"Two Girls, Two Shots to the Head"
"Palestinian 15-year-olds among growing number of children hit by Israeli snipers during 'Days of Penitence'
Islam Dwidar's classmates were still taking in her shocking death - the teacher weeping outside before facing the girls, her closest friend recounting how they walked to school together each day - when the news arrived about Tahreer Abu El Jidyan.
The two 15-year-old pupils at Jabaliya's school were both shot in the head by Israeli soldiers inside their homes just a few blocks and several hours apart. Islam died almost immediately after the bullet smashed through her forehead as she baked bread with her mother in their yard on Sunday. Tahreer is still on life support at a Gaza hospital after an operation to remove shards of shattered skull from her brain.
We knew the Israeli soldiers were around, we knew they had snipers in the buildings on our street but we didn't expect what happened. They just shot her in the head. Her brains spilled out. She said: 'Mum, I'm hit'. She praised God and she collapsed."
There were two bullets. The first struck Tahreer in the head. As she fell, the second hit the wall behind her. "I've no doubt a sniper shot her deliberately. There was no fighting in the area. There were no other shots, only the ones that hit Tahreer," said her mother.
With her stood Tahreer's 14-year-old brother, Naser, who was wounded by shrapnel last week. Israeli forces killed their father 11 years ago during the first intifada.
Mrs Abu El Jidyan regrets preventing Tahreer from walking to school on Sunday morning. She thought it would be too dangerous to venture out of their home in Jabaliya's Sikka neighbourhood because it is on the edge of the area occupied by Israeli troops and tanks last week. Snipers are posted in buildings overlooking their street and a tank is less than a block away.
But the killing went on as the conflict claimed the life of another teenage girl in the Gaza strip yesterday. Palestinian medics said Israeli soldiers fired about 20 bullets into 13- year-old Iman al-Hams, including five into her head.
Five shots to the head. Five shots into the head of the world's abandoned people, the indigenous Palestinians.
Five shots to the head by member of the ZOF (ZIONIST OCCUPATION FORCE) that has been slowly strangling the life out of Palestine for over 60 years, all in pursuit of the Zionist dream of Eretz Israel.
Five shots to the head of some children, bought and paid for by American tax dollars.
From those noted lovers of peace, Israel.
The only peace Israel wants is: a "piece" of Jordan; a "piece" of Syria; a "piece" of Lebanon; a "piece" of Egypt; a "piece" of Iraq; a "piece" of Saudi Arabia and whatever "pieces" are left after Israel finishes it's genocidal extermination of the Palestinians."
"In Their Own Words – Members of the IDF Speak
Mark Glenn
December 11, 2007
It is important for Americans to remember–and particularly these days when well-paid liars for Israel such as Normon Podhoretz, Daniel Pipes, David Horowitz et al are pushing the entire Western World into armed conflict with those in the Middle East–that the start of the whole affair between America and “terrorism” was not the rise of ‘Islamo-fascism’ that warmongers such as the aforenamed have labeled as being the cause of the problems.
Rather, it is the history–the well-documented and easily-verifiable history–of unspeakable violence that has been perpetrated everyday for the last century by those under the ungodly, inhuman spell known as Zionism against the peoples of the Middle East, Christian as well as Muslim, violence that rarely (if ever) gets a fair hearing in the Western media.
Those who make it their business to document and expose Israel’s regularly-occurring viciousness against the peoples of Palestine, Lebanon and elsewhere are usually met with scoffs and contempt by a media in the West for the most part completely within the clutches of Zionist/Jewish interests. While the world is forced to hear about every instance–real or contrived–of someone from the Jewish community suffering a nose bleed or whose ‘dignity has been offended’ by some bigoted remark, at the same time the world is rarely afforded the opportunity of hearing about what takes place in the lives of innocent Arabs–men, women and children–who must suffer under the oppression of a foreign occupier that considers them ‘grasshoppers’ whose ‘heads should be smashed against the wall’, as one former Israeli prime minister once quipped.
A recent piece appearing in the Guardian of London sparked outrage in the Zionist Jewish community for its brutal frankness concerning the brutal behavior of Israel’s soldiers, inaccurately named the ‘IDF’–meaning Israeli Defense Forces’ towards the Arabs who find themselves in the tragic position of being under their thumb. The piece in question detailed a series of interviews conducted by a psychologist at Hebrew University named Nufar Yishai-Karin with 21 members of the IDF.
As the reader will see, the members of Israel’s military forces are not the ‘most moral army in the world’ as they are often called by the slavish, sycophant supporters of the political corporation based on gangster principles known as Israel. Rather, as the damning interviews indicate, being one of ‘God’s chosen soldiers’ in Gaza and the West Bank means being tasked with the business of inflicting as much pain, suffering and humiliation upon the Christians and Muslims there as possible so as to eventually make them leave, resulting in the racially-pure ‘Eretz Y’Israel’ that Zionism demands. Reprinted below–in their own words–are the remarks of just a few members of the IDF describing what life is like for the Arabs living in the Occupied Territories, a mere smattering of the truth that Americans–and particularly American Christians–never read or hear about, neither from their news media nor their well-paid and over-fed preachers.
‘The truth? When there is chaos, I like it. That’s when I enjoy it. It’s like a drug. If I don’t go into Rafah, and if there isn’t some kind of riot once in some weeks, I go nuts…’
‘The most important thing is that it removes the burden of the law from you… You are the law…The moment you leave the place that is called Eretz Yisrael [the Land of Israel] and go through the Erez checkpoint into the Gaza Strip, you are the law. You are God…’
‘We were in a weapons carrier when this guy, around 25, passed by in the street and, just like that, for no reason - he didn’t throw a stone, did nothing - bang, a bullet in the stomach, we shot him in the stomach and the guy is dying on the pavement and we keep going, apathetic. No one gave him a second look…’
‘With women I have no problem with violence…One threw a shoe at me and I kicked her here [pointing to the crotch], I broke everything there. She can’t have children. Next time she won’t throw shoes at me. When one of them spat at me, I gave her the rifle butt in the face. She doesn’t spit anymore…’
Another instance recounted by the psychologist conducting the interviews described an occasion where the soldiers were escorting some arrested Palestinians. The arrested men had been taken from their beds in the middle of the night and were barely clothed, even though the temperature was below zero. The new recruits trampled on the Palestinians and then beat them for the whole of the journey. They opened the bus windows and poured water on the arrested men from their canteens.
As the testimonies prove, the brutality is not limited to grown men and women. In one instance, a soldier recounts something he witnessed while on patrol–
“It’s 6am, Rafah is under curfew, there isn’t so much as a dog in the streets. Only a little boy of four playing in the sand. He is building a castle in his yard. Our officer suddenly starts running and we all run with him. He grabs the boy and breaks his hand here at the wrist and his leg here. Then he started to stomp on his stomach, three times, and left…The next day I go out with him on another patrol, and the soldiers are already starting to do the same thing.”
These short, small-in-number testimonies from ‘Israel’s finest’ are but microscopic testimonies to a version of the truth that the world rarely hears, if ever, and despite the fact that they are things that have appeared more recently, what the world should remember is that it is but the tip of an iceberg that has existed for nearly a century now. And let not the world make the mistake of thinking that it is limited to the ramblings of a few nobodies in the IDF, when considering the words of Ariel Sharon, the Butcher of Beirut, war criminal and the monster that George Bush once referred to as a ‘man of peace’–
“…I encourage my soldiers to rape Arabic girls, since the Palestinian woman is a slave for the Jews, and we do whatever we want to her and nobody tells us what we shall do but we tell others what they shall do…”
–or a diary entry from –‘Moshe,’ a Second Lieutenant in the Israeli army–
“…I took the Palestinian girl captive. On the first night the soldiers pack-raped her and the next day I saw fit to remove her from the world. I had the soldiers dig a shallow grave, and then I killed the 12 year-old girl with a burst from a sub-machine gun.”
–or the remarks of Christopher Hedges, American journalist on assignment in Gaza–
“……The Israeli soldiers shoot with silencers. The bullets from the American M-16 rifles tumble end over end through the children’s slight bodies. Later, in the hospital, I will see the destruction: the stomachs ripped out, the gaping holes in limbs and torsos. Yesterday at this spot the Israelis shot eight young men, six of who were under the age of eighteen. This afternoon they killed an eleven-year-old boy, Ali Murad, and seriously wound four more, three of who are under eighteen. Children have been shot in other conflicts I have covered, but never before have I watched as soldiers enticed children like mice into a trap and murdered them for sport.”
And it is precisely this last thing, ‘murdering people for sport’ and sadism of the Zionists that is the reason for American men and women dying in Iraq and Afghanistan today and–barring some miracle–why they will be dying in Iran and Syria tomorrow.
Article originally appeared in American Free Press newspaper."
"”I’d Better Confess, Otherwise They’ll Kill Me” Testimony of Torture Victims in Israel"
"”We’re Going to Break Your Back” – The Case of Bahjat Yamen
“I simply felt terrified, and I had excruciating pains in my back and I felt that my back was about to really break, and I yelled and cried and begged, but the torture did not stop.
Ariel even told me straight out right then that they had decided to paralyze me....“They threatened to bring my mother and my wife..
”I Must Confess, Or Else He’ll Kill Me” – The Case of Amin Shqirat
They brought long metal handcuffs and bound my hands behind me with the cuffs on my arms. They would close the cuffs and press on them until the metal dug into the fleshandyoufelt your arm has been amputated. When I cried out in pain, they laughed and jeered”.
“The interrogators threatened me that they would arrest my wife and torture her. Afterwards they told me that she had been taken to the detention center and tortured, that the torture had caused a miscarriage and that the fetus had died.”
”I’m Going to Emerge from the Interrogation Room Paralyzed”– The Case of Luwaii Ashqar
“I would lose consciousness from so much pain, particularly in my back. The edge of the chair was sharp. When I sat on it, it would press into my lower back while the interrogator beat me on my thighs, and that would hurt me very much. This activity was repeated many times, from April 22nd through Tuesday, April 26th”.
”We Have Methods that No One Will Discover” – The Case of Muhammad Barjiyye
“Gur placed cloth black glasses over my eyes, so that I couldn’t see a thing, and began slapping me hard, relentlessly, on both cheeks. Oscar said that I was carrying all of Palestine on my shoulders and that the military interrogation would make me set it down. He released my hands, placed them in front of me and
shackled them again. He said that from now on they didn’t want me to talk. They wanted me to show ability and endurance”.
“Oscar grabbed me by the shoulders and began shaking me for maybe ten minutes, shouting at me to confess. I felt as if heat waves were rising from the nape of my neck and spreading throughout my head, and I had an intense pain in my neck.
”I’d Better Confess, Otherwise They’ll Kill Me” – Case of ‘Abd al-Halim ‘Eiz a-Din.
“They also beat my wife. They pushed her inside. My wife was pregnant, approximately in her second month. Apparently as a result of the pushing and the
subsequent fall, my wife miscarried our baby.
”Those Who Enter Petach Tikvah Don’t Come Out” – The Case of Amjad Abu-Salha
“He said that there are testimonies against me, and that if I didn’t speak, they would beat and torture me, forcing me to speak.
Then Major Rani, responsible for the department, came in and said: “You see that chair. The greatest have sat on that chair and confessed.” I insisted on my version”.
”They’re About to Paralyze My Arms” – The Case of Hassan LedadiyaAtty. Maher Talhami
“At the end of this stage, Itizk or another interrogator would go over to the paper that they had shown me, and mark off that they
had completed one of the torture stages, and again they’d start over... these are the stages that were repeated over time for three consecutive days”.
Time and again, when the "detainee" was nearing death or coma from the tortures visited upon him by the Israeli's, they'd bring in a doctor to keep the "detainee" alive for more interrogation.
Time and again, when the Israeli's couldn't get the "detainee" to say what the torturers wanted the victim to say, they'd bring in the victims wife and or mother for "enhanced interrogation."
These are the actions of the only "democracy" in the ME.
The actions of a nation that likes to proclaim that it is a nation of peace.
The actions of what is supposed to be our only friend in the ME.
Funny, but i can't help but to remember that before Israel came into existence, the U.S. had NO enemies in the ME."
Maybe if Israel went away, the U.S. could have friends in the Middle East again -- a day I yearn with all my heart for!
"Sealed off by Israel, Gaza reduced to beggary"
"Essentially, it's the ordinary people, caught up in the conflict, paying the price for this political failure," said John Ging, director of the U.N. Relief and Works Agency in Gaza, which serves the majority refugee population. "The humanitarian situation is atrocious, and it is easy to understand why -- 1.2 million Gazans now relying on U.N. food aid, 80,000 people who have lost jobs and the dignity of work. And the list goes on."
Israeli military and political leaders say the restrictions are prompted by near-constant rocket and small-arms attacks and concerns over what uses Palestinian gunmen might have for some materials entering Gaza, particularly fuel and batteries."
Isn't it strange that this article is no longer available, reader!
Bloggers emphasis next article.
"No limit to Jewish brutality"
"The Palestinian genocide in Gaza has become so extreme that even the Washington Post has taken note…
____________________________________________________
Israel will not allow tiny batteries into Gaza so deaf Palestinian children can hear. The batteries are silvery dots the size of a button on a man's shirt, and are readily available at places like Radio Shack. They are needed for hearing aids used by several hundred Palestinian students taught by the Atfaluna Society for Deaf Children in Gaza City.
The batteries are all but used up. The few that are left are losing power, turning voices into unintelligible echoes in the ears of Hala Abu Saif's 20 first-grade students.
The Israeli government is increasingly restricting the import into Gaza of batteries, anesthesia drugs, antibiotics, tobacco, coffee, gasoline, diesel fuel and other basic items. The Israelis even ban chocolate in order to further lower Palestinian morale.
The 1.5 million people in Gaza no longer have an effective system of health or education.
Moamen Ayash, a frail, 6-year-old Palestinian boy, has not had a working hearing aid for three months. The inability to hear even the faintest sounds, which hearing aids sometimes make possible for the deaf, hinders children such as Moamen from acquiring spoken language.
Few of the estimated 20,000 Gazans suffering from hearing loss know even rudimentary sign language. The deaf represent an isolated collective, dependent for funding largely on the kindness of strangers and the proceeds of their own crafts shop.
Their condition resembles the larger estrangement of Gaza, a walled-in jumble of squalid refugee camps set amid rubble-strewn dunes.
Work is rare. Food is scarce. Gasoline is almost gone. Electricity has been shut off.
"It’s the ordinary people, caught up in the conflict,* paying the price for this political failure," said John Ging, director of the U.N. Relief and Works Agency in Gaza, which serves the majority refugee population. "The humanitarian situation is atrocious, and it is easy to understand why -- 1.2 million Gazans now relying on U.N. food aid, 80,000 people who have lost jobs and the dignity of work. And the list goes on."
* There’s that word again. When we refer to World War II, let’s stop using the word “holocaust,” and start using the phrase “Nazi-Jewish” conflict.
Israeli officials insist there is no humanitarian crisis in Gaza. But for Gazans the sense of crisis is pervasive as they struggle to buy essential food from a shrinking and increasingly expensive stock.
"I hold every man, woman and child in Israel responsible for this," said Geraldine Shawa, 64, the Chicago-born director of the Atfaluna Society. A tall, imposing woman who has lived in Gaza for 36 years, Shawa has watched her pupils squeezed in recent months by Israel's practice of collective punishment.
Israeli military officials admit that Hamas's military wing is not behind Qassam rocket attacks, for which smaller armed groups generally assert responsibility. But Hamas leaders do little to stop the firing of the rockets and rarely condemn them.
On Tuesday, Israeli tanks rolled into the central Gaza city of Khan Younis, killing another six Palestinians. Israeli officials labeled the operation "routine."
In the rank, crowded wards of Gaza City's Shifa Hospital, the dispensary is completely out of 85 essential medicines, and close to using up almost 150 others.
Dialysis treatment has been cut back from three to two times a week for even the most critically ill kidney patients, roughly 900 in all. A stack of nearly two dozen blood-cleaning machines gathers dust in a corner, awaiting spare parts that the Israelis will not allow in.
Since June more than three-dozen Palestinians seeking treatment for cancer and other critical illnesses at Israel's more advanced hospitals have been denied any chance to leave the Gaza prison. At least 29 patients have died since June, including 12-year-old Tamer al-Yazji, who Palestinian health officials said was denied entry into Israel after developing acute complications from encephalitis.
"What do you call sending dozens of Gaza patients to a slow death because they are refused treatment?" asked Bassem Naim, Palestinian minister of health. "That's not a humanitarian crisis. That's a war crime."
In the fall of 2005, Israel withdrew 8,500 Jewish “settlers” from Gaza, and walled in the place, preventing escape. Israel has been increasingly starving Palestinians in Gaza since Hamas was democratically elected in January 2006.
Below, Hala Abu Saif's 1st-grade class is seen at the Atfaluna Society for Deaf Children in Gaza. The school ran out of hearing-aid batteries in September due to Israeli import restrictions. Now the children rely solely on sign language, which makes it difficult, if not impossible, to acquire the spoken language.
Posted in
Labels: Gaza, Israel, Palestinians"
"'This village will be erased'"
"Last update - 07:09 16/12/2007
Twilight Zone
By Gideon Levy
The shattered marble panels of the Hashalom factory, some of which were designated for the kitchens of settlers, testify like a thousand witnesses to the events of the night of revenge. The weeping of Naama Masalha, who had to hide with her young children in the bathroom while the settlers smashed the windows of their house, also tells the story of that night of horror. In the small village of Al Funduq on the Qalqilyah-Nablus road, where Israelis, mainly settlers living in the area, still repair their cars and go shopping, they are now licking their wounds and assessing the damage.
The head of the local council, Omar Jaber, presents a report: damage to marble - NIS 111,000; to cars - NIS 76,000; to homes - NIS 6,000; to shops - NIS 10,000. He claims that 16 cars, 15 homes, 15 shops and two marble factories were damaged on the night of November 24. It is almost certain that nobody will compensate them for these hostile acts. Now just fear, fury and frustration remain in peaceful Al Funduq, which paid the price for the killing of settler Ido Zoldan, 29, a resident of Shavei Shomron, who was shot on the road that passes through the village five nights earlier.
On that Saturday night, hundreds of settlers stormed Al Funduq under the protection of Israel Defense Forces soldiers - who, according to testimony, even assisted in the destruction - and rioted in the village that was under curfew. Two days later it was reported that Israeli security forces had caught the gang suspected of killing Zoldan: three members of the Palestinian National Security organization, from Kadum. Last week the settlers went there, too.
The group of young settlers recently took over an abandoned Palestinian house overlooking the road leading to Al Funduq, and painted it pink. But the sight on that road, which passes below the rogue outpost of Shvut Ami, is not at all rosy: It is strewn with stones that the settlers now throw at Palestinian cars that use it. The terrifying IDF bulldozer that creeps slowly along the road is supposed to use the massive rocks in its maw to block off the villages in the area - not the outpost, of course. That is Israeli justice.
About 500 people live in Al Funduq. It is a village that has not suffered any casualties and is almost without prisoners in Israeli jails - only stonemasons, grocers and garages that serve the settlers in the area. Five days after Zoldan was killed the village was under total curfew. Afterward, for another eight days, it was put under nighttime curfew. The settlers have to be appeased, don?t they?
The atmosphere in the local council building is heated. The secretary, Jaber, says that about 400 settlers stormed the village on that black Saturday night. Zakariyah Asade, coordinator of field activities for the Rabbis for Human Rights organization, who lives in the neighboring village of Jit, says that the soldiers illuminated the area with their flashlights for the settlers, so that they could sow their destruction more easily. ?They showed them where to break things, says Asade.
One thing is as sure as the sun that rises in the east: The settlers would not have entered without army protection,? says Omar Shari, a resident of a neighboring village, who is doing infrastructure work in Al Funduq, and two of whose tractors were damaged during the rampage. In places where there were cars standing in the dark or behind a wall, the army showed them the way and lit everything up for them.
Shari estimates the damage to his tractors at NIS 15,000. I honor your dead just as I want you to honor our dead, he says. To the Russian soldier who came here two months ago and asked me, "Where did you come from?" - I have to ask: As a Russian, what are you doing here? Go to Haifa. Al Funduq has been here for 500 years. [The settlement of] Kedumim has been here for 20 years, and it wants to dominate the entire area. It's the army that allows the settlers to dominate.
Jaber declares that collective punishment is not just. We have children, wives, infants, ill and elderly people. If they want to arrest someone, let them. I have no idea who killed the settler, but why impose collective punishment on the entire village? To close off Al Funduq is to close off one-third of the West Bank. All the traffic between the north and the center of the West Bank passes along our road. It's the only road. Until yesterday it was closed. We hear every day about the peace process, but on the ground we don't feel a thing. When I?m in my house and they come to demolish my home and my car, what should I do?
The owner of the tractors, Shari, adds a warning: There are no shaheeds [martyrs] in Al Funduq, but [after] what they?re doing now to the children, in another 10-15 years, when they grow up - you'll be hearing what happens here.
A truck unloads crates of chickens from the Off Nehedar slaughterhouse in Hadera, on the main road of the village. In Sakr Bari's grocery store stands a settler in a large white skullcap, buying vegetables. Bari estimates the damage caused to him as a result of the curfew to be NIS 3,000. He has a notebook where he lists all the debts of the settlers who buy on credit. Usually they pay once every month or two, but NIS 34,000 are permanent debts, since the outbreak of the second intifada.
Bari brings special kosher cans of corn and miniature carrots to his Jewish customers. Some of them, he believes, certainly participated in the night of rioting. Since then, only a few of his Jewish customers have returned. They come from all the settlements in the area: Kedumim, Shavei Shomron, Elon Moreh, Ariel, Emanuel, Karnei Shomron and Einav. The new map of Israel.
At the end of a muddy road, at the entrance to a relatively isolated house, stands Naama Masalha, dressed in black and extremely depressed. When settlers stormed the house, her husband, Akram, 31, was still at work, loading crates of vegetables bound for Israel. At about 9:30 P.M. he tried to get home in spite of the curfew, until he realized that the road was blocked by hundreds of settlers and soldiers. After a while he heard that the settlers were surrounding his house and damaging it, while his wife and three young children were trapped inside.
He was helpless. His young son, Rima, a first grader who is now doing his homework, brings the evidence: two IDF grenade cases, on which it says in Hebrew: Blinding stun grenade. 1.5 second delay. Akram describes the damage, some of which has been repaired - eight shattered windows, three broken lights on the porch, torn screens, a damaged water hose - and points to footprints in the mud of the settler who arrived on horseback, to break and destroy.
Naama: We were sleeping in the room; my husband wasn't home. Suddenly I heard the settlers breaking the windows and trying to enter the house. The door was locked. She quickly gathered her children from the spacious rooms and together they entered the bathroom, a cubicle at the end of the house, where they hid until things quieted down. They were there for over an hour. Naama's cell phone was broken and she had no way of calling for help; finally her brother managed to get to the house and rescue her. Naama is crying now. She still cries when she remembers, says Akram. Yesterday I told her, Prepare food and we'll sit the way we used to, and she said she wasn't able to do it.
When her brother Mohammed arrived at the house, it was surrounded by a large number of settlers, among them soldiers and policemen. In order to record the event, he activated the recording device on his cell phone, after realizing that he would not be able to photograph anything because of the blackout.
Now he plays the recordings for us: Erase this village - erase this house, one can hear a woman screaming in Hebrew, in a hoarse voice. And then one hears the sound of blows. Mohammed says the intruders banged on the windows with their weapons, throwing stones at them, and that they also had sticks and iron poles in their hands. The soldiers and policemen stood by and watched. The woman continues to scream on the recording: People of Funduq, pay attention: You will suffer, this village is erased. In blood and in fire, this village will be erased. Come out, come out of your homes.
The recording is lengthy and not everything is clear; occasionally one hears the honking of a car horn or the noise of a stun grenade. All this time Naama and her three children were in the bathroom, frightened.
Before fleeing, the eldest daughter, Ishra, 14, saw the settler on the horse through the barred window of her room, banging on the windows. Attention, policemen and soldiers, the voice of the female settler can be heard again. If you don't provide a suitable response and don't take this house down, you will be to blame for the next casualties.? Then, only then, can the sound of the policemen be heard, calling for all the Israelis to leave within five minutes. Naama and her three children were rescued unharmed by her brother Mohammed, and spent the following days in the home of Naama's parents in a neighboring village.
A settler wants to buy a canister of cooking gas in Sakr's grocery store. The gas has run out and the settler asks: How will I cook?
The shattered panels in the Hashalom marble factory stand in a row. Fragments of marble are scattered everywhere. Majed Diab, the owner, estimates the damage to his factory at NIS 50,000. He lives in the stone house that rises above the factory; some of its window panes are still shattered. He stood on the balcony the entire time, that night, and says he saw the settlers smashing everything.
When a settler girl tried to destroy a marble panel and was unsuccessful, recalls Diab, the soldiers helped her. He saw it with his own eyes. What did he do? Nothing, he replies in embarrassment, his face covered with white dust, a pencil stuck behind his ear. He says the rampage continued until 11:30 P.M. He was on the roof, the settlers and the soldiers were in the square in front of the factory.
The IDF spokesman, in reply to our query this week, ignored the question of whether the soldiers really helped the settlers, and stated: ?During the course of the demonstration, mutual stone-throwing erupted between the settlers and the Palestinians, residents of the village. IDF forces, together with forces from the Border Police and Israel Police, dispersed the demonstrators. In addition, during the demonstration the forces arrested two settlers and two Palestinians who were rioting and throwing stones. The detainees were transferred to the Israel Police. It should be mentioned that the IDF is strongly opposed to illegal disturbances of the peace, and that the demonstration was not authorized by the military.
An IDF bulldozer entered Al Funduq by storm, carrying another load of rocks and escorted by three jeeps. It is supposed to place the rocks on one of the village roads at the end of an olive grove, to choke off traffic there. At the last moment the driver changes his mind and leaves the village, careful not to harm the olive trees en route, and rushes off with his load to the neighboring village of Jinsafut.
There, at the entrance to the village's auto-repair shop, he drops the rocks and blocks traffic. From a yellow transporter, a family silently watches what is happening, the children with their noses pressed against the windows. What are their parents telling them?
Next to the new roadblock that has just been set up - Annapolis-Shmannapolis - the old sign on behalf of the German government is, ironically, still in place: A project for the rehabilitation of village roads. The bulldozer driver packs down the mound of earth, adding another rock, just to be on the safe side."
"An Israeli army probe reveals 25 percent of soldie..."
"
25 percent of Israeli soldiers have been directly or indirectly involved in violence against Palestinians across the West Bank, mainly on checkpoints, reveals n Israeli army probe.A spokesperson of the Israeli army told Agence France Press (AFP) that given orders by the army central command, the Israeli army has recently conducted a probe into the behavior of soldiers, manning checkpoints.
The survey found that %25 of each 1.000 soldiers were involved in or witnessed harassment against Palestinians on the army checkpoints. A part of the harassment was physical.
The spokesperson asserted that the army decided, accordingly, to place the soldiers, aged 18-19 year-old, under intensive 48-hour-long special trainings.
The Israeli human right group, Betselem, which is concerned with human rights in the occupied Palestinian territories, had earlier reported that Israel erected 43 permanent checkpoints and 455 flying ones, throughout the West Bank.
Israeli army harassment of Palestinians at checkpoint has been omnipresent since Israel intensified presence between Palestinian cities, towns and villages over the past few years.
Several international bodies, including the United Nations Secretary General, Ban-Ki Moon, had urged Israel to remove such roadblocks, which block the civilian population's life."
"Israeli artillery fire on funeral, seriously injur..."
"
Israeli artillery fire on funeral, injuring three children
Date: 14 / 12 / 2007 Time: 15:40
تكبير الخط تصغير الخط
(Ma'anImages)
Gaza – Ma'an – Three Palestinian children were injured when Israeli artillery fired at mourners during the funeral procession of two of Thursday's victims of Israeli shelling in Jabalia in the northern Gaza Strip, Palestinian medical sources announced on Friday.
Muawiya Hassanain, the director of ambulance and emergency services in the Palestinian health ministry said the injured were Alaa Khalaf, Muhammad Da'ur and Abdul-Karim Nafith.
He added that they were in a serious condition."
I've got a lot of catch-up work, so I'll move on.
