John Dugard gives a presentation on how “the apartheid regime operated in law and policy in South Africa, and provide an overview of Israeli law and policy with respect to the prohibition on apartheid.” for the 3rd International Session of the Russell Tribunal on Palestine in Cape Town in November 2011
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So much for ‘normalisation’ : A school set up to promote peace and understanding between Arab and Jewish communities in Jerusalem has been hit by vandals who have daubed racist threats on its playground walls, including “Death to Arabs”.
An historic national conference to promote the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement directed at ending Israel’s crimes against the Palestinian people was held at the University of Pennsylvania Feb. 3-5.
Even before the conference began a wave of vicious racist attacks were directed against Palestine solidarity activists by the campus press, on-line blogs and the Philadelphia Inquirer. Penn students active in organizing the conference were verbally attacked by pro-Israeli forces.
Perhaps the most disgusting was the anti-Semitic slur of “kapos” aimed at Jewish pro-BDS students by Professor Ruben Gur in the campus paper The Daily Pennsylvanian. The term refers to Jews who collaborated with Nazis in concentration and extermination camps during World War II.
The night before the conference opened, Harvard Law Professor Alan Dershowitz — an apologist for Israeli and U.S. war crimes — addressed an event sponsored by several Penn academic departments and the college chapters of the Republicans and Democrats.
Dershowitz encouraged this audience to deny the brutal ethnic cleansing of Palestinians during the creation of the State of Israel, known as al-Nakba.
For too long we have tolerated your crimes against humanity and allowed your sins to go unpunished.
Through the use of media deception and political bribery, you have amassed the sympathies of many. You claim to be democratic, yet in reality this is far from the truth, in fact your only goal is to better the lives of a select few while carelessly trampling the liberties of the masses. We see through the propaganda that you circulate through the main stream media and lobby through the political establishment.
Your Zionist bigotry has displaced and killed a great many. As the world weeps, you laugh while planning your next attack. All of this is done under the veil of peace but so long as your regime exists peace shall be hindered.
You label all who refuse to comply with your superstitious demands as antisemetic. And have taken steps to ensure a nuclear holocaust. You are unworthy to exist in your current form and will therefore face the wrath of anonymous. Your empire lacks legitimacy and because of this you must govern behind a curtain of deceit. We will not allow you to attack a sovereign country based upon a campaign of lies. Your grip over humanity will weaken and man will be closer to freedom.
But before this is accomplished the people of this world will rise against you and renounce you in all your worth. Our crusade against your reign of terror shall commence in 3 steps.
Step one will be initiated after the release of this video and will be comprised of systematically removing you from the internet.
Step two will be later disclosed and is already in initiation. And as for step 3, well think of this one as a present from Anonymous to you. We will not stop until the police state becomes a free state.
British Water has decided to cooperate with MATIMOP, an Israeli government agency that has been ordered to enter into international agreements and “aggressively expand opportunities for Israel’s industry”.
Jazi Abu Kaf talks about the crime of persecution in regards to Israel’s actions towards the Bedouins in the Naqab (Negev) desert during the 3rd International Session of the Russell Tribunal on Palestine in Cape Town, November 2011.
Today Al Mezan releases ‘Children in the Gaza Strip’s Access to Medical Care’ a factsheet published under the Save the Children UK funded project ‘Child Rights at the Centre: Enhancing National Capacities to Monitor, Document, and Report on Child Rights Issues in the oPt.’ The factsheet documents Israel’s policies towards the Gaza Strip which result in children being denied the right to access proper medical care.
The ongoing siege on Gaza which stops essential medical equipment and drugs from entering and causes sporadic fuel and electricity cuts combined with the closure system which prevents medical professionals from travelling abroad to access advanced training outside Gaza. These policies have resulted in a medical system in Gaza which cannot provide care and procedures for many patients. Children requiring care that is unavailable have to go outside Gaza, usually to hospitals in Israel, Jerusalem or the West Bank (as well as to Egypt and Jordan). In order to access these hospitals children require a permit from the Israeli authorities. The process for acquiring a permit is long and complex and often results in denials. Since January 2008, 4 children have died because their application was denied or took too long to be approved.
Israel also denies children’s access to medical care when it prevents ambulances from accessing the Buffer Zone. Ambulances require prior coordination with the Israeli military authorities before they can access the sick or injured in the Buffer Zone. 173 children have died because ambulances have been denied access to reach them (throughout the Gaza Strip, not just in the Buffer Zone).
The policies outlined in this factsheet result in serious violations of international human rights and humanitarian law which Israel, as the Occupying Power in the Gaza Strip, has an obligation to uphold.
“Children in the Gaza Strip are deprived from receiving quality medical treatment and access to procedures that can save their lives. The right to access medical treatment and to enjoy the highest attainable physical and psychological health is one of the Israeli systematic violations of children’s rights in the Gaza Strip,” Samir Zaqout, Al Mezan’s fieldwork coordinator, states. “This has particularly been the case in the last five years since Israel tightened its siege on the Gaza Strip.”
In addition to the polices outlined in this factsheet which directly affect access to medical care Samir Zaqout says that “the Israeli siege has caused a deterioration in the health of children due to increasing poverty levels and diseases among children such as anemia. Israeli military attacks have also injured thousands of children, hundreds of them sustaining permanent physical disabilities.”
the UN General Assembly has adopted a new Optional Protocol to the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC) establishing a complaints procedure for violations of children’s rights.
The new treaty will enable children, or their representatives, claiming that their rights have been violated to bring a complaint to an international committee of children’s rights experts if they have not been able to get remedies for these violations in their countries. A coalition of over 80 international and national NGOs, coordinated by the NGO Group for the CRC, which has been actively campaigning for the treaty since 2006, welcomed the news.
‘Israeli children are educated to see the Palestinians as a problem that must be solved and as a threat that must be eliminated. They can go through life, as I did growing up in Jerusalem, without ever meeting a Palestinian child. They know nothing of the life or culture of Palestinians who quite often live only several hundred meters from them.’
Israel’s theft from the people of Nabi Saleh of their water and land created the weekly protests against the Occupier. This is the moving speech of Nariman Tamimi, read at the Human Rights March rally in Tel Aviv, December 9, 2011 by Nisreen Alyan, an attorney at the Association for Civil Rights in Israel (ACRI), which emphasises that
“In the shadow of the Occupation, there is no dignity and there is no freedom of expression.”
“Even the most basic right to demonstrate and protest against the action of the Occupation is grossly abused.”
A short time after the speech was read in Tel Aviv, at the weekly demonstration in Nabi Saleh, Mustafa Tamimi was critically injured from an IOF teargas projectile manufactured in the US and fired at him face from point blank range. He died in the hospital the following day, on International Human Rights Day, December 10, 2011.
‘The soldiers laughed. They smiled. They took pictures of us, zooming in on each of our faces, and they smirked. ‘They laughed at us as we screamed at them to let us through to where he was, unconscious in a taxi near the watchtower. They threatened us if we didn’t go back. We waved the flag with his blood on it in front of them. One of them had the audacity to bat it away. We shouted, “His blood is on your hands!” They replied, “So?”’
Another eye witness, Ibrahim Bornat, artist and activist from Bil’in was standing next to Mustafa at the time of the murder and describes the inordinate, cruel delays created by the Occupation forces.
I ran back to get people, because we were far away, but there was no ambulance around, so the people around gathered him and put him in a servee [a communal taxi] and tried to leave. The soldiers stopped the servee and tried to arrest Mustafa, but when they saw that he was on the brink of death, they began to act as if they were humanitarian, to revive his heart. But what is ‘humanitarian’, to shoot someone to kill, and then to try to help him? These were the same soldiers from the jeep that shot him. They shot him, then say they want to help him. What they really did is prevent him from leaving.
The body lay on the ground for half an hour. They wanted Mustafa’s ID, and they also wanted the ID of his mother, of another family member, and of Bassem Tamimi’s wife, because these people wanted to go out with him too… They were doing some kind of medical treatment while he was lying on the ground, but this was no hospital, and what he needed was to be taken to a hospital. He should have been flown out in that moment. There is nothing you can do for him on the street there.
RT @ibnezra: The Israeli army has failed to confirm that its soldiers violated ‘open-fire regulations” resulting in the death of Mustafa Tamimi.
RT @shunradan: The jeep frm which #mustafatamimi was shot carries a “how am I driving?”sticker http://twitpic.com/7qupdd Call 02-5694211 & tell them!
RT @Abou_Charlie: #MustafaTamimi’s father was denied a permit to exit West Bank to be with his son as he fought for his life. How ethical!
RT @iRevolt: IOF spokesperson displays picture of slingshot as the reason 4 blowing off half of #MustafaTamimi’s head is.gd/JycvNU
RT @gazaheart: Hate has no limits. I was shocked to read comments re IDF murder of #mustafatamimi beneath article is.gd/EXLXZ0
Mustafa was the 20th person which Israel’s sadistic Occupation forces have killed with tear gas canisters, and the first martyr of Nabi Saleh. The criminal IOF have excused themselves by stating that the incident was ‘exceptional’. (exceptionally cruel?)
Figures in the army’s Central Command said the soldier claimed he “didn’t see” Tamimi. But even if that is true, the IDF’s rules of engagement prohibit the firing of tear gas grenades from a rifle pointed directly at demonstrators or from a distance of less than 40 meters away. They also stipulate that the shooter must use the rifle sight and verify that no one is in the line of fire. Central Command and the Military Police are conducting separate investigations into the incident.
Plan Dalet has never ended, Israel’s genocide of Palestinians has never ended, Israel’s expansionism, its deceitful posture of ‘defence’ and ‘security’ which it uses to obscure and justify its foul land grabs and murder has never ended.
At Mustafa’s funeral, the IOF again resorted to violence, with 3 people injured and 8 arrested. Once again, the IOF fired tear gas projectiles directly at the crowd, spraying the village with skunk water which will pollute it for days. This collective punishment on people who are being robbed of their birthright and denied civil rights is a crime against humanity.
RT @LinahAlsaafin: The pig soldiers wanted to arrest us all. They beat us. We formed a human pile on the ground, limbs bodies twisted. They continued to hit us
RT @LinahAlsaafin: I held up a picture of #MustafaTamimi in front of a soldier’s face. He grabbed it and balled it in his fist. It’s in my bag now, torn.
On Saturday, Israeli soldiers fired artillery shells targeting a chicken and sheep farm in Beit Hanoun, in the northern part of the Gaza Strip — dozens of livestock died in the attack; excessive damage was reported.
The Maan News Agency reported that the shelling targeted the farm of local resident Ramadan Abu Ghazala, located east of Beit Hanoun. The shelling led to no human casualties.
A Palestinian child was severely wounded and her father was injured in an Israeli airstrike that targeted a house in Zaytoun neighborhood in Gaza city at dawn Sunday.
At present, Gaza may serve as a scapegoat for Israel’s impotence toward incidents in the Sinai. Israel is also threatening to punish the Gazan people in another despicable way – by cutting off their water supply.
‘It is not important what this bill teaches us about Danon as a person – that he did not study history, for example, or that he did but he knows very well that in fascist regimes the State is above all else; or that as an experienced demagogue he knows just how close a connection there is between the level of discrimination against a certain ethnic group and the claims about crime among its members. ‘
Recalling that Bob Geldof praised the JNF land thieves. Bob Geldof breached the boycott [on May 31, 2011, ‘when he accepted a dis-honorary fake degree from Ben Gurion University] praised the JNF when he spoke to patrons at a Jewish National Fund event telling them that the JNF ‘got’ the idea of sustainability & the importance of water over 100 years ago.
