Starting around 5am this morning and lasting until the evening, the Israeli army surrounded the Mukatah (local government building) in Nablus with close to 100 military vehicles. They killed three people inside who are a part of the preventative security force of the PA, that the Israelis claim were wanted persons. They detained the bodies of the fallen in Nablus after abducting them from an ambulance. The bodies have not yet been identified because their faces were so mutilated by gunfire. This comes on the same day that the Israelis stormed a government building in Ramallah, arresting five people. They also stormed the office of the Palestinian Wafa News Agency in a pre-dawn raid.
The Israeli military has invaded El-Maghazi refugee camp in Gaza and killed 6 people, including two children. They have bombed refugee camps, civillian infastructure and government buildings in Gaza in the last few days, killing many civilians. Since Israel stepped up the bombing of Gaza last month, the Israeli army has been enforcing more severe closures on the entire West Bank. It is currently impossible to travel to Nablus from the south.
Members of the ministry of security were held hostage in the Nablus building, surrounded by bulldozers, jeeps and tanks. It has since been reported that they were moved to another building and stripped of their clothing. The army has completely destroyed the preventative security building, part of the Nablus Mukatah, which was already mostly destroyed by the Israeli offensive in the West Bank of 2004.
The Israeli soldiers occupied buildings nearby in order to shoot into the Mukatah and people nearby. Palestinian Medical Relief, one of the many ambulance services, has reported that twenty people in Nablus have been injured including an Al-Jazeera technician who was shot in the leg by a rubber-coated metal bullet while he was helping shoot a live broadcast. BBC News Online has reported 45 people injured, according to hospital officials they have spoken to. The latest figures as collected by the Palestinian Center for Human Rights (PCHR) in their latest press release are that 81 Palestinians have been injured and 9 killed, including 2 children.
It’s the wee hours of the morning, still dark outside. A guerrilla force comes out of nowhere to kidnap a soldier. After hours of careful movement, the force reaches its target, and the ambush is on! In seconds, the soldier finds himself looking down the barrel of a rifle.
A smash in the face with the butt of the gun and the soldier falls to the ground, bleeding. The kidnappers pick him up, quickly tie his hands and blindfold him, and disappear into the night.
This might be the end of the kidnapping, but the nightmare has just begun. The soldier’s mother collapses, his father prays. His commanding officers promise to do everything they can to get him back, his comrades swear revenge. An entire nation is up-in-arms, writing in pain and worry.
Nobody knows how the soldier is: Is he hurt? Do his captors give him even a minimum of human decency, or are they torturing him to death by trampling his honor? The worst sort of suffering is not knowing. Will he come home? And if so, when? And in what condition? Can anyone remain apathetic in the light of such drama?
Israeli terror
This description, you’ll be surprised to know, has nothing to do with the kidnapping of Gilad Shalit. It is the story of an arrest I carried out as an IDF soldier, in the Nablus casbah, about 10 years ago. The “soldier” was a 17-year-old boy, and we kidnapped him because he knew “someone” who had done “something.”
We brought him tied up, with a burlap sac over his head, to a Shin Bet interrogation center known as “Scream Hill” (at the time we thought it was funny). There, the prisoner was beaten, violently shaken and sleep deprived for weeks or months. Who knows.
No one wrote about it in the paper. European diplomats were not called to help him. After all, there was nothing out of the ordinary about the kidnapping of this Palestinian kid. Over the 40 years of occupation we have kidnapped thousands of people, exactly like Gilad Shalit was captured: Threatened by a gun, beaten mercilessly, with no judge or jury, or witnesses, and without providing the family with any information about the captive.
When the Palestinians do this, we call it “terror.” When we do it, we work overtime to whitewash the atrocity.
Suspects?
Some people will say: The IDF doesn’t “just” kidnap. These people are “suspects.” There is no more perverse lie than this. In all the years I served, I reached one simple conclusion: What makes a “suspect”? Who, exactly suspects him, and of what?
Who has the right to sentence a 17-year-old to kidnapping, torture and possible death? A 26-year-old Shin Bet interrogator? A 46-year-old one? Do these people have any higher education, apart from the ability to interrogate? What are his considerations? I all these “suspects” are so guilty, why not bring them to trial?
Anyone who believes that despite the lack of transparency, the IDF and Shin Bet to their best to minimize violations of human rights is naïve, if not brainwashed. One need only read the testimonies of soldiers who have carried out administrative detentions to be convinced of the depth of the immorality of our actions in the territories.
To this very day, there are hundreds of prisoners rotting in Shin Bet prisons and dungeons, people who have never been –and never will be – tried. And Israelis are silently resolved to this phenomenon.
Israeli responsibility
The day Gilad Shalit was kidnapped I rode in a taxi. The driver told me we must go into Gaza, start shooting people one-by-one, until someone breaks and returns the hostage. It isn’t clear that such an operation would bring Gilad back alive.
Instead of getting dragged into terrorist responses… we should release some of the soldiers and civilians we have kidnapped. This is appropriate, right, and could bring about an air of reconciliation in the territories.
Hell, if this is what will bring Gilad home safe-and-sound, we have a responsibility to him to do it.
I decided to take a vacation to Balata refugee camp and give art lessons to children there. I hadn’t been there since the invasion in February and I recently completed a portrait of Ibrahim, a boy who died while I was there and I wanted to give it to his family.
Because of all the roadblocks and closures, just getting from Hebron to Balata is an ordeal in and of itself. I took a service from Hebron to the junction near Bethlehem, another service to Bethlehem to meet up with my friend Chris, we crossed through the Orwellian Bethlehem checkpoint which is built around the concept of no human to human interaction between the people trying to get through and the soldiers giving them permission or not. You can’t see the soldiers, they’re behind tinted, bullet proof glass; you just hear them barking orders over a PA system at you in Hebrew.
Next we took a service to Jerusalem, got off and took another service to Qalandia checkpoint, got off, took a service to Huwara checkpoint. Ah Huwara, my least favorite checkpoint in all of the West Bank. Going through isn’t difficult but coming back out can take hours. Last time our friend Mohammad Farraj, a filmmaker, tried to leave through Huwara on his way to the airport to catch a plane to a film festival in the United States, soldiers refused to let him and told him if he tried to go through again, they’d put him in jail for six months.
Huwara checkpoint
All in all, it took three and a half hours from Hebron to Balata, a distance of 40 miles. This was about the best you can expect if you are an international. If you are Palestinian it would take longer.
Balata is a town of ghosts. You walk down any street and the ghosts stare back at you from the walls of all the buildings. These are Balata’s martyrs and this is how the residents of the camp choose to remember them. It’s a strange feeling to come back here and recognize faces of people you never actually met.
We stayed at Mohammad Farraj’s house. He’s a friend of Chris and I’d talked to him via email about coming to the camp and doing art projects with the children. The first person I saw when I walked into Mohammad Farraj’s apartment was Mohammad Issa, the brother of Ibrahim whose portrait I had brought with me. I’d never met Mohammad Issa formally in person but we had corresponded quite a bit over email while I was working on some paintings illustrating life in Balata. He was pointed out to me the day after Ibrahim died and I had never seen anyone with so much pain on their face in my life. I instantly recognized him and introduced myself. I told him I brought the portrait of Ibrahim for him and his smiling face instantly fell. I felt like shit. It took an hour before he finally asked to see it. I couldn’t look at his face for at least five minutes after I gave it to him. He didn’t speak for about five minutes either, he was just staring at the painting. I was trying really hard not to cry and feeling a bit ridiculous since I was sitting in a room full of Ibrahim’s friends and I was the only one who was losing my composure. Nobody said anything for awhile. Finally he told me, “Thank you, you gave me the feeling that he was alive again. It’s amazing.”
Ibrahim is the only person I have painted a picture of in life and in death. I never got a chance to scan the portrait I gave to his brother. Maybe next time I am back there.
Later we went to Mohammad Issa’s house and he gave the painting to his mother. She thanked me and told the story of how he died, how she heard screams and found him on the roof with his best friend who was killed by the same bullet. Her other son was also with them, he had been shot in the leg. Mohammad Issa asked very matter of factly, if I would like to see the pictures of the two boys at the morgue. It was almost as if he was asking if I would like tea. I don’t like to see pictures of dead people but I felt like it would be rude to say no. Their eyes were half open.
After leaving the Issa’s house we went to the neighbor’s of Mohammad Farraj. They were a very sweet family who made us coffee and asked us how the situation in Palestine is reported on in the US. I told them people have absolutely no idea what is going on here. It never ceases to amaze me, the warmth and friendliness of people I meet in places like this. There’s not one family in Balata that doesn’t have a horror story of their own, yet they are so kind and welcoming. Ahmad, one of the sons, about 15 years old is missing all of the teeth on the right side of his mouth where he was hit with shrapnel. His face is also mildly disfigured.
There was gunfire on and off all night. Mohammad Farraj promised nonchalantly it was only Palestinian fighters shooting in the air. At some god-forsaken hour we all woke up to the sound of a bulldozer. I never found out what that was about.
The next day at about 10 AM we bought felafel sandwiches for 11 boys and girls, put them in two taxis, drove them out of the refugee camp to a playground in Nablus where I gave them an art lesson.
I asked them to draw pictures of their daily life and this is the result. It was heartbreaking and at the same time it was really fun to be able to give these kids something fun to do, something they were so grateful for and also to be able to play with them in the park. We all had an great time. It was a much needed break.
I’m sitting here looking at these adorable kids and I’m wondering if any of these boys are going to live past 30.
Haroun says:
“I drew the army and the martyr Khalil and some boys who threw stones at the jeeps and the sun.”
Amal says:
The soldiers killed someone who is sitting in front of his building. And some helicopters were shooting the building.” She wrote: “We will return to our homeland and our original life.”
Noor says:
“I drew my cousin who was killed by the Israelis. Some men are carrying the Palestinian flag.” She wrote “occupied Palestine”
Asil says:
“I drew houses very close to each other. There are some soldiers who killed a martyr and soldiers who would not let the ambulance take the martyr away. People in the building are crying.”
Dalia says:
“I drew my house, a tree, a Palestinian flag, Israelis, jeeps, two people, a martyr and a sun.” She wrote: “The sweetest flag is the Palestine flag, we hope the situation is fixed soon, inshallah. My mother, don’t cry, the days will come back to Balata camp.”
At 4pm we left Balata. I plan to continue doing art lessons with the kids here. If anyone is looking to save the world I urge you to come to Balata and start a summer camp there for the kids. They need it so much.
Ahmad the 15 year old neighbor of M.F. walked us to our taxi. He had a necklace around his neck with about six tiny pictures in it, sort of like a locket. I asked him about it, he said they were his friends.
Police on Tuesday detained 20 settlers in the West Bank city of Hebron after they hurled rocks, bricks and glass bottles at Israel Defense Forces soldiers and police. A policeman was lightly wounded in the riot.
The rioting took place next to a Palestinian house where the IDF was securing the construction of a wall to protect its inhabitants from settlers.
The Palestinian inhabitants, living in proximity with Jewish houses, were forced to leave their home due to unrelenting attacks by settlers. The IDF recently began securing the Palestinian house in order to allow the inhabitants to return to their home.
The settlers say that a Palestinian house in their neighborhood poses a threat to their personal security. The police said it will “exercise determination and zero tolerance against lawbreakers and anyone who harms police or soldiers.”
Later on Tuesday the High Court of Justice rejected a request by the Jewish community of Hebron to issue an injunction against the construction of a wall around the Palestinian house.
Farmers suspect settlers cut down olive trees
Palestinian farmers suspect that settlers are behind the vandalizing of some 45 olive trees in the Palestinian village of Salem near the West Bank city of Nablus.
A farmer working in a field adjacent to the groves on Saturday discovered that many trees in the grove had been cut down. The grove owner filed a complaint with Ariel police.
In recent months Israeli volunteers have been assisting Salem farmers in tilling their fields while suffering from ongoing sabotage by settlers. Buma Inbar who visited the vandalized grove said “the site was horrifying – it’s hard to see dozens of old trees broken down so brutally, this is sheer vandalism.”
The apartment belonging to the International Solidarity Movement (ISM) in Balata refugee camp, Nablus was broken into by the Israeli military last week, May 31st. In what is an apparent act of vandalism and harassment, the military forced their way into the empty apartment and destroyed many things.
A neighbor reported, “At 1am, the Israeli army bombed both doors in order to enter the house. When they entered, the started shooting all over the house. They broke the toilet, the dishes, everything. The house is a huge mess. They also bombed the walls between two rooms. Really loud, horrible sounds were heard. They left the house at 4am.”
The IOF regularly enters Balata refugee camp and conducts operations, arresting people, often children, and indiscriminately destroying property. They often occupy houses, herding the family into one room and setting up snipers in the house or on the roof. It is not clear why they entered the ISM apartment, but it is not uncommon treatment in Balata.
