New Israeli airstrikes after third ‘ceasefire’ agreement, two killed
Palestine Information Center – 31/10/2011
KHAN YOUNIS — Two more Palestinians were killed at midnight Sunday in a fresh Israeli violation of the Egyptian brokered calm that supposedly went into effect for the third time at 10 pm Sunday.
Medical sources told the PIC reporter that the medical crews could not retrieve the bodies of the two men until dawn Monday, noting that they were killed in a raid on the Fakhari area east of Khan Younis, south of the Gaza Strip.
The Ansar brigades, the armed wing of the Ahrar movement, said that the two were of its fighters.
The casualties bring the number of Palestinian martyrs since Saturday to 12 mostly from Islamic Jihad operatives.
Meanwhile, Palestinian resistance factions retaliated to the Israeli violations of the ceasefire and fired homemade rockets at areas adjacent to the Gaza Strip with no casualties reported.
An Arab member in the Israeli Knesset, Dr. Jamal Zahalka, said that Israel was trying to restore its “deterrence” but ruled out a big military operation on Gaza for the time being.
He said in a statement to Quds Press on Sunday that Israel had no justification for the attacks on Gaza but rather had its own goals such as maintaining the siege on the coastal enclave and to strike at Palestinian factions to sway them from the path of resistance.
Israel violates Egypt-brokered truce, escalates aerial attacks on Gaza
Palestine Information Center – 30/10/2011
GAZA — Israel has escalated its military aggression against the Gaza Strip and intensified its air raids at dawn Sunday immediately after a truce brokered by Egypt was declared between the two sides.
A spokesman for medical services in Gaza told the Palestinian information center (PIC) reporter there that Israel waged from one o’clock to three thirty in the morning more than 10 air strikes on different targets in Gaza especially in Khan Younis and Rafah areas.
The air raids caused extreme horror and panic among civilians especially children and also caused material damage in the bombed areas, the spokesman added.
Egypt was reported to have managed to broker a truce, supposed to start at 3:00 am, between the Palestinian resistance factions in Gaza and the Israeli occupation state, but the latter waged a series of air raids after this time violating the cease-fire.
A Palestinian informed source told the PIC that efforts made by the Egyptian intelligence service were able to convince the resistance factions in Gaza especially the Islamic Jihad Movement to accept a reciprocal cease-fire with the Israeli occupation starting today at three o’clock in the morning.
Kiryat Arba councilman calls for killing liberated prisoner
Palestine Information Center – 27/10/2011
AL-KHALIL- Kiryat Arba councilman Bentzi Goffstein has called for the killing of a liberated Palestinian prisoner in Al-Khalil, who was recently freed in the prisoners’ exchange deal between Hamas and Israel.
Jewish settlers, from the Kiryat Arba settlement built in Al-Khalil city, recently circulated a statement in Al-Khalil in both Arabic and Hebrew calling for the murder of Hani Jaber, who was released after 18 years in jail, with a photo of him attached.
Goffstein said that Jaber would not enjoy a stable life and that he might be hit in the very near future.
He said that the safest place for Jaber is behind bars.
Jaber was jailed for killing a Jewish settler who used to pester Palestinian citizens in Al-Khalil especially children on their way to school. The settler used to beat the children, pull the hair of schoolgirls, throw garbage on civilians and insult them, and throw stones at their homes.
Palestinians repeatedly complained about his acts to the Israeli authorities but no one stopped him.
Israeli army shoots at children and two ISM activists
Notes from Behind the Blockade | October 28, 2011
After a lovely day of drinking excessive amounts of tea with a few families in South Gaza (Faraheen and Khuza’a, to be exact), an Italian colleague, Silvia, who used to live in Khuza’a, suggested walking down the road towards the local school. It was late afternoon, about 4:30 p.m. and dozens of children played in the area. We walked past slices of a giant concrete wall placed in the middle of the road. The slivers reminded me of Israel’s Apartheid Wall in the West Bank — 25 feet of reinforced concrete. The local villagers had apparently retrieved these sections from a former settlement and placed them there so that children could play outside while being (somewhat) protected from Israeli army gunfire.
Silvia pointed to a school farther down the road. “That’s where the children go to school,” she said. The sun was beginning to set and the area was quite beautiful if one didn’t look to hard at the Israeli military towers n the distance. I took some pictures, and even asked Silvia to take a photo of me. Kids played nearby and a donkey cart passed us. I photographed a house that looked like it had been bombed, but the bougainvillea had grown back in vibrant fuchsia. Two boys playing with a piece of plastic ran towards us from farther up the road and begged me to take a photo. I snapped a sloppy photo, and they eagerly checked their digital images on my camera. One in a green sweater thought it was terribly funny that the boy’s in a red hoodie’s head was missing in my photo.
They ran up ahead, and we walked for about 15 seconds when I heard a strange whiz, a whistle, eerily close to my ear. I paused, a bullet? Red hoodie and two younger boys up ahead hit the floor as I momentarily pondered the strange sound.
The kids turned around and yelled at us two stupid foreigners to get down. We bent down and started to walk away — fast — and they yelled at us to get completely on the ground. The Israeli army left us no time to be scared. No gunshots over our heads. No warnings. A second bullet whizzed past the three kids, and then us. The Israelis were shooting at us from the towers 500 meters ahead. This time, we were on the ground. I continued to look at these 9-year-olds or 10-year-olds or whatever they were for cues–walking towards their school under Israeli fire was clearly routine for them and they knew what they were doing. We waited on the ground for several minutes. As I still had my camera in hand, I snapped a quick photo of them from the ground.
A minute or two later a father and his toddler, also further up on the road came towards us and offered a ride on the back of his motorized cart. We jumped in and he “sped” back to behind the wall. Anyway, I got back to my apartment about an hour later, just in time for my Arabic class. Even though I had actually studied this time, I couldn’t concentrate. Why was the Israeli army shooting at our heads?
And I realized this is what Palestinian first, second, third, fourth graders experience daily in Gaza.
Israeli airstrikes on Gaza, five killed
By Alaa Ashkar | IMEMC & Agencies | October 29, 2011
Five Palestinians were killed, and five others were injured, when the Israeli Air Force bombarded, on Saturday afternoon, a training center that belongs to fighters of the Al-Quds Brigades, the armed wing of the Islamic Jihad.
The Air Force fired at least two missiles into a training center for the Al-Quds Brigades near Tal As-Sultan, south of the Gaza Strip; at least five fighters were killed in the attack.
Medics arrived at the scene and transferred the dead and the wounded to a local hospital, local sources reported.
The he Al-Quds Brigades issued a statement confirming that one of its military training centers was bombarded leading to several casualties.
The Brigades said that Ahmad Al Sheikh Khalil, one of its main leaders specialized in explosives, was killed in the attack, and added that Khalil is the brother of four fighters who were previously killed by the Israeli army.
Fighters Basem Abu Al Ata, Mohammad Ashour Shatat, Imad Bakeer and Bassel Ghannam, were also killed in the attack.
The Brigades vowed retaliation while its spokesman, Abu Ahmad, to the Hamas-affiliated Palestinian Information Center, that what happened is a serious Israeli escalation, and a crime that “cannot go unpunished”.
The Olive and the F-16: Autumn in Gaza
27 October 2011 | Notes from Behind the Blockade
Today completes another week of olive picking in Gaza. Another week of pausing, breaths held, as Israeli tanks the color of sand moved nearby along the buffer zone, another week of children frightened at the sound of roaring F-16s, another week below the watchful eye of the drone.
Together with the Beit Hanoun Local Initiative, International Solidarity Movement (ISM) volunteers picked olives with families near the buffer zone in the village of Burej and in two different locations in Beit Hanoun this week.
“We’re here to harvest olives and be with the land because this is our land and we don’t want to abandon it,” said 27-year-old Randa Hilou a local student to came to pick in solidarity with the farmers in Beit Hanoun.
On Wednesday, dozens of local children joined in the picking. I asked the children why they had come. “I’m here to pick olives,” declared 9-year-old Mahmoud, taking a break from dumping olives into a blue plastic crate. “We love olives,” added other children, who gathered around.
At one point in the day, the sound of Israeli F-16s could be heard overhead. “I went picking with my mother and father,” added Bursa, also 9-years-old. “I am not afraid.”
Later in the week, ISM volunteers picked closer the Erez crossing in an area that used to be full of olive, orange and grapefruit groves.
“Before, people came from all over Gaza to pick fruit in this area,” explained Saber Zaaneen, the 33-year-old coordinator of the Beit Hanoun Local Initiative explained to me on Thursday as we sat on a plastic tarp picking plucking purple olives off of supple branches. “Why did Israel destroy the groves?” he asked. “To destroy the economy of Gaza. Why the resistance? Because of the occupation.”
I had asked Saber on earlier occasion why the olive trees in Gaza were so skinny. In the West Bank, they’re very big, I explained. He informed me that these trees were new, and that Israel had bulldozed the beautiful old olive trees of Gaza in 2001 and 2002. “Israel does not have a culture of peace,” explained Saber. “They have all of this advanced technology, why do they kill children like this?”
Nine year old Yara, who wants to be a doctor when she grows up expressed a similar sentiment on Wednesday, “They [the Israelis] are always occupying us. They threaten children.”
Ashraf Abu Rahmah in the midst of circus military court
By Maria Stephanya | International Solidarity Movement | October 28, 2011
West Bank – The proof is all there: photos, videos, witnesses. All of them showed that Ashraf Abu Rahmah, one of the main activists of popular non violent struggle in the village of Bil’in, Palestine, walked peacefully on the road which goes from Bil’in’s recent liberated land to the center of the village, when an Israeli jeep passed besides him. Then it stopped. The soldiers stepped down, took the flag Ashraf carried and arrested him, forcing him to enter in the back of the vehicle under arrest, on October 23rd.
Rani Burnet, who saw everything in his wheelchair – part of his body was paralyzed because of live ammunition shot by an Israeli soldier, 11 years ago – complained.
In spite of lack of evidence to support charges brought against Abu Rahmah, in spite of the witnesses and the video which prove otherwise, Captain Tzvi Frenkel, a military judge at the Ofer Military Court, ordered the indefinite extension of his arrest, until the end of legal procedures against him.
In July 7th, 2008, Ashraf was blindfolded and bound in Ni’lin when the soldiers shot his foot. The video, seen by millions of people around the world, caused international protests. In April 17th, 2009, his brother Bassem was shot dead while trying to alert the soldiers for not harming livestock which was passing on the road beyond the wall. A high-velocity tear gas projectile, aimed at him from a distance of 40 meter hit him in the chest, killing him. In January 1st, 2011, their sister Jawaher also passed away because of the effects of the massive amount of toxic tear gas she had inhaled during a peaceful demonstration of December 31, 2011.
Maria Stephanya is an activist with International Solidarity Movement (name has been changed).
ACLU in Appeals Court to Hold Officials Accountable For Torture of Jose Padilla
ACLU | October 26, 2011
RICHMOND, Va. – The American Civil Liberties Union argued in a federal appeals court today for the reinstatement of a lawsuit against former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and other government officials for their role in the unlawful detention and torture of U.S. citizen Jose Padilla.
“The defendants in this case seized Jose Padilla from a civilian jail and hid him away in a military brig precisely to keep the courts from interfering with the terrible things they were doing to him. By granting the defendants legal immunity for their cruel acts, the district court vindicated their deliberate efforts to circumvent the Constitution,” said Ben Wizner, litigation director of the ACLU National Security Project. “If the law does not protect Jose Padilla – an American citizen arrested on American soil and tortured in an American prison – it protects no one.”
The U.S. District Court for the District of South Carolina ruled in February that the defendants were entitled to “qualified immunity” for their roles in the detention and abuse of Padilla because no “clearly established” law prohibited the torture of an American citizen designated an “enemy combatant” by the executive branch. The ACLU asked the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit to reinstate the case.
Padilla was taken from a U.S. jail in 2002 by military agents, declared an “enemy combatant” and secretly transported to a military brig in South Carolina. He was imprisoned without charge for nearly four years, subjected to extreme abuse and was unable to communicate with his lawyers or family for two years. The illegal treatment included forcing Padilla into stress positions for hours on end, punching him, depriving him of sleep and threatening him with further torture and death.
Attorneys on the case are Wizner and Alex Abdo of the ACLU; Jonathan Frieman, Hope Metcalf and Tahlia Townsend of the Allard K. Lowenstein International Human Rights Clinic at Yale Law School; and Michael O’Connell of the law firm Stirling & O’Connell.
More information about the case is available online at:
www.aclu.org/national-security/padilla-v-rumsfeld
Palestinian detainees still held in solitary confinement
Ma’an – 27/10/2011
RAMALLAH — The Israeli prison administration has not fulfilled its commitment to stop holding Palestinian prisoners in solitary confinement, the ministry of prisoner affairs in Ramallah said Wednesday.
Around 20 detainees are still in isolation despite Israel’s pledge to end the practice following a 3-week mass hunger strike in jails across Israel to protest the policy, the ministry said in a statement.
Prisoners suspended the strike on Oct. 17 after they said Israel had announced it would meet the strikers’ key demand.
Israel promised that detainees would be released from isolation immediately after 477 prisoners were released in a swap deal to free captured Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit on Oct. 18, minister of detainees affairs Issa Qaraqe said, announcing the agreement.
Some prisoners who remain in solitary confinement have been in isolation cells for many years, including Hassan Salama, Ahmad al-Mughrabi, Abdullah al-Barghouthi and Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine secretary-general Ahmad Saadat, the ministry noted.
The UN special rapporteur on torture Juan Mendez told a UN General Assembly panel last week that all governments should ban solitary confinement except in extreme circumstances.
“Segregation, isolation, separation, cellular, lockdown, Supermax, the hole … whatever the name, solitary confinement should be banned by states as a punishment or extortion technique,” he said.
He also said indefinite and prolonged solitary confinement in excess of 15 days should be ended, citing studies that have established that lasting mental damage is caused after a few days of isolation.
“Considering the severe mental pain or suffering solitary confinement may cause, it can amount to torture or cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment when used as a punishment, during pre-trial detention, indefinitely or for a prolonged period, for persons with mental disabilities or juveniles,” he said.
Meanwhile, detainees affairs ministry lawyer Shireen Iraqi said the Israeli prisons administration had implemented new ways to punish detainees. Prison officials have closed the accounts of 28 prisoners so they cannot receive money from their families, she said.
Families in Gaza are still unable to visit relatives in Israeli jails.
Israel banned families in Gaza from visiting detained relatives in 2007 after militants in Gaza detained Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit, a move widely criticized as a form of collective punishment.
In June, the International Committee of the Red Cross called on Israel to lift the ban, noting that under international humanitarian law, detainees held in relation to the conflict had a right to family visits.
“The decision by the Israelis is of particular consequence for children, whose ties to their detained parents may become frayed or may even be severed,” ICRC said in a statement.
Anata falls victim to militarized, illegal settlement once again
By Jenna Bereld | International Solidarity Movement | 26 October 2011
West Bank – When Mohammad woke up on Tuesday, he still did not know about the Israeli forces or the bulldozers that were on their way to uproot his trees and demolish his entire farm. But before the day was over, all of his property was erased and one could hardly guess that there had ever been a building there.
“I’m very sad because of the farm”, Mohammad said.
The soldiers claimed that the buildings were illegal, referring to the Israeli Civil Administration. ”This is the land from my grandfather, and I have no other land,” Mohammad says.
Mohammad lives in Anata in the West Bank with his wife and twelve children. The village is trapped by the Separation Wall around Jerusalem to the west, and Area C and the planned expansion of the settlement Ma’ale Adumim to the east. The village has no possibility to expand without building permits from the Israeli Civil Administration. The process is expensive, and for Palestinians, the application is rejected in 95% of the cases. From 2000 to 2007 almost 5,000 demolition orders against Palestinian buildings were issued.
In a separate incident, a four year old Palestinian child from Anata was shot in the neck around noon. Asil Arara’s wounds have left her in serious condition and may cause paralysis. The illegal Israeli settlement of Anatot, also home to settlers who recently violently attacked Israeli peace activists, is home to a military training camp from where it is said the shot that struck Arara was fired.
Jewish settlers burnt or uprooted 7500 olives trees in 9 months
Palestine Information Center – 26/10/2011
RAMALLAH — Jewish settlers burnt or uprooted 7500 Palestinian olive trees in the first nine month of 2011, a report by the UN office for the coordination of humanitarian affairs in the occupied territories (OCHA) said on Tuesday.
The report documents the damage of thousands of dunums of Palestinian agricultural fields cultivated with olives.
It said that Palestinians’ access to their olive fields near 55 settlements in the West Bank was limited to certain periods in the year and in the presence of Israeli occupation forces.
It noted that the Israelis turn down 40% of requests by Palestinian farmers to “visit” their fields located beyond the separation wall.
OCHA pointed out that Palestinian farmers in the Gaza Strip suffer from the same complications when trying to approach their fields near to the border fence.
It said that thousands of farmers are deprived of reaching their land for “security reasons” or for failure to meet the Israeli requirements to prove that those are their lands.
The report underlined that 45% of all Palestinian farmlands are cultivated with 12 million olive trees, mostly in the West Bank, adding that the olive oil industry provides one quarter of the overall agricultural revenues in Palestine on which 100000 families depend for their sustenance.
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