Monthly Archive for January, 2009

Israeli Settlements Expand

Published on January 30, 2009 in Israel, Middle East and Palestine. 0 Comments Tags: , , .

The US,  the EU, the Arab League, Fatah and even Hamas have accepted in principle the two state solution to the ongoing conflict in Israel/Palestine. In a nutshell, this would involve Israel moving back to their 1967 borders, the Palestinian state being set up in the West Bank and Gaza and a just solution for the refugee problem. However, Israel, given their continued illegal expansion of the settlements in the West Bank, seem to be the only holdouts.

According to Peace Now, an Israeli Human Rights organisation, 1,257 new structures were built in settlements during 2008, compared to 800 in 2007, an increase of 57 percent.

WASHINGTON, Jan 28 (IPS) – Israeli settlement construction in the West Bank increased sharply in 2008, despite Israel’s pledge at the beginning of the year to freeze all construction, according to a new report by an Israeli non-governmental organisation.

The report, released Wednesday by the group Peace Now, found that settlement construction in 2008 increased by almost 60 percent, including new construction both inside and outside of the security barrier and within illegal settlement outposts.

The Peace Now study was released on the same day that newly appointed U.S. peace envoy George Mitchell – a longtime critic of settlement construction – arrived in Israel. The increase in construction is expected to be a source of friction in Mitchell’s negotiations with Israeli leaders.

Critics warned that the increase in construction is likely to damage the already fragile prospects for a two-state solution in Israel and Palestine.

“Every structure built in a settlement makes the two-state solution more difficult to achieve and further jeopardises Israel’s future as a Jewish democratic country,” said Debra DeLee, president of Peace Now’s sister organisation Americans for Peace Now.

The report found that at least 1,257 new structures were built in West Bank settlements in 2008, up sharply from 800 in 2007. This figure did not include the 261 new structures built in illegal outposts in the West Bank.

Nearly 40 percent of the new structures were built east of the security barrier, many of them extending deep into the West Bank.

And despite the Israeli government’s pledge to crack down on the illegal outposts, the study found that “not a single real outpost was evacuated”.

Additionally, the report found evidence that land confiscations were continuing to take place, contradicting the government’s stated policy.

Following the Annapolis peace conference in late 2007, Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert pledged to freeze settlement construction and remove some existing settlements.

In November 2008, he announced that the government would cut off funding for illegal outposts – thereby admitting that it had continued to fund them up to that point.

The Peace Now report found that the Israeli government had encouraged the increase in settlement construction both through active aid and through non-enforcement of its stated policies.

Also on Wednesday, U.S. envoy Mitchell arrived in Jerusalem and met with leaders including Olmert, Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni, and Defence Minister Ehud Barak. He is scheduled to meet with Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas and Prime Minister Salaam Fayad in Ramallah, and Likud party chief Binyamin Netanyahu on Friday.

Although preliminary reports indicated that the aftermath of the war in Gaza was the primary topic under discussion at Wednesday’s meetings, the settlements are expected to be a continued sticking point going forward.

Mitchell served an earlier stint as Middle East peace envoy in 2001, after which his committee released a report that was harshly critical of Israeli settlement policies.

The 2001 Mitchell report called on Israel to “freeze all settlement activity, including the ‘natural growth’ of existing settlements”. This call was taken up in the George W. Bush administration’s “road map” for the peace process, which formed the basis of the 2007 Annapolis conference.

Mitchell’s insistence on a settlement freeze as a precondition for the peace process led many right-leaning pro-Israel groups in the U.S. to oppose his recent selection as peace envoy. Abraham Foxman, the influential head of the Anti-Defamation League, stated that he was “concerned” about Mitchell’s “meticulously even-handed” approach to the region.

Nevertheless, in the eight years since Mitchell’s initial report, his calls for a halt to the settlement project have become a mainstream consensus view.

Olmert and his predecessor Ariel Sharon – who had been an original architect of the settlement project – both came to believe that it was likely to doom Israel if left unchecked.

Given the basic demographic trends, an Israeli state encompassing the West Bank and Gaza would soon have an Arab majority. This would force Israel to choose between becoming a secular and binational state with full political rights for all citizens, or an undemocratic state that denied full political rights to Arab residents.

It was partially this logic led Sharon to withdraw from the Gaza Strip and remove Israeli settlements there in 2005.

However, the challenge in the West Bank is much greater. There are now estimated to be over 285,000 settlers in the West Bank, many of them militantly opposed to a two-state solution. The Israeli government has generally paid lip service to the goal of curbing the West Bank settlers, but has been reluctant to crack down on them.

If Netanyahu becomes the next Israeli prime minister, as currently seems likely, he and Mitchell could be set to clash on the settlements issue.

Netanyahu has recently tacked to the centre on the issue, telling Quartet envoy Tony Blair on Sunday that a Likud-led government would build no new settlements.

However, Netanyahu said that he would continue to permit “natural growth” of existing settlements – a qualification that strips his promise of much of its meaning.

Israel has not officially created any new settlements in over a decade, instead ascribing all settlement construction to “natural growth”. It was this consideration that led both Mitchell’s 2001 report and Bush’s road map to explicitly forbid construction under the auspices of “natural growth”.

Gershom Gorenberg, author of “The Accidental Empire”, a 2007 history of the settlements, urged Mitchell to stand firm against Netanyahu in an open letter published Wednesday in The American Prospect.

Netanyahu’s position is a “con”, Gorenberg wrote. “You need to insist on [a full settlement freeze] publicly in the months ahead”.

At the moment, however, none of the leading candidates for prime minister appears to have much appetite to confront the settlers. How much pressure Mitchell and the Obama administration are willing to exert on the Israeli government to do so will be one of the first tests of the U.S.-Israel relationship in the months ahead.

[MIDEAST: Peace Recedes as Israeli Settlements Expand]

For the full Peace Now report click here.

Arabs need 2 die

Published on January 29, 2009 in Israel, Middle East and Palestine. 0 Comments Tags: , , , .

The IDF is the most moral army in the world, it does not and never has made a policy of targeting civilians.

arabs-need-2-die

I saw the above Steve Bell cartoon in The Guardian the other day and remember thinking that it would have the hasabara brigade rushing off to their keyboards to flood the paper with emails complaining about anti-semitism. Sure enough, I found this post:

At The Guardian, cartoonist Steve Bell suggests Israel enjoys killing Arabs, and the tombstone dated “1948-2009″ drives his point home even clearer: this is the way Israel has always been.

Memo to Bell: Israel’s war is with Hamas, not the Palestinian people.

In the comments for this post was the following comment:

This is appalling. It’s spiteful in the extreme and will only exacerbate the level of anti semitism in the UK, which is already at an all time high.

I’m going to register my complaint with the Guardian in writing – I urge others to do the same.

Posted by: Tabatha at Jan 28, 2009 6:33:26 PM

However, Steve Bell’s cartoon actually uses grafitti left by Israeli “Defense” Force soldiers in Zeitoun and judging by what happened there it doesn’t really capture the full horror of the “incident”.

Helmi Samouni knelt yesterday on the floor of the bedroom he once shared with his wife and their five-month old son, scraping his fingers through a thick layer of ash and broken glass looking for mementoes of their life together. “I found a ring. I might find more,” he said.

His wife Maha and their child Muhammad were killed in the second week of Israel’s 22-day war in Gaza when they were shelled by Israeli forces as they took shelter nearby along with dozens of relatives. In total 48 people from one family are now known to have died that Monday morning, 5 January, in Zeitoun, on the southern outskirts of Gaza City.

Of all the horrors visited on the civilians of Gaza in this war the fate of the Samounis, a family of farmers who lived close together in simple breeze-block homes, was perhaps the gravest.

Around a dozen homes in this small area were destroyed, no more than piles of rubble in the sand yesterday. Helmi Samouni’s two-storey house was one of the few left standing, despite the gaping hole from a large tank shell that pierced his blackened bedroom wall. During the invasion it had been taken over by Israeli soldiers, who wrecked the furniture and set up sand-bagged shooting positions throughout.

They left behind their own unique detritus: bullet casings, roasted peanuts in tins with Hebrew script, a plastic bag containing a “High Quality Body Warmer”, dozens of olive-green waste disposal bags, some empty, some stinking full – the troops’ portable toilets.

But most disturbing of all was the graffiti they daubed on the walls of the ground floor. Some was in Hebrew, but much was naively written in English: “Arabs need 2 die”, “Die you all”, “Make war not peace”, “1 is down, 999,999 to go”, and scrawled on an image of a gravestone the words: “Arabs 1948-2009″.

There were several sketches of the Star of David flag. “Gaza here we are,” it said in English next to one.

Helmi’s brother Salah, 30, had an apartment in the same house. He too was pulling out what he could, including an Israeli work permit once issued to his father. “They gave him a permit and then they came from Israel and they killed him,” said Salah. In the attack he lost both his parents, Talal and Rahma, and his two-year-old daughter Aza.

During the war, Israel banned journalists from entering Gaza. But the accounts of Salah and his neighbours outside the rubble of their homes yesterday corroborate the accounts from witnesses given in the days after the attack, accounts which led the UN to describe the killings at Zeitoun as one of the gravest episodes of the war and the Red Cross to call it, in a rare public rebuke, “a shocking incident”.

More than a dozen bodies were pulled from the rubble on Sunday, and one more yesterday, bringing the Samouni death toll to 48, according to Dr Mouawia Hassanein, head of Gaza’s Emergency Medical Services. With more bodies being recovered each day, the death toll from Israel’s three-week war now stands at 1,360. On the Israeli side, 13 were killed.

On the second Saturday of the war, after a week of Israeli air strikes, there came a wave of heavy artillery shelling which preceded the ground invasion of Gaza. That night, Salah Samouni took shelter on the ground floor with 16 others from his family. By the next morning, Sunday 4 January, more neighbours had come looking for shelter and the number now there was approaching 50.

“They fired a shell into the upstairs floor and it started a fire,” said Salah. “We called the ambulance and the fire service, but no one was able to reach us.” Soon a group of Israeli soldiers approached. “They came and banged on the door and told everyone to leave the house,” he said. They walked a few metres down the dirt road and entered the large, single-storey home of Wa’el Samouni.

There they stayed for the rest of the day, now a group of around 100 men, women and children, with no food and little water. Though there may have been Palestinian fighters operating in the open fields around the houses, all the witnesses are adamant that those gathered in Wa’el Samouni’s house were all civilians and all from the same extended family.

On the Monday morning, four of the men – Salah among them – decided to go out to bring back firewood for cooking. “They fired a shell straight at us,” Salah said. Two of the four were killed instantly, the other two were injured. Salah was hit by shrapnel on his forehead, his back and his legs. Moments later, he said, two more shells struck the house, killing dozens of them.

Salah and a group of around 70 fled the house, shouting to the soldiers that there were women and children with them. They ran to the main road and on for a kilometre until ambulances could reach them. Others stayed behind.

Wa’el Samouni’s father, Faris, 59, lived next door to the house where the crowd had taken shelter. He had a single-storey house with only a corrugated iron roof and so his family had moved next door to shelter, but he had stayed behind. He was unable to leave his building for fear of being shot, but on the Tuesday the survivors called to him to bring water. He ran quickly the short distance and joined them.

“Dead bodies were lying on the ground. Some people were injured, they were just trying to help each other,” he said. There among the dead Faris found his wife Rizka, 50; his daughter-in-law Anan; and his granddaughter Huda, 16.

Only on the afternoon of the following day, the Wednesday, were the survivors rescued when the Red Cross arrived to carry them out to hospital.

The Israeli military has said it is investigating what happened at Zeitoun. It has repeatedly denied that its troops ordered the residents to gather in one house and said its troops do not intentionally target civilians.

Others in the family saw a different but equally grim fate. Faraj Samouni, 22, lived with his family next door to Helmi and Salah. Again on the Saturday evening the family had sought shelter from the heavy shelling, a group of 18 of them gathering in one room for the night. On the Sunday morning the Israeli soldiers approached. “They shouted for the owner of the house to come out. My father opened the door and went out and they shot him right there,” said Faraj.

With the body of his father Atiya, 45, slumped on the ground outside, the soldiers fired more shots into the room, he said, this time killing Faraj’s younger half-brother Ahmad, who was four years old, and the child’s mother.

Yesterday there was blood on the wall of the small room where the child had been sitting.

Then the troops ordered them to lie on the floor. But when a fire started burning in the room next door, sending in acrid smoke, they began shouting to be allowed out. “We were shouting ‘babies, children’,” Faraj said.

Eventually the soldiers let them out and they ran along the street, passing the others who had gathered in Wa’el Samouni’s house and making their way out on to the main road and to safety.

When Faraj returned, he found his home completely destroyed, a pile of twisted iron bars and concrete. On a small outdoor grill were the charred remains of the eight aubergines that the family had been cooking that Sunday morning for their breakfast.

Only on Sunday was he able to bury his father’s body and even then there was a final injustice: Gaza’s graves are now so crowded and concrete so scarce because of Israel’s long blockade that he had to break open an older family grave and put his father in with the other corpse.

“How can we have peace when they are killing civilians, even children?” said Faraj. “I support the ceasefire now. We have no power. If there wasn’t a ceasefire we couldn’t even bury our dead.”

Some Gazans speak privately of their anger at Hamas, blaming the Islamist movement that rules the small territory for dragging them into this conflict. But by far the larger majority are speaking now of their bitter anger at Israel and their deep resentment at the apathy of the Arab world and the rest of the international community, which failed to halt the destruction and the killing.

“We blame everyone,” said Ibrahim Samouni, 45, who lost his wife and four of his sons in the killings at Zeitoun. “We need everyone to look at us and see what has happened here. We are not resistance fighters. We are ordinary people.”

The most moral army

Published on January 29, 2009 in Israel, Middle East and Palestine. 0 Comments Tags: , , .

The IDF is the most moral army in the world, it does not and never has made a policy of targeting civilians.

EZBT ABED RABBO, Gaza Strip — Nasser Abu Freeh was one of the first to see the Israeli soldiers as they entered this pastoral Gaza neighborhood overlooking the Israeli border on Jan. 3, hours after the Israeli government ordered the first ground forces into Gaza.

Abu Freeh’s two-story hilltop home is a favorite spot for Israeli soldiers, who used it as a command post during three previous attempts to deter Gaza militants from firing crude rockets into Israel from the surrounding cattle farms, orange groves and dirt alleys.

Scouts from the militant Islamist group Hamas also favored the hilltop as a place to watch for approaching Israeli soldiers, and the fighters tried to lure the Israelis into a trap by planting land mines outside Abu Freeh’s home.

As the Israelis moved in, neighbors said, the Hamas scouts put up little resistance and quickly fell back into the more densely populated part of the neighborhood.

Within hours, the Israeli soldiers took over Abu Freeh’s house, moved the seven people living there into one room and began interrogating the adults. The questioners were angry because one of their soldiers had been killed nearby in the early hours of the ground offensive, and they wanted to know what traps Hamas had set for the Israeli forces.

“Where are the tunnels?” Abu Freeh said the soldiers asked in Arabic. “I will kill you if you don’t tell me.”

Israeli tanks and bulldozers soon took up hilltop positions around Abu Freeh’s home, and Khaled Abed Rabbo’s five-story house in the valley below was one of those in the line of fire.

More than 70 members of his family crowded into one apartment for days. On Jan. 7, Abed Rabbo said, the shelling intensified, and they heard an Israeli solider calling for people to come out of their homes.

Abed Rabbo said he gathered his wife, their three daughters and his mother, Souad. Souad Abed Rabbo said that she tied a white robe around a mop handle and two of her granddaughters waved white headscarves as they walked outside.

When they opened the door, they saw an Israeli tank parked in their garden about 10 yards away.

“We were waiting for them to give us an order,” Khaled said last week as he stood in the ruins of his home. “Then one came out of the tank and started to shoot.”

Souad Abed Rabbo said she was shot as she pushed her son back inside and her granddaughters fell on the stairs. When the shooting was over, she said, 2-year-old Amal and 7-year-old Souad were dead.

The allegation is one of at least five such white flag incidents that human rights investigators are looking into across the Gaza Strip. It’s part of a growing pattern of alleged abuses that have raised concerns that some Israeli soldiers may have committed war crimes during their 22-day military campaign in Gaza.

“The evidence we’ve gathered in two of the cases so far is exceedingly strong,” said Fred Abrahams, a senior researcher with Human Rights Watch working in the Gaza Strip. “All the research so far suggests they shot civilians that were leaving their homes with white flags.”

Along with the white flag incidents, Human Rights Watch is calling for an international investigation into widespread charges that Israel prevented medical teams from helping wounded Palestinians trapped in their homes and needlessly demolished hundreds of houses, including dozens in Ezbt Abed Rabbo.

“This was not a rogue unit,” said Abrahams. “The needless civilian deaths resulted from concrete decisions made by the military.”

The Israeli military, which Prime Minister Ehud Olmert called “the most moral army in the world,” said it’s investigating the increasing number of war crimes allegations, but it rejected any suggestion that its soldiers had targeted civilians.

“IDF forces have clear firing orders,” the Israel Defense Forces said in a statement in response to questions from McClatchy. “But in the complex situation in which fighting takes place inside towns and cities, placing our forces also at great risk, civilian casualties are regrettably possible.”

Throughout the war, Israeli officials said Hamas militants put Palestinian civilians in danger by booby-trapping homes and firing on soldiers from crowded buildings.

However, residents living near Khaled Abed Rabbo all said that Hamas forces quickly abandoned the outlying neighborhood once the Israeli forces took over.

With his daughters bleeding to death, Abed Rabbo said, the family screamed for help.

Samieh al Sheik, an ambulance driver who lived in an adjacent home, heard the shouting. Without thinking about what could be waiting outside, Sheik said he ran to his ambulance, turned on the emergency lights and drove toward the screams.

As he turned the corner and headed for Abed Rabbo’s home, Sheik said he came face-to-face with the Israeli tank unit. The soldiers ordered him to get out of the ambulance and told him to walk straight out of the neighborhood.

“I didn’t see what happened to the family that day because I couldn’t reach them,” said Sheik, who returned to find the ambulance crushed under a demolished building.

Faced with his dying children, Abed Rabbo gathered up the wounded and sought to escape, even if the Israelis opened fire.

With Israeli soldiers shooting at the ground near their feet, Abed Rabbo said, the family walked more than a mile to the main road, where they finally found help. His surviving 4-year-old daughter, Samer, was one of the few to be allowed out of Gaza to receive special medical care in Brussels.

Halima Badwan was less fortunate. As Abed Rabbo rushed his surviving daughter to the hospital, she lay dying in a house nearby.

Halima and her husband, Ahmed, a retired 63-year-old Palestinian Authority general, were among nine people who’d gathered in one room during the fighting. The previous day, Ahmed Badwan said, a tank round had smashed into the room, killing a neighbor and seriously injuring his wife.

Badwan didn’t think he could carry his wife to safety. Red Cross officials in Gaza said that Israeli military officials repeatedly denied their requests to send medical teams to the neighborhood.

So, when the Israeli military began declaring a short “humanitarian pause” to the shooting each day, Badwan said he took his wife’s gold necklace and left her lying nearly unconscious in the ruins of their home.

As he walked out of his neighborhood, Badwan said, he stopped at a nearby ambulance station and asked for help. The International Committee for the Red Cross was powerless to do anything.

Iyad Nasr, a Red Cross spokesman in Gaza, said Israeli soldiers had fired at ambulances that tried to reach some areas, even when medical officials had received approval from the Israeli military to enter certain neighborhoods.

“Our request for Ezbt Abed Rabbo was just pending and pending and pending and pending day after day,” Nasr said.

Israel’s widespread denial of access to medical crews in Gaza appears to be a breach of humanitarian law, said Yuval Shany, a legal scholar at Hebrew University in Jerusalem.

“In international law, there is obligation to facilitate access to the wounded and even to treat the wounded,” Shany said. “In this area, I think there was a deviation from the international standard and this should be investigated.”

When Badwan, Abed Rabbo and scores of other residents of Ezbt Abed Rabbo finally returned to their neighborhood after Israel declared a unilateral cease-fire on Jan. 17, they were stunned to discover that their neighborhood was reduced to rubble.

Using bulldozers, tank shelling and explosives placed in the houses, the Israeli military had leveled entire blocks of homes.

Badwan found his wife’s body buried under the rubble of their building.

The destruction didn’t come as a complete surprise to Taysir Abed Rabbo, who lived in a two-story home near Badwan’s that Israeli soldiers had used as a temporary post.

Abed Rabbo, a member of the Palestinian Authority presidential guard, was among dozens of men who were rounded up nearly a year ago during an operation called Operation Warm Winter and taken to Israel for interrogation.

The interrogators gave Abed Rabbo a prophetic warning.

“They said if we did not stop the rocket fire, they planned to make this area ‘a red area,’” said Abed Rabbo, who said he wasn’t sure at the time what the Israelis meant.

Israeli leaders are moving swiftly to insulate their soldiers from any penalties for their actions during the offensive, which left more than 1,200 Palestinians dead, destroyed more than 4,000 buildings and caused $2 billion in damage.

The Israeli military has barred reporters from printing the names of military leaders who took part in the Gaza campaign, known as Operation Cast Lead, and Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert has created a legal defense unit to protect any soldiers accused of war crimes.

In a defense of his military on Sunday, Olmert accused Israel’s critics of using “moral acrobatics” to question Israel for using its military to try to halt the Palestinian rocket fire from Gaza that’s killed 12 people since September 2005.

“The soldiers and commanders who were sent on missions in Gaza must know that they are safe from various tribunals, and that the State of Israel will assist them on this issue and defend them just as they bodily defended us during Operation Cast Lead,” Olmert said.

While human rights groups are investigating the allegations, Shany said, Israeli leaders should take the lead and investigate allegations of wrongdoing.

“It makes sense to try to protect the soldiers, but it would also make sense to investigate where needed,” Shany said. “They should investigate, and when actions were justifiable they should protect, and when not, they should prosecute.”

[Israeli troops killed Gaza children carrying white flag, witnesses say]

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