Tag: Tom Hurndall

From The Guardian
Monday April 10, 2006

Israel will boycott an inquest opening today in London which will investigate the death of a British peace activist shot dead in broad daylight by an Israeli soldier.

Tom Hurndall, 22, died after being shot in Rafah, Gaza, while trying to lead Palestinian children to safety after the soldier opened fire from a nearby observation tower in April 2003.

His mother, Jocelyn, told the Guardian she is angry Israel is not cooperating as she still has many questions about how her son came to be shot: “We are hoping the coroner will address the culture of impunity in which the soldier was functioning and the enormous lack of cooperation we have experienced from the Israelis.”

Mrs Hurndall said that only when the family went to Israel and for seven weeks pressured the authorities and raised the case in the media did any sort of investigation begin.

Her solicitor, Imran Khan, said Israel’s boycott of the inquest is disrespectful: “It shows their disdain for the whole process.”

Mr Hurndall was one of three British civilians killed, allegedly deliberately, within seven months by Israeli forces. In all three cases Israel claimed the Britons were killed after their troops came under fire. In two cases the claims were not accepted at inquests.

Ian Hook was killed in November 2002 and in December last year an inquest jury ruled that he had been unlawfully killed and the victim of a “deliberate killing”. The UN said that Hook, 50, who led a house reconstruction programme in Jenin camp, was sitting in his office when he was hit by several bullets.

Last week an inquest jury found that cameraman James Miller was unlawfully killed by an Israeli soldier who shot him dead in May 2003, just weeks after Tom Hurndall was shot, and just a mile away.

Like last week, the inquest will be held at St Pancras coroners court, north London, before Andrew Reid.

Mrs Hurndall said: “It was deliberate. Tom was targeted, intentionally. I think the soldier was shooting to kill.”

Unlike the other two Britons, an Israeli soldier has been jailed for eight year for Mr Hurndall’s manslaughter. Sergeant Taysir Hayb admitted he was lying when he said the peace activist was carrying a gun, but said he was under orders to open fire even on unarmed people.

He told the military court that after shooting Mr Hurndall he had reported it to his commander: “I told him that I did what I’m supposed to: anyone who enters a firing zone must be taken out. [The commander] always says this.”

Mrs Hurndall’s fears were stoked when the soldier said at his court case: “The [Israeli army] fires freely in Rafah.”

Mr Hurndall was in Israel with a peace activist group, the International Solidarity Movement, and was wearing a bright orange top given to volunteers when he was shot. He was in a coma for nine months before he died.

His mother said the lack of reaction from the top of the British government bothered her: “I’m shocked that Tony Blair has never publicly denounced the shooting of Tom. I think we have to question our relationship with Israel if they are not going to show themselves to be transparent and cooperative about the killing of British citizens and Palestinians.”

B’Tselem, the Israeli human rights organisation, said that since 2000 1,737 Palestinians had been killed while not participating in fighting. The army has investigated only 131 cases of wounding and killing, which has led to 12 trials.

Israel says the fact it convicted a soldier for Mr Hurndall’s death shows it is serious about the rule of law applying to soldiers.

A spokesman from Israel’s London embassy said: “We regret the tragic death of Tom Hurndall. A due legal process has been completed in Israel and a soldier convicted of the killing and jailed. A full account has been presented to the family and the British government. The legal procedure in Israel has been completed.”

From Guardian Unlimited
Monday April 10, 2006

A jury has ruled that a British activist shot while acting as a human shield in the Gaza Strip was “intentionally killed”. Tom Hurndall, from north London, was wearing an orange jacket to mark him out as a peace activist.

The 22-year-old had apparently been trying to move young Palestinian children from the line of fire when he was hit in the head. He was left in a coma and died nine months later.

Speaking after the hearing, the Hurndall family representative, Michael Mansfield QC, said they were delighted with the verdict. However, he stressed there was still work to be done.

“Make no mistake about it, the Israeli defence force have today been found culpable by this jury of murder,” he said.

The family accused the Israeli authorities of a “cover-up”, calling on the British government to take action under the Geneva convention.

They said it should investigate, and if necessary extradite the five Israeli officers they believe made up the a chain of command which led to Mr Hurndall being shot.

If this did not happen the family would consider pursuing justice through the courts. Earlier, Mr Hurndall’s mother had criticised the government for not speaking out about her son’s death.

“We are astonished to this day that Tony Blair has never publicly condemned the shooting of Tom,” Joyce Hurndall said. “It is necessary for the Israelis to hear condemnation from him.”

She said the foreign secretary, Jack Straw, had never seemed to “expect an apology” from the Israelis over the shooting.

Initially, the Israeli army denied a soldier from an army watchtower had shot Mr Hurndall, but witnesses at the demonstration in the Palestinian town of Rafah said he had been hit by a rifle bullet while trying to shield the children.

Following a hard-fought campaign by the peace activist’s family, ex-sergeant Taysir Hayb was convicted at an Israeli military court of manslaughter and sentenced to eight years in prison last year.

He was the first soldier to be convicted over the death of a foreign national during recent Israeli-Palestinian violence.

The inquest heard how Mr Hurndall, who had been taking photographs in Iraq before going to the Gaza Strip with the International Solidarity Movement (ISM) activist group, had contemplated what it would be like to be hit by a bullet.

Ms Hurndall said she had received an email from Tom on April 11, just hours before the shooting. He reported being “shot at, gassed and chased” by soldiers during the five days he was in Rafah and described the danger that both he and the Palestinians were facing.

She also described what she thought had been her son’s last words. Around half an hour before he was shot, he had been talking to a Palestinian man, who had been telling him how difficult life was for residents in Rafah, she told the hearing.

“Tom put his hand on his shoulder and said: ‘We want to make a difference’,” she said. “Really, those were his last words.”

Mr Hurndall’s father, Anthony, told the hearing that his son and other activists from the ISM had gone out to try and block tanks that had been shooting into houses at random.

He said Tom had seen a group of ten to 15 children playing on a mound of sand, and noticed that bullets were hitting the ground between them. The children fled, but several were overcome with fear and could not move.

“Tom went to take one girl out of the line of fire, which he did successfully, but when he went back, as he knelt down [to collect another], he was shot.”

Mr Hurndall said the Israelis had initially admitted someone had been shot, but claimed it had been a gunman who had opened fire first.

After photographs of Tom having been shot in the head emerged, the Israeli military later admitted that Hayb – a sentry who had won prizes for marksmanship – had shot him using telescopic sights.

“They just lied continuously,” Mr Hurndall’s father said. “It was a case of them shooting civilians and then making up a story. And they were not used to being challenged.”

There had been a “general policy” for soldiers to be able to shoot civilians in that area without fear of reprisals, he added.

Although Hayb had been sentenced, the issue of the “culture” within the Israeli army had not been addressed, he said. “This goes much higher up the chain.”

The ten-strong jury at the inquest into the death of Mr Hurndall, a Manchester Metropolitan University student, also expressed its “dismay with the lack of cooperation from the Israeli authorities”.

Mr Hurndall was shot a mile away from where the award-winning cameraman James Miller had died three weeks beforehand. Last week, a jury ruled the Israeli defence force had deliberately killed the 34-year-old during the incident in May 2003.

The coroner, Dr Andrew Reid, said he would be writing to the attorney general to see whether there was any further legal action that could be taken in relation to the deaths.

Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2006

Originally published in the Hampstead & Highgate Express

Sitting in her living room nearly two and a half years after the shooting of her son Tom, Jocelyn Hurndall remains defiant.

The sentencing of a soldier in the Israeli Defence Force (IDF) to eight years in prison for the manslaughter of Mr Hurndall may have seemed to be the closing chapter of her family’s struggle.

But there has been no let-up in the fight for justice she has been leading since her son was shot in the head while he tried to carry Palestinian children from gunfire in Rafah, in the Gaza Strip.

Now she wants the Israeli military, not just the soldier who fired the fatal bullet, to take responsibility.

She says: “We will continue speaking about the chain of command.

“And apart from the racism and the discrimination that exists in Israel, the Israelis are doing terrible things; preventing access to housing and medical treatment to Palestinians – the most basic sort of benefits.

“So, as far as being closed, no it is not.”

Mrs Hurndall’s sense of enduring injustice has acted as a beacon in the gloom of her grief. It has given her a clear purpose: to take up the case of innocent Palestinians killed by the IDF.

She says: “We have said all along that this has been about justice for Tom and for everyone else suffering human rights abuses.”

It has inevitably led to Mrs Hurndall, her husband Anthony and their three children – Freddie, Billy and Sophie – being portrayed as pro-Palestinian.

While Tom has become a martyr to the Palestinian cause, his siblings have been involved in their own ways in the campaign to bring his killer to justice.

It even led to Billy being denied free entry to Israel to see his brother’s killer stand trial.

The Hurndalls received hate mail and were cast by some right-wing commentators as little more than pawns in the hands of the left-wing, pro-Palestinian forces.

“Some people see us as partisan,” she says. “And we are sympathetic to the Palestinian situation, but it is about justice for all, not just for our son – for Palestinians or for other groups that have suffered.

“The soldier, he certainly sees us as partisan.”

The story of Tom’s shooting is particularly strange, in that it does not fit with the notion of a war between Jews and Arabs.

Tom was British, volunteering with a group of peace protesters called the International Solidarity Movement. His killer is an Arab.

Idier Wahid Taysir is a Bedouin who served in the Bedouin Reconnaissance Battalion. A member of the Arab minority in Israel, he now claims he has become a scapegoat for the overwhelmingly Jewish military’s own problems.

While Mrs Hurndall agrees with him and has some sympathy for his plight. But, she says: “It is a very, very conservative sympathy.

“In general, I would [have sympathy] for those who are scapegoated. There is serious racism in the Israeli Army. [Bedouin] are confined together within particular units and don’t mix with other Jewish units.

“They are seen and treated differently and I think that is an iniquity.”

Despite her serious concerns about Israel, she is quick to praise the professionalism of the Israeli court that tried her son’s killer and she says she was impressed by their summing up in advance of sentencing.

She also accepts that racism and inequality are common to many parts of the world, not least in other parts of the Middle East.

But she says: “I believe that it is very important to separate religion from politics, and if it was more possible to do this then I believe it would have huge benefits to both sides and it would relieve poverty and suffering in the region.”

The shooting of Tom, a photography student, became a touchstone for Britain’s own role in the Palestinian question.

This country once resisted the formation of the state of Israel, when after the First World War it came to rule over the territory.

Since then, Britain’s position on Israel’s occupation of Palestinian territories has been hidebound with a diplomatic unwillingness to criticise Israel.

Mrs Hurndall says: “I came to understand quite a lot about the diplomatic relations [between the countries] and to have a regard for it.

“But because we challenged the Israelis so regularly I hope that we shifted more ground, in terms of the position that the military investigation into my son’s death was highly mendacious.”

When asked about the effect of the last two years on her family, Mrs Hurndall says that she would prefer not to say too much.

She says: “Each member of the family has had to find a way to deal with it and get our jobs and careers together after the loss.

“That will go on for a very long time, because we valued him so much and he has been a cataclysmic loss in the family.”

But she is more forthcoming when asked about the effect her son’s death has had on her.

She says: “It hasn’t changed my views, but it has developed them. We would always have tried to be open-minded and broad-minded in our thinking and non-judgemental. But the tragedy of what has happened to Tom, it has changed me as I’m much more in touch with mortality and therefore life.

“I see significance in everything now. It is possible for every moment to be significant now and I’m aware of that. There is also no room for superficiality.”

She says that her son was disapproving of their comfortable life in north London, and felt they had “far more than they needed.”

Does she feel this event and the way it has changed her has made her a little more like her son – who travelled out to Iraq and Israel to become a photojournalist?

She says: “They never see you as you are capable of being – and to have never had that conversation with him…

“But I do actually agree. He was discovering things for the first time in his life and I did understand what he was trying to do. But I would never have been as brave