News

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. 

Final thoughts from Palestine

Kathleen and Bill Christison East Jerusalem 5 April 2003

“As we left East Jerusalem for Amman last week, on our way back home, we were struck by the cynicism of what appeared to be a concerted effort by the Israeli press and others in the media to justify, retrospectively, Israel’s siege and destruction of Jenin a year ago because it is now clear that U.S. and British forces are doing the same thing in Iraq.” Kathleen and Bill Christison reflect on their trip from Occupied East Jerusalem. 

"Where shall we go? Baghdad?"

Arnon Regular 4 April 2003

“The soldiers divided arrivals into two groups, separating those aged 15-20 from those aged 20-40. The younger group was led into classrooms, forced to tear pictures of shahid (martyrs) off the walls and step on them. At around 9 AM, a few hours after the operation began, a Druze officer reportedly told a few hundred men on site: ‘You are leaving the camp. Don’t come back until it is all over.’ Abd a-Latif a-Sudani, 30, recalls: ‘We asked him - `Where are we to go? To Baghdad?’ And he said: `You’d be better off there.’” Arnon Regular of Haaretz reports on a disturbing IDF operation in Tul Karm which has turned refugees into refugees once again. 

The Shopkeeper

Chris Brown Hebron, Palestine 3 April 2003

My friend’s shop is in the old city. Because there is curfew everyday, he has been unable to get there. Recently, his shop, along with nineteen others, was welded shut by the Israeli army.