Issue No.589
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6 - 12 June 2002 Issue No.589 Region |
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| Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 | Recommend this page | ||
Standard operating procedures
The Israeli army continued to consolidate its reoccupation of Palestinian towns this week, destroying a Greek Orthodox church in the process. Khaled Amayreh reports from Jerusalem
Israeli tanks once again rolled into several Palestinian population centres this week. Tanks were deployed in Nablus, the largest town in the West Bank, as well as Tulkarm, Qalqilya, Bethlehem and Hebron, in a show of force that coincided with raids by the Israeli army on a number of refugee camps including Balata, Askar, Ein Beit Al-Ma'a near Nablus, Nur-Shams near Tulkarm, and Dheishe, Ayda, and Azza near Bethlehem.
In Nablus, the Israeli army killed at least one civilian and demolished a number of civilian homes. Israeli occupation troops also arrested Essam Abu Bakr, secretary-general of Fatah in Nablus, along with more than 300 Palestinians who were taken to the notorious Ofer internment centre.
At Balata refugee camp, the Israeli army rounded up the entire male population between the ages of 13 and 60, taking the men to the Hiwwara detention camp. The number of detainees is not clear, but local officials said it was in the hundreds and might even be as high as 1,000. The Balata camp suffered more than just the rounding up of its male population. Israeli soldiers, using explosives, demolished scores of homes by blasting holes in the connecting walls, apparently to allow soldiers to move from one house to the next without going outside.
International observers and Palestinian families pleaded with the soldiers to stop their destruction, but the army continued to wreak its havoc. An IDF spokesman said the army was carrying out a "routine operation" at the camp, adding that the army "knows best how to defend Israel".
Places of worship, it seems, are not immune from destruction in the course of such defence, as Israeli troops showed when they dynamited a historic Greek Orthodox church in the village of Abboud, north-west of Ramallah this week. The Palestinian Authority (PA) criticised the destruction of the church, while the Christian community in Palestine called on Christians around the world to protest "this nefarious sacrilege and aggression on Christian holy places".
"If a Jewish synagogue had been destroyed, the Jews would have raised hell about anti-Semitism and Nazism and so on, but when Israeli troops destroy Christian churches and Muslims mosques, the world is silent," said Toni Abboudi, a Greek Orthodox man from the village.
Meanwhile, the plight of Palestinians detained in camps throughout Israel was highlighted this week by an article carried by the Ramallah-based daily Al-Ayyam. A Palestinian detainee who had just been released from the Ofer detention camp told Al-Ayyam that the Israeli prison official had addressed the prisoners, saying, "We have created this camp especially for you; it was built according to the design of a concentration camp. What the Nazis did to us, we will do to you, and after we punish you, maybe you will find another people whom you will persecute and torment like we are doing to you now."
The detainee, 41-year-old Abdel-Rahman Al-Ahmar of the Dheishe refugee camp, said he was forced to translate the Israeli prison official's remarks from Hebrew to Arabic. Al- Ayyam published Al-Ahmar's testimony in full on 3 June. The Israeli army refused to confirm or deny the incident.
Another ugly episode took place on 1 June when Israeli occupation soldiers manning a roadblock at Beit Hanina north of Jerusalem beat up and humiliated a Palestinian driver of a van that was carrying gas canisters to be used for cooking.
"They told me to raise my hands, which I did, and then they took me to a nearby hill where they continued to kick and beat me up. While being beaten up, one of the soldiers took a cutter out of his pocket, and with the other soldiers holding my head, hands and legs, he started tattooing a swastika on my right cheek and the star of David on my forearm," the man said.
These are just two examples of dozens of cases of humiliation to which ordinary Palestinians are subjected. Meanwhile, the Israeli occupation army continued to impose closures on every Palestinian town, village and refugee camp.
The closures coincided with the confiscation of tens of thousands of acres of privately-owned Palestinian land along the former armistice line between Israel proper and the West Bank.
Israel says the confiscations are necessary to build a security fence to prevent Palestinians from crossing into Israel. However, the fact that the fence is being built several kilometres inside the West Bank suggests that the Israeli government had other goals in mind besides security, namely, the seizure of more land to expand Jewish settlements, which already cover more than 50 per cent of the West Bank.
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