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Faye Harrison
Jenin
I speak as a peace activist from London currently living in Jenin in the West Bank. Until a couple of weeks ago I was in Balata refugee camp, Nablus.
I have seen and heard of innumerable human rights violations and atrocities committed by the Israeli forces. Recently an Israeli force came into Balata refugee camp during a funeral. There could be no legitimate reason, no one in Balata could have been posing a threat to the Israelis at that point. The army came only to harass and abuse the people.
They instigated a confrontation and another Palestinian boy was killed. On Tuesday night they sent tanks into Jenin to arrest a seventeen-year-old girl. No one has heard from her since or knows of charges brought against her. We expect she will be held indefinitely in ‘administrative detention.’
My colleagues have recently reported many similar abuses, including killings in Nablus and the blindfold detention of children.
On Tuesday I attended a small demonstration to mark Land Day. The participants demonstrated peacefully on a hillside across the road from the Separation Wall. Some of the young children then threw stones into the road, none coming close to the Israeli army. The soldiers responded by firing numerous canisters of tear gas. The children ran away and the adults immediately left for the buses. When they were perhaps two hundred metres away and clearly leaving, the army came through the gate and followed. They took up positions in Palestinian houses, from where they fired further gas canisters at the people. I have photographs to show this.
One night when the town was surrounded by tanks, we could do nothing but wait for an incursion. So we sat around listening to the news and watching old footage. We saw a six week old video of the funeral of a ten year old boy who was shot in the head, wounds explicitly shown (being Aljazeera, we had footage from the ambulance through the hospital to the burial). As we watched, locals pointed out, one by one, five participants in that funeral who were then killed in an operation three weeks ago. It's shocking to look at something so recent and to be able to point out so many further casualties. The next video was of a farmer killed a few weeks ago.
The victim was an ordinary farmer driving across his fields, just in the wrong place at the wrong time. We saw the car. There are huge bullet holes in the car door, I'm told caused by a large gun. That would have killed him pretty quickly but that wasn't enough for the soldiers. There were indentations on the roof and bonnet where the soldiers had stood and shot the body through the windscreen and roof. I didn't even try to count the bullet holes. It was pretty messy, flesh had been splattered across the car. Aljazeera showed the body in the hospital. It was just a bloody mess of flesh. I doubt anyone will be held accountable.
If tanks rolled into Malta, would you really condemn the children as violent for throwing lumps of chalk (the rocks they throw here are calcite and disintegrate on impact, usually without damaging the vehicles) at them? And should all Maltese be punished as the aggressors if one of them bombed Tripoli?
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