CPTnet 9
October 2006
HEBRON UPDATE: 23-30 September 2006
Many Palestinian schools were participating in a "strict" strike until the
teachers were paid, so few students were going to school during the period
this update covers. They plan to stay at home until they hear through the
media that the teachers have received their back salaries.
On team during this period were Jan Benvie, Cynthia Burnside, Christina
Gibb, Donna Hicks, Barbara Martens, Abigail Ozanne, and Kathie Uhler.
Saturday 23 September
Cynthia Burnside, Christina Gibb, Donna Hicks, Barbara Martens, two visitors
and a neighbor went on school patrol at 7:00 a.m. The team had to go
through the stairwell and courtyards of a house because the Ibrahimi Mosque
and mosque gate was closed for Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year
celebration. Only a few Palestinian students were on the streets. Israeli
soldiers would not let some Palestinian men go through the nearby Yatta Road
checkpoint, nor could they pass through the checkpoint at the foot of the
Ibrahimi Mosque across from the Gutnick Center. The team had to return to
the office via a circuitous route because the other ways were closed to
them.
Burnside, Hicks, Martens, a visitor, and a neighbor walked through the
neighborhood above the Hebron Rehabilitation Committee (HRC) to the
cemetery above the road to the Israeli settlement Kiryat Arba. On the way
back down, the team paused to observe a house on the street above the HRC
from which a new Israeli flag was. One of the team observed an Israeli
soldier looking out a window.
Sunday 24 September
Burnside, Hicks, Martens, and a friend of the team had to walk through the
Duboyya Street checkpoint, around the back of Qurtuba School, and down
Shuhada Street to reach the area where the team does school patrol, because
the mosque gate and the Ibrahimi Mosque were closed to the Palestinian
community again.
On returning to the Old City from H1, the Palestinian-controlled area of
Hebron, the team learned that an Israeli soldier had entered the Othman bin
Affan Mosque inside the Old City.
Monday 25 September
On school patrol, Hicks and a friend of the team noted that no teachers were
visible at Ibrahimi Boys' School, and that the gates to Al Fahya Girls'
School were locked. When Hicks joined the students outside the gates, an
adult was telling the students to go home. When Martens and Burnside were
walking along Shuhada Street, an Israeli settler riding a bicycle rode at
high speed directly towards them and at the last second veered away.
The CPTers met one of the team translators nearby who told them that Israeli
soldiers had searched her brother's house the night before. The soldiers
found some Islamist flags and had commented that if those were there, they
might find weapons some time in the future.
Around 1:00 p.m. near the teashop around the corner from the CPT apartment,
Burnside, Martens and a friend of the team observed two Israeli soldiers
with rifles pointed at a shopkeeper who had his cart in the middle of the
road. The soldiers stopped the gathering crowd from moving towards the Bab
iBaledeyya (Beit Romano checkpoint). The friend approached the soldiers
saying, "We are doing nothing wrong. We are not hurting you. Why are you
not letting us pass?" She kept moving forward and others followed behind
her. The soldiers moved backward. The crowd moved ahead ignoring the
soldiers' commands to stop or to step back. After a half hour, the crowd
and soldiers had reached the Bab iBaledeyya (Beit Romano checkpoint.)
Another contingent of soldiers was cordoning off the crowd wanting to go
into the Old City. No one was shouting. When some of the Palestinian youth
became more aggressive towards the soldiers, older men guided them away.
Suddenly, an Israeli soldier threw a percussion grenade towards the Old City
entrance. The crowd dispersed around 1:45 p.m.
Tuesday 26 September
Around 11:30 a.m. Hicks and Martens encountered Israeli soldiers in the Old
City. They were searching Palestinian men on their way to noon prayers,
creating a bottleneck coming into the Old City from the Bab iBaledeyyah.
Hicks called Burnside and asked her to bring a camera. Martens asked the
soldiers, "Why don't you simply allow these men to pass so that they can get
to their prayers in time? You would not like to be prevented from getting
to your prayers in the synagogue." The soldier did not respond. Soon,
another soldier told Burnside and a friend that the situation was "all your
fault." A soldier told Martens to move back. She agreed to do so if the
soldiers would allow the men to proceed without searching them. It took
about an hour for the searching to wind down and the crowd to thin out.
The squad moved through the Old City to the Natsheh Quarter, where they
locked themselves into three rooms of a house for several hours. Hicks,
Martens, a neighbor, and two press photographers found a mother and three
small children huddled on the steps in the courtyard. The soldiers had
entered the bedroom where a computer was. Martens pushed the top window
open from the stairs and took a picture before the soldiers locked the
window. The soldiers did not respond to repeated knocking on the window,
nor did they respond to knocking on the door. Two hours later, a family
member tried the door and found it unlocked. The family speculated that the
soldiers had quietly unlocked the door and used the key to exit via another
door. The family found a sofa set vertically up against the wall outside
which the soldiers had used as a ladder to get to the roofs and move on.
Hicks and a team translator visited the family whose home on the road above
the Hebron Rehabilitation Center had sported an Israeli flag over the
weekend. Seven Israeli military vehicles with twenty-five soldiers arrived
at the house on Friday afternoon while the mother and father were visiting a
daughter for dinner. Two daughters, three sons, and an eighty-year-old
blind grandmother were at home. The soldiers arrived with all the equipment
they would need to stay at the house and forced the family into the
grandmother's ground floor room. After the children called their parents to
come home, the family was able to leave Friday evening and go to the
daughter's home. They returned home around 9:00 p.m. Sunday after neighbors
phoned them to say the soldiers had left.
Wednesday 27 September
Around 11:00 a.m., Burnside, Hicks, and Martens found Israeli soldiers
slowing down the movement of people inside the Bab iBaledeyyah. When a
group got to a certain size, the soldiers would let them go and slow down
pedestrian traffic again.
Thursday 28 September 2006
The team learned that Israeli settlers had bulldozed Palestinian
agricultural land near the Israeli settlements of Kiryat Arba and Harsina
the previous day, in anticipation of settlement and bypass road expansion.
Friday 29 September 2006
Around 10:30 a.m., Jan Benvie and Martens observed Israeli soldiers
detaining a young Palestinian man near the Bab iBaledeyyah (Beit Romano
checkpoint). Upon the CPTers' return from the market, soldiers were still
holding the youth. An Israeli soldier explained that another Palestinian
youth had shot at a soldier. The soldiers then shot him in the leg, but he
ran away. Palestinians the soldiers were lying.
Burnside, a visitor, and a Palestinian friend of the team attempted to walk
to the pottery shop across from the Gutnick Center and near the checkpoint
at the foot of the Ibrahimi Mosque. The Israeli military staffing the
checkpoint told the three to walk via the pathway for Palestinians, who are
forbidden to walk in front of the Gutnick Center and the Ibrahimi
Mosque/Cave of the Machpelah complex. A soldier told the Palestinian she
needed a pass to walk in that area. When she questioned whether a pass was
required, a border police officer got up from his seat nearby and pushed
her. Burnside got in between the two. Burnside and the visitor asked the
officer to back off. A relative and Burnside tried to calm down the friend.
The soldiers and police nearby were laughing.
A female soldier yelled for them to get out and that the land would never
belong to the Palestinian people.
To follow up on information received the previous day, Burnside, Kathie
Uhler, a visitor, and a team translator visited the Beqa'a Valley outside
Hebron, where recently settlers from Harsina have been tearing down parts of
the fence beside the road and bulldozing the land beside it.
A Palestinian man met the team on the road and told them that settlers
regularly throw stones at the local people passing by, and that the previous
day an eighty-year-old woman had been injured when a stone hit her in the
head. He said his own children walk two kilometers to school, rather than
200 meters to avoid being stoned. Fourteen people live in his house, and
one night fifteen settlers came to stone it.
Further down the road, they saw patches of land beside the road that
settlers had bulldozed the previous day by. Soldiers had stopped them.
Another resident said that five days ago settlers removed the wire fencing,
and two days ago the rocks alongside his land. He was not permitted to
speak to the bulldozer drivers. He believes that settlers wish to create a
buffer zone on Palestinian land between the Harsina settlement and local
Palestinian families. The buffer zone would be enclosed with a wire fence
and roads, similar to other areas. He said the Israeli authorities had
confiscated 250 to 260 dunams (one dunam=1/4 acre) for this purpose,
fifteen of which are his. An Israeli military officer has denied him access
to his own land on the other side of the road, saying the land was
"conflicted." Settlement security also forbade him from taking his own
water, though he has a permit. Settlers also damaged seventeen of his olive
trees. He said, "Taking care of a tree is like taking care of one's child.
We live a good life, except for the settlers, and only ask of God a secure
life in peace."
About ten days ago, as he was tending his olive trees, an Israeli military
jeep arrived on his land with three male soldiers and one female soldier
inside. He said the three male soldiers took turns having sex with the
female soldier, in full view. Of the young soldiers having sex in the jeep,
he commented that even if they were animals they would have gone to a
private place to have sex. In another incident, two settler men appeared
naked in his field.
Saturday 30 September
A CPT partner visited with the team. Commenting on the current political
situation for Palestinians, he said, "You know, many of us have not received
a salary for over seven months. We suffer. But we are not hungry for food.
We are not hungry for money. We are hungry for freedom. You are our
friends. You see us suffer, but it is not the same. It is WE who are
experiencing the suffering. It is WE who must speak about our suffering.
You see me smiling, but the smile is on my face, only it is not in my heart.
In my heart is the pain."
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