Tag: Tear-Gas Canister

Israeli military beats and arrests journalists, suppresses Kufr Qaddoum demonstration

By Marshall Pinkerton and Alma Reventos

18 August | International Solidarity Movement, West Bank

On Friday, August 17, 5 were injured and 8 arrested during the weekly protest in Kufr Qaddoum. Israeli soldiers fired tear-gas canisters, rubber-coated steel bullets, and beat protesters with wooden sticks. The village experienced an unprecedented amount of violence during the peaceful demonstration as the village was surounded and invaded by over 100 Israeli occupation forces, leading to several broken arms, the arrests of participants, including 6 journalists, and the asphyxiation of a 60 year-old bystander.

Journalist beaten and arrested by Israeli soldier

Those arriving from outside Kufr Qaddoum were forced to travel around flying checkpoints, posted along the main roads used to reach the village, which would prevent them from their right to participate in the democratic protest.

“Something felt strange about this morning,” Morad Shtayi, Popular Struggle Coordination Committee representative for Kufr Qaddoum said.

Before the demonstration at 11:30 a.m., Shtayi and several other men heard that 14 soldiers had entered houses under construction from the east, where the protest was due to take place.

“We began shouting at the soldiers until they left,” he says.

The demonstration began per usual at 1:15 p.m., with protesters marching down the road leading to Nablus. An Israeli bulldozer was present on the road, with over 30 border police, police, and soldiers standing on the hill to the North. After 15 minutes, Israeli forces descended on the village from the North, firing tear gas and rubber-coated steel bullets. Soldiers also began climbing up the valley from the south, followed by several military jeeps and the bulldozer.

“Protesters fled into the village to seek safety, as they faced tear gas canisters and rubber-coated steel bullets shot from distances of less than 10 meters,” solidarity activist Alma Reventos recounts.

Shtayi said witnesses reported soldiers firing live ammunition in the air as they entered the village in search of protesters.

The bulldozer pushed into the village, causing protestors to run head over heels.

Two Palestinians were arrested by border police, Qassam Aahi, 17, and Abdallah Awni. Israeli forces also arrested 6 Palestinian journalists for reporting on the demonstration; Jaafar Shtayi (Associated Free Press), Nidal Shtayi (Chinese Press), Faris Faris (Palestine Today), Bakir Abd al-Haq (TV Nablus), Odai Qudoomi (B’tselem), and Noah Qudoomi (Alfajir Tulkarem). Among the 6 journalists arrested, 2 were beaten, with Jaafar Shtayi suffering a broken arm. The journalists were released several hours later under the condition that they face imprisonment if they attempt to document the demonstrations in Kufr Qaddoum again.

In addition to the arrests, 2 Palestinians were beaten and a 60-year-old woman fell unconscious after border police repeatedly fired tear-gas inside the village. Rani Suliman Ali, 30, had his arm broken and was kept for a period from seeking medical treatment by Israeli checkpoints outside of the village. Mohannad Shtaiw, was beaten on the back with wooden sticks, and taken to Qalqiliya hospital. Israeli forces finally left the village at 3:30 p.m. with those arrested.

The purpose of the weekly demonstration in Kufr Qaddoum focuses on the closure of the main road that connects the village with Nablus. The road, which passes alongside the nearby illegal Israeli settlement of Kedumim, was closed to Palestinian access. As a result, the journey to Nablus has increased from 15 minutes to 40 minutes. This has resulted in hardships because many residents travel daily to Nablus for work, studies, or health care. Kufr Qaddoum has also lost 4000 dunums of land to the 5 illegal Israeli settlements that surround the village. Farmers seeking to reach their lands face threats, attacks, and arrests. Some of the Palestinian-owned agricultural lands have been declared ‘closed military zones’, and Israeli settlers regularly burn them. This demonstration follows 2 weeks in which several young men were arrested from Kufr Qaddoum during night raids by Israeli forces.

Marshall Pinkerton and Alma Reventos are volunteers with the International Solidarity Movement (names have been changed).
Video and pictures taken from www.facebook.com/AlMasira.KufurKaddom

Asira al-Qibliya: terrorizing settler attacks

By Saffron

6 August 2012 | International Solidarity Movement, West Bank

Armed Israeli settlers reinforced by the Israeli military regularly assault the villagers if Asira al-Qibliya. The settlers come from nearby colonies built in violation of International law, raid Asira al-Qibliya, throw stones, and shoot live ammunition.

The illegal settlers often enter Asira al-Qibliya, scream and knock on doors and windows simply for the psychological terror impact it has on the residents. At the same time, wheat and farmland is burned, olive trees are uprooted, and vital farmland is annexed by the illegal Israeli settlement of Yitzhar, making it difficult for Palestinians to secure a livelihood.

These threats have become a part of daily life in Asira al-Qibliya, a village located in the northern West Bank.

“A culture of fear.” This is how Nabila Saleh, a resident of the village, sees it.

“I never sleep more than a couple of hours each night. I jump at every sound,” says Nabila, “that is the way it is. Everybody fears a settler attack, even if they have not yet been attacked directly themselves.”

Nabila sits in her living room. Instead of glass panes in the windows are metal grids. This is the physical memory of a settler attack in November of last year, when settlers broke the windows of the Saleh’s and their neighbours’ homes, and the Israeli army followed by shooting tear-gas directly into the houses.

As she talks, Nabila’s children curiously creep into the living room. The youngest is especially shy. Nabila explains how the children of the village tend to be afraid of strangers. Many parents are afraid of letting their children go out and play, says Nabila. On Saturdays, the day of the Jewish Sabbath, when settler attacks are most likely to occur, hardly anyone dares to go out at all.

As Nabila is talking, she is suddenly interrupted by a whistling sound. The children immediately react by crying, “Jesh! Jesh!” – “Soldiers! Soldiers!”

Asira al-Qibliya has developed its own alarm system: when soldiers appear, the villagers warn each other by whistling. Nabila says she will instinctively jump at the sound of a whistle, even while doing her shopping in the city.

From Nabila’s roof, an Israeli military jeep and a group of soldiers are visible on a nearby hill where Yitzhar colony is located. Whistles and shouts of “jesh!” resound through the village.

The appearance of soldiers has become a prelude to a settler attack. Settlers do not attack or even enter the village alone. They arrive in groups and are often escorted by the military.

This time, it is a false alarm. After a while, the soldiers withdraw to a military base in the settlement. Asira al-Qibliya breathes a sigh of relief. But it is a short respite.

One of Nabila’s neighbours explained how only 15 meters from his family’s front door, a 22 year-old resident, Nimer Asaira, was shot in the head by a settler during an attack only one month ago. Miraculously, the young man survived, but lost his hearing. During the attack, the armed settlers were protected by the army.

The 20 year-old son of this neighbouring house witnessed the shooting, and helped to carry away Nimer as he bled. Since then, the young man has been sleepwalking. He has been in touch with a representative from Doctors Without Borders, who diagnosed the sleepwalking as a symptom of trauma and insisted that he be treated in Tel Aviv, where he is now receiving therapy.

“Of course, that is good for my son,” says his father, “but still, he is only one person. The entire village is traumatized.”

Altogether, the Yitzhar colony has annexed one third of the land belonging to the villages south of Nablus. Approximately 2 years ago, 50 dunums of the area Khusfe, farmland stretching from Asira al-Qibliya to the Huwara checkpoint, was annexed, burnt, and cleared by Yitzhar settlers.

Two times, villagers replanted their land, but the third time, the Israeli army declared the area a Closed Military Zone (CMZ), and prohibited the villagers from entering their land. The fields are still a CMZ, but now Israeli settlement buildings have been erected on them.

“I am very afraid,” says Khadra Abdelkarim, another resident of Asira al-Qibliya, “and my 6 children are very afraid. It is hard for them to focus in school.”

She recounts a recent nighttime settler attack, wherein a group of settlers knocked on doors and attack whoever would answer with pepper spray.

Khadra’s husband sums up the different rationales of the settler attacks. The settlers come to burn wheat and uproot olive trees in order to destroy livelihoods. They come on the occasion of Jewish holidays, the annual ones as well as the weekly sabbath. They come for retaliatory ‘price-tag’ attacks: if a settler is attacked or threatened anywhere in the occupied West Bank, or if the state of Israel is reconsidering settlement policy, Palestinian villages are forced to pay the price. Most importantly, they come to create unease among the Palestinian villagers.

“To disturb the peace,” says Khadra.

“So show me the meaning of the peace process? The more peaceful we are, the worse we get attacked. Everything has gotten worse since Oslo. If this development continues, the settlers will be in my bedroom within a year.”

Saffron is a volunteer with the International Solidarity Movement (name has been changed).

 

Nablus: night raids and arrests

By Jonas Webber

30 July 2012 | International Solidarity Movement

Five Palestinian men were arrested by the Israeli Occupation Forces (IOF) in a night raid inside the old city of Nablus on Saturday, July 28. Tear gas and sound bombs were used against families and civilians protesting the arrests. 19 young men suffered asphyxiation and were taken to hospital. Israeli soldiers remained inside the city until 6 a.m. terrorizing residents.

A Palestinian woman walks through the destroyed home of the Kharuf family | Team Palestina & Free Gaza

Military incursions in Nablus, which is located in Area A and therefore under Palestinian military jurisdiction, are breaches of the Oslo Agreement, but nonetheless occur regularly. As always in occupied Palestine, human rights and agreements take the back seat to Israel’s political desires.

Among the families who were particularly afflicted by the night raid was the al-Kharuf family. At 2 a.m. their home was attacked by Israeli soldiers shooting tear gas at the 9 inhabitants, 5 of whom are children under 12 years old. The children were terrified by the attack and have now been sent to stay with relatives outside the city. An elderly woman had to go to the hospital after suffocating from the tear gas.

The IOF entered the house, where they seized Walid Kharuf. He was questioned on the whereabouts of his brother Omar and was severely beaten. When Walid claimed he did not know where his brother was, he was threatened by the commanding officer, “if you are lying and I find you brother here, I will destroy the house.”

The Kharuf home was turned upside down in the search for Omar, who was eventually found. After arresting the 23 year old young man, Israeli soldiers ordered everyone outside while they applied a bomb to one of the walls in the house. The blast that followed tore a hole in the house and devastated the room in which it was placed.

A Palestinian man looks into a wardrobe of the home of the Kharuf family after Israeli forces carried out a raid and bombed a wall of the home | Team Palestina & Free Gaza

All of Saturday the Kharuf family was busy clearing their home of rubble and broken furniture scattered throughout the house.

“So now we are homeless,” Walid solemnly noted, surveying the damage to his home.

Jonas Webber is a volunteer with the International Solidarity Movement (name has been changed).

Israel refuses to investigate death of slain Palestinian protester from Bil’in

18 July 2012 | Popular Struggle Coordination Committee

Jawaher Abu Rahmah from the West Bank village of Bil’in village, died of cardiac arrest caused by inhalation of excessive amounts of tear gas. The Israeli High Court laid the onus of collecting evidence to justify an investigation on the family, instead of police.

Israeli High Court judges ruled today that the family of the late Jawaher Abu Rahmah and the Bil’in Popular Committee should submit documents and testimonies indicating that Abu Rahmah’s death was caused by tear-gas inhalation to the Israeli Judge Advocate General (JAG) until September 1st. The Justices ordered to reconsider his decision to not launch an investigation of the incident

By doing so, the court unjustly laid the burden of collecting evidence with the victims to justify the opening of an investigation, while it should clearly lay with the authorities and, in fact, be the result of such an investigation. During the hearing, Jusitce Miriam Naor told the State Attorney that once the evidence is submitted by the appellants, “[The State] must consider whether to launch an investigation with an open mind. After all, demonstrations do not normally end in death.”

The ruling was given at the conclusion of the first hearing in an appeal launched by Abu Rahmah’s mother, Subhiyah, and the Bil’in Popular Committee Against the Wall and Settlements, with the assistance of the Israeli human rights organization, Yesh Din. The appellants petitioned that the court instruct the JAG to investigate the circumstances surrounding the death of Jawaher Abu Rahmah, who collapsed during a demonstration in Bil’in, after breathing tear gas shot by Israeli forces in massive quantities to disperse the protesters.

Mohamad Khatib of the Bil’in Popular Committee said, “Israeli forces regularly use excessive force to try and crush Palestinian demonstrations. With more than 270 unarmed demonstrators killed since the year 2000, no lip service comment by the judiciary on the informality of how our people are slain is going to cut it. Israeli soldiers are sheltered by a wall of unaccountability, supported by today’s ruling that it is the victims who should produce evidence, and not a criminal investigation by the authorities.”

Background

Jawaher Abu Rahmah, 36, resident of the Palestinian village of Bil’in, was hurt on December 31, 2010 during the weekly demonstration against the route of the separation barrier on her village’s land. According to demonstrators’ testimonies, Israeli security forces used widespread and perhaps unprecedented quantities of tear gas that day, to disperse the demonstration. At some point Jawaher, who was standing next to her house inside the village, some distance from site the demonstration, was caught in a cloud of tear gas. As a result of inhaling the gas, Abu Rahmah began to suffer from respiratory distress and collapsed shortly thereafter. She was evacuated to a hospital in Ramallah, where she died less than 24 hours later. In the days following the incident, anonymous Israeli Army sources released varied and unlikely claims about the circumstances of Abu Rahmah’s death – including the untruthful claim that she was a leukemia patient – and all so as to persuade the public, with no investigation, that the Israeli Army is not responsible for her unnecessary death, and even that the Palestinians had invented the details of the incident.

Instead of immediately ordering an investigation into the circumstances of her death, the Israeli Army held only an operational debriefing. According to the petitioners, the operational debriefing is a tool to derive operational lessons, but is not a tool meant to collect evidence or establish personal responsibility, and therefore cannot substitute a criminal investigation. The findings of the debriefing are confidential, and it is not known what investigative activity was carried out, who was interviewed or which documents were made available to the investigators. However, we do know that not a single civilian eyewitness was questioned, not one medical professional was interviewed, and apparently no medical documents were made available to the investigators.

In the JAG’s response to the petitioners’ inquiry shortly after the incident, he rejected the demand to open an investigation, claiming that the operational debriefing and other inquiries made after the event found that “there was no causal link between the event and the death of the deceased.” This contradicts the recent change in Israeli Army investigation policy which was declared just days before the Turkel Commission, according to which a criminal investigation would be launched into every Palestinian civilian death which occurs during an Israeli Army operation in circumstances that is not “actual combat.” The JAG admitted that had Jawaher been killed today he would have ordered an investigation. Thus, the JAG Corps is evading launching an investigation, hiding behind the “technical” argument that the policy was changed a few weeks after the incident.

The petition argues that the decision not to order a criminal investigation of the event is unreasonable in the extreme, because “the circumstances and reasons for the death of Jawaher, an unarmed civilian who was hurt while in the middle of her village, are unclear to this day, and in view of the fact that her death was not a ‘natural death,’ the respondent is obligated by both Israeli law and international law to investigate her death.

Nabi Saleh: 11 arrested in weekly demonstration

By Hakim M.

16 July 2012 | International Solidarity Movement, West Bank

The weekly demonstration in Nabi Saleh faced brutal repression from the Israeli military on Friday, July 13.

Beginning at 1:30 p.m., Palestinian and solidarity activists walked down the village road to find it closed off by Israeli border police and a ‘skunk’ tank, which pumps out a foul-smelling liquid. The crowd headed to Nabi Saleh’s stolen water spring which was annexed by the nearby illegal Israeli settlement of Halamish. The protesters were met at the foot of the southern hill by Israeli soldiers resulting in 4 arrests: 3 Israeli activists and one Palestinian.

Young Palestinian boy is treated after being shot by a rubber-coated steel bullet

The demonstration continued to the entrance to the village, where Israeli border police shot a number of rubber-coated steel bullets into the crowd. One protester was shot in the arm and a young Palestinian boy also injured his leg in the process and needed medical care from the Palestinian Red Crescent.

‘Skunk’ water was sprayed at the protest as well as directly into Palestinian homes as a form of collective punishment. Deafening sound bombs were thrown in various directions. 7 more internationals were arrested, either for participating in the protest or just for being in the village of Nabi Saleh on a Friday.

Protesters are met by the Israeli military while trying to reach Nabi Saleh's stolen water spring

After a final tour with 2 military jeeps and the skunk tank, Israeli forces left Nabi Saleh at 5 p.m. Of the 11 arrested, the Palestinian was released within the hour, the Israeli activists some hours later, and the International activists stayed in prison overnight. They faced accusations in court and were not released until 1:00 a.m. on Sunday night. They are forbidden to join any further demonstrations and must leave the country by July 19.

The village of Nabi Saleh was declared a closed military zone (CMZ) every Friday and any solidarity activist, or Palestinian not from the area can be arrested on the charges of entering a CMZ. The increased targeting and subsequent deportations is a further attack by Israel on international solidarity activism and the ability to spread the free word.

Hakim M. is a volunteer with the International Solidarity Movement (name has been changed).