_______ ____ ______ / |/ / /___/ / /_ // M I D - E A S T R E A L I T I E S / /|_/ / /_/_ / /\\ Making Sense of the Middle East /_/ /_/ /___/ /_/ \\� http://www.MiddleEast.Org News, Information, & Analysis That Governments, Interest Groups, and the Corporate Media Don't Want You To Know! * * * * * * * IF YOU DON'T GET MER, YOU JUST DON'T GET IT! To receive MER regularly email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] NEWSFLASH: NABLUS, West Bank (Reuters - 31 July, 7:11am ET) - At least five Palestinians were killed on Tuesday in an explosion in an office of the militant Muslim group Hamas in the West Bank city of Nablus, witnesses and ambulance workers said. The witnesses said missiles fired from an Israeli aircraft hit the office. Ambulance workers at the scene said they saw at least five bodies. IMPRISONED, TRAPPED, AND UNPREPARED BY ARAFAT MID-EAST REALITIES � - www.MiddleEast.Org - Washington - 7/31: Arafat has once again trapped and imprisoned his own people -- keep reading. Wherever he has set up his headquarters corruption, repression, nepotism, and scandal have followed. And always these realities of what we have termed the "Arafat regime" are exploited to further fracture and weaken the Palestinian people -- a people whose basic claim to independence, "return", and reparations should at this point be unassailable. It was that way leading up to the Jordanian civil war in 1971, it was that way in Lebanon with Arafat fleeing leaving his people defenseless just before the horrible Sabra and Shatila Refugee Camp massacres in 1982, it was that way in distant exile in Tunisia, and it is that way in Gaza and the West Bank under the Arafat-created "Palestinian Authority". This first article from Reuters today shows how helpless and defenseless individual Palestinians are under the agreements Arafat has signed. The next two articles, the first from The Independent (London) and the second from Agence France-Presse (Paris), help explain the terrible circumstances in which Arafat has essentially trapped his own people who are still extraordinarily unprepared both on the ground and internationally to deal with what the Israelis are dishing out. PALESTINIANS SAY ISRAELI SOLDIERS BEAT THEM By Michael Carney JERUSALEM, July 31 (Reuters) - The Israeli soldiers whistled, so Khaled Rawashdeh pulled his yellow Palestinian taxi to the side of the Samou'-Hebron road in the West Bank. But instead of engaging in what Palestinians call the usual routine of humiliation and harassment, a dozen soldiers beat Rawashdeh and eight other Palestinians for two hours, the taxi driver said, according to a complaint he filed with a human rights group. "We were nine men standing in a line...and the soldiers continued beating us as if they were playing a game," Rawashdeh told Israel's B'Tselem organisation, which has investigated numerous reports of brutality since a Palestinian uprising erupted in September. "I saw one of the soldiers run from his position, six meters (20 feet) away, and kick one of the men in the stomach," Rawashdeh said two days after being released from hospital. "They also threw stones at us and beat us with their hands and their gun butts." The soldiers also destroyed two taxis and stole about $300, according to four complaints filed with B'Tselem. The Israeli army confirmed that its soldiers behaved in a "violent manner" and were being investigated by military police, but said it had no information about the alleged theft. The army mentioned only one taxi in its response. "In the next 24 hours the investigation will be concluded, and at that time any soldier found to be connected with this event will be tried and severely punished," an army spokeswoman told Reuters on Monday. Tensions between Israelis and Palestinians have worsened dramatically since a Palestinian uprising against occupation in the West Bank and Gaza Strip began 10 months ago. The army is also investigating reports of regular harassment and brutality at a checkpoint in the West Bank city of Hebron, a review announced on the same day the soldiers stopped Rawashdeh and another taxi driver, Muhammad a-Salamin. The soldiers, lounging alongside their jeep, whistled and motioned for the taxis to pull over near the Palestinian village of Karma. "When I stopped near the jeep, one of the soldiers came towards us and took my ID card and those of the passengers and told me to get out of the car," said Rawashdeh, 36. "Another soldier got into the taxi and opened the glove compartment. He threw the documents, the cassettes and the money that were in the glove compartment on the floor of the taxi." The soldiers then chased away three women, a child and an elderly man who had been passengers in the taxis, the Palestinians say. "The soldier dragged me behind the jeep...and started beating me while swearing and yelling in Arabic," passenger Muhammad Sufia, 21, told B'Tselem. "He hit me on the left ear with the butt of his gun. He took a metal helmet from the jeep and hit me. "I was crying and screaming," said Sufia, who lost consciousness and awoke on Tuesday in a Hebron hospital. The reports describe severe beatings in which the soldiers punched and kicked the Palestinians from the West Bank village of Samou', who were also forced -- at gunpoint -- to strike one another. By all indications, the attack was unprovoked. "One of the soldiers pulled my hair hard and ordered me to beat the man who was standing next to me," passenger Mahmoud Muhammad Hawamdeh, 22, told B'Tselem. "I hesitated at first, but the soldier started hitting me on the head and shouting at me to beat the person next to me." "I hit him with my fist three times," Hawamdeh, a student, said. "They then turned to that person and told him to hit me back. He hit me twice." The Palestinians say the soldiers also forced Rawashdeh and a-Salamin to drive across a rock-strewn field, where the Israelis reportedly smashed windows, punctured tyres and slashed upholstery. The army confirmed one of its soldiers punctured the tires. "They broke the windshield," a-Salamin, 28, told investigators. "One of the soldiers grabbed me by the hair, turned my head around and said: 'Look at your vehicle, pretty isn't it? If we broke the rear window it would look even better."' The Palestinians say they were chased away after two hours, pelted with rocks and forced to abandon the two taxis. "I ran away toward the storage rooms and from there, I could see the jeep's license plate," a-Salamin said. "I will never forget the number - 6100210." PALESTINIANS IMPRISONED BY ARAFAT'S FLAWED DEAL By Phil Reeves in Hebron [The Independent - 28 July 2001]: Wars create lies as fast as corpses. Take "curfew" and "closure". What nice, cool, BBC Radio 4 kind of words. Isn't curfew the word you use when you order your stroppy teenager to stay at home after a night out on the Special Brew? And "closure" sounds like a road, blocked off because of flooding. But the Arabs of Hebron know other meanings. They know that "closure" means economic misery, and "curfew" means to be imprisoned for up to 24 hours a day, under threat of being arrested, beaten, jailed or shot for "looking suspicious" if they so much as stray beyond their doorstep. The king of lying, Jeffrey Archer, has more freedom. Three British aid agencies � Oxfam, Christian Aid and Save the Children � have warned this week that violence, insecurity and poverty in the West Bank and Gaza Strip could turn an already dire situation into "a full-scale humanitarian crisis". They said that nearly two thirds � some 64 per cent � of Palestinian households now live below the poverty line, and an estimated 74 per cent of the 3 million Palestinian population qualify for emergency food assistance from the United Nations. There were, they noted, disturbing indications that the population's ability to cope with the cumulative effects of "closure" � better described as a siege � is coming to an end. Hebron, once a flourishing West Bank city, has felt the brunt more than most. The entire city has been blockaded by the Israeli army for months. But the 35,000 Arabs living in the Israeli-controlled sector have been under curfew for more than 128 days since last September. I went there the other day, on a bright summer's mid-afternoon. Streets that I remember as full of activity before the Palestinian intifada were utterly deserted. A small boy was flying a kite from a rooftop, searching in the sky for the freedom denied to him on the ground. The babble of TV sets and bursts of conversation, muffled by the thick walls of Hebron's old stone houses, occasionally interrupted the hush. One had the surreal sense that everyone was hiding, waiting to leap out and shout "Surprise!" >From time to time, an Israeli army jeep thundered through, checking that everyone was >locked away. But no one was on the streets, except for some Israeli soldiers, loading >a lorry, and a few armed Jewish settlers, whose presence in this overwhelmingly Arab >city has provided Israel with a reason for imposing this misery. Although the sun was high, it was as quiet as the dead of night � in contrast to the frenetic, teeming day of the market place on the city's Arab side a few hundred yards away, or to the hum of the fenced-in Jewish settlement of neighbouring Kiryat Arba, an oasis of wide roads, modern buildings and green lawns through which we drove to get into Hebron. (No one bothers with euphemisms there; "No Arabs," announced the armed security guard at the electric iron gate, as he glowered into our car before letting us through). Hebron's imprisoned residents are now seeing the results of an agreement concluded in 1997 by Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli Prime Minister of the day, and the Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat, the flaws of which are becoming more cruelly apparent. Eighty per cent of the city of 120,000 people was handed to the Palestinians, who assumed control over municipal services � local security, education, health, traffic and so on. But Israel kept all the main levers of power including crucial parts of the city's infrastructure, such as water and electricity. The other 20 per cent of the city also remained in its hands on the staggering basis of protecting some 450 Jewish settlers � many recent immigrants. They refuse to budge from a city in which they form 0.03 per cent of the population because they see it as historically and religiously their own. Their continued presence � armed by the Israel Defence Forces, guarded by thousands of troops � laid the ground for the inter-communal strife that has now erupted. The agreement meant that the Israeli army remained in overall charge, controlling the entrances, and looming over the city from an army base on a hill to the south. Hebron became a model in miniature of the larger configuration of power and control that Israel was using the Oslo negotiations to establish in the West Bank and Gaza Strip: an island of limited Palestinian autonomy, cut off from the outside world and set in a landscape which Israel rules. No one understands this better than Mustafa Abdel-Nabi Natshe, the Palestinian Mayor of Hebron. During the Oslo negotiations, he pressed Mr Arafat not to sign a deal that allowed the 450 settlers to stay, perpetuating a terrible fault-line between the city's two communities, which now produces almost daily acts of horror � the killing, for instance, of a 10-month-old settler baby by a Palestinian sniper, or the killing by the army of unarmed Arabs, and the bombardment of Palestinian homes with tanks . Mr Natshe is surely right when he says that life is "becoming more and more unbearable". The industrial zone in H2, the Israeli-controlled part of Hebron, is closed. Electricity has been regularly interrupted, not least because Israeli tanks shelled the transformers. Businesses have been ruined. And in a hospital intensive care unit nearby, lies one of the latest victims � 10-year-old Marwar Ishrif. She has a bullet in the head, which hit her as she slept in bed. There aren't many nice, cool BBC Radio 4 words to sum all this up. But curfew and closure won't do. [For background on the Hebron Agreement that led to this situation: http://www.MiddleEast.Org/archives/hebron.htm] PALESTINIANS ILL-PREPARED FOR ISRAELI OFFENSIVE NABLUS, West Bank, July 28 (AFP) - Even if the threat of an outright offensive by the Israelis is to be taken seriously, there is virtually no evidence of Palestinian preparedness for such a move. "We are not left with many options. All we can do is stock food, medicines and get our emergency units ready", Nablus governor Mahmud al-Allul told AFP. "We have given instructions to our forces posted at the entrances of the autonomous zones to redeploy in case of an attack" in order to retreat to safer sectors, said Allul, a high-ranking civil and military official. "We can fight against Israeli infantrymen, but it will be a lot more difficult to resist tanks, helicopter attacks or shooting coming from the hills which overlook the city", the governor pointed out. Yet in Nablus, as in all West Bank cities and towns, it is difficult to detect any sign of preparations to face a major military offensive. Nothing has been done to replace or even beef up the simple defence of sandbags around Palestinian posts: no concrete shelters, not even any trenches. Colonel Abdel Hai Abdel al-Wahed, in charge of civilian security for the whole of the West Bank, complains of "a total lack of coordination between the various civilian and police services". A high-ranking West Bank security official told AFP that Yasser Arafat's Palestinian Authority "does not even have a plan taking into account the various scenarios" of an Israeli attack. When an outright offensive seemed imminent six weeks ago, the National Islamic Forces -- a Palestinian coalition of 13 movements including Arafat's Fatah, as well as Islamic Jihad and Hamas -- called on Nablus residents to prepare Molotov cocktails with which to attack Israeli tanks. Hamas even urged volunteers to prepare explosive belts to be used in suicide attacks against the occupying forces. Last week, the same coalition distributed flyers calling on the population to "be on alert and ready to defend its land", while giving no guidance or instructions to that effect. The makeshift defence strategy coupled with the calls for mobilisation leave more than one West Bank Palestinian bemused. "I suggest we prepare stocks of stones, it'll be more effective", says a sarcastic refugee from the Dheisheh camp near Bethlehem. On several occasions Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon has ruled out an all-out offensive against the Palestinian Authority, because of the international complications it would create for Israel and because it is not in the Jewish state's interest to reoccupy Palestinian urban centres. On this point many Palestinians agree with the hardline Israeli leader, including those directly involved in the conflict that has torn the region apart since last September. "I am expecting the Israeli army to carry out repeated incursions, to create buffer zones (where it may shoot on sight), to step up assassinations (of Palestinian activists), but not to launch a global offensive", said an anonymous member of the Fatah's armed wing in the West Bank town of Ramallah. ---------------------------------- MiD-EasT RealitieS - http://www.MiddleEast.Org Phone: 202 362-5266 Email: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Fax: 815 366-0800 To subscribe email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with subject SUBSCRIBE To unsubscribe email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with subject UNSUBSCRIBE
