Tag: Nablus

by ISM Nablus, 4th of November 2006

Today, Palestinian farmers from Azmut village north of Nablus city were attacked on their land by a gang of Israeli settlers, who were accompanied by two soldiers. The settlers ran after the families, shouted and threw stones at them. At one point they kicked and hit international volunteers, who had come to help the farmers pick olives. The group of settlers, aged from around eight to twenty, came from the settlement of Elon Moreh two kilometres away from the village.

This year’s olive harvest has been difficult for the people of Azmut. This is the third time this week that farmers from the village were forced off their land. Five days ago an armed settler stopped nearby and used a megaphone to threaten families picking olives, intimidating them into leaving. Yesterday, a group of settlers chased the farmers off their land. The farmers, knowing the violence that has come from these settlers in the past and the extreme views of those in the Elon Moreh settlement, didn’t want to risk any injuries and subsequently left.

This morning the farmers had to begin their work by picking up all the olives that settlers had thrown across the ground the previous night. They had only harvested for about forty minutes, when two soldiers approached and told them that “there is no coordination today, come back tomorrow”.

The international volunteers attempted to negotiate with the soldiers about the families’ legal right to access their land at any time, but after a couple of minutes a gang of around 25 settler children and young people suddenly descended down the hill towards the groves. The families had no time to collect their tools and olive sacks as they were forced to flee.

As the settlers approached the families and international volunteers, they stopped by the soldiers to pick up and throw stones. As they got closer one volunteer was kicked by a settler. Other volunteers were hit with rocks, one volunteer seemingly because he was recording the attack with a video camera. All of this happened with soldiers standing by and making no attempt to stop the settlers or to protect the families and the international volunteers, in spite of their legal obligations under Israeli law to stop settler attacks.

Elon Moreh is one of the oldest settlements in the northern West Bank and has explicitly expressed its purpose: to block the creation of a Palestinian state. The 1200 or so inhabitants are infamous for their religious and violent extremism. They have been involved in a number of serious attacks on Palestinian villages, where they have burnt down trees, attacked Palestinians and in some cases killed them.

This settler attack is just another example of the harassment that Palestinians face. Checkpoints, settler-only roads and military harassment all serve to keep them away from their land and livelihoods. The villagers of Azmut are afraid. But they are also determined to go back to their land, even in the face of such violence, to continue their harvest and to keep their land.

For more information on Elon Moreh, see this entry on the Peace Now website.

by ISM Nablus, 3rd November

In a shockingly common scenario, the Israeli occupation forces shot a Palestinian child dead in Nablus’ Balata Refugee Camp early this morning and wounded two other Palestinian civilians. Fifteen year-old Brahmin Smakreh was shot and killed as he tried to help his brother Ahmed who was lying in the street after being wounded by the Israeli military.

The unsurprising tragedy began last night at 9:30pm when a small Israeli force entered the Balata refugee camp, reportedly looking for two wanted men. The soldiers fired a number of shots but did not injure anyone and left after about an hour. Balata residents, who are subjected to frequent military operations, returned to the streets.

Then at 1:30am this morning, a much larger force of soldiers invaded Balata in a numerous jeeps, humvees and tanks and laid virtual siege to the camp. The Israeli army occupied a Palestinian house to set up sniper positions, blindfolding the family and forcing them to huddle in one room. The soldiers fired heavy caliber weapons into the main street of Balata and engaged in many clashes with resistance fighters.

Palestinian paramedics were called to the camp after Israeli soldiers severely beat a Palestinian man, 30 year-old Nazem Qatawi, while searching for the wanted men. The Israeli military refused to allow the ambulance or medical teams into the camp, so the ambulance waited nearby.

After Ahmed Smakreh was wounded on the street in front of his house, his younger brother Brahim tried to cross the street and drag him to safety. But before Brahim could reach his brother, he was shot by an Israeli sniper.

Palestinian paramedics received the report of additional casualties and again requested permission to enter the camp to evacuate the wounded. According to the paramedics, the Israeli army responded by firing live ammunition directly at the uniformed paramedics and their Red Crescent ambulance.

Around 4:30am there was a series of explosions followed by a much larger blast as the Israeli army blew up a car on the main street of Balata. The massive explosion knocked out electricity to the entire refugee camp, blew out windows of the neighboring houses, and started a fire that threatened the nearest house. The paramedics called in the Nablus fire department but the Israeli military would not allow any fire trucks to enter the camp.

By 5:30am the Israeli soldiers left Balata camp without arresting anyone. Palestinian paramedics and firemen immediately entered the camp to put out the fire and attend to the civilian casualties. Once the fire was extinguished and the wounded evacuated, electricity crews began to fixeding the electrical wiring to restore power as quickly as possible to the beleaguered citizens of Balata.

The funeral for the murdered boy, Brahim was held at 10:30 this morning. His brother Ahmed and Nazem Qatawi are recovering from their injuries in hospital.

by ISM Nablus, Wednesday 1st November

At one o’clock this afternoon, the Israeli checkpoint of Beit Iba, just west of Nablus City was closed for all vehicles and pedestrians attempting to pass it. Located at a junction between the villages of Beit Iba, Quusin and Deir Sharaf, this is a central thoroughfare to and from Nablus, especially for students and workers from Jenin and its surrounding villages.

At five o’clock in the afternoon, buses and trucks were queued up in two lines which were at least 500 meters long on each side of the checkpoint. Hundreds of men, women and children, subject to orders barked out by Israeli soldiers, were continuously forced to move from behind the turnstiles into the car lane and then back again. A group of students from Tubas had been waiting for at least three hours to go to their homes. Tension was rising as finally the soldiers started to open the checkpoint, allowing a slow trickle of women and children to go through. One hummer and three soldiers blocked the entrance to the pedestrian passageway on the west side of the checkpoint, forcing people to wait in the way of the traffic which created chaos.

Three jeeps were also stationed in the middle of the junction, blocking the road for ambulances, trucks and buses that were -with difficulty- squeezing past them. At least twenty soldiers milled about, pointing their machine-guns into the crowd to enforce their conflicting orders. At one point, an international human rights worker approached an officer from the “Humanitarian Division” of the Israeli occupation forces, standing to the side seemingly observing what was going on. When asked what he thought of the situation, the soldier answered “very bad”. As the human rights worker expressed a concern that someone could be shot at any moment, the soldier nodded in agreement but said “there is nothing I can do. I am not from here”.

At about six o’clock, the checkpoint opened up completely and the men, some of whom had been waiting to pass since two o’clock, were finally allowed to pass. Three men who had been detained a few hours earlier were released and the line of vehicles started to move. As a large coach full of al-Najah students were forced to step off their bus while it was being searched, one of the girls remarked that “this gives us no time to study, or to spend time with our families. I ate here today, at the checkpoint! It will take me another hour to get home and then I must go straight to bed. And tomorrow I have to go through here again. This is not a life.”

Fortunately, no one was hurt today. Similar closures frequently take place at the more than 518 checkpoints, guarded gates and other forms of road blocks located throughout the West Bank, and often lead to injuries or even death. These restrictions on freedom of movement cripple the economy and prevent people from being able to plan their daily lives – yet another aspect of the slow genocide orchestrated by the Israeli government and sanctioned by the international community’s silence.

by ISM Nablus, Wednesday 1st November

“What do you think of this place? Isn’t is beautiful?” The woman asking the question, a mother of four polished and polite children, looks at us expectantly. What can we say? Wadi Al-Khrazey on the outskirts of the 2,000 person village of Zawata, west of Nablus city, is not an immediately attractive place. The olive groves, made up of two long rows of trees rooted in red sand, are crammed in between a military road and a slope leading up to the notoriously violent Sabatash checkpoint (named after the Palestinian security force that used to man it) with its watchtower looming ominously on the highest hilltop.

Yet by the time the blue sky has been replaced by dark clouds weighted down by rain, and the donkey has tottered up and down the hillside on his spindly legs for the fourth time, the place seemed to transform. We can see gophers scurrying among the rocks, paths carefully trampled over by two hundred years worth of hooves and sandaled feet, and gnarled trunks of trees spiraling into branches lovingly trimmed to perfection. We know now that the military street used to be a railway track planned by the British colonial administration, and that it led from cities as exotic as Damascus and Baghdad to the ports of Haifa and Jaffa. We sit on the uppermost chair-like branches sprinkling olives on the people below while three young girls squeeze into a wheelbarrow singing the latest Arabic pop hits. This is truly a beautiful place that before long has a whole history of joys and sorrows ringing in our ears.

Last Wednesday, a few families tried to start picking olives from their trees along side the military road, with jeeps and hummers speeding past every 10 minutes. After only a couple of hours, the harvesters were chased off their land. Soldiers stepped out of their hummer, screamed at the people through megaphones to leave the area and fired several rounds into the air. Frightened for their own and their children’s lives, everyone left. Since then, people have been reluctant to return to their land without international accompaniment.

Today, three families and a group of internationals harvested every last olive from the area. It would, however, be wrong to say that the work proceeded without interruption. Every time a hummer passed by, one of the younger children’s knees would involuntarily buckle. As he ducked behind a bush, his father Maher Saleh smiled at us sadly. A father’s powers of consolation scorned. And again, we did not know what to say. Only last night, Israeli forces entered the village under the protection of darkness and abducted two young men from their homes. This is a regular occurrence that, apart from being horrific in itself, completely undermines parental authority and children’s general sense of security.

Come to Palestine! There is a great need for international accompaniment during the olive harvest – supporting the sense of civil resistance that has people out in their fields every single day reclaiming their rights to their land. Together, we can try to make sure that every last olive is picked and that the children are allowed to play among the olive trees in peace, if only for a day.

by ISM Nablus, 30th October

At 8am this morning two international Human Rights Workers (HRWs) accompanied a Palestinian family from the village of Azmut, just east of Nablus, to their olive groves. This land has found itself within close proximity to the illegal Israeli settlement of Elon Moreh, meaning that the family has been unable to harvest or cultivate this land for the past 8 years. Just 5 minutes after starting to harvest, a settler-operated “security” jeep pulled up a short distance further up the hill, and started screaming over a loudspeaker at the Palestinians, mainly in Hebrew with a little Arabic. One of the family told us he he had demanded that they “go back go back to [their] houses”. The villagers were visibly distressed, the village having long been subject to violence and intimidation from the settlers. With the settler in the jeep continuing to threaten us over the loudspeaker, the villagers left immediately. The two HRWs called the DCO (District Co-ordination Office, the civilian administration wing of the Israeli military in the West Bank) and asked for the Israeli police to intervene. Around 15 minutes later a border police jeep arrived and stopped next to the settler vehicle. However by this stage the villagers, accompanied by the 2 internationals, had retreated to a safe distance, and so it was not clear what the border police were going to do about the situation.

After the border police arrived the settler jeep remained where it was for about 10 minutes. There didnt seem to be much interaction between the police vehicle and the settler jeep; a police man appeared to say a few words to the settler(s) when they first arrived, but both vehicles remained next to each other on the top of the hill. The army certainly didn’t come to protect the villagers.

The villagers were unwilling to return without explicit assurances from the DCO that their protection from the Israeli settlers could be ensured.

The Palestinian family decided instead to harvest some olives out of sight of the settlement, and the rest of the day’s harvest went ahead without incident. This one family alone has 90 dunums of land which they are unable to cultivate due to the proximity of this notorious Israeli settlement, leaving them with just 60 dunums.

The settlement’s colonist residents have been known to shoot at Palestinians attempting to pick their olives, and the army is complicit in this intimidation, the family told us. They regularly refuse to allow Palestinians access to their land, in contravention to Israeli High Court rulings. We were also told of several previous incidents of the army entering the village and assaulting its residents.

The HRW’s were also shown a stream running into the village. Although it previously provided the village with much needed water, it is now heavily polluted by a factory in the Elon Moreh settlement, and its chemical stench spreads over a considerable area. Despite all the setbacks and intimidation, the villagers of Azmut refuse to leave, and will continue this year’s olive harvest as they have done for many generations.

Clarified and expanded: 6 November.