Palestinian family retracting at the Great Return March encampment after being fired at by Israeli soldiers. (Photo: Mahmoud Abusalama

As I write this, I recall the many times I had to sit in a room where Europeans discuss their deep-felt guilt over the atrocities committed against their Jewish communities. I recall the many deeply painful times I felt completely unseen during discussions over racism, colonialism, social justice and refugee and migrant rights. My racing heartbeat that overcome me as countless memories of terror and pain surface, silenced a cry that desperately wanted an answer: Why is there no guilt felt towards us as European countries fuel and enable more Israeli terrorism against Palestinians? Or do we not count as people? How about Palestinians’ most longstanding refugee problem in our modern history?

I wish I could shake people’s consciousness and face them with a century of complicity which if they acknowledged, they would have a feeling of backbreaking guilt towards Palestinians. The situation was, is and will continue to be grim until concrete action is pursued to halt (not ease) these grave injustices happening in daylight before the eyes of the whole world for 70 years of Israeli colonial occupation and apartheid.

Until then, the unfulfilled desires of our grandparents who died while clinging to their right of return to the last breath, will haunt you. The lives of the many patients who died of minor illness due to shut barriers and checkpoints, will haunt you. The dreams of our children. The cries of Palestinian mothers. The stolen years of our political prisoners. The pictures of all our victims, young and old. The drops of blood that shed from every and each wounded person. The amputated limbs. The uprooted olive trees. The demolished houses. The memories made at each of its corners. The deserted lands. The sleepless eyes that long waited for a dawn of freedom. The executed bodies that were left bleeding until they were drained of blood. The lifeless body of Malak Rabah Abu Jazar, a Palestinian girl from Gaza whom the sea waves pushed to Turkish shores after a failed escape from Gaza’s open-air prison to a more secure life. All that will haunt you, and ignoring it is at our peril.

Along Gaza’s separating fence, massive crowds still confront Israeli snipers hiding behind sand mounds and in their military jeeps, going forward and backward depending on Israel’s level of lethal force used against them. The Great Return March continues for its 7th month, with the field repeatedly turned into a traumatic scene of bloodshed and repression, all documented by local news and people on the ground who want to remind the world of the gruesome injustices Palestinians endure and push for an action that could bring it to an end.

As these atrocities continue with impunity, dominant western media discourse is turning these horrific events into a spectacle that diverts attention from the unjust reality that Palestinians live under Israel and their legitimate claims, and still start every news report with an Israeli military statement justifying its crimes. If the media succeeded in desensitizing you, just remember that if you accumulate the tears of all the families who are grieving at least a member killed, maimed, or drawn in the sea, or jailed, those floods of tears would bury earth underneath the sea.

Despite this longstanding and ongoing process of dehumanization, demonization, and pacification, and the consequently intensified Israeli repression, protesters are not deterred from returning to the fence. For them, the choices remain between a living hell or a dignified death. They are desperate for the world to bare witness to Israel’s criminality. They express the urgency of a political solution that is not limited to the boundaries of Gaza and lifting the siege, hence the demand for the Right of Return.

Palestinians also call out for a competent Palestinian leadership to invest in this inspirational popular resistance and sacrifice. They call upon them to correct the path that 1993 Oslo peace accords marked with internal divisions and marginalization of the backbone issues of our anti-colonial struggle for delusional autonomy over bantustan-structured territories (where they are actually servants of the Israeli occupation).

Palestinians sacrifice to remind internal and external actors that our anti-colonial struggle is about liberation, not independence. This was, is and will continue to be the nature of our struggle despite the damning hands that attempt to redefine it and distort it.

Shahd Abusalama is a PhD student on Palestinian cinema at Sheffield Hallam University, born and raised in Jabalia Refugee Camp, northern Gaza, Palestine. She is an artist, activist, the author of Palestine from My Eyes blog, and a co-founder of London-based Hawiyya Dance Company. Follow her on Twitter at @ShahdAbusalama.

Courtesy: https://mondoweiss.net/

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In a report published on Monday, DCIP said that between January and July, the number of slain Palestinian children was three times higher than during the same time period in 2017.

According to the group, Israeli forces have killed more Palestinian children since January this year than in any previous year of the past decade, outside of large-scale Israeli military offensives.

On August 5th, the day before the report was published, 17-year-old Ahmad Jihad Ahmad al-Aydi from Gaza succumbed to wounds he had sustained on the first day of Great March of Return protests on March 30th.

Al-Aydi was one of four minors who died of gunshot wounds between July 27 and August 5 after Israeli forces shot them during protests on the the Gaza border.

The other three were identified as Muath Ziad Ibrahim al-Soury, 15, Moemen Fathi Yousef al-Hams, 16, and Majdi Ramzi Kamal al-Satri, 11.

The majority of the children killed in 2018 were killed in Gaza, according to DCIP, with at least 22 of those children killed in the context of the Great March of Return protests.

The ongoing popular demonstrations have been violently suppressed by Israeli forces, who have killed 160 Palestinians and injured over 17,000 more, according to numbers from the Gaza Ministry of Health.

The majority of the slain children, according to DCI, were shot with live ammunition, while two were struck by artillery shells.

Of those killed by live ammunition, 13 children were shot in the head, neck, or chest, the group said said.
 

Arkan Mezher. (Photo: Twitter)
 

One of those children shot in the chest was 14-year-old Arkan Mizher, who was shot and killed by Israeli forces shot during an arrest raid in Dheisheh refugee camp in the middle of the night on July 23.

“Israeli forces have operated with near complete impunity for so long that unlawful killings and other flagrant violations of international law have become the norm,” Ayed Abu Eqtaish, Accountability Program director at DCIP said in the report.

The group added that “DCIP evidence has determined on multiple occasions that children killed along the Gaza Strip perimeter did not pose a direct, mortal threat at the time of their death,” while noting that under international law, the use lethal force is strictly reserved for instances when a”direct and mortal threat to life or of serious injury exists.”

The number of Palestinian children who died at the hands of the Israeli occupation this year has doubled in comparison to 2017, during which 15 children were killed, according to DCIP records.

Courtesy: https://mondoweiss.net

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The kindergarteners rallied for three child prisoners in particular, a young girl named Razan Abu Sal, 13, who was sentenced to 13 and a half months and a fine of $870 (3000 NIS), Shadi Farrah, 12, who has already served two years of his three year sentence, and the infamous Ahed Tamimi, 17, who was detained (at age 16) on charges of incitement and slapping an Israeli soldier. She has become a worldwide symbol of child imprisonment and the Palestinian struggle for freedom.

(Photo: Human Rights Defenders)
 

Israeli settler Tzippi Shissel films Palestinian children as they demonstrate in Hebron. (Photo: Human Rights Defenders)
 

Activists with Human Rights Defenders, Badee Dwaik and Arif Jabar, organized the rally in one of the most contentious areas of Hebron, the Tel Rumeida neighborhood where Palestinians systematically experience violence from settlers, and the Israeli soldiers in the area tend to turn a blind eye, or back up those settlers.

Badee Dwaik told the group that the demonstration marked the start of the annual campaign, “Dismantle the Ghetto,” an effort to publicize and protest the horrors of life under the illegal occupation in the city of Hebron.  The campaign is a call for the lift the closures inside of the city and the suppression of its population.  It will be held on the 24th anniversary of the massacre at the Ibrahimi mosque by Baruch Goldstein. On February 25, 1994, Goldstein opened fire on Palestinians worshippers inside of the mosque, killing 29.

At the demonstration the children carried signs protesting the occupation, an all encompassing-word for the abuses and indignities that are carried out against them by Israeli soldiers and settlers. They chanted, “every child deserves a childhood.” They asked the international community to protect them and for international law to be upheld. They carried banners speaking of their anger at Israel and the Western countries that support Israel’s racist, apartheid, colonial, occupation of the Palestinian people. Israel is the only country in the world today that maintains an apartheid regime.

The demonstration culminated with settler attacks on two Palestinian journalists, Du’aa Yahya al-Atrash from Ma’an television and Zidan al-Sharbat. When the event ended, Israeli soldiers prevented the children from returning to their homes.As the protest concluded, settlers approached the group. Anat Cohen, a settler notorious for slapping, kicking and yelling at activists, was filmed hitting Du’aa Yahya. Another settler, Ofer Hassan also known for his violence, attacked Human Rights Defenders’ Arif Jabar. Hassan even attempted to stop a Palestinian from filming the protest from inside his house even as he pleaded, “I am in my own home. Get out of here!”

Badee Dwaik is the Coordinator of Human Rights Defenders Group in Palestine and an activist in Hebron.

Courtesy: http://mondoweiss.net

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Israeli soldiers detain a Palestinian minor inside of Hebron’s Old City on October 13, 2017. (Photo: Christian Peacemakers Team)

“I kept on walking, but then I saw soldiers in front of me and behind me, then a group of soldiers came out of their jeeps,” Dwaik said in a interview produced by the Christian Peacemakers Team (CPT), a collection of internationals who volunteer to monitor human rights violations in the West Bank.

In a recording of the interview, the video cuts between Dwaik recounting the October 13, 2017 events and shots of soldiers hastily detaining the minors. At first the children are rounded up on Hebron’s unpaved streets. The soldiers take them to a nearby checkpoint. CPT identified the post as Checkpoint 56, an Israeli army crossing that divides Hebron in half where one side is under the security control of the Palestinian government and one side is under the jurisdiction of the Israeli military.

Later footage shows soldiers swiftly locking the minors inside of a metal cage situated at the checkpoint. A crowd gathers around and the next shot captures around 30 soldiers, journalists and Palestinian bystanders are in the area. The scene is calm enough that the soldiers do not seem to pay any attention to the onlookers and journalists. In a daily incident report compiled by the Palestinian government, the event was logged as “Israeli forces raided Hebron city”–without noting any children were detained. 

The exact details of what occurred when Dwaik was detained is not explained. His narration is spliced between shots of the Palestinian children in and around the cage: “The soldiers dragged us to the checkpoint then to the military base. They beat us and afterwards they handcuffed and blindfolded us,” Dwaik said.

Next he explains he and the others were held for three hours at an army base in Hebron before being released:
 

“All of them came inside, almost ten soldiers. The soldiers hit 18 of us. They hit us hard and hit some of the other boys and others were hit in the eyes. Some of the boys couldn’t see or walk. They hit a ten year old boy and threw him on the floor and they told him if they saw him again, he would be arrested. They threatened us and said that they would arrest us again and will demolish our house. They took me and interrogated me and asked me to give the names of other boys. I said I don’t know and they started to threaten me. And told me to tell them so that I can be safely released or they will arrest my father. I was scared and I wished my family was with me. Ofer, the settler, was allowed to be inside with us and looked at us.”

A statement from CPT said, “All of those arrested were later released without charge.”

According to Defense of Children International-Palestine, the Israeli military detains 500-700 Palestinian children per year. “The majority of Palestinian child detainees are charged with throwing stones, and three out of four experience physical violence during arrest, transfer or interrogation,” says a factsheet on the group’s website.

Allison Deger is the Assistant Editor of Mondoweiss.net. Follow her on twitter at @allissoncd.

Courtesy: Mondoweiss.net
 

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