Events of the past 24 hours
All Posts post a reply | post a new topic

AuthorTopic: Events of the past 24 hours
topic by
John Calvin
4/20/2002 (21:16)
 reply top
Events of the past 24 hours

Ramallah April 20th 2002 Wafa;

Amal Mahmoud Azzam (20) was severely wounded in the thigh by an Israeli sniper shot, north to the city of Ramallah, while other citizens we also wounded but could not reach the village’s medical center, witnesses said that the Israeli criminal forces have destroyed all the water containers on top of the houses.

the Nazi Israeli forces deployed in the eastern villages of Jenin open their machinegun and personal gun’s fire towards the citizens intimidating them and confining them inside their houses, where a tight curfew have been imposed for the four successive days.

Mr. Pierson the Swedish Prime minister who met with the Palestinian minister of planning and international relations Dr. Nabil Sha’ath, expressed his worries about the Palestinians under the Israeli criminal occupation promising that he and his country will continue their efforts together with the EU, Russia, the UN and the USA to achieve peace in the region where the Palestinians will fulfill their national goals of establishing their independence in the their own State.

Yousef Zannon a 38 years old Palestinian was killed by Israeli snipers bullet in the head near Rafah where the Israeli Nazi occupation forces commenced this early morning shoveling the lands around the city.

The occupation forces shoveled 50 to 100 meters sideways of the main road to Tulkarem destroying Palestinian trees and agricultural crops of the village of Far’on, they also destroyed the main water supply grid.

The Governor of Jenin district:

“Israel uses the spinning doors policy”

Jenin April 20th 2002 Wafa; Mr. Zohair Manasra Jenin District’s Governor said that the Israeli forces are still occupying the entire district.

He told Wafa that the Israeli declaration on withdrawing from the district is an absolute false allegation. He added that the Israeli tanks are still speeding in the streets of the City, the villages and the Camp, shooting to all directions intimidating and endangering the lives of the confined citizens in their homes due to the imposed tight curfew.

He warned from provision disaster where the people have ran out of food and basic needs for maintaining the lowest level of life, emphasizing that Curfew and closure is worse than the occupation itself.

A Palestinian official statement

Ramallah April 20, 2002 Wafa; An official Palestinian Spokesman said:

The Israeli organized terrorist occupation forces are viciously escalating their criminal practices against the Palestinians where the Israelis are invading the privacy of all the Palestinians in their homes, ransack, humiliate beat the people undistinguishing between men, women, old or young, and looting their belongings breaking into facilities and stealing valuables, and above all arrest the citizens leading them into Nazi Ghettos exposing them to extreme torture, oppression and humiliation.

The occupation forces are intensifying their presence in all the West Bank major cities, shooting all over and in all directions, intimidating the citizens injuring many and killing others where the infant Tabarak Jaber from Deir Alhatab has martyred due to shrapnel and the 14 years old boy Ali Kfeer from Ramallah was also killed due to a direct hit of a bullet from an Israeli sniper, and a newly born infant died at a roadblock where his mother was forbidden to move him to the Nablus Hospital since he needed medical attendance.

According to the public organizations the villages and refugee camps are lacking food medications, water and other essential items, including electricity.

In Qalqilya that was re-occupied over and over again the Sharon criminal forces ransack Anwar Alnatian’s house, when they could find nothing, they destroyed the house leveling it to the ground.

In Jenin, the citizens took advantage of the very short curfew lift to bury 29 corpses of martyrs of the Jenin independence battle, in a mass grave called later the “Cemetery of the Jenin Martyrs”. While the Israeli Nazi occupation forces have penetrated another 4.5 KM inside the Jenin district covered by heavy machinegun fire and shooting every moving thing.

In Bethlehem the city of Peace where the ugliest war crimes are being committed by the occupation Nazi Israeli forces, a hermetic closure and tight curfew are imposed on the City of Nativity preventing all kinds, shapes, or forms of provisions and aid, whether human or religious.

In the Almintar area in Gaza two civilians (15), and (26) were severely injured due to Israeli machinegun fire that targets the citizens.

This ugly and criminal war waged against us and our sacred places is practiced under the suspicious silence of the international Christian and Islamic and official bodies, that give the Butcher Sharon a green light to proceed with his crimes and massacres, at a time when the Palestinian people consisting of all the factions of Moslems, Christians and Jews are heroically standing in protecting the homeland, for a brighter future reaching the establishment of the independent and free Palestinian state with east Jerusalem as its Capital.


Israel prevents an investigating delegation
from entering Israel

Nazareth April 20th 2002 Wafa, The Israeli Authorities have prevented yesterday, a group of international experts and doctors from entering Israel, and ordered them to fly back to Frankfort where they came from.

The team of international experts and doctors that have arrived in Tel Aviv Air port, were supposed to investigate the Israeli war crimes in Jenin and elsewhere in the Palestinian occupied lands.

The team included the internationally known figures of high reputation in their field: from the international center for rehabilitating the victims of torture Dr. Maria Kali (Greece) and Dr. Jeans Mudwig (Denmark), Dr. Kerstin Amersen (Denmark), Miss. Suzan Monroe (Australia) and Christen Papadoplo (Greece).

MK Dr. Azmi Beshara issued a statement in which he said that Israel has many crimes and massacres to hide.What Israel Has Done

New York, April, 20, 2002, Wafa – Professor Edward Said wrote an article in the Nation’s web site, in which he says: Despite Israel's effort to restrict coverage of its destructive invasion of the West Bank's Palestinian towns and refugee camps, information and images have nevertheless seeped through.

The Internet has provided hundreds of verbal as well as pictorial eyewitness reports, as have Arab and European TV coverage, most of it unavailable or blocked or spun out of existence from the

mainstream US media.

That evidence provides stunning proof of what Israel's campaign has actually--has always--been about: the irreversible conquest of Palestinian land and society.

The official line (which Washington has basically supported, along with nearly every US media commentator) is that Israel has been defending itself by retaliating against the suicide bombings that

have undermined its security and even threatened its existence. That claim has gained the status of an absolute truth, moderated neither by what Israel has done nor by what in fact has been done to it.

Phrases such as 'plucking out the terrorist network,' 'destroying the terrorist infrastructure' and 'attacking terrorist nests' (note the total dehumanization involved) are repeated so often and so unthinkingly that they have given Israel the right to destroy Palestinian civil life, with a shocking degree of sheer wanton destruction, killing, humiliation and vandalism.

There are signs, however, that Israel's amazing, not to say grotesque, claim to be fighting for its existence is slowly being eroded by the devastation wrought by the Jewish state and its homicidal prime minister, Ariel Sharon.

Take this front-page New York Times report, 'Attacks Turn Palestinian Plans Into Bent Metal and Piles of Dust,' by Serge Schmemann (no Palestinian propagandist) on April 11: 'There is no way to assess the full extent of the damage to the cities and towns--Ramallah, Bethlehem, Tulkarem, Qalqilya, Nablus and Jenin--while they remain under a tight siege, with patrols and snipers firing in the streets. But it is safe to say that the infrastructure of life itself and of any future Palestinian state--roads, schools, electricity pylons, water pipes, telephone lines--has been devastated.'

By what inhuman calculus did Israel's army, using dozens of tanks and armored personnel carriers, along with hundreds of missile strikes from US-supplied Apache helicopter gunships, besiege Jenin's refugee camp for over two weeks, a one-square-kilometer patch of shacks housing 15,000 refugees and a few dozen men armed with automatic rifles and no missiles or tanks, and call it a response to terrorist violence and a threat to Israel's survival?

There are reported to be hundreds buried in the rubble, which Israeli bulldozers began heaping over the camp's ruins after the fighting ended. Are Palestinian civilian men, women and children no more than rats or cockroaches that can be attacked and killed in the thousands without so much as a word of compassion.


reply by
AngloSaxon
4/21/2002 (1:56)
 reply top
'Demolishing the homes of Arab civilians... Shooting handcuffed prisoners... Forcing local Arabs to test areas where mines may have been planted...'

These sound like the sort of accusations made by British and other European officials concerning Israel's recent actions in Jenin. In fact, they are descriptions from official British documents concerning the methods used by the British authorities to combat Palestinian Arab terrorism in Jenin and elsewhere in 1938.

The documents were declassified by London in 1989. They provide details of the British Mandatory government's response to the assassination of a British district commissioner by a Palestinian Arab terrorist in Jenin in the summer of 1938.

Even after the suspected assassin was captured (and then shot dead while allegedly trying to escape), the British authorities decided that 'a large portion of the town should be blown up' as punishment. On August 25 of that year, a British convoy brought 4,200 kilos of explosives to Jenin for that purpose.

In the Jenin operation and on other occasions, local Arabs were forced to drive 'mine-sweeping taxis' ahead of British vehicles in areas where Palestinian Arab terrorists were believed to have planted mines, in order 'to reduce [British] landmine casualties.'

The British authorities frequently used these and similar methods to combat Palestinian Arab terrorism in the late 1930s.

BRITISH forces responded to the presence of terrorists in the Arab village of Miar, north of Haifa, by blowing up house after house in October 1938.

'When the troops left, there was little else remaining of the once-busy village except a pile of mangled masonry,' The New York Times reported.

The declassified documents refer to an incident in Jaffa in which a handcuffed prisoner was shot by the British police.

Under Emergency Regulation 19b, the British Mandate government could demolish any house located in a village where terrorists resided, even if that particular house had no direct connection to terrorist activity. Mandate official Hugh Foot later recalled: 'When we thought that a village was harboring rebels, we'd go there and mark one of the large houses. Then, if an incident was traced to that village, we'd blow up the house we'd marked.'

The High Commissioner for Palestine, Harold MacMichael, defended the practice: 'The provision is drastic, but the situation has demanded drastic powers.'

MacMichael was furious over what he called the 'grossly exaggerated accusations' that England's critics were circulating concerning British anti-terror tactics in Palestine. Arab allegations that British soldiers gouged out the eyes of Arab prisoners were quoted prominently in the Nazi German press and elsewhere.

The declassified documents also record discussions among officials of the Colonial Office concerning the rightness or wrongness of the anti-terror methods used in Palestine. Lord Dufferin remarked: 'British lives are being lost and I don't think that we, from the security of Whitehall, can protest squeamishly about measures taken by the men in the frontline.'

Sir John Shuckburgh defended the tactics on the grounds that the British were confronted 'not with a chivalrous opponent playing the game according to the rules, but with gangsters and murderers.'

There were many differences between British policy in the 1930s and Israeli policy today, but one stands out - the British, faced with a level of Palestinian Arab terrorism considerably less lethal than that which Israel faces today, utilized anti-terror methods considerably harsher than those used by Israeli forces.