On Wednesday 9th October, around 5:40pm, Israeli special forces entered Nablus by car and carried out a deliberate assassination of four Palestinians who were inside a a black Skoda vehicle, in broad daylight, on Faisal Street, near a popular market. The Israeli special forces’ car was painted in Palestinian colours to pass undercover. They fired directly at the Palestinians’ car which was driving in the center of the city, and in which were five young men, one of which survived and is currently in critical condition.
The attack caused a state of horror and fear amongst the resident of the area and passersby, with people rushing to flee the scene.
One of the martyr’s loved ones in a state of distress at the funeral. @Diana Khwaelid
After shooting at the car from a distance, the Israeli special forces then got out of their car to shoot again at point blank to ensure the Palestinian’s deaths, after which they withdrew from the area. Immediately after, Palestinian medical teams and ambulances rushed to the scene as residents began to gather in front of the assassination site. Due to the intensity of the shooting, onlookers found pieces of flesh and of one of the young men’s brain. All victims were taken to the Rafidia government hospital in Nablus, where they passed away from their injuries.
Shortly thereafter, the Israeli military stormed the city and in particular took over the place where the operation had taken place. Finding that the bodies had been moved to the hospital, they left the scene again.
The funeral ceremony for the martyrs began on Thursday at 10:30 am. It started in front of the Rafidia hospital and proceeded to the martyrs roundabout in the city, where a funeral prayer was held. They then headed to the martyrs’ hometowns of Balata camp and Askar, where they grew up. Hundreds of Palestinians participated in the funeral, chanting for the liberation of Palestine.
During the funeral march, Palestinians protest against the occupation (1) @Diana Khwaelid
During the funeral march, Palestinians protest against the occupation (2) @Diana Khwaelid
Amongst the four Palestinians killed was Issam Al-Salaj, commander of the Balata camp battalion, who the citizens of the camp honoured as a martyr that had evaded the Israeli army for years.
The Women Support Center is a project of the Tanweer Cultural Center and has been active in Nablus and surrounding communities of the Northern West Bank for four years now. It serves women and children with legal, mental health, economic, educational, and recreational initiatives. Designed to encourage independence, safety, wellness, and solidarity among women, they offer trainings in media, legal rights, entrepreneurship, and vocational training, group and individual therapy, legal counsel, sponsorship for gardening cooperatives, and individualized support for ad hoc projects when needs emerge.
Since October, military and settler activity have presented serious risks and delays in regional transportation into and out of Nablus. Palestinians are often forced to wait three or more hours at checkpoints before they are allowed through (if, indeed, they are allowed at all). This presents special difficulties to women and girls, due to lack of safe places to use the restroom. In recent months, the Center installed a restroom for women awaiting checkpoint passage. They also frequently arranged Iftar deliveries so that travelers entering and exiting the city could meet their bodies’ needs, which the occupation was otherwise preventing.
Cars delayed at an IOF checkpoint outside Nablus.
Public women’s toilet built by Women Support Center for Nablus checkpoint.
Hakema Hassan, coordinator of the Gardening Cooperatives program, shared that the economic and social benefits for women who can produce food are immense. The Women Support Center distributes seeds and seedlings, and provides grant money for women to establish and sustain cooperatives. However, many women who would otherwise engage in this work do not feel comfortable leaving the cities—even to their home villages—as settler and military violence have worsened dramatically. “Our car windows have been broken many times”, reports Hassan. And at the aforementioned checkpoints, women face gendered harassment: “They ask us to dance for them…. This is forbidden.”
Other programs, such as upcoming media classes, are intended to offer women and girls tools for their activism. Other recent activist initiatives include: forums on female political prisoners under the occupation, vigils and protests for Gazans resisting genocide, and resistance against sexual violence and gender oppression.
Tanweer and the Women Support Center survive on a small budget—which has been all the more limited since the Israeli government cut off funding since the 7th of October. We invite you to help the Women Support Center and Tanweer to provide lifesaving and empowering services to the northern West Bank by donating at the PayPal account tanweer.nablus@gmail.com.
In an age of disinformation, spectacle, and erasure, remembrance is revolutionary. Palestine has a rich 20,000 year history. Amid an ongoing catastrophe in the Holy Land that rivals the nakba in 1948, people in Nablus are keepers of memory.
One such project is the The Cultural Center of the Palestinian Narrative which raises awareness about Palestinian history, including mapping what Palestine was like pre-1948, and archiving witness testimony of ethnic cleansing.
Interactive Palestinian history archive from The Cultural Center of the Palestinian Narrative
Tanweer, another cultural center in Nablus, in addition to current efforts to introduce art, joy, and more freedom into the public sphere, has chosen to uncover the ancient names of the springs in the Old City of Nablus and surrounding areas. After rediscovering the names, they create and install signs to connect the present with the past and remind people what has been and what will be. In Arabic, the word for spring also means way or path. Names of words and places, like names of people, are often repositories of ancient wisdom.
Spring sign in Nablus (photo credit: ISM)
Fitra is an Arabic word meaning “original disposition” or “innate nature”. It is common belief in Palestine and throughout the Arab and Muslim world that every person is born innocent with innate goodness, and only through social conditioning are people led to oppression and injustice. And so the inner work that must be done isn’t achieving something far removed from one’s self, but rediscovering, reconnecting with, and remembering one’s original nature.
Some of the people honored by Palestinians at the Tanweer Center include ISM activists killed while doing solidarity work (photo credit ISM)
Just as Jewish people throughout the United States, Europe, and the Middle East remember the horrors of their past and honor those who maintained their humanity amid the inhumanity around them, Palestinians remember the horrors of their past (and present), honor those who maintain their humanity amid the inhumanity around them, try to make a way where there is no way, and hope that the people of the world will not watch from afar their extermination, but instead, choose to remember their essential, original, buried under the rubble humanity.
Hundreds of thousands of Palestinian children in Gaza are at risk of famine and preventable death from disease as the world’s observant retreat into family and faith to mark the birth of another Palestinian child. In a lightless, treeless Bethlehem, haunting displays capture the specter of a collective grief. Christ lies in the rubble. And just over 70 kilometers away in Gaza, many thousands of Palestinians are entombed in the very same reality.
Christmas falls quiet on Bethlehem. Photo Credit, ISM
Through the doorway of a thousand checkpoints, the children of the West Bank avoid the binding of their hands and the breaking of their bones as occupation forces have leapt in tandem with the perpetrators of the Gaza genocide, exacting spasms of violence on their own long descent from humanity. To the immediate west of the place of Christ’s birth, a Palestinian child’s life was stolen by the bullets of the occupation just days ago. Mahmoud Mohammad Zaaoul lay murdered in the village of Husan. In occupied East Jerusalem, faithful Muslims endured beatings and pursuit on horseback by occupation soldiers energized by their greenlit domination of the indigenous population, arbitrarily blocking prayers from being spoken in Al Aqsa Mosque by Palestinian worshippers.
It is Christmas in Palestine.
16 year old Mahmoud Mohammad Zaaoul was killed on 12/20 west of Bethlehem by occupation forces. Photo Credit: WAFA
According to a UNICEF press release dated December 22nd, the latest statistics “warn that acute food insecurity puts all children under five in the Gaza Strip—335,000—at high risk of severe malnutrition and preventable death.” As a traumatized population of genocide-displaced, the people of Gaza have been forced between districts with bombs and drones biting at their heels. Public health and sanitation conditions are non-existent.
Frigid wind and rain have exacerbated illness and flooded small handmade structures that displaced Gazans are existing within as their homes lie in ruins. The World Health Organization has been sounding the alarm about the dangerous prevalence of diarrhea in children; the swelling statistic of instances is nearing 60,000 affected. This is further worsening the already horrific sanitation conditions and rising dehydration with many spending endless days searching for water, albeit contaminated and fueling illness.
Gaza is being ravaged by not only bloody diarrhea, but a host of other illnesses which are tearing through the traumatized population. Hepatitis A, jaundice, meningitis and respiratory infections as dangerous smoke from the burning of found materials to stay warm wafts across densely packed makeshift shelters peppering the gouged landscape.
Pre-existing medical conditions did not cease to be a battle impacted Palestinians were fighting prior to the gears of genocide thrusting towards them through the joint American-Israeli operation. Dialysis and cancer patients, diabetics in need of regular insulin and the means with which to maintain and monitor their blood glucose levels, disabled Palestinians needing around the clock care, stroke and cardiac patients reliant on medication to sustain life- every normal function of their medical support system lies broken among the wreckage.
In the occupied West Bank, flashes of violence strike across heavily targeted communities from Jenin to Nablus. From Tulkarm to al Khalil. The violent raids have been ramping up with the world viewing the horror through both the careful and courageous documentation of Palestinians on the ground as well as through countless antagonistic and cruel tiktok videos shared by occupation forces, mocking and dehumanizing Palestinians as they raid and desecrate a Mosque while using its amplification for prayer to sing Jewish songs. As they sit smoking on the couches of a Palestinian family home laughing and filming bound and blindfolded Palestinians gathered on the ground before them.
Running from the terror of flying rockets, earth shattering explosions and buildings collapsing around them, 50,000 pregnant women in Gaza are among those fighting to survive. Over 180 births are taking place each day in genocide-torn Gaza. They are taking place in the rubble, in packed lobbies of shelters, in makeshift tent structures. The conditions are beyond horrific with only a fraction of hospital beds available from before October 7th across all Gaza’s districts. This says nothing of Palestinians ability to access one of the few medical facilities left in the devastated Gaza Strip.
The situation swells to new heights of crisis as the observant mark the day that Mary, having nowhere to stay in the town, utilized a makeshift crib to lay down her infant as angels sang the birth of the Christ lying in a Bethlehem manger.
Like so many children in Gaza, in today’s Bethlehem, Christ lies in the rubble.
Striking Palestinians across the occupied West Bank have been joined by millions in countries across the world for the Global Strike for Gaza, which was announced by a coalition of major Palestinian factions. The cadence of the strike declarations accelerated rapidly throughout the day in demand of an immediate ceasefire and an end to the genocide in Gaza.
The global strike action was coordinated in response to the dashing of efforts toward an immediate humanitarian ceasefire in Gaza. Comfortably seated with his arm stretched high, US Ambassador Alternate Representative of the US for Special Political Affairs in the United Nations Robert A. Wood lit a fire of rage and condemnation across every continent following his signaling that the United States would use its veto power to kill a UN resolution, supported almost thoroughly through the UN security council, to block an immediate humanitarian ceasefire in Gaza.
Entire nations shut down. A strike was born.
Sign on shop in Jordan announcing closure due to strike. Photo Credit: (MEE/Mohammad Ersan)
Across the territory, shops fell silent. Schools remained closed. Government offices shut down. Masses gathered in Ramallah’s Al-Manara Square for what was, by many accounts, the largest crowd gathered in protest in the area in some time. Palestinian children made art work and protestors carried a banner naming Gaza’s martyrs while large protests occurred simultaneously in al Khalil. Shops in occupied East Jerusalem remained shuttered through the day as the global strike action flashed across the planet with several countries joining in nationwide efforts to deal economic blows to the heart of the powers who profit from the continuation of occupation force’s genocide in Gaza.
Silence in the streets of Nablus. Photo Credit: [Zain Jaafar/AFP]Lebanon:
Secretary-general of Lebanon’s Council of Ministers, Mahmoud Mekkiya delivered the announcement to the nation; all governments and national institutions would be shuttered in solidarity with the global call out. In reports out of major Lebanese cities, “workers downed tools” and the call for global strike was supported in calls for nationwide solidarity by the ministers of education and culture and several heads of finance. People across Lebanon engaged in the strike in solidarity with Gaza as well as southern Lebanese villages which have also been impacted in occupation forces bombardment.
Streets were bare across Jordan as a stunning show of solidarity surged through “the transportation sector, aviation, trade, banks, ports, as well as schools and universities.” Thousands gathered in the streets of Amman and across Jordan in massive protests. Handmade signs announcing solidarity strikes were placed across hundreds of shops as the nation grinded to a halt in a powerful cry to end the continued atrocities being committed in Gaza.
Photo Credit: English News.cn (Photo by Mohammad Abu Ghosh/Xinhua)
In observation of the strike, the country saw abandoned streets throughout the day, with images circulating across social media of empty streets and gated shops in the typically bustling city of Istanbul.
Photo Credit: Palestine Online @OnlinePalEng
While many countries held full nationwide shutdowns in honor of the strike call, others which did not, saw massive protests in major cities across the world. Entire communities vocally joined the strike in solidarity. #StrikeForGaza was trending across social media, businesses announced individual shutdowns, millions across the world did not report to work or school and millions more refused all financial transactions for the day, no physical purchases, no shopping, no online orders. Boycott actions are a powerful tool to cost companies standing on the side of genocide, occupation and apartheid millions of dollars in profit. Momentum continues to build for an end to the bombardment which has now claimed nearly 20,000 lives. Thousands of the missing lie among the rubble.
One day prior to the global strike, the world marked the 75th anniversary of International Human Rights Day as the bombs continued to fall on Gaza.
