Naalin under siege and attacked for resisting the Apartheid Wall.

On the second day of the siege in Naalin, village resident Hilal Al Hawaje, a guard at the communications tower of the Palestinian mobile phone company Jawal and painter by trade, received a telephone call from a friend. Al Hawaje, it appeared, left his car close to the tower at which he works, and now a friend was calling to tell him that he saw soldiers throwing stun grenades into the car until it blew up and was completely burned out. The request of the friend from the soldiers to allow him to leave his home in order to put out the fire was met with rubber coated bullets in his direction. 

After hearing the report from his friend, Al Hawaje ran up to his roof, from where he could see his burned out car. “When I saw what they did to my car I went out to the street with my family, to protest, because what is left for me? In response,” he noted, “they beat me, my wife and children, ran after us to the house and filled our inner yard with tear gas. Imagine that your children see you being beaten by soldiers. I wanted to die from embarrassment. I am no Bin Laden or Nasrallah – I am only a painter. Did I do something wrong? Arrest me, I am ready. But to do this?" 

ActiveStills activist Keren Manor was shot by Israeli soldiers during an anti-Wall demonstration in the Palestinian village of Na'alin.

Keren Manor, a photographer with the ActiveStills Collective (www.activestills.org ), which documents the protests against building the separation wall in Na'alin, was injured last Thursday by a rubber coated steel bullet. The bullet was shot at a range of 10-15 meters by a Border Police officer who walked behind Manor, shot at her belt and from there moved to her thigh. Even though the law prohibits the use of rubber coated steel bullets at a distance of less than 50 meters, because of the inherent danger of injury, this has become common practice in dealing with demonstrations against the Wall in the territories. However, this is not the most shocking part of Manor’s story, which begins when she was taken to Ichilov Hospital.

Manor arrived with an open wound from which tissues and fat hung. The doctor at the reception refused to treat her due to the seriousness of the wound, and sent her to the emergency room. Ichilov’s emergency room was particularly busy that same afternoon, and Manor waited five hours with no treatment or exam. However, even though the doctors had ‘no time’ to check Manor, three of them had enough free time to begin political arguments with her.

“The first doctor entered and began to lecture me how the Wall defends us and what would we do without the Wall – as if to argue with me against what I am doing,” Manor said last week. “Another one said to me “What, that is from a rubber bullet? Two weeks ago I was in Ramallah and shot many rubber bullets and didn’t see such an impact,” while the third doctor said he is an officer in the reserves and began to lecture me how our army is moral while the other side is not.”

Apart from a decided lack of empathy, Manor was treated to a cursory examination and external cleaning of the wound by Dr. Davir Abraham, and was sent home. After one day she noticed there was no improvement in the open wound and returned to the emergency room. The doctors assumed that since Manor had already been treated there, that there was no need to carry out an x-ray, and they simply stitched the wound closed. However, after two days when the pain did not decrease, Manor went to her family doctor, who ordered an x-ray. The doctor discovered, to her amazement, that the bullet was still in her thigh. From here Manor returned to the emergency room, where the doctors conducted an operation under full sedation in order to open the wound, take out the bullet and close the area.

Ichilov Hospital: “The patient was examined by three different doctors in the emergency room, but was not sent for an x-ray as the doctors assumed, incorrectly it seems, that a rubber bullet cannot be viewed in an x-ray. The hospital will review the procedures for identifying foreign bodies accordingly. Out of respect for the patient, we will not respond to her contention that she was not treated due to her political opinions.”

Israel does not provide infrastructure to Bedouin villages 'unrecognised' by the state, and residents must organise their own water supplies. (Photo: Marjie Sackett, AIC)

Bustan: Sustainable Community Action for Land and People (www.bustan.org), together with LifeSource recently conducted a critical “Negev Unplugged Tour” that provided an in-depth, first hand look at water and sanitation issues plaguing the Bedouin communities of the Negev desert.  

In an effort to coerce the Bedouin to move from their land and into one of the seven Israeli state-initiated “townships”, the Israeli government purposely denies the Bedouin community adequate access to water.  The Bedouin, who possess Israeli citizenship, are indigenous inhabitants of the Negev and have lived in the area for thousands of years, but after the 1948 Middle East war their numbers were significantly reduced as many fled or were expelled during the war. From 1948-1966, the Israeli military administration forcibly transferred the Bedouin from most of the Negev area and resettled them in the northern part of the area, which constitutes only 2% of the Negev desert territory.  In 1963 a process of ‘Bedouin urbanization’, as a way of concentrating their population, was started by the Israeli government with the claim that 80% of the land in the Negev is a military training zone and national park, prohibited for non-governmental purposes.