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			BostontoPalestine Boston support group for the International Solidarity Movement

	Home About us News from Palestine Contact Email Subscribe Donate Current Delegation Summer 2005 Past Delegations Olive Harvest 2004 Freedom Summer 2004 Past Campaigns Events Photos Videos (ISM) Rachel Corrie Links Speakers Be a Delegate Press faq Actions!		Dunya is a local activist supported by bostontopalestine. Only a month after returning to Boston from the Olive Harvest Campaign (Oct-Nov 2002), she is back in Palestine for a three month stint with the International Women's Peace Service (IWPS: www.womenspeacepalestine.org). The IWPS is a participant organization in the International Solidarity Movement , confronting Israeli occupation in the Northern West Bank. Much of the current work is focusing on "The Wall" being built on Palestinian land in the Tulkarem/Qualqilya area. See below for details. Dunya's reports: 2) Jan 20,21 2003 Nazlat Issa Incident report and photos by: Dunya Naslat Issa 1.20.03 Nazlat Issa, is a Palestinian village north of Tulkarem just east of the Green Line in occupied Palestine. A vibrant market has developed in this village with '48 Arabs, also know as Palestinian Israelis, being a primary customer base. This village is also one of the 15 northern West Bank villages that sit between the Green line and the new "security" wall Israel is building to create a physical barrier Israel and west bank Palestinians. Nazlat Issa and the other villages will be essentially annexed or isolated within Israel, and their residents separated from friends and relatives, social services, work, schools, medical care, etc... in neighboring villages. These people will be unable to enter Israel or enter the West Bank will be forced to live in a virtual no-man's land under Israeli control. This is part of a systematic effort on the part of Isreal to confiscate Palestinian land for illegal Israeli settlement or colony construction and expansion and bypass roads. It is also part of a plan to increasingly limit Palestinians ability to move in the occupied territories using mechanisms such as curfews, closures of particular areas, checkpoints and roadblocks. Through these and other methods, Israel is creating fractured isolated communities and tremendous economic and social hardship. There is a great concern that these conditions could cause Palestinians to relocate. Such a forced population displacement would also be considered a defacto "transfer". In Naslat Issa, Israeli authorities have ordered the demolition of nearly 200 shops and six homes. The reason given by Israel for orders is the "lack of building permission". This means that the buildings were built without construction permits and while the land is Palestinian owned, the state of Israel enforces its construction guidelines in the West Bank using them to raise buildings. It was a frenetic scene when we arrived. The areas Israeli military commander had told shopkeepers the buildings would be destroyed within twenty-four hours and that he would determine exactly when without warning. Shop owners were hurriedly packing and trucking their wares to unknown locations. A building supply house was unloading window from its shelves in an attempt to save as much merchandise as possible. On the next corner a several house wares shops was being packed up, on the next block it was a grocery store while a car wash had nothing to pack and would lose everything in a matter of hours. A noticeable number of journalists were in the main street which runs between Israeli and Palestine. There were also close to fifteen activists principally from ISM. A meeting was called with shopkeepers and strategies to resist the bulldozers and some plans were made to try to gather in the morning. As the evening wore on I went into a small food store to buy something to drink. Very little packing of this shop was taking place the shelves were fully stocked with canned and boxed goods, the ceilings were hung with household goods and there were several display refrigerators full of food and drink. When I went to pay for my bottle of juice my money was refused. I insisted and was told that they were about to loose everything and that my few sheckles could do nothing for them. Naslat Issa 1.21.03 Three other activists including myself were at the market by 6:30 am. We arrived to find military and bulldozers and other heavy equipment arriving on trucks in the area of the market. Soldiers told us that the area had been deemed a "closed military zone" and showed us a photocopied sheet in Hebrew with a cupid printed in the corner which confirmed that the village of Nazlat Issa and it's neighbor the village of Baqa Ash Sharqia were closed military zone. Children were walking to school and cars were driving through this "closed military zone," and though the soldiers tried to pressure us to leave, we called for more activists to join us. Approximately 15 activists arrived over the next thirty minutes. Shopkeepers also arrived slowly to continue to empty their goods, towns people came to watch as did some journalists. More heavy construction equipment arrived as well. We did not see many of the Palestinians we'd been planning with the night before and the general feeling seemed to be that resistance was futile. Though the pressure from the army for us to leave the area, they continued to allow Jewish settlers coming from inside the West Bank through the checkpoint into Israel. The military started literally pushing people out of the area in preparation to proceed with the demolition plan. My small affinity group went into a shop to help a frantic family wrap and box the fragile glassware and home goods filling the shelves of their shop. We worked there for about 40 minutes until the electricity to the shop was cut and we went into the street to find only military, police and demolition crews. Eventually all of the International activists and local Palestinians were forcibly cleared from the area. A Palestinian member of the ISM, Osama Qashoo, was detained by Israeli Border Police who forced to lie on the wet ground then into a jeep and then took him to Army base near Jenin where he was interrogated before being set free later that night. Close to two hundred people watched as wrecking cranes and bulldozers accompanied by Israeli soldiers and Border Police went to work on the bringing down building after building. In total an estimated 60 Palestinian-owned shops and businesses housed in 28 of the approximately 170 shops buildings in the market were destroyed in three hours. The rest are scheduled to be demolished in the coming days. The above Israeli measures violate international law and the following articles of the Fourth Geneva Convention: -- Article 33 of the Fourth Geneva Convention forbids collective punishment and states that a person shall not be punished for an offense he or she has not personally committed. This article explicitly relates to administrative punishment imposed on persons or groups because of acts that they did not personally commit. Article 50 of the Hague Regulations states a comparable prohibition. -- Article 39 stipulates: "Protected persons [residents of occupied lands] who, as a result of the war, have lost their gainful employment, shall be granted the opportunity to find paid employment." It thereby prohibits the imposition a permanent "closure" on the Occupied Territories, such as Israel has done since 1993. -- Article 49 forbids deportations and any "forcible transfers," which would include such common practices as revoking Jerusalem IDs or banning Palestinians from returning from work, study or travel abroad. It also stipulates that "The Occupying Power shall not...transfer parts of its own civilian population into territories it occupies" a clear ban on settlements. -- Article 53 reads: "Any destruction by the Occupying Power of real or personal property belonging individually or collectively to private persons...is prohibited." Under this provision the practice of demolishing Palestinian houses is banned, but so is the wholesale destruction of the Palestinian infrastructure (including its civil society institutions and records in Ramallah) destroyed in the reoccupation of March-April 2002.. -- Article 64 forbids changes in the local legal system that, among other things, alienate the local population from its land and property, as Israel has done through massive land expropriations. -- Article 146 holds accountable individuals who have committed "grave breaches" of the Convention. According to Article 147, this includes many acts routinely practiced under the Occupation, such as willful killing, torture or inhuman treatment, willfully causing great suffering or serious injury, unlawful deportation, taking of hostages and extensive destruction and appropriation of property. Israeli courts have thus far failed to charge or prosecute Israeli officials, military personnel or police who have committed such acts. 1)Wednesday, January 8th, 2003 Arrival Dunya, near Salfit, West Bank Dear B2P, I made it back into Israel/Palestine easily. Unfortunately, Angie Zelter* was being put on a plane back to the U.K. at around the same time of my arrival. Given that Angie was refused entry and Kate, another IWPS colleague, et al have been increasingly harassed, I came straight to the house in Haris to check in. In the last days I've been to Yanoun, Nablus (where I was able to check in with Marty*), Tulkarem and Salfit for demonstrations and meetings and a bit of check point watching/facilitating. I am thinking about which projects to take up as my own and I think they will probably include the wall, ISM and Yanoun. The slow choke here continues on an individual and collective basis. Check points are terrible and movement between non-contiguous towns is at a virtual stand still or at a minimum extremely curtailed. Much progress on the wall has taken place. There is lots of heavy equipment posted in all the towns and the landscape is DRASTICLLY changed from when I was here a month ago. I imagine the chunks of it will complete by the time I leave. I'm trying to curb my disbelief but I find myself saying "I can't believe the world is taking this sitting down." It also feels, here in Haris, to me like poverty is beginning to win the race with violence in our area for attacking the spirit of the people. To follow is a recent posting about the wall. I was able to buy the video camera and have already done an interview and made some other recordings with it. Thanks for agreeing to fund it and for doing so at the eleventh hour. I'm sure very good use will continue to be made of it. Thinking of all of you. Happy New Year. Dunya END REPORT Angie is a veteran ISMer and founding member of the IWPS. Last week she was forcibly detained and deported at Ben-Gurion airport upon on her arrival in Israel/Palestine. [b2p list moderator] Marty is another bostontopalestine delegate operating in the northern West Bank. Stay tuned for Marty's reports. --------------------------- For Latest News from the Apartheid Wall Campaign Forwarded from Dunya click here** For more information: International Solidarity Movement: www.palsolidarity.org The Rapprochement Center: www.rapprochement.org