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Obama’s torture loophole

By Paul Woodward on May 14, 2010

What’s the difference between a US-military-run detention facility and an intelligence gathering facility? For one thing, Red Cross officials are being prevented from seeing how prisoners are treated when held at Bagram’s intelligence gathering facility. Is that so that they can be tortured in secret?

Two days after taking office, Barack Obama signed an executive order banning torture. The era of secret detention facilities and CIA-administered waterboarding were over. Or so we thought.

Earlier this week, the BBC reported:

The US airbase at Bagram in Afghanistan contains a facility for detainees that is distinct from its main prison, the Red Cross has confirmed to the BBC.

Nine former prisoners have told the BBC that they were held in a separate building, and subjected to abuse.

The US military says the main prison, now called the Detention Facility in Parwan, is the only detention facility on the base.

However, it has said it will look into the abuse allegations made to the BBC.

The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) said that since August 2009 US authorities have been notifying it of names of detained people in a separate structure at Bagram.

“The ICRC is being notified by the US authorities of detained people within 14 days of their arrest,” a Red Cross spokesman said.

“This has been routine practice since August 2009 and is a development welcomed by the ICRC.”

The spokesman was responding to a question from the BBC about the existence of the facility, referred to by many former prisoners as the Tor Jail, which translates as “black jail”.

Prisoners say they have been kept in isolation in cold cells and subjected to sleep deprivation, but it turns out the CIA’s hands are clean — this time it’s the Defense Intelligence Agency at work. And as for the fact that the Red Cross has been barred from entering this facility, that’s because it isn’t being called a detention facility.

Marc Ambinder reports:

Defense officials said that the White House is kept appraised of the methods used by interrogators at the site. The reason why the Red Cross hasn’t been invited to tour it, officials said, was because the U.S. does not believe it to be a detention facility, classifying it instead as an intelligence gathering facility.

A Defense official said that the agency’s inspector general had launched an internal investigation into reports in the Washington Post that several teenagers were beaten by the interrogators, but [Pentagon spokesman, Bryan] Whitman disputes this.

When the Obama Administration took over, it forbade the DIA from keeping prisoners in the facility longer than 30 days, although it is not clear how that dictum is enforced. It is also not clear how much Congress knows about the DIA’s interrogation procedures, which have largely escaped public scrutiny.

May 14, 2010 Posted by | Subjugation - Torture, War Crimes | Leave a comment

Israel’s Disappeared

Legal Persecution

By NADIA HIJAB | May 14, 2010

At first it seemed bizarre. Israel slapped a blanket gag order to prevent media coverage of the May 6 arrest of Ameer Makhoul, a prominent Palestinian citizen of Israel who heads Ittijah, a coalition of 64 major civil society organizations. Yet in no time at all the news had shot round the world, and Facebook pages were up calling for his freedom and for a demonstration in Haifa to demand his release.

So is there a point to such gag orders? It turns out there is. Unlike Makhoul’s case, the news about some arrestees remains unknown for weeks. As people mobilized for Makhoul, reports began to surface about another Palestinian citizen of Israel, Omar Said, who was arrested on April 25 on his way to Jordan.

Said holds a PhD from Israel’s Technion, and his innovative work at the Antaki Center for Herbal Medicine was featured in Haaretz in 2007. Legal sources affirmed that there was also a gag order against media coverage of his case and that, like Makhoul, he has not yet been allowed to see a lawyer.

Then of course there is the now famous case of Anat Kamm, the journalist who was held secretly under house arrest for more than three months earlier this year, accused of having leaked Israeli military documents concerning the premeditated killing of Palestinians in the occupied territories.

How many more are there? So wonders Didi Remez, an Israeli Jewish human rights advocate who blogs at Coteret. How many indeed? As Remez notes, Makhoul’s prominence may now draw attention to a much more widespread phenomenon. Writing about the Kamm case, The Jerusalem Post reported that the Israeli police ask the courts for a gag order about 100 times a year.

Although Israel on Monday lifted the gag orders against both Makhoul and Said, the question of “how many more” is now posed with urgency, given the Israeli state’s growing crackdown on its citizens — crackdowns that are enthusiastically supported by the settler movement as it remorselessly colonizes Palestinian land.

The Israeli Palestinian community is clearly at risk. Israel has now accused Makhoul and Said of spying for Hizbullah — similar accusations drove former Knesset member and community leader Azmi Bishara into self-imposed exile to avoid ending up in prison. Still. the community is determined to stand its ground. “We won’t be silent,” Ynet quoted Adalah, the legal center for Arab minority rights, and others as saying, but will struggle against “the ‘legal’ persecution by the Israeli government against the Arab sector.”

But Jewish human rights advocates are at risk too. Israeli rightwing groups have targeted both Naomi Chazan, head of the New Israel Fund, along with Adalah in the same billboard campaign.

One outcome of the crackdown may be growing Israeli Palestinian and Jewish collaboration in defence of basic rights and freedoms: Adalah and the Association for Civil Rights in Israel together protested the Makhoul gag order to the Supreme Court. As Moshe Yaroni wrote in Zeek, a progressive American Jewish online magazine, “The erosion of rights is a dynamic that threatens every Israeli,” And, he predicted, “Israel is moving toward a very frightening future; a future where most Jews will no longer be able to support Israel.”

Frightening is the word that best describes the state of a person completely cut off from his world, without recourse or rights. The soft-spoken, steel-willed Makhoul has played a major role in defending Palestinian rights and identity in Israel — indeed, Ittijah’s member groups have doubled over the past few years. Makhoul’s dedication has now landed him in jail. His wife, feminist scholar Janan Abdu, writes bravely on her Facebook page, “No prison in the world can absorb a whole nation.” But the family must be frantic with worry — as must other community activists. Who will be next?

Not many countries claiming to be democracies “disappear” their own citizens and deny them due process. Ironically the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development, which sets democracy as a condition of membership, just welcomed Israel into its midst. By so doing, the OECD sent a terrible signal that state power trumps human rights. Further, by not holding Israel accountable for its ongoing violations in the occupied Palestinian territories, its member states risk rendering themselves complicit in its crimes.

Ever since its attack on Gaza in 2008-2009, Israel has mounted a major public relations campaign to counter popular outrage and the growing boycott, divestment, and sanctions movement calling on it to uphold international law. It accuses its critics of anti-Semitism — even the fast-growing Jewish communities working for equality and justice. Wouldn’t it be easier to admit that maybe, just maybe, Israel is doing something wrong? And that until it respects equality, justice and freedom at home and abroad, it will not secure the legitimacy it craves?

Nadia Hijab is a senior fellow at the Institute for Palestine Studies.

May 14, 2010 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Subjugation - Torture | Leave a comment

Israeli settler kills Palestinian youth

There has been a spike in settler violence against Palestinians in recent weeks

Al-Jazeera | May 14, 2010

A Palestinian teenager has been shot dead by an Israeli settler in the occupied West Bank, witnesses and activists said.

The settler opened fire after Palestinian youths threw stones at his car travelling along Route 60 in Mazra’a al-Sharqia, east of Ramallah.

The Popular Struggle Co-ordination Committee activist group said that Aysar al-Zaben was not involved in the stone throwing, but was tending his family’s land when he was shot.

“According to his uncle, his lifeless body was found lying face down on the ground with a bullet hole in his back,” the group said in a statement.

Israeli police said that the killing was being investigated, while the Israeli military stressed that it was not involved in the incident during which “shots were fired after stones were thrown at an Israeli car”.

Route 60, which runs from Beersheba to Nazareth and connects a number of Israeli settlements, is closed to Palestinians in areas of the West Bank. It has seen a number of protests against the restrictions imposed on Palestinians by Israel.

Settler violence

About 500,000 settlers and about 2.5 million Palestinians live in the West Bank and areas near Jerusalem annexed by Israel after the 1967 Middle East war.

Al Jazeera’s Sherine Tadros, reporting from the West Bank, said there had recently been a spike in settler violence against Palestinians.

“Many people are saying this is a direct response to what the settlers feel is a threat from the United States that there will be pressure put on the Israeli administration to stop, or at least freeze, its settlement building empire that it’s constructed here in the occupied West Bank,” she said.

“Many people are saying Palestinian blood has been shed as a price tag, if you like, for the setters to give that message to Prime Minister Netanyahu and his administration that he cannot touch these illegal settlements in the West Bank.

“And if he does try and dismantle them in any way or freeze construction, this will be the result.”

In a report published on Thursday, the UN Office for the Co-ordination of Humanitarian Affairs in the Palestinian territories said that there had been been at least nine violent incidents involving Israeli settlers in the last week.

Israeli settlers injured five Palestinians, including three children, aged five, nine and 12, in two separate incidents of stone-throwing and physical assault, it said.

‘Catastrophe continues’

Thursday’s attack in the West Bank came as Palestinians marked the 62nd anniversary of the Nakba, or Catastrophe, when an estimated 700,000 Arabs were forced to flee the creation of Israel.

Saeb Erekat, the senior Palestinian negotiator, said “the catastrophe continues” for Palestinians.

“In other conflicts, refugee rights have been honoured and respected, including the right of return, restitution and compensation. In stark contrast, however, Israel refuses to even recognise the Palestinian right of return, thus continuing to deny the refugees’ basic rights.

“No state is above the law,” Erekat said, calling on the international community to end Israeli “beligerence and disregard for international law”.

Candle-lit vigils were planned in refugee camps on Friday evening and major demonstrations were scheduled in the Palestinian territories on Saturday, including a march to the grave of the late Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat in Ramallah.

The Palestinians recently resumed indirect peace talks with Israel, mediated by the United States, but both sides have spoken pessimistically about the chances of tangible results.

May 14, 2010 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Illegal Occupation, Subjugation - Torture | Leave a comment

Israel’s red line: Shin Bet arrests boycott leader

By Jonathan Cook | May 14, 2010

Amir Makhoul is leading an emerging movement inside Israel

The recent arrest of two respected public figures from Israel’s Palestinian Arab minority in night-time raids on their homes by the Shin Bet secret police – brought to light this week when a gag order was partially lifted – sent shock waves through the community.

The arrests were not the first of their kind. The Shin Bet has been hounding and imprisoning politicians and intellectuals from the country’s Palestinian minority, a fifth of the population, since the birth of the Jewish state more than six decades ago. Currently, two MKs from Arab political parties, as well as the leader of the popular Islamic Movement, are facing trials.

But the detention of Amir Makhoul and Omar Sayid by Israeli intelligence forces has been seen differently – as the gathering storm clouds in a political climate already fiercely hostile to its Palestinian citizens.

Mohammed Zeidan, the head of the Human Rights Association in Nazareth, said: “We are used to our political leaders being persecuted but now the Shin Bet is turning its sights on the leaders of Palestinian civil society in Israel, and that’s a dangerous development.”

Makhoul and Sayid were not accused of the usual public order offenses, nor had they simply violated chauvinistic legislation that criminalizes Palestinian citizens’ visits to neighboring Arab states. Both are facing the much more serious charge of espionage, on behalf of Lebanon’s Hizbullah.

Makhoul, who appears to be the chief object of the Shin Bet’s interest, is the head of Ittijah, an umbrella organization coordinating the activities of Palestinian human rights groups in Israel. More specifically, he has become the leading voice inside Israel backing the growing international campaign for boycott, sanctions and divestment against Israel.

On Wednesday, the courts approved an extension of Makhoul’s remand. He was not allowed to be present and was denied the right to a lawyer until at least next Monday, 12 days since his arrest. He is reportedly being interrogated around the clock.

Sayid, an activist with the Tajamu political party and a scientist who specialises in developing new medicines from Middle Eastern plants, has been held by the Shin Bet since 24 April.

Amnesty International threatened to declare Makhoul a “prisoner of conscience,” saying his arrest “smacks of pure harassment, designed to hinder his human rights work.”

Observers from the Palestinian minority too have ridiculed the allegations, based on secret evidence, that the pair made “contact with a foreign agent.” They point out that under the draconian emergency regulations being used in this case the Shin Bet needs only the flimsiest circumstantial evidence to lay such a charge.

Zeidan called it an easy, “one size fits all” security offense that was difficult to challenge but persuasive to the Jewish majority. “You only need unwittingly to meet at a conference a relative of a relative of someone in Hizbullah and the Shin Bet thinks it has grounds to arrest you.”

The Palestinian minority is not alone in believing that Makhoul and Sayid have not spied in the accepted sense of passing classified or sensitive information to an enemy: Israel’s military correspondents have been largely dismissive of the espionage charges too. In the Israeli daily newspaper Haaretz, writers Amos Harel and Avi Issacharoff pointed out that neither Palestinian citizen is privy to secrets that would interest Hizbullah.

Instead, the correspondents hinted at other motives behind the arrests. Any contacts between Israel’s enemies such as Hizbullah and Palestinian rights activists in Israel are a threat, they surmise, because Palestinian leaders in Israel might offer assistance in “co-ordinating political positions” or initiate “protests and riots during sensitive periods.” That radically expands the traditional definition of “espionage”.

The Shin Bet’s pursuit of Makhoul and Sayid, in the view of community leaders, needs to be understood in terms of a fixed assumption by the Israeli establishment that the Arab minority poses a political threat to the continued survival of a Jewish state.

The roots of this worldview can be traced back to the signing of the Oslo accords. With the launch of a peace process with the Palestinians, Israeli politicians began to reconsider the status of the large Palestinian minority. Many believed that allowing a significant population of Palestinians to remain inside Israel as citizens after the creation of a neighboring Palestinian state might one day prove to be the country’s Achilles’ heel.

Might not the Palestinian minority provide the Palestinians in the occupied territories with a “foot in the door” to try to win back the whole of historic Palestine rather than settle for a mini-state in the West Bank and Gaza?

Those fears escalated dramatically when Oslo turned sour and the second intifada erupted in 2000. Israel believed the Palestinians had refused its “generous” offer at Camp David in the hope that they could use the Palestinian minority as a “Trojan horse” to destroy the Jewish state demographically from within.

Ehud Barak, the Israeli prime minister at the time, called the Palestinian minority the “spear point” of what he believed was Yasser Arafat’s attempt to dismantle Israel as a Jewish state. He feared that a political reform program demanding a “state of all its citizens”, which had become a rallying cry for Palestinian citizens, was really intended to bring the return of millions of Palestinian refugees under cover of an equal rights struggle.

Israel responded by making contact all but impossible between Palestinians in Israel and those in the occupied territories, including by building a wall around the West Bank and legislating an effective ban on marriages across the Green Line.

Perhaps not surprisingly, the Shin Bet’s chief target prior to the latest arrests was Azmi Bishara, the architect of the “state of all its citizens” campaign. In 2007 Bishara was accused of spying for Hizbullah too, and has been in exile ever since.

At that time, Yuval Diskin, the head of the Shin Bet, warned that he regarded it as his job to “thwart” any activities, including political ones, that threatened Israel’s survival as a Jewish state.

According to Zeidan and other analysts, the Shin Bet’s hand in the latest arrests appears to be guided by a similar assessment that the Palestinian minority is again posing an “existential threat” to Israel – even if for different reasons.

Makhoul is seen as the figurehead of an emerging movement inside Israel that, faced with the refusal of Israelis to countenance political reforms to democratize the country, is devising new political strategies.

He has not hidden the extensive contacts he has developed both among western Palestinian solidarity activists and in the Arab world, urging the need for a boycott of Israel. He was also at the forefront of the protests inside Israel against its attack on Gaza last year. He was called in for interrogation by the Shin Bet at the time.

“The occupation isn’t news anymore,” Zeidan said. “The big threats facing Israel, in the Shin Bet’s view, are its deteriorating image in terms of human rights and the growing sense abroad that it is an apartheid state.

“Palestinian civil society in Israel, more so even than our political parties, is best placed to make the case on those issues to the international community, to expose the racism and discrimination inherent in a Jewish state. Amir Makhoul’s arrest should be understood in that light.

“The Shin Bet believes we have crossed a red line in our international advocacy.”

Jonathan Cook is a writer and journalist based in Nazareth, Israel. His latest books are “Israel and the Clash of Civilisations: Iraq, Iran and the Plan to Remake the Middle East” (Pluto Press) and “Disappearing Palestine: Israel’s Experiments in Human Despair” (Zed Books). His website is http://www.jkcook.net.

May 14, 2010 Posted by | Solidarity and Activism, Subjugation - Torture | Leave a comment

Settlers Torch Olive Orchard In Silwan

By Saed Bannoura – IMEMC & Agencies – May 13, 2010

A group of fundamentalist Israeli settlers torched, Wednesday night, an 11-Dunam olive orchard in al-Rababa valley, in Silwan, south of the Old City of Jerusalem.

The Maan news Agency reported that three olive trees, over 300 years old, were burnt down while dozens of trees were partially burnt. The attack took place while thousands of Jewish settlers held a provocative procession in Silwan under extensive Israeli police presence. Yet, the police did not prevent the settlers from torching the orchard.

On Tuesday at dawn, May 4, a group of fundamentalist settlers torched the main mosque of the al-Lubban al-Sharqiyya village, south of the northern West Bank city of Nablus. The settlers attacked the mosque approximately at 3 a.m., rounded up several copies of the Holy Koran in one place and set them ablaze.

The fire caused excessive damage to the property of the mosque, including its ceiling, its ceiling fans and walls. Its 450 square meters of carpet and eight air conditioners were burnt also.

This is the third mosque to be torched by the settlers this year as the settlers torched a mosque in Yasuf village near Salfit, and another mosque in Huwwara town, near Nablus.

In April, settlers torched three Palestinian vehicles in Huwwara town, near the northern West Bank city of Nablus and sprayed “price tag” graffiti on a local mosque.

Two days after the attack in Huwwara, the settlers torched two Palestinian cars in Jinsafut village, near the northern West Bank city of Qalqilia. The settlers also sprayed the star of David on a building in the same village.

In December of last year, a group of settlers torched a mosque in Yasuf village, near the central West Bank city of Salfit, and also sprayed “price tag” on its walls.

May 13, 2010 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Subjugation - Torture | Leave a comment

Shin Bet blackmails Jerusalem medical students

Press TV – May 12, 2010

The Shin Bet is reportedly trying to entice Palestinian medical students to join the Israeli intelligence service by promising entry permits to al-Quds (Jerusalem).

The spying agency allegedly tried to blackmail two fifth-year medical students at al-Quds University who are pursuing internships in Palestinian university hospitals in the city, Israel’s English-language Haaretz newspaper said on its website on Wednesday.

A “Captain Biran” who introduced himself as the Shin Bet agent responsible for monitoring the university told the two to report on other students and their activities as a condition for renewing their entry permits, Haaretz reported.

The medical faculty of the university — located in the village of Abu Dis near East al-Quds — is affiliated with some of the oldest and largest hospitals in al-Quds and have up to 200 students of medicine, nursing and physiotherapy who need entry permits to enter the occupied city.

Hospital officials file requests to authorities of the al-Quds Civil Administration in the settlement of Beit El who at the discretion of the Shin Bet issue permits valid for between three and six months.

One of the two Palestinians in question encountered the recruitment request in mid 2009 after his entry permit into al-Quds was not renewed following his pilgrimage to Mecca. He was then told by the Civil Administration to meet with a Shin Bet coordinator.

In his meeting with Biran, the agent allegedly threatened the student that the Shin Bet could “interfere with your ability to finish your studies,” but that if he acceded to “help” him monitor other students, the agency would even grant him entry to the prestigious Hadassah medical center.

The other student met Biran in March, days after his entry permit to al-Quds was confiscated at Zeitim checkpoint outside East al-Quds. He was told that his entry permit had been seized because “some illegal things were found in your bag” and was similarly instructed to report to the Shin Bet about students traveling abroad.

The Palestinian students said they were effectively prevented from choosing a residency specialty and continuing their medical training when they both refused to spy on their peers.

The Shin Bet said in response that the entry permits for the two students had not been renewed for security reasons, but did not comment on the blackmail claims.

May 12, 2010 Posted by | Full Spectrum Dominance, Subjugation - Torture | Leave a comment

Jewish settlers attack Palestinian villagers in Ramallah

Palestine Information Center – 12/05/2010

RAMALLAH — Hundreds of armed Israeli settlers, without prior warning, raided the villages of East Farm and Sinjil, east of Ramallah city, which caused fierce clashes at noon Tuesday.

Eyewitnesses said that hand-to-hand fighting erupted between the Palestinian villagers and the Israeli assailants who used their guns in the attack.

The settler-related incidents are rarely reported in these two villages and such sudden barbaric attack means that the settlers expanded their area of violence against the Palestinians.

The Israeli Aasor military post, which is the largest base in the West Bank and located near the East Farm village, was the staging point from which the settlers waged their attack.

In another incident in Nablus, other violent Israeli settlers appropriated Palestinians’ agricultural lands in the village of Jalud and forcibly prevented the owners from entering them before bulldozing them.

Local sources in the village said that the settlers bulldozed 30 dunums of plowed fields as a prelude to seizing them.

In another context, Al-Ahrar center for prisoners’ studies and human rights said that the Israeli occupation forces stormed and ransacked the home of prisoner Ayed Dodeen in the village of Dura in Al-Khalil causing panic and terror among the children.

Director of the center Fouad Al-Khafsh explained that in conjunction with the election of Dodeen as the head of Hamas detainees in the Negev prison, a large military force barbarically broke into his house terrorizing his wife and children and destroying everything in its way without giving any reason for the raid.

Khafsh said that Dodeen, 43, is a father of six children and has spent 13 years in administrative detention except for few months he spent with his family.

His wife appealed through a telephone call with Al-Ahrar center to international human rights organizations to swiftly intervene to get her husband released from Israeli jails.

May 12, 2010 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Illegal Occupation, Subjugation - Torture | Leave a comment

Rights orgs condemn arrest of Palestinian civil society leader

Press release, Various undersigned, 6 May 2010


This morning at 3:10am, Israeli Security Agency (ISA) agents accompanied by Israeli police raided Ameer Makhoul’s family home in Haifa and arrested him. Makhoul is a human rights defender and serves as the general director of Ittijah – The Union of Arab Community-Based Associations and as the Chairman of the Public Committee for the Defense of Political Freedom in the framework of the High Follow-up Committee for the Arab Citizens of Israel.

The 16 ISA agents and police officers immediately separated Makhoul from his family, including wife Janan and daughters Hind, 17 and Huda, 12, and conducted an extensive search of the home. According to Janan, the police confiscated items including documents, maps, the family’s four mobile phones, Ameer and Janan’s laptops, the hard drives from the girls’ two desktop computers, a camera and a small tape recorder containing un-transcribed oral histories Janan collects as part of her work. At one point during the police search, Janan says, one officer violently restrained her, twisting her arm and pushing her when she attempted to leave the home’s living room to observe the confiscations. The security forces also refused to identify themselves and showed her a warrant authorizing Makhoul’s arrest only after she repeatedly insisted. The order was signed on 23 April 2010 and cited unsubstantiated “security” reasons as the grounds for Makhoul’s arrest.

Meanwhile, approximately 40 minutes after their arrival, a group of the security forces left with Makhoul in custody. At around the same time, the Israeli authorities raided the Ittijah office and confiscated documents and the hard drives from all of the organization’s computers.

A hearing in Makhoul’s case was held at the Petah Tikva interrogation center later that morning, and his detention was extended for six days. Reports also indicate that Makhoul has been banned from meeting with an attorney for at least two days.

This arrest comes shortly after Israeli Interior Minister Eli Yishai signed an administrative order prohibiting Makhoul from exiting the country for a two month period. In the order, which was signed on 21 April and is based on Article 6 of the 1948 emergency regulations, Yishai states, “I have reached the conviction that the exit of Ameer Makhoul from the country poses a serious threat to the security of the state, and therefore I issue this order to prevent him from leaving the country until the 21st of June, 2010.”

However, Makhoul’s case is only one example amidst a recent escalated campaign by Israeli authorities against Palestinian human rights defense and civil resistance. In addition to arbitrary arrest and detention, Israeli authorities have met Palestinian human rights activism in recent months with a variety of measures, including raids, deportations, travel bans, visa denials and media attacks against nongovernmental organizations. Moreover, Palestinian communities involved in grassroots human rights defense efforts are frequently levied with collective punishment measures in the form of curfews, sieges and destruction of property, threats to individuals and the community as a whole, beatings, the use of lethal and “non-lethal” ammunition, including 40mm high velocity tear gas canisters, denial of permits, tear-gassing, army incursions and intentional injury and killings.

The undersigned organizations view these measures as deliberate violations of fundamental freedoms, particularly freedoms of movement, expression, association and nonviolent assembly, and of the special protections owed under international law to human rights defenders. Furthermore, as Makhoul’s arrest warrant and travel ban order are based on emergency regulations and “secret” information that is never disclosed to the defense, the undersigned consider them to be arbitrary political actions in violation of fundamental due process principles and human rights standards.

The undersigned organizations therefore strongly condemn Makhoul’s arrest and travel ban and call for his immediate release and the ban’s immediate suspension.

The undersigned also call upon the international community to take a strong stand in opposition to the Israeli campaign against human rights defenders, and to intervene with Israel for:

  • Ameer Makhoul’s immediate release and the lifting of the travel ban against him;
  • An end to the Israeli practice of arbitrary detention and deportation of human rights defenders; and,
  • Full adherence to and respect for relevant international standards, including the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and the UN Declaration and EU guidelines on Human Rights Defenders, as applied to the Palestinian population in the OPT and Israel.

Undersigned organizations:

Addameer Prisoner Support and Human Rights Association
BADIL Resource Center for Palestinian Residency & Refugee Rights
Ensan Center for Democracy & Human Rights
Al-Haq
Defence for Children International – Palestine Section (DCI-Palestine)
Women`s Centre for Legal Aid and Counselling
Institute for Policy Studies
Palestinian Centre for Human Rights (PCHR)
Palestine Solidarity Committee – South Africa

May 6, 2010 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Subjugation - Torture | Leave a comment

Turkish Relief Foundation Demands That Israel Release Its West Bank Representative

By Saed Bannoura – IMEMC & Agencies – May 06, 2010

The Turkish Relief Foundation demanded Israel to unconditionally release its representative in the West Bank, Mohammad Shahin, who was kidnapped on Wednesday April 27.

Head of the Foundation, Bülent Yıldırım, stated during a press conference in Istanbul attending by several civil society institution and the wife of Shahin, called for the unconditional release of Shahin who will appear in court Thursday.

Shahin arrived recently in the West Bank, opened the representative office of the foundation and registered for Hebrew courses at the Hebrew University. He was kidnapped at a roadblock near Bethlehem and was moved to Petah Tikva detention and interrogation facility. The army also broke into his home and searched it before confiscating his personal laptop and several files. His wife said she is concerned for the life of her husband who has been under interrogation since one week, and demanded his release.

Bülent Yıldırım stated that it is likely that Shahin was arrested for the Foundations’ activities in organizing and aiding the popular campaign to break the siege on Gaza, and added that such arrests and violations will not stop the foundation especially its upcoming humanitarian trip to the Gaza Strip in the middle of this month. He added that should Israel keep Shahin behind bars, it would expose all of Israel’s illegal activities in Turkey.

Bülent Yıldırım said that the Foundation attempted to send three lawyers to represent Shahin but the Israeli embassy did not respond.

Israel claims that Shahin endangers its security and that he has connections with “terrorist organizations”.

May 6, 2010 Posted by | Illegal Occupation, Subjugation - Torture | Leave a comment

Two Little Girls: Murder in the Jordan Valley

International Solidarity Movement | 5 May 2010
Emad Fakha, father
Emad Fakha, father

We stopped by the roadside at the spot where the two little girls had been killed. Their blood still stained the cushion on which they had been sitting, fragments of the military jeep which had rammed their father’s tractor still littered the ground. Janaa Fakha (8), her sister Maasa (5) and their brother Hussein (9) never saw what hit them as they waited for their father to take them from the family fields to their home in the small village of Al Ain al Baida in the northern Jordan Valley. Al Ain al Baida (the White Spring) is one of the few remaining Palestinian villages here. Its inhabitants scratch a living from what remains to them of their lands in this fertile and beautiful area.

That April day Emad Fakha had taken three of his four children to help in the fields after school, something they enjoyed, a treat. The children had climbed into the “basket” on the ground at the rear of the tractor, ready to be lifted up. Emad was preparing to start the motor when an Israeli military jeep swerved off the road, at speed, and rammed into the tractor from behind. While Hussein was thrown clear and suffered only a broken leg, the little girls didn’t stand a chance. With the body of one sister draped obscenely over its front bumper, the jeep reversed for five or six metres and then rammed once again into the tractor. What might have been a tragic accident is thus revealed for what it was – a cold-blooded murder.

Their jeep undriveable and so unable to escape, the soldiers threatened Emad with their rifles. More soldiers arrived but it was 25 minutes before the Israeli police reached the scene. The soldiers claimed that it was “an accident”, but Israeli citizen Eliazer Salam, from the settlement at Yama, who had witnessed the entire incident from his car, testified that the jeep driver had not applied his brakes at any stage and had, indeed, swerved off the road and accelerated into the tractor.

The jeep’s driver was arrested but there has been no news that he is to face any charges in a court of law. When I asked the family whether there would be an inquest (explaining that this was the usual procedure in Western, democratic countries) they didn’t understand the term. They have no recourse to the protection of the law, as we know it. Far from protecting the civilian population of the territories which they occupy, as required under international law, the Israeli military brutalises and preys upon a helpless people.

Recent similar incidents in the Nablus region – at Awarta and in Jenin – where Israeli military vehicles have been used to run down pedestrians and ram a civilian car, with fatal consequences, seem to point to an emerging pattern. The psychopathic tendencies of certain members of the Israel Defence (sic) Force have found an outlet.

Meanwhile, a single, small grave has been dug in the graveyard at Al Ain al Baida. It houses the remains of two small sisters, their severed limbs and bodies buried as one, together forever under the sun, clouds and rain of their beloved Palestine.

Update, the pattern continues:

Uniformed woman behind Netanya hit-and-run

Ma’an – 10/05/2010

Hebron – A Hebron man working in Israel was killed in a hit-and-run incident in Netanya, north of Tel Aviv, on Monday with police saying the woman driving the vehicle was in army uniform… Full article

Military jeep, car collide near Halhoul, 2 injured

Ma’an – 10/05/2010

Hebron – Two Palestinians were injured in a car accident involving an Israeli military jeep on Sunday afternoon, when the vehicles collided near the Halhul bridge north of Hebron, reports said… Full article

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May 5, 2010 Posted by | Aletho News, Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Subjugation - Torture | Leave a comment

The sadistic logic behind Israel’s siege of Gaza

By Paul Woodward on May 3, 2010

The Israeli human rights group, Gisha, has taken the Israeli government to court in an effort to force Israel to reveal information on the import controls through which Gaza is being held under siege.

Rules that allow the importation of cinnamon but not coriander might seem arbitrary and it’s unlikely that further documentation from the Israelis will show otherwise. But there does appear to be a sadistic logic at work here. Nothing more effectively reinforces a sense of powerlessness in a population than for the minutiae of everyday life to be under the constant, arbitrary and callous control of an invisible and inaccessible power. This is the logic and practice of subjugation. It is an exercise in the crushing of human will.

Gisha’s director, Sari Bashi, says she is no security expert, “but preventing children from receiving toys, preventing manufacturers from getting raw materials – I don’t see how that’s responsive to Israeli security needs.”

And she says that some of the prohibitions appear to be absurdly arbitrary: “I certainly don’t understand why cinnamon is permitted, but coriander is forbidden. Is there something more dangerous about coriander? Is coriander more critical to Gaza’s economy than cinnamon? This is a policy that appears to make no sense.”
She argues that if there is a logic behind such decisions, the military should reveal what it is.

Now, after several months’ waiting, the state has given its response to the court, in a written submission, seen by the BBC.

It throws a small pool of light on the process behind the blockade.

The overall rationale is set out, in bold type: “The limitation on the transfer of goods is a central pillar in the means at the disposal of the State of Israel in the armed conflict between it and Hamas.”

The Israeli authorities also confirm the existence of four documents related to how the blockade works: how they process requests for imports into Gaza, how they monitor the shortages within Gaza, their approved list of what is allowed in, and a document entitled “Food Consumption in the Gaza Strip – Red Lines” which sets out the minimum calorie intake needed by Gaza’s million and a half inhabitants, according to their age and sex.

This paper was however, the state insists, just a draft power-point presentation, used for “internal planning work”, which “never served as a basis for the policy of the authority”.

But while the first three documents promise a great deal of detail, that detail is not delivered.

In each case, the state argues that disclosure of what is allowed in and why would, in their words, “damage national security and harm foreign relations”.

May 4, 2010 Posted by | Subjugation - Torture | Leave a comment

Soldiers Level Mosque Near Rafah, Settlers Torch Mosque Near Nablus

By Saed Bannoura – IMEMC & Agencies – May 04, 2010

Israeli soldiers invaded an area in Rafah, in the southern part of the Gaza Strip, leveled the Al Dahniyya mosque and uprooted farmlands on Tuesday at dawn. Local sources reported that the mosque was leveled to the ground after several armored military vehicles and bulldozers invaded Rafah.

Also in Rafah, soldiers uprooted farmlands near the Yasser Arafat Airport east of Rafah. Several military bulldozers and armored vehicles bulldozed farmlands and opened fire at random in Al Dahniyya area. The vehicles, originally stationed at the Karem Abu Salem (Kerem Shalom) military post, advanced 800 meters into the area and placed sand hills.

Also on Tuesday at dawn, a group of fundamentalist settlers torched the main mosque of the Al Lubban Al Shariyya village, south of the northern West Bank city of Nablus. The settlers attacked the mosque approximately at 3 A.M., rounded up several copies of the Holy Koran in one place and set them ablaze. The fire caused excessive damage to the property of the mosque, including its ceiling, its fans and walls. Its 450 square meters of carpet and eight air conditioners were burnt also.

This is the third mosque to be torched by the settlers this year as the settlers torched a mosque in Yasuf village near Salfit and another mosque in Huwwara town, near Nablus.

Photo credit Maan Images/Wissam Nassar

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Al-Manar TV

… According to the town’s mayor, Jamal Daragma, this is not the first time the village was targeted by settlers: “In the past they also smashed windows, uprooted olive trees, damaged houses and property. At least once a week settlers come in, riot and harm the village.”

The town is located next to three Israeli settlements: Shilo, Ma’ale Levona, and Eli. Contacted by AFP, the Israeli occupation army could not immediately confirm or deny the report.

On April 14, a mosque in Huwara near Nablus was desecrated by settlers who scrawled Hebrew graffiti and a Star of David over the walls. Two cars were also torched during the incident.

In December, settlers vandalized another mosque in the northern West Bank village of Yasuf, torching Muslim holy books and spraying hate messages in Hebrew. The incident triggered clashes between villagers and Israeli occupation troops. Israeli police arrested youths from the settlement of Yitzhar, but no one was charged.

May 4, 2010 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Subjugation - Torture | Leave a comment

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