AI
Monday, January 03, 2011 1:16:12 AM
Israeli troops kill Palestinian man at checkpoint in West Bank
By Joel Greenberg
Sunday, January 2, 2011; 5:25 PM
JERUSALEM - Israeli soldiers fatally shot an unarmed Palestinian man who approached them at a West Bank checkpoint Sunday. The army said he had been holding a bottle and was shot according to the military's rules of engagement.
The shooting underscored simmering tensions in the West Bank as peace efforts remain at an impasse.
Palestinian witnesses and a military spokeswoman gave differing accounts of the incident, which the Israeli army said was under investigation. The dead man was identified as Ahmad Maslamani, 24, a farm laborer who worked at nearby Israeli settlements.
The shooting occurred at an army checkpoint on a road linking the West Bank city of Nablus to the Jordan Valley. Palestinian witnesses said travelers pass through the checkpoint by first crossing a turnstile and then going through a metal detector.
Abdallah Sbeitan, a farmer who was at the scene, said in a telephone interview that Maslamani had passed through the metal detector, emptying his pockets, and then mistakenly turned left instead of right to leave the checkpoint area. "A female soldier starting screaming, and soldiers, one behind her and another near a concrete barrier, opened fire from about five meters away," Sbeitan said.
Sbeitan said Maslamani was empty-handed, but Rashid Sawafta, a driver who was standing nearby, said in a telephone interview that he heard the female soldier loudly question Maslamani and heard him reply that he was carrying a bottle of water. "She screamed, 'Bottle!,' in Hebrew, and then I heard gunfire."
The military spokeswoman said Maslamani approached "from an unauthorized lane holding a glass bottle" and ignored orders to halt. He "came to stand several meters away from the soldiers, who then operated according to the Israel Defense Forces rules of engagement and fired towards him."
Palestinian medical officials who received the body from the army said Maslamani had been shot in the chest, hand and leg. Sbeitan said soldiers made no attempt to treat the wounded man.
Israeli military checkpoints, which control Palestinian movement in the West Bank, are frequent flash points of tension, with Palestinians often complaining of humiliation and harsh treatment by troops, who are on guard for possible attacks.
In other violence Sunday, Israeli aircraft attacked targets in the Hamas-controlled Gaza Strip, wounding two Palestinians, medical officials said. The military said it had struck a "Hamas terror activity center in northern Gaza and a weapons manufacturing facility in central Gaza" in response to a rocket strike on Israel on Saturday.
As peace efforts remain stalled, Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu said Sunday that he is ready to sit down with Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas for one-on-one talks until they reach a peace deal. "If Abu Mazen agrees to my proposal to directly discuss all the substantive and core issues, we will know very quickly if we can reach an agreement," Netanyahu said, using Abbas's nickname.
Netanyahu was responding to a statement by Abbas that a peace deal could be reached within two months if Netanyahu showed "goodwill."
Direct talks faltered in late September after Israel ended a 10-month freeze on new construction [ http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/story/2010/12/07/ST2010120707415.html ] in Jewish settlements in the West Bank. Abbas has insisted that Israel must halt all settlement construction before the negotiations can resume.
Greenberg is a special correspondent.
© 2011 The Washington Post Company
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2011/01/02/AR2011010202230.html [comments at http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2011/01/02/AR2011010202230_Comments.html ]
=====
The price of resisting
Picture: AP
By Jody McIntyre [ http://blogs.independent.co.uk/author/jody-mcintyre/ ]
Eagle Eye
Sunday, 2 January 2011 at 10:05 am
On New Year’s Eve, as people across the world celebrated together, Jawaher Abu Rahmah lay alone, struggling for breath in a Ramallah hospital. The day before, the people of her village, Bil’in, in the West Bank, had marched to Israel’s wall, which cuts through half of the village, to non-violently demonstrate against the theft of their land, just as they have done every Friday since construction on the wall began in 2005.
Jawaher had suffered from asphyxiation as a result of the tear gas the Israeli army had fired at demonstrators. Jawaher, however, was not participating in the demonstration herself; she was sitting at her family’s home 500 metres away when she begun to suffocate. On Saturday morning, Jawaher, aged 35, died in hospital.
In 2009, I spent six months living in Bil’in; for four months straight, the Israeli army would raid the village at night, taking young teenage boys from their homes, some as young as thirteen years old, and imprisoning them for months on end. No reasons were given for their arrests, but those attending the demonstrations were often targeted.
The first person I met upon my arrival in Bil’in was a man called Haitham. He was working as a film maker, and came out every night to document the army raids, and every Friday to film the demonstrations at the wall. Haitham had a two year-old son called Karme, who had been diagnosed with leukemia just a few months after his birth. Before the demonstrations began, Haitham took his son to hospital in Jerusalem every day to get treatment, but since he began filming, the Israeli army refused to renew his permit to travel to Jerusalem.
I spent much of my time in Bil’in living with Hamde Abu Rahmah, a young photo-journalist, and we developed a close relationship. During one of the Friday demonstrations at the wall, Hamde’s oldest brother, Khamis, had been shot by an Israeli soldier in the head with a high-velocity tear-gas canister. He spent two weeks in a coma, and still suffers from his injuries today. One of the people to care for Khamis during the first few months was his cousin, and Jawaher’s brother, Bassem Abu Rahme. In April 2009, Bassem died after being shot in the chest with the same weapon.
Another person I became close to during my time in Bil’in was Rani Burnat, a man who had been paralysed after being shot in the spine on the first day of the second intifada. I remember once asking him if the Israeli soldiers treated him differently because he was in a wheelchair. He said, “Jody, I want to tell you two things… firstly, I think you know very well by now, as I do, that the Israeli army do not care if you are walking, in a wheelchair, man, woman or child!” ”And the second thing I want to tell you,” Rani said, “is that it doesn’t matter if you’re in a wheelchair or not. What’s important are the ideas, and the resistance, that’s in your mind.”
Jawaher Abu Rahmah died for refusing to accept the theft of her family’s land. How many more will suffer a similar fate?
©independent.co.uk
http://blogs.independent.co.uk/2011/01/02/the-price-of-resisting/ [with comments]
=====
Spent tear gas canisters thrown at US amb. house
Photo by: AP
11 people arrested outside James B. Cunningham's house in a protest against death of woman who died from tear gas in Bil'in.
By BEN HARTMAN
01/03/2011 04:39
Eleven people were arrested outside the Herzliya residence of US Ambassador James B. Cunningham early overnight Saturday, after they threw spent tear gas canisters at the building during a loud protest.
The protest, which took place around 12:30 a.m., was in response to the death on Saturday morning of Jawaher Abu Rahma, 36, who is believed to have died from tear gas fired by soldiers during a protest against the West Bank security barrier on Friday [ http://www.jpost.com/MiddleEast/Article.aspx?id=201758 ] outside Bil’in, near Modi’in Illit.
According to online reports from activists and bloggers associated with the protesters, the ambassador’s residence was chosen for the demonstration partly because US corporations supply non-lethal crowd control equipment like tear gas to the IDF.
The 11 protesters – 10 Israelis and a female German tourist – were brought to the Tel Aviv Magistrate’s Court on Sunday, where their remand was extended by three days.
Police spokesman Mickey Rosenfeld said police received a complaint around 12:30 a.m. that a large group of people was creating a disturbance outside the ambassador’s house. Officers were dispatched who arrested the 11 activists. He added that searches turned up a metal chain and two additional tear gas canisters in one of the protester’s cars.
The protest took place hours after police arrested several protesters, including former Meretz MK Mossi Raz, at the end of a rally outside Defense Ministry headquarters in Tel Aviv also protesting Abu Rahma’s death.
Witnesses said Raz was struck by a police officer during the fracas, and was later released from custody.
During some of the recent riots in the valleys of east Jerusalem’s Arab neighborhoods, the acrid smell of tear gas has hung over the houses for hours.
That is why Abu Rahma’s death after the weekly Bil’in protest raised fears in the Silwan neighborhood.
“We’re more worried now, because now we can see what happens with tear gas,” said Murad Shafi, 35, a Silwan resident and a member of the al- Bustan community council. “They throw it at us in the middle of the night. It’s not healthy; because of one person who throws a rock they tear-gas a whole neighborhood. There’s no defense against it.”
Attorney Nisreen Alyan of the Association for Civil Rights in Israel called on the security forces to consider using less dangerous types of tear gas or “set a limit on the means that can be used to disperse a protest.”
Rosenfeld said the police would not change the procedures for using tear gas during riots in east Jerusalem, or anywhere else in the country, as a result of Abu Rahma’s death.
Melanie Lidman contributed to this report.
---
RELATED:
Bil’in victim dreamed of meeting brother ‘in paradise'
http://www.jpost.com/MiddleEast/Article.aspx?id=201982
---
© The Jerusalem Post 2011
http://www.jpost.com/NationalNews/Article.aspx?id=201981 [no comments yet]
=====
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By Joel Greenberg
Sunday, January 2, 2011; 5:25 PM
JERUSALEM - Israeli soldiers fatally shot an unarmed Palestinian man who approached them at a West Bank checkpoint Sunday. The army said he had been holding a bottle and was shot according to the military's rules of engagement.
The shooting underscored simmering tensions in the West Bank as peace efforts remain at an impasse.
Palestinian witnesses and a military spokeswoman gave differing accounts of the incident, which the Israeli army said was under investigation. The dead man was identified as Ahmad Maslamani, 24, a farm laborer who worked at nearby Israeli settlements.
The shooting occurred at an army checkpoint on a road linking the West Bank city of Nablus to the Jordan Valley. Palestinian witnesses said travelers pass through the checkpoint by first crossing a turnstile and then going through a metal detector.
Abdallah Sbeitan, a farmer who was at the scene, said in a telephone interview that Maslamani had passed through the metal detector, emptying his pockets, and then mistakenly turned left instead of right to leave the checkpoint area. "A female soldier starting screaming, and soldiers, one behind her and another near a concrete barrier, opened fire from about five meters away," Sbeitan said.
Sbeitan said Maslamani was empty-handed, but Rashid Sawafta, a driver who was standing nearby, said in a telephone interview that he heard the female soldier loudly question Maslamani and heard him reply that he was carrying a bottle of water. "She screamed, 'Bottle!,' in Hebrew, and then I heard gunfire."
The military spokeswoman said Maslamani approached "from an unauthorized lane holding a glass bottle" and ignored orders to halt. He "came to stand several meters away from the soldiers, who then operated according to the Israel Defense Forces rules of engagement and fired towards him."
Palestinian medical officials who received the body from the army said Maslamani had been shot in the chest, hand and leg. Sbeitan said soldiers made no attempt to treat the wounded man.
Israeli military checkpoints, which control Palestinian movement in the West Bank, are frequent flash points of tension, with Palestinians often complaining of humiliation and harsh treatment by troops, who are on guard for possible attacks.
In other violence Sunday, Israeli aircraft attacked targets in the Hamas-controlled Gaza Strip, wounding two Palestinians, medical officials said. The military said it had struck a "Hamas terror activity center in northern Gaza and a weapons manufacturing facility in central Gaza" in response to a rocket strike on Israel on Saturday.
As peace efforts remain stalled, Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu said Sunday that he is ready to sit down with Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas for one-on-one talks until they reach a peace deal. "If Abu Mazen agrees to my proposal to directly discuss all the substantive and core issues, we will know very quickly if we can reach an agreement," Netanyahu said, using Abbas's nickname.
Netanyahu was responding to a statement by Abbas that a peace deal could be reached within two months if Netanyahu showed "goodwill."
Direct talks faltered in late September after Israel ended a 10-month freeze on new construction [ http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/story/2010/12/07/ST2010120707415.html ] in Jewish settlements in the West Bank. Abbas has insisted that Israel must halt all settlement construction before the negotiations can resume.
Greenberg is a special correspondent.
© 2011 The Washington Post Company
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2011/01/02/AR2011010202230.html [comments at http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2011/01/02/AR2011010202230_Comments.html ]
=====
The price of resisting
Picture: AP
By Jody McIntyre [ http://blogs.independent.co.uk/author/jody-mcintyre/ ]
Eagle Eye
Sunday, 2 January 2011 at 10:05 am
On New Year’s Eve, as people across the world celebrated together, Jawaher Abu Rahmah lay alone, struggling for breath in a Ramallah hospital. The day before, the people of her village, Bil’in, in the West Bank, had marched to Israel’s wall, which cuts through half of the village, to non-violently demonstrate against the theft of their land, just as they have done every Friday since construction on the wall began in 2005.
Jawaher had suffered from asphyxiation as a result of the tear gas the Israeli army had fired at demonstrators. Jawaher, however, was not participating in the demonstration herself; she was sitting at her family’s home 500 metres away when she begun to suffocate. On Saturday morning, Jawaher, aged 35, died in hospital.
In 2009, I spent six months living in Bil’in; for four months straight, the Israeli army would raid the village at night, taking young teenage boys from their homes, some as young as thirteen years old, and imprisoning them for months on end. No reasons were given for their arrests, but those attending the demonstrations were often targeted.
The first person I met upon my arrival in Bil’in was a man called Haitham. He was working as a film maker, and came out every night to document the army raids, and every Friday to film the demonstrations at the wall. Haitham had a two year-old son called Karme, who had been diagnosed with leukemia just a few months after his birth. Before the demonstrations began, Haitham took his son to hospital in Jerusalem every day to get treatment, but since he began filming, the Israeli army refused to renew his permit to travel to Jerusalem.
I spent much of my time in Bil’in living with Hamde Abu Rahmah, a young photo-journalist, and we developed a close relationship. During one of the Friday demonstrations at the wall, Hamde’s oldest brother, Khamis, had been shot by an Israeli soldier in the head with a high-velocity tear-gas canister. He spent two weeks in a coma, and still suffers from his injuries today. One of the people to care for Khamis during the first few months was his cousin, and Jawaher’s brother, Bassem Abu Rahme. In April 2009, Bassem died after being shot in the chest with the same weapon.
Another person I became close to during my time in Bil’in was Rani Burnat, a man who had been paralysed after being shot in the spine on the first day of the second intifada. I remember once asking him if the Israeli soldiers treated him differently because he was in a wheelchair. He said, “Jody, I want to tell you two things… firstly, I think you know very well by now, as I do, that the Israeli army do not care if you are walking, in a wheelchair, man, woman or child!” ”And the second thing I want to tell you,” Rani said, “is that it doesn’t matter if you’re in a wheelchair or not. What’s important are the ideas, and the resistance, that’s in your mind.”
Jawaher Abu Rahmah died for refusing to accept the theft of her family’s land. How many more will suffer a similar fate?
©independent.co.uk
http://blogs.independent.co.uk/2011/01/02/the-price-of-resisting/ [with comments]
=====
Spent tear gas canisters thrown at US amb. house
Photo by: AP
11 people arrested outside James B. Cunningham's house in a protest against death of woman who died from tear gas in Bil'in.
By BEN HARTMAN
01/03/2011 04:39
Eleven people were arrested outside the Herzliya residence of US Ambassador James B. Cunningham early overnight Saturday, after they threw spent tear gas canisters at the building during a loud protest.
The protest, which took place around 12:30 a.m., was in response to the death on Saturday morning of Jawaher Abu Rahma, 36, who is believed to have died from tear gas fired by soldiers during a protest against the West Bank security barrier on Friday [ http://www.jpost.com/MiddleEast/Article.aspx?id=201758 ] outside Bil’in, near Modi’in Illit.
According to online reports from activists and bloggers associated with the protesters, the ambassador’s residence was chosen for the demonstration partly because US corporations supply non-lethal crowd control equipment like tear gas to the IDF.
The 11 protesters – 10 Israelis and a female German tourist – were brought to the Tel Aviv Magistrate’s Court on Sunday, where their remand was extended by three days.
Police spokesman Mickey Rosenfeld said police received a complaint around 12:30 a.m. that a large group of people was creating a disturbance outside the ambassador’s house. Officers were dispatched who arrested the 11 activists. He added that searches turned up a metal chain and two additional tear gas canisters in one of the protester’s cars.
The protest took place hours after police arrested several protesters, including former Meretz MK Mossi Raz, at the end of a rally outside Defense Ministry headquarters in Tel Aviv also protesting Abu Rahma’s death.
Witnesses said Raz was struck by a police officer during the fracas, and was later released from custody.
During some of the recent riots in the valleys of east Jerusalem’s Arab neighborhoods, the acrid smell of tear gas has hung over the houses for hours.
That is why Abu Rahma’s death after the weekly Bil’in protest raised fears in the Silwan neighborhood.
“We’re more worried now, because now we can see what happens with tear gas,” said Murad Shafi, 35, a Silwan resident and a member of the al- Bustan community council. “They throw it at us in the middle of the night. It’s not healthy; because of one person who throws a rock they tear-gas a whole neighborhood. There’s no defense against it.”
Attorney Nisreen Alyan of the Association for Civil Rights in Israel called on the security forces to consider using less dangerous types of tear gas or “set a limit on the means that can be used to disperse a protest.”
Rosenfeld said the police would not change the procedures for using tear gas during riots in east Jerusalem, or anywhere else in the country, as a result of Abu Rahma’s death.
Melanie Lidman contributed to this report.
---
RELATED:
Bil’in victim dreamed of meeting brother ‘in paradise'
http://www.jpost.com/MiddleEast/Article.aspx?id=201982
---
© The Jerusalem Post 2011
http://www.jpost.com/NationalNews/Article.aspx?id=201981 [no comments yet]
=====
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http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=53926596 and preceding and following
http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=58335233 and preceding (and any future following)
Greensburg, KS - 5/4/07
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upon the Right of Election, 1790
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