News

Another assassination

Palestine Monitor 7 April 2003

Israeli troops yesterday raised the level of violence in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. According to Palestinian security sources, yesterday afternoon Israeli Special Forces, dressed in women’s clothes entered the Palestinian town of Salfeet. Upon reaching the center of town they opened fire on 23 year old Badr Abdel Raouf Yassin, killing him. 

Israeli Army Invades Tulkarem Refugee Camp

2 April 2003

In the small hours of this morning the Israeli Army and border police invaded Tulkarem refugee camp with attack helicopters, tanks, APCs, hummers (special forces vehicles) and hundreds of soldiers and border policemen. After taking control of the camp, they began to round up the camp’s entire male population between the ages of 15 and 45. At dawn the men were marched in groups to the Tulkarem refugee camp’s School for Girls where they were held until for varying periods of time before being taken away in trucks. This update offers detail about what ISM activists witnessed at the scene. 

First major ISM anti-bulldozer action since Rachel Corrie killing

Joseph Smith Rafah, Palestine 6 April 2003


“At about 5pm, we received a call from a Palestinian journalist friend of ours with information that bulldozers were working in the Tel Zorob area, the western-most refugee camp next to the Egyptian border. We were actually in the middle of a meeting, so within minutes all eleven of us were geared up and out the door. Five English, two Scottish, two Americans, and two Italians piled into a large taxi and headed to the scene.” Joseph Smith, a member of the International Solidarity Movement, based in Rafah, Gaza writes about the first major ISM action against bulldozers since his friend Rachel Corrie was killed on 16 March 2003. 

Brian Avery shooting: Annotated map from eyewitness Tobias Karlsson

Tobias Karlsson 7 April 2003


International Solidarity Movement activist Brian Avery was shot in the face with heavy machine gun fire in Jenin on 5 April 2003 by Israeli troops in an armored personnel carrier. Tobias Karlsson, International Solidarity Movement coordinator for the Jenin area, offered the following annotated map giving more information about the incident, thus highlighting the incredibility of the Israeli army’s claim that the shooting was a “crossfire”-type accident. 

What about the apartheid wall?

International Womens Peace Service Mas'ha, Palestine 7 April 2003

If you’ve ever sat in springtime in an olive grove, enjoying the shade of the trees and the scent of the fresh earth, perhaps you will understand what land can mean to people who depend on it. Go just once to Mas’ha, Bidya, Sanniria or one of the dozens of Palestinian villages that are losing most of their land to the Israeli Apartheid Wall and you will get an idea of what kind of pain Palestinians feel at this theft and destruction. 

Israel threatens Palestinan land and homes in Qalqiliya

Robyn Long East Jerusalem 6 April 2003

Between walking among the lands in Qalqiliya, which Israel is confiscating for the so-called ‘security barrier’, and visiting the hospital where Jihad, a fourteen year-old martyr who was shot by Israeli ‘special forces’, was prepared for his funeral, one can easily understand why the residents of this caged city state there is an internal closure on their spirits. Robyn Long writes from Occupied Jerusalem. 

Another busy day for IDF bulldozers

Gila Svirsky East Jerusalem 5 April 2003

“They had to do 16 houses by sundown, and they couldn’t start until the men who live in them had gone off to work in the morning. But those machines are tireless, and by the end of the day, you could find 16 families sitting on heaps of rubble, weeping and cursing. Children, too.” Gila Svirsky of the Coalition of Women for Peace reports on another average day in Occupied Palestine.