Tag: Settlers

Illegal settlers and Israeli military attack Palestinian non-violent demonstration against settlement expansion

International Women’s Peace Service

8 January 2010

On January 8, villagers from the Palestinian village of An Nabi Saleh (population approx 500), located in the north of the Ramallah district, held its third demonstration in three weeks against creeping settlement expansion and land confiscation by the illegal Israeli settlement of Hallamish (also known as Neve Tzuf). According to the residents of the village, since the settlement was established illegally on land belonging to An Nabi Saleh in 1977, there have been repeated attempts to expand the settlement. In 2009, the village successfully challenged, in the Israeli courts, the expansion of the settlement fence to land immediately alongside settler highway 465. In the past month, however, illegal settlers residing in Hallamish colony have attempted to re-annex the land alongside the highway, which now divides An Nabi Saleh’s land. In this period, the settlers have proceeded to build a shelter structure for the purpose of a memorial, on the land, which includes a fresh water spring used by An Nabi Saleh farmers and shepherds.

In response to the attempts by the Hallamish settlers to re-annex the land, An Nabi Saleh residents commenced non-violent demonstrations and actions to oppose the settlement expansion in December 2009. Prior to the demonstration on 8th of January, actions were also held on 1 January 2010 and 26 December 2009. These demonstrations included the replanting of olive trees in the area annexed by the illegal settlers.

Around 120 residents of An Nabi Saleh were joined by Israeli anti-occupation activists and internationals from the International Women’s Peace Service and the International Solidarity Movement in a non-violent demonstration, marching to the land which the Hallamish settlers have attempted to re-annex. During the course of the demonstration, the residents of An Nabi Saleh successfully blockaded 465, the illegal settler highway, for more than two hours. Mid-demonstration, one section of the non-violent demonstration also broke off from the highway and successful reached the land re-annexed by Hallamish, tearing down the illegally built settler structure.

Both sections of the non-violent demonstration, however, were met with force by the Israeli military who deployed more than 17 jeeps and at least two dozen soldiers to the area. During the course of the two hour demonstration, the Israeli military proceeded to fire up to 100 tear-gas canisters, as well as firing rubber-coated steel bullets and live ammunition at the un-armed demonstrators. More than 20 residents of the village were injured as a result, including three who were hospitalized. Those hospitalized, included two people injured by rubber bullets, and one teenage boy who received a head injury when he was struck in the head with a tear gas canister.

Many of the non-violent demonstrators were also injured by rocks which were thrown by illegal settlers from Hallamish from the hillside below the settlement and above the demonstration. One IWPS volunteer narrowly missed being hit by one of the rocks thrown by the settlers.

Despite a large presence, the Israeli military did little to stop the illegal settlers’ violent attack on the unarmed Palestinian demonstration. In one instance, when the Israeli military did attempt to prevent the illegal settlers from descending the hill in order to reach the non-violent Palestinian demonstration, the illegal settlers also attacked the soldiers. For several hours after the conclusion of the non-violent Palestinian demonstration, settler youth repeatedly threw rocks at passing Palestinian vehicles on the road below Hallamish colony. On 9 January, the day after the non-violent demonstration, residents of An Nabi Saleh informed IWPS volunteers that more 100 olive trees had been cut down and burnt by the Hallamish settlers on the land that belongs to the village, which the settlers were trying to re-annex.

Twenty demonstrators injured in Nabbi Saleh

Popular Struggle Coordination Committee

8 January 2010

For immediate release:

As part of a recent surge in popular protest in the West Bank, about 300 demonstrators occupied and blocked the main road in near the Halamish settlement for over two hours. The demonstrators, twenty of which were injured by rubber-coated bullets, protested recent land grabs.

About 300 people took to the street today in the West Bank village of Nabbi Saleh, north-west of Ramallah, in protest of recent land grab by the adjacent Jewish-only settlement of Halamish. The protesters occupied and blocked the main street leading to the settlement, and amidst clouds of tear gas and whizzing rubber-coated bullets, managed to hold it for over two hours. A group of demonstrators also managed to reach the area that was recently taken over by settlers.

Settlers who came down from Halamish threw stones and shot live rounds of demonstrators. Soldiers who were present took no actions to stop them. Following the demonstration the army invaded Nabbi Salleh, where clashes ensued.

Twenty of Nabbi Saleh’s residents were struck by rubber-coated bullets, and dozens suffered from tear gas inhalation.

Bassem Tamimi, one organizers of the demonstration said that “For three weeks we have been prevented from reaching our land for because of the settlers who occupied it. In any reasonable place, we would be allowed to just drive them out by force, but they have the army on their side even though the law is on our side. Under the occupation we are not even allowed to merely protest”.

Demonstrations were also held today in N’ilin, Bil’in – where a journalist and a demonstrator were lightly injured, and in alMaasara where the army invaded the village.

Wave of arrests continue in Burqa village

7 January 2010

The Israeli army has abducted another young man from the northern West Bank village of Burqa. Muhammad Samir, 21 years old, was stopped outside the village by soldiers as he returned from his workplace in Tulkarem and arrested. Arrests and military invasions have surged this past month in Burqa, with Samir becoming the 22nd person taken since the beginning of December.

Samir was returning from his work at the Tulkarem offices of the Palestinian Authority at 10am yesterday morning when he was stopped at a flying checkpoint between Burqa and the neighbouring village of Bisaia. Upon checking his ID he was immediately place under arrest by soldiers. He was released from prison just two years ago, serving a two-year sentence from the age of 17.

The wave of arrests, primarily carried out in night raids on the village, have robbed Burqa of 22 young men in the past month alone. The village’s 4,000 residents sleep uneasily now, unknowing of who may be taken the next time the military comes. It is the standard story in hundreds of cases of its kind: young men, generally aged 16 or 17 and in their last year of school, arrested and charged with throwing stones at military jeeps when they enter the village.

International solidarity activists have initiated a nightly vigil in Burqa, joining local residents in keeping watch until the early hours of the morning in the hopes of documenting and de-escalating the violence of the night raids. During the invasions soldiers enter either by jeep or on foot, surrounding the homes of wanted people and preventing residents from leaving their home. Residents report extreme violence at the hands of the soldiers during invasions, with shots fired as the family is usually forced in to the bathroom for several hours and their home torn apart by soldiers, searching for weapons or other incriminating possessions.

Burqa has long been a target for Israeli Occupation Forces and its residents are no strangers to the senseless violence meted out by soldiers. The village itself became a training ground for Israeli soldiers preparing for battle in the 2006 war with Hezbollah, the village’s topography resembling that of southern Lebanon. Residents recall almost nightly invasions during the period, with soldiers storming the homes of families who were forced out in to the street, handcuffed and ID’d, only to be informed that they were participating in an Israeli military training exercise.

Atop the mountain overlooking Burqa sits Homesh, an Israeli settlement built on the village’s lands and evacuated by the military in 2005 as part of Ariel Sharon’s disengagement from 4 West Bank settlements and the 21 Jewish settlements in Gaza. Not that Burqa’s farmers have been permitted to recommence work on their lands – the area was declared a military zone following the settlement’s original evacuation, and so it has remained.

Nor has the evacuation of settlers from Homesh been maintained in the years following the disengagement. A campaign of reclamation, spearheaded by the extremist “Homesh First” organisation, has been growing ever since and has ensured a significant settler presence still active in the area. Despite the military’s repeated attempts to disperse the settlers, nothing has successfully prevented the Homesh First supporters from attempting to repopulate the area, particularly during Jewish religious holidays when settlers converge in their thousands on the site. Thus Burqa farmers’ goal of land reclamation is not just borne of the legitimate desire for vital lands to be returned to their legal owners, but also out of a real fear of resettlement of the site by ideological Israeli settlers.

Farmers of Burqa continue live under constant threat of violence at the hands of the settlers, vengeful in their attempts to lay claim to the stolen land. Over 5000 fertile dunums remain inaccessible to the Palestinian population. For the last two years the village has co-ordinated an annual trip to the contested area, re-planting and cultivating 95 dunums of land. Settlers have descended each time on the area soon after to destroy the farmers’ work, uprooting trees and destroying new wells built for irrigation. 25 dunums of the original 95 remain.

Settlers desecrate olive groves in Burin

7 January 2010

20 olive trees belonging to the Sufan family of Burin village were destroyed by settlers this morning. Burin, located in the northern West Bank, comes under frequent attack from the settlements of Yitzhar and Bracha enveloping the village.

Under the cover of dark, settlers entered the olive groves of the Sufan family home at around 3am and began chopping the trees. The attack is the third of its kind in the last two months, with the family losing 96 trees in November. The family’s home sits on the southern tip of the village towards the hill ascending to Yitzhar settlement, and bears the brunt of their violent neighbours’ attacks. It is the third attack of its kind in the last two months alone, with the family losing 96 of their olive trees in November directly after the harvest.

The Sufan family has experienced harassment from the settlement almost from the day of its construction in 1982, but the violence has peaked in the last three years, seeing settlers attempting to torch the home on several occasions, several rooms of which are still burnt and damaged. The family has been forced to equip every window in the house with strong wire fencing, in the hopes of protecting themselves when settlers descend on the property en masse, hurling stones at the house. Even the family’s livestock have come under attack.

Background:
Burin village is located in a valley directly between two mountains, colonised by two of the northern West Bank’s most extreme settlements – Yitzhar and Bracha. Burin’s 1000 residents have suffered greatly over the years, seeing destruction and arson of home and property, the slaughter of livestock and constant violence and intimidation at the hands of their neighbours. In addition to this, the village’s available farmland is under threat and continues to shrink, as Burin farmers abandon their lands, fearing the risk of harassment lest they be spotted by settlers and provoke an attack.

Yitzhar settlement is notorious for its fanatically ideological residents, the violence they inflict on neighboring Palestinian communities, and the extremist doctrines they espouse. Saturdays, the Jewish religious holiday of Shabbat, typically sees Yitzhar settlers roused to fever pitch zeal, wrecking havoc upon Palestinian villages unfortunate enough to live in its shadow. Settlers have frequently launched attacks with rocks, knives, guns and arson on Palestinian families and property in the area. In one of the most extreme act of terrorism students of the Yitzhar Od Yosef Hai yeshiva fired homemade rockets on Burin in 2008.

Not content with committing their own acts of brutality, Yitzhar rabbis are key players in incitement of targeted violence across the West Bank. Rabbi Elitzur from the same Yitzhar yeshiva published a book this November titled “The Handbook for the Killing of Gentiles”, condoning even the murder of non-Jewish babies, lest they grow to “be dangerous like their parents”. Rabbi Elitzur is vocal in his encouragement of “operations of reciprocal responsibility” such as the arson attack made on Yasuf mosque in November 2009.

Despite West Banks settlements’  status as illegal under international law, Yitzhar was included in the Israeli governments’ recent “national priority map” as one of the settlements earmarked for financial support. Construction has continued unabated in both Yitzhar and Bracha, despite the 10-month “freeze” announced in November. Yitzhar and Bracha also receives significant funding from American donations, tax-deductible under U.S. government tax breaks for ‘charitable’ institutions.

Abdallah Abu Rahmah: No army, no prison and no wall can stop us

Free Abdallah Abu Rahmah

January 6, 2010

To all our friends,

I mark the beginning of the new decade imprisoned in a military detention camp. Nevertheless, from within the occupation′s holding cell I meet the New Year with determination and hope.

I know that Israel’s military campaign to imprison the leadership of the Palestinian popular struggle shows that our non-violent struggle is effective. The occupation is threatened by our growing movement and is therefore trying to shut us down. What Israel′s leaders do not understand is that popular struggle cannot be stopped by our imprisonment.

Whether we are confined in the open-air prison that Gaza has been transformed into, in military prisons in the West Bank, or in our own villages surrounded by the Apartheid Wall, arrests and persecution do not weaken us. They only strengthen our commitment to turning 2010 into a year of liberation through unarmed grassroots resistance to the occupation.

The price I and many others pay in freedom does not deter us. I wish that my two young daughters and baby son would not have to pay this price together with me. But for my son and daughters, for their future, we must continue our struggle for freedom.

This year, the Popular Struggle Coordination Committee will expand on the achievements of 2009, a year in which you amplified our popular demonstrations in Palestine with international boycott campaigns and international legal actions under universal jurisdiction.

In my village, Bil’in, Israeli tycoon, Lev Leviev and Africa-Israel, the corporation he controls, are implicated in illegal construction of settlements on our stolen land, as well as the lands of many other Palestinian villages and cities. Adalah-NY is leading an international campaign to show Leviev that war crimes have their price.

Our village has sued two Canadian companies for their role in the construction and marketing of new settlement units on village land cut off by Israel’s Apartheid Wall. The legal proceedings in this precedent-setting case began in the Canadian courts last summer and are ongoing.

Bil’in has become the graveyard of Israeli real estate empires. One after another, these companies are approaching bankruptcy as the costs of building on stolen Palestinian land are driven higher than the profits.

Unlike Israel, we have no nuclear weapons or army, but we do not need them. The justness of our cause earns us your support. No army, no prison and no wall can stop us.

Yours,

Abdallah Abu Rahmah
From the Ofer Military Detention Camp

This letter from Bil′in′s Abdallah Abu Rahmah was conveyed from his prison cell by his lawyers. Please circulate widely.