BEERSHEBA (Ma'an) -- Israeli police detained six Palestinians while another six were injured during clashes that erupted as Israeli bulldozers demolished a house in the Wadi al-Niam village in Beersheba on Tuesday.
Residents in the Wadi al-Niam village told Ma'an that clashes erupted in the village as Israeli bulldozers demolished a house of an elderly woman, Amnah Abu Sweilem, 70.
The Israeli police detained six Palestinian youths and another six, including three women, were injured during the clashes; ambulances took them to the Beersheba Suroka Hospital.
(...) Over the past year, Breaking the Silence has collected about one thousand testimonies describing soldier violence and misconduct. Stollar just visited a 23-year-old who described to him his service at a checkpoint -- how he locked children into wire cages, sometimes for hours, even in the cold and the rain, because they got on his nerves. "Such experiences aren't uncommon -- that is the reality in the army."
Other soldiers describe how they tied up 12-year-old Palestinians with zip ties, lay them on the floor with their eyes covered and stepped "lightly on their testicles." They describe how they threw shock grenades and tear gas into village mosques because they were bored.
JERICHO (Ma'an) -- Dozens of Israeli settlers damaged wells belonging to Palestinians in the Khirbet Samra area of the Jordan Valley, a local official said Wednesday.
Aref Daraghma, the head of a local village council, told Ma'an that dozens of Israeli settlers who gathered to celebrate the Jewish holiday of Sukkot damaged more than seven wells in the al-Malah area of Khirbet Samra.
The covers of the wells were damaged, and parts of some of the wells were "destroyed," Daraghma said.
He said the settlers' actions were meant to pressure Palestinian residents to leave the area.
The Jordan Valley is within the 61 percent of the occupied West Bank it is under full Israeli military control as "Area C."
Area C comprises the only contiguous piece of land connecting 227 Palestinian residential communities in areas A and B as well as about 150,000 Palestinian residents.
More than 500,000 Israeli settlers live in settlements across the West Bank and East Jerusalem, in contravention of international law.
Every year there are dozens of attacks by Israeli settlers on Palestinians and their property in the occupied West Bank, but such crimes are rarely prosecuted by Israeli authorities.
The Israeli army arrested Hebron city council member Faruk A'shur on October 8, later placing him in administrative detention for three months.
An optician, A'shur is a leading activist in local committees promoting the boycott of Israeli products by Palestinians in Hebron and the West Bank more generally. A'shur is also renowned for his selfless efforts to provide the best possible services to residents of the poor and marginalised neighbourhoods of Hebron, particularly those exposed to ongoing settler violence and Israeli military attacks. These efforts are particularly crucial in assisting families in these areas to remain steadfast in their homes despite the enormous difficulties of daily life there.
The Hebron Defense Committee, a coalition of social movements and political parties acting to defend Hebron and its residents against Israeli colonial policies and practices, has called for A'shur's immediate release, as well as the release of all 6,500 Palestinian political prisoners.
In addition to issuing an administrative detention order against A'shur, in the last few days Israeli authorities have issued an additional 41 administrative detention orders for periods between two to six months. These orders are both news, as in the case of A'shur, and extensions of previously existing orders. Over 480 Palestinians are currently held in administrative detention, imprisonment without charges or trial
Palestinian prisoners are suffering in Israeli jails, especially those who have become ill following the bad detention conditions imposed on them by the Israeli Prison Service, as there is no concern for their health even in cases of serious illness.
According to the Palestinian Prisoner's Club, more than 6,200 Palestinian prisoners are being detained in Israeli jails with approximately 600 of those prisoners suffering from serious chronic illnesses which require immediate medical attention to save their lives.
Moreover, many of these prisoners have grown ill due to the harsh detention conditions and deliberate medical neglect imposed on them by the Israeli authorities.
President of the Palestinian Prisoners' Club Qadura Fares told Al-Araby Al-Jadeed: "Prisoners suffering from severe chronic illnesses, such as heart disease, cancer, kidney failure and patients with mental or physical disabilities, do not receive the necessary treatments for their conditions. They are instead given painkillers and basic medications just to keep them alive. No therapeutic treatments are provided to any prisoners with the conditions mentioned above."
Fares pointed out that, "Many chronic illnesses develop due to a delay in diagnosis. In many cases, if a prisoner were to receive a medical check-up, their tests would be prolonged and can sometimes drag on for days if not months. That is, if a patient is even lucky enough to be examined in the first place. All of these conditions and policies further aggravate the disease."
"Often, the state and condition of the prisoner are not serious; however, the lack of a precise diagnosis causes their health to deteriorate," Fares added.
According to the Palestinian Prisoners' Club, there are about 20 cases of prisoners with permanent disabilities in the occupation's jails and they are unable to move. There are four cases of disabled detainees who now reside in the prison hospital in Ramla.
According the organisation's statistics, "about 25 prisoners are suffering from cancerous tumours and are in need of immediate medical treatment, which is not provided by the prison service. Approximately 160 prisoners suffer from severe chronic illnesses resulting from deliberate medical neglect and these prisoners continue to be neglected despite their immediate need for medical treatment."
"Many of these diseases are directly caused by the policies carried out by the Israeli occupation, including the process of arrest. Not to mention, the conditions in which the prisoners live, Israel's policy for the interrogation rooms and the state of the cell can all cause psychological and neurological diseases among the prisoners. More importantly, the way they are treated during detention, including increased assault and movement from one prison to the next, could perhaps lead to the development of some disabilities," Fares explained.
Poor conditions among the prisoners can often be worsened in some cases by malnutrition, inadequate lighting and ventilation in the cells and prison itself as well as certain practices that are universally rejected as acceptable for prisons such as collective punishment, intrusions, and the use of tear gas in prisoner cells.
RAMALLAH (Ma'an) -- A Palestinian teenager was shot dead by Israeli forces in the village of Beit Laqiya northwest of Ramallah on Thursday evening.
Medical sources said Bahaa Samir Badir, 13, was shot in the chest after Israeli forces raided the village.
Badir was reportedly shot in the chest from close range, and suffered from severe bleeding shortly before dying at the Palestine Medical Complex in Ramallah.
Clashes broke out in the village of Beit Laqiya after news of Badir's death spread.
An Israeli military spokeswoman said that Israeli forces "encountered an illegal riot in Beit Laqiya," and "while they were exiting the village, rioters hurled Molotov cocktails at the forces."
"They responded to the threat with live fire," she said, adding: "Reports of a dead Palestinian are being reviewed. There will be military police investigation."
She added that the Molotov cocktails had posed a "direct threat" to the lives of the soldiers.
The death of Bahaa brings the total number of Palestinians killed by Israeli forces in the occupied West Bank so far this year to 42, in addition to the nearly 2,200 Palestinians slain during Israel's summer offensive across Gaza.
More than 4,300 Palestinians have also been injured by Israeli soldiers in the West Bank since the beginning of 2014, as well as more than 11,000 during the nearly two-month assault on Gaza.
The West Bank and the Gaza Strip have been under Israeli military occupation since 1967.
This policy of ethnic cleansing, by different means since 1948, is a consensual issue in Israel and thus leaves very little hope for peace and reconciliation. The current Israeli left, the self-acclaimed ‘peace bloc’, is willing to oppose new settlements but refuses to acknowledge the historical injustice inflicted on Palestinians in 1948 and denies displaced Palestinians their right to return to their homes and their homeland. Most of its members also wish Palestinians would consent to the annexation of so-called ‘settlement blocs’, large swaths of illegal Jewish colonies in different parts of the West Bank, to Israel.
The refusal to acknowledge the Right of Return and the wish to retain the settlement blocs is intended to keep Israel a Jewish state over large parts of historical Palestine while leaving Palestinians limited sovereignty over what remains of the country. These remains can become the State of Palestine without any real sovereignty and viability while the Palestinians inside Israel would have to accept their second degree citizenship as a fact of life under a final agreement.
The strategy of ethnic cleansing is marketed differently domestically and externally. It is based on the need to ‘preserve Jewish identity’ to the Israeli public and abroad as ‘Israel’s need for security’. Taken together these pretexts or excuses form the Israeli consensus behind the ethnic cleansing strategy
(...)
The worst method of ethnic cleansing was imposed on the Gaza Strip since 2006. Palestinians there were placed out of sight and beyond the demographic count by imposing a siege on the 1.8 million people living there. It was rationalized by Israel as a security measure but in truth it is part of their ethnic cleansing strategy that, in this case, can easily turn into a genocidal policy. No wonder Palestinians there resist ethnic cleansing with all they have.
What ethnic cleansing enabled Israelis to do was forget about the Palestinians imprisoned behind all the means their state implemented to take the land and ‘solve’ the demographic problem. Even when, in desperation, the people of Gaza resisted the worst of these devices it did not affect most Israelis. The carnage which was broadcast all over the world did not seem to move the vast majority of Israelis who continued, despite what Israeli propaganda attempted to portray, their normal life as they had done before. Life may have been disrupted for a few weeks in certain parts of Israel, but this was not enough to alert Israeli society to the crimes committed in their name.
The problem with Israel thus is not a policy here or there, but its overall strategy that has not changed since 1948 and is as cruel, and far more effective, than some of the ethnic cleansers now in action elsewhere in the Middle East and in the world as a whole.
RAMALLAH (Ma'an) -- A young Palestinian girl who was struck by an Israeli settler vehicle earlier Sunday has succumbed to her wounds, medics told Ma'an.
Einas Khalil, five, died after being hit by a car driven by an Israeli settler near the central West Bank town of Sinjil, medical sources at Palestine Medical Complex in Ramallah said.
The girl and young Nilin Asfour were walking on the main road near the village when they were hit, and were taken to the hospital in Ramallah where their wounds were described as serious.
Einas passed away hours later.
Residents of Sinjil accused the settler of deliberately hitting the girls.
BETHLEHEM (Ma'an) -- Israeli forces detained two Palestinian men from the southern West Bank village of Husan west of Bethlehem early on Sunday morning, according to the Palestinian Prisoner's Society.
The group identified the detainees in a statement as Majdi Hamamra and Nasri Hamamra.
The pair were detained after Israeli troops ransacked their homes in the village.
An Israeli military spokeswoman confirmed the arrests, saying that the two were detained because of "involvement in illegal activity."
Approximately 7,000 Palestinians are currently being held in Israeli jail, including around 500 without charge or trial.
In preparation for what some have labelled an accelerated wave of ethnic cleansing, officials from Israel’s Civil Administration, which administers the West Bank, have been demolishing Palestinian infrastructure in Area C including shacks, tents, animal shelters and homes and other structures deemed to have been built “illegally”.
As part of the forced relocation, more than 12,000 Bedouins will be relocated to a new settlement near the West Bank city of Jericho where they will be surrounded by a firing zone, settlements and an Israeli checkpoint which will limit their ability to graze their herds, the main source of income for these nomadic pastoralists.
Several Bedouin communities were forcibly relocated in the 1990s by the Civil Administration from near East Jerusalem to an area of land near a garbage dump in Abu Dis which falls in Area B.
The expulsion of the Bedouins in the 1990s was primarily to make way for enlarging the Israeli settlement of Maale Adumim, one of the largest in the West Bank.
Further to enlarging Maale Adumim, part of Israel’s plan has been to keep an area known as the E1 corridor, which links the settlement with East Jerusalem, contiguous and under Israeli control by building more settlements, effectively dividing the West Bank in two.
The move also further isolates East Jerusalem from the West Bank. East Jerusalem is of great importance to Palestinians due to cultural, educational, family, business, and religious ties. Palestinians also hope to establish a Palestinian state with East Jerusalem as its capital.
“The Civil Administration’s plan blatantly contravenes international humanitarian law, which prohibits the forced transfer of protected persons, such as these Bedouin communities, unless the move is temporary or is necessary for their safety or to meet a military need,” says Israeli rights group B’tselem.
“The Civil Administration’s expulsion plan meets none of these conditions. Israel, as the occupying power, is obligated to act for the benefit and welfare of residents of the occupied territory. Expansion of the settlements does not comport with this requirement.”
Irrespective of irrelevant pro-Zionist harpies here and their shameless mocking of daily tragedies, oppression and theft of land and property suffered by the Palestinians at the hand of Zionists:
21st October 2014 | International Solidarity Movement, Nablus team | Jordan Valley, Occupied Palestine
On October 20th, the Israeli military destroyed six structures belonging to a family in the village of al Jiftlik, in the Jordan Valley.
At approximately 6:00 am, Israeli soldiers destroyed the family home of Mohammed Mousa Mohammed Abohernam, as well as five other buildings, including his family’s storage unit and two buildings used to house goats.
Mohammed and his father.
The village of al Jiftlik belongs in “Area C” of the occupied West Bank, which is under full Israeli military civil and security control.
Al Jiftlik village is also used as a testing area for Israeli weapons.
As ISM activists interviewed the family, four Israeli jets flew in formation over the village in two, separate passes.
Abohernam said he intends to rebuild his home.
His father, and grandfather, lived on the same land. “This is my land and I am not leaving,” he stated.
Yesterday, soldiers briefly detained a developmentally disabled Palestinian boy, who is under the age of criminal responsibility, on suspicion that he had thrown stones. The boy, A. a-Rajbi, (full name withheld in interest of privacy) who will be 12 in a month, was detained after Palestinian children threw stones at soldiers on the main road of the Jabel Johar neighborhood in Hebron, close to the settlement of Kiryat Arba. A-Rajbi was handcuffed, blindfolded, and held on the floor of an army jeep for some 15 minutes until his father arrived and convinced the soldiers to release his son, who is mentally disabled and cannot speak.
In the video footage, filmed by B’Tselem volunteer Samih Da’na from his window, soldiers are seen holding the boy, handcuffing him, blindfolding him and closing him in the jeep, despite cries by Palestinian residents that the boy is mentally disabled. The footage also shows settlers from Kiryat Arba, watching the incident from behind the settlement’s fence. Some are seen calling out encouragement to the soldiers, including several racist remarks.
Tuesday October 21, 2014 11:35 by Saed Bannoura - IMEMC News
The Palestinian Prisoners Society (PPS) has reported that Israeli soldiers have kidnapped 225 Palestinians in the last three weeks, in different parts of the occupied West Bank. Israel also issued 13 new arbitrary administrative detention orders, and renewed six.
The PPS said the Hebron district, in the southern part of the West Bank, witnessed the largest wave of arrests, similar to previous months, as the soldiers have kidnapped 70 Palestinians since October 1.
In Jerusalem, soldiers kidnapped 46 Palestinians, while 24 Palestinians were kidnapped in Bethlehem district, 19 in Nablus, 17 in Ramallah, 10 in Salfit, 9 in Jenin, 5 in Jericho, and 3 in Qalqilia.
The PPS also said that the Israeli Prison Authority issued arbitrary administrative detention orders, without charges, against 13 detainees, and renewed administrative detention orders against six detainees.
It added that detainee Raed Mousa, also held under administrative detention, entered his 32nd consecutive day of hunger strike, and is facing serious health complications.
The PPS further said Israel continues to impose severe restrictions and sanctions on the detainees, especially since this past June, denying a large number of detainees, among many other things, the right to family visits.
It added that dozens of detainees require urgent and professional medical attention, but are denied access to adequate care, while their health conditions continue to deteriorate.
The PPS said there are currently more than 1300 detainees, held at the Negev Detention camp, one of the biggest Israeli prisons.
In addition, the PPS said detainee Saber Misbah Suleiman, 32, was violently attacked by Israeli soldiers while at the Ofer Military Court attending an appeal hearing.
The detainee, from Beit ‘Ur at-Tihta near Ramallah, suffered cuts and bruises to various parts of his body.
On October 10, Suleiman was sentenced to 19 months, and is currently held at the Ramon prison.
22nd October 2014 | International Solidarity Movement, Nablus team | Huwwara, Occupied Palestine
This morning at approximately 09:30, settlers from the illegal settlement of Yizhar sat fire to a Palestinian olive field above Huwwara village, just outside of Nablus.
The settlers sat the land on fire from the top of the hill. People from the village started fighting the fire, but suddenly the wind turned and the flames started moving towards the illegal settlement on the top of the hill. At this point the settlers started fighting their own fire, to prevent damage to their illegal buildings.
The owner of the land, Nasser Jihad Mufdi Houwwari, spoke to ISM about his previous experiences with settlers, in 2002 settlers from Yizhar shot Nasser in the shoulder with two bullets. Nasser continued to state that they [the settlers] threaten him and damage his properties every year, however this is the first time they burnt such a large area of his land.
Thursday October 23, 2014 02:30 by IMEMC News & Agencies
Palestinian medical sources have reported that a child was killed, after an undetonated explosive dropped by the Israeli army, during the latest aggression on Gaza, went off in Beit Hanoun, in the northern part of the Gaza Strip.
photo: Palestinian Ministry of Health
The Ministry of Health in Gaza said that the child has been identified as Mohammad Sami Abu Jarad, age 4.
The child suffered serious injuries to the head, face, chest and various parts of his body when the explosive went off, as he was playing near it on Zeitoun Street, in Beit Hanoun.
More than 2,142 Palestinians have been killed during Israeli’s 52-day aggression on Gaza that officially began on July 8, 2014, one day after the Israeli army assassinated eight resistance fighters for firing missiles at them, in two separate attacks.
Some of the victims died of their wounds after the ceasefire agreement was reached.
The number of slain Palestinians killed by Israeli missiles and shells includes at least 578 children, 264 women, and 103 elderly, while more than 11.100, including 3,374 children, 2,088 women and 410 elderly have been injured.
Ahrar- The Ahrar Center for Detainees Studies and Human Rights has issued its monthly report on Israeli arrests in West Bank and Gaza Strip during September. The report said that 278 Palestinians have been arrested and one was killed by Israeli soldiers. The highest numbers of detainees during September were from al-Khalil, where 81 arrests were reported.
Meanwhile, 62 Palestinian were detained in Jerusalem, while 32 others were from Nablus, 30 detainees were from Bethlehem, 28 arrests in Ramallah, while 17 arrest cases were detained in Jenin. In Qalqilya 11 arrest cases were documented, 7 other cases were in Salfit, and 5 detainees in Tulkarem, while only 3 arrests took place in Gaza.
Ahrar center reported that 21 arrests were carried out at the Israeli military checkpoints and border crossings during September. The monthly report said that 9 children under 15 years old were among the detainees in addition to two women named: Ayat Mahfouz from al-Khalil who was arrested on 08.09.2013 near the Ibrahimi mosque under the pretext of possession of a knife, and Tharwat Ghanem, from Tulkarem, who was arrested on 29/09/2013 on her way to visit her brother Ghanem Ghanem who is detained in Negev prison.
In the same context, the center’s report documented the arrest of one Palestinian journalist Mahmoud Abu Atta, from Jerusalem, who was arrested on 24/09/2013. Abu Atta is the director of the media department at Al-Aqsa Foundation for Endowment and Heritage in Jerusalem. Meanwhile, the report documented the martyrdom of one Palestinian Islam Tubasi, from Jenin refugee camp, on 17/09/2013 during clashes with the Israeli occupation forces that stormed the camp at dawn on that day.
Ahrar reported an increase in detainees’ numbers in comparison between September and August where 250 arrest cases were documented, in addition to the extension of some prisoners’ detention. The director of Ahrar center Fouad Khuffash confirmed that the West Bank cities are subjected to daily raids and break-ins, denying any Palestinian sovereignty over the Palestinian lands. He pointed that more arrests could be carried out during September and the center failed to report them. Khuffash has also pointed out to the Palestinians’ suffering while passing by military checkpoints where they are subjected to arrests and humiliation.
that may be so subgenious, but archinect is going to be tied to palestinian websites on search engines due to tammuz's incessant spam. it's like archinect is electronic intifada's sister site. i wonder if that's a goal of this site's administrators?
Hamas, Islamic Jihad salute Jerusalem terror attack, threaten new 'Palestinian intifada' in capital
“The attack in Jerusalem is an act of heroism and a natural response to the crimes of the occupation against our people and our holy places,” said Mushir al-Masri, a senior Hamas spokesperson.
Hamas and Islamic Jihad hailed Wednesday’s terrorist act by an east Jerusalem resident who rammed his car into a crowd of commuters at a light rail station, killing a three-month old infant and injuring seven others.
“The attack in Jerusalem is an act of heroism and a natural response to the crimes of the occupation against our people and our holy places,” said Mushir al-Masri, a senior Hamas spokesperson.
“The attack in Jerusalem is a natural response to what is taking place in the city, given the harassment and overall attacks of Judaization affecting our holy places and Muslims,” said another Hamas official, Salah Baradwil.
Hamas warned that the latest developments may augur the next "Palestinian intifada in Jerusalem."
Islamic Jihad released an official statement on Thursday through its military wing, the Al-Quds Brigade, saying: “There is Zionist aggression against all of our people, and today the resistance responded to this attack. This is a natural right.”
“This attack is a strong response to the Israeli occupation, whose crimes are unable to break the resistance,” the organization said.
Both Hamas and Islamic Jihad called on the Palestinian Authority to “halt its security coordination with Israel and to act in resistance in the West Bank.”
The two groups also praised the residents of east Jerusalem “for their fierce stance against the crimes of the occupation.”
RAMALLAH (Ma'an) -- Israeli forces shot and killed a Palestinian teenager late Friday during clashes in Silwad village near Ramallah in the occupied West Bank, medical officials said.
Orwa Abd al-Wahhab Hammad, 14, was shot multiple times with live bullets. He was taken to Palestine Medical Complex where he was pronounced dead.
An Israeli army spokeswoman said that soldiers fired at a Palestinian adult who was hurling a Molotov cocktail at forces in the area.
Witnesses said Hammad was hit by an Israeli sniper from close range, insisting the soldier shot to kill.
Orwa was a US national. His uncle was killed during the First Intifada.
He had spent 14 months in prison for stone-throwing and was released in December 2013. He was arrested again in February and held for 20 days as Israeli investigators tried to establish whether he was involved with Hamas. But they found nothing and released him.
Israel has claimed that Shaludi was a Hamas activist.
Although his mother's late brother, Muhi al-Din Sharif, was a senior Hamas bomb-maker who was killed in the West Bank in 1998, there has been no independent confirmation Shaludi belonged to the movement.
Since his arrest in February, Israeli investigators had not left him alone, his mother said. Relatives have said that he was tortured and faced severe trauma during his time in Israeli prisons.
"They kept on harassing him and summoning him for questioning over and over again and they tried to enlist him into working for them, but he repeatedly refused.
"They threatened him, saying he would never find work or be able to continue his education or have a normal life," she said.
Israel has retained al-Shaludi's body for a post mortem, with the family expecting it will be handed over on Sunday for burial.
Published Wednesday 22/10/2014 (updated) 24/10/2014 11:10
(MaanImages/file)
GAZA CITY (Ma'an) -- A Palestinian child died on Wednesday after he touched an unexploded Israeli ordnance left over from the most recent offensive over the summer, causing it to explode.
Ministry of Health spokesman Ashraf al-Qidra said that 4-year-old Muhammad Sami Abu Jrad from the northern Gaza city of Beit Hanoun was killed after he came into contact with the ordnance.
Muhammad was severely injured when the ordnance exploded as a result of contact, and passed away after beign transferred to al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza City.
Muhammad is at least the 10th person to be killed by unexploded Israeli ordnance, including six in August and three in September.
Watch groups have warned that the ordnance can be a particular threat to children, who often think the bombs are toys.
The Gaza Strip is currently littered with a large number of unexploded Israeli ordnance, a constant reminder of the more than 50-day Israeli offensive that left more than 2,150 dead, 11,200 injured, and more than 110,000 homeless.
Although Gaza police explosives teams have been working across the territory to destroy unexploded ordnance and prevent safety threats to locals, lack of proper equipment due to the seven-year Israeli siege as well as lack of resources more generally have hindered efforts.
Even before the most frequent Israeli assault, unexploded ordnance from the 2008-9 and 2012 offensives was a major threat to Gazans.
A 2012 report published by the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights said that 111 civilians, 64 of whom were children, were casualties to unexploded ordnance between 2009 and 2012, reaching an average of four every month in 2012.
Published Sunday 19/10/2014 (updated) 21/10/2014 14:09
(MaanImages/al-Quds)
RAMALLAH (Ma'an) -- A young Palestinian girl who was struck by an Israeli settler vehicle earlier Sunday has succumbed to her wounds, medics told Ma'an.
Einas Khalil, five, died after being hit by a car driven by an Israeli settler near the central West Bank town of Sinjil, medical sources at Palestine Medical Complex in Ramallah said.
The girl and young Nilin Asfour were walking on the main road near the village when they were hit, and were taken to the hospital in Ramallah where their wounds were described as serious.
Einas passed away hours later.
Residents of Sinjil accused the settler of deliberately hitting the girls.
Israeli police arrived at the scene shortly after the incident and opened an investigation into whether it was deliberate, locals said.
Over 500,000 Israeli settlers live in settlements in the occupied West Bank, including East Jerusalem, in contravention of international law.
A young Palestinian man named Abd al-Rahman al-Shaludi rammed his car into pedestrians exiting the Ammunition Hill light rail station in northern Jerusalem on Wednesday, killing three-month-old Haya Zissel Brown and injuring at least seven others.
Israeli officials instantly labeled the crash a terrorist attack, which US media outlets have parroted without question even though the intent of the driver remains unclear. Given that Israeli police shot and killed al-Shaludi immediately after he exited the vehicle, whether the crash was deliberate may never be certain.
His family insists it was an accident, telling reporters that al-Shaludi, 21 years old, suffered from mental illness as a result of being tortured in Israeli prison.
“We believe that he was shot and killed in cold blood and there was no attempt to question him, and hear his side of the story,” his cousin, Abed al-Shaludi, told the Israeli newspaper Haaretz.
Al-Shaludi had been jailed by Israel three times since September 2012 for allegedly hurling stones and molotov cocktails at Israeli settlers and their property in Silwan, his neighborhood in Israeli-occupied East Jerusalem. The Israeli press is using this to cast al-Shaludi as a career criminal with a history of “anti-Jewish” violence.
According to his mother, al-Shaludi’s metal health began to deteriorate after a three-week-long interrogation at the hands of the Shin Bet (Israel’s secret police) in the Jerusalem Russian Compound jail, a notorious site of abuse and torture of Palestinians.
This context has of course been missing or buried in most US media accounts, of which there are many. Israel and Palestine-related news is currently saturated with headlines about a Palestinian man killing an Israeli baby.
Meanwhile, these same outlets have either whitewashed or completely ignored the ongoing abuse and killings of Palestinian children by the Israeli military and settlers.
Gaza children still dying
The same day that al-Shaludi killed an Israeli infant with his car, an unexploded Israeli bomb took the life of four-year-old Muhammad Sami Abu Jrad in Beit Hanoun, a city in northern Gaza that was decimated by Israel’s merciless summertime bombing campaign, which killed nearly 2,200 Palestinians, most of them civilians, including more than 500 children.
According to the Ma’an News Agency, Jrad is the tenth person killed by unexploded Israeli munitions, most of which have yet to be cleared because the Israeli-imposed, Egypt-enforced blockade hampers access to the robotic and protective equipment needed to neutralize the leftover ordnance.
Unlike the tragic death of three-month-old Haya Zissel Brown, Muhammad Jrad’s killing elicited only silence from the American press corps, as did that of another Palestinian child run over by an Israeli settler earlier this week.
Children run down
On Sunday, a man reportedly from the Jewish-only settlement of Yitzhar ran over Palestinian schoolchildren as they made their way towards their mothers after exiting a school bus in the West Bank town of Sinjil.
Five-year-old Inas Khalil died of her wounds shortly thereafter and another girl, also hit, was left in critical condition.
Instead of stopping to check on the children or calling for help, the man kept driving until he reached a nearby Jewish settlement, at which point he says he called the police.
Residents accused the settler of ramming the children deliberately, but Israeli police ruled the hit-and-run an accident, siding with the settler, who claims he fled out of fear of being hurt by the Palestinian crowd which gathered around the girls he maimed.
Raed al-Jabari, a 35-year-old Palestinian father and husband, was not so lucky when he hit Israeli settlers with his car in the Gush Etzion settlement bloc in late July. Al-Jabari insisted it was an accident and turned himself in to the police, reported Ma’an News Agency. But unlike the settler who killed Inas Khalil, al-Jabari was jailed for two months and ultimately died under suspicious circumstances.
Israeli authorities claim al-Jabari hanged himself in the bathroom at Israel’s Eshel prison, but the autopsy suggests the man was tortured to death, according to Palestinian officials. Either way, the disparity in treatment of the settler who killed Khalil versus that of al-Jabari is the essence of Israel’s apartheid regime that affords different, unequal rights to those under its rule.
Palestinian Ambassador to the United Nations Riyad Mansour responded to the latest settler hit-and-run by filing a complaint with the UN Security Council, accusing “extremist terrorist settlers” of launching intentional hit-and-run attacks against Palestinians in recent months.
Indeed, settlers slamming their vehicles into Palestinians in the occupied West Bank is a commonoccurrence that is routinely overlooked by the Israeli authorities as well as western media outlets.
As far as this writer can tell, none of the perpetrators have been labeled “terrorists” nor have any been held accountable. But such is the nature of apartheid.
Meanwhile, Khalil’s killing received a mention of two sentences in The New York Times, buried near the end of an article about Wednesday’s Jerusalem incident.
The Associated Press, one of the only US media outlets to cover Khalil’s death, devoted just five sentences to the hit-and-run, framing it as nothing more than an unproven accusation by Palestinians against an unnamed Israeli settler.
“The Palestinians are accusing an Israeli settler of running over two schoolgirls, killing one of them, and speeding away,” reads the article’s opening line.
In stark contrast, here is the opening sentence to the Associated Press article on the Jerusalem car crash: “A Palestinian motorist with a history of anti-Israel violence slammed his car into a crowded train station in Jerusalem on Wednesday, killing a three-month-old baby girl and wounding eight people in what police called a terror attack.”
Boy shot dead
On Thursday, 16 October, Israeli soldiers shot Bahaa Samir Badir, 13, in the chest at close range in Beit Laqiya, a village northwest of Ramallah in the occupied West Bank. He was pronounced dead shortly thereafter at the Palestine Medical Complex in Ramallah.
The Israeli army excused the killing, saying its soldiers were simply responding to firebombs directed at their jeeps as they were leaving the village. Live fire, an Israeli army spokesperson said, was an appropriate response to stones and Molotov cocktails, a troubling narrative that went largely unchallenged in the US media outlets which bothered to report on Badir’s death.
The US press showed even less interest in the video that surfaced this week that shows Israeli soldiers blindfolding, handcuffing and abusing an eleven-year-old developmentally disabled Palestinian boy in the occupied West Bank city of Hebron as a crowd of settlers and their children laughed, cheered and shouted racist slurs.
The abuse and wanton killing of Palestinian children by the Israeli war machine is not an exception, but rather a norm that US media outlets are complicit in enabling through omission or obfuscation, and, like Israel, they are guilty of valuing some children’s lives more than others
There is no exit sign off Route 40 for the unpaved road leading to the village of al-Araqib.
Located in the Naqab (Negev) region of present-day Israel, al-Araqib is older than the state itself: its cemetery dates back to 1914. Yet that is not considered significant by the authorities.
That gives the authorities an excuse to deprive it and many other Bedouin villages of essential services such as electricity and water.
Acute deprivation
The deprivation is especially acute in al-Araqib. Because their homes have been demolished more than seventy times since 2010, the local Bedouins are forced to live within the confines of the cemetery. Rubble from their old houses has been removed by the authorities but remnants of kitchen and bathroom tiles still litter the ground.
Today, the Bedouins have to rely on a well dug in 1913 for water. “Before, we had electricity and water piped to the houses, but the government destroyed the infrastructure,” said resident Sheikh Sayah al-Turi. “We just want tap water like everyone else.”
By contrast, water is abundant across the road in the Jewish-only settlement of Givot Bar. Lawns are green in this settlement — even though it is located in the desert.
Givot Bar was established ten years ago by the Or Movement.
Along with its partner organization, the Jewish National Fund (JNF), the Zionist group is building a network of towns exclusively for Jews. The Or Movement has set the ambitious goal of bringing 600,000 Jews to the Naqab and Galilee regions of present-day Israel by 2020.
Decades of dispossession
To achieve this goal, the two organizations are furthering the decades-old project of dispossessing Palestinians.
The JNF portrays itself as an environmental group dedicated to afforestation. In reality, it is trying to purge Palestine of the trees and crops best suited to its arid landscapes, at the same time ridding the land of its indigenous communities and their agriculture-based economy.
To make way for a eucalyptus plantation it is developing, around 4,500 citrus, fig and olive trees have been uprooted in al-Araqib.
Water for the recently planted eucalyptus trees is taken to the area in tanker trucks. Yet the Israeli authorities have forbidden Bedouins from trucking water in to al-Araqib. Tankers and trucks for carrying water have been confiscated during the demolitions of the village.
“The government says it is illegal to bring water here, but at the same time, they won’t connect us,” al-Turi said.
Discriminatory pricing
Mekorot, Israel’s national water company, implements the official policy of cutting off the water supply to Bedouin communities.
Mekorot recently came under fire from a committee headed by Ram Belinkov, a former Israeli interior minister. Belinkov’s committee found that Mekorot was inflating its costs.
The Israeli business press has reported that while Mekorot has repeatedly called for rate hikes, the company was actually raking in “excessively high profits.”
Mekorot was also among the state-owned companies included in a $4 billion privatization plan approved by Benjamin Netanyahu’s government earlier this month.
A price list issued by the Israeli Water Authority in 2012 showed that “individual users” who bought water directly from Mekorot rather than through a local administration were subjected to a 67 percent rate hike. Most of these “individual users” lived in Palestinian villages that Israel has refused to recognize.
“Driving us from our land”
“There is a troika of Israeli entities working to drive us from our land: the state, Mekorot and the Jewish National Fund,” said al-Turi.
Mekorot’s involvement in the ethnic cleansing of historic Palestine has not prevented it from striking international deals. It has, for example, signed a cooperation agreement with Acea, Italy’s largest water company, in which the City of Rome has a 51 percent stake.
This writer recently visited al-Araqib — as well as Palestinian communities in the occupied West Bank — with an Italian delegation of activists organizing against water privatization. The intention of the trip, sponsored by the Beyond Walls project, was to gain first-hand knowledge of Mekorot’s activities in order to assist the campaign against its agreement with Acea.
The villagers of al-Araqib deeply impressed us with their defiance of Israeli apartheid.
They have refused to sell one centimeter of land to the Israeli authorities. They have also rebuilt their village after each demolition.
And some of the olive trees that were cut rather than completely uprooted are sprouting new growth.
“This is very symbolic for us,” said Aziz al-Turi, the son of Sheikh Sayah al-Turi.
Even though it is a quasi-governmental Israeli agency, the Jewish National Fund is registered as a charity in many countries. Donations to it are therefore tax-deductible.
Aziz al-Turi, a father of five, underscored the hypocrisy of that status when he told The Electronic Intifada that “supporting the JNF is killing me and my family.”
Israel plans to present itself as an innovative and environmentally progressive country by celebrating its “water conservation” projects at the Expo 2015 in Milan.
The criminal behavior of Israel and its allies in al-Araqib prove that it is anything but progressive.
Stephanie Westbrook is a US citizen based in Rome, Italy. Her articles have been published by Common Dreams, Counterpunch, The Electronic Intifada, In These Times and Z Magazine. Follow her on Twitter: @stephinrome
The daughter of Ismail Haniyeh, Hamas’s leader in Gaza, has undergone treatment at an Israeli hospital, just weeks after a 50-day war between Israel and the Palestinian Islamist movement that left more than 2,000 people dead.
She was transported to Ichilov hospital in Tel Aviv as an emergency case after suffering complications from a procedure originally carried out in Gaza, the coastal enclave whose hospitals came under severe strain due to the deluge of casualties admitted during the summer’s conflict.
The identity of the daughter – one of Mr Haniyeh’s 13 children – has not been revealed, nor have details of her condition been disclosed.
Her admission suggests that humanitarian cooperation between Israel and the Gaza authorities continues despite the bitterness left by the hostilities, which ended on August 26 after both parties accepted the terms of an Egyptian-brokered ceasefire.
It is not known if Mr Haniyeh, whose home was destroyed in the conflict but who spent the period sheltering underground from possible Israeli assassination attempts, personally requested or approved his daughter’s transfer to a hospital in Israel.
An unnamed Israeli doctor told Reuters that the request of a Palestinian physician was usually sufficient to guarantee the admission from Gaza of patients deemed urgent cases, suggesting the Hamas leader may not have been personally involved.
Nevertheless, the treatment of his daughter is likely to be seized upon by Israeli officials as an example of the country’s magnanimity towards an unstinting foe. Hamas refuses to recognise Israel’s right to exist.
One of Mr Haniyeh’s granddaughters was admitted to an Israeli hospital last November, while his mother-in-law sought treatment for cancer at a hospital in Jerusalem in June, according to Israeli media.
The Israeli authorities impose stringent controls on the entry of Palestinians from Gaza, with most cases permitted only on health or humanitarian grounds.
Doctors at Gaza’s under-resourced hospitals complained that the near-closure of the border crossing during the July/August conflict meant they were unable to transfer sufficient numbers of severely injured patients into Israel for emergency treatment in facilities in East Jerusalem and elsewhere.
Of course, time for the Zionist bot to interject with a question that does not relate to the article in order to obfuscate....pretending to be polite after resorting to name calling and lowlife insults only a few posts ago.
Laud? It sounds like there's a third party here and Israel would be or would not be doing the lauding.
No, Israel kills (it is, of course outdated given the latest Gaza massacre; a more recent counting - which is of course outdated, given that Israel continues to kill) and tortures Palestinian children.
Of course, brainwashed Zionist your-everyday-normal Israelis have no problem urging , cheering and mocking the mass massacre by Israel of Palestinians and their children either.
And how about the lauding of bringing down the non-Jewish "minority birth rates" (ie Palestinians in the occupied colonized regions of Palestine by Zionists that is called Israel) down. Evidently, stifling the chance of Palestinian children being born is just as effective, if not more effective way than killing them.
Of course, you should know that while racism in this Zionist colony against Palestinians is the most overt issue, racism against other minorities is rife:
Increasingly, Israel is being seen as a racist and exclusionist state. Its subjugation and abuse of Palestinians living within Israel (20 per cent of the population), as well as those living under the Israeli military occupation of the Occupied Palestinian Territories, are well documented and have led to it being called an apartheid state. What is less well known, however, is just how ingrained and insidious racism in Israel actually is, in that it not only extends to Palestinian Christians and Muslims, but also to Jews who come from ethnic minority backgrounds. Jews who were once supposedly welcomed into Israel as brothers and sisters in faith now find themselves relegated to the underclass in Israel. While they may be placed far above Palestinians, they are nonetheless far below non-black Jews.
In Ethiopia, it is true that the Falasha had to contend with poverty, famine and drought, but, in Israel, people who once had strong familial and societal ties are finding their community plagued with high levels of unemployment, a shift in social hierarchies, an erosion of their traditions, an increased level of criminalisation of their youth and other social ills. They are finding themselves confined to ghettos, discriminated against in the workplace, insulted by scandals such as the blood donation fiasco and subjected to interracial attacks, which appear increasingly prevalent. It appears that elements of Israeli society are crumbling from within, and endemic and institutionalised racism is certainly a contributing factor
Blumenthal explained to Consortium News how The New York Times commissioned the 11-minute video, but after the paper’s editors saw it, refused to publish it:
I was asked to submit something by The New York Times op docs, a new section on the website that published short video documentaries. I am known for short video documentaries about the right wing in the US, and extremism in Israel. They solicited a video from me, and when I didn’t produce it in time, they called me for it, saying they wanted it. So I sent them a video I produced with my colleague, David Sheen, an Israeli journalist who is covering the situation of non-Jewish Africans in Israel more extensively than any journalist in the world.
We put together some shocking footage of pogroms against African communities in Tel Aviv, and interviews with human rights activists. I thought it was a well-done documentary about a situation very few Americans were familiar with. We included analysis. We tailored it to their style, and of course it was rejected without an explanation after being solicited. I sent it to some other major websites and they have not even responded to me, when they had often solicited articles from me in the past.
My "lowlife" posts were a response to your disgusting claim that the slaughter of Jews in the Holocaust was, in part, a consequence of a Zionist conspiracy.
Still waiting for a link showing that Israeli leaders praise the killing of Palestinian children.
Also, while you're at it, could you provide showing that Sudanese migrants seek asylum in adjacent Muslim countries? Egypt, perhaps?
Also, could you share with the board the backstory of the Israeli government providing its own resources to help Ethiopian Jews emigrate?
Just to be clear - I'm not condoning the racism of Israeli civilians so don't even try to twist the argument that way.
Israel is racist, not just Zionist Israelis. Zionism is racist and colonial. It is not surprising that Zionist Israeli citizens would be racist too. Land theft, massacres, mass oppression practiced by Zionists, from its early days right to nowadays is a testimony of a clear agenda of displacement and/or disappearing of one indigenous population by a colonizing people from elsewhere. Israeli racism is not merely indicative of racism within Israel but an expression of the base mentality of Zionism, within and without, as a movement that is slowly devolving into the more vulgar expressions within it. There was never such a thing as liberal Zionism when measured against the very aim of Zionism, to colonize and steal someone else's land and property.
Everything else happening in Palestine (and I mean the rightful wholesome historic and entire Palestine) is a consequence of this. Trying to nullify this by obfuscating and lying is only evidence of anachronistic belonging to a racially privileging and colonial heritage.
As for twisting, it I these Zionist bots who come here solely for the reason of twisting in order to serve their falsifying ends. For instance, I have no where mentioned that the Zionists conspiracy included the genocide - what the linked article suggests (and if there is counter evidence then let it be presented, after all, I did not myself write the article) , however, was that Zionists were not above opportunistically using the genocide to their ends. Here is an account of how the Stern gang (known as LEHI) and Yitzhak Shamir - Israel's seventh prime minister- actively sought an alliance with Nazi Germany in order to help them answer Nazi Germany's Jewish question with Zionists/ Israel's answer to that question.
........................
From that source, we read:
LEHI showed its uniqueness in its very earliest political strategy, namely in its persistent search for an alliance with Nazi Germany throughout 1940 -- 41. Unlike all other Jewish groups of that time, the LEHI men respected Hitler. Later, the veterans of LEHI tried for a long time to deny that they had ever made alliance overtures to the Nazis. Unfortunately for them, documents proving the contrary were found by Israeli scholars and journalists and published long ago. The search for that alliance and its implications are best described in the above-mentioned book by Heller. He shows that the drafting of the Principles of Renaissance took place at the same time, and he argues that LEHI's pro-Nazism was by no means unrelated to the contents of this document.
Heller opens his discussion by recalling that Yair had, on ideological grounds, advocated a Jewish alliance with fascist states even before he founded his own organization in September 1940. His advocacy of that alliance was further spurred by advances of the Italian army into Egypt in September 1940 and by the Italian air raid on Tel Aviv at the same time. The raid, which resulted in over 100 dead and hundreds of wounded "impressed him deeply," turning him, as Heller notes, into a believer in Italian victory. Unlike all other Jewish groups in Palestine, Yair refused to believe that Mussolini's alliance with Hitler and his concomitant adoption of anti-Semitic policies could be of any significance for the Jews. Nor did he believe that Hitler's views on the "Jewish question" could have consequences for the fate of Jews. In order to persuade his comrades, he used two "ideological" arguments. The first was borrowed from Jabotinsky's distinction between "verbal" and "behavioral" anti-Semitism. Although used by Jabotinsky in a different context, it became a fundamental tenet of LEHI's ideology. Thus, argued Yair, Polish anti-Semitism (generalized by him as affecting every single Pole), was "behavioral" and therefore much worse than the Nazi one, which was supposed to be merely "verbal." Shamir is apparently affected by this doctrine to this very day. His virulent anti-Polish racism, as recently expressed in his notorious statement that "every Pole sucks anti-Semitism with his mother's milk," is clearly traceable to those ravings of his teacher Yair, and even reminiscent of the latter's pro-Nazi leanings.
The second argument of Yair, no less demagogic than the first, was the supposed distinction between "enemies of the Jews" and "Jew-haters." The latter, who, like
Hitler, "merely" hated the Jews, were to be regarded as a lesser evil, since according to Yair they were no more than the usual run of anti-Semites "who arise in every generation." The "enemies," by contrast, were those "who occupied the Jewish homeland" (as defined above), which meant the Arabs, the British and (on account of their rule in Syria and Lebanon) also the French: all three to be regarded as much worse than Hitler. Yair, who wanted the Jews to learn this distinction well, regarded every Jew cooperating with the British as deserving death. He expressly stated his wish to be like Quisling, already known then as the ruler of Norway on Hitler's behalf. He wanted to perform the same role in the "kingdom of Israel" allied with the Nazis. He would even consider this scheme as his personal contribution to the Messianic rebirth. To be sure, some former adherents were sufficiently repelled by this ideology to defect from LEHI. But Shamir remained, demonstrating his agreement with it. He can be presumed to agree with it still.
And, again, remember, Shamir went on to become the 7th prime minister of Israel, not merely a constituent part of Israel but a top representative figure. Shimon Peres called him a "brave warrior" who, by the way, also happened to have:
As head of the Stern Gang, Shamir authorized the assassinations of Lord Moyne, the British minister in Palestine, in 1944, and Folke Bernadotte, the U.N. envoy (and Swedish count) in 1948
When Bernadotte finally presented his progress report, “Mediation, Truce Supervision, Refugees, Proposals for Peaceful Settlement,” on Sept. 16, 1948, it included this unequivocal statement regarding the Palestinian Right of Return:
“It is not yet known what the policy of the Provisional Government of Israel with regard to the return of Arab refugees will be when the final terms of settlement are reached. It is, however, undeniable that no settlement can be just and complete if recognition is not accorded to the right of the Arab refugee to return to the home from which he has been dislodged by the hazards and strategy of the armed conflict between Arabs and Jews in Palestine.
“The majority of these refugees have come from territory which, under the Assembly resolution of 29 November, was to be included in the Jewish State. The exodus of Palestinian Arabs resulted from panic created by fighting in their communities, by rumours concerning real or alleged acts of terrorism, or expulsion. It would be an offence against the principles of elemental justice if these innocent victims of the conflict were denied the right to return to their homes while Jewish immigrants flow into Palestine, and, indeed, at least offer the threat of permanent replacement of the Arab refugees who have been rooted in the land for centuries.” (A/648 1.V.6)
The very next day, Sept. 17, 1948, Bernadotte was assassinated in West Jerusalem by members of Lehi, acting on Shamir’s explicit orders.
So, whether including or excluding the interesting digression above about the attempts to ally Zionism with Nazism at one point in its history, we see that Israel is fundamentally based on terrorism, not on the freedom of the Jewish people, as a means to colonize and eradicate another people.
Another article I have linked to, however, certainly does more than suggest that, elsewhere (ie not the genocide commited by the Nazis), Zionist "conspiracy" did indeed include terrorizing Jewish communities in numerous Arab lands in order to get them to go to Israel.
The fact that Zionist bots are not able to discriminate and determine where there is suggestion and what this suggestion suggests displays either of the two, imbecility or their proclivity to create an aura of falsification around my intentions.
Listen, retard. Sure, there are historical records showing that certain Jewish factions in WWII Europe used "bargaining chips" with Nazis-- i.e., they agreed that certain Jews could be killed in the interest of protecting other Jewish groups. The behavior was depraved, but it was done in the context of ongoing genocide (read This Way to the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen for further accounts of this type of depravity in death camps).
What you are doing is saying that because some of these Jewish "bargainers" were Zionist (hmm-- wonder why they wanted a Jewish state), Zionism contributed to the Holocaust.
Yet again, in spite of the clarification, that Zionist bot attempts to misrepresent. I never said "contribute" to the Holocaust neither did any of the linked articles. The suggestion was opportunism and not contribution. The fact that the Zionist bot only sieves through its hasbara guide book is further evidence that it is here solely to defend Israel at all costs, perversely twisting connotation and denotation to its own ends and not on grounds of reason and logic.
Funny how it ping-pongs from digressive "Please can you explain...?" questions to trivial name calling. That exposes that these bots are following guidelines that are separate from the person behind them - thus the reason for this schizophrenic and irrational behavior. These are hasbara trained trolls specifically sent here with specific guidelines (hence automated). A troll-bot.
Archinect, please boycott Israel (its about time!)
did you try boycotting turkey? it works.
Please tell me what "worked." I'm also not calling for a boycott of Turkey.
The daily destruction of Palestinian homes and lives by the colonial entity known as Israel...
From : Clashes, injuries as Israeli bulldozers demolish house in Beersheba
(MaanImages)
BEERSHEBA (Ma'an) -- Israeli police detained six Palestinians while another six were injured during clashes that erupted as Israeli bulldozers demolished a house in the Wadi al-Niam village in Beersheba on Tuesday.
Residents in the Wadi al-Niam village told Ma'an that clashes erupted in the village as Israeli bulldozers demolished a house of an elderly woman, Amnah Abu Sweilem, 70.
The Israeli police detained six Palestinian youths and another six, including three women, were injured during the clashes; ambulances took them to the Beersheba Suroka Hospital.
the habitual detainment and torturing of Palestinian children by Israel.
From:
Kids Behind Bars: Israel's Arbitrary Arrests of Palestinian Minors
(...) Over the past year, Breaking the Silence has collected about one thousand testimonies describing soldier violence and misconduct. Stollar just visited a 23-year-old who described to him his service at a checkpoint -- how he locked children into wire cages, sometimes for hours, even in the cold and the rain, because they got on his nerves. "Such experiences aren't uncommon -- that is the reality in the army."
Other soldiers describe how they tied up 12-year-old Palestinians with zip ties, lay them on the floor with their eyes covered and stepped "lightly on their testicles." They describe how they threw shock grenades and tear gas into village mosques because they were bored.
Palestine sucks
Video: The Impassioned Testimony To Israeli War Crimes By An Israeli Journalist
Israeli journalist David Sheen testifies at the Russell Tribunals hearing on Israeli War Crimes.
Settlers damage Palestinian wells in Jordan Valley
Published yesterday (updated) 15/10/2014 15:17
(MaanImages/File)
JERICHO (Ma'an) -- Dozens of Israeli settlers damaged wells belonging to Palestinians in the Khirbet Samra area of the Jordan Valley, a local official said Wednesday.
Aref Daraghma, the head of a local village council, told Ma'an that dozens of Israeli settlers who gathered to celebrate the Jewish holiday of Sukkot damaged more than seven wells in the al-Malah area of Khirbet Samra.
The covers of the wells were damaged, and parts of some of the wells were "destroyed," Daraghma said.
He said the settlers' actions were meant to pressure Palestinian residents to leave the area.
The Jordan Valley is within the 61 percent of the occupied West Bank it is under full Israeli military control as "Area C."
Area C comprises the only contiguous piece of land connecting 227 Palestinian residential communities in areas A and B as well as about 150,000 Palestinian residents.
More than 500,000 Israeli settlers live in settlements across the West Bank and East Jerusalem, in contravention of international law.
Every year there are dozens of attacks by Israeli settlers on Palestinians and their property in the occupied West Bank, but such crimes are rarely prosecuted by Israeli authorities.
This is the trailer of Children in Chains - a documentary on the abuse of Palestinian children in the Israeli Military Court System.
This is the full Children in Chains documentary
Israel arrests leading BDS activist
The Israeli army arrested Hebron city council member Faruk A'shur on October 8, later placing him in administrative detention for three months.
An optician, A'shur is a leading activist in local committees promoting the boycott of Israeli products by Palestinians in Hebron and the West Bank more generally. A'shur is also renowned for his selfless efforts to provide the best possible services to residents of the poor and marginalised neighbourhoods of Hebron, particularly those exposed to ongoing settler violence and Israeli military attacks. These efforts are particularly crucial in assisting families in these areas to remain steadfast in their homes despite the enormous difficulties of daily life there.
The Hebron Defense Committee, a coalition of social movements and political parties acting to defend Hebron and its residents against Israeli colonial policies and practices, has called for A'shur's immediate release, as well as the release of all 6,500 Palestinian political prisoners.
In addition to issuing an administrative detention order against A'shur, in the last few days Israeli authorities have issued an additional 41 administrative detention orders for periods between two to six months. These orders are both news, as in the case of A'shur, and extensions of previously existing orders. Over 480 Palestinians are currently held in administrative detention, imprisonment without charges or trial
600 Palestinian patients held in Israeli prisons
Tuesday, 14 October 2014 16:17
Palestinian prisoners are suffering in Israeli jails, especially those who have become ill following the bad detention conditions imposed on them by the Israeli Prison Service, as there is no concern for their health even in cases of serious illness.
According to the Palestinian Prisoner's Club, more than 6,200 Palestinian prisoners are being detained in Israeli jails with approximately 600 of those prisoners suffering from serious chronic illnesses which require immediate medical attention to save their lives.
Moreover, many of these prisoners have grown ill due to the harsh detention conditions and deliberate medical neglect imposed on them by the Israeli authorities.
President of the Palestinian Prisoners' Club Qadura Fares told Al-Araby Al-Jadeed: "Prisoners suffering from severe chronic illnesses, such as heart disease, cancer, kidney failure and patients with mental or physical disabilities, do not receive the necessary treatments for their conditions. They are instead given painkillers and basic medications just to keep them alive. No therapeutic treatments are provided to any prisoners with the conditions mentioned above."
Fares pointed out that, "Many chronic illnesses develop due to a delay in diagnosis. In many cases, if a prisoner were to receive a medical check-up, their tests would be prolonged and can sometimes drag on for days if not months. That is, if a patient is even lucky enough to be examined in the first place. All of these conditions and policies further aggravate the disease."
"Often, the state and condition of the prisoner are not serious; however, the lack of a precise diagnosis causes their health to deteriorate," Fares added.
According to the Palestinian Prisoners' Club, there are about 20 cases of prisoners with permanent disabilities in the occupation's jails and they are unable to move. There are four cases of disabled detainees who now reside in the prison hospital in Ramla.
According the organisation's statistics, "about 25 prisoners are suffering from cancerous tumours and are in need of immediate medical treatment, which is not provided by the prison service. Approximately 160 prisoners suffer from severe chronic illnesses resulting from deliberate medical neglect and these prisoners continue to be neglected despite their immediate need for medical treatment."
"Many of these diseases are directly caused by the policies carried out by the Israeli occupation, including the process of arrest. Not to mention, the conditions in which the prisoners live, Israel's policy for the interrogation rooms and the state of the cell can all cause psychological and neurological diseases among the prisoners. More importantly, the way they are treated during detention, including increased assault and movement from one prison to the next, could perhaps lead to the development of some disabilities," Fares explained.
Poor conditions among the prisoners can often be worsened in some cases by malnutrition, inadequate lighting and ventilation in the cells and prison itself as well as certain practices that are universally rejected as acceptable for prisons such as collective punishment, intrusions, and the use of tear gas in prisoner cells.
Israeli forces shoot, kill 13-year-old Palestinian near Ramallah
Published yesterday (updated) 17/10/2014 16:07
(MaanImages)
RAMALLAH (Ma'an) -- A Palestinian teenager was shot dead by Israeli forces in the village of Beit Laqiya northwest of Ramallah on Thursday evening.
Medical sources said Bahaa Samir Badir, 13, was shot in the chest after Israeli forces raided the village.
Badir was reportedly shot in the chest from close range, and suffered from severe bleeding shortly before dying at the Palestine Medical Complex in Ramallah.
Clashes broke out in the village of Beit Laqiya after news of Badir's death spread.
An Israeli military spokeswoman said that Israeli forces "encountered an illegal riot in Beit Laqiya," and "while they were exiting the village, rioters hurled Molotov cocktails at the forces."
"They responded to the threat with live fire," she said, adding: "Reports of a dead Palestinian are being reviewed. There will be military police investigation."
She added that the Molotov cocktails had posed a "direct threat" to the lives of the soldiers.
The death of Bahaa brings the total number of Palestinians killed by Israeli forces in the occupied West Bank so far this year to 42, in addition to the nearly 2,200 Palestinians slain during Israel's summer offensive across Gaza.
More than 4,300 Palestinians have also been injured by Israeli soldiers in the West Bank since the beginning of 2014, as well as more than 11,000 during the nearly two-month assault on Gaza.
The West Bank and the Gaza Strip have been under Israeli military occupation since 1967.
Ethnic Cleansing by All Means: The real Israeli ‘peace’ policy Israel/Palestine
Ilan Pappé and Samer Jaber on October 17, 2014
(...)
This policy of ethnic cleansing, by different means since 1948, is a consensual issue in Israel and thus leaves very little hope for peace and reconciliation. The current Israeli left, the self-acclaimed ‘peace bloc’, is willing to oppose new settlements but refuses to acknowledge the historical injustice inflicted on Palestinians in 1948 and denies displaced Palestinians their right to return to their homes and their homeland. Most of its members also wish Palestinians would consent to the annexation of so-called ‘settlement blocs’, large swaths of illegal Jewish colonies in different parts of the West Bank, to Israel.
The refusal to acknowledge the Right of Return and the wish to retain the settlement blocs is intended to keep Israel a Jewish state over large parts of historical Palestine while leaving Palestinians limited sovereignty over what remains of the country. These remains can become the State of Palestine without any real sovereignty and viability while the Palestinians inside Israel would have to accept their second degree citizenship as a fact of life under a final agreement.
The strategy of ethnic cleansing is marketed differently domestically and externally. It is based on the need to ‘preserve Jewish identity’ to the Israeli public and abroad as ‘Israel’s need for security’. Taken together these pretexts or excuses form the Israeli consensus behind the ethnic cleansing strategy
(...)
The worst method of ethnic cleansing was imposed on the Gaza Strip since 2006. Palestinians there were placed out of sight and beyond the demographic count by imposing a siege on the 1.8 million people living there. It was rationalized by Israel as a security measure but in truth it is part of their ethnic cleansing strategy that, in this case, can easily turn into a genocidal policy. No wonder Palestinians there resist ethnic cleansing with all they have.
What ethnic cleansing enabled Israelis to do was forget about the Palestinians imprisoned behind all the means their state implemented to take the land and ‘solve’ the demographic problem. Even when, in desperation, the people of Gaza resisted the worst of these devices it did not affect most Israelis. The carnage which was broadcast all over the world did not seem to move the vast majority of Israelis who continued, despite what Israeli propaganda attempted to portray, their normal life as they had done before. Life may have been disrupted for a few weeks in certain parts of Israel, but this was not enough to alert Israeli society to the crimes committed in their name.
The problem with Israel thus is not a policy here or there, but its overall strategy that has not changed since 1948 and is as cruel, and far more effective, than some of the ethnic cleansers now in action elsewhere in the Middle East and in the world as a whole.
5-year-old Palestinian girl hit by settler car succumbs to wounds
Published today (updated) 19/10/2014 17:39
(MaanImages/al-Quds)
RAMALLAH (Ma'an) -- A young Palestinian girl who was struck by an Israeli settler vehicle earlier Sunday has succumbed to her wounds, medics told Ma'an.
Einas Khalil, five, died after being hit by a car driven by an Israeli settler near the central West Bank town of Sinjil, medical sources at Palestine Medical Complex in Ramallah said.
The girl and young Nilin Asfour were walking on the main road near the village when they were hit, and were taken to the hospital in Ramallah where their wounds were described as serious.
Einas passed away hours later.
Residents of Sinjil accused the settler of deliberately hitting the girls.
Israeli forces detain 2 Palestinians from Bethlehem-area village
Published today (updated) 19/10/2014 15:56
BETHLEHEM (Ma'an) -- Israeli forces detained two Palestinian men from the southern West Bank village of Husan west of Bethlehem early on Sunday morning, according to the Palestinian Prisoner's Society.
The group identified the detainees in a statement as Majdi Hamamra and Nasri Hamamra.
The pair were detained after Israeli troops ransacked their homes in the village.
An Israeli military spokeswoman confirmed the arrests, saying that the two were detained because of "involvement in illegal activity."
Approximately 7,000 Palestinians are currently being held in Israeli jail, including around 500 without charge or trial.
From Israel Planning Mass Expulsion of Bedouins from West Bank
(...)
In preparation for what some have labelled an accelerated wave of ethnic cleansing, officials from Israel’s Civil Administration, which administers the West Bank, have been demolishing Palestinian infrastructure in Area C including shacks, tents, animal shelters and homes and other structures deemed to have been built “illegally”.
As part of the forced relocation, more than 12,000 Bedouins will be relocated to a new settlement near the West Bank city of Jericho where they will be surrounded by a firing zone, settlements and an Israeli checkpoint which will limit their ability to graze their herds, the main source of income for these nomadic pastoralists.
Several Bedouin communities were forcibly relocated in the 1990s by the Civil Administration from near East Jerusalem to an area of land near a garbage dump in Abu Dis which falls in Area B.
The expulsion of the Bedouins in the 1990s was primarily to make way for enlarging the Israeli settlement of Maale Adumim, one of the largest in the West Bank.
Further to enlarging Maale Adumim, part of Israel’s plan has been to keep an area known as the E1 corridor, which links the settlement with East Jerusalem, contiguous and under Israeli control by building more settlements, effectively dividing the West Bank in two.
The move also further isolates East Jerusalem from the West Bank. East Jerusalem is of great importance to Palestinians due to cultural, educational, family, business, and religious ties. Palestinians also hope to establish a Palestinian state with East Jerusalem as its capital.
“The Civil Administration’s plan blatantly contravenes international humanitarian law, which prohibits the forced transfer of protected persons, such as these Bedouin communities, unless the move is temporary or is necessary for their safety or to meet a military need,” says Israeli rights group B’tselem.
“The Civil Administration’s expulsion plan meets none of these conditions. Israel, as the occupying power, is obligated to act for the benefit and welfare of residents of the occupied territory. Expansion of the settlements does not comport with this requirement.”
President Rivlin: "Time to admit that Israel is a sick society that needs treatment"
Deal with him, the President of Israel, from now on in this thread!
What's the Palestinian stance on Ebola?
Irrespective of irrelevant pro-Zionist harpies here and their shameless mocking of daily tragedies, oppression and theft of land and property suffered by the Palestinians at the hand of Zionists:
Family home and five other structures demolished by Israeli military
in Nablus, Reports October 20, 2014
21st October 2014 | International Solidarity Movement, Nablus team | Jordan Valley, Occupied Palestine
On October 20th, the Israeli military destroyed six structures belonging to a family in the village of al Jiftlik, in the Jordan Valley.
At approximately 6:00 am, Israeli soldiers destroyed the family home of Mohammed Mousa Mohammed Abohernam, as well as five other buildings, including his family’s storage unit and two buildings used to house goats.
Mohammed and his father.
The village of al Jiftlik belongs in “Area C” of the occupied West Bank, which is under full Israeli military civil and security control.
Al Jiftlik village is also used as a testing area for Israeli weapons.
As ISM activists interviewed the family, four Israeli jets flew in formation over the village in two, separate passes.
Abohernam said he intends to rebuild his home.
His father, and grandfather, lived on the same land. “This is my land and I am not leaving,” he stated.
VIDEO
Published on Oct 20, 2014
Yesterday, soldiers briefly detained a developmentally disabled Palestinian boy, who is under the age of criminal responsibility, on suspicion that he had thrown stones. The boy, A. a-Rajbi, (full name withheld in interest of privacy) who will be 12 in a month, was detained after Palestinian children threw stones at soldiers on the main road of the Jabel Johar neighborhood in Hebron, close to the settlement of Kiryat Arba. A-Rajbi was handcuffed, blindfolded, and held on the floor of an army jeep for some 15 minutes until his father arrived and convinced the soldiers to release his son, who is mentally disabled and cannot speak.
In the video footage, filmed by B’Tselem volunteer Samih Da’na from his window, soldiers are seen holding the boy, handcuffing him, blindfolding him and closing him in the jeep, despite cries by Palestinian residents that the boy is mentally disabled. The footage also shows settlers from Kiryat Arba, watching the incident from behind the settlement’s fence. Some are seen calling out encouragement to the soldiers, including several racist remarks.
Miko Peled
If you support Israel, you support this! Its time to make a clear choice. This is the legacy of Zionism. We must oppose it, reject it, and do it fast.
Settler's ran over two children in Sinjel village near Ramallah.
Sadly they hit and run Inas Shawkat 5 years old, who died .
19.10.2014
Soldiers Kidnapped 225 Palestinians In Three Weeks
The Palestinian Prisoners Society (PPS) has reported that Israeli soldiers have kidnapped 225 Palestinians in the last three weeks, in different parts of the occupied West Bank. Israel also issued 13 new arbitrary administrative detention orders, and renewed six.
The PPS said the Hebron district, in the southern part of the West Bank, witnessed the largest wave of arrests, similar to previous months, as the soldiers have kidnapped 70 Palestinians since October 1.
In Jerusalem, soldiers kidnapped 46 Palestinians, while 24 Palestinians were kidnapped in Bethlehem district, 19 in Nablus, 17 in Ramallah, 10 in Salfit, 9 in Jenin, 5 in Jericho, and 3 in Qalqilia.
The PPS also said that the Israeli Prison Authority issued arbitrary administrative detention orders, without charges, against 13 detainees, and renewed administrative detention orders against six detainees.
It added that detainee Raed Mousa, also held under administrative detention, entered his 32nd consecutive day of hunger strike, and is facing serious health complications.
The PPS further said Israel continues to impose severe restrictions and sanctions on the detainees, especially since this past June, denying a large number of detainees, among many other things, the right to family visits.
It added that dozens of detainees require urgent and professional medical attention, but are denied access to adequate care, while their health conditions continue to deteriorate.
The PPS said there are currently more than 1300 detainees, held at the Negev Detention camp, one of the biggest Israeli prisons.
In addition, the PPS said detainee Saber Misbah Suleiman, 32, was violently attacked by Israeli soldiers while at the Ofer Military Court attending an appeal hearing.
The detainee, from Beit ‘Ur at-Tihta near Ramallah, suffered cuts and bruises to various parts of his body.
On October 10, Suleiman was sentenced to 19 months, and is currently held at the Ramon prison.
Zionist settlers burn Palestinian olive grove
in Nablus, Reports October 22, 2014
22nd October 2014 | International Solidarity Movement, Nablus team | Huwwara, Occupied Palestine
This morning at approximately 09:30, settlers from the illegal settlement of Yizhar sat fire to a Palestinian olive field above Huwwara village, just outside of Nablus.
The settlers sat the land on fire from the top of the hill. People from the village started fighting the fire, but suddenly the wind turned and the flames started moving towards the illegal settlement on the top of the hill. At this point the settlers started fighting their own fire, to prevent damage to their illegal buildings.
The owner of the land, Nasser Jihad Mufdi Houwwari, spoke to ISM about his previous experiences with settlers, in 2002 settlers from Yizhar shot Nasser in the shoulder with two bullets. Nasser continued to state that they [the settlers] threaten him and damage his properties every year, however this is the first time they burnt such a large area of his land.
Nasser Jihad Mufdi Houwwari
...
Child Killed In Northern Gaza
Palestinian medical sources have reported that a child was killed, after an undetonated explosive dropped by the Israeli army, during the latest aggression on Gaza, went off in Beit Hanoun, in the northern part of the Gaza Strip.
photo: Palestinian Ministry of Health
The Ministry of Health in Gaza said that the child has been identified as Mohammad Sami Abu Jarad, age 4.
The child suffered serious injuries to the head, face, chest and various parts of his body when the explosive went off, as he was playing near it on Zeitoun Street, in Beit Hanoun.
More than 2,142 Palestinians have been killed during Israeli’s 52-day aggression on Gaza that officially began on July 8, 2014, one day after the Israeli army assassinated eight resistance fighters for firing missiles at them, in two separate attacks.
Some of the victims died of their wounds after the ceasefire agreement was reached.
The number of slain Palestinians killed by Israeli missiles and shells includes at least 578 children, 264 women, and 103 elderly, while more than 11.100, including 3,374 children, 2,088 women and 410 elderly have been injured.
Ahrar Center: One martyr and 278 arrests in the West Bank and Gaza during September
Ahrar- The Ahrar Center for Detainees Studies and Human Rights has issued its monthly report on Israeli arrests in West Bank and Gaza Strip during September. The report said that 278 Palestinians have been arrested and one was killed by Israeli soldiers. The highest numbers of detainees during September were from al-Khalil, where 81 arrests were reported.
Meanwhile, 62 Palestinian were detained in Jerusalem, while 32 others were from Nablus, 30 detainees were from Bethlehem, 28 arrests in Ramallah, while 17 arrest cases were detained in Jenin. In Qalqilya 11 arrest cases were documented, 7 other cases were in Salfit, and 5 detainees in Tulkarem, while only 3 arrests took place in Gaza.
Ahrar center reported that 21 arrests were carried out at the Israeli military checkpoints and border crossings during September. The monthly report said that 9 children under 15 years old were among the detainees in addition to two women named: Ayat Mahfouz from al-Khalil who was arrested on 08.09.2013 near the Ibrahimi mosque under the pretext of possession of a knife, and Tharwat Ghanem, from Tulkarem, who was arrested on 29/09/2013 on her way to visit her brother Ghanem Ghanem who is detained in Negev prison.
In the same context, the center’s report documented the arrest of one Palestinian journalist Mahmoud Abu Atta, from Jerusalem, who was arrested on 24/09/2013. Abu Atta is the director of the media department at Al-Aqsa Foundation for Endowment and Heritage in Jerusalem. Meanwhile, the report documented the martyrdom of one Palestinian Islam Tubasi, from Jenin refugee camp, on 17/09/2013 during clashes with the Israeli occupation forces that stormed the camp at dawn on that day.
Ahrar reported an increase in detainees’ numbers in comparison between September and August where 250 arrest cases were documented, in addition to the extension of some prisoners’ detention. The director of Ahrar center Fouad Khuffash confirmed that the West Bank cities are subjected to daily raids and break-ins, denying any Palestinian sovereignty over the Palestinian lands. He pointed that more arrests could be carried out during September and the center failed to report them. Khuffash has also pointed out to the Palestinians’ suffering while passing by military checkpoints where they are subjected to arrests and humiliation.
Palestine sucks
that may be so subgenious, but archinect is going to be tied to palestinian websites on search engines due to tammuz's incessant spam. it's like archinect is electronic intifada's sister site. i wonder if that's a goal of this site's administrators?
Considering how none of my posts critiquing Tammuz's platform haven't even posted to the site, you may be onto something, curt.
^I am pretty sure we've already hinted at this in another discussion.
I just find it pathetic and think it should be recognized as censorship.
I wonder if Archinect Sessions would do a podcast featuring a debate between me(or any other sane person here) against Tammuz...
burn.
http://www.jpost.com/Arab-Israeli-Conflict/Hamas-Islamic-Jihad-salute-Jerusalem-terror-attack-threaten-new-Palestinian-intifada-in-capital-379619
By YASSER OKBI/ MAARIV HASHAVUA \
10/23/2014 13:26
Hamas, Islamic Jihad salute Jerusalem terror attack, threaten new 'Palestinian intifada' in capital
“The attack in Jerusalem is an act of heroism and a natural response to the crimes of the occupation against our people and our holy places,” said Mushir al-Masri, a senior Hamas spokesperson.
Hamas and Islamic Jihad hailed Wednesday’s terrorist act by an east Jerusalem resident who rammed his car into a crowd of commuters at a light rail station, killing a three-month old infant and injuring seven others.
“The attack in Jerusalem is an act of heroism and a natural response to the crimes of the occupation against our people and our holy places,” said Mushir al-Masri, a senior Hamas spokesperson.
“The attack in Jerusalem is a natural response to what is taking place in the city, given the harassment and overall attacks of Judaization affecting our holy places and Muslims,” said another Hamas official, Salah Baradwil.
Hamas warned that the latest developments may augur the next "Palestinian intifada in Jerusalem."
Islamic Jihad released an official statement on Thursday through its military wing, the Al-Quds Brigade, saying: “There is Zionist aggression against all of our people, and today the resistance responded to this attack. This is a natural right.”
“This attack is a strong response to the Israeli occupation, whose crimes are unable to break the resistance,” the organization said.
Both Hamas and Islamic Jihad called on the Palestinian Authority to “halt its security coordination with Israel and to act in resistance in the West Bank.”
The two groups also praised the residents of east Jerusalem “for their fierce stance against the crimes of the occupation.”
What a peaceful group of victims.
Israeli forces shoot, kill Palestinian teenager near Ramallah
Published yesterday (updated) 24/10/2014 20:08
(MaanImages/File)
RAMALLAH (Ma'an) -- Israeli forces shot and killed a Palestinian teenager late Friday during clashes in Silwad village near Ramallah in the occupied West Bank, medical officials said.
Orwa Abd al-Wahhab Hammad, 14, was shot multiple times with live bullets. He was taken to Palestine Medical Complex where he was pronounced dead.
An Israeli army spokeswoman said that soldiers fired at a Palestinian adult who was hurling a Molotov cocktail at forces in the area.
Witnesses said Hammad was hit by an Israeli sniper from close range, insisting the soldier shot to kill.
Orwa was a US national. His uncle was killed during the First Intifada.
Some background,
From Questions plague mother of Jerusalem car attack suspect
He had spent 14 months in prison for stone-throwing and was released in December 2013. He was arrested again in February and held for 20 days as Israeli investigators tried to establish whether he was involved with Hamas. But they found nothing and released him.
Israel has claimed that Shaludi was a Hamas activist.
Although his mother's late brother, Muhi al-Din Sharif, was a senior Hamas bomb-maker who was killed in the West Bank in 1998, there has been no independent confirmation Shaludi belonged to the movement.
Since his arrest in February, Israeli investigators had not left him alone, his mother said. Relatives have said that he was tortured and faced severe trauma during his time in Israeli prisons.
"They kept on harassing him and summoning him for questioning over and over again and they tried to enlist him into working for them, but he repeatedly refused.
"They threatened him, saying he would never find work or be able to continue his education or have a normal life," she said.
Israel has retained al-Shaludi's body for a post mortem, with the family expecting it will be handed over on Sunday for burial.
Palestinian child killed by unexploded Israeli ordnance in Gaza
Published Wednesday 22/10/2014 (updated) 24/10/2014 11:10
(MaanImages/file)
GAZA CITY (Ma'an) -- A Palestinian child died on Wednesday after he touched an unexploded Israeli ordnance left over from the most recent offensive over the summer, causing it to explode.
Ministry of Health spokesman Ashraf al-Qidra said that 4-year-old Muhammad Sami Abu Jrad from the northern Gaza city of Beit Hanoun was killed after he came into contact with the ordnance.
Muhammad was severely injured when the ordnance exploded as a result of contact, and passed away after beign transferred to al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza City.
Muhammad is at least the 10th person to be killed by unexploded Israeli ordnance, including six in August and three in September.
Watch groups have warned that the ordnance can be a particular threat to children, who often think the bombs are toys.
The Gaza Strip is currently littered with a large number of unexploded Israeli ordnance, a constant reminder of the more than 50-day Israeli offensive that left more than 2,150 dead, 11,200 injured, and more than 110,000 homeless.
Although Gaza police explosives teams have been working across the territory to destroy unexploded ordnance and prevent safety threats to locals, lack of proper equipment due to the seven-year Israeli siege as well as lack of resources more generally have hindered efforts.
Even before the most frequent Israeli assault, unexploded ordnance from the 2008-9 and 2012 offensives was a major threat to Gazans.
A 2012 report published by the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights said that 111 civilians, 64 of whom were children, were casualties to unexploded ordnance between 2009 and 2012, reaching an average of four every month in 2012.
More background?
5-year-old Palestinian girl hit by settler car succumbs to wounds
Published Sunday 19/10/2014 (updated) 21/10/2014 14:09
(MaanImages/al-Quds)
RAMALLAH (Ma'an) -- A young Palestinian girl who was struck by an Israeli settler vehicle earlier Sunday has succumbed to her wounds, medics told Ma'an.
Einas Khalil, five, died after being hit by a car driven by an Israeli settler near the central West Bank town of Sinjil, medical sources at Palestine Medical Complex in Ramallah said.
The girl and young Nilin Asfour were walking on the main road near the village when they were hit, and were taken to the hospital in Ramallah where their wounds were described as serious.
Einas passed away hours later.
Residents of Sinjil accused the settler of deliberately hitting the girls.
Israeli police arrived at the scene shortly after the incident and opened an investigation into whether it was deliberate, locals said.
Over 500,000 Israeli settlers live in settlements in the occupied West Bank, including East Jerusalem, in contravention of international law.
(Hatem Omar / Maan Images)
Why do media value Israeli children’s lives more than those of Palestinian kids?
Submitted by Rania Khalek on Fri, 10/24/2014 - 18:21
221014_mua_00_1.jpg
The scene of a fatal Jerusalem car crash on Wednesday.
(Muammar Awad / APA images)
A young Palestinian man named Abd al-Rahman al-Shaludi rammed his car into pedestrians exiting the Ammunition Hill light rail station in northern Jerusalem on Wednesday, killing three-month-old Haya Zissel Brown and injuring at least seven others.
Israeli officials instantly labeled the crash a terrorist attack, which US media outlets have parroted without question even though the intent of the driver remains unclear. Given that Israeli police shot and killed al-Shaludi immediately after he exited the vehicle, whether the crash was deliberate may never be certain.
His family insists it was an accident, telling reporters that al-Shaludi, 21 years old, suffered from mental illness as a result of being tortured in Israeli prison.
“We believe that he was shot and killed in cold blood and there was no attempt to question him, and hear his side of the story,” his cousin, Abed al-Shaludi, told the Israeli newspaper Haaretz.
Al-Shaludi had been jailed by Israel three times since September 2012 for allegedly hurling stones and molotov cocktails at Israeli settlers and their property in Silwan, his neighborhood in Israeli-occupied East Jerusalem. The Israeli press is using this to cast al-Shaludi as a career criminal with a history of “anti-Jewish” violence.
According to his mother, al-Shaludi’s metal health began to deteriorate after a three-week-long interrogation at the hands of the Shin Bet (Israel’s secret police) in the Jerusalem Russian Compound jail, a notorious site of abuse and torture of Palestinians.
This context has of course been missing or buried in most US media accounts, of which there are many. Israel and Palestine-related news is currently saturated with headlines about a Palestinian man killing an Israeli baby.
Meanwhile, these same outlets have either whitewashed or completely ignored the ongoing abuse and killings of Palestinian children by the Israeli military and settlers.
Gaza children still dying
The same day that al-Shaludi killed an Israeli infant with his car, an unexploded Israeli bomb took the life of four-year-old Muhammad Sami Abu Jrad in Beit Hanoun, a city in northern Gaza that was decimated by Israel’s merciless summertime bombing campaign, which killed nearly 2,200 Palestinians, most of them civilians, including more than 500 children.
According to the Ma’an News Agency, Jrad is the tenth person killed by unexploded Israeli munitions, most of which have yet to be cleared because the Israeli-imposed, Egypt-enforced blockade hampers access to the robotic and protective equipment needed to neutralize the leftover ordnance.
Unlike the tragic death of three-month-old Haya Zissel Brown, Muhammad Jrad’s killing elicited only silence from the American press corps, as did that of another Palestinian child run over by an Israeli settler earlier this week.
Children run down
On Sunday, a man reportedly from the Jewish-only settlement of Yitzhar ran over Palestinian schoolchildren as they made their way towards their mothers after exiting a school bus in the West Bank town of Sinjil.
Five-year-old Inas Khalil died of her wounds shortly thereafter and another girl, also hit, was left in critical condition.
Instead of stopping to check on the children or calling for help, the man kept driving until he reached a nearby Jewish settlement, at which point he says he called the police.
Residents accused the settler of ramming the children deliberately, but Israeli police ruled the hit-and-run an accident, siding with the settler, who claims he fled out of fear of being hurt by the Palestinian crowd which gathered around the girls he maimed.
Raed al-Jabari, a 35-year-old Palestinian father and husband, was not so lucky when he hit Israeli settlers with his car in the Gush Etzion settlement bloc in late July. Al-Jabari insisted it was an accident and turned himself in to the police, reported Ma’an News Agency. But unlike the settler who killed Inas Khalil, al-Jabari was jailed for two months and ultimately died under suspicious circumstances.
Israeli authorities claim al-Jabari hanged himself in the bathroom at Israel’s Eshel prison, but the autopsy suggests the man was tortured to death, according to Palestinian officials. Either way, the disparity in treatment of the settler who killed Khalil versus that of al-Jabari is the essence of Israel’s apartheid regime that affords different, unequal rights to those under its rule.
Palestinian Ambassador to the United Nations Riyad Mansour responded to the latest settler hit-and-run by filing a complaint with the UN Security Council, accusing “extremist terrorist settlers” of launching intentional hit-and-run attacks against Palestinians in recent months.
Indeed, settlers slamming their vehicles into Palestinians in the occupied West Bank is a common occurrence that is routinely overlooked by the Israeli authorities as well as western media outlets.
201014_shh_00_17.jpg
Relatives mourn over the body of Inas Khalil during her funeral in the West Bank village of Sinjil on 20 October.
(Shadi Hatem / APA images)
In September, a six-year-old Palestinian girl was run over by a settler driver south of the occupied West Bank city of Hebron. In August, an eight-year-old Palestinian girl was hit by a settler vehicle in the southern West Bank, an act witnesses described as a deliberate attack. A week later, a 23-year-old Palestinian man was run over and killed by a settler vehicle in the central West Bank.
As far as this writer can tell, none of the perpetrators have been labeled “terrorists” nor have any been held accountable. But such is the nature of apartheid.
Meanwhile, Khalil’s killing received a mention of two sentences in The New York Times, buried near the end of an article about Wednesday’s Jerusalem incident.
The Associated Press, one of the only US media outlets to cover Khalil’s death, devoted just five sentences to the hit-and-run, framing it as nothing more than an unproven accusation by Palestinians against an unnamed Israeli settler.
“The Palestinians are accusing an Israeli settler of running over two schoolgirls, killing one of them, and speeding away,” reads the article’s opening line.
In stark contrast, here is the opening sentence to the Associated Press article on the Jerusalem car crash: “A Palestinian motorist with a history of anti-Israel violence slammed his car into a crowded train station in Jerusalem on Wednesday, killing a three-month-old baby girl and wounding eight people in what police called a terror attack.”
Boy shot dead
On Thursday, 16 October, Israeli soldiers shot Bahaa Samir Badir, 13, in the chest at close range in Beit Laqiya, a village northwest of Ramallah in the occupied West Bank. He was pronounced dead shortly thereafter at the Palestine Medical Complex in Ramallah.
Like Khalil’s death, Badir’s killing elicited a mere five sentences from the Associated Press.
The Israeli army excused the killing, saying its soldiers were simply responding to firebombs directed at their jeeps as they were leaving the village. Live fire, an Israeli army spokesperson said, was an appropriate response to stones and Molotov cocktails, a troubling narrative that went largely unchallenged in the US media outlets which bothered to report on Badir’s death.
The US press showed even less interest in the video that surfaced this week that shows Israeli soldiers blindfolding, handcuffing and abusing an eleven-year-old developmentally disabled Palestinian boy in the occupied West Bank city of Hebron as a crowd of settlers and their children laughed, cheered and shouted racist slurs.
The abuse and wanton killing of Palestinian children by the Israeli war machine is not an exception, but rather a norm that US media outlets are complicit in enabling through omission or obfuscation, and, like Israel, they are guilty of valuing some children’s lives more than others
Please provide link to show Israeli leadership lauding the death of Palestinian children.
How Israel forces Bedouins to live in a graveyard
Stephanie Westbrook
The Electronic Intifada
24 October 2014
activestills1402926800fvmth.jpg
Women gather in the cemetery of al-Araqib as Israeli police raid the village in June.
(Keren Manor / ActiveStills)
There is no exit sign off Route 40 for the unpaved road leading to the village of al-Araqib.
Located in the Naqab (Negev) region of present-day Israel, al-Araqib is older than the state itself: its cemetery dates back to 1914. Yet that is not considered significant by the authorities.
Home to a Palestinian Bedouin community, al-Araqib is deemed an “unrecognized village” by Israel.
That gives the authorities an excuse to deprive it and many other Bedouin villages of essential services such as electricity and water.
Acute deprivation
The deprivation is especially acute in al-Araqib. Because their homes have been demolished more than seventy times since 2010, the local Bedouins are forced to live within the confines of the cemetery. Rubble from their old houses has been removed by the authorities but remnants of kitchen and bathroom tiles still litter the ground.
Today, the Bedouins have to rely on a well dug in 1913 for water. “Before, we had electricity and water piped to the houses, but the government destroyed the infrastructure,” said resident Sheikh Sayah al-Turi. “We just want tap water like everyone else.”
By contrast, water is abundant across the road in the Jewish-only settlement of Givot Bar. Lawns are green in this settlement — even though it is located in the desert.
Givot Bar was established ten years ago by the Or Movement.
Along with its partner organization, the Jewish National Fund (JNF), the Zionist group is building a network of towns exclusively for Jews. The Or Movement has set the ambitious goal of bringing 600,000 Jews to the Naqab and Galilee regions of present-day Israel by 2020.
Decades of dispossession
To achieve this goal, the two organizations are furthering the decades-old project of dispossessing Palestinians.
The JNF portrays itself as an environmental group dedicated to afforestation. In reality, it is trying to purge Palestine of the trees and crops best suited to its arid landscapes, at the same time ridding the land of its indigenous communities and their agriculture-based economy.
To make way for a eucalyptus plantation it is developing, around 4,500 citrus, fig and olive trees have been uprooted in al-Araqib.
Water for the recently planted eucalyptus trees is taken to the area in tanker trucks. Yet the Israeli authorities have forbidden Bedouins from trucking water in to al-Araqib. Tankers and trucks for carrying water have been confiscated during the demolitions of the village.
“The government says it is illegal to bring water here, but at the same time, they won’t connect us,” al-Turi said.
Discriminatory pricing
Mekorot, Israel’s national water company, implements the official policy of cutting off the water supply to Bedouin communities.
Mekorot recently came under fire from a committee headed by Ram Belinkov, a former Israeli interior minister. Belinkov’s committee found that Mekorot was inflating its costs.
The Israeli business press has reported that while Mekorot has repeatedly called for rate hikes, the company was actually raking in “excessively high profits.”
Mekorot was also among the state-owned companies included in a $4 billion privatization plan approved by Benjamin Netanyahu’s government earlier this month.
A price list issued by the Israeli Water Authority in 2012 showed that “individual users” who bought water directly from Mekorot rather than through a local administration were subjected to a 67 percent rate hike. Most of these “individual users” lived in Palestinian villages that Israel has refused to recognize.
“Driving us from our land”
“There is a troika of Israeli entities working to drive us from our land: the state, Mekorot and the Jewish National Fund,” said al-Turi.
Mekorot’s involvement in the ethnic cleansing of historic Palestine has not prevented it from striking international deals. It has, for example, signed a cooperation agreement with Acea, Italy’s largest water company, in which the City of Rome has a 51 percent stake.
This writer recently visited al-Araqib — as well as Palestinian communities in the occupied West Bank — with an Italian delegation of activists organizing against water privatization. The intention of the trip, sponsored by the Beyond Walls project, was to gain first-hand knowledge of Mekorot’s activities in order to assist the campaign against its agreement with Acea.
The villagers of al-Araqib deeply impressed us with their defiance of Israeli apartheid.
They have refused to sell one centimeter of land to the Israeli authorities. They have also rebuilt their village after each demolition.
And some of the olive trees that were cut rather than completely uprooted are sprouting new growth.
“This is very symbolic for us,” said Aziz al-Turi, the son of Sheikh Sayah al-Turi.
Even though it is a quasi-governmental Israeli agency, the Jewish National Fund is registered as a charity in many countries. Donations to it are therefore tax-deductible.
Aziz al-Turi, a father of five, underscored the hypocrisy of that status when he told The Electronic Intifada that “supporting the JNF is killing me and my family.”
Israel plans to present itself as an innovative and environmentally progressive country by celebrating its “water conservation” projects at the Expo 2015 in Milan.
The criminal behavior of Israel and its allies in al-Araqib prove that it is anything but progressive.
Stephanie Westbrook is a US citizen based in Rome, Italy. Her articles have been published by Common Dreams, Counterpunch, The Electronic Intifada, In These Times and Z Magazine. Follow her on Twitter: @stephinrome
Waiting for your link.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/middleeast/israel/11174416/Hamas-leaders-daughter-treated-in-Israeli-hospital.html
Hamas leader's daughter treated in Israeli hospital
Daughter of Ismail Haniyeh was admitted to Tel Aviv hospital from Gaza after the two sides fought a bloody seven-week war over the coastal territory
By Robert Tait, Jerusalem
5:36PM BST 20 Oct 2014
The daughter of Ismail Haniyeh, Hamas’s leader in Gaza, has undergone treatment at an Israeli hospital, just weeks after a 50-day war between Israel and the Palestinian Islamist movement that left more than 2,000 people dead.
She was transported to Ichilov hospital in Tel Aviv as an emergency case after suffering complications from a procedure originally carried out in Gaza, the coastal enclave whose hospitals came under severe strain due to the deluge of casualties admitted during the summer’s conflict.
The identity of the daughter – one of Mr Haniyeh’s 13 children – has not been revealed, nor have details of her condition been disclosed.
Her admission suggests that humanitarian cooperation between Israel and the Gaza authorities continues despite the bitterness left by the hostilities, which ended on August 26 after both parties accepted the terms of an Egyptian-brokered ceasefire.
It is not known if Mr Haniyeh, whose home was destroyed in the conflict but who spent the period sheltering underground from possible Israeli assassination attempts, personally requested or approved his daughter’s transfer to a hospital in Israel.
An unnamed Israeli doctor told Reuters that the request of a Palestinian physician was usually sufficient to guarantee the admission from Gaza of patients deemed urgent cases, suggesting the Hamas leader may not have been personally involved.
Nevertheless, the treatment of his daughter is likely to be seized upon by Israeli officials as an example of the country’s magnanimity towards an unstinting foe. Hamas refuses to recognise Israel’s right to exist.
One of Mr Haniyeh’s granddaughters was admitted to an Israeli hospital last November, while his mother-in-law sought treatment for cancer at a hospital in Jerusalem in June, according to Israeli media.
The Israeli authorities impose stringent controls on the entry of Palestinians from Gaza, with most cases permitted only on health or humanitarian grounds.
Doctors at Gaza’s under-resourced hospitals complained that the near-closure of the border crossing during the July/August conflict meant they were unable to transfer sufficient numbers of severely injured patients into Israel for emergency treatment in facilities in East Jerusalem and elsewhere.
Of course, time for the Zionist bot to interject with a question that does not relate to the article in order to obfuscate....pretending to be polite after resorting to name calling and lowlife insults only a few posts ago.
Laud? It sounds like there's a third party here and Israel would be or would not be doing the lauding.
No, Israel kills (it is, of course outdated given the latest Gaza massacre; a more recent counting - which is of course outdated, given that Israel continues to kill) and tortures Palestinian children.
Of course, brainwashed Zionist your-everyday-normal Israelis have no problem urging , cheering and mocking the mass massacre by Israel of Palestinians and their children either.
Oh, lets not forget the admirable and humane figures of Moshe Feiglin, Knesset deputy speaker of the "concentrate" and "exterminate" philosophy (yes, concentration camps).
Or how about that most motherly of figures, Knesset member Ayeled Shaked, calling for a genocide against the mothers of these "snakes".
And how about the lauding of bringing down the non-Jewish "minority birth rates" (ie Palestinians in the occupied colonized regions of Palestine by Zionists that is called Israel) down. Evidently, stifling the chance of Palestinian children being born is just as effective, if not more effective way than killing them.
Of course, you should know that while racism in this Zionist colony against Palestinians is the most overt issue, racism against other minorities is rife:
From Israel: promised land for Jews ... as long as they're not black?
Conclusion
Increasingly, Israel is being seen as a racist and exclusionist state. Its subjugation and abuse of Palestinians living within Israel (20 per cent of the population), as well as those living under the Israeli military occupation of the Occupied Palestinian Territories, are well documented and have led to it being called an apartheid state. What is less well known, however, is just how ingrained and insidious racism in Israel actually is, in that it not only extends to Palestinian Christians and Muslims, but also to Jews who come from ethnic minority backgrounds. Jews who were once supposedly welcomed into Israel as brothers and sisters in faith now find themselves relegated to the underclass in Israel. While they may be placed far above Palestinians, they are nonetheless far below non-black Jews.
In Ethiopia, it is true that the Falasha had to contend with poverty, famine and drought, but, in Israel, people who once had strong familial and societal ties are finding their community plagued with high levels of unemployment, a shift in social hierarchies, an erosion of their traditions, an increased level of criminalisation of their youth and other social ills. They are finding themselves confined to ghettos, discriminated against in the workplace, insulted by scandals such as the blood donation fiasco and subjected to interracial attacks, which appear increasingly prevalent. It appears that elements of Israeli society are crumbling from within, and endemic and institutionalised racism is certainly a contributing factor
From Watch the video on Israeli racism The New York Times didn’t want you to see
Blumenthal explained to Consortium News how The New York Times commissioned the 11-minute video, but after the paper’s editors saw it, refused to publish it:
I was asked to submit something by The New York Times op docs, a new section on the website that published short video documentaries. I am known for short video documentaries about the right wing in the US, and extremism in Israel. They solicited a video from me, and when I didn’t produce it in time, they called me for it, saying they wanted it. So I sent them a video I produced with my colleague, David Sheen, an Israeli journalist who is covering the situation of non-Jewish Africans in Israel more extensively than any journalist in the world.
We put together some shocking footage of pogroms against African communities in Tel Aviv, and interviews with human rights activists. I thought it was a well-done documentary about a situation very few Americans were familiar with. We included analysis. We tailored it to their style, and of course it was rejected without an explanation after being solicited. I sent it to some other major websites and they have not even responded to me, when they had often solicited articles from me in the past.
My "lowlife" posts were a response to your disgusting claim that the slaughter of Jews in the Holocaust was, in part, a consequence of a Zionist conspiracy.
Still waiting for a link showing that Israeli leaders praise the killing of Palestinian children.
Also, while you're at it, could you provide showing that Sudanese migrants seek asylum in adjacent Muslim countries? Egypt, perhaps?
Also, could you share with the board the backstory of the Israeli government providing its own resources to help Ethiopian Jews emigrate?
Just to be clear - I'm not condoning the racism of Israeli civilians so don't even try to twist the argument that way.
Israel is racist, not just Zionist Israelis. Zionism is racist and colonial. It is not surprising that Zionist Israeli citizens would be racist too. Land theft, massacres, mass oppression practiced by Zionists, from its early days right to nowadays is a testimony of a clear agenda of displacement and/or disappearing of one indigenous population by a colonizing people from elsewhere. Israeli racism is not merely indicative of racism within Israel but an expression of the base mentality of Zionism, within and without, as a movement that is slowly devolving into the more vulgar expressions within it. There was never such a thing as liberal Zionism when measured against the very aim of Zionism, to colonize and steal someone else's land and property.
Everything else happening in Palestine (and I mean the rightful wholesome historic and entire Palestine) is a consequence of this. Trying to nullify this by obfuscating and lying is only evidence of anachronistic belonging to a racially privileging and colonial heritage.
As for twisting, it I these Zionist bots who come here solely for the reason of twisting in order to serve their falsifying ends. For instance, I have no where mentioned that the Zionists conspiracy included the genocide - what the linked article suggests (and if there is counter evidence then let it be presented, after all, I did not myself write the article) , however, was that Zionists were not above opportunistically using the genocide to their ends. Here is an account of how the Stern gang (known as LEHI) and Yitzhak Shamir - Israel's seventh prime minister- actively sought an alliance with Nazi Germany in order to help them answer Nazi Germany's Jewish question with Zionists/ Israel's answer to that question.
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From that source, we read:
LEHI showed its uniqueness in its very earliest political strategy, namely in its persistent search for an alliance with Nazi Germany throughout 1940 -- 41. Unlike all other Jewish groups of that time, the LEHI men respected Hitler. Later, the veterans of LEHI tried for a long time to deny that they had ever made alliance overtures to the Nazis. Unfortunately for them, documents proving the contrary were found by Israeli scholars and journalists and published long ago. The search for that alliance and its implications are best described in the above-mentioned book by Heller. He shows that the drafting of the Principles of Renaissance took place at the same time, and he argues that LEHI's pro-Nazism was by no means unrelated to the contents of this document.
Heller opens his discussion by recalling that Yair had, on ideological grounds, advocated a Jewish alliance with fascist states even before he founded his own organization in September 1940. His advocacy of that alliance was further spurred by advances of the Italian army into Egypt in September 1940 and by the Italian air raid on Tel Aviv at the same time. The raid, which resulted in over 100 dead and hundreds of wounded "impressed him deeply," turning him, as Heller notes, into a believer in Italian victory. Unlike all other Jewish groups in Palestine, Yair refused to believe that Mussolini's alliance with Hitler and his concomitant adoption of anti-Semitic policies could be of any significance for the Jews. Nor did he believe that Hitler's views on the "Jewish question" could have consequences for the fate of Jews. In order to persuade his comrades, he used two "ideological" arguments. The first was borrowed from Jabotinsky's distinction between "verbal" and "behavioral" anti-Semitism. Although used by Jabotinsky in a different context, it became a fundamental tenet of LEHI's ideology. Thus, argued Yair, Polish anti-Semitism (generalized by him as affecting every single Pole), was "behavioral" and therefore much worse than the Nazi one, which was supposed to be merely "verbal." Shamir is apparently affected by this doctrine to this very day. His virulent anti-Polish racism, as recently expressed in his notorious statement that "every Pole sucks anti-Semitism with his mother's milk," is clearly traceable to those ravings of his teacher Yair, and even reminiscent of the latter's pro-Nazi leanings.
The second argument of Yair, no less demagogic than the first, was the supposed distinction between "enemies of the Jews" and "Jew-haters." The latter, who, like
Hitler, "merely" hated the Jews, were to be regarded as a lesser evil, since according to Yair they were no more than the usual run of anti-Semites "who arise in every generation." The "enemies," by contrast, were those "who occupied the Jewish homeland" (as defined above), which meant the Arabs, the British and (on account of their rule in Syria and Lebanon) also the French: all three to be regarded as much worse than Hitler. Yair, who wanted the Jews to learn this distinction well, regarded every Jew cooperating with the British as deserving death. He expressly stated his wish to be like Quisling, already known then as the ruler of Norway on Hitler's behalf. He wanted to perform the same role in the "kingdom of Israel" allied with the Nazis. He would even consider this scheme as his personal contribution to the Messianic rebirth. To be sure, some former adherents were sufficiently repelled by this ideology to defect from LEHI. But Shamir remained, demonstrating his agreement with it. He can be presumed to agree with it still.
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And, again, remember, Shamir went on to become the 7th prime minister of Israel, not merely a constituent part of Israel but a top representative figure. Shimon Peres called him a "brave warrior" who, by the way, also happened to have:
As head of the Stern Gang, Shamir authorized the assassinations of Lord Moyne, the British minister in Palestine, in 1944, and Folke Bernadotte, the U.N. envoy (and Swedish count) in 1948
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Why? Because, as we read in Yitzhak Shamir: the Well-Liked Terrorist :
When Bernadotte finally presented his progress report, “Mediation, Truce Supervision, Refugees, Proposals for Peaceful Settlement,” on Sept. 16, 1948, it included this unequivocal statement regarding the Palestinian Right of Return:
“It is not yet known what the policy of the Provisional Government of Israel with regard to the return of Arab refugees will be when the final terms of settlement are reached. It is, however, undeniable that no settlement can be just and complete if recognition is not accorded to the right of the Arab refugee to return to the home from which he has been dislodged by the hazards and strategy of the armed conflict between Arabs and Jews in Palestine.
“The majority of these refugees have come from territory which, under the Assembly resolution of 29 November, was to be included in the Jewish State. The exodus of Palestinian Arabs resulted from panic created by fighting in their communities, by rumours concerning real or alleged acts of terrorism, or expulsion. It would be an offence against the principles of elemental justice if these innocent victims of the conflict were denied the right to return to their homes while Jewish immigrants flow into Palestine, and, indeed, at least offer the threat of permanent replacement of the Arab refugees who have been rooted in the land for centuries.” (A/648 1.V.6)
The very next day, Sept. 17, 1948, Bernadotte was assassinated in West Jerusalem by members of Lehi, acting on Shamir’s explicit orders.
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So, whether including or excluding the interesting digression above about the attempts to ally Zionism with Nazism at one point in its history, we see that Israel is fundamentally based on terrorism, not on the freedom of the Jewish people, as a means to colonize and eradicate another people.
Another article I have linked to, however, certainly does more than suggest that, elsewhere (ie not the genocide commited by the Nazis), Zionist "conspiracy" did indeed include terrorizing Jewish communities in numerous Arab lands in order to get them to go to Israel.
The fact that Zionist bots are not able to discriminate and determine where there is suggestion and what this suggestion suggests displays either of the two, imbecility or their proclivity to create an aura of falsification around my intentions.
Listen, retard. Sure, there are historical records showing that certain Jewish factions in WWII Europe used "bargaining chips" with Nazis-- i.e., they agreed that certain Jews could be killed in the interest of protecting other Jewish groups. The behavior was depraved, but it was done in the context of ongoing genocide (read This Way to the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen for further accounts of this type of depravity in death camps).
What you are doing is saying that because some of these Jewish "bargainers" were Zionist (hmm-- wonder why they wanted a Jewish state), Zionism contributed to the Holocaust.
You're a moron.
Yet again, in spite of the clarification, that Zionist bot attempts to misrepresent. I never said "contribute" to the Holocaust neither did any of the linked articles. The suggestion was opportunism and not contribution. The fact that the Zionist bot only sieves through its hasbara guide book is further evidence that it is here solely to defend Israel at all costs, perversely twisting connotation and denotation to its own ends and not on grounds of reason and logic.
Funny how it ping-pongs from digressive "Please can you explain...?" questions to trivial name calling. That exposes that these bots are following guidelines that are separate from the person behind them - thus the reason for this schizophrenic and irrational behavior. These are hasbara trained trolls specifically sent here with specific guidelines (hence automated). A troll-bot.
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