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DAILY UNSPEAKABLE BRUTALITY AND
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NABLUS UNDER TOTAL SIEGE "Two and a half weeks ago, the commander of the Paratroops battalion in the city told Ha'aretz: 'We will not be able to maintain the curfew indefinitely. We must not 'Hezbollize' the population. We don't want suicide to become the only source of livelihood in the city ... It's impossible to keep the residents cooped up forever." Since then two and a half weeks have gone by and the IDF is proving that it is in fact possible to lock up an entire city indefinitely." MID-EAST REALITIES - MER - www.MiddleEast.Org - Washington - 9/30/2002: The Americans and the Israelis continue to conspire in still growing ways to control the Middle East region. They are doing so through a combination of covert means (CIA, NSA and Mossad), military means (special forces and Pentagon operations), as well as economic manipulation and of course Arab "client regimes"...most especially those in Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Jordan, and the lesser Arab sheikdoms of Kuwait, Qatar, Bahrain, UAE, Oman. Then of course there are the still growing and very important alliances with Turkey and with India. They are also doing so through still growing propaganda as well as disinformation campaigns, including such big leaks/lies as that perpetrated on and by CBS's 60 Minutes Program last Sunday evening. Indeed, political and media manipulation, such as the jerking around of Arafat and entourage then presented to the world as a US/Good Cop versus Israeli/Bad Cop production, is all really an added part of the subterfuge and pretext. EVERYDAY OCCURRENCES By Amira Hass Ha'aretz - Wednesday, September 25, 2002: Last Thursday morning, two huge bulldozers dug into the earth energetically, as they have been doing in recent months, in a wadi north of Ramallah. Over the past two years, with the gradual closure to Palestinian traffic of all the roads in the West Bank, this wadi has become a central and important juncture crossed on foot nearly every day by hundreds or thousands of people on their way to and from Ramallah from the nearby villages and from the Jalazun refugee camp. Taxis drop them off on one side of the wadi and they climb down among the boulders and dirt up to the other side, where different taxis await them. This, of course, is when soldiers are not posted there with their weapons, gas grenades, and stun grenades, who stop people from passing. Last Thursday, passage was prevented by a police jeep and a military van. There weren't many people anyway because of the curfew on Ramallah (even before the renewal of the siege of the Muqata and its demolition). An ambulance traveling along the road that cuts across the wadi - and is forbidden to Palestinians - was stopped near the police jeep and examined. An elderly woman stepped out of the ambulance and, with the support of a young woman, began to climb on the rocks of the northern slope, stopping to rest now and then on a boulder. At the top of the northern slope of the wadi, a car arrived and a man and a woman in their 30s got out. Both of them were doctors, who had been called urgently to the village of Sinjal (about 10 kilometers north of Ramallah). At night it had been totally impossible for them to get out, and a long, hard trip awaited them, which began with bypassing the police jeep and evading the policemen's eyes and rifles. All along the bulldozers were at work: A fence all along the road will prevent passage through the wadi and gradually complete the isolation of the Ramallah enclave, which has already been blocked to the south by a fence. On Monday afternoon, intelligence warnings led to the blocking of all the routes to Palestinian neighborhoods in northern Jerusalem. A curfew was imposed on the village of Bir Naballah. At a large kindergarten in the village, with about 250 children aged three to five, teachers decided to hurry up and drive the kids to the A-Ram/Beit Hanina crossing point, home to their worried parents in East Jerusalem. There is no knowing how long the curfew will last and it is hard to keep so many small children in field conditions. The kindergarten teachers hoped they would be able to persuade the Border Police to let the children through, but instead the police began to throw tear gas and stun grenades at them - from a distance of only a few meters, according to one staff member. Some of the policemen held large dogs quite close to the children, which added to the huge panic. (The response of the Israel Defense Forces Spokesman did not reach Ha'aretz by press time). These two everyday scenes have long ceased to be news items, if they ever were. This is not only because of the terror attacks in Tel Aviv and Hebron, and not because of the nine people killed in the Israel Defense Forces attack yesterday in Gaza. They are not newsworthy in Israel because they are everyday occurrences. They are not "news" because in the spontaneous catalog that has been produced by Israeli society, and therefore also in the media, they are just more "tiresome" stories about Palestinian suffering, for which the Palestinians are to blame anyway. No routine, mass suffering, Palestinian or otherwise, is newsworthy. After all, the people who determine the public agenda are mainly politicians and the elite. Usually, "suffering" has to be noisy, if not violent, if it is to be newsworthy and for the media not to cooperate with the authorities in muffling it. But the professional mistake here is that this is not a matter of news items about suffering, the aim of which is to arouse pity in someone. Whether it is a question of Palestinian suffering, or Ethiopian suffering, or the suffering of children below the poverty line - it remains a matter of government policy, hidden from the public even though in the long term, the public is affected by it. Tear gas thrown by police at little children and preventing doctors from reaching their patients in the villages - this is a policy that is set from above, even if Prime Minister Ariel Sharon did not know about these things and did not sign the orders for every tear gas canister and every obstruction of doctors. The less that is known about this policy in Israel, the fewer questions are asked about its efficacy in the long term. The doctors could not go out at night to the village and the children - for fear of the tear gas and the dogs - did not go back to their kindergarten yesterday. But their suffering and their an gerare spurring anyone who wishes to take revenge and has already decided to die - more than the official calls to stop harming Israeli civilians are convincing them. No fence or blocked crossing point or tear gas will deter them. ------------------- PRESS RELEASE: INTERNATIONAL SOLIDARITY MOVEMENT [MONDAY SEPTEMBER 30, 2002 NABLUS AREAS] The city of Nablus and surrounding cities and villages have been under strict military curfew, and majority of the Nablus area citizens have couragously defied these orders imposed on their lives. For the past 24 hours the people of Nablus have had to endure shelling not only from heavy land artillery of the most sophisticated weapons but also from air raids. At 4:30 PM the Israeli Occupation Forces have stepped up their violent shelling campaign especially in the Dawar Centre Area (Circle Center) of Nablus. What was already a dangerous situation spun into an even more violent situation. Two buildings known as Sabre and Karmel Buildings have been totally set on fire due to IOF's cantsant shelling. As people rushed to the scene amdist reports of people trapped in these burning buildings the IOF kept them away using live rounds of ammunition shooting in the direction of International Solidarity Movemnet volunteers and local Palestinian children. The IOF for a long period of time kept the media, ambulances, and firetrucks from entering. At approximately 6:30 PM they were all allowed in, ISM activists entered with paramedics and firefighters into the burning building as a search and rescue team. One of the burning buildings has been utterly destroyed and 10 of the unknown number of people trapped in the building are in serious condition due to smoke inhalation and were whisked away to Rafadiya Hospital in Nablus, luckily no deaths have been reported. Five Israeli soldiers have been injured and 1 died due to the exchange of heavy gun fire with Palestinian fighters in the Dawar Centre Area. It is reported that an Israeli tank used for shelling the buildings had exploded; the cause of this explosion is not yet known. It is also reported at 6:30 PM a second Palestinian child was killed from Israels murderious rage. Martyr Mohamed Zaghloul was only 10 years old also from the Nablus area. The first child martyr today was 13 year old Ahmed Youseff Abu-Abayya from the Balata Refugee Camp also killed from direct live ammunition. At approximately 8PM the Israeli Occupation Forces have left the area of the burning buildings in Dawar Centre Area heading towards Balata and Askar Refugee Camps to continue their shelling campaign. The total thus far of those injured due to Israel's violent rage is 36, and one of those injured is a little child who was shot in the stomach. All of the injured are now present in the Rafadiya Hospital in Nablus. ----------------------- A SUFFOCATING CURFEW By Gideon Levy Ha'aretz - September 29, 2002: Sayef Abu Kishaq did not sleep a wink all night on Friday. He is a 21-year-old volunteer in the International Solidarity Movement and a resident of the Iskar refugee camp on the outskirts of Nablus, in the West Bank. Slightly before midnight, the residents were startled out of their sleep when the Israeli army began to shell the camp. In the morning, Abu Kishaq started out for the organization's local office, which is situated in the heart of Nablus. He walked across the hills that surround the city, taking refuge in houses along the way when he heard a tank approaching. At week's end the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) again tightened the supervision of the ongoing curfew on the city: Once again it is dangerous to walk the streets of Nablus. Friday marked the 10th consecutive day of full curfew in Nablus, a curfew that has not been lifted for a minute, and this week will mark 100 days since the imposition of the general curfew, which is lifted only rarely, and for only a few hours, at very short notice. This is the lengthiest curfew that has been imposed on the largest city in the West Bank. Its 200,000 residents and a few tens of thousands more in the surrounding villages are effectively locked in their homes without a break. Are Israelis capable of imagining what this is like? For how long is it possible to incarcerate an entire city, to force tens of thousands of people to remain indoors and prevent them from pursuing their ordinary way of life? For how long can Israel continue to abuse a civilian population in this way, citing dubious security needs as a pretext? Such questions are rarely asked in Israel, mainly because people are not aware of, or do not want to think about, the fact that the curfew in the West Bank, and in Nablus especially, is beginning to reach suffocating proportions. The 200,000 residents of the city are apparently close to reaching the outer limits of their ability to cope with the horrific situation the IDF is forcing on them. On Friday, a few of them tried to get to the Othman Mosque on Amman Street, in the center of the city, in order to pray. For the past month, not a single worshiper has entered the mosque. Others violated the curfew and went out to demonstrate in the face of the tanks that are stationed at the barrier in front of the mosque. Two and a half weeks ago, the commander of the Paratroops battalion in the city, Lieutenant Colonel Amir Baram, told Ha'aretz: "We will not be able to maintain the curfew indefinitely. We must not 'Hezbollize' the population. We don't want suicide to become the only source of livelihood in the city ... It's impossible to keep the residents cooped up forever." Since then two and a half weeks have gone by and the IDF is proving that it is in fact possible to lock up an entire city indefinitely. The most beautiful city in the West Bank lies in ruins and the lives of its residents have become inhumane. The Old City of Nablus, where some of the buildings are more than a thousand years old, has been destroyed almost entirely. The Nablus Road is pockmarked with pits that the IDF dug across it in order to prevent vehicles from passing through the city streets. The municipality's Internet site, on which the last report is five months old, looks like a disaster area. It contains only lists of those who were killed (84 in the IDF's April incursion), reports about devastated sites (two mosques that were more than a thousand years old, 60 ancient buildings, 200 houses partially destroyed, 500 shops, two soap factories that were 500 years old, and even the Turkish hamam, which was struck by two missiles) and a list of the location of the roadblocks that are choking the city. Nablus paid the highest price in blood during the IDF incursions, even higher than its famous neighbor to the north, Jenin. Nablus exacted a heavy price in blood from Israel. Many suicide bombers and other terrorists came from Nablus. However, even that fact cannot justify the harsh and prolonged collective punishment that Israel is inflicting on all the city's residents. From Defensive Shield to Determined Path and Maybe This Time - the colorful names of the IDF's operations - the lives of the residents have become increasingly impossible. A few days ago, the IDF allowed the schools in the city to reopen, despite the curfew, after weeks in which there were no classes or makeshift classes were started in private homes. But it's not difficult to guess the feelings of parents who have to send their children to school along a street that is crawling with tanks. There is food in the stores, but who can buy anything after three months without income and two years of massive unemployment? Representatives of aid organizations report problems in getting assistance to the hungry and the indigent in the city: Their self-respect prevents them from asking for help or from accepting it in public. The IDF has taken over a few houses in the city and turned them into fortified positions, forcing the occupants to crowd into one room and unable to leave, in some cases even when the curfew is lifted. Last week the army captured the tall Zafer Building, situated next to An-Najah University, and its 60 occupants are now forced to crowd onto three floors. How much longer will it continue? The IDF Spokesperson did not bother replying to that question. In any event, the answer would be something along the lines of, "As long as the IDF sees fit," or "As long as security needs dictate this." And what about the lives of the 200,000 residents? No one gives a damn. -------------------------- MiD-EasT RealitieS - http://www.MiddleEast.Org Phone: (202) 362-5266 Fax: (815) 366-0800 Email: [EMAIL PROTECTED] To subscribe free to MER email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with subject SUBSCRIBE To unsubscribe email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with subject UNSUBSCRIBE Let us please be civil and as always, Caveat Lector. ======================================================================== Archives Available at: http://peach.ease.lsoft.com/archives/ctrl.html <A HREF="http://peach.ease.lsoft.com/archives/ctrl.html">Archives of [EMAIL PROTECTED]</A> http:[EMAIL PROTECTED]/ <A HREF="http:[EMAIL PROTECTED]/">ctrl</A> ======================================================================== To subscribe to Conspiracy Theory Research List[CTRL] send email: SUBSCRIBE CTRL [to:] [EMAIL PROTECTED] To UNsubscribe to Conspiracy Theory Research List[CTRL] send email: SIGNOFF CTRL [to:] [EMAIL PROTECTED] Om |
