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A riot near Yizhar demonstrates the essence of Israeli occupation

The comedy, in whole

By Yossi Gurvitz | Yesh Din | January 31, 2014

Settlers hurl stones near the settlement of Yitzhar.

On April 25th, 2013, Raed Mahmoud Ahmad Sabah was in his house in the village of Urif, when he noticed three Israeli civilians, all wearing hoods, approaching his house from the settlement of Yizhar. Shortly afterwards, a settlement security vehicle arrived and joined the raiders, and out stepped a man who Sabah identified as a settlement security officer. Several minutes late, two IDF vehicles joined the group, out of which emerged a handful of soldiers. The squad of hooded Israelis were reinforced by more hooded Israelis, who also came from the direction of Yizhar. Together they began to hurl stones at Sabah’s home and at the neighboring houses.  The group also started to uproot saplings. The Israeli soldiers, as well as the settlement security officer, stood about aimlessly, without bothering to stop the attack. The young men of Urif gathered to defend themselves and their property, and only then did the army spring into action. Large forces of the IDF and Border Police began firing tear gas canisters – at the Palestinians, naturally. Sabah would later count seven tear gas canisters in his courtyard. The Israeli rioters used the opportunity to sneak back home under cover of the gas screen. Needless to say, none of them were detained.

Yizhar is one of the most notorious settlements. Its municipal council recently resigned (Hebrew) after its residents? decided to stop cooperating with the IDF and appointed a suspected criminal, Boaz Albert (Hebrew) as their representative to the army.  Last August, the Yizhar settlers denied Druze workers entry to the settlements. At the time, the army decided once more to retreat (Hebrew) and sent Jewish workers in their stead. Yizhar is home to the Od Yosef Khai Yeshiva (religious school), whose rabbis published the gentile-slaying manual, “Torat HaMelekh”. The yeshiva students operate the “HaKol HaYehudi” website, which several years ago published an article (Hebrew) by Yossi Elizur (one of the writers of Torah/torat? Hamelekh), which detailed the principles of “arvut hadadit,” the name given by the settlers at the time to the terror acts known as “price tag” attacks. The security system alleges that several Yizhar residents are involved in a series of “price tag” incidents, as well as daily terror attacks on Palestinians.

So, here was another story of the usual riot and collaboration by the army with the attackers. We’ve become inured to that. Our client, Sabah, possesses a sense of humor, so he complained to the Military Police Criminal Investigations Department (MPCID) about the behavior of the soldiers, and to the police against the settlers and settlement security officers. This, we should note, is his second complaint: three months earlier, Sabah lodged another complaint about a settler attack.

So, what did the police do with Sabah’s complaint? It did nothing. Just like Sabah’s earlier complaint, this case was also closed by the police on grounds of “perpetrator unknown.” The police did so even though Sabah presented it with a video showing the settlement security officer exiting the vehicle near the hooded settlers. Indeed,  the only investigative action taken by the JSDP (Judea and Samaria Police District Police) was taking Sabah’s statement and watching his video.

As noted by our attorneys, Anu Lusky and Noa Amrami, there were quite a few actions the police could have taken. It could have interrogated Sabah’s neighbors; he said in his testimony that they, too, were attacked. The police didn’t do so. The JSDP could have interrogated the settlement’s security officer, but instead it was satisfied with a short question presented to him about the issue, which was dropped when he replied that he “did not remember” such an incident.

The police could have located the soldiers, who Palestinians testified were seen talking to the Israeli rioters during the incident, and interrogated them – but the investigators did not bother to find out who they were. In a handwritten memo, a police officer noted that he asked the security coordinator of Yizhar whether he could identify the rioters – but the officer didn’t even bother to write down the answer.

This is how it looks. First, you build a settlement. Then you let it turn into a base of attacks against the local villages and towns, while the army not only refrains from stopping the attacks but provides cover for them; and then comes the police and puts the investigation out to pasture. In the West Bank, this desolate state of affairs is masquerading as “the rule of law.”

We’ll repeat this again: the residents of the West Bank are protected persons according to the Geneva Conventions and the rulings of the Israeli High Court of Justice. When the army and the police refrain from providing them with this protection, they betray their basic duty. The words of Attorneys Lusky and Amrami in the appeal against the decision to close the case are worth quoting:

“We shall further remind you that according to Israeli law, as well as international law, the military commander and the police in the region are under an active duty to ensure the realization of the rights of the Palestinian residents and their protection. Hence, it is clear that our client is entitled to full protection by the JSDP, as has been ordered by the military commander in the region, particularly as this is not a single offense. […] This duty was blatantly violated in this case by the failure of the IDF troops and settlement security officials, who stood idly by and did not stop the violence started by [the settlement’s] residents, even though they were present at the scene in real time. This duty was violated once more, when a decision was made to close the case without fully investigating it.”

Israel should decide to which world it wants to belong: that which performs tikkun olam based on the rule of law and international law, or that of the rogue nations. Even though the question has never been presented to the citizens of Israel, the State’s actions in the West Bank provide a fitting answer.

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February 1, 2014 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Illegal Occupation, Subjugation - Torture, Timeless or most popular | , , , , , | Leave a comment

The most violent settlement in the West Bank encroaches on Asira al Qibliya

International Solidarity Movement | January 27, 2013

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Asira al Qibliya, Occupied Palestine – According to OCHA statistics Yizhar is the most violent settlement in the whole of the West Bank with 70 recorded incidents in 2011 alone. Every week there is at least one attack by Yizhar settlers in the six affected villages.

Four months ago, settlers from Yizhar built a temporary outpost on top of a hill belonging to villagers from Urif. This continued until earlier in the week when Israeli authorities delivered maps to the village which showed that Yizhar had laid claim to 2 dunums of land. This was a massive understatement; they had in-fact seized the entire hill.

The land grab of this hillside seems to be all but complete; a shepherd who was working the land around the Yizhar outpost was recently beaten whilst tending to his sheep: the injuries he sustained were serious but not critical. In another incident, as the Palestinian owners of the land were walking along the road towards the hill this week, they were fired on by Israeli soldiers. Villagers want to challenge this latest land grab, however the law in this country is anything but just. The villagers are all too aware that if they resist they have only stones in the face of tear gas, stun grenades and the very real threat of being fired upon with live ammunition.

Harassment of the residents has also been on the rise. Currently at least once a week soldiers have been invading Asira in the middle of the night. They have been banging on villagers doors with the butts of their assault rifles, making sure people are disturbed in much the same way as has been reported in Urif as well as in Burin.

Yizhar a relatively small but very aggressive settlement in the north of the occupied West Bank. It is situated on a hill surrounded by six Palestinian villages which are all made to live in a state of constant fear.

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January 27, 2013 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Illegal Occupation, Subjugation - Torture | , , , , , , , , | 1 Comment

Yitzhar settlers attack school children in Urif

29 April 2012 | International Solidarity Movement, West Bank

Urif is a Palestinian town in the Nablus Governorate of the northern occupied West Bank, located thirteen kilometres South of Nablus. The town has a population of just under 3000 inhabitants and is overlooked by the illegal Israeli colony of Yitzhar. Last week on Sunday, April 22, Urif’s boys school was attacked by mask-wearing settlers supported by four Israeli Occupation Force (IOF) soldiers who used tear-gas, sound bombs, and live ammunition against unarmed Palestinian children.


The training of armed, illegal settlers (Photo courtesy of IMEMC)

The settlers were led by the head of security for the Yitzhar colony, a man suspected in the murder of a resident of Urif in 2004, a murder that nobody has yet been charged with. He continues to lead brutal assaults against the civilian population of six Palestinian towns in the lands surrounding Yitzhar: Burin, Huwara, Madma, Assria Al-Kalibya, Ein Nabous, and Urif.

The attack began when the Yitzhar head of security and a number of masked settlers approached the school from an overlooking hill. “The children were sitting their mock exams,” said Arif, a member of the local popular committee, “the settlers used foul language and began throwing stones at the windows of the school.”

The settlers were soon joined by four uniformed IOF soldiers who did nothing to stop the abuse and stones hurled towards the school.

“When the army came they were supposed to stop the settlers coming to the school, in fact the opposite happened, there was chaos,” said Arif. A number of Palestinian youth approached the armed Israeli settlers and soldiers on the hill, using stones to resist the attack. The IOF soldiers then threw tear gas canisters down towards them and the school. One canister landed on the roof where a member of the Israeli human rights group B’tselem, Adil Safadi, was filming the attack.

Following the attack teachers from the school collected sixty tear gas canisters, a number of sound grenades, and at least thirty rounds of live ammunition fired directly over their heads.

In the video of the incident wherein International Solidarity Movement (ISM) volunteers are shown, the screams of the children and the loud report of an assault rifle being fired in fully automatic mode can clearly be heard. At one point an IOF soldier took aim with his M16 directly at a Palestinian youth out of camera shot. The sustained assault lasted for around an hour before the settlers decided to leave with their IOF minders in tow.

Whilst some children hid in their classrooms during the attack under the watchful eye of their teachers, many rushed to their homes and were exposed to large amounts of tear-gas and required medical attention. The children of Urif’s boys school, aged between 13 and 18, have been subjected to this kind of brutality on a regular basis since the founding of the school which sits on the outskirts of the village and is thus vulnerable to these kind of attacks. Many of the older kids that attend the school were in the process of studying for their year final examinations which take place in early May.

“You can’t imagine the loss we have suffered as a result of this settlement,” says Arif,  “we would like to live in peace and prosperity, but that is something we cannot gain. The settlers are very aggressive, there is no word in the dictionary to describe them.”

This is not the first time the settlers, supported by the military, have attacked the school. Roughly one year ago they attempted and failed to burn it down. ISM was shown pictures depicting the charred remains of one classroom that was severely damaged during the attack.

Incursions from Yitzhar into Urif and Surrounding Villages

Arif and members of Urif municipality informed ISM of the following.

The illegal colony of Yitzhar was founded in 1984. It was not until the beginning of 2000 that it began to aggressively expand into the surrounding Palestinian lands. Yitzhar illegally annexed vast swaths of land and barred access to the Palestinian farmers, shepherds, and villagers that have lived and worked the land for countless generations.

The village of Urif is a mere 1500 meters away from the Israeli colony, and since 2000, over 2200 dunams have been stolen by the nearby settlement. In addition, four thousand olive trees cultivated by the village have been uprooted or burnt by settlers in the past four years.

The villagers of Urif have no access to running water, instead they rely on a small number of ancient wells. Two years ago, members of the village were dismayed to find tear gas canisters had been dropped into one of the wells by unknown settlers, poisoning the water supply.

Any attempt to expand infrastructure in the village is also met with settler attacks. ISM volunteers were shown the remains of a house that had been under construction before it was attacked and completely dismantled.

“Late at night they launch attacks on the residents in this area,” said Arif, pointing to the rubble strewn skeleton of the destroyed house. A tractor and a number of cars belonging to residents of the village had also been destroyed in a series of recent arson attacks.

Settlers have shot through the windows of a number of the homes. Graffiti reading ‘revenge’ in Hebrew was scrawled across one residents house. The widespread attacks of agricultural land has lead to a vast “wasteland” between the outskirts of Urif and Yitzhar. Hundreds of goats, sheep, and a few horses have been stolen.

This is not to mention the violence towards the villagers themselves. Arif reports that hundreds of villagers have been injured since 2000, with as many as 40 serious injuries (many of which were gunshot wounds) and one murder.

The combined effects of this systematic assault on Urif residents’ way of life, economy, and civil society is akin to a form of ethnic cleansing. One of the most stark indicators of the impact of the measures taken against the village of Urif by Yitzhar settlement is that unemployment is as high as 40%. Many people simply cannot survive under these conditions and are thus forced to abandon the village of their birth, leaving behind their friends, family, and identity.

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April 29, 2012 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Illegal Occupation, Subjugation - Torture | , , , , , | 2 Comments

Jewish settlers attack village, block Nablus road

Ma’an – 26/04/2012
Settler attacks are common and rarely prosecuted

NABLUS – Settlers in the northern West Bank set up a roadblock and attacked a Nablus village on Thursday, a PA official said.

Ghassan Daghlas, who monitors settler activity in the northern West Bank, said that settlers blocked a main road that links the West Bank town of Huwwara to Tulkarem and Qalqiliya.

Settlers prevented Palestinian vehicles from passing through, causing a large traffic jam. Around 12 settlers also attacked the village of Urif in Nablus, clashing with local villagers.

Witnesses said the Israeli army was present during the incident but fired tear gas at the villagers.

In 2011, the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs reported that settler attacks had increased by 50 percent on the previous year.

The Nablus district experienced the majority of settler violence in 2011.


Source: When Settlers Attack, The Palestine Center, 2012
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April 26, 2012 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Subjugation - Torture | , , , , , | Leave a comment