Israel plans to build 740 new homes in settlements in occupied East Jerusalem, a minister said, despite its commitment to freeze all settlement activity. Rafi Eitan, minister for Jerusalem affairs, said Israel had never promised to stop building within Jerusalem and had a duty to house its citizens.
Israeli Housing Minister offers Israelis free land to build homes next to Gaza Saturday December 22, 2007 04:14 by Saed Bannoura - IMEMC News saed at imemc dot org
On Thursday evening, Israeli Housing Minister Ze'ev Boim made a speech encouraging Israelis to move to areas adjacent to the Gaza Strip (an Israeli-occupied Palestinian territory in which 1.4 million Palestinians are imprisoned).....
Israel's Palestinians speak out Tuesday December 18, 2007 09:38 by Nadim Rouhana - The Nation saed at imemc dot org
The Annapolis peace talks regard me as an interloper in my own land. Israel's deputy prime minister, Avigdor Lieberman, argues that I should "take [my] bundles and get lost." Henry Kissinger thinks I ought to be summarily swapped from inside Israel to the would-be Palestinian state.
The Arab-Israeli town of Nazareth, in northern Israel
I am a Palestinian with Israeli citizenship -- one of 1.4 million. I am also a social psychologist trained and working in the United States. In late November, on behalf of Mada al-Carmel, the Arab Center for Applied Social Research, I polled Palestinian citizens of Israel regarding their reactions to the Annapolis conference and their views about our future, and how they would be affected by Middle East peace negotiations.
During Israel's establishment, three-quarters of a million Palestinians were driven from their homes or fled in fear. They remain refugees to this day, scattered throughout the West Bank and Gaza, the Arab world and beyond. We Palestinian citizens of Israel are among the minority who managed to remain on our land. Like many Mexican-Americans, we didn't cross the border, the border crossed us. We have been struggling ever since against a system that subjects us to separate and unequal treatment because we are Palestinian Arabs -- Christian, Muslim and Druze -- not Jewish. More than twenty Israeli laws explicitly privilege Jews over non-Jews.
The Palestinian Authority (PA) is under intense pressure to recognize Israel as .........
In recent days, Gaza, like other Islamic communities around the world, prepared to celebrate Eid al-Adha, a major holiday marking the end of the annual pilgrimage to Mecca, the Hajj. Normally a time of joy, this year's Eid is different from past years because Gaza suffers from the tight Israeli closures on all travel and commercial crossings.
People across this large street spoke to EI, expressing how they view the occasion under the current conditions, mainly the economic siege Israel has imposed since mid-June....
...Israel claims its closure is intended to prevent Palestinian resistance factions from firing homemade rockets onto nearby Israeli towns. While Israelis are rarely injured by these rockets, Palestinians continue to be maimed and killed on a daily basis by Israeli attacks from land and air.
On the ground it's the people who are suffering most from the Israeli closure. This human-imposed poverty has left many Gazans saying that this Eid al-Adha is the worst ever
Refusing to accept apartheid in Beit Jala Monday December 24, 2007 09:14 by Adri Nieuwhof and Amer Madi - electronicintifada.net saed at imemc dot org
Last night the rains finally arrived in Beit Jala, a small town in the West Bank, one kilometer west of Bethlehem and about eight kilometers south of Jerusalem. Its alluring hills are covered with olive trees, vineyards and apricots. In 1967 Israel confiscated 22 percent of Beit Jala's land. Now, the construction of Israel's separation wall is in full swing and will cut off another 45 per cent of Beit Jala's land. We went to visit the area to feel the impact of the wall and listen to the stories of the farmers who didn't sell their land and choose to resist the its confiscation.
Abu Salim on his land in Beit Jala
Our guide accompanies us to the house of 86-year-old Yacoub Salim Abu Amsha. His garden borders Aida refugee camp which was established in 1950. Our guide explains that Road 60 is built on the land of Abu Salim, which is about three kilometers from where he lives. Road 60 is a bypass road for Jewish settlers; Palestinians are prohibited from using it. Our guide met Abu Salim a few years ago when he saw a desperate old man walking in his field while Israeli bulldozers were in his olive orchard. He stopped and talked to the old man. Abu Salim was desperate, because the Israelis planned to uproot his trees including a very old olive tree which he said dated back to Roman times. In 1933 his grandfather pointed to that olive tree and told him to take care of it because olive trees are a blessing. His grandfather was very attached to this particular tree and Abu Salim looked after it his entire life. Abu Salim had told our guide, "if the Israelis uproot my grandfather's old tree, I will die."
The tree was uprooted along with many others, but with the assistance of the Olive Tree Campaign it was replanted in the field beside Road 60. Others were replanted in the garden of Abu Salim's home in Beit Jala. When we asked Abu Salim if could write about his story he gave us permission and said, "I want you to show my pain, I will be grateful. I have pains like the pains of Baghdad." While he spoke he reached out his hands which told a story their own story of years of hard work, pain and a refusal to accept the confiscation of his land.
Together with our guide and Abu Salim we drove a few kilometers to his land near al-Khader which Road 60 and the wall cut right through. We parked the car and met some people in the street. From here we had a view of the trucks and cranes constructing the wall. One of the men in the street owns a house, from which we can enter Abu Salim's land. We went down the stairs to the house. We crawled through the fence of the house and started our descent to Road 60 and the wall. It was slippery and our shoes were not fit for the walk. We helped each other and got close to the crash barrier of the bypass road. On our side of the road the field has been flattened as if another road will be built. Abu Salim shows us where his grandfather's tree along with other old trees have been replanted. The trees offer a sad picture. On the other side of the bypass road towers the wall. A Scania truck with a crane on it is performing its destructive work. A few days ago we saw a Volvo truck with a crane making its contribution to the wall.
Abu Salim knew all the marks and features of his land, but the bypass road and the wall destroyed it and cut off parts of it on other side of the wall. Hand in hand with Abu Salim we try to cross the bypass road. Wearing his characteristic clothes it is not difficult to identify Abu Salim as Palestinian. Many cars and trucks driven by Jewish settlers honk, as if to say, "you have no right to be here!" How does a landowner not have the right to be on his land? It is Israel that does not have the right to build the bypass road and the wall on Abu Salim's land!
The olive tree orchard continues on Abu Salim's land on the other side of the bypass road. All the roads to Abu Salim's lands have been closed off to Palestinians. We refused to accept that Palestinians are not allowed to walk here and together we walked all the way back on the road which Palestinians are not allowed to travel. Back in the car we continued our way along the projected route of the wall. Within a kilometer from where we entered Abu Salim's land there is the place where the wall will soon cut off the road. The olive trees that will be uprooted to make way for the wall are already marked with white paint. Most of Beit Jala's fertile agricultural land will end up behind the wall. While Bush, Olmert and Abbas pretend to be involved in peace talks, Israel continues its destruction of Palestinian land and livelihoods.
Adri Nieuwhof and Amer Madi are consultants based respectively in Switzerland and Palestine. All images by Adri Nieuwhof.
Report: Palestinian shepherds displaced by Israeli military Monday December 24, 2007 08:48 by Saed Bannoura - IMEMC + IRIN
According to a new report by the United Nations information service (IRIN), a community of Palestinian shepherds numbering 272 people in 37 families were forced off their land in Khirbet Qassa village by the Israeli military several weeks ago, and are currently wandering the area with no place to go.
Palestinian shepherd with Israeli soldiers behind
"The best thing about Khirbet Qassa was the grazing land. We had open spaces. Now we've become dependent on other people and their land," said Abdel Halim Nattah, a shepherd in the southern West Bank.
Several weeks earlier he and all his fellow villagers, 37 families numbering 272 people, were evacuated by the Israeli military from Qassa and told to find a new home somewhere else.
The Israel Civil Administration said the land the Palestinians were living on was an archaeological site under state auspices, and the villagers had been given warnings about the impending evacuation.
"They came at 7:30 in the morning," one villager told IRIN. "We sent away the women, children and sheep. An old man pleaded with the soldiers saying 'we will move ourselves'. They gave us until the next afternoon, and said anyone remaining would be arrested and anything left confiscated."
When the villagers told the soldiers they had nowhere to go, the response was: "That's not our problem. This is state land."
Some villagers noted that Qassa sits between Israel's separation barrier and the pre-1967 Green Line border, and felt this was a factor in the eviction.
For most of Khirbet Qassa's inhabitants, this was not the first time their families had been forcibly moved, as 29 of the 37 families are registered refugees with UNRWA, the UN agency for Palestinian refugees. The older members of these families came to Qassa from Beit Jubrin, in what is now Israel, during the 1948 Arab-Israeli war.
"Starting all over again in the winter of 2007 is not easy," said Abdel Halim, aged 63.
Lost fodder
"We had food for a year for our sheep, but all of a sudden it's gone. It's a shock," Khaled al Aghberiya, a 37-year-old father of five, told IRIN.
When the Israeli military came in late October to remove the villagers, many of their belongings, including 240 tonnes of fodder, 180 feeding devices and several water tanks were destroyed.
"The fodder is the main issue. We bought so much and we lost it. We will have to sell some of our sheep to replace it," Khaled said. With the increasing cost of fodder, the economic burden will be extensive.
Costly water
They also miss the water well in their old village. For now, aid agencies like the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) and Action Against Hunger have provided water and tanks, but eventually they will have to buy water, something they rarely did in the past.
"The community has been on that land since 1948 and they are totally dependent on the land and water resources there," said Manuel Bessler, head of the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs in the occupied Palestinian territories. "Having been moved, they will be in increased poverty and hardship as they don't have any alternative sources to make a living except herding."
After their evictions, most of the villagers went to nearby Idhna village where they have friends and family.
"This is my home for now. All of us, 29 people, sleep here at night," said Abdel Halim, standing inside a half built building he accesses using a wooden plank which goes through what will one day be a window frame. All the other gaping holes are covered by plastic, and the only source of heat is a coal grill.
Stressed children
The impact of the forced move has affected many children.
"My daughter, she is nine, all of sudden now she wakes up in the middle of the night. My other children started to wet their bed," said a concerned father. His wife, three months pregnant at the time of the eviction, miscarried the next day, he said.
For the proud shepherds, having to ask for help is not easy. "Since 1948 we never asked for anything from the [UN and aid] agencies. Now we need help," said Khaled.
"But we don't want any charity. Give us job creation programs. If we have to we'll sell our sheep and contribute to funding for education programs. If they train us, we will make sure it becomes a sustainable source of income," he said, worried that he and his fellow herders will never find another suitable grazing area to call home.
This item comes to you via IRIN, a UN humanitarian news and information service, but may not necessarily reflect the views of the United Nations or its agencies. All IRIN material may be reposted or reprinted free-of-charge; refer to the copyright page for conditions of use. IRIN is a project of the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs.
AN ISRAELI AIR STRIKE ON CENTRAL GAZA LEAVES TWO DEATHS Monday December 24, 2007 10:48 by Rami Almeghari
Israeli war planes launched early on Monday morning an air strike on central Gaza Strip, leaving two people dead.
Palestinian medical sources announced that Attallah aL-Awawda and Jom'a Abu Hjayer, were admitted to the Shuhada aL-Aqsa hospital in central Gaza Strip, as dismembered corpses and that many burns appeared all over their bodies.
Witnesses said that early on Monday dawn, an Israeli warplane fired at least one missile on the said Palestinian residents in the Buraij refugee camp
Israeli army troops swept last Thursday into the nearby Maghazi refugee camp, n central Gaza Strip, killing at least 9 Palestinians, mostly resistance fighters and wounding about 25 others, including civilians.
In the meantime, Israeli gunboats opened fire earlier in the day on Palestinian fishing boats on northern Gaza shores, forcing fishermen to flee and leaving no causalities.
Also in northern Gaza, Israeli tanks, stationed to the east of Abraj aL-Nadda neighborhood in Beit Lahya town, opened heavy random fire, causing a state of panic to the civilian population, witnesses said.
The Israeli army attacks on Palestinians have been intensified over the past few weeks, as Israeli military threatened of carrying out attrition war against infrastructure of Palestinian resistance groups.
In September, Israel declared Gaza a 'hostile entity' and imposed in October a series of 'apparently' punitive measures, including fuel supplies cut and further restricting a 6-month-old siege.
Israeli military says its actions are meant to stop homemade shells fire from Gaza onto nearby Israeli towns. Human rights groups branded the actions 'collective punishment', as United Nations Secretary General, Ban-Ki Moon, urged Israel to reconsider them.
Over the past seven years of Israeli-Palestinian violence or since the outbreak of the Palestinian uprising (Intifada) in September2000, more than 5.500 people have been killed, majority of them have been Palestinians.
gaza strip | israeli attacks | news report
"The moon that I love clears a path through the pines And guides a stream right to the bamboo gate."Poems by Zen Master Hsu Yun: Series I
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