Tag: Nablus

The Siege on Balata Camp Continues

19:10 February 19, 2006 Twenty-two year old Mohammad Subkhi Abu Hanade was shot in the chest with live ammunition while he was in his home by a sniper in an occupied house adjacent to his. A medical team andinternational volunteers who were in the vicinity say that the atmosphere was quiet when they heard two shots followed by screaming coming from the house. They immediately came in and found Abu Hanade bleeding heavily. After Mohammad was evacuated, a pregnant woman in the house went into what seemed to be shock induced labor and was also evacuated to hospital.

They say they saw no weapon, nor any apparent reason for the shooting. Israeli soldiers subsequently ordered Mohammad’s family, a total of 12 people including two small babies, out of the house at 20:45 and detained them in the street for an hour and a half.
Since the incursion in Balata refugee camp started on 1:00 am February 19, Balata camp has been under ongoing curfew. In addition, The Israeli Military has made medical emergency work impossible. All entrances to Balata refugee camp are blocked. The one ambulance left in the camp brings the wounded only to the edge of the camp, as medical workers fear that the army would prevent the vehicle from re-entering.
The wounded are carried on stretchers to the entrance of the camp and transported to hospitals in Nablus. Normal ambulance traffic has come to a complete halt. International volunteers are working with ambulance personnel to transport the wounded to an emergency field clinic inside the camp and to hospitals in Nablus and other cities. They witnessed all following incidents or heard and confirmed them from ambulance personnel of the United Palestinian Medical Relief Committees (UMPRC) and the Palestinian Red Crescent Society (PRCS).
• 07:15-An Israeli military Jeep shot in the direction of an ambulance
and prevented it from approaching the camp.
• 11:15-The military attempted to close the UN medical clinic by shooting warning shots and percussion grenades. They also prevented patients from entering the clinic.
• 13:45-Mohammad Yousef was shot with a rubber coated metal bullet in the head while throwing stones at a military jeep on Jamal Abdel Nasser Street near the entrance of the camp.
The bullet entered several centimetres into his skull. Today there were an additional 12 young men injured while throwing stones at the military jeeps, in Balata village. Another five were injured in the Balata refugee camp by rubber coated steal bullets.
• 15:20-Four youths are injured by rubber coated steel bullets in Balata village. One of them is shot in the head.
• 15:40-Israeli soldiers denied entry to a medical team attempting to deliver food and medicine into the camp. The Israeli soldiers also threatened to shoot them.
• 18:00- Until the writing of this report, a large group of soldiers are surrounding a house in the Magdush neighbourhood in Balata camp.
Soldiers have broken into neighbouring houses and broken windows and doors. In several instances today, soldiers drove through the camps cursing the residents’ mothers and sisters in Arabic in what seemed to be an attempt to provoke the youth to throw stones. The volunteers have witnessed no armed resistance, only youth throwing stones and building
barricades.

In the Spirit of Revolution

By Hanna

I’ve been traveling for the past two weeks with groups of people who enjoy more privilege here than perhaps any other group – American Jews. We can relatively easily pass through walls, fences, gates, checkpoints, “terminals” and other obstacles, moving from Jerusalem to Bethlehem to Ramallah to Haifa and back to Jerusalem without a second thought. Unless we think. Unless we call our Palestinian friends on the phone and try to explain what we’re doing. Unless they ask us, “Where are you?” and we debate whether to lie or to tell them we’re in their capital city that they haven’t been able to reach for the past 5 years.

Last week my host family was looking at some of Dunya’s pictures of the terminal and the Wall, and my 11-year-old host brother looked at one photo and asked, “That’s the Wall?” “You haven’t seen it?” I asked incredulously. “Once or twice,” was the reply, “but not recently.” Freedom of movement is so limited that people who don’t have the permits to leave their ghetto have no reason to even approach its walls.

A couple days ago I asked the International Women’s Peace Service (IWPS) landlord if he is still able to drive to work in Salfit from Hares, a village separated from Salfit by the settlement of Ariel and roadblocks and checkpoints. For now, he told me, he can drive there, but the checkpoint at Zatara is being made bigger. I said, “Yes, I know, it will be like the new checkpoints at Bethlehem and Kalandia.” “No,” he said, “the Bethlehem checkpoint is easy to get through.” Instantly I realized that he hasn’t seen the new terminals, because he isn’t allowed on one side of each of them. So he goes around the long way, through a huge valley that steers clear of Jerusalem, and ends up back in Bethlehem, in order to attend a conference on nonviolence. And the checkpoint in the valley, he says, isn’t so bad. He’s a well-connected man with ties to the Palestinian government, and still I know more about the institutionalization of the checkpoint structures than he does, at least on the physical level of having seen and experienced them. If you separate an entire population into small disconnected enclaves, it makes it difficult for people to organize against the magnitude of the system. This is not a new concept for the Israeli government. This is not coincidental.

And then there’s the less visible, or, for internationals like myself, invisible. I’ve been traveling north and south and all over the place for the past two weeks, and I found out only two days ago that nobody from the northern West Bank has been allowed south of Zatara checkpoint (in the center of the northern West Bank) for the past several weeks. 800,000 people in Jenin, Tulkarem, and Nablus cannot travel to Ramallah because of this Israeli closure. People like me can travel without knowing this, because our taxi drivers from Ramallah or Jerusalem can come north and bring us south. We never have to know, but the same is not true of my Israeli friend who is married to a Palestinian from Nablus. They were traveling back from Nablus to Ramallah after Eid Al-Adha, one of the biggest Muslim holidays of the year, and they split at the checkpoint so my friend could come meet our group in Ramallah while her husband twisted and turned through unpaved dirt roads to try to get home without being turned back at checkpoints. Or another man I know from Jenin who works at a human rights organization in Ramallah. He had gone home for the holiday, and it took him more than 5 hours to return to Ramallah. It should have taken about 2 hours, and that’s already taking into account the separation of land and roads due to settlement expansion. I asked him about his father, who I know is sick, and he told me the family has moved him to a hospital in Jericho, though none of them live there, because it’s the only place that different family members can go check up on him without too much hassle.

The division of the West Bank into tiny disconnected cantons is the most recent method of separation the Israeli government has employed, beginning in 1967 and intensifying continuously until today. But I’ve also been especially conscious these weeks of the more existential separation that still haunts people to this day – the loss of 78% of Palestine in 1948, the expulsion of more than two thirds of the Palestinian population, and the separation of families that have never been reunited. I’m not sure I’ve ever met a Palestinian who is able to have regular family get-togethers. Some of them are in the West Bank or Gaza, some in Lebanon, some in Syria, some in Jordan, Bahrain, Dubai, Russia, Venezuela, London, Montreal, Chicago, Houston… Everywhere but together.

I’ve been especially conscious of this dispersion these past weeks because Dunya and I are beginning a new project today that I wish wholeheartedly we had no reason to do. We will try to take kids from a refugee camp to their holy sites in Jerusalem, to the sea in Yaffa, and to the villages that their grandparents fled in 1948. We wish they could just go with their parents and grandparents, that they could visit the land, picnic on the land, build a new house on the land if that’s what they chose to do. But they have no choice. So we will go with them for a short visit, though it breaks my heart when people in the older generations ask us to call them on the phone from the villages so we can describe what we see and they can tell us where we are, what houses used to stand there, where the children used to play.

It breaks my heart when we talk about the project to other Palestinian friends and they ask if we can do the same with their children. It breaks my heart when I tell a 17-year-old friend about the project and she says, “I wish I were younger so I could come… But I’m not sure if I wish I were a refugee.” She just wants to come to the beach. Just to see the sea.

Sometimes my work with refugees, my work connecting Palestinians on either side of the Green Line, feels like a sloppy symbolic attempt to sew back together what my people have torn apart. Sometimes if feels like repentance. Except it’s not about me, and most Palestinians don’t particularly care about my identity as a Jew or as an American. It’s about power and trying to dismantle it. It’s about injustice and trying to fix it. It’s about my 17-year-old friend’s response to a question last week about what message Americans can take back to the U.S. from Palestine. “Revolution,” she said. “If all the people in the world overthrow all the governments in the world, we’ll have no problem living with each other in peace.”

Does Santa get through the checkpoint?

Huwarra checkpoint is the main checkpoint to the south of Nablus, and probably one of the worst ones that I have experienced in Palestine.

Every time I pass through, people are being humiliated in many ways: screamed at, beaten, detained, forced to wait for no reason, arrested, you name it. Some days it is open, some days closed. Some days women can get out, some days not and if you are from one of the refugee camps, you might as well forget about being able to get through Huwarra, even on a good day.

So approaching the checkpoint sometime around 4pm, we saw just what I feared; the checkpoint was crammed with people, all of them crushed in a mass trying not to get wet in what was a day of constant rain and bitter cold weather, as well as suffering the beatings and abuse of the soldiers manning the checkpoint. Having been stuck there before in a similar yet less intense version of this situation for at least an hour (but in good weather), I decided that we should just use our privilege as foreigners and just walk through the checkpoint. I had never done this at Huwarra, or any checkpoint, for that matter, but with the weather nasty and the checkpoint even nastier, I just had to do it. So we walked confidently (and inside quite guiltily) past the hundreds of Palestinians, who had been waiting there for hours, and flashed our passports to the soldiers there. They waved us on, but then changed their minds and said to check in with the officer at the end of the checkpoint. We went to him and he asked us the usual stupid questions;

Q: Did you get special permission to be in Nablus?

A: Sir, we were let through the checkpoint when we arrived.

Q: Where did you stay? A hotel?

A: Yes, at the Yasmeen hotel.

Q: Is it a five star hotel?

A: Sir, I have no idea how many stars it has, it is a good hotel.

And more like that; stupid questions asked by young boys with guns that have a slightly hard time mustering up the kind of racism and nastiness that comes easily when questioning Palestinians. After a very poor search of our bags, we passed through Huwarra. Just before leaving, I stopped when I saw that 3 or 4 young male Palestinians were being detained in a small area of the checkpoint. I turned around and asked the soldier that had just let us pass “How long have those boys been there? Why are they there?” The soldier said to me “They hit a soldier,” and made a motion like a slap.

This just made me so angry inside I can’t tell you. Myself and every other person I know that went through that checkpoint that day saw soldiers hitting and beating Palestinians. Of course, I’ve seen it many other times as well; activist friends of mine have been arrested for allegedly beating a police officer, which are just plain lies told by the police (even the Israeli judge in one case stated that he was “outraged” by the behavior of the police). It seems a logical axiom that if one is charged by the Israeli military for beating a soldier, that means a soldier assaulted you.

“They hit a soldier,” he said. So, in response to the officer, I mustered as much sarcasm as I could manage without screaming, and said “Well, that’s too bad,” and walked away (for more descriptions of what checkpoints are like, I highly recommend an article by Gideon Levy, Theater of the Absurd).

And so I left, angry, guilty, just plain revolted at the injustice and brutality of it all. If this was my daily life, what would I do with all these emotions? How would I survive?

Next was to arrange a ride to Ramallah, the next large city before crossing into Jerusalem. What followed was a crazed and dysfunctional process of getting either a taxi for the two of us or waiting until enough people trickle through the checkpoint to fill up a shared taxi.

While we were haggling over prices, we had a surprise; who shows up, but our friend who left hours before us! He had arrived at Huwarra at 1pm, and did not pass through until 4pm!! Even he had tried to use his passport to get ahead of the line, but to no avail; they told him to wait his turn, and that he did. Needless to say, he was happy to see us, and I could not imagine what I would be like mentally after 4 hours of being crushed in a sea of people, in that weather, while watching soldiers beat and abuse people the whole time.

He joined us in the shared taxi, but our travels had not ended yet! Off we went from Huwarra in the pouring rain and thick fog, which did slow traffic from its usual somewhat too fast driving pace, but as a lovely Christmas present to Palestine, the IOF had a few more hurdles to get past. Usually, the next manned checkpoint is at Zaatara, not too far down the road from Huwarra. But on this day, there was an impromptu “flying” checkpoint, as they are called, both before and after the Zaatara checkpoint. It usually consists of an army jeep/truck blocking the road with soldiers out waving people to stop or keep going.

Sometimes taxis alert each other ahead of time and they can be avoided, sometimes not. So, before getting to Ramallah we had to show our IDs and be assessed by soldiers at checkpoints three times. Each time is much like the other, the humiliating experience of being treated like possible criminal just for traveling in Palestine. And as awful as all these experiences were for me yesterday, it is nothing compared to what a Palestinian has to go through. My time here has given me the barest, most basic taste of what it is like, but I would never claim to ‘know’; in the end, I am a foreigner, and eventually, I will leave Palestine with my all powerful passport and white male privilege intact.

And then to Ramallah we arrived. After a walk in the rain, we got our things organized for the next leg of the journey, the crossing at Qalandia checkpoint into the ‘Greater’ Jerusalem area which the Apartheid Wall is annexing to Israel as we speak. Qalandia Checkpoint has always been another one of those nasty, abusive and in the past, makeshift checkpoints, and with the construction of the Apartheid Wall, Qalandia is out of control; blocks of cement, railing, piles of gravel and dirt, fencing, razor wire, sniper towers, and plenty of subversive graffiti, of course. Right next to this is the most surreal thing; where there was once a hill, the hill is no more, and a brand spanking new, shiny and gleaming terminal-like building has been constructed, along with a parking lot and a large sign with a picture of a flower, next to which is written in three languages “The Hope of Us All.” Myself and other activists who have seen this feel that it is only a matter of time until: “Arbeit Macht Frei” or “Despair all ye who enter here” are spray-painted in its place.

This is the new (improved�) Qalandia terminal, paid for by US tax dollars, of course, and it is a cruel joke. I don’t know which is worse, walking through a random assortment of concrete and steel while soldiers point guns treat you like dirt, or a spotless post-post-modern cross between an airport terminal and a sanatorium, with soldiers sitting behind bullet proof glass and yelling commands through a machine while they sit comfortably, as if you are some infected microbe that they dare not be in the same room with. The walls are complete with screens that say “welcome” and other signs saying “please keep the terminal clean,” and “enjoy your stay.” Who was it that designed such a cruel joke? This checkpoint is miles past the 1967 green line, well into Palestinian land, and no one has any possibility of ‘enjoying their stay’ while they are being humiliated, whether up front or by remote control.

So, do you think that that is it? Nope, one more checkpoint, a quick stop while taking a bus to Jerusalem. Everyone on the bus has the process down: lifts up their IDs, the border policeman comes in, looks at them, and then waves us on (on a good day of course). It was close to 9pm when we got to the hostel, a journey of 60 kilometers took about 5 hours (for Aaron, 9 hours) and we had to pass through 6 checkpoints in the process.

And people ask, when will peace come to the Holy Land? God only knows, when people are forced to live like this.

Nablus Region: Palestinian Farmers Protest Massive Settler Vandalism

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

From on Friday Dec. 23 untill Sunday 25 , villagers in Salem and Burin, in the Nablus region, will attempt to replant trees and tend their land near the settlements of Elon Moreh and Bracha and the Har Bracha outpost. The farmers will be joined by Israeli and international activists.

“We haven’t been here for five years,” said one of the farmers from Burin on Thursday, Dec. 15th, as they were taking a break from the plowing of their lands next to Har Brakha. “What do you mean?” another asked. “I haven’t been here since 1989.” “The last time I was here was with my grandfather” a third commented. But on this day, the villagers, accompanied by Israeli activists with Rabbis for Human Rights and ISM internationals, the people of Burin were able to plow their land and tend to their land and trees in peace, despite the attempt of a settler to stop the day’s work.

But on Friday the 16th, 140 trees in that very area were cut down, and on the 19th of December another 100 trees of Burin village were cut down by the settlers of Bracha. This is just one of many acts of property destruction, land theft, and violence committed by the Nablus area settlers who are able to act with impunity and without any significant response by the Israeli military, police or justice system for their actions.

On Friday Dec. 23 and Saturday Dec. 24, villagers in Salem, to the east of Nablus, will attempt to replant trees and tend their land near the settlement of Elon Moreh, joined by Israeli and international activists. All the farmers’ fruit trees in the area that the villagers will attempt to work in are gone, victim to settler attacks on Nov. 27, when 200 trees were cut down, and in October, when settlers burned 50 acres and destroyed more than 300 trees, according to the Israeli daily Yediot Aharanot. There have been ten such attacks in the past two years. Salem villagers have difficulties accessing 2,500 dunums of their land due to settler violence, and Israeli authorities have failed to provide adequate protection.

Where to meet in Burin: Sunday 8:30 AM by the Council building.

Where to meet in Salem: Friday and Saturday at 8:30 AM by the Council building

For more information call:
Mohammed Ayash 054-6218759 or 0522-223374
ISM media office 02-2971824
Arik Ascherman (Rabbis for HR) 050-5607034
The head of Burin village (Arabic only)052-2458857

Israeli Military Attacks Civilian Houses in Nablus

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

This morning, international Human Rights Observers based in the Nablus area witnessed the direct aftermath of what the Israeli military is calling an “arrest operation” – a path of destruction and houses destroyed by gunfire and grenades. To the Palestinians of the Al Maskew and Al Shabir neighborhoods of Nablus, it seemed more like collective punishment for sheltering the fleeing Hamas fighter. Contrary to media reports from the Israeli military, the people of the neighbourhood claimed that the dead fighter did not live in the houses that were attacked by the military.

According to eyewitnesses, at approximately 12:30 last night the Israeli Occupational Forces approached the Al Maskew and Al Shabir neighborhoods of Nablus, which are located close to the Askar refugee camp. A Hamas fighter, Amjad Hanawi had entered the area and was being pursed by the Israeli military. The IOF remained in the neighborhoods until 6 AM and Hanawi was killed at approximately 5:00 AM. There was extensive property damage to 3 apartment buildings, both the interior and the surrounding yards.

At 11:30 this morning, nine Human Rights Observers visited the homes and the families to determine the extent of the damage and get eyewitness accounts. According to them, the Israeli military entered the homes and forced everyone to leave during the night. The men at this time were naked and not allowed to put on clothes, whereas the women were forced to undress while they were outside. The military were attacking from two nearby houses, to the east and west of the buildings. This was clear from the large holes left from grenades shot from M-16 rifles into the apartments, which were at either an upwards or downwards angle, but level with the apartments. There was also damage from explosions which left a wide spray of damage, much like a grenade or fragmentation explosive of some type. Bullet holes were everywhere and all the windows were smashed. According to the families, the Israelis had emptied the homes and continued to fire explosive devices into them, causing extensive property damage in a form of collective punishment. According to eyewitnesses, this all occurred after the wanted man had been killed.

The wanted man had been shot by the Israeli military while jumping over a wall outside the buildings, after which a bulldozer approached and buried him beneath the wall. While doing this the bulldozer did extensive property damage to the surrounding houses.

The ISM condemns this blatant violation of International Law and human rights. The practice of targeted assassination is condemned by the international community, as is the principle of collective punishment.