CPTnet
2 October 2006
HEBRON UPDATE: 9-22 September 2006
Christian Peacemaker Team (CPT) members serving in Hebron during this period
included Cynthia Burnside, Christina Gibb, Donna Hicks, John Lynes, and Char
Smith
Saturday 9 September
John Lynes and Christina Gibb were on school patrol until after 8:00 a.m.,
because groups of boys had to head home after their school did not open due
to the general strike.
At 2:00 p.m., Gibb and Char Smith, along with a team translator, visited a
neighbor whose house faces Shuhada St. The only access to their home is
through an empty house nearby. From the second floor, access is by two
ladders to the neighboring rooftop, through a hole knocked in a concrete
wall, and then down the steep inside stairs, into the house. Until they
were able to knock the hole in the wall up on the roof, they had had to use
yet another ladder, and slide and scramble down the other side. One of the
women at home described how she had given birth to her son (now five) at
home, without doctor or midwife, at the height of the intifada, when they
were trapped there under curfew. Some of her family members were next-door,
but unable to get to her. A shooting had occurred nearby, and Israeli
settlers were rampaging in the street. Israeli soldiers had not allowed an
ambulance or doctor to come to her.
At 4:00 p.m., Gibb and Smith visited the family on Tel Rumeida, whose wall
the night before an Israeli settler had vandalized.
As they were leaving, they got a call from an international asking for
assistance in the area between the Dubboya Street checkpoint and the Israeli
settlement enclave of Beit Hadassah. Gibb and Smith went down the to the
street, where they saw a crowd of Israeli settlers and soldiers. They found
their colleague surrounded by soldiers and police halfway along the street.
When Gibb tried to "get in the way" between them, the soldiers pushed her
back roughly, and the police then walked the international down to Beit
Hadassah where their vehicles were parked. The soldiers would not say what
was happening.
Gibb and Smith walked on to the checkpoint, where a group of internationals
had gathered. They discovered the police had taken their colleague to the
Kiryat Arba police station. A coworker followed in a taxi. When Gibb
telephoned late in the evening, the two had just gotten home, after three
hours at the police station. They told Gibb that a settler woman had
attacked and kicked the international, and then filed a complaint that the
international had scratched her. Apparently, the settler has done this
before, so the police did not treat the accusation seriously.
Monday 11 September
Lynes and Burnside walked an uneventful school patrol and took three
internationals on a tour of the Old City, to Wadi Nasara, between the
Israeli settlement of Kiryat Arba and Hebron, and then up to Tel Rumeida.
Tuesday 12 September
While on school patrol, Gibb, along with Smith, counted about eighty
children coming out of the Old City and crossing Shuhada Street to get to
their schools, compared with about 100 last school year when the teachers
were not striking.
Wednesday 13 September
Gibb, Burnside, and Smith visited Beit Ummar to deliver some photographs to
the municipality. They met with Mayor Farhan Alqam, just released after
fifteen days in jail. (See release of 26 September CPTnet release "BEIT
UMMAR: Mayor Farhan Alqam freed.")
At 10:00 p.m., a colleague telephoned to say that he had just heard that
soldiers were rounding men up near the Hebron Rehabilitation Committee (HRC)
offices. A few minutes later team members saw soldiers on a neighbor's
roof. Burnside, Gibb, Lynes, and Smith, together with a visitor, went out
to investigate. (See 16 September CPTnet release: "HEBRON: Nighttime
round-up Palestinian men.") The team monitored the situation until all the
men were released around 1:30 a.m.
Thursday 14 September
Gibb and Smith went out on school patrol, but found all schools shut and no
children or teachers on the streets. They found out later that the
Palestinian education authorities had implemented a new five-day school
week, with no school on Thursdays and Fridays.
A Peace Cycle team from Britain had planned to visit Hebron in the morning,
but soldiers delayed them for several hours at checkpoints on their way from
Bethlehem. They arrived late in the afternoon with time for only a brief
tour.
Friday 15 September 2006
Between 11:30 a.m. and 1:30 p.m., Burnside and Smith monitored the
checkpoint below the Ibrahimi Mosque near the Gutnick Center. Soldiers held
seven to ten men for twenty-five minutes. When Burnside and Smith asked the
soldiers why they were still holding the men, the four soldiers quickly
gathered up the ID cards and let them go. One soldier asked Smith, "What
are you doing?" She told him, "I'm checking to see that the people are able
to go to the Mosque." They met a Palestinian woman with her grandson who
indicated that Israeli authorities had handcuffed his father and taken him
away.
Saturday 16 September 2006
During morning school patrol, Cynthia Burnside and Donna Hicks walked from
the Mosque gate down through the Tariq ibn Ziad Street junction where many
children were heading to their schools even though the teachers' strike was
still going on. Christina Gibb and Char Smith patrolled the road linking
the Gutnick Center to Shuhada Street where a group of ten Israeli settler
boys repeatedly spat at them, threw small stones, and taunted them. A stone
hit Smith on the hand. An Israeli soldier moved the boys on. At one
moment, some Palestinian boys came near the group. Gibb and Smith moved
between the two groups, and the soldier again moved the settlers away. The
patrol remained on the street until the boys coming out of Ibrahimi Boys'
School headed home when school was called off.
Around 5:00 p.m., Burnside, Gibb, Hicks, and a neighbor walked to the Wadi
Nasara where Israeli settlers from Kiryat Arba sometimes gather on Saturday
afternoons. On returning to the Old City, they met a group of Israeli
visitors touring with an Israeli military escort. When Hicks greeted a
young man with "Shabbat shalom," he made a rude gesture. Another visitor
tried to have a conversation with Burnside and the neighbor, but a soldier
prevented him from doing so.
Monday 18 September 2006
Around 11:00 a.m., Gibb took a telephone call from Al Fahya Girls School
asking that someone come to photograph the latest vandalism. Hicks and a
neighbor responded. Vandals had gotten in the main door and ransacked
several rooms, including the headmistress's office, in which they had burned
some papers on the corner of the desk. When Hicks asked the headmistress
what had gone missing from this break-in, she said, "Ask after we have an
opportunity to get things organized and cleaned up."
Around 6:00 p.m. when Burnside, Smith, and a neighbor returned from picking
tomatoes in the Beqa'a Valley, Hicks received a phone call from another
neighbor announcing that Israeli soldiers had invaded a neighboring house.
The family has to enter their home from the Old City side via a vacant
house, a concrete stairwell, and two ladders on the roofs. When the CPTers
reached the street-level door, they found a teenage son waiting there. The
soldiers had told him not to move. The son, CPTers, and a team translator
went to the roof. The door to the house was locked. CPTers called the
names of family members for several minutes before the family called back,
saying that they had been locked in one room. The soldiers had locked the
outside door behind them and were inside the house. After some minutes, six
soldiers came out of the house and the family was released. The father told
CPT that the soldiers had locked the outside door when they heard CPT was on
the way.
The CPTers followed the soldiers as they searched the adjacent roofs and
went back down to street level. Hicks tried to stop the soldiers from
locking the door to the next house by putting her foot in the door, but the
lead soldier forced the door closed and bolted it from inside. From another
place on the roofs, Smith followed the soldiers into the house. As the
soldiers left the house, they stepped over the grandmother who was sitting
in the doorway. The soldiers went across the roofs next to the CPT
apartment, after which the team lost sight of them.
Tuesday 19 September 2006
Around 5:30 p.m., the team learned from a neighbor that Israeli soldiers had
entered the Glassblowers' Mosque and climbed the stairs to the top of the
minaret. When Burnside, Hicks, and the neighbor arrived, the soldiers had
come out of the mosque and were checking the ID's of the men outside. The
patrol leader was admonishing a photographer that he could not take
pictures, but that CPT could, because it "was licensed to." Hicks and
Burnside expressed concern that the soldiers had gone into a place of
worship. Hicks asked one of the soldiers how he might feel if soldiers went
into his synagogue. The soldier turned away. The caretaker of the mosque
invited CPT in to see the damage. The soldiers had torn a large poster with
a panoramic view of the Dome of the Rock and Al Aqua. The caretaker took
the CPTers to the far side of the worship space and pointed out that the
soldiers had looked through some books on the shelves.
Wednesday 20 September 2006
Shortly after 11:00 a.m., Burnside and Hicks encountered a procession of
Hebron sheiks and imams coming from the Bab iZaweyya, the main produce
market area, to the Ibrahimi Mosque in protest of the pope's comments about
Islam in a lecture in Germany the week before. An imam in the center of the
front row was carrying aloft a copy of the Qur'an and some participants
carried a banner in English characterizing Islam as a religion of peace and
justice. As the group got to the mosque gate and moved towards the
turnstile, Israeli police and military delayed their movement through to the
mosque. Burnside and a neighbor were caught between the old metal gate and
the turnstiles. The neighbor managed to move back from the gate into the
area of shops. Burnside moved with the marchers through the turnstiles and
metal detector. The men entered the mosque for noon prayers. Meanwhile,
Hicks walked back through the Old City and out the Bab ilKhan (Gates 4-5),
entrances to the Old City and to the Avraham Avinu settlement enclave to try
to get to the Ibrahimi Mosque from Shuhada Street. Israeli border police
had set hard plastic barriers so no one could walk towards the mosque,
although they let Palestinians leave the area. Several Palestinian women
trying to move towards the mosque engaged the police in a lively
conversation. As noon prayers were finishing, Hicks, Burnside, and a
neighbor returned to the mosque gate and met the imams returning from
prayers.
The team joined other internationals and Palestinians staffing the Tel
Rumeida Community Center for dinner and a presentation of equipment for the
Center. A benefactor who had heard one of the internationals speak in
Australia about the suffering of the Palestinians at the hands of the
Israeli settlers had purchased the equipment.
Thursday 21 September 2006
At 10 p.m., CPT's immediate neighbor took Gibb to their apartment to show
her that Israeli settlers on Shuhada St. had again thrown stones through
their windows.
Friday 22 September 2006
Burnside and Hicks met a young man whose family used to live in the Waqf
Building near the Israeli settlement enclave of Avraham Avinu. The family
moved after Israeli settlers briefly occupied the building across from
theirs in April, making access and staying on much more difficult. The
family is doing well in their new location.
Barbara Martens and three visitors observed a heated conversation with a
Palestinian man at the checkpoint below the Ibrahimi Mosque. An Israeli
soldier, despite having checked the Palestinian's I.D., was refusing him
permission to visit his father's house opposite the Ibrahimi Mosque.
Martens asked two of the soldiers why the man was not allowed to go to the
house. Neither answered; they only shrugged. After about ten minutes, the
man was allowed to proceed to his father's house.
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