CPTnet
May 16, 2003
HEBRON UPDATE: April 28 -May 4, 2003
Monday, April 28
During school patrol two street cleaners told CPTers Germana Nijim and Eric
Schiller that soldiers were detaining a schoolboy. Nijim and Schiller went
back to investigate. They found several soldiers holding the boy, who
appeared to be eight or nine years old. The soldiers had asked the boy to
show the contents of his school bag. As Nijim and Schiller approached, the
soldiers let the boy go. The boy then picked up a stone to throw at the
soldiers. Two Palestinian adults talked the boy into dropping the stone, and
he went on to school. As Nijim and Schiller walked away a car passed them
and the settler driving it shouted obscenities at them.
In response to a call from internationals staying in a home that is
threatened with a demolition order, Greg Rollins and Ecumenical Accompanier
(EA) Theo Von Fellenberg went to the home in Jabal Johar. Two Israeli
Defense Force bulldozers were on the scene, and the family was afraid their
home was going to be destroyed. However, the bulldozers were continuing to
make a road around the Israeli settlement of Kiryat Arba.
The team learned that the appeal to stop the demolition of the houses was
denied by the Israeli military court.
Tuesday, April 29
Team members saw six soldiers climbing over the roofs nearby. They came onto
the roof of the Turkish bath next to the CPT apartment. One soldier looked
up to where Nijim and Mary Lawrence were watching.
"What's happening?" asked Lawrence. "Nothing is happening," replied the
soldier "We're just hanging out." The soldiers made their way across the
neighbors' roofs all the way down to the end of the Shuhada Street shops and
remained there for about thirty minutes.
Thursday, May 1
CPTers Nijim and Eric Schiller went out to the Beqa'a valley to visit a
family that lives across from Hilltop 26, a recently dismantled Israeli
outpost. The family told the CPTers that groups of about fifteen to twenty
settlers sometimes take walking tours through Palestinian vineyards, which
intimidates the Palestinian farmers, who stop working and leave.
At another Palestinian home near Harsina settlement, the CPTers noticed that
a barrier of earth and rocks which had previously blocked access onto road
60 had been opened up. Trucks were now able to get from the highway to the
Palestinian farm roads. They had heard an earlier report that soldiers had
shot out the tires of trucks entering highway 60.
Saturday, May 2
Nijim, Schiller, Diane Janzen and Rollins went with Ta'ayush (an Israeli
peace organization) to Twaneh, a Palestinian village in the south Hebron
hills. On Shabbat, the Israel settlers from Ma'on, harass the villagers
the villagers. The CPTers and Ta'ayush members helped Palestinian farmers
plow their fields. The farmers had not been able to work on their land for
two years because one settler would shoot at them when they came into the
fields to work.
After they had been working for two hours Israeli soldiers arrived and told
them that the area was a "closed military zone." The group of CPTers and
Ta'ayush were ordered back to their cars by the soldiers and then forced to
leave.
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