damaged by Israeli forces
Among the injured was a 19 year old girl and a 15 year old boy, each shot with live ammunition and brought to the hospital in serious condition. The army entered the camp to demolish the homes of the families of two young men, Anan Habsah and Issa Asaaf, both 21, who carried out knife attacks and killed one soldier in East Jerusalem on December 23rd last year. Both were killed by soldiers while carrying out the attacks, so the demolition of the homes comes only as a form of collective punishment to terrorize the families and the people in Qalandia, who repeatedly suffer from night raids and house demolitions as well as beatings and arrests by the Israeli occupation forces.
Anan’s family first evacuated their home in January when the Israeli high court announced their decision to demolish the houses. The displaced family members lived spread across the area, staying at friends’ and family’s homes in Ramallah and elsewhere in Qalandia for two months until the lawyer suggested they could move back in in March. The father, Abu Saleh, refused to leave his home during the two month period however, staying in a tent outside the building. Three weeks ago the two families were yet again told to evacuate their homes and were informed that the demolition would take place within five days. However, the exact date of the demolition was not disclosed. Sunday night it finally happened without advance notice, and only two days before the end of Ramadan and the beginning of Eid celebrations.
In the ruins of his family home
Issa and his family have experienced severe trauma at the hands of occupation forces before, when he and his two younger sisters were brutally assaulted by Israeli soldiers at a checkpoint near East Jerusalem. The incident left one of Issa’s sisters unable to speak for three months, and caused the Assaf family significant distress and anguish.
Both Issa and Anan were imprisoned for significant periods of time; Anan at age fifteen for a period of eight months, and Issa for seven months in the year before his death.The families’ suffering did not end there, however. In the week following Issa’s release from prison, he was again assaulted at his home in Qalandia when soldiers dragged him from his home in the middle of the night and beat him in the street without justification.
The Habsah family also bears the long lasting scars of pain and trauma. Anan’s imprisonment as a child devastated the family, and they say their boy was never the same afterwards. “I know he did not want to die … but when a boy is put in jail, deprived of sleep, and deprived of his childhood, something in him changes,” said Anan’s uncle.
Inside the Asaaf family home
When we arrived on Monday morning, neighbors and relatives had already begun to gather in support of the families. Anan’s aunt explained to us that this is the third time her family had been forcibly displaced; first in 1948, when the family was expelled from their home in West Jerusalem, and later again in 1975 when their modest home in the refugee camp was destroyed for the first time.
UNRWA spokesman Chris Gunness condemned the demolitions on Monday, stating that punitive home demolitions “inflict distress and suffering on those who have not committed the action which led to the demolition, and they often endanger people and property in the vicinity.” A 2005 study by the Israeli army itself concluded that home demolitions are not effective as a deterrent or punitive measure, but the practice still continues. According to the Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions, about fifty thousand residential structures have been destroyed by Israel since 1967.
“This is psychological warfare. In the whole camp of more than ten thousand people, no one slept [last night], and they did not go to work today,” Adnan Habsah, the uncle of Anan said. Qalandia Refugee Camp has long been subjected to various forms of collective punishment by Israeli forces, and is severely affected by all aspects of the Illegal Occupation. The camp is located within area “C” and greater (East) Jerusalem, near the main checkpoint between Ramallah and Jerusalem and beside the apartheid wall. According to the UNRWA, the construction and expansion of the Wall in the early 2000s has drastically affected the economic situation in the camp by isolating it from the Israeli job market and Jerusalem. According to the most recent data, Qalandia’s unemployment rate is as high as 40 percent, compared to Occupied Palestine’s overall rate of 26.6 percent.
The Camp was originally established to house some 5,000 Palestinians who were displaced by the 1948 Nakba. Today, according to Afaq Environmental Magazine, the population of Qalandia Refugee Camp has reached about 14,000. Under the 1993 Oslo Agreement, the whole territory of Qalandia Refugee Camp is classified as area “C,” where Israel retains full control over security and administration related to the territory; however, Qalandia camp, like other Palestinian refugee camps, is under the administrative control of UNRWA.
As the uncle of Anan said when we spoke to him on Monday, “This is a UN refugee camp. The whole world owns this place. You cannot destroy it.”
5th July 2016 | International Solidarity Movement, Gaza team | Gaza, occupied Palestine
Just in the last 3 months Gaza’s fishermen had 21 boats stolen and 2 sunken by the Israeli occupation forces.
Each small boat sustains at least 20 people on average and each one of the big ones at least 100 people. That means that just in the last 3 months around 550 people lost their source of income and were left in a situation of severe food insecurity.
Palestinian fishing boat
All of these attacks took place within the fishing limit imposed by the occupation, as one of the fishermen interviewed by ISM pointed out: “they always know who they are taking, it’s not by chance or because we cross any of the limits they impose on us. They come for us. They kidnapped me and my cousin while we were less than a mile from the coast, and on that day the limit they gave us was for 6 miles”.
It is known that one of the main reasons to kidnap the fishermen is in order to try to buy them or blackmail them into becoming collaborators.
Fishermen kidnapped by Israeli occupation forces
One fisherman that insisted on remaining anonymous, given the sensitivity of this matter, explained to ISM what happened to him while he and his cousins were in Ashdod port: “they sat us in a room and we had in front of us a table with two trays, one with money and another one with gold. They told us that if we work with them all of it would be for us. Then they started asking us about our neighbours, relatives and anyone they thought we could know something about”.
Most of the fishermen kidnapped are tortured during the interrogation in Ashdod port and suffer from several kinds of physical and verbal abuse. They are beaten, their heads get rubbed on the floor or with a dirty mop and the soldiers step on their faces with their military boots. Those are just some common examples from most testimonies.
But humiliations already start in the sea, where most of the fishermen are told to strip off their clothes and swim naked towards the warship of the occupation forces. In many cases by that moment they have been already injured by rubber coated steel bullets, buckshot-filled sacks or even live ammunition.
