Tag: Refugees

Palestinian, you are on your own!

Natalie Abou Shakra | Gaza 08

He said, “Your wife is beautiful, I want to sleep with her.” During the interrogation, they would hit us extensively. They prevent us from sleeping, urinating, drinking and eating. During my friend’s interrogation, they brought in his wife. They touched her breasts, her sensitive areas in front of him. They wanted him to admit to their accusations. Imprisonment by the occupation forces is the attempting to murder a resistant spirit… all that we have against their state-of-the-art weaponry .

Gilad Shalit “who turned 22 in captivity, will have been a hostage of Hamas for about 1,000 days,” writes Isabel Kershner on March 8th 2009, in the New York Times . ِAround 11,700 Palestinians resisting illegal occupation, including children under the age of 18 and elderly, are held hostage by Apartheid Israel, writes the history of the oppressed. Most of those detained, according to Ali ‘Olwan a lawyer at the Ministry of Detainees and Ex-Detainees Affairs in Gaza, have spent more than twenty years in captivity. These prisoners are held under inhumane conditions, says ‘Olwan, in denial of medical examination, no visits by their families and children are allowed, in addition to being subject to various torture techniques. Majdi, who is now 43, hasn’t seen his brother, Bashir, who has been in captivity since 1986, 23 years of age then. “My mother’s wish is to see her son before she dies. It has been 15 years that she last saw his face.”

After collecting information about you, they would break into your house one night. The Shin Bet would arrest you, take you into prison, remove all your clothes off. Sometimes with underwear, sometimes without. Undressing you is a must. Then, they begin the hakirah , which includes extensive interrogation… and hitting. They would then bring you clothes with an acrid smell, and begin to use their torture techniques. Have you heard of the shabeh ?

Ihab Bidir, 30, arrested by the IOF on the Mata’hin checkpoint in Gaza six years ago after being accused of affiliation with Hamas, was released on the 27th of January, 2009. Before his release by four days, Bidir, in his testimony, admitted that he was taken into a special division of the Naqab prison, called division 1, which is not under the jurisdiction of the Israeli Prisons Authority, but under the military’s control. He specified being accused as an “enemy combatant” and that the officer investigating his case denied him access to legal representation and an independent and impartial court claiming his file as “top secret” and that this was “not a legal matter, but entirely political.” He was released after spending four nights in division 1, in solitude. Bidir was clueless as to why he got to be placed in, and why he was later released.

The chair would be made of metal. A low seated chair, with a low back support. They’d tie your hands to the back, so that your spine would be inclined against the metal low back support. Being seated as such for hours, the pain resulting from the back, and the spine, would be intolerable. And, then, they would ask you to spread your legs wide open, and begin to whack your member- you would go insane!

After the Israeli Occupation Forces claimed withdrawing its troops from Gaza in 2005, while redeploying them, it stopped implementing administrative arrest codes, but begun placing the detained under the category of “enemy combatant.” This category was used by Israel in dealing with Hezbollah detainees. Prof. Peter Jan Honigsberg of the University of San Francisco School of Law writes that “enemy combatant did not and does not exist under international law,” that it was a “generic term until February 2002,” and that the US administration created it for the case of its detainees (Guantanamo Bay and Abu Ghreib) since it “circumvent[ed] the Geneva Conventions and the international human rights laws,” in addition, he continues, to “shelter individual members of the administration from being charged with war crimes.” Since January 18, 2009, after the 22 day genocidal attacks on Gaza, Israel has placed more than 20 Palestinian detainees under the category of “enemy combatant”, says Ali ‘Olwan, and the number is increasing, making each individual placed under this category unprotected by international law.

They would ask if you smoked, and then try to lure you into admitting into their accusations by allowing you a cigarette, or with food, water, or by admitting you to go to the bathroom. If you wet yourself, they would rub your body against the liquid on the floor and strike you. Did I tell you about placing detainees in refrigerators?

The Geneva Convention relative to the Treatment of Prisoners of War in its 13th, 14th, and 15th articles states that the detainees must be treated humanely, with no violence and “physical mutilation” in cruel treatment and torture, in addition to no offenses upon “personal dignity, in particular, humiliating and degrading treatment”, along with “free of charge medical attention.” In placing prisoners under an internationally unrecognized category such as “enemy combatant,” the state of Israel adds on to the growing list of crimes against humanity yet another heinous violation. Kershner in her article published in the New York Times, states that “in a small country where 18-year-olds are conscripted into the army complete strangers feel intimately connected to the Shalits.” On a land whose non-Jewish natives underwent ethnic cleansing genocidal wars since 1948, it is time for the world to stand in solidarity with and be “intimately connected” to the six million refugees worldwide, the remaining families of martyrs, those men, women and children burnt alive, those who became physically challenged, those who live below the poverty line, those who cannot have an education, those who are racially discriminated against, those who want no help in fighting for their right to live with dignity on their land, those who choose to resist, limited resistance against the largest nuclear power in the region. What Kershner also needs to realize is that Shalit is an illegal occupier, and that the 11,700 detained Palestinians have the legal right to defend themselves, their land against any occupier, or modern-day colonizer.

More than 11,000 of us are in there. Is Shalit-the-occupier more human than us?

1967: Abandoned and rejected

By Ahmad Shaheen | Guardian: Comment Is Free

I was born in a tent and I’m living in a tent, but I hope I won’t die in a tent.

I’m a middle-aged journalist and a human rights advocate. My children are grown up and college educated – three of them married with children. I’m far from them though, living with my partner in a desert refugee camp on the Iraqi-Syrian border. Through friends I managed to get word to my brother to phone me on a borrowed mobile, from a shop in our refugee camp in Gaza last week. I was describing my situation and he told me “you born in a tent and you will die in one”. I don’t know if his prediction will come true. So far I’ve been in Tanaf refugee camp for eight months and have still not received asylum from any state. Hundreds of Palestinian refugees are currently in the same situation, along Iraq’s western borders, living in tents.

I fled Baghdad eight months ago. Palestinian life there had become unbearable and incredibly dangerous. After the arrival of Anglo-American troops, we refugees were stripped of all rights, denied the renewal of refugee travel documents that had been customarily issued to us since the days of the monarchy.

Paperless and unable to leave, we were targeted by the death squads as an unprotected minority, and then a collective execution fatwa was issued against our entire community, some 40,000 strong who have been in Iraq since 1948.

Many of my friends were killed in perverse and cruel ways. My neighbour, Abu Adel, was murdered while trying to pick up the body of his son from the morgue. Others were killed by militia having their heads drilled with electric tools. I had previously tried to leave Iraq, spending 14 months at the Ruwaished camp on the Jordanian border, only to be refused entry.

Upon my return to Baghdad, I found that things had got far worse. One afternoon, the interior ministry’s Saqer force arrested me at a café, along with my 76-year-old neighbour, for the crime of sipping tea while being a Palestinian. Taken to an American-run interrogation centre, we saw young men blindfolded and tied, while others were hanging from the ceiling. Fortunately, the debacle ended after the ranking American officer took pity on my elderly friend and ordered our release. We were thereafter thrown in the street while curfew was on, lucky not to have been shot. This incident, along with a phone call ordering me to evacuate my house, convinced me of the need to leave at whatever cost. Nowadays, a tent shields me from the strong dust-storms of the Khamseen wind, while my house in Baghdad has been converted into a local militia office.

My first displacement occurred in the aftermath of what we call the setback, the naksah, of 1967. I was a 15-year-old teenager when the Israeli occupying forces entered Gaza, their megaphones blasting the order for all males between the ages of 15 and 60 to congregate in designated local schools. A vast campaign of random arrests began, and my family feared I would face the fate of other neighborhood youth and told me to escape. Through the desert and across the river, I fled the occupation to Jordan, separated from my family for ever; up until this day never allowed to return. I joined the ranks of the 400,000 displaced (naziheen), almost half of whom had already been refugees since 1948.

Here I am; six displacements later and four decades into my life. I am not that old, but I feel really tired. Stressed out by the last war, I now have diabetes along with high blood pressure. Everyone around me has been through hard times though, and we all share in the daily struggle for survival. The camp is overcrowded, intolerably hot in the morning and incredibly cold during winter nights, extremely flammable (only last month there was a terrible fire that destroyed some of the camp), and lacks most medical and social services. Nevertheless, a UN water truck arrives every other day and rations are distributed monthly (although they are not ideal for diabetics, consisting mainly of flour and sugar). Palestinian refugee volunteers from Syria also come to support us, and the Palestinian Red Crescent Society currently provides me with insulin.

Somehow, incredibly, we are still alive, but we are frozen in time, isolated and abandoned by the governments of the world. I am not a refugee by choice and I will hold forever to the right of return to my home. Nevertheless, until I am able to exercise that right, I want to live in safety and dignity somewhere, anywhere, away from the wretchedness of this desert and the carnage of Iraq. Yes, I was born in a tent but I certainly hope I don’t die in one.

Ahmad Shaheen (Abu Fadi) is a Palestinian refugee from the village of Al-Qubayba near Al Ramleh. In 1948 his family was forced out to Gaza. Since 1967, he has been displaced six times. Before moving to the Tanaf refugee camp on the on the Iraqi-Syrian border, he was a Baghdad based journalist and human rights activist.

Al Nakba Remembered

Palestinian children
Palestinian children
By Joharah Baker | MIFTAH

On May 14, 1948, Israel declared its independence. Although it is not unprecedented in history that countries gain their independence through war, either by conquest or by flinging off the yoke of colonization, there are few examples in history that match the circumstances under which Israel was created.

The Palestinians, the people at whose expense the Jewish state was established, have another word for Israel’s Independence Day – Al Nakba or The Catastrophe. In a matter of months, over 800,000 Palestinians fled or were expelled from their homes throughout Palestine. Hundreds of others were massacred by Jewish gangs in Deir Yassin and Ein Al Zaytoun as a tactic to terrorize people into fleeing. Villages were destroyed, people killed and homes left behind as horrified Palestinians fled the fighting between Jewish troops, Arab armies and Palestinian resistance groups, believing they would be allowed to return home in a matter of days.

That was not to happen. As Jewish troops continued to launch attacks against both Palestinian resistance groups and unarmed civilian populations, pushing back the much weaker and far less organized Arab armies, more and more people fled the battle scenes, crossing borders in the north into Lebanon and Syria, across the river into Jordan and into the West Bank and Gaza in the south. As the fighting raged on, little did the Palestinians, the Arabs or even the international community realize a deep-rooted problem that would prove to be one of the thorniest issues in the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, was in the making.

Still, even after the war ended and Israel declared its independence, the hundreds of thousands of Palestinians who had left behind their entire lives still believed they would be allowed to return home. Thinking they would only be away from their homes for a few days at most, people took the bare minimum, trudging across the borders with thin mattresses slung over their backs, children on their hips and the keys to their homes securely hanging from their necks.

The journey was to become the Palestinians’ worst nightmare. After months of sleeping in makeshift tents with whatever provisions they could scrap up or were provided them by their unexpecting host countries, the UN General Assembly passed Resolution 194 in December, 1948 which, “declared that in the context of a general peace agreement ‘refugees wishing to return to their homes and live in peace with their neighbors should be permitted to do so’ and that ‘compensation should be paid for the property of those choosing not to return.’”

And as history will later lend evidence to, this was just one of the many hypocrisies perpetrated by the international community and Israel against the Palestinians. Not only was the resolution disregarded by the fledgling Jewish state, it was swept under the rug by the West and the rest of the world. Fifty-eight years later, Palestinians across the board are asking for no more than for UN resolutions to be enforced as they so often are in other areas of conflict.

However, as it became apparent that the refugees would not return to their homes in Palestine, now either destroyed or inhabited by new Jewish immigrants, the world was at least obliged to deal with the disaster that had come into being. On December 8, 1949, UN General Assembly resolution 302 (IV) called for the establishment of UNRWA, the UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees. The agency has since provided homes, schools, food and work for the approximately 4.3 million registered Palestinian refugees throughout its areas of operation.

Now, 58 years later, the double standards of Israel – the self-proclaimed democracy of the Middle East – and the world at large have never been so stark. As Israel celebrates its day of independence, the Palestinians continue to languish in sprawling refugee camps in Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, the West Bank and Gaza under extremely poor living conditions and even poorer political horizons. The right of return for Palestinian refugees has been a “national constant” for the Palestinian leadership and people for over half a decade and a most serious sticking point for Israel, which claims it cannot allow the refugees to return to their prior homes for fear that this would sabatoge the demographic composition of its Jewish majority.

In addition to the refugee problem, Israel has little to be proud of when it comes to its neighbors, the Palestinians. Crammed into demeaning cantons, each city severed from the next, fighting off poverty, unemployment and international condemnation for resisting 39 years of Israeli military occupation, the Palestinians are clear proof that Israel is a country based on racism and double standards. As it oppresses, occupies and aims to annihilate the national cause of an entire people, it portrays itself to the world as a democracy and a peace-loving nation under fire.

Even Israelis themselves have truly come to believe this fallacy. On May 3, as Israelis marked the beginning of independence celebrations, Acting Knesset Speaker Shimon Peres said Israeli citizens can look back on their past with satisfaction. Peres was also quick to add the Palestinians into the mix as well.

“I turn, first and foremost, to our neighbors the Palestinians. This evening too we are proffering beautiful days of peace, the squeeze of a handshake of peace rather than a squeezing of the trigger,” he said.

After 58 years of displacement, expulsion and oppression, when will the world finally realize that the Palestinians have and continue to be on the receiving end of the gun?

Joharah Baker is a Writer for the Media and Information Programme at the Palestinian Initiative for the Promotion of Global Dialogue and Democracy (MIFTAH). She could be contacted at mip@miftah.org.

Israeli soldiers opened fire on a small group of children in Bethlehem’s Aida Refugee Camp

by Kristin Ess

Just over an hour ago Israeli soldiers opened fire on a small group of children in Bethlehem’s Aida Refugee Camp.
The Israeli occupying army entered the camp, as they do most days and nights, in jeeps,with their tanks rumbling on the side roads.

The Israeli soldiers were throwing tear gas into the camp, choking its Palestinian residents who could not escape from their homes because the Israeli military had imposed curfew on them. To leave ones home means arrest or death.
A group of Palestinian children protested the Israeli invasion by throwing stones at the heavily armoured jeeps and tanks. Israeli soldiers shot the kids.

One is dead. His name was Tariq Abu Jadu. Ambulances could not reach the camp. Two other kids are still in critical condition in the hospital. One is 15, the other is just 12 years old. A few people in the camp snuck out with the three to take them to the hospital. They live in a refugee camp in a Palestinian city which suffers from Israeli invasion after invasion.

The Israeli military government imposes curfew on them which deems attending school or living a free life impossible. This is now the 55th year of Israeli imposed horror on the Palestinian people.

Grown Palestinians must ask the permission of the occupying military government to leave ones own town. The Israeli government would not issue travel permits to the Palestinian delegation to attend the conference on the “peace process” in Britain.