Brighton & Hove Palestine Solidarity Campaign - International Womens Peace Service Diary

International Womens Peace Service - reports from Brighton based supporters, Spring 2003.

ITULKAREM 8-12 MARCH and 17 MARCH 2003

I have spent a few days in Tulkarem together with the International Solidarity Movement. Tulkarem is a town in the north west of the West Bank, as few kilometers from the Green Line.

In the centre of Tulkarem there is a huge refugee camp where people from the South of Palestine came in 1948 when Israel was created. They live in a situation of poverty in overcrowded houses. In the last two years, Tulkarem and its refugee camp have been the center of violent clashes between the Israeli army and the Palestinian population. Many people are killed in Tulkarem every week. Often children and adolescents.

Moreover, Tulkarem is also affected by what the Israelis call the “security fence” and the Palestinians the “apartheid wall”. Large part of the land east of Tulkarem has already been confiscated to make room to the wall. In recent days, the Israeli army has been marking the land west of Tulkarem to build another part of the wall that will completely encircle the city.

8 March 2003 – Organised women in Tulkarem

It is International Women’s Day. The General Union of Palestinian Women in Tulkarem, has organized a demonstration in the streets of the city. The women meet in front of the Red Crescent. It is not a huge demonstration, maybe fifty women. And there are about ten internationals to support them.

Two days after the demonstration we are invited to a meeting with them. The meeting is very well organized. The leader, Nadya, introduces the work of the organization saying that they focus both on political and social issues. They work on the occupation but at the same time they work on women’s issues and to improve women’s position in Palestinian society and law. She also explains how during the Ssecond Intifada, Palestinian women not only have to take responsibility for the family but also have taken up an important economic role as most of their husbands have lost their jobs and they are the only ones to be allowed to work and to move around.

She then gives the floor to the other women present at the meeting, who talk about their situation.

One woman, Leila, cries about her husband in prison. He was arrested for shooting against an Israeli jeep. A few months earlier two of his brothers had been killed by the Israeli army on the same day.

Another woman, Rina, is a teacher. The schoool where she teaches has been shelled many times during night and day. Many of the students have decided to abandon the school. Now only 240 students remain out of 600, and they are disturbed and find difficult to concentrate at school.

Ramia is auniverisyt student. It is almost impossivle for her to reach the university. The journey, which requires many changes and, has become expensive and many of the lectures held in Nablus and Jenin have been cancelled.

Kifah has seven children. Her husband lost his job in Israel and she is now the only supporter for the family. She works at home, preparing handicrafts and selling them thank to the help of the women’s organization.

At the end, the women ask us to help them to remove a roadblock which makes difficult the life for a village not far from Tulkarem. We receive with enthusiasm such initiative by a group of wome. We will help them to do so. The roadblock removal is planned for the following week, on Monday the 17th of March.

9 March 2003 – It is the occupation that did it

It is about 4pm. An explosion has been heard in the outskirts of Tulkarem. The ambulance has been called and the ISM too. We run to the site of the explosion. It is an olive grove. I walk among the people who are already there. There is a whole in the ground. An ambulance is already there. One person has died, there are no other injured people. A white body bag is on the ground. The people are looking for the remains of the person scattered around. The red checks keffiah is on a tree and so is a part of his body. I hear “ar-ras maugiud”,”the head has been found”. From about fifty meters some people call. The ambulance driver comes back with unrecognizable dismembered body parts. A burnt ID is also found. The man was called Rebhi Mahmoud Abdul Rahman Musleh, from Fanoun and was 50 years old. The family reaches the site. The people keep them away from the remains of the body. The women cry.

People say that Rebhi was there with his sheep, when he found a plastic bag full of a white powder. He said to about his finding to other people there and added that he wanted to remove it because he did not want his sheep to eat it. He went back to the place and then the explosion. Maybe some of his cigarette fell on the powder.

People start leaving. I leave as well. I talk to the taxi driver. It is not clear where that white powder came from. But one thing is certain, as the taxi driver tells me: “It’s the occupation that did it”. Another death for Tulkarem, as any other day. “That’s our life” people keep repeating.

11 March 2003 – The occupation of Sa’ida

We receive a phone call in the morning. A local journalist ask for our help. A village North of Tulkarem, called Sa’ida, has been occupied in the night. The Israeli army had entered the village to arrest a wanted the man. In the operation one Israeli soldier and the Palestinian wanted man have been killed. The soldiers have rounded up all the men above the age of fifteen in the local school and have been conducting a house by house search in the village.

Five of us and three local journalists get a taxi and go to Sa’ida. As expected, at the entrance of the village there is a jeep of the Israeli army. The driver stops the car and we all get out. First the soldiers talk to the Palestinians and tell them that is forbidden to enter the village. Then they accept to talk to us. We say that we are teachers of English and that we have an appointment with the teachers of the school and that we want to get in. They say that it will not be possible for the whole day and to come back another time.

We move back. The inhabitants of the next village show us a way to get into Sa’ida thorugh the fields, avoiding the army jeep. Through the fields, we manage to circumvent the army jeep and to reach the main road of the village. We walk slowly talking loud in English and we manage to reach the school. We arrive while an ambulance of the Red Crescent is taking away the body of the Palestinian killed during the night. The soldiers are around the school and many jeeps and other military cars are in the courtyard. We ask to be allowed in but we are prevented from doing so.

Around us, other soldiers are searching house by house. We enter a house just after they have been there. Everything is messy and trashed. Inside just a woman and her children looking terrified. We understand the order the soldiers are following in searching the houses and we decide to enter the houses before they arrive. We do so. We enter the first house but the soldiers kick us out quite brutally. We decide to pass to the second. In the house again just a woman and five little children. Her husband and her older son are held in the school. She is scared and she wants us to stay. As expected, about half an hour later the soldiers arrive. Because of our presence they restrain themselves and search the house in almost a polite way. We manage to do the same thing for other four houses. A small success.

When it gets dark, the soldiers go back to the school. Men inside the school try to talk to us from the windows. They tell us that they have not been given neither food nor water for the whole day. From one of the windows we see an old man in a bad state alone on a chair. Only few hours later, the soldiers will allow an ambulance to take him away.

Some of us remain in the village during the night. The soldiers continue the search house by house during the night. After midnight the men are allowed to leave the school and go back to their families, with the exception of about fifteen who are instead arrested.

The day after three houses in Sa’ida are blown up. Other seven have a destruction order, but a complaint has been filed at the High Court in Israel and might be saved.

URGENT ALERT TO THE INTERNATIONAL COMMUNITY

16 March 2003

The International Women’s Peace Service (IWPS), based in the Salfit governorate of the West Bank, warns the international community of possible ethnic cleansing in the Salfit and Qalqilya area during the forthcoming war against Iraq.

War is coming, and the fear of ethnic cleansing is growing in the Salfit and Qalqilya governorates of the West Bank.

The Salfit and Qalqilya governorates are two areas of the West Bank close to the Green Line, the de facto border between Israel and the West Bank. The region is fertile and rich in water, and Israel has long been interested in appropriating it. Since the late 1970s a policy of land confiscation and settlement building has been adopted, leaving Palestinian communities isolated. Every village is surrounded by illegal Israeli settlements, and 40% of the population here is made up of settlers. Since the Al Aqsa Intifada began, the isolation of the villages has worsened due to the introduction of numerous roadblocks and checkpoints by the Israeli military.

Possession of this area is strategically important for Israel; by emptying the area of its Palestinian population Israel would be able to annex it. For all of these reasons, the local population and Israeli peace organizations fear that while international attention is diverted by the war against Iraq, the region could become the target of Israeli violence aimed at expelling the local population from their land.

It is feared that the Israeli government and the army will give settlers the freedom to terrify the local population and carry out ethnic cleansing in the Salfit and Qalqilya areas. The use of settlers in this way would allow the Israeli government to deny responsibility. Israel has used this tactic in the past. The massacres conducted by paramilitary groups like the Stern Gang and the Irgun helped to drive out Palestinians from historic Palestine in 1948 and Lebanese Phalangists were used to massacre Palestinian refugees in Sabra and Shatila in Beirut in 1982.

We call upon the international community and all people of conscience to pay attention to what is going on here. We call for international observers and human rights organizations to be present in this area. Urgent action is required in order to prevent these crimes from taking place.

17 March 2003 - Roadblock removal

Patricia and I go to Tulkarem again to join the roadblock removal promoted by the group of Palestinian women. The roadblock is in the outskirts of Tulkarem and it is huge, made up of four different roadblocks. It has been there for more than eight months and the people have been forced for all this time to reach Tulkarem through the fields. The women we met in the previous week are all there, more determined than ever. We walk together from their office to the roadblock. Together with the International Solidarity Movement based in Tulkarem they have arranged a bulldozer to come and do the work.

We are there to protect them in case the Israeli soldiers will turn up. Luckily they do not. In two hours the roadblock is removed.

On the way back home, between Tulkarem and Azun, four huge bulldozers of Israeli contractors are building a new roadblock which will cut off Tulkarem from Qalqilya.

International Womens Peace Service - reports from Brighton based supporters, Spring 2003.

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Women removing roadblock
March, 2003