CPTnet
6 July 2006
HEBRON UPDATE: 16-24 June 2006
Team members during this time period were Christina Gibb, Tracy Hughes,
Dianne Roe, Andrea Siemens, and Kathie Uhler.
CPT continued accompaniment for high school seniors taking the taujihi
exams. Team members are also collecting stories from the descendants of
Jewish and Muslim families who lived together peacefully for hundreds of
years until August 1929.
Friday 16 June
Three members of EAPPI (ecumenical accompaniers) joined CPT for morning
worship. Dianne Roe and Kathie Uhler went to Hasham Al Azzah's home in Tel
Rumeida for a visit with a weekly Breaking the Silence tour group led by
Yehuda Shaul. ( For more information about the soldiers serving in Hebron
who "broke the silence," see www.shovrimshtika.org.)
At 7:30 p.m., Gibb and Hughes went on a Shabbat patrol to Haret iJaber
(Worshipper's Way.) At dusk, they saw more than seventy settlers gathered
for worship near Wadi Nasara. On their way back through the souk at about
9:45 p.m., Gibb and Hughes saw a patrol of eight new Israeli soldiers
pointing their guns in all directions, even as children played nearby. CPT
waited, observing them until they left.
Saturday 17 June 2006
Team members heard that settlers set fire on the previous day to the olive
orchard of Fariel Abu Haikel. Roe joined two EAPPI (ecumenical
accompaniers) to visit the Abu Haikel family. Fariel told them that every
summer when the grass is dry, Israeli settlers set fire to their orchard.
She said that the soldiers from the camp adjacent to the orchard came to
help only after the family had extinguished the fire. Abu Haikel also
recounted three recent late night soldier incursions into their home. Most
recently, on 8 June, soldiers took her twenty-year-old son Wadiyya into a
room. When his sisters asked the soldiers what they were doing with their
brother, one answered, "We are going to f---- him." A sister screamed that
if they touched their brother it would be the end of "our lives." The
soldiers did not harm Wadiyya.
Roe then visited the tea shop of Hani Abu Haikel (nephew and neighbor of
Fariel Abu Haikel's husband). Roe asked him about the visit of some of the
pre-1929 Jews last month. Abu Haikel said that the visit was very
meaningful for him. (The Abu Haikel rescued Jews during a massacre in 1929.
Descendants visited Hebron last month.)
Abu Haikel said he remembers a conversation he had with his grandfather
around 1970 when he was about seven years old. "My mother asked me to take
a plate of food to my grandfather who was working in the orchard. It is the
same orchard the settlers burned yesterday. I sat down with my grandfather
and he told me about the Jews who used to be our neighbors and best friends.
My grandfather lived in the bottom of Beit Hadassah and the Jewish family
lived upstairs. I try to remember their name but all I can remember is that
my grandfather told me about a woman named Rivka who was a healer. He told
me about the time the Jewish neighbor Rivka healed a child in the Abu Haikel
family."
Tracy Hughes and Kathie Uhler took two visitors on a tour of Hebron's Old
City. They met with the mother of the Bader family (across from the cemetery
and behind Qurtuba School) who told about the troubles her eleven-year-old
son had with the soldiers in their area. On one day last week, seven Israeli
soldiers hassled him, saying they had seen him throwing stones. The mother
said he was in the house watching TV at the time.
During this visit, a religious Jewish man from the Israeli settlement of
Kiryat Arba came up the hill. The young son saw him and went to greet him.
Then the entire family jumped up and went out to greet their friend. When
they returned they told Hughes and Uhler that they were friends and "he was
one of the good ones."
An American Jew who was visiting, told CPT that her grandfather was a member
of the pre-1929 Jews of Hebron. She remembers him telling the story of a
family member saved by Muslim neighbors during the 1929 riots.
Monday 19 June 2006
The entire team and two EAPPI members went to Dura, a neighboring village,
for maqlubah (chicken, rice, and vegetable dish) at the home of Abdel Hadi
Hantash, who directs the Hebron Land Defence Committee (HLDC.) They looked
at photos of Hantash's recent visit to Canada and the US.
In the evening, team members visited a neighbor family. The father is a
tentmaker. He said that for generations in Hebron the family had lived
there in the old city and had been tentmakers.
Tuesday 20 June 2006
Hughes hosted a delegation of United Church of Christ members from the
Wisconsin Conference UCC. Gibb met a tour group from Manchester College in
Indiana. Roe and Siemens accompanied the Manchester group to At-Tuwani for a
further tour.
In the evening, Kawla Sharabati and her oldest son, Yusuf, came to the CPT
apartment for accompaniment to the Kiryat Arba Police Station. Soldiers had
detained another of her four sons, Suhaib, a 17-year-old "taujihi" student
at the Bab Al Baladiyye (Beit Romano) checkpoint at around 5:30 p.m. Kawla
said the soldiers detained the two boys because a companion of Suhaib was
holding a knife. Gibb and Uhler went with her and Yusuf to the station. The
police told them that no one by that name was at the station. While walking
back into the souq to go to the Sharabati home, the team saw the two boys
came walking towards the group from another direction.
Wednesday 21 June
Hughes and Gibbs, along with a translator and two internationals, responded
to a report that settlers had injured a Palestinian man. He gave the
following account of the attack:
"Twenty Israeli settler youth, ages 13-15, from Avraham Avinu attacked me at
about 7:30 p.m. Monday, 16 June 2006. I was on the back side of Ibrahimi
boys school with my donkey. The donkey was carrying metal that I got from a
room I was cleaning. First the teens asked nicely if they could buy my
donkey. I said it was too expensive. And soon the boys started stoning me
primarily in the face. I fell to the ground and hurt my shoulder and arm.
The boys also attacked my donkey that sustained many small injuries to its
body. The settler teens were about four meters away while stoning me. I was
right in front of the door near Ibrahimi school that has 'Death to Arabs'
spray painted on it in Hebrew.
"When the boys saw the blood on my face they took off and ran away. I went
to the checkpoint near Yatta Rd. The soldiers saw the blood on my face and
called an army ambulance. The soldiers gave me first aid. The army ambulance
came to check me out and called a Palestinian ambulance to take me to the
hospital. I received three stitches on my left cheek. I made a report of
the attack at Kiryat Arba police station."
The man also told CPT and the internationals that settlers attacked him
twice before and ten months ago they attacked his wife while she was
carrying their three-month old daughter. He said Israeli soldiers invade
his home and neighborhood on a regular basis.
As the internationals, CPTers and translator were going home, Israeli
soldiers stopped the translator at the checkpoint at Bab el Khan. He showed
CPT the house where he was born. The soldiers would not let him through
(past his house) so he and the internationals went back the other way. He
was stopped again (for the third time in one afternoon) at the checkpoint
near the Guttnick Center.
Roe and Siemens attended the Peace Team Forum meeting at the headquarters of
IWPS (International Women's Peace Service) in Hares village north of
Ramallah. From there they traveled to the village of Shefa'amr, a village
inside Israel between Haifa and Nazareth to visit a family there.
Thursday 22 June
Siemens and Roe visited a woman in Nazareth who has been involved in
grassroots organizing for fifty years. Hughes and Uhler went out for
school patrol for the three taking the taujihi exam.
Saturday 24 June
Roe and Uhler covered the last "taujihi" exam patrol and then went on to
Haret iJaber. En route they visited Im Jawad Idrees and several of her
seven children. The Israeli army demolished their home in April 1996, along
with five other homes, in one of the earliest home demolitions that CPT
documented.
Two students from Al Quds Open University visited. They had taken
nonviolence training and they wanted to know "what next?" Roe shared with
them a letter written recently by Sami Awad (of Holy Land Trust, the
organization that sponsored the trainings in non violence.)
Hughes and Siemens went on Shabbat patrol. They sat in the park in front of
the Tomb of the Patriarchs to observe the settlers. An Israeli settler woman
(new to the area) came and talked with the CPTers. She had much to say about
following the Jewish laws and being orthodox. She lived in Tiberius for one
month until the previous week but found that location not suitable because
it was too secular. She moved to Kiryat Arba because that community was more
religious. She also added that life here is Hebron is better because it is
more controlled and safe. CPTers responded agreed that life in Hebron is
definitely controlled. Siemens and Hughes continued Shabbat patrol.
Everything on the streets seemed quiet.
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