Earlier today in Sheikh Jarrah, East Jerusalem, Israeli settlers attacked Palestinian residents and international solidarity activists, five of whom sustained injuries. The settlers were armed with stones and sticks. According to eyewitnesses, one settler was wielding a knife.
A group of approximately twenty Israeli settlers entered the neighborhood and began throwing stones at three women from the Ecumenical Accompaniment Programme in Palestine and Israel (EAPPI), hitting and lightly injuring each of them. Five Palestinian residents moved up the street towards the settlers in an attempt to stop the stone throwing, at which point the settlers began attacking them with sticks. According to eye witnesses, one settler then drew a knife and appeared to be about to stab Nasser Al-Ghawi, a local resident, when another Palestinian grabbed the blade of the knife to prevent the attack. The resident who intervened was then pushed to the ground and repeatedly beaten. He has been hospitalized, as his hand was lacerated by the knife blade, and he has suspected fractured ribs.
Settlers then left the area as soon as the police arrived. Nasser Al-Ghawi was arrested. None of the settlers were detained or arrested.
UPDATE: Mousa Abu Maria was released at 2am Tuesday morning without charge. He was not ill-treated or harshly interrogated. The PA’s involvement in the raid stemmed from a unfounded suspicion that Mousa was a part of ring of car thieves. Mousa was released after it was discovered they had apprehended the wrong person.
In night time raids on the houses of the organisers of popular protests against the Israeli occupation and the theft of Palestinian land, Palestinian police officers came in the early hours of this morning to arrest a number of Beit Ommar residents in collaboration with the Israeli occupation forces. Mousa Abu Maria was arrested at 01.40 this morning from his house by 8 heavily armed Palestinian police. Police attempted to arrest another member of the National Committee tonight, Younes Arar, but he was not at home. His wife and young children were left distressed and crying at the raid. Reports have been received that there are up to 20 police vehicles involved in the operation tonight.
These arrests are aimed at the community leaders who organise against the occupation, land theft, violations of religious freedoms and are supported by their communities. Yesterday the PSP and the National Committee of Beit Ommar carried out a sit down demonstration against the settlement expansion in Beit Ommar on Route 60 for the third time in a month.
Repairing the historic natural springs in Wadi QanaA group of internationals, including two ISM activists, joined supporters from Jerusalem and other parts of the West Bank in assisting the villagers of Qarawat Bani Hassan repair and rehabilitate the historic natural springs which lie in the nearby Wadi Qana. The springs which issue at the base of the wadi feed into a series of reservoirs cut into the stone, said to date from Roman times. From time immemorial they have been the source of water for those villagers without their own wells. Today the springs and their surroundings, a location of outstanding natural beauty, are the most important cultural heritage for the village.
Situated between Ramallah and Nablus, Qarawat Bani Hassan has the misfortune to be surrounded by a number of settler colonies, including Nofim, Yaqir, Revava and Kiryat Netafim. Settlers routinely trespass onto village lands and two weeks previously, in an act of deplorable vandalism, emptied sacks of cement and steel mesh into one of the Roman-era tanks. This followed upon the previous dynamiting of a nearby cave which, too, contained a natural spring and pool.
On this Friday the villagers and their supporters labored under a hot sun to clean out the reservoirs, build dry stone walls nearby and bring the site back to its original condition. They were interrupted twice by groups of settlers attempting to access the area. A confrontation was avoided only when the villagers returned to their work and ignored the presence of the intruders who, after a short time, returned to their colony on the overlooking hilltop. The presence of international and other observers armed with cameras undoubtedly deterred the settlers, on this occasion, from any further acts of vandalism.
Qarawat Bani Hassan is a village of approximately 4,000 Palestinians, located in the Salfit District. The village owns 9,684 dunams of land (approximately 2,421 acres) which includes the Ein Enwetef natural springs that serve the locality as a primary source of water for agricultural and herding purposes. Eighty-nine percent of this land is in Area C, under total Israeli control.
Newly planted trees in the al-Kurd yard in celebration of Land DayIn honor of Land Day, an upbeat group of local residents and school children gathered on Wednesday in front of the half-occupied Al Kurd home in Sheikh Jarrah. Neighbors, friends and supporters cleaned up the garden and planted olive trees. The conspicuous and unusual absence of both settlers and police contributed greatly to the positive mood of the day, although the ongoing threat of further evictions looms over the whole neighborhood.
The al-Kurd family live in the back half of their home, but were evicted from the newly built front partition in December 2009. The day’s actions were seen by many present as a sign of defiance against the illegal presence of Israeli settlers in the front part of the house, and against the imminent court proceedings which may be used to force them from the back half.
The day concluded with the usual Wednesday night community dinner, in which international and Israeli supporters join the local families for a shared meal in the street opposite the Gawi family home, which has been illegally occupied by settlers since August 2009.
Background on Sheikh Jarrah
Approximately 475 Palestinian residents living in the Karm Al-Ja’ouni neighborhood of Sheikh Jarrah, located directly north of the Old City, face imminent eviction from their homes in the manner of the Hannoun and Gawi families, and the al-Kurd family before them. All 28 families are refugees from 1948, mostly from West Jerusalem and Haifa, whose houses in Sheikh Jarrah were built and given to them through a joint project between the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) and the Jordanian government in 1956.
So far, settlers took over houses of four Palestinian families, displacing around 60 residents, including 20 children. At present, settlers occupy all these houses and the whole area is patrolled by armed private security 24 hours a day. The evicted Palestinian families, some of whom have been left without suitable alternative accommodation since August, continue to protest against the unlawful eviction from the sidewalk across the street from their homes, facing regular violent attacks from the settlers and harassment from the police.
The Gawi family, for example, had their only shelter, a small tent built near their house, destroyed by the police and all their belongings stolen five times. In addition, the al-Kurd family has been forced to live in an extremely difficult situation, sharing the entrance gate and the backyard of their house with extremist settlers, who occupied a part of the al-Kurd home in December 2009. The settlers subject the Palestinian family to regular violent attacks and harassment, making their life a living hell.
The ultimate goal of the settler organizations is to evict all Palestinians from the area and turn it into a new Jewish settlement and to create a Jewish continuum that will effectively cut off the Old City form the northern Palestinian neighborhoods. On 28 August 2008, Nahalat Shimon International filed a plan to build a series of five and six-story apartment blocks – Town Plan Scheme (TPS) 12705 – in the Jerusalem Local Planning Commission. If TPS 12705 comes to pass, the existing Palestinian houses in this key area would be demolished, about 500 Palestinians would be evicted, and 200 new settler units would be built for a new settlement: Shimon HaTzadik.
Implanting new Jewish settlements in East Jerusalem and the West Bank is illegal under many international laws, including Article 49 of the Fourth Geneva Convention. The plight of the Gawi, al-Kurd and the Hannoun families is just a small part of Israel’s ongoing campaign of ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian people from East Jerusalem.
Legal background
The eviction orders, issued by Israeli courts, are a result of claims made in 1967 by the Sephardic Community Committee and the Knesseth Yisrael Association (who since sold their claim to the area to Nahalat Shimon) – settler organizations whose aim is to take over the whole area using falsified deeds for the land dating back to 1875. In 1972, these two settler organizations applied to have the land registered in their names with the Israel Lands Administration (ILA). Their claim to ownership was noted in the Land Registry; however, it was never made into an official registry of title. The first Palestinian property in the area was taken over at this time.
The case continued in the courts for another 37 years. Amongst other developments, the first lawyer of the Palestinian residents reached an agreement with the settler organizations in 1982 (without the knowledge or consent of the Palestinian families) in which he recognized the settlers’ ownership in return for granting the families the legal status of protected tenants. This affected 23 families and served as a basis for future court and eviction orders (including the al-Kurd family house take-over in December 2009), despite the immediate appeal filed by the families’ new lawyer. Furthermore, a Palestinian landowner, Suleiman Darwish Hijazi, has legally challenged the settlers’ claims. In 1994 he presented documents certifying his ownership of the land to the courts, including tax receipts from 1927. In addition, the new lawyer of the Palestinian residents located a document, proving the land in Sheikh Jarrah had never been under Jewish ownership. The Israeli courts rejected these documents.
The first eviction orders were issued in 1999 based on the (still disputed) agreement from 1982 and, as a result, two Palestinian families (Hannoun and Gawi) were evicted in February 2002. After the 2006 Israeli Supreme Court finding that the settler committees’ ownership of the lands was uncertain, and the Lands Settlement officer of the court requesting that the ILA remove their names from the Lands Registrar, the Palestinian families returned back to their homes. The courts, however, failed to recognize new evidence presented to them and continued to issue eviction orders based on decisions from 1982 and 1999 respectively. Further evictions followed in November 2008 (Kamel al-Kurd family) and August 2009 (Hannoun and Gawi families for the second time). An uninhabited section of a house belonging to the al-Kurd family was taken over by settlers on 1 December 2009.
Demonstrators in An Nabi Saleh protest the theft of their agricultural land and the ongoing OccupationIn recent weeks there has been an escalation of Israeli military violence against the weekly demonstration in the village of An Nabi Saleh, which last week led to 25 injuries, as well as attacks on 12 homes and 3 cars. Despite this, approximately 100 villagers joined the demonstration on Friday and attempted to reach their land, much of which has been stolen by the nearby illegal settlement of Halamish. The Israeli army prevented the demonstration from leaving the village by surrounding it on all sides, and firing large amounts of tear gas and rubber coated steel bullets directly at the demonstrators.
The demonstration was preceded by a press conference in which representatives of the village spoke of the land they have lost, and the importance they attach to continued resistance against the occupation, as manifested in the nearby settlement and the attacks from the Israeli military. Following these speeches, the demonstration began, but quickly came up against a barrage of tear gas from Israeli jeeps which had moved into the village.
Soldiers illegally fired a number of tear gas canisters directly at the demonstration, aiming at the head or chest height of most participants. They also invaded a Palestinian home, and fired down into the central square of the village, where people were gathered near the mosque.
No serious injuries were reported, though a number of villagers suffered respiratory problems due to tear gas inhalation.
The hilltop village of An Nabi Saleh has a population of approximately 500 residents and is located 30 kilometers northeast of Ramallah along highway 465. The demonstrations protest the illegal seizure of valuable agricultural land and the uprooting in January 2010 of hundreds of the village resident’s olive trees by the Hallamish (Neve Zuf) settlement located opposite An Nabi Saleh. Conflict between the settlement and villagers reawakened in the past month due to the settlers’ attempt to re-annex An Nabi Saleh land despite an Israeli court decision in December 2009 that awarded the property rights of the land to the An Nabi Saleh residents. The confiscated land of An Nabi Saleh is located on the Hallamish side of Highway 465 and is just one of many expansions of the illegal settlement since it’s establishment in 1977.
