Gaza Unsilenced Read online

  These sites have historical importance and provided irreplaceable material evidence of Palestinian culture and history. Al-Saifi believes that by destroying mosques, “the occupation was erasing the historical proof and evidence of our presence in Palestine.”

  The devastation of hundreds of years of Gaza’s Islamic history would be expected to have done harm to Gaza’s identity, but Al-Saifi insists that Israel could not erase the Palestinian memory and the peoples’ right to exist. “I believe that the Israelis will not succeed in this because to us, mosques are not merely stones, but hold great and holy value to all of the Muslim generations.”

  The damage to these irreplaceable landmarks has led Israel to claim that it targeted mosques and civilian buildings used for military purposes, such as the stockpiling of weapons and as meeting points for the fighters of the Qassam Brigades. The IDF alleged that Hamas “cruelly abused mosques by using them for terror activities” in a statement to the Associated Press.

  Hamas has denied the accusation and many in Gaza feel that the allegation is an attack on their way of life. “Every citizen in Gaza is proud of these fighters,” Dr. Al-Saifi said, “and mosques are completely open places; they do not contain any shelters or secret rooms, they are open houses of worship.” He went on to say that Israel knowingly targets civilian sites. “There is no doubt that the Israeli intelligence agencies have their eyes and ears in Gaza, and they are certain that these are fabrications.”

  The damage done to these sites has undermined the territory’s social infrastructure. For the residents of Gaza, many of the targeted mosques provided social, educational and health facilities.

  The Palestinians are of the opinion that Israel does not distinguish between military and civilian targets in their aggression against Gaza. Their suspicions appear to be validated by UN OCHA figures released in a recent report. They suggest that at least 80 percent of those killed were civilians. These figures indicate that Israel has found little difficulty in treating civilian infrastructure as legitimate military targets considering that it has targeted churches and other buildings not accused of being used by Qassam fighters.

  Many have noted Israel’s disproportionate use of force in areas that it associates with enemy fighters. It is an army that is used to inflicting widespread devastation on the civilian population, which is supposed to serve as a deterrent.

  For Al-Saifi, this strategy is abhorrent: “Honestly, the targeting of mosques on such an unprecedented large-scale reflects the barbaric and brutal nature of the Israeli occupation, and the army’s frustration and sense of failure, as it reached an impasse. It resorted to targeting civilians and places of worship, which have been guaranteed protection and immunity under all international conventions.”

  The pursuit of collective punishment is an international war crime and it appears that these violations by Israel have been observed clearly by international institutions. The retiring UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Navi Pillay, condemned the operations in Gaza. In a statement to Britain’s Guardian newspaper she said, “There seems to be a strong possibility that international law has been violated.”

  In a similar incident, despite being given the coordinates of UNRWA schools they were bombed under the pretext of the presence of missiles. “Even though the Arab and foreign UNRWA spokesperson stressed and confirmed that the occupation’s claims were fabricated,” complained Al-Saifi. The UN has condemned the bombing of these schools and notified the IDF of their locations repeatedly. It was alleged by Israel that mosques and UNRWA schools all facilitated the activities of the Palestinian resistance groups.

  Israeli shelling damaged the ancient al-Sousi mosque in Shati refugee camp in the northern Gaza Strip, but the center of the main structure continued to be used by residents for prayer. According to Euro-Mid Observer for Human Rights, Israeli shelling during the 51-day attack completely destroyed 62 mosques and 10 Muslim cemeteries; 109 mosques were partially destroyed, together with one church and one Christian cemetery.5

  Photo by Mohammed Asad.

  Because of this, Al-Saifi has questioned Israel over its accusations of “terror” activities in historic mosques; he believes that the world has seen through Israel’s empty justifications of war crimes. “All of the international community organizations and international observers know that these are lies.”

  Indeed, the targeting of religious and cultural sites as civilian sites constitutes a violation of international humanitarian law; it is covered by Article 4 of the Hague Convention of 1954 for the Protection of Cultural Property. Under this convention, all feasible precautions must be taken to avoid damage of cultural property in cases of war. It is also designated a criminal act under Article 8 of the ICC Statute which stipulates that “intentionally directing attacks against buildings dedicated to religion... [and] historic monuments...constitutes a war crime.”

  In recent months, the destruction of historic monuments and houses of worship has usually been associated with radical groups like Islamic State (ISIS) rather than state actors like Israel. In July, ISIS destroyed the mosque of Prophet Younis (Jonah) in Mosul and several Shiite Mosques in Iraq. ISIS’s presence has warranted considerable responses from the international community. Yet Israel’s attack on Gaza’s heritage of the same nature has created little response.

  The international community and Israel itself will be reluctant to label the assault on Gaza an act of terror. Domestically, it is believed that Israel’s agenda of eliminating the people of the Gaza Strip in the name of “security” stands above criticism from anyone and everyone. “Israel wanted to give itself an excuse” to commit acts of brutality, claims Al-Saifi.

  In Palestine, there has been considerable pressure to get the international community to hold Israel to account for its actions. “The Palestinian Authority,” insists Al-Saifi, “must go to the ICC in The Hague...in order for us to witness the occupation being prosecuted, just as the criminals in Yugoslavia and Bosnia were prosecuted.”

  Middle East Monitor, September 10, 2014, http://bit.ly/1CWWo5g

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  Elsewhere in Palestine...

  As Gaza bled, Palestinians throughout the country felt its agony. This chapter explores not only the Palestinian response to Israel’s brutal offensive but also the events that unfolded in the weeks prior to and during the offensive. Racist rampages by Israeli settlers and vigilantes made the streets unsafe for Palestinians; from Jerusalem in particular, eyewitnesses reported several attempted kidnappings of Palestinian children by vengeful Israelis on the loose, finding support for their lawlessness in the wildly irresponsible statements of public officials and rabbis. Palestinian citizens in Israel, whose presence has long been a thorn in the side of the government, found their own status as precarious as ever. The Gaza Strip remained sealed, the Rafah and Erez crossings closed. Viewed as a whole, the events of the summer of 2014 are simply the most recent expression of Israel’s systematic campaign of suppression and control of the Palestinian nation.

  Administrative Detainees on Hunger Strike Issue Their Will as They Stand “at the Edge of Death”

  Shahd Abusalama

  Our Palestinian detainees have been battling the Israel Prison Service (IPS) with their empty stomachs since April 24, embarking on the longest-known mass hunger strike in the history of the Palestinian prisoners movement. Hunger is the only remaining weapon they can use against the IPS and its well-armed Israeli occupation soldiers.

  They launched this hunger strike to call for an end to their detention with no charge or trial based on secret “evidence” submitted to a military court that is kept from the detainees and their lawyers—an unjust policy that Israel calls administrative detention. One hundred and twenty administrative detainees launched this mass hunger strike, which grew to involve nearly three hundred prisoners, according to the rights group Addameer.

  Our dignified prisoners are striking in protest of Israel’s violation of an agreement reached with the IPS after the 28-day mass
hunger strike that ended on May 14, 2012. According to that deal, the use of administrative detention—the key issue behind the hunger strike—would be restricted and administrative detention orders would not be renewed without fresh evidence being brought before a military judge. However, Israel did not abide by the agreement and has continued its practice of arbitrary administrative detention.

  Strikers Hospitalized

  Administrative detainee Ayman Tbeisheh from Dura village near Hebron in the occupied West Bank has exceeded one hundred days of refusing food in protest of his administrative detention orders which have been continuously renewed since his last arrest in May 2013, according to al-Quds al-Arabi newspaper. Tbeisheh has spent a total of eleven years in Israeli jails, including nearly five years under administrative detention.

  According to Addameer, Tbeisheh first began to refuse food on May 22, 2013, immediately after his four-month administrative detention order was confirmed in a military court. He suspended his strike after 105 days, when he thought he reached a deal with the IPS. But this was soon broken as his order was again renewed, despite his deteriorated health.

  Ayman Tbeisheh told Palestinian lawyer Ibrahim Al-Araj, who managed to visit him during his previous hunger strike, “I will continue this open hunger strike until I put an end to the ghost of administrative detention that keeps chasing me.”

  Soon after he regained some of his physical strength, he re-launched his hunger strike on February 24, 2014. Tbeisheh has since been placed in Assaf Harofe Medical Center where he lies shackled to a hospital bed that may become his deathbed at any moment.

  Ayman’s condition is no different than the rest of administrative detainees whose hunger for freedom and dignity drove them to launch the mass hunger strike that has been continuing for 51 days. Eighty hunger strikers have been hospitalized as a result of their ongoing hunger strike, but they persevere in this battle for dignity.

  Despite their weak bodies that are drained of energy, their hands and feet are shacked to their hospital beds. They are threatened with force-feeding on a daily basis, an inhumane and dangerous practice that Israel’s parliament, the Knesset, is close to setting into law.

  Death Penalty

  My father, who spent a total of fifteen years in Israeli jails, calls force-feeding “a death penalty.” He participated in the Nafha prison mass hunger strike in 1980 which lasted for 33 days. He was subjected to force-feeding and thankfully survived. But his comrades Rasem Halawa from Jabaliya refugee camp and Ali al-Jaafary from Dheisheh camp were victims of this murderous practice that aimed to break their hunger strike, and were killed after being subjected to force-feeding.

  The Israel Prison Service escalates its oppression of the hunger strikers as their health constantly deteriorates. They put them in windowless isolation cells, keep their hands and legs shackled for tens of hours, deny them family and lawyer visits, and they even deny them access to salt, which is necessary for their survival.

  The strikers are committed to “hunger until either victory or martyrdom,” the same as Khader Adnan, Hana al-Shalabi, Mahmoud Sarsak, Samer Issawi, and other ex-detainees who freed themselves after heroic battles of hunger strike against the IPS.

  Prisoners’ Letter

  Below is my translation of a letter our administrative detainees managed to smuggle on June 8 to call upon humanity and people of conscience for popular and international support of their battle for justice. The ex-detainee Allam Kaaby read it during a press conference in front of the sit-in tent erected in front of the International Committee of the Red Cross in Gaza in solidarity with our Palestinian prisoners’ open-ended mass hunger strike.

  Despite the chains and the prisons’ bars and walls, this is a will from those who are standing at the edge of death to the guards of our homeland, Palestine.

  After leaving the isolation cells which are no longer able to tolerate our pains, illnesses and corroded bodies, from our hospital beds to which we are shackled by chains and guard dogs, from amidst the jailers who keep watching our heart monitors that may announce our death any moment, from the edge of death, we send our call which could be the last for some of us. It might be the time to announce our will before we embrace our people as dignified martyrs. Our call is our voice, our scream, our will. We are the administrative detainees who are heading towards immortality, towards embracing the sun of dignity which might mark at the same time, the end of the battle for dignity. We raise our voice, hoping that it will reach our revolutionary people.

  First, we call upon you to intensify your support of the hunger strikers who are not yet martyred; the fighters who fight our fascist enemy with their bodies deserve from you a stand of loyalty that prevents the continuation of our bloodshed which will never stop until the achievement of our just demands.

  Second, the pains of hunger damaged some of our organs but some organs must be still intact. As death is waiting for us, we declare that nothing will stand in the way of our sacrifices, even death. Therefore, we donate our functioning organs to the fighters, poor and oppressed people who are in need. We are waiting a visit from the International Committee of The Red Cross to endorse these donations.

  Third, we call on you to stay faithful to our blood and the blood of all martyrs who sacrificed their souls over the course of our Palestinian struggle. Faithfulness is not just through words, but through revolutionary practice that knows no hesitance nor weakness.

  Fourth, hold on to our historical and legitimate rights and never give up an inch of Palestine, from the river to the sea. The right to return is the bridge to our historic rights. These rights cannot be restored without resistance, which is the only language that our enemy understands.

  Fifth, don’t fail prisoners who remain alive after us, as those who sacrifice their freedom as a price for their people’s freedom deserve freedom rather than death.

  To our dignified people in Palestine and diaspora, to the free people and freedom fighters worldwide, we will let our screams be heard despite the darkness of Israeli jails, which are graves for the living. To people of dead conscience worldwide, our Palestinian people will continue the struggle until victory. We bid farewell with smiling faces.

  Reading their words, which embrace pain and disappointment, must make us all ashamed as we watch them die slowly. Changing our profile pictures to a picture that shows solidarity with their battle for dignity cannot do them much help. We have to move beyond superficial solidarity to serious actions that will bring meaningful change to them. Act before we count more martyrs among Palestinian heroes behind Israeli bars. Their death would be our shame.

  The Electronic Intifada, June 11, 2014, http://bit.ly/1FcABaq

  Merciless Israeli Mobs Are Hunting Palestinians

  Rania Khalek

  All eyes are on Gaza, where the death toll from Israel’s merciless bombing campaign has topped 1,000.

  But back in Jerusalem, where sixteen-year-old Muhammad Abu Khudair was burned alive by Jewish vigilantes in a “revenge killing” incited by Israeli politicians early this month, right-wing lynch mobs continue to roam the streets in search of Arabs to attack.

  Their most recent victims are twenty-year-old Palestinians Amir Shwiki and Samer Mahfouz from the Beit Hanina neighborhood in occupied East Jerusalem. The pair were severely beaten into unconsciousness on Friday night by Israeli youths armed with iron bars and baseball bats.

  Mahfouz told the Israeli newspaper Haaretz that he and Shwiki were on their way to the light rail when they were stopped by “a man [coming] from the direction of Neve Yaakov,” an illegal Jewish-only Israeli settlement in occupied East Jerusalem.

  “He said give me a cigarette. I told him I don’t have any, and he heard [from my accent] I’m Arab and went away, coming back with his friends, maybe twelve people. They had sticks and iron bars and they hit us over the head,” Mahfouz recounted.

  Haaretz added, “According to the victims, police officers that arrived at the scene did not call an ambulance, and they were
instead evacuated by passersby to receive medical treatment at a Beit Khanina [sic] clinic. They were later rushed to Hadassah University Hospital, Ein Karem in serious condition.”

  Though investigators believe the beating to be racially motivated, no one has been arrested.

  Police Complicity

  Israeli police have a pattern of ignoring hate crimes against Palestinians, as was the case immediately following the reported kidnapping of Muhammad Abu Khudair. Police did not immediately respond when his family called to report that he had been kidnapped and they actively thwarted efforts to locate those who murdered him by spreading false rumors that Abu Khudair was murdered by his family in an “honor killing” over his sexuality.

  Police also neglected to respond when Abu Khudair’s murderers tried to kidnap ten-year-old Mousa Zalum from the same East Jerusalem neighborhood two days earlier.

  When police aren’t busy ignoring Jewish vigilante violence against Palestinians, they are actively participating in it.

  On Thursday night last week, police teamed up with a Jewish mob assaulting two Palestinian men while they were delivering bread to grocery markets on Jaffa Street in West Jerusalem from their van.

  The men—identified by Ma‘an News Agency as twenty-year-old Amir Mazin Abu Eisha and Laith Ubeidat (age not specified)—were encircled and beaten with empty bottles by a mob of some twenty to thirty Israelis, according to their attorney, Khaldun Nijim.

  Rather than assist the men as they were being attacked, Nijim told Ma’an, “The Israeli police stopped them in their van and pointed guns at them.”

  Nijim added, “After they drove away a few meters, the police shot at them. They then stopped and were assaulted again.”