Necessity and Defiance
By Eva Bartlett | April 16, 2010
Mohammed Abu Jerrad, 12, works with his older brother and 4 others to gather their wheat. Although it is still somewhat early for harvesting, the family hopes to harvest their 5 dunams quickly, preferring the early harvest over the possibility that Israeli soldiers will demolish or light their crops afire, as they have routinely done in the past. [One such incident occured in Johr Ad Dik last May, when Israeli soldiers shot incendiary devices into ripe wheat and barley fields, setting nearly 3 km, 200 dunams, of crops and fruit trees afire.]
Abu Jerrad’s 5 dunams lie roughly just over 300 metres from the border, along which Israeli military tower and remote controlled machine gun towers loom. From these towers, Israeli soldiers regularly shoot on farmers, workers gathering rubble and scrap metal for construction uses, and civilians on the land.
This plot of wheat is on rented land.
“We grow it to feed our sheep and goats,” Abu Jerrad says of his 150 animals.
“This morning when we came here to work the Israelis began shooting, so we left,” he says.
“Yes, Mohammed was with us,” he answers of the 12 year old helping him.
“Sometimes they even shoot at the sheep,” he adds. “Are they afraid of the sheep?” he jokes.
The 6 farmers can do two trips of 3 loaded donkey carts per day, if all goes well. It will take many more days before their crops are harvested.
In a Strip under years of siege and an area where Israeli shooting, shelling and kidnapping is the norm, every incident of farming is an act of necessity and an act of defiance: Palestinian farmers will not be driven off their land.
*Sheep, most often seen scouring Gaza’s vacant lots and garbage dumps, find good grazing land for a change. Much of Gaza’s prime grazing land has been destroyed or is inaccessible due to the Israeli-imposed “buffer zone”.
Adding Torture to Injury
By Pam Bailey | IPS | April 14, 2010
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GAZA – It was bad enough that Ahmad Asfour was severely maimed by an Israeli drone strike outside his house on Jan. 9, 2009. But, his search for advanced treatment landed the journalism student, now 19, in Israeli prison where he remains.
According to Mahmud Abo Rahma of the Al Mezan Centre for Human Rights, not many Palestinians are arrested as Ahmed was, but it is increasingly common for patients entering Israel to be denied treatment unless the patient or family agrees to collaborate.
Al Mezan has joined the Physicians for Human Rights and the ADALA Centre (which defends the rights of Palestinian Arabs in Israel) to charge Israel with blackmailing Palestinian patients in Gaza, exploiting their need for medical treatment to pressure them into collaborating with its intelligence agencies.
Ahmad and four teenaged cousins were hit by fragments from a missile fired by an Israeli drone, east of Khan Younis, in the southern region of the Gaza Strip, just 14 days after Israel launched its massive, 22-day assault on the densely populated strip of land wedged between Israel and Egypt. The fragments lodged in his left eye, broke his jaw, shattered his teeth, severely lacerated both hands and right thigh, destroyed his genitals, and damaged his pancreas and intestines.
His father, Samir, was in Egypt at the time with one of Ahmad’s brothers, who had been injured just eight days before. Due to the siege imposed by Israel since Hamas took control in 2007, medical care in Gaza is often inadequate. Gazans have been unable to repair the 15 (out of 27) hospitals and 43 (of 110) primary healthcare facilities damaged in last year’s Israeli invasion, because of the ban on importation of construction materials.
Treatment in Egypt is not advanced and, according to Abo Rahma, the risk of contracting Hepatitis C is significant. Getting permission to enter Israel is difficult for Palestinians during normal times, and it was impossible during and immediately after the invasion. Even a year later, the UN reports that almost a quarter of the 1,103 patients who had sought permits for treatment in Israel in December 2009 were denied or delayed. As a result, 27 patients died while awaiting referral last year.
Ahmad and his cousins were rushed to the local hospital by his oldest brother, and the medical director sent them immediately to Egypt. Ahmad spent the next eight months there, but little could be done. In fact, because of the damage to his pancreas and the lack of appropriate treatment, he soon developed diabetes.
Doctors caring for Ahmad recommended he travel to Germany. But there was a catch: Ahmad needed a visa, and for that he was required to go to Tel Aviv – an impossibility for Gazans.
Finally, one physician suggested a hospital in Jerusalem, St. Joseph’s. As part of the approval process, Samir took his wheelchair-bound son to the Erez Crossing into Israel on Nov. 23. After waiting four hours, they were turned away, and told to return two days later. When they arrived, they were subjected to a harrowing ordeal.
“Here I am with my injured son, terrified about his health, and we were forced to remove all of our clothes so we could be strip searched. Then they took my son away from me,” recounted Samir through an interpreter. “Ahmad needed insulin every two hours, but I couldn’t give it to him…The next thing I know he is in shackles! They took the medication I had brought for Ahmed and all the money I had collected from charities (about US$2,500) and he was gone.”
It was 20 days, says Samir, before he finally found out what had happened to his son, after he sought help from human rights organizations.
Lawyers from the Al Mezan Center for Human Rights discovered that other young men who had gone before Ahmad to Erez and been interrogated had apparently implicated him, claiming he had been in possession of a gun and an explosive for one of the Gaza-based militias. (Samir claims the “explosive” was actually his son’s insulin vials.)
Ahmad maintained his innocence during his four hours of interrogation at Erez, and as a result, he was transferred to an Israeli prison in Ashkelon. After five consecutive days of further interrogation, Ahmad could take no more and confessed. The charges: ” membership in a terrorist organization, observation of and passing information to the enemy, providing services for a terrorist organization and possession of firearms.”
“He was subjected to practices that we consider torture and ill treatment, mainly in the form of forced stress positions for long hours, such as sitting on a chair with hands cuffed behind,” the Al Mezan legal team said in a response to an inquiry. “Torture is unconscionable at any time, but it is particularly cruel when the victim is already medically vulnerable.”
Samir, who receives information on his son from the attorneys and the Red Cross, said he learned later that his son had been told that his father was in jail as well, and that therefore he must cooperate with the Shin Bet, Israel’s internal security agency. Meanwhile, Physicians for Human Rights learned that Ahmad was being denied all medical treatment except for his insulin, and has been advocating on his behalf. Samir says the latest news he received is that one of his son’s arms may need to be amputated.
Today, Ahmed is still in prison, although he has been transferred to Beersheba. Based on his “confession,” he was offered a plea bargain of 33 months incarceration or a shortened list of charges with sentencing to be determined. He rejected the “bargain” and at a Mar. 24 session, the court set a new hearing for June, to allow the prosecution to call its witnesses – the police who conducted the interrogation.
“Every Palestinian has the right to health, which is enshrined in Article 25 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights,” Al Mezan stated in a March 2009 report. “This right must be provided without any conditions hinged to it, a principle that Israel repeatedly violates. The Shin Bet has on numerous occasions pressured Palestinians in need of external medical treatment to become informants in exchange for permission to leave Gaza.’’
According to Physicians for Human Rights, agents interrogate Gazans who want to enter Israel for medical care about their relatives, neighbors and friends; those who don’t cooperate often don’t get travel clearance. It has received reports from 32 patients in Gaza who say they were denied permission to leave for refusing to cooperate with Israeli questioners at the Erez Crossing by answering questions about the political affiliations of relatives, friends and acquaintances.
Samir has hired an Israeli attorney to plead his son’s case, but so far doesn’t have the money to pay her. He will sell his house, he says, if he has to.
“My son is not guilty!” exclaims Samir in frustration and pain. “If my son was a militant, would I have tried to take him through Erez? He is just a boy who needs treatment, who is being used as part of their game.”
Afghans ‘abused at secret prison’ at Bagram airbase
By Hilary Andersson | BBC News | April 15, 2010
Bagram – Afghan prisoners are being abused in a “secret jail” at Bagram airbase, according to nine witnesses whose stories the BBC has documented. The abuses are all said to have taken place since US President Barack Obama was elected, promising to end torture.
The US military has denied the existence of a secret detention site and promised to look into allegations.
Bagram was the site of a controversial jail holding hundreds of inmates, who have now been moved to another complex.
The old prison was notorious for allegations of prisoner torture and abuse. But witnesses told the BBC in interviews or written testimony that abuses continue in a hidden facility.
Sleep deprivation
“They call it the Black Hole,” said Sher Agha who spent six days in the facility last autumn.
“When they released us they told us we should not tell our stories to outsiders because that will harm us.”
Sher Agha and others we interviewed complained their cells were very cold.
“When I wanted to sleep and started shivering with cold I started reciting the holy Koran,” he said. But sleep, according to the prisoners interviewed, is deliberately prevented in this detention site.
“I could not sleep, nobody could sleep because there was a machine that was making noise,” said Mirwais, who said he was held in the secret jail for 24 days.
“There was a small camera in my cell, and if you were sleeping they’d come in and disturb you,” he added.
The prisoners, who were interviewed separately, all told very similar stories. Most of them said they had been beaten by American soldiers at the point of arrest before being taken to the prison.
Mirwais had half a row of teeth missing, which he said was from being struck with the butt of a gun by an American soldier.
No-one said they were visited by the International Committee of the Red Cross during their detention at the site, and they all said that their families did not know where they were.
In the small concrete cells, the prisoners said, a light was on all the time. They said they could not tell if it was night or day and described this as very disturbing.
Mirwais said he was made to dance to music by American soldiers every time he wanted to use the toilet.
The ex-prisoners said they were imprisoned at the secret jail before being taken to the main detention centre at the Bagram airbase, a new complex called The Detention Facility in Parwan. Bagram’s prisoners were moved to the Parwan complex from the old notorious Bagram prison site on the airbase earlier this year… Full article
Israeli Demolition Campaign in Three Towns Across the West Bank
Popular Struggle Coordination Committee | 14th April 2010
House demolished by Israeli bulldozers in the village of Al-Khader, near Bethlehem. [MaanImages/Luay Sababa]
In an aggravation of Israeli policy of home demolitions, a house and two shops were razed in the Central West Bank village of Hares this morning. An additional house was reduced to rubble in the village of alKhadder, west of Bethlehem and a 1,000 square meters factory was demolished in the town Beit Sahour.
In what seems a coordinated move, Israeli forces carried out demolitions in two different areas of the West Bank today, rendering at least 16 people homeless. In recent months, international pressure has caused a significant decline in the demolition of Palestinian houses in the Israeli-controlled Area C of the West Bank. Israel uses its statutory authority in Area C, which spans over 60% of the West Bank, to dramatically limit Palestinian development. Palestinians fear that today’s concerted demolitions may be the opening salvo in a provocative change in Israeli policy.
Mahmoud Zwahare a popular committee member from the Bethlehem region said during the demolitions that “Israel keeps claiming it strives for peace and constantly complains about Palestinian incitement and violence. It is doing so while carrying out destructive and irreversible steps on the ground against ordinary civilians. The demolitions today have nothing to do with the security of Israelis and everything to do with provocation and injustice”.
A convoy of eight armored military jeeps and a D9 bulldozer entered the village of Hares in the early morning today and advanced towards the newly built house of Maher Sultan. The house, which Sultan had just finished constructing after five years, was to be home for himself, his wife and their five children. The two story house was quickly demolished by the bulldozer, which left nothing but rubble behind it.
The demolition order was posted on Sultan’s house a month ago, citing a Mohammed Mansour as the owner of the house, which complicated to procedures to stop the demolition. At the time of the demonstration, Sultan was actually at the DCO in Tulkarem to try an negotiate an injunction, unaware that his home is being razed.
After completing the demolition of Sultan’s house, the Israeli forces continued to demolish two stores in the outskirts of the village.
Almost simultaneously, a massive contingent of Israeli forces invaded the town of alKhadder, West of Bethlehem. The massive Israeli bulldozer demolished the house of Ali Mousa, which was home to nine people, including a one year old baby, as soldiers prevented anyone from nearing the house – including the family’s lawyer, who showed soldiers a 2006 court-issued injunction on the demolition.
After completing the demolition, an Israeli Civil Administration officer who was present at the scene informed people that more house demolitions will be carried in the near future.
Shortly after the alKhadder demolition, forces lead by the Israeli Civil Administration demolished a factory in the town of Beit Sahour. Roughly a year ago, Omar Ayyoub, the owner of the factory was served a halt-construction order by the civil administration, which he complied with and have been fighting ever since. When the bulldozers arrived today he pleaded with the officer in charge to stop the demolition, or at least present him with a valid demolition order. The officer refused and ordered Ayyoub removed from the scene.
Home destroyed on 14 April 2010 under the pretext it was too close to Israel`s wall. [MaanImages/Haytham Othman]
Over 60 percent of the West Bank is currently classified as Area C, in which, under the Oslo accords, Israel has complete control, over both civil and security issues. According to the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) some 70 percent of Area C, or approximately 44 percent of the West Bank, has been largely designated for the use of Israeli settlements or the Israeli military. The Israeli authorities generally allow Palestinian construction only within the boundaries of an Israeli-approved plan and these cover less than one percent of Area C, much of which is already built-up. As a result, Palestinians are left with no choice but to build “illegally” and risk demolition of their structures and displacement.
According to information released by the Israeli State Attorney’s Office in early December 2009, approximately 2,450 Palestinian-owned structures in Area C have been demolished due to lack of permit over the course of the past 12 years.
When the Army Uses “Enhanced Interrogation” on an American Soldier
Joshua Kors | The Nation | April 14, 2010
I had been covering veterans’ issues for several years and thought I’d developed a thick skin. But the pain on the other end of the telephone line was difficult to stomach. Sergeant Chuck Luther, now back from Iraq, was describing his journey to hell and back. The worst part, he said, wasn’t battling insurgents or even the mortar blast that tossed him to the ground and slammed his head against the concrete — it was the way he was treated by the U.S. Army when he went to the aid station and sought medical help.
In gruesome detail, Luther described what happened to him at Camp Taji’s aid station. He thought he would receive medical care. Instead he was confined to an isolation chamber and held there for over a month, under enforced sleep deprivation, until he agreed to sign papers saying that he was ill before coming to Iraq and thus not eligible for disability and medical benefits. “They wanted me to say I had a ‘personality disorder,'” Luther told me.
Luther’s call did not come out of the blue. For two years I had been investigating this personality disorder scandal: how military doctors were purposely misdiagnosing soldiers, wounded in combat, as having this pre-existing mental illness. As in the civilian world, where people can be locked out of the insurance system if they have a pre-existing condition, soldiers whose wounds can be attributed to a pre-existing illness can be denied disability benefits and long-term medical care.
My reporting began with the case of Specialist Jon Town, who was wounded in Iraq, won a Purple Heart and was then denied disability and medical benefits. Town’s doctor had concluded that his headaches and hearing loss were not caused by the 107-millimeter rocket that knocked him unconscious but by a pre-existing personality disorder.
The spotlight on Town prompted military doctors to step forward and talk about being pressured by their superiors to purposely misdiagnose wounded soldiers. One doctor spoke of a soldier who returned from Iraq with a massive chunk missing from his right leg. The doctor quit after he was pressured to diagnose that soldier as having personality disorder.
Since 2001 more than 22,600 soldiers have been discharged with personality disorder (PD), saving the military billions in disability and medical benefits.
My articles on the scandal sparked a Congressional hearing, a Law and Order episode, and before leaving office, President Bush signed a law requiring the Pentagon to investigate PD discharges. In the wake of those developments, I was flooded with calls from soldiers who had fractured bones and been pierced by grenade shrapnel, only to be told that their wounds came from a problem with their personality — a pre-existing illness that had somehow gone undetected with each military screening and only popped up now, after they returned wounded from combat.
Luther was one of thousands severely wounded in Iraq and Afghanistan now facing a lifetime without medical care. I had spoken to dozens of soldiers in his shoes. But his call haunted me. He sent me photos of the isolation chamber. It was the size of a walk-in closet and was crammed with cardboard boxes, a desk and a bedpan. Armed guards monitored him 24 hours a day. Luther told me how they stopped him from sleeping, keeping the lights on and blasting heavy metal music at him all through the night: Megadeth, Saliva, Disturbed. When he rebelled, Luther was pinned down and injected with sleeping medication.
“This was an aid station,” he said, “but it felt a lot more like enhanced interrogation than medical care.”
After a month, Luther was willing to sign anything — and did. Soon after he signed his name to a personality disorder discharge, he was whisked back to Fort Hood and informed about a PD discharge’s disastrous consequences. No disability pay, no long-term medical care, and because he didn’t serve out his contract, he’d have to pay back a portion of his signing bonus. “They told me I now owed the Army $1,500.”
I would spend the next two years investigating Luther’s case: reading the stacks of medical records written by Luther’s doctors, which document his confinement; talking with a fellow soldier who visited Luther during his month in the aid station; and interviewing his commander, who confirmed all the details.
Settlers vandalize mosque, burn cars, uproot olive trees in Huwwara
Ma’an – 14/04/2010
File Photo
Nablus – Israeli citizens living in an illegal West Bank settlement vandalized a mosque the village of Huwwara, after storming the Nablus village early Wednesday morning.
Settlers from the nearby Yitzhar settlement ascended upon the village at 2am and sprayed graffiti, including a Star of David and racist slogans across the the Bilal Ben Rab Mosque in the Qoza area of the village, said Ghassan Doughlas, Palestinian Authority official in charge of the settlement portfolio in the northern West Bank.
Two cars were further set on fire in the village, belonging to Ziad Abdullah Theeb and Sameer Ibrhaim Zahar respectively. The official added that settlers crashed into another vehicle belonging to Zaher’s brother.
According to Israeli media,more than 300 olive trees were uprooted and the racist graffiti was sprayed across the village.
In response to the incident, Itamar Ben-Gvir, a spokesman for the right-wing Jewish National Front party, said: “We are talking about a hostile village that has been the source of a large number of violent attacks against the residents of Yitzhar,” the Israeli daily Haaretz reported.
“The time has come for the Arabs to understand that Jews are not suckers and that Jewish blood will not be shed without consequence,” Ben-Gvir said, according to the daily.
A statement issued by the Israeli army confirmed the incident and said “the Commander of the IDF Judea and Samaria division [the West Bank], Brig. Gen. Nitzan Alon ordered an immediate investigation into the incident, condemned the acts and said that those responsible should be brought to justice.”
The Israeli army added that it “conveyed a message to the Palestinians through the Civil Administration,” reassuring them that it “takes the matter of harming holy sites very seriously.” The Civil Administration erased the graffiti following the incident, the statement said. In December 2009, Israeli settlers set fire to a mosque in the West Bank village of Yasuf.
Gaza: Clash with Israeli force kills 2 fighters
Ma’an – 13/04/2010
Gaza – Two fighters were killed and two others injured in clashes with Israeli forces near the Al-Bureij refugee camp following an Israeli military incursion into the Strip early Tuesday.
Medical sources at the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital in Deir Al-Balah initially confirmed one dead and two injured, as eyewitnesses said Israeli artillery vehicles shelled the area while helicopters opened machine gun fire.
Until late in the morning, ambulances were unable to access the area to evacuate the injured, medics confirmed. By 2:30pm, however, medics reached the area and identified two slain fighters.
Islamic Jihad’s militant wing the Al-Quds Brigades said fighters with the units were involved in fierce clashes with an Israeli military force which attempted to cross the border. The group said its combatants hit their targets directly.
Israeli media said there were no soldiers injured in the attack, and said the incident was precipitated when Israeli forces saw a group of Palestinians planting an explosive device near the border, where Israel enforces a 150-300 meter no-go zone used for continued military control of the area.
An Israeli military spokeswoman confirmed the media report, noting a vehicle on a regular patrol in the border area identified the fighters, calling in armored vehicles and the Israeli airforce to assist in the attack.
They’ve Stolen Our Road!
By Peter Balaam | Palestine Monitor | 8 April 2010
We sat with Jamal and Susan and in their home in Shufa. Their seven children peeped in from time to time, daring each other to go and speak to the foreigners. Jamal explained how the road to their village has literally been stolen by some Israelis who live in a nearby illegal settlement.
We already knew about this, because our taxi-ride to Shufa had been interrupted by a huge earth mound and some concrete blocks in the road. We had to get out and walk the last mile up a steep hill.
This stretch of road is now solely for the use of the settlers, who use it to get to their settlement from the main road. The Israeli army will not allow Palestinians to use the road except on foot or on a donkey.
Photo: Peter Balaam
The road was built in 1950 by the Palestinians. In 1987, the Israelis built 40 houses on Palestinian land and started to share the road with the local villagers. The settlement expanded for some years, and then in 1995, the Israeli army suddenly built the earth mound and forbade the Palestinians to use the road. Now Jamal has to drive home from the school where he is the headteacher, park his car by the earth mound and walk the last mile uphill to his home. And he does this every day, in any weather, including temperatures in the 40s in summer.
“Why?” I asked Jamal. “Why can’t they share the road with you?” Jamal had no answer. For years they had shared the road with no problem. The Israeli answer is just “Security”, but they refuse to explain what they mean by this.
The only explanation that Jamal can think of is that the Israelis simply want to cause the Palestinians to suffer. Another explanation I have heard is that if someone wished to attack people in the settlement, the road would have provided an easy way of escape. But there has been no such attack in 23 years. Perhaps it’s just that the settlers feel nervous about sharing a road with people whose land they appropriated in order to build their settlement.
Photo: Peter Balaam
The stolen road has all sorts of other consequences. Jamal and Susan cannot drive to see their family in Lower Shufa, which is the other side of the earth mound. Farmers’ profits are reduced because each time they take their produce to market in Tulkarem, they need fuel for a 25 km journey instead of 6 km.
The villagers of Shufa have learnt to live with the settlers. In the past, they have been attacked by settlers during the olive harvest and settlers have destroyed hundreds of their olive trees. But they do not face the daily threat of settler violence that other Palestinians face. Life is merely uncomfortable. And nothing changes the fact that their road has been stolen. They live with this reality every day – just one more quiet, unchanging injustice.
The article was written by Peter Balaam. He works for Quaker Peace and Social Witness as an Ecumenical Accompanier serving on the World Council of Churches’ Ecumenical Accompaniment Programme in Palestine and Israel (EAPPI). The views contained in this article are personal and do not necessarily reflect those of QPSW or the WCC.
Israeli occupation forces surround school
Ma’an – 2/04/2010
File Photo
Qalqiliya – Israeli forces surrounded the Yasser Arafat School in the west end of Azzun, a town east of Qalqiliya on Monday. Troops demanded children evacuate the school so boys accused of rock throwing could be detained.
The school’s principal, Majid Odwan, said three military vehicles were stationed outside the gates of the building. Soldiers started by calling out the the children with loudspeakers demanding that they empty the school so several boys could be detained, he said.
Odwan shouted back that he refused the request and would keep children inside the school compound for the duration of their lessons, he said.
Responding to the principal’s remarks, soldiers declared that they would remain stationed outside the school until classes finished and take the children then. Soldiers remained outside the school for more than an hour, reports said.
An Israeli military spokeswoman confirmed the incident, but said a boy threw a “firebomb at an Israeli vehicle” and proceeded to “escape to a nearby school to hide out.”
Soldiers arrived to detain the child, she said, but did not in the end make an arrest.
Affecting and Affected
Eva Bartlett | In Gaza | April 11, 2010
Abu Basel (right) is one of the long-termers, having served over 20 years as a medic in Gaza.
“Who will take care of people if not us? Someone has to do this work. Without medics, who will care for the injured? Everyone has something to contribute,” he replied to the question: why do you do such dangerous work.
Dangerous work. Being a medic hardly seems dangerous…anywhere else. But in a place like Palestine, medics have to contend with more than tending to the injured or bringing in the dead. They have to be aware of Israeli soldiers’ shooting, shelling from Apaches, F-16s, tanks, the sea…
Having spoken with Abu Basel many times during and after the Israeli massacre of Gaza last year, I thought I’d heard most of his horror stories.
He is a calm man, when not driving the ambulance, and relates all his stories in the same laid-back tone, whether joyful or atrocious.
Upon request, he begins to recall some of the many dangers he was exposed to during the last Israeli attacks, not to mention the nearly 2 decades before that.
He recalls being with medics and 4 ambulances, 2 metres from the Al Kurdi house in the Jabaliya region when an F-16 bombed it.
“How in the world are you alive?” I ask.
“It’s in God’s hands,” he replies.
He remembers a night in Beit Lahiya when they rushed to the site of a drone missile bombing.
“It was 1 am. We found the injured and brought the stretcher. A drone dropped another missile. Because it was night and there were not as many noises as during the day, I heard the sssss of the missile and we ran. The missile landed 1 metre from ambulance and 1.5 metres from the injured.
We ran back and grabbed the injured and drove. Two minutes later an F-16 bombed the house where we’d taken the injured from.”
He relates another incident in Sheyjayee where, similarly, a drone attacked his ambulance, dropping a missile metres from his ambulance.
“We’d gone to retrieve 5 injured but were only able to take four before the missile struck. A man nearby who had come to help us load the injured was killed by the missile. The ambulance windows shattered and my colleagues were injured.”
He then recalls 2 incidents when he says his ambulance had coordination via the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) to reach an area the Israeli soldiers were occupying or preventing ambulances from accessing.
We went to Attatra with 3 Red Crescent ambulances and an ICRC jeep to bring out injured. When we reached the area, Israeli tanks started firing on us with machine gun fire. An ICRC employee started speaking with the Israelis via phone. ‘You’re firing on us,’ he said and the Israelis denied it. But the tanks kept firing and we had to leave quickly because of the danger.
Another time, in Esserah area, Beit Lahiya, we again went with coordination. We went there along the sea route and when near the area got on the microphone. ‘If there’s anyone injured or anyone needs to leave or has an ill person or needs help, we’re ICRC and RC, we’re here to help,’ we told them.
There was a guy sitting outside his destroyed house. He told us 13 people from his family were inside the house (children, elderly, women). We began helping them, loading them into our ambulances. When the Israeli soldiers saw us helping the people, they began firing on us from their tanks. We hurried, took the 13 people into our ambulance. Two tires were blown out on one ambulance, but there wasn’t time to transfer the people or wait for other ambulances. They’d been in there, the 14 of them, since their house was destroyed a week earlier. They’d been without food for the week, just had water.”
Iyad has been a medic for 16 years and equally has too many close calls to remember.
He shares some of his near-death escapes.
“I was working in the Red Crescent centre near Al Quds hospital, in the Tel el Howa area of Gaza City. After the Samounis were bombed, I went one afternoon to bring some of the martyrs. A drone and tanks fired missiles on the road we were driving on. Six missiles, the closest was just 8 metres away. We had gone without coordination, because there were many martyrs and the area where we headed was somewhat far from the Israelis, maybe 500 metres away. I saw them and they saw me. We managed to take a marytr and leave.”
Living in central Gaza, Iyad was among the medics completely cut off from his family during the massacre.
“For about a week I didn’t know anything on my family, the phone reception was so bad we couldn’t call each other. I live in Nussierat, and the road was severed by the Israelis, so I couldn’t get to them or communicate with them.”
“There are so many incidents,” Abu Basel says, “but I can’t remember them all, so many.”
He repeats what most medics have said.
“We weren’t afraid, despite the danger. But it was hard. We weren’t sleeping, not eating well –there was no time to eat or sleep. Most didn’t see our families during the war, just a minute or two here or there.”
While you’d think the most difficult time was the Israeli war on Gaza itself, because the medics were kept busy, most didn’t have time to think about the horrors of what they were seeing and experiencing.
“The hardest hardest was after the war,” says Abu Basel. “During the war, I knew there was death. I’d see a body, then a different body. I wouldn’t dwell on what I had seen, would just think about what I had to do next.
But after the war, I began to have terrible dreams, I’d remember everything. For 2 months I dreamed horrible dreams, warplanes, the bodies, everything I saw in the war I re-lived in my dreams.
That was much harder than the war.”
I remember Abu Basel telling me about finding Shahed Abu Halima, the infant girl killed by white phosphorous shelling, her corpse left for days as medics and family were unable to bring it out. Abu Basel was among the medics who uncovered the Abu Halima massacre, the charred remains of those family members killed in the shelling, and the gnawed body of Shahed, partially eaten by dogs.
“For the rest of my life I’ll remember that day. I’ll never get over it,” he said.
Do they feel scarred by their work and experiences?
“After 20 years of this, this kind of stress and work is normal. But still, after this last war, the worst so far, people were extremely nervous and agitated. Some developed diabetes. Many found that after the war they got angry easily and were not sociable, didn’t want to speak to people… but now most are better.
Many medics can’t have babies. I know one who after 7 years still hasn’t had children.
Many take medications to have kids. It’s because they are very stressed, they see a lot of terrible things and begin to have problems with psychology.”
After the massacre, a psychologist came to the Red Crescent to do workshops with the medics, says Abu Basel.
“For a month and a half, two days per week, we had sessions. He spoke with us, showed us exercises for relaxation, took us to the sea…
He gave us the will and spirit to work and live well.
The problem for us isn’t our psychology. We only need a break, to go somewhere else for a vacation and see something different. Go to Europe or somewhere, see a different life and try to forget what we saw.
For Iyad, there is no relaxation.
I sleep. Only. There’s nothing else to do. When I use the internet, there’s news. I watch TV or listen to the radio, and I hear news. I walk on the street, and all I hear is politics. There is no escape from this stress, no way to relax but to sleep.”
Ahmed Abu Foul’s daughter Hola is 6 months old now. Married just one week before the Israeli massacre of Gaza erupted, Ahmed’s honeymoon was 23 days of hell in his dual positions of medic with the Red Crescent and with the Civil Defense, along with the hell of being separated from family.
Although only 27, Ahmed’s stories are too many to recount.
He re-visits some of them, which I marveled over before:
-The time he went to retrieve a martyr near a cemetery in Beit Lahiya. Israeli machine gun fire erupts at him and Ahmed is trapped, lying on the road, breaking for it and zig-zagging his way back to the ambulance.
-When they went to the site of a bombing in Sheik Radwan, north of Gaza City.
“There had been a drone strike on a house, they said there were injured.
I was looking to see if anyone [was] injured. I was next to a 5 story house, in the alley, when an F-16 hit the house next to me. It fell in the other direction, but rubble fell on me.
I wasn’t badly injured, somehow, but my hair stood on end and I lost my hearing for 4 or 5 days,” Ahmed tells with a grin.
But his most troubling recent injury is that inflicted as he attempted to evacuate a martyr from a Jabaliya apartment.
“The Israelis had fired numerous missiles on Hamouda tower, a 5 story building in Jabaliya district. When we got there, we were told there was a martyr on 5th floor. I was the first to enter, everyone else was afraid. I found the body and Dr Issa Salah came up to help.
We were carrying the corpse down the stairs when the Israelis fired on us. The bomb blast decapitated Dr. Issa. His head hit me in the back of my head . I thought I’d been hit by shrapnel or something. Now I’ve got shrapnel in my head, but its bone shrapnel, from the dr. Issa. And shrapnel in leg from the bomb blast.
In a society where nearly everyone suffers from the continuous Israeli attacks, invasions, and wars, venting is not easy, and going to a psychologist is not the norm.
“After the war, I became extremely, extremely nervous. I was agitated and got angry easily. Sometimes if someone was making noise or annoying me I’d want to hit them,” he says, still smiling his open smile.
“I was never rested. When I’d wake, I’d still feel like I hadn’t slept.
Until today, I still have nightmares from the war.
I went to a doctor. Every 2 days I saw her. If I hadn’t gone I would have been completely destroyed long ago.
We talked about my feelings. I just talked and talked, no medicine, just talking. By the end she said I was fine.
Some people are afraid to go to a therapist. Others might say they are crazy. But I know I wasn’t crazy, I just needed to talk, needed to fix my psychological state.”
And like the others, Ahmed longs for a reprieve, even for a week.
“If I could just leave Gaza for one week, breathe a different air, all my psychological problems and stress would go. Even if I just went to Cairo.”
Israeli occupation forces round up 14 including foreigners, journalists
Palestine Information Center – 11/04/2010
AL-KHALIL — Israeli occupation forces (IOF) rounded up 14 civilians in Beit Ummar, north of Al-Khalil, on Saturday night including foreign activists and journalists.
Local sources told the PIC that the IOF troops severely beat up participants in a march that headed to farmers’ lands near the village after firing teargas bombs and stun grenades at them.
They added that the soldiers blocked the foreign activists, farmers and anti-settlement campaigners from reaching the lands threatened with confiscation near Beit Ayan settlement and arrested 14 one of them including two journalists and six foreigners.
A similar demonstration was organized by the Irak Burin villagers south of Nablus on Saturday with the participation of foreign activists to protest Israeli confiscation of their land east of the village.
Eyewitnesses said that the massive march headed to the mountain threatened with confiscation, noting that the participants hoisted the photos of two martyrs who were killed by IOF soldiers a few weeks ago during protest demonstrations.
The village of Irak Burin is the target of systematic attacks on the part of settlers in nearby settlements of Yitzhar and Brakha, which were built on village land. The settlers wish to expand their settlements at the expense of the village land.
Israel’s Pentagon Papers
By Bernard Avishai | TPM | April 9, 2010
Common sense tells you that the Israeli military, charged with keeping Israeli citizens as safe as possible, should have the right to keep operational plans secret; and that the government–acting within bounds set by the judiciary–should have the right to censor any stories about such plans and prosecute the people who leak them. But what if the military, acting as an occupation force, is itself violating bounds set by the judiciary, and its actions are arguably making citizens less safe? What if a whistle-blower leaks documents to a journalist, who then uses them to write a story questioning the legality or efficacy of the military’s actions? What if the story is itself passed by the censor, but the government opens an investigation into the journalist’s sources?
What, then, if the journalist, cooperating with the investigation, hands over documents in an agreement that stipulates that they could not be used to prosecute the source, if found? And what, nevertheless, if the government finds the whistle-blower and charges her under laws written, not to deal with the press, but to prevent espionage for a hostile foreign government? What if the government refuses to renounce the option of arresting the journalist for holding prohibited documents–so he remains in London, refusing to return to the country?
THIS, IN A nutshell, is the troubling case of a young woman, Anat Kam, who allegedly (well, apparently) leaked documents from the office of the Central Command to Haaretz journalist Uri Blau, showing that the IDF systematically issued operational guidelines to its soldiers quite different from regulations the courts have required. The latter decreed that the military may not simply engage in targeted assassination in the occupied territories; that, rather, soldiers must at least try to take Palestinian suspects alive, and not unreasonably endanger innocent bystanders during search operations. Blau’s original piece exposed how the IDF ignored these bounds. He explored cases where Palestinians who might have been arrested were killed, as were bystanders.
Haaretz–which, as if more proof were needed, is emerging as a great world newspaper–is defending its journalist with all of its force. I won’t attempt to compete with its morning edition, that gives any patient reader the full picture, including this editorial, arguing how military intelligence broke the deal it made with the paper, and this follow-up by Blau.
I will, however, make one point the paper does not make, about the efficacy of targeted assassinations themselves. Presumably, these are justified, and the regulations issued to facilitate them justified, because occupation forces preempt attacks on Israeli civilians by getting the bad guys before they get us. I have no doubt that, in some cases, this preemption has saved lives. But what if, on the whole, the opposite is true, that shooting preemptively and recklessly raises the likelihood of violence against Israelis.
ANYONE WHO GIVES this a moment’s thought must see this is at least possible. An old friend of mine, the University of Toronto sociologist Robert Brym, carefully studied all 138 suicide bombings between September 2000 and mid-July 2005. He concluded that, in the vast majority of cases, the suicide bombers themselves–whatever their “ideological” predispositions, or the groups that claimed responsibility–had lost a friend or close relative to Israeli fire. They acted, he wrote, “out of revenge.”
Which is precisely why the newspaper was as justified in exposing these secret documents as the Times and the Post were justified in publishing the Pentagon Papers. Haaretz’s Akiva Eldar connected the dots this morning when he wrote that he expects the real story of how the Al-Aqsa Intifada got started is buried somewhere in similar documents–the ones we have not yet seen–documents pointed to by Kam’s leaked ones, testifying to the IDF’s vendetta culture:
Right now, hundreds of clerks and officers are sitting in the Defense Ministry, the Foreign Ministry and the army lacking the courage to contact a journalist and divulge that the ministers or commanders in charge are endangering their children’s future.
Some are keeping to themselves the real story behind the big lie peddled by Ehud Barak, Shaul Mofaz and Moshe Ya’alon – the falsehood that “Yasser Arafat planned the intifada,” which gave rise to the disastrous “there is no partner” ideology. The real story, of course, is contained in documents stamped with the words “Top Secret.”
I expect we will soon hear stories about Kam’s youth, or ingenuousness, or flakiness, which all may be as true as Daniel Ellsberg’s depressions. None of this changes the importance to Israeli democracy of airing the question of whether targeted assassinations as practiced and sanctioned by the IDF command are either morally acceptable in a country of law or will make any of us sleep more safely, even if not more soundly.
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How 1960’s French Nuclear Tests Are Still Claiming Lives in Algeria
Sputnik – 15.02.2018
On February 13, 1960, France carried out its first nuclear test in Algeria’s southern Reggane region. According to official statistics, 17 nuclear tests were carried out in total over the next 6 years. The area remains affected, and local scientists say that radioactive contamination has caused genetic mutations and irreversibly changed the region.
There are no official statistics on the number of victims. The only figures can be found in the records kept by the French representative of the local church, which lists 42,000 victims of nuclear tests. Three years ago, the French Ministry of Defense issued a statement, putting the number at 27,000 people. The victims include French soldiers as well as local Algerians who lived in the surrounding areas. … continue
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