Israel: victim or culprit?

A book about Israeli practices

that qualify as terrorism

and other human rights abuses

 

Based on news stories over eight years
from several hundred references,
mainly Israeli and Palestinian

 

by Jerrold Cohen
an American Jew with family members
murdered in Russia just for being Jews

 

Most Americans never call Israelis terrorists, but below are stories of Israeli treatment of Palestinians that should make you think twice. On the next page a few pictures explain it better than a thousand words.

 

If you had known about these incidents, you might have been able to help stop them from continuing.

The boy’s name was Ayman Fares. No soldier was ever punished and no remuneration was ever given to the family for his killing.

 

Yamoun (a town in the northern West Bank), March 6, 2006, late in the day near sunset. An eight-and-a-half-year-old girl with stitches in her chin from a fall is driven by her uncle in his taxicab to a doctor’s office to have the stitches removed. When he parks at the doctor’s office he sees Israeli soldiers besieging the house next door, and before he can start the car again the soldiers shoot his cab up with  bullets, immediately wounding the girl critically, and also wounding the uncle.

 

He manages to get her into the doctor’s office, where they call for an ambulance. When he leaves the doctor’s office he is taken captive by the soldiers, who put him in a Jeep and begin beating him up, including banging his head against the wall of the Jeep. When it is clear that he has nothing important to tell them, they let him out, and when he gets to the hospital, he finds that his niece had died of her wounds. In their report the soldiers say that they had followed standard procedure and a shot at the tires of the cab. There are no bullet marks around the tires, but the windows of the cab are shattered. The girl’s name was Akaber Zaid. Her family never received any remuneration from Israel.

 

Christmas day 2008 in the Gaza Strip, fuel shipments are blocked by Israel, throwing about a million people into darkness. The electric power plant has been stalled for two full weeks because of lack of diesel fuel. Flour and cooking gas have run out. More than 80% of the bakeries are completely closed.

 

February 14, 2007, Israeli soldiers break into a secondary boys’ school in Abu Dis, a suburb of Jerusalem, and burst into classroom after classroom, pushing teachers out of the way, beating several of the students. Some of the students hide under their chairs and others protect themselves with their school bags. At least six children suffer broken hands when they try to protect themselves from being beaten with soldiers’ batons by covering their heads with their hands.

 

 

Beit Sahour, May 2, 2006: soldiers break into the Beit Sahour medical center, (the town hospital) assaulting guards and vandalizing equipment, particularly the operating room. Not a single examination room is spared. They destroy doors. Soldiers forced the night guard to open up the sterilized operating room and make it useless. They vandalize the pharmacy, the waiting rooms, and the hospital files. The Director of the medical center reports that they rendered the surgery room useless.

Anata Village (northeast of Jerusalem) January 16, 2007 mid-afternoon. Classes at a boys’ high school and a girls’ elementary school, about a block apart, have just finished. Girls in the schoolyard are beginning to walk home, and boys from the high school are already walking home.

 

Several Israeli Jeeps with border police come down the street, the police shooting indiscriminately toward the boys with rubber-coated metal bullets. The boys, having been baited by the police like that in the past,  start throwing stones at the police cars.

 

A ten-year-old girl leaving her school is afraid of the shooting, and runs to a storefront, facing away from the action. She doesn’t want to see the shooting. A Jeep stops near her. One policeman opens a small window in the side of the Jeep, points his gun at the back of her head, and shoots her. Then the Jeep leaves.

 

Several of the girl’s friends and a 16-year-old boy from the high school, who is standing next to her, see it. The girl lies unconscious on the ground, blood coming from the back of her head. The boy  lifts her and runs back to her school carrying the girl. Teachers summon an ambulance. She must go to an Israeli hospital for a wound that serious. In the hospital, doctors say the wound could have been made by a boy throwing a rock. All measures fail to revive her. She is taken off life support equipment and dies January 19, 2007. Later, her family’s pathologist determines that the wound was caused by a rubber-coated metal bullet, commonly used by Israeli border police.

 

The girl was Abir Aramin. No Israeli policeman or other person or agency has ever given so much as a shekel of remuneration to the family.

 

Khan Younis (in the southern half of the Gaza Strip) refugee camp,  late afternoon,  August 15, 2002. A five-year-old boy will be going to his first day of school in just a few days. His mother has already bought him his school uniform and school supplies. He is playing behind his grandfather’s house, where he lives. A few hundred feet away there is a tank manned by Israeli soldiers, not an unusual sight for the boy. Tanks patrolled his area often.

 

His grandfather and a neighbor keep a wary eye on the tank as they farm the land behind the grandfather’s house. The tank aims its gun at the little boy! Grandfather and neighbor begin running toward the boy and screaming at him to get out of the way.  They do not reach him in time. A gunner inside the tank shoots a single bullet through the boy’s head, killing him, and also shoots at the grandfather and neighbor, wounding both. The Israeli army excuses the tank’s action by saying there were terrorists in the area. It is my observation over several years that when Israeli soldiers think  there are terrorists in the area they spray the  entire area with thousands of bullets. In this case, the tank used less than a dozen bullets.

PICTURES >>