Israeli gunboats opened heavy fire at Palestinian fishermen in the northern coast of the Gaza Strip on Sunday morning, Palestinian security sources said.
Sources reported that the Israeli navy targeted a number of Gazan fishermen and their boats near Al-Sudaniya neighborhood north of Gaza, no injuries or damages were reported.
The Israeli warships frequently open fire at the coast of Gaza, targeting the Gazan fishermen and their boats.
The Israeli navy imposes tightened measures on the Palestinian fishermen and prevents them to sail more than 3 miles into Gaza regional water, what makes it difficult to find the good fish.
The Israeli Navy continues its aggression towards the Palestinian fishermen. Since the declaration of the “ceasefire” at least 5 fishermen have been injured by gunfire in the sea while another 5 have been reportedly injured on shore by Israeli shelling. 40 abductions have been reported (at least 2 fishermen abducted twice) and 17 “confiscations” of fishing boats About 10 fishing boats have been returned but with damages and equipment missing, and one hassaka was stolen again. Some of the latest incidents:
Wednesday, 20 May 2009
Some hours before hundreds of Palestinian fishermen and supporters demonstrated in the sea, Khalil Abdullah Al Najar and his brother Ibrahim Abdullah Al Najar were abducted off shore of Rafah, while they were trying to collect their nets. Their hassaka (small fishing boat) along with the paddle and the net for sardines have been stolen. The two brothers were later released.
Khalil has been abducted again along with other 2 of his brothers and one of his cousins on the 25th of March while fishing in a shanshula boat. The 4 fishermen were later released and after several days and the intervention of Al Mezan Center for Human Rights, the shanshula boat was also returned but without the motor.
Another brother, a cousin and an uncle of the 2 fishermen are prisoners in Israeli jails, they have been tortured and have been deprived of their right to be visited by their families.
Tuesday, 26 May 2009
According to their testimony, Nahed Hassan Abdel Rahman Hassouna (41) and Mohammed Abdel Rahman Hassouna (45), at about 6.30 am, while they were fishing about 200 meters from the Rafah shore and about 3 km from the Egyptian border, they were approached by a zodiac of the Israeli Navy. The zodiac started to go around the hassaka. The Israeli soldiers ordered the Palestinian fishermen to leave their nets and gave them a cable to pull the small fishing boat towards a bigger gunboat. The 2 fishermen were ordered to take off their clothes, jump in the water and swim to the bigger Daboura gunboat. When they arrived they were handcuffed and blindfolded by the Israeli soldiers who took them along with their hassaka to Ashdod port.
According to the testimony of one of the 2 fishermen, the Israeli security officer asked them to collaborate with the Israeli military, to become spies. The fishermen refused. The reply of one of them was that he doesn’t know anything and he only works from the sea to his house. So the Israelis accused them to have reached the Egyptian borders, something that the fishermen denied. Later, at about 6.45 pm they were released but their hassaka remains stolen along with the paddle.
The fishermen told the ISM Gaza Strip volunteers that this is the worst year for them ever and that the only thing they want is to survive and live with security.
The same night of 26th of May, at about 11 pm, another brother of the Najar family, Youssef Abdullah Al Najar ( who was also abducted on the 25th of March ) was attacked again by the Israeli Navy. According to his father Abdullah Khalil Abdullah Al Najar, the boat owner, Youssef was fishing in a felouka boat (see photo) when he was approached by an Israeli gunboat which started to make circles around the fishing boat. The waves made the felouka turn upside down and the fisherman lost part of his equipment: a 9hp 5 KW generator, which cost when is used 5,000 NIS, but it cost 8,000 NIS to buy a new one. And 2 projector lights 400W (see photo) which cost 100 US $ each.
Wednesday, 27 May 2009
The next morning, approximately in the same area, another felouka (see photo) was attacked in the same way, and was turned upside down, and the boat owner Jamal Bassel lost a 10hp 5KW generator that costs about 1,000 US $. Also 2 of his projector lights were damaged and it will cost him about 100 to 150 NIS to fix each one of them. According to him, one of the fishermen in the felouka was lightly injured during the incident when the paddle hit him at the chest.
In another area, in northern Gaza Strip, Zaki Taroush (45) and his son Zayed Zaki Moustafa Taroush (17) were fishing at about 200 m south of Wafa and about 600 m from the coast. At about 6.00 am they were approached by 2 Izraeli zodiacs who opened fire around the hassaka. Zaki Taroush tried to escape but on of the zodiacs blocked it’s way. The Israeli soldiers told the Palestinian fishermen to go west. Zaki replied that they were fishing in an allowed area. But the Israeli soldiers ordered him to stop talking and go west. Zaki saw another hassaka forced to go west, with Jihad As Sultan and Mohammed Ahmed Abou Warda. Zaki was forced to paddle his hassaka for about an hour and a half till he reached a buoy marking the borders. He was then forced to strip completely naked and then jump in the water and swim for about 50 meters to an Israeli gunboat. There him and his son were blindfolded and handcuffed. In fact Zaki was blindfolded twice and very tightly something that made him hurt. He was given clothes and his son a blanket. He was brought to Ashdod, examined by a doctor and made sign a paper that his health was OK. He was then taken for interrogation and he recognized the same officer that has interrogated him before. [Zaki Taroush, with another of his sons, were abducted on the 13th of March. They were later released but their hassaka has been confiscated for almost 2 months, and it was returned a couple of weeks ago, along with 8 other hassakas, through the Karem Abou Salem crossing. The fishermen had to pay about 150 NIS for the transportation of the hassakas back home. Zaki has also lost a house that has built for his sons and it was bulldozed by the IOF during the recent war]
Zaki Taroush was interrogated about an incident that happened on the 13th of April and the Israelis claim that it was an attack from the Palestinian armed resistance. It happened in the area that usually Zaki is fishing. He told them that he wasn’t there that day but they didn’t believe him. He was trying to explain that he couldn’t possibly be there because his hassaka was still “confiscated” by the Israeli Navy. The Israelis told him that he has to be responsible for his area and not to worry because they will protect him. He replied that he can’t give them information because that will make him spy for all of his life and finally he will be killed by the resistance. He cannot work for them and he has to work to bring food for 10 people at home. They Israelis asked him to keep in touch with them. They asked for his mobile number, and said that he couldn’t remember. Then they found his house number and they called and put him to speak with his other son. At about 7 o’clock they were all released.
Jihad As Sultan (46) had a very similar story to tell. The only difference is that he was accused to cross the Israeli borders. The Israelis shot the balloons that were holding his nets and he lost them, which makes a loss of 1,000 US $, but he estimates the total loss of his fishing property up to 5.000 US $. He was also asked to work for the Israelis. They said that if he wants to work in this area he has to work for them. He was also given a vague sketch [see photo] showing roughly the areas that the Palestinian fishermen are allowed to fish. While he was in custody he managed to see a lot of the nets stolen from the Gazan fishermen. It was the third time that Jihad was abducted by the Israeli Navy. The first time was 9 years ago and the second, last August.
Note: ISM Gaza Strip volunteers, in the evening of 28th of May, while they were heading to Sudaniya to meet the Taroush family, they witnessed Israeli gunboats open fire towards Palestinian fishing boats. The attack was obvious as the Israelis were also using tracer bullets. During the meeting with the fishermen, the attack has been intensified and the Israeli Navy used also shells.
They worked for years for Israeli companies. For years, they paid their taxes and social insurance contributions in Israel in compliance with Israeli labour and fiscal law. But they also had accidents at work suffering serious and invalidating injuries in Israel’s factories, building sites or fields.
Until the period following the Oslo agreements, more than 80,000 Palestinian workers left Gaza every morning, arriving at the Eretz border crossing at 4 a.m. in order to be on time for work in Israel; they returned to Gaza after 6 p.m. dead tired but ready to start again the next morning. Progressively during these years, Israel closed its border crossings for people and goods, including Gaza workers, who were in part replaced by new poor Jewish immigrants but above all by Asian and Romanian workers.
Today, because of the Israeli siege of the Gaza Strip, more than 5,000 of those Palestinian disabled workers no longer receive their disability allowances: the transfer of insurance payments for invalidating injuries as well as retirement entitlements were stopped in January 2009 because Israeli Banks suspended all their transactions with banks in the Gaza Strip.
This is another aspect of the siege of Gaza that, for over two years, has continued to stifle the civil population, oppressing them through a collective punishment in which children, women, elderly people and men are deprived of food, fuel, medicines – which are allowed to enter the Strip, through the closed border crossings, only in few days per week and for few hours per day – and in which many hundreds of Palestinian patients have died and continue to die because of the lack of medical cares as well as a lack of those permits issued by the Israeli Authorities allowing them to go to hospitals abroad for treatments.
After the recent ‘Cast Lead’ aggression, that caused the death of more than 1,400 people – mostly civilians and children, and with more than 5,000 Palestinians from the Strip injured by white phosphorus bombs and unconventional arms- this decision represents an umpteenth insult that worsens the ongoing desperate situation of human rights and legality in Gaza. But as the saying goes: there are no limits to the worst.
And so, the worst has arrived with the news released by the Al-Mezan Center for Human Rights (http://www.mezan.org/en/), reporting that a private Israeli law firm is seeking power-of-attorney for Gaza residents entitled to Israeli national insurance allowances but who cannot receive them because of the siege: these Israeli lawyers would personally manage the transfer of the money but they would demand an undetermined percentage of the insurance allowances.
A practice of clear profiteering, and a fraud.
A further violation of legality, denounced the Al-Mezan Center that, in cooperation with Adalah – the Legal Center for Arab Minority Rights in Israel – delivered letters to the Director of the Bank of Israel, the Director of the National Insurance Institute of Israel and the Israeli Minister of Finance, demanding the payment of the indemnities owed to disabled Palestinians, and launched a legal campaign through a petition – still to be defined – to be submitted to the Israeli High Court in order to demand the unconditional transfer of the accrued allowances entitled to Palestinians in the Gaza Strip.
This practice also represents an explicit form of racial discrimination, as affirmed by Al Mezan lawyers, since Israeli counterparts continue to receive their insurance allowances and Palestinians in Gaza have the same right.
These people are entitled to receive their allowances without any cuts: those workers, in fact, were obliged to pay insurance and taxes from when they took up their work right up to the date of their injury, in the same way as all Israeli workers.
After they were injured, they submitted requests to the insurance institute to receive their disability allowances in accordance with the Israeli National Insurance Law. Each request was assessed by a medical committee, which approved the nature and the size of the disability allowance and confirmed that it was as a result of a work injury. In some cases, the disability amounted to 100%. Some of these disabled people have been receiving their insurance allowances since 1978. Then, the Bank of Israel decided to suspend all transactions with all banks in the Gaza Strip, including the Bank of Palestine.
The siege and the closure of Gaza continue and the International Community once again demonstrates its powerlessness and complicity with the illegal policies of the Israeli Government. The International Community is not able to operate for the respect of minimal humanitarian rules, while the United Nations continue to denounce the lack of freedom of movement for humanitarian goods: John Ging, UNRWA Director, affirmed that it is not right to define Gaza as an open-air prison since even in prisons there is food. For now, Palestinian disabled people have not received their retirement and insurance allowances and the military occupation and expansion of settlements continues in the West Bank.
Luisa Morgantini is the Vice-President of the European Parliament
In most of the world, May 1st is a day of international labor solidarity. It is a day of joy as workers picnic together with their families and celebrate the achievements of one of the most phenomenal movements of the 20th century.
It is fitting, then, that the Free Gaza Movement chooses May 1 to announce the launching of the HOPE FLEET TO GAZA. We are leaving on June 1 as an act of solidarity with the Palestinians, a people who have been massacred, terrorized and suffocated by the Israeli military.
We sail again to break Israel’s blockade of 1.5 million civilians, 80% unemployed because of Israel’s draconian siege. “I believe the Israeli government policies are against international law, against human rights, against the dignity of the Palestinian people,” said Mairead Maguire whose efforts for a peaceful solution to the violence in Northern Ireland earned her the 1976 Nobel Peace Prize. “And I feel grateful to be able to go again on one of these boats to visit the people of Gaza.”
The Free Gaza Movement will use the Free Gaza as the lead vessel in the flotilla. In August 2008, it was the first boat to dock in the Gaza port in 41 years. The movement intends to donate it to the fishermen who labor every day to make a living under the gunboats of Israel.
The Dignity will carry Mairead as well as two other high-profile passengers, 84-year-old Hedy Epstein, a holocaust survivor and Cynthia McKinney, former Georgia Congresswoman and candidate for U.S. President under the Green Party. McKinney was on the Dignity when it was rammed three times by the Israeli navy on December 30, 2008 when they tried to sink the small sturdy yacht.
“We cannot let Israel’s threats and aggression deter us. To do so would give in to violence and concede that might is stronger than right. To do so would turn our backs on our brothers and sisters in Gaza who have been waiting far too long for the international community to stand up to this injustice,” said Huwaida Arraf, one of the delegation leaders on the Hope Fleet.
Our boats are a part of a larger flotilla making its way to Gaza loaded with humanitarian aid and building supplies such as generators and electronic equipment for hospital emergency machines. The people of Gaza need cement and lumber and PVC to rebuild their shattered infrastructure, and Israel refuses to allow anything into the small enclave except for food and some medicine.
“The Palestinians don’t want hand-outs from the international community. They want their lives back. They want their human and civil rights. They have a great labor force wanting to rebuild their communities. They are perfectly capable of that if their borders, including the sea border, were open,” states Lubna Masarwa, another delegation leader of this flotilla and a passenger on board the rammed Dignity.
