Israeli Army Injured Over 1,000 Palestinian Demonstrators in 2010
02 January 2011 | Sergio Yahni, Alternative Information Center (AIC)
A report by the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) states that during the last week of 2010, Israeli forces injured 38 Palestinians in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, more than half of whom were participating in weekly demonstrations against the Separation Wall, settlements and land confiscations.
The report further notes that during 2010, Israeli forces injured 1,145 Palestinians in the West Bank, a 45% increase over 2009.
In confrontations that broke out on 27 December between Palestinian residents of the East Jerusalem neighbourhood of Silwan and Israeli forces, eight Palestinians were injured. The report also notes a number of injuries due to tear gas inhalation and the detention of five Palestinians, including a 13 year old child. The confrontations broke out as a result the large number of Israeli forces stationed in Silwan prior to a visit by Israeli Knesset members, who came to express solidarity with the settlement building Beit Yonathan, established in the middle of Silwan and part of which is supposed to be sealed by order of the court.
The report also details that 20 Palestinians and one international activist were injured in the weekly demonstrations in the West Bank against the Wall, settlement expansion, the total closure imposed on the main commercial road in Hebron and the uprooting of olive trees.
Five Palestinians and two international activists were injured in two additional demonstrations against restrictions on freedom of movement into East Jerusalem and Ramallah.
As a result of Israel’s violent policy of demonstration dispersal, on the first day of 2011 36 year old Bil’in resident Jawaher Abu Rahmah died from inhalation of tear gas.
According to demonstrators who were there, Israeli soldiers shot tremendous amounts of tear gas which was particularly strong. After breathing it Abu Rahmah choked, and was brought to a Ramallah hospital where it was diagnosed that she was suffering from gas poisoning. The doctors told her family members that she was not responding to treatment. Overnight her condition worsened and at 9.00 a.m. the next morning she was pronounced dead.
This is not the first time that a person is killed due to tear gas in 2010. On 24 September Mohammed Abu Sneneh, a 14 month old baby, died in the East Jerusalem village of Issawiya after he inhaled tear gas. The baby had been inside his house, into which tear gas shot by the Israeli police penetrated.
Activists in various Palestinian popular committees complain that in numerous cases, Israeli forces fire expired tear gas and that breathing this causes more damage.
Jawaher is the sister of Bassem Abu Rahmah, who was killed when Israeli soldiers shot an extended range tear gas canister directly at him during a demonstration in Bil’in on 17 April 2009.
Translated to English by the Alternative Information Center (AIC).
Detention and Torture
Obama’s Plan for Indefinite Detentions
By JENNIFER VAN BERGEN and DOUGLAS VALENTINE | December 30, 2010
Author’s Note: With the news of President Obama’s plan to make indefinite detentions a permanent feature of our legal landscape, we thought it apropos to re-publish an updated, edited excerpt from a law review article we wrote in 2006 THE DANGEROUS WORLD OF INDEFINITE DETENTIONS: VIETNAM TO ABU GHRAIB.
Where you find administrative detentions, you are likely to find torture. This connection exists even where it is clear that investigations and screenings leading to such detentions are, as Alberto Gonzales put it, “not haphazard, but elaborate, and careful . . . reasoned and deliberate.”
This reason is simple and can be traced to the elements of administrative detention itself: the absence of human rights safeguards and normal legal guarantees such as due process, habeas corpus, fair trial, confidential legal counsel, and judicial review; vague and confusing definitions, standards, and procedures; inadequate adversarial procedural oversight; excessive Executive Branch power stemming from prolonged emergencies; and the involvement of the Central Intelligence Agency, or other secret, thus unaccountable, Executive Branch agencies.
Without such protections, justice does not work and human rights are jeopardized. As William F. Schultz, Executive Director of Amnesty International, put it:
“[W]e are witnessing not just a series of brutal but fundamentally independent human rights violations committed by disparate governments around the globe. [W]e are witnessing something far more fundamental and far more dangerous. [W]e are witnessing the orchestrated destruction by the United States of the very basis, the fragile scaffolding, upon which international human rights have been built, painstakingly, bit by bit by bit, since the end of World War II.”
This is a remarkable statement that was originally made about the Bush Administration, but it applies equally as well now to the Obama Administration. The system was intentionally broken by the Bush Administration, just as it was by the Johnson and Nixon Administrations during the Vietnam War. And now Obama plans to sanctify this wrong and make it a permanent feature of American law.
Obama’s indefinite detention follows, at least in idea, the precedent set by and codified in the PATRIOT Act, enacted six weeks after 9/11. Section 412, which is still on the books, provides for the “mandatory detention of suspected terrorists.” This section nowhere refers to the detentions as “administrative detentions,” which result from administrative (that is, Executive Branch), not judicial, determinations. Yet this is exactly what they are. And they have been used before. The U.S. government’s internment of Japanese immigrants during the Second World War is perhaps the most recognizable example.
Section 412(a) authorizes the Attorney General to take into custody any alien whom he certifies as a terrorist. The alien may be detained indefinitely, in renewable periods of six months, as long as the Attorney General determines that he is a threat to national security, or endangers some individual or the general public.
In addition to PATRIOT Act detentions, the November 2001 Authorization to Use Military Force (AUMF), which preceded the PATRIOT Act, has been used by the DOJ to justify administrative detentions.
Scholars have raised concerns about the PATRIOT Act detention provisions, as well as detentions under AUMF, which allow the Secretary of Defense to detain designated alien terrorist suspects without the restrictions that Section 412 contains. Additionally, military detentions of U.S. citizens Yaser Esam Hamdi, Jose Padilla, and Ali Saleh Kahlah al-Marri have raised concerns. President Bush, citing his power as Commander-in-Chief and the laws of war, unilaterally declared these individuals “unlawful enemy combatants” subject to indefinite detention without trial or access to an attorney and without providing for a status determination hearing by a competent tribunal, which is required by the Geneva Conventions. The central concern raised by qualified legal observers about these detentions generally involves the important issues of due process and other constitutional and/or human rights guarantees.
Administrative detentions — sometimes called preventive detentions — are, by definition and practice, sought only during “national emergencies.” The emergency is the rationale for depriving suspected terrorists of adequate due process or human rights safeguards. A declaration of a national emergency is generally made unilaterally by the President and, once declared, the administrative detention laws may stay on the books for decades. This is one of the primary reasons why they are so dangerous, for without any Congressional determination of the beginning or end of hostilities, these inherently anti-democratic laws may be used for purposes of political repression.
However, few legal scholars or government officials have discussed the historically established connection between administrative detentions and torture. The subject only came into public consciousness with the revelation that U.S. soldiers were torturing terrorist suspects at Abu Ghraib Prison in Iraq, Bagram Airbase in Afghanistan, and the detention facilities at the U.S. Naval Base in Guantanamo, Cuba. Since then, American and foreign journalists and human rights activists began to raise suspicions, subsequently borne out, that U.S. soldiers and CIA officers were routinely torturing terrorist suspects at numerous detention centers around the world. Nonetheless, to date, nothing has been done to ameliorate concerns about these detentions.
The conjoining of administrative detentions and torture is sadly by no means new to U.S. Government policies and practices. Specifically, during the Vietnam War, the United States engaged in a massive program of indefinite administrative detentions in South Vietnam of persons considered “dangerous to the national security” that engendered widespread torture and deaths of terrorist suspects.
There are many similarities between the Vietnam detentions and those used in the War on Terror, and those similarities are found not only within the procedures themselves but in the rationales for and policies behind them and even in the conditions of fear that created them.The Vietnam detention procedures provide a clear and compelling flow chart of the web of connections between administrative detentions, intelligence laws, national security courts (i.e. courts intended to deal exclusively with national security concerns), violations of international law (particularly the Geneva Conventions), and torture. These components now also appear in U.S. law and policies in the War on Terror and are continued, codified, and sanctified in Obama’s intended executive order.
One would have thought that a nation which was in large part responsible for the rescue of tens of thousands of Concentration Camp survivors and was a judicial participant in one of the most significant war crimes tribunals in history, the Nuremburg trials, would know better. How American officials could justify the detention camps in Vietnam, knowing about the torture and murders of innocents in them, after having witnessed Hitler’s internment camps and learned of the horrors he perpetrated in them, is an unanswered question. But, after the revelations of Vietnam — which all came out in congressional hearings in 1971 that led to both the repeal of the EDA and ultimately by degrees to “reforms” of the CIA’s Phoenix Program, contributing to the end of that protracted War, — Section 412 of the PATRIOT Act, Bush’s Military Commissions and unlawful enemy combatant designations, and now, Obama’s executive order establishing permanent indefinite detention are inexcusable.
For the full law review article, click here.
Jennifer Van Bergen, J.D., M.S.I.E., is the founder of the 12th Generation Institute, and author of THE TWILIGHT OF DEMOCRACY: THE BUSH PLAN FOR AMERICA (Common Courage Press, 2004) and Archetypes for Writers: Using the Power of Your Subconscious (Michael Weise Productions, 2007). She is currently working under contract with Bucknell University Press on a biography of Leonora Sansay, an early American novelist who was involved in the Aaron Burr Conspiracy, and on a screenplay about the conspiracy. She can be reached at jennifer.vanbergen@gmail.com.
Douglas Valentine is the author of numerous articles and five books: THE HOTEL TACLOBAN (1984), THE PHOENIX PROGRAM (1990), TDY (2000), THE STRENGTH OF THE WOLF (2004), and THE STRENGTH OF THE PACK (2009) (the latter two are histories of federal drug law enforcement). See: http://www.douglasvalentine.com/.
Related article
1,100 Palestinian Children Detained During 2010
By Ane Irazabal – IMEMC & Agencies – December 30, 2010
The Palestinian Authority Ministry of Detainees’ Affairs reported, on Wednesday, that Israeli forces arrested 1,100 Palestinian children in 2010, most of them in East Jerusalem and Hebron.
File (photo from Al-awda.org)
In a report, PA Detainees’ Affairs Minister Issa Qaraqe claimed that these arrests are reflecting the systematic attacks that Palestinian youth suffer in the Occupied Territories on the daily basis.
He also stressed that during 2010 the higher number of detentions were made in the occupied East Jerusalem, about 500, and Hebron, stressing that children were often put under house arrest.
In addition, the report also denounced other practices that the Palestinian children suffer from the Israeli army, especially, its use as human shields.
According to Defence of Children International – Palestine, since April 2004, 16 Palestinian children suffered from this practice, although it is considered illegal by both international and Israeli law.
Recently, two soldiers from the Givati Brigade became the first soldiers to be charged and convicted of using a child as a human shield. The two soldiers were demoted from the rank of staff sergeant to sergeant and each given a three-month suspended prison sentence.
In Israel, Non-Violent Solidarity Activist Goes to Prison, Anti-Gay Terrorist Gets Community Service
By Max Blumenthal | Mondoweiss | December 28, 2010
On December 27, Anarchists Against the Wall co-founder Jonathan Pollak was slapped with a three month prison sentence for illegal assembly. He was convicted by an Israeli magistrate judge for his participation in a January 2008 Critical Mass bike ride through the streets of Tel Aviv in protest of Israel’s brutal military assault on the Gaza Strip. Though Pollak was offered community service, he accepted prison time because he was convinced that he had done nothing wrong.
The day before Pollak was sentenced, an Israeli judge handed down a sentence of six months of community service to Michael Naky. Naky’s crime? He helped devise and detonate a pipe bomb in order to kill as many homosexuals as possible at the 2007 Jerusalem gay pride parade.
In a single day in Israel’s kangaroo courts, a right-wing terrorist was sentenced to a few months of street cleaning while a non-violent activist dedicated to stopping the occupation was jailed under the most specious charges. And while Pollak’s sentencing was reported with great fanfare in Israel’s major papers, Naky’s passed below the radar (Yedioth devoted just six lines). The contrast in punishments represented just another symptom of a sick society unwilling to face the Molock in the mirror.
The state has made little effort to disguise the political nature of Pollak’s prosecution. He was not a ringleader of the Critical Mass protest, nor did he behave in an unusual manner. He simply rode his bike slowly, disrupting the normal flow of traffic along with dozens of demonstrators. However, the police recognized him as a prominent organizer of unarmed protests against the Israeli military repression in the West Bank, singled him out and arrested him.
I have documented Pollak’s actions at protests across the West Bank, where he spends most of his weekends, and I witnessed the respect he has earned from the residents of besieged Palestinian villages who count on him as their liaison to the outside world — a realm that the state of Israel has largely forbidden them from interacting with. Last summer, Pollak helped me gain entry into Ofer Military Prison to witness the show trials of Palestinian popular committee members who organize the unarmed protests against the Israeli segregation wall. He has done the same for numerous European diplomats, including British Foreign Secretary William Hague, who declared after a harrowing tour of the Israeli Occupation that Pollak helped arrange: “Popular resistance to the Occupation is the sole remaining possible alternative for the Palestinians to achieve their rights and avoid armed struggle.”
It is clear why the Israeli justice system acted in such a draconian fashion against Pollak: His activism is making an impact against the Occupation.
Association for Civil Rights in Israel chief legal counsel Dan Yakir described the political nature of Pollak’s prosecution succinctly when he said, “The fact that Pollak was the only one arrested, even though he behaved just like the rest of the protesters, and the fact that bicycle demonstrations are usually held without police involvement raises a strong suspicion regarding personal persecution and a severe blow for freedom of expression, just because of his opinions. A prison sentence in the wake of a protest is an extreme and exaggerated punishment.”
Naky’s lenient sentencing appeared to have been influenced by politics as well, especially when viewed in light of the state’s treatment of other right-wing terrorists. Chaim Pearlman, a fanatical settler suspected of stabbing to death three Palestinians in cold blood, was set free after a month in Shin Bet custody. And Jack Teitel, another Jewish settler convicted of randomly murdering several Palestinians and attempting to kill the Israeli left-wing intellectual Zeev Sternhell (Teitel also planned to attack the 2006 Jerusalem gay pride parade), was allowed to plead insanity and ruled unfit to stand trial.
The Israeli justice system has extended no such privileges to Palestinians like Ibrahim Amireh orAbdullah Abu Rahmeh, who rot in Israeli military prisons for resisting their dispossession through unarmed protest. And the state is leveling every legal weapon at its disposal against activists like Pollak, who declared at his sentencing hearing: “I will go to prison wholeheartedly and with my head held high. It will be the justice system itself, I believe, that ought to lower its eyes in the face of the suffering inflicted on Gaza’s inhabitants, just like it lowers its eyes and averts its vision each and every day when faced with the realities of the occupation.”
Palestinian Youth Assaulted Near Nablus For Not Understanding Hebrew
By Saed Bannoura – IMEMC & Agencies – December 27, 2010
Israeli soldiers stationed at the Za’tara Roadblock, near the northern West Bank city of Nablus, stopped three Palestinian youths and violently assaulted one of them for not understanding them when they spoke to him in Hebrew.
The youth, Bilal Hasan, 20, and two of his friends from Qaqra village, south of Nablus, were standing at the Za’tara Israeli military roadblock, waiting for a cab to take them to Salfit city where he is taking driving lessons.
Bir Zeit University Journalism student, Ahmad Judy, was standing at the roadblock and witnessed the attack.
He said that a military Jeep drove to the roadblock, and the soldiers started talking to the three youths in Hebrew.
When the three could not understand what the soldiers were saying, as they cannot speak Hebrew, one of the soldiers wrapped the wire of his two-way communication radio around the neck Bilal Hasan and tried to strangle him with it, which made him push the soldier away.
The soldiers then started beating and kicking Hasan before they cuffed him and took him to an unknown destination.
The Gaza massacre and the struggle for justice
Ali Abunimah, The Electronic Intifada, 27 December 2010
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27 December 2008: Israel began its deadly three-week assault on Gaza. (Hatem Omar/MaanImages) |
The Gaza massacre, which Israel launched two years ago today, did not end on 18 January 2009, but continues. It was not only a massacre of human bodies, but of the truth and of justice. Only our actions can help bring it to an end.
The UN-commissioned Goldstone Report documented evidence of war crimes and crimes against humanity committed in an attack aimed at the very “foundations of civilian life in Gaza” — schools, industrial infrastructure, water, sanitation, flour mills, mosques, universities, police stations, government ministries, agriculture and thousands of homes. Yet like so many other inquiries documenting Israeli crimes, the Goldstone Report sits gathering dust as the United States, the European Union, the Palestinian Authority and certain Arab governments colluded to ensure it would not translate into action.
Israel launched the attack, after breaking the ceasefire it had negotiated with Hamas the previous June, under the bogus pretext of stopping rocket firing from Gaza.
During those horrifying weeks from 27 December 2008 to 18 January 2009, Israel’s merciless bombardment killed 1,417 people according to the Palestinian Centre for Human Rights in Gaza.
They were infants like Farah Ammar al-Helu, one-year-old, killed in al-Zaytoun. They were schoolgirls or schoolboys, like Islam Khalil Abu Amsha, 12, of Shajaiyeh and Mahmoud Khaled al-Mashharawi, 13, of al-Daraj. They were elders like Kamla Ali al-Attar, 82 of Beit Lahiya and Madallah Ahmed Abu Rukba, 81, of Jabaliya; They were fathers and husbands like Dr. Ehab Jasir al-Shaer. They were police officers like Younis Muhammad al-Ghandour, aged 24. They were ambulance drivers and civil defense workers. They were homemakers, school teachers, farmers, sanitation workers and builders. And yes, some of them were fighters, battling as any other people would to defend their communities with light and primitive weapons against Israel’s onslaught using the most advanced weaponry the United States and European Union could provide.
The names of the dead fill 100 pages, but nothing can fill the void they left in their families and communities (“The Dead in the course of the Israeli recent military offensive on the Gaza strip between 27 December 2008 and 18 January 2009,” [PDF] Palestinian Centre for Human Rights, 18 March 2009).
These were not the first to die in Israeli massacres and they have not been the last. Dozens of people have been killed since the end of Israel’s “Operation Cast Lead,” the latest Salameh Abu Hashish last week, a 20-year old shepherd shot by Israeli occupation forces as he tended his animals in northern Gaza.
But the tragedy does not end with those who were killed. Along with thousands permanently injured, there is the incalculable psychological cost of children growing up without parents, of parents burying their children, and the mental trauma that Israel’s offensive and the ongoing siege has done to almost everyone in Gaza. There are the as yet unknown consequences of subjecting Gaza’s 700,000 children to a toxic water supply for years on end.
The siege robs 1.5 million people not just of basic goods, reconstruction supplies (virtually nothing has been rebuilt in Gaza), and access to medical care but of their basic rights and freedoms to travel, to study, to be part of the world. It robs promising young people of their ambitions and futures. It deprives the planet of all that they would have been able to create and offer. By cutting Gaza off from the outside world, Israel hopes to make us forget that the those inside are human.
Two years after the crime, Gaza remains a giant prison for a population whose unforgivable sin in the eyes of Israel and its allies is to be refugees from lands that Israel took by ethnic cleansing.
Israel’s violence against Gaza, like its violence against Palestinians everywhere, is the logical outcome of the racism that forms the inseparable core of Zionist ideology and practice: Palestinians are merely a nuisance, like brush or rocks to be cleared away in Zionism’s relentless conquest of the land. This is what all Palestinians are struggling against, as an open letter today from dozens of civil society organizations in Gaza reminds us:
“We Palestinians of Gaza want to live at liberty to meet Palestinian friends or family from Tulkarem, Jerusalem or Nazareth; we want to have the right to travel and move freely. We want to live without fear of another bombing campaign that leaves hundreds of our children dead and many more injured or with cancers from the contamination of Israel’s white phosphorous and chemical warfare. We want to live without the humiliations at Israeli checkpoints or the indignity of not providing for our families because of the unemployment brought about by the economic control and the illegal siege. We are calling for an end to the racism that underpins all this oppression.”
Those of us who live outside Gaza can look to the people there for inspiration and strength; even after all this deliberate cruelty, they have not surrendered. But we cannot expect them to bear this burden alone or ignore the appalling cost Israel’s unrelenting persecution has on the minds and bodies of people in Gaza or on society itself. We must also heed their calls to action.
One year ago, I joined more than a thousand people from dozens of countries on the Gaza Freedom March in an attempt to reach Gaza to commemorate the first anniversary of the massacre. We found our way blocked by the Egyptian government which remains complicit, with US backing, in the Israeli siege. And although we did not reach Gaza, other convoys before, and after, such as Viva Palestina did, only after severe obstruction and limitations by Egypt.
Yesterday, the Mavi Marmara returned to Istanbul where it was met dockside by thousands of people. In May the ship was part of the Gaza Freedom Flotilla which set out to break the siege by sea, only to be attacked and hijacked in international waters by Israeli commandos who killed nine people and injured dozens. Even that massacre has not deterred more people from seeking to break the siege; the Asian Convoy to Gaza is on its way, and several other efforts are being planned.
We may look at all these initiatives and say that despite their enormous cost — including in human lives — the siege remains unbroken, as world governments — the so-called “international community” — continue to ensure Israeli impunity. Two years later, Gaza remains in rubble, and Israel keeps the population always on the edge of a deliberately-induced humanitarian catastrophe while allowing just enough supplies to appease international opinion. It would be easy to be discouraged.
However, we must remember that the Palestinian people in Gaza are not objects of an isolated humanitarian cause, but partners in the struggle for justice and freedom throughout Palestine. Breaking the siege of Gaza would be a milestone on that march.
Haneen Zoabi, a Palestinian member of the Israeli parliament and a passenger on the Mavi Marmara explained last October in an interview with The Electronic Intifada that Israeli society and government do not view their conflict with the Palestinians as one that must be resolved by providing justice and equality to victims, but merely as a “security” problem. Zoabi observed that the vast majority of Israelis believe Israel has largely “solved” the security problem: in the West Bank with the apartheid wall and “security coordination” between Israeli occupation forces and the collaborationist Palestinian Authority in Ramallah, and in Gaza with the siege.
Israeli society, Zoabi concluded, “doesn’t feel the need for peace. They don’t perceive occupation as a problem. They don’t perceive the siege as a problem. They don’t perceive oppressing the Palestinians as a problem, and they don’t pay the price of occupation or the price of [the] siege [of Gaza].”
Thus the convoys and flotillas are an essential part of a larger effort to make Israel understand that it does have a problem and it can never be treated as a normal state until it ends its oppression and occupation of Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, and fully respects the rights of Palestinian citizens of Israel and Palestinian refugees. And even if governments continue to stand by and do nothing, global civil society is showing the way with these efforts to break the siege, and with the broader Palestinian-led campaign of boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS).
Amid all the suffering, Palestinians have not celebrated many victories in the two years since the Gaza massacre. But there are signs that things are moving in the right direction. Israel begs for US-endorsed “peace negotiations” precisely because it knows that while the “peace process” provides cover for its ongoing crimes, it will never be required to give up anything or grant any rights to Palestinians in such a “process.”
Yet Israel is mobilizing all its resources to fight the global movement for justice, especially BDS, that has gained so much momentum since the Gaza massacre. There can be no greater confirmation that this movement brings justice within our grasp. Our memorial to all the victims must not be just an annual commemoration, but the work we do every day to make the ranks of this movement grow.
Ali Abunimah is co-founder of The Electronic Intifada, author of One Country: A Bold Proposal to End the Israeli-Palestinian Impasse
Israeli Army Arrests 9 French Nationals In The West Bank
By George Rishmawi – IMEMC News – December 26, 2010
Israeli troops operating at the military checkpoint of Qalandia, north of Jerusalem arrested nine French protestors and assaulted others at the checkpoint, Sunday at noon.
The nine arrestees were taking part in a protest at the checkpoint expressing their solidarity with the Palestinian people and their rejection to the closure of Jerusalem by the Israeli authorities.
The protest started around 9:30 Sunday morning during which over 100 Palestinian and International protestors attempted to enter Jerusalem without permission from the Israeli soldiers.
Eyewitnesses told IMEMC over the phone that Israeli troops assaulted the protestors and beat them up with their batons and rifle buts wounding a number of them, including those who were arrested.
A major part of the protestors are part of a french delegation who came especially for a week of nonviolent activities over the Christmas week in coordination with a number of local organisations directly involved in popular resistance activities, in Beit Sahour and Bethlehem.
On Saturday three members of the group were arrested when they joined Palestinians to protest the closure of Al-Shuhada street in the city.
They also joined Palestinians in Al-Walaja village near Bethlehem on Friday to protest the ongoing settlement activities in the village.
Israeli Military Kills Shepherd in Beit Lahya
24 December 2010 | International Solidarity Movement, Gaza
Yesterday morning Salama Abu Hashish, 20 years, was herding his sheep and goats in Beit Lahya, in northern Gaza, when the Israeli Occupation Forces shot him without any warning. The bullet hit his back and went straight through one of his kidneys. He had surgery and was in the intensive care unit at Kamal Adwan Hospital, where he died at 5.30 pm. The IOF has not only taken a life away from the Abu Hashish family; it widowed a young woman and orphaned a baby that was only born the previous evening. Salama Abu Hashish had just become a father, but has not even been able to name his first born. Three more workers were injured in northern Gaza by Israeli bullets yesterday.
Yesterday’s attacks come amidst an escalating Israeli assault on workers in the border area: in the past five weeks alone, 40 people have been injured in the buffer zone, an Israeli military-declared no-go zone that runs along the Gazan side of the border in a swathe 300 to 500 meters wide. However, according to the United Nations, the “high risk” zone stretches up to 1000-1500 meters. The total area amounts to 35% of Gaza’s arable land. According to the Palestinian Center for Human Rights, 84 workers have been injured and nine have been killed by the Israeli military since January 2010. Salama Abu Hashish is the tenth victim of Israel’s war on the border area in this year alone.
Riad Abu Hashish, the victim’s uncle, says that Salama regularly took his sheep and goats to the northern border area to graze. Yesterday, he was approximately 150 to 200 meters from the border when he was hit by an IOF sniper. As ambulances cannot reach the buffer zone without Israeli coordination, nearby scrap collectors carried Salama away on their donkey cart.
“This is all because of the occupation and the poverty it has brought to Gaza! He only risked going to the dangerous buffer zone, because there are no other possibilities for feeding his animals”, said Riad Abu Hashish in shock.
ISM Gaza calls for an immediate end of the shooting of innocent civilians, driven to such work by the illegal blockade and urges the international community to pressure Israel to end these attacks.
Ameer Makhoul’s perpetual trial
Audrey Farber writing from Haifa, Live from Palestine, 20 December 2010
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Ameer Makhoul (Adri Nieuwhof) |
We arrive at the Haifa court building around 11am, half an hour after proceedings began in the ongoing trial of Ameer Makhoul, a leading Palestinian activist who holds Israeli citizenship and was arrested in his home in the middle of the night last May.
After being held without charge, tortured and denied access to an attorney for three weeks, the State of Israel accused Ameer of trumped-up charges of espionage. As it frequently does in “security cases,” the Israeli government based its accusation on “secret evidence” that Ameer and his legal defense had no access to. It became clear that Ameer’s arrest and the charges against him was an attempt to scare Palestinian citizens of Israel into submission. Ameer has stood for court dates almost monthly since being arrested, and little progress has been made. There has been talk of a plea bargain, but no judge has read a sentence and his trial has become a monthly meeting of his nearest and dearest, testifying to his commendable character and good standing in the community.
Today’s hearing was supposed to begin at 9am but was pushed back. The room — even though there is a horde of people outside waiting to get in — has only two benches for spectators. There are empty courtrooms with five or six benches, enough to easily accommodate all interested parties.
But instead we’re outside the door, while two, sometimes three, behemoth security guards control the door and glare at us intimidatingly. Milling around is a veritable who’s who of Haifa politics and activism. A Jewish member of the Communist party who is on city council comes out after giving testimony and hobnobs with influential activists, former Members of Knesset, employees of various nongovernmental organizations in Haifa, international activists, journalists, powerful lawyers and friends and family of Ameer. It’s a bit unnerving to realize that if they wanted, Israeli intelligence agents could show up outside this courtroom, arrest everyone standing there, and essentially silence all dissent in Haifa. All the major players in one place, for one cause.
As two people come out, two are let in. One comes out, one goes in. Then two come out, and the ogres at the door decide no one else is allowed in. Some among us start arguing with them, calling them out on their arbitrary change of policy, but they’re enjoying their show of strength too much. They tell us to move over; we have to wait from the side, for no apparent reason. They bring in those extendable line-makers, like those found in movie theaters and airports, and create a space where they can stand with their arms crossed, surveying their prey, a space we’re not allowed to enter. There is an easy parallel between this charade and the political situation here; we are told where we can stand, what we can do, and whether or not we are allowed in.
And just like that, it’s over. People come flooding out; greeting and kissing each other on the cheek, saying hello to friends and family and colleagues. Ameer’s wife and daughters come out into the crowd, so do his sisters and his brother, observers from European embassies, community members, then the lawyers. Some of the best lawyers in Israel were there, and still, this trial continues. It’s court date after court date of unanimously supportive character witness testimony. The prosecution has no evidence to present, at least not in a public hearing; such is the nature of these “security cases.” There was supposed to be a decision on his sentence today, but there wasn’t, and there will be yet another court date in January with more and more character witnesses, more and more people testifying in support of Ameer Makhoul. But there is irony in this; the longer they can postpone sentencing him, the longer he stays in jail, unable to kiss his wife, or hug his daughters. We can spend years and years giving positive testimony in support of Ameer but if he is not sentenced, he stays in jail, perpetually on trial.
When his younger daughter came out of the courtroom, I read her eyes. She is brave, so brave. I cannot imagine going through what she is enduring. Month after month she comes to these trials, sees the community supporting her father, perhaps once in a blue moon she can hold his hand. His sister was allowed to hug and kiss him for the first time today, but when Ameer’s wife visits him in prison they are permitted only to communicate through a telephone and a glass barrier. He is perpetually sealed off from his family. His daughter floats through the crowd, puts on a smile, hugs her aunts and uncles and shakes hands with her father’s colleagues. When they look away, her face falls, and her eyes are sad, almost empty, resigned in a way to his fate. She has gone through too much for an adolescent girl. Still she, and Ameer’s entire family, and the entire community, tirelessly fight for his rights. But with each farcical trial date, perpetuating this charade of “justice,” it seems less and less likely that these rights will ever be realized, a decision will be made, and he will be released, able to join his family at their home once again.
Audrey Farber is a writer, activist, photographer and brain-for-hire who most recently interned at Mada al-Carmel – Arab Center for Applied Social Research, in Haifa.
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This is what happens when you demand speedy production in an era of politicized regulation
By Meryl Nass, MD | February 12, 2022
All these tragedies have been due to failures of testing or failures in manufacturing processes. Most occurred before vaccine manufacturers were given virtually complete protection from liability in 1987.
With the duration of patent exclusivity determining how much new products earn, products are rushed to market as quickly as possible, most using a shortened path for FDA review. Recalls and market removals of approved products are much more common than they used to be. We can only expect more of these disasters in the future, especially if the products are mandated for everyone. … continue
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