Blog: It's time to speak out

HEBRON:  On 1st March 2010, two young brothers from the Al-Muhtaseb family were arrested just before 3:00PM. Hassan is thirteen years old and Emir is eight. The thirteen year old was taken to Kyriat Arba police station and then to Ofer military prison, in the West Bank, where he was imprisoned for six days. Emir was taken to a military base inside the Beit Ramona settlement area in Hebron.

Their father told us that his eight year old son was blindfolded and was left sitting in a chair in the open air. He could hear the breathing of a dog beside him throughout his experience. He was jeered at by settler children. He was not given food or drink and was not allowed to go to the bathroom. His only recourse was to wet himself. He was kept like this until his release at 11:00PM that night.

When we met Emir a few days later he looked deathly pale. His father told us that he is screaming in his sleep, he has lost control of his bladder and that initially he was not talking, but just staring straight ahead. He is being attended to by a specialist doctor from the Prisoners’ Torture Centre in Hebron.

Meanwhile, one of the lawyers representing Hassan was quoted as  saying, "There were no witnesses who testified that he threw stones at Israeli soldiers. No indictment was filed against the boy."

On the 3rd of March, Hassan's detention was extended, with his father commenting, "My child was brought to court with both his hands and feet cuffed. He was very scared of the many soldiers around him. It is ironic that the judge extended his detention until Sunday until an indictment is issued against him."

Hassan appeared again in Ofer military court on the 6th of March. His father was asked to pay a bail of 2,000 shekels (800 euros). "What law allows a child to be tried in a military court and then asks his father to pay a fine?" he asks. During the military hearing, he was able to see his son across the court, but when he tried to talk with his young son he was pulled back by the soldiers (CNN recorded this).

According to Article 37 of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, which Israel ratified on the 3rd October 1991, "The arrest, detention or imprisonment of a child shall be in conformity with the law and shall be used only as a measure of last resort and for the shortest appropriate period of time." 

BETHLEHEM:  Israeli Military bull-dozers recently rolled into Beit Jala and flattened anything and everything in their path. One would have to have been blind not to see the destruction the bull-dozers were causing as they uprooted one olive tree after another. Home owners were trying to replant some of the trees and cut up others to salvage what wood they could, but the bull-dozers marched onward. We had been notified by our local contacts that a demonstration would take place the following day in support of the people who were losing trees and land in this operation. The first family, whose house we stopped at, had lost part of its land the previous day, swing sets and other garden furniture had been salvaged and moved closer to the house. When we arrived the owner showed us what was left of an olive tree which had been uprooted for the sake of the separation wall.

We walked back to the other side of the highway where the bull-dozers were moving very fast up a hill taking down tree after tree. Demonstrators scrambled down the hill to meet the heavy equipment. Two young men sat down and had to be forcibly removed by the army. Another group of protesters sat under an olive tree until the army pressured them to move up the hill. It was sad to watch the local residents, the owners of the trees, watching the army take down what they had spent years building up. All we could do was be there, witness, photograph, and tell their stories.

We later heard that that the Israeli court ruled that the route of the Wall in this area as illegal and ordered the destruction to come to a halt! But who knows for how long?

BETHLEHEM:  It was a Saturday evening. Three young guys were driving their car into their village Husan, when Israeli soldiers stopped them. A while later all three were shot; one of them was severely injured, just a millimeter from death. One week later we were called to the hospital to see the most severely injured young man with his parents in the Intensive  Care department. There he laid, exhausted in his own clothes.

After the Israeli Military jeep stopped them, the soldiers let the youth go and then shot at them from behind without any warning. The seats of the car reduced the speed of the bullets. But all three young men were hit. The soldiers then disappeared. They had to drive to the clinic in the village themselves. They called an ambulance, but it was not allowed to enter the village. After two hours, one of the parents took them into his car and drove to a hospital in Beit Jala. Soldiers were monitoring the entrance to the hospital but the parent managed to get thru.

The surgeon told us, “When Hamed arrived, he lost 3-4 litres of blood. The bullet passed his kidney, touched the aorta and stopped in the chest. He was given 11 bags of blood. When we stopped the bleeding we had 25-minutes left for the life saving operation. Today there is no need to worry about Hamed, but he has a fever and we do not know if we can save his kidney.”

We also met the father of Sma’yl, 16, who was also in the car. He told us: “Sma’yl was hit by two bullets, both of them are still in his body. He is is already at home, but he will be back for an operation. One year ago he was also shot at. He is still waiting for the operation of that damage. The first came back from the hospital, Israeli soldiers broke into our house and beat him. They broke his cast and tried to force him to confess that he had thrown stones, but he refused because he did not. After that incident I lost my permit to work in Jerusalem. Now the Israeli Military claims that the boys tried to enter Jerusalem and that soldiers had followed them several kilometers. They also claim that they first shot in the air, but we have five witnesses, who can testify against this. The soldiers shot at the car directly, but the witnesses are afraid to testify because of the risk of losing their permits to work in Jerusalem and also their jobs.”

HEBRON: Four booms made all of us silent, and put down our tea glasses. We looked at Hashem. “Was that the sound of gun shots?” “I don’t know”, he said and pulled up his shoulders, “Maybe it is a family clash, let me check”, he went off to make a phone call. Soon he was back again. “The Israeli soldiers killed a Palestinian man in the old town”, he said. “Now they are going to say in the news that he tried to stab a soldier, that is what they always do.”

We had many questions but at the moment there were few answers. We decided to go down to the main square. Hashem followed us since we did not know whether we would manage to get out thru the checkpoint or not due to what happened.

The square was full of people and the Palestinian police were stopping people from entering the Old City. Behind them there was another barrier manned by Israeli soldiers. In the square we met Ahmad, a 17 year old boy who told us that he witnessed the incident. He was very upset and emotional and spoke about the blood and how he was hiding when he heard the shots. He said he recognized the soldier who was shooting. We asked what happened and if the Palestinian man was carrying a knife. He assured us that he was not. He said, “the victim was a 41 year old man, father of ten children. He was a taxi driver by profession, why would he try to stab a soldier carrying an M16?”

The killing was covered on every news homepage, and as Hashem predicted it said that the Palestinian man had a knife and tried to stab the soldier. This is in complete contradiction to the statements that we received first-hand from witnesses only moments after the incident. Later we met even more eyewitnesses and they all objected that the man had attacked the soldier. Unfortunately there will be no objective investigation of what really happened, and no one will take responsibility for making ten children fatherless. He is just written off as ‘another Palestinian terrorist’ killed by the israeli ‘Defense’ Forces and will be exploited as proof that the occupation is necessary.

JAYYOUS: They were fast and organized. They were silent and effective, and when they left they had forever changed the life of five young men and their families in the village.

We recently received a phone call a little after three in the morning, and after a few minutes we were outside. The soldiers pointed their guns at us as we opened the gate. We told them we were internationals and asked what was going on. They immediately showed us a closed military zone order and we were left standing in the street by the gate, trying to observe as much as possible. They had taken one of our neighbors, Mohi, a kind young man who only a few days earlier accompanied us on a walk in the mountains. A young man who, like the other four boys who were taken that night, had a future in front of him. An insecure, unstable future under occupation which just got a little more insecure, a little worse and which may now contain a long time in prison.

We later talked with the father of one of the other boys. He told us that when he opened the door, the street was full of soldiers. He saw one truck, 6 military jeeps and a military ambulance, but the soldiers had approached the house on foot. They came for his son Haekmat. They blindfolded him, handcuffed him and took him away. The father asked us if the soldiers have the right to use handcuffs and blindfolds in front of the families. "It was horrible to watch" he said. He then told us about the worry and horror of not knowing how his son is doing. "I am worried about him, because I know that people are being beaten in prison. It is forbidden, but it still happens. It is horrible not knowing what is happening with him." Hekmat’s younger brother, a boy of 16 years, then said "I prefer to be dead rather than keep living like this."