On 25 February 2010 activists and organizations from around the world will join together in solidarity with the Palestinian residents of Hebron, through local protests, and petitions to the Israeli Government. We will be calling to re-open Shuhada Street to all Palestinians, bring life back into the city of Hebron, and to end the Occupation.
Our demands:
• Open Shuhada Street to Palestinian movement and commerce
• Full civil and human rights for all Israelis and Palestinians
• End the occupation
Shuhada Street used to be the principal street for Palestinians residents, businesses and a very active market place in the Palestinian city of Hebron. Today, because Shuhada Street runs through the Jewish settlement of Hebron, the street is closed to Palestinian movement and looks like a virtual ghost street which only Israelis and tourists are allowed to access. Hate graffiti has been sprayed across the closed Palestinian shops and Palestinians living on the street have to enter and exit their houses through their back doors or, even sometimes by climbing over neighbor’s roofs.
Photo by Issa Amro
Shuhada Street was closed for the first time following the Baruch Goldstein massacre on February 25, 1994, in which a settler from nearby Kiryat Arba settlement murdered 29 Palestinians while praying in a mosque in Hebron. In order to raise awareness about the injustice of the closure of Shuhada Street, we will coordinate a joint solidarity campaign/action all over the world which will take place on February 25, 2010, as an effort to commemorate the Baruch Goldstein massacre which took place 16 years ago on this date.
We are calling on activist groups in cities around the world to participate in this action by gathering their forces together to symbolically shut down a major street in their cities and/or organize a protest/demonstration on February 25 in solidarity with Shuhada Street. We are focusing on Shuhada Street as a symbol of the settlement issue, the policy of separation in Hebron and the entire West Bank, the lack of freedom of movement, and the occupation at large. In addition to raising awareness about these issues, the campaign, if organized well, can be an important sign of the strength of global movement for human rights in Israel.
The Christian Peacemaker Team in Hebron released this incident report for the period between December 17 and December 31, 2009.
December 17, 2009
Shortly after morning worship, the team’s neighbor told them that soldiers were on the roof of the apartment building. When Herbert, Schroeder, and Shiffer filmed them and asked why they kept coming up to the roof, they did not respond. Kern brought up tea and cookies, but none of the soldiers accepted this hospitality.
The team decided next time the soldiers came up to the roof again, they would videotape themselves singing “Joy to the World” there for a digital Christmas greeting. When soldiers did not subsequently appear, the team decided to record a digital greeting anyway.
December 18, 2009
After consulting with their neighbor, team members decided to keep the stairwell door locked through the morning in case the soldiers arrived again. A lawyer from the Association of Civil Rights in Israel (ACRI) told the team that legally, the soldiers have no right to enter the house without a warrant.
December 19, 2009
In the afternoon, Schroeder, Kern, Shiffer and a member of EAPPI went to al-Bweireh with Hani Abu Haikel, a member of the team’s advisory committee. They continued to interview families regarding the affect of the Hill 18 (26) settler outpost on the neighbourhood students returning from school. One mother said that the thing she would like most to change is the opening of the main road into al-Bweireh, currently blocked in three locations. She also said that international accompaniment of children walking home will help bring peace of mind.
December 20, 2009
Shiffer and Schroeder went to al-Bweireh to accompany the children coming from school. Boys from the Za’atari family told Shiffer and Schroeder that on 17 December settlers had attacked them. The youngest boy had visible scrapes on his face and hand.
December 21, 2009
Schroeder and Funk monitored school patrol from outside and inside the Ibrahimi Mosque Checkpoint. At 7:25 a.m., and Israeli policeman approached Funk and asked, “What are you doing here?”
“Keeping an eye on school children on their way to school.”
“You have no right to stand there, only TIPH can legally stand there.”
“We have been here for years and it has never been a problem.”
“You have no right to be watching soldiers.”
“We do not interfere with the soldiers. We were invited to be here by the municipality.”
“You have no right to be here.”
“I believe we do, but I will respect your wishes today.”
“Bring a paper next time to show you have the right to be here.”
In the afternoon, Kern, Herbert, and Schroeder went to al-Bweireh to accompany the children and to interview the mother of a child who had been attacked by the settlers the previous week on Wednesday. A member of the team’s Advisory Committee drove the team there and translated for them. From the interview they learned the following:
The seven-year-old was with a brother and cousin when the settlers attacked. As they ran toward a nearby house, he tripped and fell, which caused the wound on his face and hand. His brother ran back to pick him up and carry him to safety. The injured boy is especially afraid of settlers, so much so that he sits beside his brother in 7th grade for an hour-and-a-half after his own school dismisses, rather than walk home without him. A settler on horseback tried to snatch up his younger sister a few weeks ago, and the house is attacked two to three times a week. The settlers who chased the boys on 17 December could have been anywhere from sixteen to twenty years old. They had a dog with them. The police refused to allow Mr. Za’atari make the complaint the next day without the seven-year-old present and then asked the boy, when he arrived, if he had taken pictures of the settlers.
December 22, 2009
Schroeder and Funk visited Tel Rumeida this morning. While they were at Hani and Reema Abu Haikel’s house, Reema stood watch by the doorway in case settlers or soldiers caused trouble for men they had hired to prune grapes and do other yard work. After about ten minutes, Reema alerted Funk and Schroeder that soldiers were in the yard and had ordered the workers to go home. When asked why, the lead soldier said: “This is neither Arab or Jewish land. When people clean the land, the next thing is they begin to build for the land in question.” The Abu Haikels hold clear legal title to the land from the time of the Ottoman Empire.
December 24, 2009
During morning school patrol, team members received Christmas greetings from a number of Palestinians who passed them while they were monitoring checkpoints. After the patrol, the team packed up special foods they had prepared and traveled to At-Tuwani to celebrate Christmas with CPTers there. The taxi driver who drove them back to Hebron from At-Tuwani, in honor of the holiday, tuned to a radio station that played only “Jingle Bells” over and over.
December 25, 2009
The team went to St. Catherine’s Church in Bethlehem for the Christmas morning service. People from six different continents were worshipping there. One of the priests had the task of preventing photojournalists from trampling the worshipers.
December 26, 2009
At about 12:00 p.m., the team heard soldiers walking up to CPT’s apartment roof. Herbert and Shiffer asked the unit commander for a warrant, his name, and the name of the individual who ordered the roof occupation. The commander failed to show a warrant or offer the necessary information. Two members of TIPH International arrived ten minutes later, and within a few minutes of their arrival, the soldiers left the roof.
Kern, Schroeder, and Hani Abu Haikel went out to visit al-Bweireh families. At the entrance to the neighborhood, a man said settlers had been stoning houses at 2:00 a.m. Friday morning. One house that received the worst stoning belonged to a family whom the team had known in 1995-96 and who had since moved to Jerusalem. A neighbor called the police in Kiryat Arba, who did not come. Then he called the owner in Jerusalem, who called the police in Jerusalem, who called the police in Kiryat Arba and told them to come to the house.
At a house directly across from the Givat Ha Harsina settlement house, a woman told them that settlers threw stones daily and about twice a week at night–usually after midnight. The children in the household are not allowed to play in the yard, because of the constant stoning.
She said they leave the gate open so that children coming home from school can run to safety in their yard when the settlers start stoning them, but that settlers then stone their house even more.
In the taxi on way home, a man had several sacks of firewood. Abu Haikel said wood fires are called called “the fruit of winter” in Arabic.
December 27, 2009
At al-Bweireh, Herbert videotaped a brief interaction between a settler boy and older male settlers. During their discussion they passed a knife back and forth.
In the evening, the team got a call from their neighbor, saying that she had heard shots fired and heard that settlers had beaten someone at the Qitoun checkpoint. [See the 5 January 2009 release here.]
December 28, 2009
Kern and Funk went out for school patrol in al-Bweireh a little later in the afternoon than usual. (The team had decided to stagger the times they went out to the neighborhood so that settlers would not anticipate their presence.) At the top of the road that descends into al-Bweireh, they saw three of the older girls running toward their home in the distance and then spotted a settler who was the cause of their flight. They learned that earlier in the day, a settler had chased one of the boys, who fell off a stone wall trying to escape, and then aimed a pistol at the boy.
Later in the afternoon, while Kern was checking in with Hani Abu Haikel, he said in an urgent manner that he had to go because he heard yelling at the checkpoint. Herbert, Shiffer, and Schroeder rushed to the scene, and found Abu Haikel, who said that soldiers had stopped his cousin and told him to stand up against the wall. Abu Haikel told them the soldiers had been targeting his family. On another night, the Abu Haikel family had a party and the military arrested several people who attended and sent his uncle to the police station where he was detained for several days.
December 31, 2009
Around 9:00 a.m., a local human rights activist called to report that the Israeli military was demolishing buildings in al-Bweireh. Kern and an EAPPI arrived in time to document the military loading a small Bobcat bulldozer onto a truck after demolishing a barn, dovecote and garage (See the 13 January CPTnet release here.)
The Christian Peacemaker Team is an ecumenical initiative to support violence reduction efforts around the world. To learn more about CPT’s peacemaking work, visit cpt.org
An amateur video shocked Palestinians on Tuesday, catching what appeared to be an Israeli settler repeatedly running over a wounded Palestinian at a gas station in Hebron last week.
The Palestinian, an unidentified man shot several times following an alleged knife attack at the station, appeared to be staggering when a silver Mercedes ran him down, stopped, reversed, and ran him over again.
The video was reportedly taken on Thursday, although at the time, Israeli representatives made no mention of the settler’s alleged attack, telling reporters only that a Palestinian man had been shot after he stabbed and lightly injured two settlers.
A military spokesman told Ma’an that after the two Israelis were hurt, a soldier shot and injured the Palestinian, who was taken to the Hadassah Ein Karem Hospital in Jerusalem. The settler, on the other hand, was released under house arrest.
That evening, a hospital spokeswoman told Ma’an the Palestinian was undergoing surgery for serious wounds, but did not mention he had been run over and trapped under a car. He was transported by an Israeli ambulance, she noted.
What follows is a partial clip from Al-Jazeera. Click here for an uncut version of the same film.
Warning: contains graphic images.
The full video captures several soldiers standing by as the incident unfolds. Those who run up to the vehicle and appear to take the keys out of the ignition are armed settlers. The Palestinian is left underneath the car screaming as settlers extract the driver. Several seconds later, medics approach the injured man.
According to The Jerusalem Post, police believe the driver was David Mizrachi, an Israeli from the illegal settlement of Kiryat Arba and the husband of one of the alleged stabbing victims. He may stand trial for attempted murder, the newspaper reported.
Both incidents come as tensions in settlements rise, with settlers vowing to defy recent orders to slow down certain West Bank construction. Soldiers have also shown an increasing aversion to cracking down on settler behavior, with some announcing their refusal to take part in missions that involve removing settlers from what Israeli courts determine are illegally occupied Palestinian homes or outposts.
Last fall in Hebron, dozens of soldiers were sent to evacuate the Ar-Rajabi home in Hebron, following which a rampaging settler from Kiryat Arba shot a Palestinian at almost point-blank range. The settler was briefly arrested and later released without charge.
On Saturday I traveled to the South Hebron Hills, to the Palestinian village of Safa, with an Israeli group called Ta’ayush that works to protect Palestinian farmers from settler violence and documents the proliferation of illegal settlements (Ta’ayush is Arabic for partnership). Things were peaceful when we arrived in the verdant grove of grape trees below Safa. A tractor plowed the land, a few farmers picked grape leaves, and the Ta’ayush activists greeted members of Anarchists Against the Wall, and the International Solidarity Movement (ISM) volunteers were already on the scene.
Within minutes, however, a group of settler children clad in white tsitsis assembled on the hill high above the valley, rolling tires down the hill and chanting in a single, piercing cry, “Death to Arabs!” The children were residents of Bet Ayn, one of the most fanatical Jewish settlements on the West Bank and home to a terrorist underground that planned to bomb a Palestinian girls’ school in Jerusalem. Recently a Palestinian resident of Safa killed a 13-year-old boy from Bet Ayn, setting off a series of violent reprisals that culminated when a masked mob of 30 settlers attacked two elderly farmers with clubs, breaking one man’s skull and seriously wounding the other. Since then, the farmers of Safa have been reluctant to work their fields without international and Israeli activists present.
The government of Benjamin Netanyahu has lined up firmly on the side of the settlers of Bet Ayn. This means that the army is a de facto arm of the settlers and responds to their every command. As soon as the settlers became agitated by our presence, they called an army unit to remove us. Four soldiers rushed to the scene in a jeep, a commander ambled down the hill — he seemed tired and unhappy about leaving his air-conditioned vehicle – and presented the farmers and activists with a closed military zone order. We had five minutes to leave the scene or be arrested.
Then, a Ta’ayush member named Amiel stepped forward with an Israeli high court ruling stating that the farmers must have access to their land without settler harassment. He warned the commander that he would be sued and held personally responsible if he enforced the illegal closed military zone order. The commander huddled with his troops, then retreated – a move that is often viewed within IDF ranks as a reprehensible display of weakness. The troops eventually vacated the scene and so did we, riding up the hill on a tractor to Safa. Joseph Dana, an Israeli Ta’ayush activist, told me the action was successful: there were no arrests or settler attacks (a regular occurrence), and perhaps the farmers could work for the rest of the day.
I hung out with some Palestinian kids in Safa until our ride came, throwing rocks into a dumpster from a few yards away. This is what passes for pickup basketball in the village. The kids liked imitating me exclaim, “Nothin’ but net!” Then we were off to Hilltop 26, an illegal settler outpost near the uber-settlement of Kiryat Arba, which dominates the landscape above Hebron.
When we arrived, four teenage settler boys were waiting for us. They immediately called the army, who arrived like clockwork with a border police unit and two members of Kiryat Arba’s security force. The settler boys, who only last week attempted to set fire to a Ta’ayush protest outpost (now destroyed), went to greet the police commander and a few soldiers they apparently knew. It was a meeting of minds, a portrait of collaboration between fanatical Jewish colonists and the Israeli government. The army commander approached us with a closed military zone order, demanding that everyone leave the scene.
The army was aware of the media’s presence, however – I was filming and an Italian photojournalist snapped pictures. So the commander also asked the settler boys to leave. They protested angrily. “You can change the order to let us stay!” one of them shouted to the commander. “You’ve done it before a few times.” But when the army marched us off the scene, they also escorted the settlers towards Kiryat Arba. Of course, the police commander walked with his arm on the shoulder of one of the settlers boys, but the relatively even-handed enforcement of the order was unusual.
“Normally they force us off and let the settlers stay,” Joseph Dana told me. “This is the first time they’ve made them go too. But they will almost certainly let the settlers go back in a few hours. I think they only did this because the media was here.”
Whether or not the settlers returned that day, their illegal outpost remained intact. It is just another stake in the Occupation, a rickety shack that, with the help of the Israeli army and the encouragement of Netanyahu’s government, will someday be a neighborhood in Greater Israel.
Max Blumenthal is an award-winning journalist and blogger whose articles and video documentaries have appeared in The Daily Beast, The Nation, The Huffington Post, Salon.com, Al Jazeera English and many other publications. He is a correspondent for The Daily Beast, a research fellow for Media Matters for America and a writing fellow for the Nation Institute.
Violence from illegal Israeli settlers directed at Palestinian residents in Hebron is an almost everyday occurrence. Recently however, several incidents indicate that settler violence in the city is increasing. On the 4th of April at around 3pm, Shah Aiwa, a 7-year-old Palestinian boy, was injured in his head after having stones thrown at him by settler children. The stoning occurred near the boy’s home in the old city, next to Beit Romano settlement. Shah was playing with another child when two settler boys started throwing stones at them from a nearby roof. According to both Shah and eyewitnesses who gathered at the scene, incidents like this are very common, happening 5 to 6 times a week. The stone that hit Shah on the head weighed over a kilo, and the injury he received required attention by medical staff from Hebron hospital.
Car windows broken from settler stones
Hebron resident shows cut from settler beating
Hebron resident’s broken wrist from settler beating
In a separate incident that same day, 17 Palestinian cars were damaged from stones thrown by settlers from Kiryat Arba. Israeli soldiers were present and witnessed the vandalism, but did nothing to prevent it. Recently, some Palestinian residences in that area have also had windows smashed from settler stones. Testimonials from residents suggest that the violence from Kiryat Arba settlers has risen in recent weeks.
Additionally, in the Tel Rumeida neighborhood of the city, several houses have been attacked by settlers at night. The residents of these houses say that 20 masked settlers descended on their homes at around 10pm on the 4th of April. Settlers threw stones at the windows, breaking at least three of them. At around 8pm that same night, a 28-year-old Palestinian resident was beaten by settlers in front of his house. The man sustained two broken bones in his wrist and a large cut near his eye as a result of the beating. A civilian observer with TIPH (Temporary International Presence in Hebron) was also attacked by settlers while he was walking in al-Shuhada street on the 4th of April.
