27th October 2015 | International Solidarity Movement, al-Khalil team| Hebron, occupied Palestine
Monday, October 26th 2015, Israeli forces entered the Palestinian market, fired tear gas into the busy market place and closed down part of the market.
Twenty minutes past two o’clock, a group of 14 soldiers entered the Palestinian market, bustling with school-children on their way home from school and adults doing shopping. The Palestinian souq is located right next to illegal Israeli settlements. The soldiers entered the souq from the direction of the settlements, took over the main junction at Bab al-Baladiyya and immediately stopped all civilians from passing by in any direction.
Israeli forces blocking the main Palestinian market
Watch a short video:
Just a few minutes after Israeli forces aggressively took over the main intersection, they started firing tear gas towards a group of children. In total, one stun grenade and 14 tear gas canisters were fired into the busy market by Israeli forces. All the time, settlers on top of the nearby Beit Romano settlement were watching and cheering on, as Israeli forces showered tear gas on civilians in the Palestinian market.
Israeli settlers cheering as soldiers shoot teargas at Palestinians
Watch a short video:
While the soldiers were shooting tear gas and a part of the soldiers was going closer into a Palestinian neigbourhood to shoot tear gas, Palestinian freedom of movement was entirely stopped in the market for more than half an hour. A group of at least 20 school-girls was stopped on their way home from school by the soldiers yelling at them and raising their guns at them, ordering them to move back immediately. When the school-children were asking to be allowed to ‘just go home’, Israeli forces refused to allow them passage and continued yelling at them.
Watch a video:
A Palestinian man that drove up in his car was also denied passage. He got out of his car and requested soldiers to check his ID and pleaded to be allowed to go through, as it was an emergency and he had to go to the hospital. Even though soldiers in the beginning refused to let him pass dismissing his urgent request, they did finally allow him to go after about 2 minutes.
Watch a video:
While soldiers were blocking the market, about 50-80 Palestinian civilians were stopped and not able to move in any direction, forced to wait for the soldiers to finish their violent attack on every-day life in occupied al-Khalil. Once the soldiers went back through Bab il-Baladiyya towards segregated Shuhada Street, people were finally able to continue their everyday life.
26th October 2015 | International Solidarity Movement, al-Khalil team| Hebron, occupied Palestine
This afternoon, Israeli forces executed a Palestinian young man in occupied al-Khalil (Hebron).
According to eye-witnesses at the scene, the man was walking towards a checkpoint in the vicinity of the Ibrahimi mosque. Israeli forces did not ask him to show his ID or even ask him to stop. Instead they just started shooting him when he was a few meters away from him. ‘There was no knife’, explains an eyewitness that does not want to be identified, ‘I heard four to five shots’. Even though an Israeli ambulance arrived at the scene shortly after, no medical attention was given to the youth. More ambulances kept coming to the scene, but still no first aid was administered. He was identified as 19-year old Saad Muhammad Youssef al-Atrash.
This is the second cold-blooded murder in the neighbourhood of the Ibrahimi mosque, after 17-year old Dania Arshid was gunned down by Israeli forces yesterday.
26th October 2015 | International Solidarity Movement, al-Khalil team| Hebron, occupied Palestine
Yesterday afternoon, Dania Arsheid, 17, was gunned down in cold blood and killed by Israeli forces in occupied al-Khalil (Hebron).
Dania was still wearing her school-uniform and school-bag, coming from school in the afternoon. Just twenty minutes before the incident, at a checkpoint leading to the Ibrahimi mosque, a female soldier was heard on the army-radio by passers-by announcing that she wanted “to kill a Palestinian person that day’.
Dania passed through the checkpoint leading from the Palestinian market to the Ibrahimi mosque, and a few meters further to the next checkpoint. She passed through the metal detector and gave her bag to the soldiers at the checkpoint. An eyewitness explains: “I saw with my own eyes, there was no knife – nothing.” According to eye-witnesses, soldiers then shot at her feet – at which point she immediately stepped back and raised her hands. That is when soldiers started shot her, according to witnesses, seven to eight times. While she lay on the ground bleeding from her neck, no first aid was given, not even the Israeli ambulance that arrived after about twenty minutes gave any medical help. A Palestinian Red Crescent ambulance was denied entry to the scene and ordered by soldiers to leave.
Palestinian ambulance denied access to critically injured Dania
While the Israeli army claims that Dania had a knife and was thus a threat to the Israeli soldiers at the checkpoint, all eye-witness accounts refute this. Regardless of that claim, shooting a child numerous times into the upper body and neck, while she is moving back with her hands in the air, clearly scared and not a threat, will never be justifiable under any circumstances. Denying first aid and access of medical personnel to critically injured persons can not be excused.
Sadly, episodes where Palestinian youth are extra-judicially executed by Israeli forces and then denied medical aid are not an exception anymore. Dania is already the third girl killed by Israeli soldiers in al-Khalil within a month. It is hard to imagine the pain of the parents and the family of these victims learning about the pointless, tragic death of their loved ones. A witness to already more than one of the heinous murders states: “What can we do? They are not human!”
24th October 2015 | International Solidarity Movement, Hamza Khalil Abu Eltarabish| Gaza Strip, occupied Palestine
Hamza Khalil Abu Eltarabish is a freelance journalist who graduated from the Islamic University of Gaza
The young Palestinian man Fadi Alon performs the dawn prayers in his home in the west of Jerusalem and browses his Facebook and other social media, until he falls hungry. He heads then to get some fresh Palestinian cakes for breakfast.
Carefully, Aloun, 19, walks in the alleys of the Old City of Jerusalem, with all the fears a young man can feel coming up, as Israeli settlers surround the city waiting for any Palestinian to attack and kill.
When he gets close to the bakery, a group of settlers surround him insulting and attacking him. The young man defends himself alone before the savage settlers.
After being attacked and beaten, Alon manages to escape and run towards his home. The group follows him and keeps saying “this is a vandal, kill him!” Immediately a policeman comes and shoots him, according to videos released on social media. His public execution is documented by videos that prove the handsome young Fadi Alon was not attacking Israelis, but that he was attacked by settlers and then shot by seven bullets.
“Israeli police killed my son while he was peacefully walking, with their alleged charge of stabbing Israeli settlers, where is the knife! We want to see the surveillance camera tape that separates every corner of the streets,” Alon’s father stated, accusing Israeli police of killing his son.
What happened with Alon is one of dozens of stories of Palestinians in Jerusalem and the West Bank. Most Palestinians killed publicly are aged between 11 and 20 years of age, according to The Independent Commission for Human Rights.
Farid Atrash, a lawyer at the ICHR told Donia Al-Watan that this is a deliberate execution and violates all the international law, Rome, and Geneva conventions. “They are war crimes, the executions of the child Abdulrahman Obidallah and Ahmed Sharaka prove that.”
The ICHR documents the Palestinian killed under the execution policy: Ahmed Abdullah Sharaka (13 years); Amjad Joundi (17 years); Mohammed Al-Jabari (19 years); Obaidullah Abdul Rahman (11 years); Hudhaifah Solomon (18 years); Ibrahim Ahmed Mustafa Awad (28 years); Fadi Alon (19 years); Thaer Abu Ghazaleh (19 years); Sam Mansi (20 years); Isaac Badran (16 years); Ahmed Salah (20 years).
Hadeel’s execution as she refused to take her veil off
This is not a different story to Alon as she was executed in Hebron the second day of Al-Adha Eid, on September 22, 2015.
Fawaz Abu Eisha, an eyewitness to the incident, said that Hadeel tried to pass as others through Checkpoint 56. As she was wearing a veil, the soldiers asked her in Hebrew to leave the barrier immediately but she didn’t understand the soldiers, she stood not responding. Fawaz Abu Eisha, a Palestinian municipal worker, tried to translate the soldiers’ words to her.
Hadeel performed the soldiers’ order but they ordered her to stop again, firing a shot where she stood and firing another shot at her left leg then another at the right one until she fell to the ground.
A Palestinian ambulance arrived but Israel prevented them from evacuating Hadeel in order to give her medical treatment. Omar Ja’ara, a specialist in the Israeli issue pointed out that Israel claims that it directly kills Palestinian people in order to deter persons from stabbing Israeli soldiers, however Israel is executing Palestinians as a deterrence preemptively, rather than provoked by the Palestinians. Ja’ara pointed out that Israel has surveillance cameras so why hasn’t this been sent to the media?
Palestinian journalist Sawsan Shaheen declared that the Israeli attack on Palestinians comes in a calculated way by putting sharp tools near a Palestinian who is wounded or killed to send the international media a version about what happened: that Palestinians are terrorists.
Presidency Stance
The precedency spokesperson said in a statement released by the official media news Wafa that if the Israeli executions continue, the area will be considered to be an uncontrolled situation and everyone will pay the price.
Legislative Council Stance
The legislative council condemned these publicly committed Israeli crimes and that the world does not raise a finger against Israel, suggesting that the world continues to consider Israel above the law.
Negativity of Local Media
Palestinian local media deals with this policy very passively. Israel succeeds in passing on its poison as most journalists and activists spread any killing as a stabbing attack by Palestinians.
Issa Abdullah, a journalist at the official newspaper Al-Ayam said that journalists are approaching the news in this way due to their incomprehension of the Israelis, in a call-out to all activists and journalist to be sure about news they’re publishing especially the execution cases.
Finally, we remind the reader of the video of the Palestinian child Ahmed Manasra, who was lying down, surrounded by many settlers calling him dirty words and saying “die son of *****!” Since the beginning of October, killings have increased to reach 24 Palestinians and more than 1000 wounded [Ed note: this number has increased significantly since this article was written] . The videos prove that Israelis shot Palestinians without being a threat. After all this evidence, who will draw an end to public executions?
24th October 2015 | International Solidarity Movement, al-Khalil team| Anata, occupied Palestine
“Some people think being jailed is a destiny. I say freedom is a destiny.”
In Heather Christle’s stirring poem, Self Portrait with Fire, bending to conceal flaming legs, (s)he sets the grass on fire. On this day, sitting with Khader Adnan, Palestinian freedom fighter, it is hard not to imagine everything in contact with the intense and pensive man beside me catching flame.
Khader Adnan, a baker, a student of economics, a father and a former captive of Israeli occupation prisons has brought himself to the brink of death by starvation twice in protestation of the illegal system of jailing of occupied Palestinians termed Administrative Detention.
During the latter of the two strikes, the sight of the world sharply dove in freefall to one hospital bed in one Israeli hospital to one prisoner who was in critical condition but with enough wherewithal to persist in his fight- he set the grass on fire.
In the chaos of the recent escalation of violence in the West Bank that frequently comes to flash fever pitch crescendos punctuating Palestine’s days and her nights, Khader Adnan speaks. “Let me ask you a question,” he begins, referencing the allegations of Palestinian knife attacks on settlers and Israeli occupation soldiers, “Why would an educated young person with so much ahead of them take a knife and attack someone only to be immediately killed but for the pressure, the frustration and hopelessness of the situation they are forced to live in?”
Khader Adnan looks in a mirror at himself at his home
Hopelessness. His words bring to mind the gut wrenching twitter post from the young Palestinian martyr, Ihab Jihad Haninni (20) who was shot and killed on Friday, October 16 by occupation forces at Beit Furik checkpoint, “Perhaps tomorrow will be better than today, God willing.”
The space between Ihab’s tweet and this day has been filled with tomorrows that were not better; tomorrows that were increasingly worse.
It is a shared devastation that settles heavily over the Palestinian landscape littered with the places the young have gasped their final breath.
For Ihab and the many others who were martyred before him- and for those martyred since, Khader’s lionizing words honor them, “The best houses in all of Palestine are the houses of the martyrs.” Words that flow in direct inverse of the Israeli government’s currently enacting illegal collective punishment procedures against the families of the martyrs by delivering their homes demolition orders; some which they will fill with concrete, some they will smash into with bulldozers.
Khader Adnan Poster: “If the people of the world had a heart for the suffering of Palestine, this would be the photo of the year.”
For a state with no organized military force by land, air or sea; a state webbed by the ever developing strands of illegal settlement and industrial blocs, by siege, by rabid, occupational government sanctioned racism, by hopelessness; hunger strike has been the Achilles heel of the mighty apartheid state delivered in what Khader termed the battle of the empty stomachs.
Having so little left and seemingly being ignored by the mainstream world media, it is through refusing what little remains which succeeded in allowing the hands of Palestinian suffering to touch the outer world. Hunger striking works. “Some think being jailed is a destiny but I say freedom is a destiny and you attain freedom through hunger strike,” Khader affirms.
Indeed, it is likely the only reason he sits across from us with his young daughter, still jailed within the occupation of the West Bank yet free from the jail within the jail.
Khader’s hunger strike was, “for the purpose of freedom. I didn’t strike to change anyone’s attitude about the situation here. It was for freedom.”
His hunger strike’s both came after enduring multiple stints on Israeli administrative detention which both involved what Khader called, “hideous and aggressive treatment” by his captors. During his July 2014 arrest, an arrest which was executed against the backdrop of a brutal bombing attack against the already besieged Gaza strip, Khader was subjected to humiliation and brutality.
“They cursed my honor as a husband and a father. They made sexual comments about my wife, cursed her. Cursed my religion, threatened my children. They rubbed their hands on the bottom of my shoes and rubbed the dirt on my face. I was slammed against the wall until my nose was bleeding. They blindfolded me. They pulled hair out of my beard.”
Is there any reason that this type of abhorrent treatment is completely allowable for Palestinians, including young children who frequently report these types of abuses, yet are protected against in the western world? Are we quantifiably more human? Unless the answer is yes, this should stir the world into mass resistance.
Amidst a hypocrisy so shrill, a terrorism enacted so horrendously as last summer’s Operation “Protective Edge”, Khader was again placed on administrative detention for nearly the tenth time. “They thought then was a good time to arrest me because everyone was so busy paying attention to the bombing in Gaza that no one would care about another Palestinian going to jail, especially one who was known for hunger strike.”
“I told representatives in the west bank that I was going on a hunger strike. I did small hunger strikes. I did a 7 day strike- to hit the alarm.”
And predictably, the unchecked Lord of the Flies like behavior of those made mighty with guns and global funding escalated in violence and antagonism, “Once I went on hunger strike, treatment was worse. Abuse was worse. They escalated so I escalated. I refused to eat, I refused to drink and now I refused to speak. Not speaking was an escalation. They interrogated me and I said nothing.”
And inside of the hospital room where Khader Adnan, whose condition was becoming critical once his strike climbed into the high forties in days, lay weak and shackled, refusing to allow visitation by physicians after being told that he would not be granted visitation unless under the watchful eye of Israeli military personnel. And though weak and near death, antagonism from the gleeful choir continued.
“It was an annoyance of no privacy, the Israeli guards and soldiers inside my room were constantly talking about military plans and thoughts while I laid there. They brought their food into my room, ate hot meals beside my bed and talked about delicious foods and spices, things to make me uncomfortable and hungry.”
Even more repugnantly, “There was a camera in my room filming me all day and night. This was not for my protection. They were violating my privacy and trying to humiliate me. I was told that photos and video of me was being broadcasted on Israeli television; that they were watching me like a live television show. Dehumanizing me.”
The extremist right wing Israeli Yesh Atid and Likud parties in response, finalized an earlier version of a force feeding draft law, a law that would involve the intravenous intrusion or gastric feeding tube insertion into an unwilling Palestinian hunger striking prisoner’s body to undermine their starvation protests against what is, in fact, a widely recognized illegality and violation of human rights.
The committee, headed by Likud MK Miri Regev, was blasted by many, including MK Ahmad Tibi (Ra’ am-Ta’al) who stated that “Today is a black day for the Knesset.” As well as another Arab Israeli MK, Basel Ghattas of the Balad party, who said the bill was an “idiotic law by an idiotic prime minister.”
When asked about whether he feared that he might be subjected to what is tantamount to torture, Khader stated, “I did not think that they would use this tactic on me because I was under 24-7 observation.”
As for the law itself, “I see it as a failure for the Israeli government. This was and is a failure in them knowing how to deal with this process. And of course, this failure faces the success of the process as a whole- how hunger strikes gain awareness, how they raise empathy for those inside occupation prisons.”
“Without hunger strikes, prisoners do not get released. The propaganda and lies coming from Israeli and the western world is something people have to break away from. Come and visit Palestine. See the situation for yourself. See the real crime happening here and who is committing it.”
Khader’s father who watches over the interview and walks us through the streets of the village Arraba as the sun falls on another day in occupied Palestine leaves us at the taxi with these words, “Tell the truth. Tell the people what Israel is doing,” before abruptly walking away. This man, this elderly man who has spent his life grappling with a force that has, with entitlement, claimed all he ever had, including his son who nearly lost his life twice resisting it.
Christle’s poem occurred to me throughout the interview, an interview with a beloved son of a beloved land. The poem referencing, in regards to the person on fire, the adoration of the people; “Obviously they loved me, were warm and pink and vocal on a promising spring day…”
Inshallah the spring day is soon coming. Promisingly so.
