CPTnet
27 July 2006

HEBRON UPDATE: 1-10 July 2006

During this period, team members patrolled the Old City on a daily basis,
with increased patrolling on Friday evening and Saturday morning and
evening. On these patrols, team members visited families in the Old City
and in the Qarantina neighborhood along with monitoring Israeli military
checkpoints. The team included Tracy Hughes, Rich Meyer, Dianne Roe, and
Andrea Siemens.

Saturday 1 July

A university professor and friends from France visited the office. The
professor gave CPT the first chapter of the book in French he is publishing
about the Palestinian situation, which includes a section on Hebron.

Roe met with an Italian independent documentary film maker working on a
project that follows the lives and stories of Jewish families saved by their
Palestinian Muslim neighbors during the 1929 massacre of Jewish residents in
Hebron. Roe and the documentarian interviewed members of Palestinian and
Jewish families who lived in Hebron in 1929 and their descendants.

Sunday 2 July

Roe and the filmmaker visited Yossi Ezra in West Jerusalem. In the
interview, Ezra told stories of the relationships between Palestinian and
Jewish neighbors in Hebron before 1929, and showed old photographs of Arab
and Jewish family members together in front of shops in Hebron. He told the
story of his family, how they survived the 1929 massacre and how they
continued their lives after the experience. During the interview, a
Palestinian friend from Hebron visited Yossi and his family for the first
time in ten years. The filmmaker said the documentary will have a November
2006 premiere in Italy and invited Roe to attend the showing.

CPTers Roe, Siemens and Hughes witnessed six soldiers checking out what
appeared to be the remains of a small fire set across the street from the
CPT apartment door in the doorway of an abandoned building. The soldiers had
one of the boys who work in the chicken market up against the wall and were
questioning him. It appeared that two of the soldiers were trying to get the
teenage boy to go into the abandoned building. The boy resisted and did not
enter the building but the soldiers detained him for some time. After the
soldiers released him, they demanded that the chicken market shops close and
the teenage workers leave the area. Roe went outside to intervene. She
tried to have a conversation with the soldiers, particularly about how the
Shaheen family (landlords of the CPT apartment building) saved their Jewish
neighbors and friends the Mizrachi Family in 1929. The soldier in command
said she could not talk to his soldiers.

Roe responded, "I can't talk to even one of your soldiers?" The same soldier
responded, "No, we are not peace soldiers; we are real soldiers." After the
incident the soldiers tried to lock the door to the abandoned building.
They told Hughes and Siemens not to take pictures from the roof.

Monday 3 July

CPT received a report from friends in Beit Ummar about an international and
Palestinian public action. The source reported that farmers tried to go to
their fields as a protest against the building of a second security road
around the Israeli settlement of Karme Tsur. The land used for the
construction of this road is confiscated land from Palestinian farmers of
Beit Ummar. Israeli police detained a Palestinian peace activist and some of
the internationals supporting the farmers' action.

Tuesday 4 July

CPTers Siemens and Roe joined other internationals and farmers from Beit
Ummar in a second day of public actions to bring attention to and stop the
continuing confiscation of the farmers' land around Karme Tsur. For
background on Beit Ummar land confiscation see

http://www.cpt.org/archives/2005/apr05/0020.html

Thursday 6 July

The Hebron team traveled to At-Tuwani to meet with CPT's At-Tuwani team.

Friday 7 July

Roe and two members of the Ecumenical Accompaniment Program in Palestine and
Israel (EAPPI) attended another day of public protest in Beit Ummar.
Approximately 500 Palestinians held noon prayers and many international and
Jewish supporters were present with farmers in the fields of Beit Ummar.
(See 24 July 2006 CPTnet release, "A different image of Hamas.") To view a
video clip of the noon prayers see

http://www.cpt.org/gallery/view_album.php?set_albumName=July-7,-2006,-Beit-U
mmar

Saturday 8 July

Members of the World Council of Churches' EAPPI (Ecumenical Accompaniment in
Palestine and Israel) program visited the CPT apartment. Roe, Siemens,
Hughes and the Ecumenical Accompaniers (EAs) discussed issues regarding the
humanitarian crisis in Gaza as well as the situation in Beit Ummar and the
Old City of Hebron. The EAs also described an attack by a Hebron settler on
an EA.