CPTnet
October 22, 2000
HEBRON UPDATE: October 17-19

Tuesday, October 17
After hearing there were tanks in the
playground of Osamma Bin Munqeth, a school
that has been occupied by the Israeli military
for seventeen days, CPTers Andrew Getman and
Natasha Krahn went to investigate.

The school is in H2, the Israeli controlled
area of Hebron. The 35,000 Palestinians in H2
are currently under curfew - twenty-four hour
a day house arrest. According to a local human
rights field worker, on Sunday October 15,
after the curfew in Hebron was lifted for five
hours, Israeli soldiers shot at teachers and
children as they attempted to attend class.

When Getman and Krahn were about one hundred
meters from the school, a soldier posted on
the roof yelled, "Stop!"

Krahn yelled, "Why?"

The soldier shouted, "This is a closed
military zone."

Krahn replied, "This is a school."

"Not any more. Now it's an army base," the
soldier said. "If you go any further I will
shoot you."

A family whose home borders the schoolyard,
told CPT that they had been scared to go and
feed their chickens because they worried the
soldiers might shoot at them. The family took
CPT up on their roof that looks into the
schoolyard. Getman and Krahn saw two tanks
inside, aimed at the city of Hebron.

This school was built on a hilltop in
southeast Hebron after a school in the old
city was confiscated by Israeli settlers and
turned into a yeshiva. Before this school was
occupied, the Palestinian Ministry of
Education estimated that there was a shortage
of forty-two classrooms in H2.

A radio station in Saskatchewan asked Krahn to
interview people in Hebron about what they
thought of the Sharm el Sheik agreement. One
soldier said "So what? The Arabs are still
going to fight us." Another said, "There is
still hate in Israeli hearts and Palestinian
hearts. Peace will only come with our
children and grandchildren. They make an
agreement 'up there' but it takes a long time
for it to come 'down here.'" Both soldiers
and Palestinians with whom Krahn spoke said,
"Is this the only agreement they've signed?"
Several Palestinian boys told her, "It is
better to die in battle than to die like this
[under occupation.]"

Shortly after 1:00 p.m., an Israeli settler
stopped outside the entrance of the alley
which the CPT apartment overlooks. He blew a
shofar (ram's horn) several times and then
yelled in English and Hebrew, "We want
mashiach (messiah) now!"

Dianne Roe and Kathleen Kern went to visit the
upstairs neighbors and hear more of the Sharm
el Sheik agreement. One of them, a young
woman in her twenties said she did not think
the agreement would stop the clashes. "Arafat
does not have the support of the people. Even
Fatah [Arafat's political party] will not
follow Arafat." She then showed Roe a picture
of Mohammed Al Dura-a twelve-year-old Gazan
boy whom Israeli soldiers shot. The videotape
of the boy cowering behind his father in
terror and his subsequent death has become an
icon in the Middle East symbolizing Israeli
contempt for Palestinian lives. The young
woman said, "Everyone in the world reacted to
that picture. But not America."

At 11:00 p.m., the team heard a barrage of
automatic weapon fire and louder explosions
that lasted for nearly two hours.

Wednesday October 18
Roe talked with one of CPT's translators,
Tarik Sharif whose brother was shot in the
recent violence (See previous update.) Tarik
told her that a nurse at the hospital in
Jerusalem was shocked to learn about his
brother and told him that he would go to
Hebron to help the wounded. A few hours later
Tarik heard that the nurse had been shot in
Hebron, while helping someone into the
ambulance.

Krahn and Getman went to investigate reports
that the Israeli military had made the main
road in Halhul, just north of Hebron,
impassable and saw a trench about 20 feet wide
and 10 feet deep that the Israeli military had
dug. They also saw a road that connects two
bypass roads in Halhul had been torn up by a
road grader for the length of one kilometer.
Water, phone and electrical lines had been
severed by the military in the process. On
the way back from Halhul, they went to see the
neighborhood that had been the target of the
shooting the previous night. They saw holes
shot through metal shop doors and the window
of a house that were a foot in diameter. Other
houses and shops in the area showed evidence
of being hit by many rounds of automatic
weapon fire.

Thursday October 19
Roe and Bob Holmes went to visit another
translator for the team in the morning. He
had just worked three 8-hour shifts in a row
at a local hospital, because other nurses had
been unable to come in from the outlying
community because of the Israeli military
closure. He said, "I've seen Hebron on CNN
and at least the world now sees how powerless
we are against the military power of Israel."
 He also predicted that Arafat will begin
cracking down on dissidents who disagree with
his policies soon.

A journalist stopped by to show the team
pictures of graffiti that settlers had spray
painted on the door of the mosque around the
corner from the CPT apartment. They referred
to the Muslim Prophet Mohammed as a pig and a
"maniac." She also showed them a picture of a
young man whose shirt the soldiers took
because it looked too much like an army shirt.
 They burned the shirt in the area in front of
the settlement of Avraham Avinu and forced
the young man to walk home in his sleeveless
undershirt (which violates local standards of
modesty.)

Holmes and Getman traveled to Qilkis to visit
the local school (which is forced to meet in
a house, because the Israeli authorities will
not give the village a permit to build a
school.) The barrier that Israeli soldiers had
erected on October 15 (See previous update)
had been cleared by young men in the community
to allow cars to pass. The villagers told
Holmes and Getman that the soldiers had
threatened to take away the car keys of anyone
who had driven through the village. The two
CPTers noticed that construction of new homes
in the nearby settlement of Beit Haggai had
continued unabated.