Tag: Qeitun Checkpoint

After School in Hebron, A Journal – 6 boys detained by Israeli forces in 2 Days

5th December 2018 | International Solidarity Movement, Al-Khalil Team | Hebron, occupied Palestine [Updated December 6]

For two days running, Israeli occupation soldiers and Border Police ambushed young children aged 10-14 years after school in Hebron.

Tuesday, 24^thDec. 2 boys were detained at Salaymeh checkpoint after being ambushed by a group of soldiers sneaking around in gardens and through a garage before bursting out behind the boys who were standing in a driveway. The boys were not throwing any the stones but were just randomly grabbed by the soldiers as they ambushed them. ISMers were only meters away and security camera footage confirms that the boys were merely standing in the driveway at the time. Two of the boys were aged 11 and one 10. One can only imagine the terror young boys experience when suddenly kidnapped by soldiers of the occupying army!

A border policeman abducts a young boy from the street after ambushing children near Hebron School. (Photo Christian Peacemaker Teams)

The Israeli Zionist forces are renowned for their cruelty even to minors: imprisoning children as young as 12 through their military courts and prisons system in which there are no rights for Palestinians. The youngest ever Palestinian child prisoner was released just days ago after a three-year prison sentence from 12 to 15 years of age.

The inhumanity of Israel is fully understood by Palestinians growing up under occupation. Collective punishment and psychological cruelty through torture and macabre tactics such as withholding bodies of Palestinians who have been killed or died during imprisonment are universally understood by Palestinians and well documented by international as well as local observers/researchers. …and there is no justice system to protect Palestinians.

Imagine what goes through the mind of a 10-year-old child suddenly grabbed by an armed solder from an occupying army and dragged from his neighbourhood! Fortunately, the boys were released after being detained for more than an hour inside the checkpoint.

Today also (December 5), 3 boys were abducted aged 14, 11 and 9. The boys attend two of the local schools and were kidnapped from the street around 300 metres from Qeitun checkpoint. They were standing in the street talking about 3 metres from an ISM activist when they were ambushed by Israeli Border Police.

The two younger boys were released later today, but the 14-year-old was taken away. According to the headmaster of the Hebron School, Khalil Abu Sunaineh, the older boy could face up to 6 months imprisonment. The military court does not need to give evidence to support any accusation on the grounds that it is “classified information”. There is a 98% conviction rate.

The headmaster showed us pictures on the wall of the school hallway, over 70 pictures taken over the last two years show child arrests, tear gas, concussion grenades both inside the school and on the street outside. They are the tip of the iceberg. He has been at the school for 14 years!

A gallery of soldier invasions of the school, abductions, concussion grenades and tear gas in the school and on the street outside.

He also told us that the soldiers and border police sneak around in the middle of the night mapping the neighbourhood and planning their ambushes. We’d witnessed this ourselves during the day. It was creepy enough in the daytime seeing soldiers just walk around in people’s gardens, exploring every alleyway, entering apartment buildings at will and ascending to the rooftops. It must feel violating to live under these circumstances.

Israeli forces justify their actions because some Palestinian children throw stones at them. To the uninformed this may seem a valid argument on the surface. However, it’s important to remember that the Israelis are the occupiers and have absolutely no rights under international law to defend themselves from the people they occupy. They are the aggressors. They are not civil enforcement officers of the Palestinian community.

This argument also holds no water because usually in any specific situation the Israeli forces are the aggressors who initiate conflict.

Even if we accepted this erroneous argument, the children who were detained on these two days were not throwing stones. To detain, or arrest and imprison them, for what someone else has done at any time at all is unjust and a form of collective punishment.

What justification can there possibly be for concussion grenades, toxic tear gas (228 tear gas rounds and 51 concussion grenades were fired in the Salaymeh / Qeitun neighbourhoods in 15 school days between November 4 and November 27, 2018 (including 34 tear gas rounds in one day!))? [Statistics from Christian Peacemaker Teams] This is on top of the usual intimidation, child abduction and invasion of streets and schools by armed soldiers in residential neighbourhoods!

Examples of tear gas being used in the Saleymeh / Quetun neighbourhoods.

These are children! Such actions are totally unacceptable on minors.

Do such actions promote peace? Do they not actually sustain and deepen the inhumane occupation of the Palestinian people?

Do they not also inspire rejection of the immoral occupation, and provoke further resistance against such oppression?

Fortunately, Palestinians usually choose non-violent resistance rather than violence, leaving Israelis with the moral predicament of enforcing the immoral and illegal occupation and the international community with the shame of their inaction.

Addendum:

These are part of a much larger continual attack on Palestine’s future by targeting children and their education: The following links show the extent of these attacks in just one week of November and other articles by Palestinian and international commentators are given for reference:

First day in Al-Khalil

6th September 2016 | International Solidarity Movement, al-Khalil team | Hebron, occupied Palestine

Today was my first full day as an ISM’er in Al-Khalil (Hebron).

A regular part of our work is to monitor Israeli checkpoints beside schools in the mornings since the teachers ask for an international presence. Often there can be problems with violence between Israeli forces and Palestinian children. Another reason ISM is there, is to count the number of school children using the checkpoint, to see how many children are suffering from this daily stress, which sadly, is part of normal life under the occupation. The data we collect is passed on to NGOs who collects data on children in the whole of Palestine. It is necessary for children living in the H2 area to pass through this checkpoint to reach their school. The Palestinian children are often subjected to intimidation and harassment as they are searched in claustrophobic rooms within the highly militarized structures. This morning i was monitoring Qeitun checkpoint with two other ISM’ers.

Around 120 children, mostly boys, passed through the checkpoint in the first half an hour. There were clearly armed Israeli solders stationed in heavily armored towers overlooking the checkpoint, creating an intimidating atmosphere. There was an older Palestinian man encouraging the children to go through the checkpoint as a few of them were nervously waiting in front of them. In the midst of our counting of children we heard shouting from around the corner and saw a group of Palestinian children being chased by heavily armed Israeli border police, although we were in H1, out of Israeli jurisdiction. A few of the children thew stones towards the invading border police and before we knew what happened a soldier lobbed a stun grenade directly at the children. This grenade exploded a few metres in front of the children standing at an entrance to a junior school. I was down the street but the loud noise really reverberated through my body and sent my heart racing. It was the first time I had experienced this kind of weapon and moments after, I was still terrified. The grenade sent the children fleeing in all directions and one of them dropped his school bag. An Israeli soldier stole his bag and took it with him. As he walked past us an ISM activist asked him “why have you taken his school bag?’, the soldier muttered “to check it”. Of course this was a lie as they did not open it and I found it infuriating that heavily armed, grown men would steal the school bag of a child as some sort of immature intimidation technique.

Some minutes later few stones were thrown from the top of a building, neither us or the Israeli border police could see who was throwing them, but the border police responded with yet more stun grenades. One of the soldiers was incompetently rushing to throw so many that he missed one and it bounced off the building towards him- and it sent him scampering away. By this point there were very few children left in the street and they were hundreds of meters away from the checkpoint. But the altercation had clearly infuriated the border police and they began launching scores of tear gas canisters down the street at the remaining children. We were ushered inside a school by some teachers as we were very close to where the canisters landed. It was terrifying to hear the loud pop of the canisters launching and not knowing if they were about to land on top of you. They are heavy steel cylinders and a direct hit, especially on your head, would do some serious damage- never mind the gas that stops the children breathing and burns their eyes. In all we counted at least 6 stun grenades and 16 tear gas canisters used by the Israeli border police against the unarmed Palestinian school children. The teachers in the school told us that this was a regular occurrence and asked how they could teach students with this going on as it not only disrupts lessons and scares children in the school, but it also stops many children from attending in the first place.

It is clear to me that the soldier’s actions were not in self defense, as they had heavily defended battlements in which to remain in. Instead they choose to escalate the violence by attacking the children in order to assert their dominance and intimidate the children. My experiences of Al-Khalil thus far have proven that the occupation and militarization of large parts of the city are not for the purposes of ‘security’, as the Palestinians here are friendly and welcoming to all religions and everyone. Instead the soldiers aim to harass Palestinians and disrupt their way of life as much as they can, meaning that a normal childhood and opportunity to focus on their education is impossible.

By ISM-activist; “Hugh”

video: Border Police steals Palestinians schoolbag

VIDEO: “They look like they’re in a war zone, but what they’re aiming at is five-year-olds”

31st December | International Solidarity Movement, Khalil team | Hebron, Occupied Palestine

By 10:30 am on Tuesday morning of December 30, Palestinian children attending school near Qeitun checkpoint in al-Khalil (Hebron) had endured over forty tear gas canisters, multiple rounds of rubber coated steel bullets and stun grenades, and the arrest of a twelve-year-old boy.

Israeli forces fired down the road leading from the checkpoint to the schools, filling the street adjacent to the schools with a choking cloud of gas and preventing Palestinians walking through the checkpoint from continuing down the street. As it is exam season in al-Khalil’s schools, children were attempting to reach school between seven and eight am and leaving again between nine thirty and eleven. Israeli military forces kept up a sporadic barrage of fire from the time some children were still walking to school until after school finished, forcing anyone traveling in either direction to brave whistling tear gas canisters and the dizzying smoke which still lingered even after the shooting had halted.

Early in the morning, Israeli occupation forces grabbed the twelve-year-old near the checkpoint, accusing him of throwing stones. Eyewitnesses present at the scene denied the accusation. After they took the young boy away to the police station, Israeli army and border police advanced further down the road away from the checkpoint, heavily armed with tear gas, stun grenades, and the long rifles used for firing rubber coated steel bullets. Sometimes they fired systematically, setting off five or more rounds of tear gas at a time; at other times it seemed bizarrely random, as when a single border policeman would suddenly run up the street and fire off a tear gas grenade at the distant crowd of children.

In between assaults, when the Israeli military temporarily halted their fire, young boys kicked stun grenades around and tried to squash tear gas grenades with their shoes. Many of them were stuck, waiting behind and among the soldiers as lingering clouds of tear gas fogged the road in front of their school. Looking down the road from near the military’s position to where the tear gas was landing, one could catch glimpses of the impacts: a small child coughing, a teacher dodging the falling tear gas canisters.

Israeli forces advanced down the main road, standing menacingly across it and also occupying the corners of side-streets, aiming their rifles up towards nearby neighbourhoods. Some stood far down the street, partly hidden by a parked car, in the same location where Israeli border police had arrested a seventeen-year-old boy a couple of weeks earlier. “They look like they’re in a war zone,” one ISM activist commented at the scene, “but what they’re aiming at is five-year-olds.”

As some of the ISM activists walked home, travelling up through the souk (market) in al-Khalil’s Old City, they asked if the tear gas from the area around Qeitun checkpoint had reached all the way up to the shops. “Not too much today,” one shop owner replied. He asked how the activists were. After they gave a brief summery of their morning, he responded matter-of-factly: “there’s always tear gas down there.”

It is a fact of life in al-Khalil – one which perfectly illustrates the senseless, violent injustice so characteristic of the zionist occupation. This morning is only one of countless violent mornings and afternoons these children will face along their everyday route to school. Military assaults and checkpoints are as familiar to them as their daily assignments and schoolbooks. These repeated attacks expose the absurd lengths to which the Israeli occupation has invaded the lives of Palestinians, when even the road to school becomes a battlefield.

Israeli forces fire 29 tear gas canisters towards youths and schoolchildren in Hebron

19th November 2014 | International Solidarity Movement, Khalil team | Hebron, Occupied Palestine

This morning in al-Khalil (Hebron), clashes broke out in the Qeitun area starting between 07:00 and 08:00 near the Qeitun checkpoint. By 08:00 the group of Palestinian teenagers and young boys present had grown to approximately 100 individuals, since the school closed, most likely due to tear gas drifting inside. The large group of schoolchildren marched towards the checkpoint while chanting and shouting. Some of the boys threw stones at the checkpoint, though no soldier was either hit with a stone or injured.

The clash went on for one and a half hours, with Israeli forces firing many tear gas canisters at the children. Two ISM’ers present saw how a group of soldiers tried to ambush a group of children, seemingly in an attempt to arrest them.

An ISM’er present stated, “Suddenly five or six soldiers came running from an alleyway, the kids saw them in time, and fled. I yelled at them [the soldiers] that they should leave, and that it was only children.”

Overall approximately 29 tear gas canisters and one stun grenade were fired.

At around 11 am the soldiers were still stationed outside the checkpoint, aiming their guns down the street, even though no stone throwing youths were present.

Jewish holiday leads to large influx of settlers, zionist tourists, and Israeli soldiers

12th October 2014 | International Solidarity Movement, Khalil team | Hebron, Occupied Palestine

Today in al-Khalil (Hebron), as part of the Jewish holiday of Sukkot, thousands of settlers and Zionist tourists descended upon the city. The Israeli military presence in Hebron, which is already a large an oppressive part of everyday life, greatly increased.

Many tour buses lined up filled with Zionist tourists

Hebron is the only city in the West Bank where there is an illegal settlement in the heart of the city. It is split into H1 and H2, H1 under Palestinian Authority Control, and H2 under Israeli military control.

This morning, in both the Salaymeh and Qeitun neighbourhoods, the checkpoints designating the end of H1 were extended further into Palestinian territory.

The roadblocks moved further down in Qeitun.

The roadblocks moved further down in Salaymeh.

Israeli soldiers drove between Salaymeh and Qeitun, entering houses, hiding in alleyways, and aiming their guns at passing schoolchildren and other people in the area.

In the afternoon, the army presence was just as heavy, with children walking home past heavily armed soldiers.

In H1, Bab al-Zawiye (the centre of Hebron), Israeli forces partially closed the road to allow settlers and Zionist tourists through the checkpoint to visit a religious holy site.

Settlers entering their religious site in H1.

They were escorted by approximately 45 Israeli border police and soldiers. Several Palestinian shops were forced to close for several hours, to allow the setters and tourists to pass.

The Ibrahimi mosque and nearby checkpoint was also closed today, with all Palestinian shops in the area forced to close with it.

Addendum:

Opinion – redactional

Reports (Nov 2018)

Older reports on palsolidarity.org