Action urged as Israel punishes dozens of hunger-striking political prisoners
Maureen Clare Murphy – The Electronic Intifada – 10/04/2011
Thousands of Palestinians in the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip rallied in recent days in support of political prisoners who are protesting worsening conditions in Israeli detention. Thousands of prisoners are said to be taking part in the civil disobedience protests which began on 27 September.
The Electronic Intifada reported in August that the Israeli government was imposing harsher measures on Palestinian political prisoners by banning academic study. Ending the abuse of solitary confinement is also a key demand of the civil disobedience campaign.
Another demand is the resumption of family visits. As The Electronic Intifada reported earlier this year, Palestinians in Gaza have escalated the regular sit-ins at the International Committee of the Red Cross because Israel has denied visits to imprisoned family members — a collective punishment measure leveled after an Israeli soldier was captured by Palestinian resistance forces in Gaza.
National unity amongst political prisoners
While national unity efforts between the Hamas and Fatah parties remain at an impasse, detainees affiliated with the two groups are uniting with prisoners associated with the leftist Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), who initiated the civil disobedience campaign.
Ma’an News Agency reported yesterday:
The rallies were held as inmates saw through the seventh consecutive day of a hunger strike to protest against worsening conditions for Palestinian detainees in Israeli prisons.…
On Sunday, prisoner support group Addameer said Palestinian detainees affiliated to Hamas and Fatah were joining the Popular Front prisoners who launched the strike, protesting the treatment of PFLP leader Ahmad Saadat, who has been held in isolation for three years.
Director of the Abu Jihad center for prisoners affairs at al-Quds university Fahd Abu al-Hajj said Sunday that 3,000 or so prisoners were taking part.
There was no immediate comment from the Israeli Prisons Authority of the number of prisoners who refused food last week, but by Monday, IPA spokeswoman Sivan Weizman said “160 prisoners” were observing a hunger strike.
Israeli Prison Service punishing protesting prisoners
The Palestinian human rights group Addameer (addameer.info) reported on Sunday that prisoners are being punished for their civil disobedience protest. Punishment includes transferring prisoners, as well as withholding salt water from prisoners waging hunger strikes.
Addameer stated:
On 27 September 2011, Palestinian prisoners held in Israeli prisons announced the start of a campaign of disobedience to protest an escalating series of punitive measures taken against them by the Israeli Prison Service (IPS) in recent months. The campaign is composed of several elements, including a hunger strike and refusal to cooperate with a number of IPS rules, such as wearing prison uniforms and participating in multiple daily roll calls.
As of 2 October, all Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) prisoners — who launched the campaign — in all Israeli prisons were participating in the campaign on a full-time basis, including an open-ended hunger strike. The campaign has now gained further momentum, with prisoners from other political factions gradually joining the campaign on a part-time basis, whereby they will take part in acts of disobedience three days a week (Wednesday, Thursday and Saturday). In Ramon, Eshel and Nafha prisons, Hamas leaders joined the campaign on 1 October on a part-time basis, and in Ashqelon prison, Fatah and Hamas prisoners are also participating on a part-time basis. In Ofer and Naqab prisons, although a number of prisoners from other political factions have already joined in the campaign on a part-time basis, representatives of all factions will reach a final decision on the matter on 4 October. In Ofer prison in particular, it is estimated that by the end of the week, 250 Hamas prisoners will join the strike on a part-time basis.
The IPS has already started punishing participating prisoners in an effort to undermine the campaign. On 1 and 2 October respectively, it transferred 28 PFLP prisoners from Naqab prison and 6 PFLP prisoners from Ofer prison to as-of-yet unknown locations. In Naqab prison, the IPS also confiscated the hunger-striking prisoners’ only nourishment, salted water.
Addameer issues action appeal
Addameer issued an email alert yesterday, urging action to support the demands of Palestinian political prisoners:
On 27 September 2011, Palestinian prisoners held in Israeli prisons announced the start of a campaign of disobedience to protest an escalating series of punitive measures taken against them by the Israeli Prison Service (IPS) in recent months. The campaign is composed of several elements, including a hunger strike and refusal to cooperate with a number of IPS rules, such as wearing prison uniforms and participating in multiple daily roll calls.…
The Palestinian prisoners have made several key demands, some of which are listed below:
– End the abusive use of isolation;
– End restrictions on university education in the prisons;
– End the denial of books and newspapers;
– End the shackling to and from meetings with lawyers and family members;
– End the excessive use of fines as punishment;
– And ultimately end all forms of collective punishment, including the refusal of family visits, night searches of prisoners’ cells, and the denial of basic health treatment.
TAKE ACTION!
In response to these demands, we are calling on all activists and supporters of human rights and justice for the Palestinians to take action in solidarity with the hunger strikers. There are two important ways in which to take action:
– Organize a protest, silent vigil or similar public action outside the Israeli embassy in your country and highlight the demands of the political prisoners. Addameer can send you further information on particular prisoners who are engaged in the hunger strike to support your action.
– Write a letter to the Israeli Prime Minister expressing your concern for the hunger strikers and demanding an end to the arbitrary treatment of Palestinian prisoners.
Please keep Addameer informed of any action you are planning to take and any response given by the Israeli authorities.
Jewish settler injures two nursing students in hit and run incident
The Nablus area has witnessed a surge in settler attacks over the last month, involving village raids as well as attacks on property including arson and vandalism on two mosques.
By Mais Azza | IMEMC & Agencies | October 04, 2011
Two Palestinian sisters were injured on Tuesday when an Israeli settler hit them with his vehicle at the Huwwara Road, south of the northern West Bank city of Nablus, before fleeing the scene, the Maan News Agency reported.
Local sources stated that the settler was driving his own vehicle, a pickup truck, and sped away without even slowing down, leaving the injured young women in the street.
Palestinian medical sources reported that the two sisters are Ahlam Hamad, 19, and Saja Hamad, 18. They were trying to cross the main street while heading for IbnSina Medical College, where they are students. They were transferred to Rafidya Hospital in Nablus, where X-ray and other tests revealed that they suffered concussions and external injuries.
Jewish terrorists strike again, this time in the Galilee
By Lizzy Ratner | Mondoweiss | October 3, 2011
Another day, another act of extreme “price tag” violence. It’s all getting to be terrifyingly, horrifyingly routine.
Early this morning, suspected Jewish extremists — or heck, let’s just call them what they are, suspected Jewish terrorists — set a mosque on fire on fire in Tuba Zangaria, a Bedouin village in the northern Galilee. The blaze caused “serious damage” to the mosque, police spokesman Micky Rosenfeld told The New York Times, and destroyed copies of the Koran as well as walls and rugs. The arsonists also took the time to spray-paint a message in Hebrew on the outside walls of the mosque: the words “Price Tag,” “Revenge” and “Palmer.” “Palmer,” it is believed, is a reference to Asher Palmer, a settler from Hebron who was killed last week in a car crash that Israeli police have labeled a terrorist attack — though what the people of a small Bedouin village in northern Israeli have to do with the death of an Israeli settler near Kiryat Arba remains utterly perplexing.
This was the third arson attack on a mosque in the last month, but the first such attack committed inside Israel (the other two mosque-burnings have taken place in the West Bank). It is part of a growing trend of right-wing Jewish attacks on Palestinians, Palestinian property, and Jewish leftists that has grown so frequent and so organized that even the Shin Bet has begun, rather stunningly, to describe the attacks as “terrorist” incidents. According to a September 13th Haaretz article published titled “Shin Bet: Israel’s extreme rightists organizing into terror groups”:
Extreme right-wing Jewish activists in the West Bank have moved from spontaneous acts against Arabs – following the demolition of Jewish homes by Israeli authorities, or terror attacks against Jews – to organized planning that includes use of a database of potential targets, according to new analysis by the Shin Bet security service.
The small groups of Jewish extremists are difficult to infiltrate and carry out surveillance on Arab villages and collect information about access points and escape routes in the villages. They are also collecting information about left-wing Israeli activists.
The fruits of this all this busy terrorist organizing have been widespread, vicious, and alarming, and have included everything from assaulting and brutalizing Palestinians to torching cars in Arab villages, uprooting and burning olive orchards, setting fire to mosques, attacking an Israeli military base in the West Bank, and vandalizing the property of well-known peace activists. And yet, much of it goes unreported or unremarked upon, gets treated as non-events by Israel’s media, security services, politicians, and public. “We’ve become used to it,” wrote Yossi Gurvitz in a disturbing article this past June in +972 titled “Settler ‘price tag’ pogroms against Palestinians go under the radar.” “Pogroms are a daily event – nothing to write home about, as long as they are kept within bounds. It’s background noise. A dog bites a man. Nothing to see here, move along.”
For whatever reasons, this morning’s attack on the Tuba Zangaria mosque did manage to break through the consensus of silence, enough at least to wrench statements out of both Benjamin Netanyahu and Shimon Peres. Peres later jogged up north with Israel’s two chief rabbis to survey the damage and express solidarity with Tuba Zangaira’s residents (and, perhaps, try to quell their protests). The only problem is that statements of outrage have only so much meaning when every other act, intention, and ambition of your administration is dedicated to displacing and disempowering the wounded population. They’re almost as absurd as, say, condemning the atrocities at Abu Ghraib when you and your advisers have given the green light to waterboarding, Guantanomo, and Shock-and-Awe.
Actually, come to think of it, George W. Bush didn’t condemn the atrocities at Abu Ghraib, not really, not initially. As the ever-brilliant Susan Sontag observed, he merely expressed shock and disgust at the photographs, “as if the fault or horror lay in the images, not in what they depict.” And sure enough, Netanyahu harped on the representation of the crime as well: “The images are shocking and have no place in the State of Israel,” he said (emphasis added).
Which means: expect more Price Tag attacks.
Bahraini woman doctor tells of jail abuse
Bahraini authorities have jailed dozens of medics for treating injured anti-government protesters
Press TV – October 3, 2011
A Bahraini woman doctor has detailed the humiliations and beatings she suffered after being arrested on suspicion of supporting anti-government protests.
Roula al-Saffar says her interrogators tried to force her and other medical staff to confess to plotting to overthrow the Manama regime.
Saffar said that she was tortured by electric shocks and beaten by cables.
She also said that she heard the screams of inmates who were being tortured by interrogators in other cells.
Her remarks came days after another female Bahraini doctor, Nada Dhaif, recounted mistreatment at the hands of government’s forces. Dhaif was sentenced to 15 years behind bars for treating injured anti-regime protesters at Salmaniya hospital.
”It was 03:00 a.m., when they broke into my house. I was taken away blindfolded and handcuffed. I didn’t know that they were security forces,” she said adding that ”They were in civilians clothes. So, I thought I was actually kidnapped”.
Dhaif said, ”I was thinking that I was being taken to an unknown place. Later on, I came to know that they were from the Central Investigation Department (CID)”.
”Immediately after I was taken away…I was treated with beating and cursing”. She said the torturers had even touched her face, using ‘electrocuters.’
”I was crying and I lost consciousness two or three times during this time in the military clinic.”
Many of those released from jails in Bahrain have accused the Manama regime of serious abuse. Some also charge that a member of Bahrain’s royal family named Sheikha Noora bint Ibrahim Al Khalifa beat prisoners with sticks and rubber hoses and gave them electric shocks.
Several Bahraini prisoners have died under torture.
Israeli occupation authorities arrest Palestinian woman in bid to pressure brother
Palestine Information Center – 03/10/2011
AL-KHALIL — Israeli occupation authorities arrested a 20-year-old woman from Beit Fajjar Sunday evening, eight kilometers south of Bethlehem in the West Bank, in an apparent bid to pressure her brother into confession.
The detainee Nubal Ali Issa Taqatqa has been summoned on several occasions for questioning by both the Israeli security forces and those of the Palestinian Authority, amid accusations involving the use of the Facebook social network.
Taqatqa’s brother Muhammad Ali Issa Taqatqa was arrested on 1 Sept. 2011 while heading for prayers in the Ibrahimi Mosque in Al-Khalil and is still under investigation for suspicion of trying to stab Israeli soldiers.
The family has maintained that Muhammad’s sole purpose of going to Ibrahimi Mosque was to pray and he did not have any implements in his possession.
In separate incidents, the Israeli Damon prison administration has isolated four female prisoners from the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine after the women joined a hunger strike declared by Palestinian prisoners a week back.
Pro-Israel whitewash of 10-year-old’s killing unravels in court
By Max Blumenthal | Al-Akhbar | 2011-09-28
One day in 2007, Israeli Border Police officers swept into the in the village of Anata just north of Jerusalem and began firing rubber bullets at a group of children who had thrown rocks at them. One Israeli bullet landed in the skull of a 10-year-old Palestinian girl named Abir Aramin, tearing the back of her head off and killing her. Aramin was the daughter of a prominent Palestinian activist named Bassam Aramin, who helped lead the group Combatants for Peace, a group that fosters dialogue between former combatants on both sides of the conflict. The little girl’s death sparked international outrage, generating headlines around the world.
The Israeli government went into damage control mode, denying any wrongdoing in connection with Aramin’s death and insisting without evidence that she had been struck in the head with a rock.
Meanwhile, the pro-Israel media watchdog group CAMERA claimed that the uproar surrounding Aramin’s death was a plot to inflame anti-Israel opinion and that all media reports suggesting that the Border Police killed her were categorically false. CAMERA declared that “stone-throwing Palestinians, as opposed to Israeli border police firing rubber bullets (as initially reported), may very well have been responsible for the death of Aramin.” Staffers from CAMERA called Haaretz reporter Danny Rubinstein to demand that he “clarify” his reporting on the killing by noting that “the Israeli border police are not necessarily to blame.”
Israeli state pathologists refused to perform an autopsy on Aramin, forcing her family to pay for their own examination, which proved she was shot by a rubber bullet. Though an officer testified that he may have shot Aramin, the Israeli Supreme Court rejected the family’s demand to put him and a colleague on trial. The whitewash continued until this week, when an Israeli court conceded the Border Police’s guilt in the young girl’s killing by ordering the state to pay the Aramin family $432,000 in damages.
Though the cover-up has unraveled, CAMERA has yet to correct its baseless claims. Since the group’s staffers are so accustomed to complaining to the media about supposed falsehoods, they surely would not mind fielding demands to correct their own bogus assertions, especially those they made to whitewash the killing of a little girl. CAMERA can be reached here and at (617) 789-3672.
Update: CAMERA has posted an extremely defensive, intellectually contorted semi-clarification of their original piece on Aramin’s killing.
Extremist settler attacks shepherd and brutally abuses flock
28 September 2011 | International Solidarity Movement, West Bank
On the 17th of September Israeli colonists attacked a shepherd near Sha’ab el-Butom, resulting in several sheep injured and the arrest of the young shepherd.
Sha’ab el-Butom is a small Bedouin village in South Hebron Hills not even mentioned in most maps, a village that faces daily harassment from the surrounding illegal settlements and outposts composed by the most ideological settlers in the West Bank. On Saturday September 17th of September, Nahel Ahmed Mousa Aburem, a 23 year old shepherd, went as usual down the road with his sheep when one settler accompanied by a soldier from the illegal Abigail settlement approached him, shouting for him to come towards them.
“Why are you here?” they asked, and Ahmed simply answered “This is my land.”
“No! It’s a closed military area!”
Aburem then tried to explain to them that he had permission from the military and the police to stay there and go around with his sheep. It was not a good answer for the settler. With ideology based on extreme interpretation of Judaic law, his reaction was to start beating Ahmad’s sheep with stones and sticks.
3 sheep lost their eyes, one died, another one was pregnant but lost her kid, and four others tried desperately to escape. The soldier was just 10 metres away, and Ahmed asked him help to stop the settler but he didn’t react so he tried to reach the sheep and the settler threw stones at him too and tried to grab his head while Ahmed tried defend himself and pushed the settler away.
This was enough to make an Israeli army jeep arrive and bring Aburem to a military base near Susiya and then to the police station in Kiryat Arba where they told him that he wanted to shoot the settler. He had to spend 2 nights in the police station in Kiryat Arba, 2 nights in the detention centre in Jerusalem, referred to as The Russian Compound, 2 other nights in Ramla prison, and then finally one day in Ofer for the supposed court hearing where they actually just gave him conditions and a bill of 5000 shekels needed to be paid for his release. His family paid, while he must meet the condition of signing his name every Tuesday in the Kiryat Arba police station.
Aburem said that he is supposed to have a court hearing by the end of October, but speculated that precarious and manipulative court procedures would play with time and be at the whim of the court.
“In any case” he said “we want to make actions in cooperation with Israeli and International activists in order to resist and keep going back to our land.”
Israel closes West Bank crossings for Jewish holiday
Ma’an – 28/09/2011
BETHLEHEM — The Israeli army announced its closure of the West Bank from midnight Tuesday until midnight Saturday, a statement said late Tuesday.
The Allenby Crossing between the West Bank and Jordan will also operate under reduced hours on Wednesday and Thursday, as Israeli Jews celebrate Rosh Hashana, the Jewish New Year.
Israeli Minister of Defense Ehud Barak ordered the four-day closure of crossings bridging the West Bank to Israel and Jerusalem, the army statement said.
No Palestinians will be permitted to leave the West Bank during the holiday period, except patients cleared to receive medical care in Jerusalem or Israel, according to the release.
Humanitarian aid and passage of doctors and medical staff will be subject to the authorization of the Israeli military authorities in the West Bank, it added.
The sole access point for Palestinians traveling abroad, the Allenby terminal, will be opened from 8 a.m. to 4 p.m. on Wednesday and 8 a.m. to 8 p.m. on Thursday, before returning to normal operating hours, crossings authorities said.
Three confirmed dead in Gaza tunnel from Egyptian wastewater attack
Ma’an | September 27, 2011
GAZA CITY — Three Palestinians were pronounced dead on Tuesday morning after Egyptian authorities pumped sewage inside a smuggling tunnel under the Gaza border on Sunday.
The ambulance and emergency services committee in Gaza said the three victims were found alive inside the tunnel. They were evacuated to the Abu Yousef an-Najjar Hospital in Rafah but were pronounced dead 30 minutes after arrival.
Gaza medical spokesman Adham Abu Salmiya identified the victims as Fadi Mustafa Ash-Shaer, 20, Firas Ahmad, 18, and Anwar Abu Aradeh, 25.
They were all residents of al-Salam neighborhood in Rafah in southern Gaza, Abu Salmiya said.
Medics had said Sunday that one man was injured and two others were missing after Egyptian authorities pumped sewage inside a Rafah smuggling tunnel running underneath the border with the Gaza Strip.
Egyptian security officials said in early September that they were cracking down on the network of tunnels used by smugglers from the coastal enclave.
Including Tuesday’s victims, eight Palestinians have been killed while working in tunnels in September. Five Palestinians were killed in three separate tunnel collapses earlier this month.
Medics say over 160 Palestinians have died in the network of underground tunnels since Israel imposed a siege on the Gaza Strip in 2006.
Under Israel’s crippling blockade, the tunnels have provided a lifeline for residents of the coastal enclave.
Egypt opened the Rafah crossing in May, the only border terminal not controlled by Israel.
The opening allowed some residents to leave the coastal enclave for the first time in years, but the terminal is not equipped for the transfer of goods and it has had little impact on Israel’s siege.
Palestinian MP kidnapped from the Red Cross in Jerusalem
Palestine Information Center – 26/09/2011
OCCUPIED JERUSALEM — An Israeli Border Guard unit, dressed as Arabs, kidnapped Palestinian MP Muhammad Attoun at the entrance of the Jerusalem Red Cross at noon Monday in a move expected to spark rage among local Palestinians.
The operation was also coordinated with the Israeli occupation police unit’s minorities division, according to media reports.
MP Attoun, along with another Palestinian MP Ahmed Totah and the Palestinian Authority’s former minister of Jerusalem Khalid Abu Arafeh, were staying at a protest tent at the Red Cross compound in the Sheikh Jarrah district after the Israeli occupation authorities revoked their right of residence in their native city of Jerusalem and sought to banish them.
Attoun’s wife said she was visiting him alongside her daughter when undercover officers suddenly pounced on him as he neared the entrance of the Red Cross premises where he has been holding a sit-in for over a year to protest the banishment decision. She added that she does not know where her husband was taken to.
Director of the Jerusalem information center Muhammad Sadiq told our correspondent that when Attoun’s wife and daughter came to visit, three masked men abducted Attoun and detained him in a vehicle before Israeli security forces arrived at the scene.
Sadiq said the entry into the Red Cross sanctuary was in violation of international laws, adding that the arrest of the Palestinian people’s government representative could trigger friction across the occupied Palestinian territories.
Attoun, Totah, and Abu Arafeh, politicians from Hamas’s Change and reform bloc, were arrested in 2006 after Hamas gained dominance in the Palestinian ballot boxes. The Israeli occupation authorities also revoked their residence in Jerusalem after the men were released following three year prison terms.
