From Gaza: Suffering Like Gazans

"International Conference on Palestinian Refugees: Change of Event Venue"

2009-12-05T16:03:00.000-08:00

Gaza, December 5, 2009 ( Pal Telegraph ) -Due to the growing number of participants and many distinguished guests taking part in the International event. The Palestinian Return Center (PRC) has decided to change the venue of the conference from Friends house in London Euston to the Congress Centre, 28 Great Russell Street, London WC1B3LS near Totenham Court Road station. The conference is still scheduled for Wednesday, 16th of December 2009. The key aim of the event is to commemorate the 60th anniversary of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency UNRWA. It will provide a detailed and comprehensive analysis of the terrible situation facing the Palestinian Refugees and UNRWA within a regional and international context.

Prominent personalities will open the conference which will include four sessions. Academics from USA, UK and the Middle East plus Politicians from Asia and other Arab countries will participate in the event.

It is an open conference and the audience will be served light refreshments and lunch in the afternoon.

This is a rare and great opportunity for Researchers and students to engage in discussion which would take place within the sessions.

Keynote speaker Norman Finkelstein will give a lengthy presentation entitled "What's Preventing Peace?" Renowned Palestinian Researcher, Professor Salaman Abu Sitta is taking part in the conference with a unique topic "UNRWA! The unsung Hero"

Claire Short - MP, Geremy Corybon MP and Baroness Jenny Tonge are amongst the many politicians taking part in the event where each will deliver a speech on the Palestinian cause and in particular the refugees.

More importantly, a survey compiled in refugee camps across the Middle East showed many interesting views on the performance and services of UNRWA which will be presented in the conference. The results of the survey and the discussions taking place will be used to produce many recommendations.

The Conference is open for all interested people and the admission is free. No pre-registration required.

For a map of the location follow this link
http://maps.google.co.uk/maps?f=q&source=s_q&hl=en&geocode=&q=WC1B3LS&sll=53.800651,-4.064941&sspn=8.57166,24.609375&ie=UTF8&hq=&hnear=London+WC1B3LS,+United+Kingdom&z=15

For more information visit: http://www.prc.org.uk

"International Conference on Palestinian Refugees: Change of Event Venue"

2009-12-05T16:02:00.000-08:00

International Conference on Palestinian Refugees: Change of Event Venue

Saturday, 05 December 2009 17:08 Added by PT Editor Sameh A. Habeeb

"Locked in: Life in Gaza"

2009-10-19T15:47:00.000-07:00

(Pal Telegraph) - Munzer al-Dayyeh is a 40-year-old mechanic living in Gaza. In a land of ruin and disrepair, Munzer is kept busy fixing generators and repairing motorbikes. In June 2007, Israel placed Gaza under siege and imposed an unprecedented blockade on nearly all movement and supplies in and out of the Gaza Strip.

Munzer is a traditional man from a conservative society where inter-marriage is common.

In Munzer's case, inter-breeding has brought hereditary problems - most of his children are either visually impaired or physically handicapped.

Munzer can not find any way to get his children out of Gaza to get medical treatment.

Petrol is increasingly expensive, motorbikes not cars are becoming popular. Electricity is sporadic and infrequent, generators are becoming popular. Munzer fixes both.

But while the effects of war and ongoing siege may be good for his business, it has frustrated his attempts to secure medical treatment for his disabled children.

His eldest daughter is blind and clings to the hope of travelling to London for specialist treatment. His eldest son is suffering from muscular disorder.

Besieged in Gaza, neither has the hope of medical treatment abroad.

This film offers an insight into an everyday man struggling to make a living and to find a solution for his family in the unique difficulties of the Gaza Strip.

Al Jazeera spoke to some Gazans about their daily lives, their hopes and dreams for the future, and how the siege affected them:

Doctor Mustafa Al-Hawi, 50, lecturer at al-Aqsa university

Mustafa al-Hawi, holds a PhD in environmental management and he currently works as a lecturer at al-Aqsa university.

He lost a job opportunity in Spain due to the blockade.

"I feel very traumatised, pissed off and very sad for not being able to travel and to have the freedom to do whatever I like," he says.

Fadi Bakheet, 27, Hip hop group manager

Fadi Bakheet is the manager of a hip hop group called "darasheen, the Arabian revolutionary guys."

His group missed out on an opportunity to represent Palestine in a festival in Copenhagen due to the siege.

"I don't think I would leave Gaza if things were better because this is my home, the worst thing about being here is being trapped and not be part of the world community," he says.

Iman Salem, 22, Medical student

Iman Salem is a medical student at the faculty of medicine at al-Azhar university.

She lost her scholarship in Jordan university because she could not leave Gaza.

"In these circumstances that we live under now, I would leave Gaza to pursue my dream to become a doctor," she says.

Ahmed abu-Hamda, 39, TV producer

Ahmed abu-Hamda is a TV producer, he feels paralysed under the siege because he does not have the freedom to leave whenever he wants.

Due to the siege he has not been able to see his parents who live outside Gaza, and they have not seen their grand child.

"it is an awful feeling to be under the siege, you feel paralysed," he says.

Mohammed el-Sharif, 39, Executive director

Mohammed el-Sharif is the executive director of the society for deaf children.

He is a Palestinian-American, but he is unable to get his daughters their US citizenship because they can't get out to start the process.

"Living in Gaza means that you can not exercise your right, everything is out of reach," he says.

Watch it on Al jazeera TV

Locked in Gaza can be seen from Monday, October 19, 2009 at the following times GMT: Monday: 1230; Tuesday: 0600, 1930; Wednesday: 0830; Thursday: 0330; Friday: 1630; Saturday: 2330; and Sunday: 1030.

Al Jazeera

"Legal Action to enforce Human Rights Conditions in EU-Israel Association Agreement"

2009-09-03T05:47:00.000-07:00

Gaza Strip, September 2, 2009 (PalTelegraph)- Clare Short MP and the European Campaign to End the Siege of Gaza have launched a legal action which require the European Union to uphold the human rights conditions entrenched in the EU-Israel Association Agreement.

The action was launched in a letter sent to President Barroso and Javier Solana, the High Representative for the Common Foreign and Security Policy, spelling out the way in which the Treaty conditions are being breached and the way in which international law applies.

The case is being taken forward on behalf of the complainants by Public Interest Lawyers of 8 Hylton Street, Birmingham.

The Commission has been given 28 days to reply to the detailed case outlined in a 15 page letter which spells out the fact that under the EU-Israel Association Agreement, the EU has clear obligations in the light of Israel's violations of international human rights and humanitarian law in the Occupied Palestinian Territories. The case made is that the EU is failing to meet these obligations.

In the letter it is argued that ‘Palestinian, Israeli and International Human Rights organizations have concluded in numerous reports and studies that Israel's actions in Operation Cast Lead intentionally and systematically disregarded and violated both international humanitarian law and international human rights law'.

Furthermore ‘the combined reports delivered to the UN including that of Richard Falk, charged with investigating the human rights situation in Palestine found several breaches of law in Operation Cast Lead. The Special Rapporteur on Poverty discussed reports that during the military intervention Israel deliberately obstructed the work of humanitarian personnel leaving the poor without basic medical, food and other services in violation of both international humanitarian law and human rights law'

The case presented outlines the position of the International Court of Justice and the UN with respect to the countless violations, amongst which include the acquisition of territory by force, obstructing the self determination of the Palestinian People and many other peremptory norms.

In pointing to EU's obligation in the face of so many reports and statements of the highest authority in international law, it states that ‘Under the Geneva convention The EU must not only insure that its own comply with human rights: it also requires it to base its relations with Israel on the mutual respect for human rights.

Thus where Israel persistently violates human rights and the EU does not take appropriate steps against Israel it will be in breach of article 2 of the Geneva Convention'.

Maintaining the status quo in the EU-Israeli Association Agreement, which makes Israel, EU's biggest trading partner is improper and more importantly it is justiciable. The letter points towards specific steps which the European Community is required to take under the agreement where Israel is in breach of Article 2 of the Geneva Convention.

In recognition of its obligations it calls upon the Commissioner to meet its obligations and further provide detailed description of its actions in fulfilling its obligations.

Clare Short said today "I and many others have tried through our parliaments to require our governments to comply with international law, without success. We now hope legal action will require compliance.

It is my firm belief that the only way to peace is to require Israel to comply with international law and that this is in the interests of all parties. The European Commission and member states are failing in their duty to uphold the conditions of our own treaty with Israel and to use these requirements to obtain long term peace and justice."

Civilians must now ‘take up task’ of breaking Gaza siege

2009-07-29T03:42:00.000-07:00

London, July 29, 2009 (Pal Telegraph) - When governments fail to protect human rights, civilians must step up, human rights group Free Gaza Movement said during a talk at the American University of Beirut on Tuesday.

“Civilians have a very important role to play, especially when government institutions fail to do their job in upholding the law and human rights,” Huwaida Arraf, Chairperson of the Free Gaza Movement (FGM), said.

Delivering a lecture entitled “What we learned from breaking the siege, confronting Israel,” at the American University of Beirut, Arraf recounted how a group of activists from the FGM, herself included, set sail from Larnaca in Cyprus with two fishing boats to deliver aid to Gazans.

“In 2006 when Israel began tightening the siege, we couldn’t even get into Gaza to stand by the Palestinians. So we began to think, what can we do?”

Since the election of Hamas in 2006, Israel has allowed only limited humanitarian supplies into Gaza, causing around half of the 1.5 million population to rely on food aid, according to UN agencies.

The FGM took out loans, sold possessions and borrowed from where they could to raise money for the trip. They filled the boats with medicines, toys, writing equipment and anything that was denied the Palestinian people by the blockade.

“It was the most beautiful and memorable moment of my life when we arrived in Gaza to see thousands of people standing along the shore, fishing boats coming out to meet us and children swimming out,” Arraf said.

The next time the FGM was to return to Gaza, this time on a ferry, they were rammed by Israeli navy boats. This would not deter them from repeating their mission four more times.

“We could not back down. We could not allow violence to triumph. So we went back again,” said Arraf.

The group once again left Larnaca on their vessel named “Spirit of Humanity” to carry more aid to Gazans suffering under the blockade. Accompanying them were former Congresswoman Cynthia McKinney and Nobel Laureate Mairead MaGuire.

A video played at the lecture showed Israeli naval vessels surrounding the boat and demanding they return to Larnaca. "We will be forced to take all necessary action if you do not return to Larnaca immediately," a voice from an Israeli naval vessel said over the boat's radio.

The reply from "Spirit of Humanity" came back: "The Israeli navy is mistaken. Since you occupy Gaza, under international law you are responsible for the safety of Gazans. We are delivering humanitarian aid to Gaza and it is illegal for you to stop us."

"Spirit of Humanity" was boarded and all 20 activists on board were arrested and detained within Israel for seven days, until they were deported.

The group also ran a short film shot by the FGM showing the Israeli navy opening fire on Gazan fishing boats, shooting the water surrounding them and forcing them to return to shore.

Documentary filmmaker and human rights activist Adam Shapiro spoke at the meeting of his motivation for getting involved with the campaign.

"I was quite skeptical at first. I had lots of concerns, especially when I saw the boats. But I went to Gaza in February for the first time in 10 years, and I saw tremendous devastation. I couldn't see anything new being built; I realized that the blockade was stopping people from rebuilding their lives."

Shapiro also added that "Spirit of Humanity" was in international waters when it was boarded by Israeli naval personnel.

Both speakers expressed the need not just for humanitarian aid, but for this action to be undertaken alongside political attempts to end the blockade.

They also described as "complicit" the NGOs who adhere to the blockade by not taking in items which Israel doesn't consider to be "essential humanitarian aid."

"The blockade is collective punishment, it constitutes a war crime under the Geneva Convention. Many organizations have declared the blockade to be illegal including Amnesty International and the International Red Cross. Who is standing up against it? Which state?" Arraf asked.

The FGM is planning another voyage to break the siege on Gaza later this year.

By Richard Hall
Daily Star
Lebanon

"On the Right of Resistance"

2009-07-27T06:05:00.000-07:00

London, July 27, 2009 (Pal Telegraph) - "If you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor." - Desmond Tutu

On the Right of Resistance
By Ramzi Kysia

We live in an era defined by its brutality. Our challenge is whether to accept this - or to take the risks necessary to transform our world commons in beloved community.

A year ago this August, forty-four ordinary people from seventeen different countries sailed to Gaza in two, small wooden boats. We did what the world would not do - we broke through the siege of Gaza. Over the last year the Free Gaza Movement has organized seven more voyages, successfully arriving to Gaza on five separate occasions. Ours remain the only international ships to reach the Gaza Strip in over forty-two years.

In the Middle-East, the struggle for justice is an uncertain endeavour in the best of times. On all sides human rights workers are beset with difficulties and distress. The Arab states are tyrannies, their peoples subject to secret police, arbitrary arrest, torture, and oppression. Within their societies, the Arab world is equally fractured by ethnic and class tensions, poverty, and political stagnation. From the outside, from the West, the Middle-East faces both open and covert acts of intimidation, intervention, economic destabilization, and even war, invasion, and mass killings.

Standing astride all these troubles, blocking near every attempt at progress in the region are the twin colossi of big oil and Israel. Seldom have a people been cursed with burdens more bitter, more devastating, and seemingly more intransigent than have the Arabs with oil and Israel.

Nowhere is this truer today than in Gaza. In 1999, British Gas discovered huge natural gas fields, worth billions of dollars, in Palestinian territorial waters off the coast of Gaza. Israel has already built a horizontal pipeline to siphon off gas from at least one of these fields. If there is an unspoken reason for the siege of Gaza - this is it.

Israel maintains effective control of all points of entry and exit to Gaza, as well as de facto control of Gaza's revenues and economy. As such, and despite the closure of settlements in Gaza in 2005, Israel remains an occupying power in Gaza as in the rest of Palestine. As an occupying power, Israel is responsible for the well-being of the people it occupies and cannot legally impose a blockade, particularly one the collectively punishes the entire population of Gaza. These are clear crimes and the Israeli government and military should be prosecuted for them.

For the last three and a half years the Israeli siege has become increasingly ruthless. Less than twenty percent of normal trade is allowed into Gaza today. The siege has caused the local economy to collapse, leading to steep increases in unemployment, poverty and childhood malnutrition rates.

Because of Israel's siege there is little fuel to run Gaza's power plant - so electricity is scarce and intermittent. Without electricity, water and sanitation systems do not function. On March 27, 2008 two elderly women in their 70s, a teenage girl, and two babies were killed by a flood of sewage in Umm Naser. Last year alone, well over 16 billion litres of raw sewage had to be dumped in the sea, turning the Mediterranean into a toilet and creating a public health disaster.

Gaza is a tiny coastal plain, barely twenty-five miles long by four to seven miles wide. It does not have the ability to independently support the one and a half million human beings who live in one of the most densely populated places on the planet. Two-thirds of Gaza's people are refugees, driven out of historical Palestine during Israel's founding war in 1948. Over half the population are children.

Israel has a long history of violence against Palestinian children. A few examples: In December 2004, the IDF shot and killed seven-year old Rana Siyam. Earlier that year, nine-year old Raghda Alassar was shot and killed in her school while she was taking an English test. Thirteen-year old Iman al-Hams was shot seventeen times by the IDF as she was walking home after class in Gaza. An Israeli captain went up to her corpse and shot her again in the head - "dead-checking" the schoolgirl. The IDF prosecuted him, but not for murder. He was charged with "illegal use of his weapon," and - despite admitting that he emptied his entire magazine into a little girl - he was found "not guilty."

Over the summer of 2006, the IDF killed three-year old Bara Habib, three-year old Rajaa Abu Shaban, six-year old Rawan Hajjah, nine-year old Aya Salmeya, and over thirty-five other children just in Gaza alone. On January 16th, 2007, the IDF killed ten-year old Abir Aramin, the daughter of a Palestinian peace activist, as she was walking home from school. These are only a handful of cases. The Israeli human rights organization B'tselem estimates that over 900 Palestinian children were killed by the Israeli military between 2000 and 2008.

Israel has already recreated the worst aspects of the Warsaw Ghetto in Gaza - transforming this small strip of land into the world's largest open-air prison, and the humanitarian condition of the one and a half million men, women, and children illegally incarcerated in Gaza is now at its worst point in the last forty-two years of Israeli occupation.

But there are darker histories waiting to be reborn. The simple and terrifying truth is that Israel is pushing the world on a path towards genocide. We are all en route to the slow-drip destruction of the Palestinian people. This reality must be forcefully confronted and fully overcome before it's too late.

It's now been more than six months since the end of Israel's latest assault on the Gaza Strip, which led to the killing of over 1,400 Palestinians, and the people of Gaza are still living in rubble. Israel's hermetic closure has created a man-made and deliberately-sustained humanitarian catastrophe. The continuing failure of the international community to enforce its own laws and protect the people of Gaza demands that we as private citizens directly intervene to take action commensurate with the crisis. We must act because our governments refuse to do so.

Regardless of Israeli threats or intimidation, Free Gaza volunteers intend to continue sailing unarmed boats to Gaza. Now more than ever - we need the people of the world to join with us.

The siege of Gaza only serves to strengthen authoritarian structures on all sides of this conflict, entrenching centralized control, rallying people against a common enemy. The isolation of Gaza reinforces a belief that the world has forgotten Palestine, and little cares how Palestinians are forced to live or even whether they live or die.

In contrast, civil resistance and citizens' action movements are not only aimed against the injustices that we face - they are also strategies for social change. Nonviolent resistance empowers everyone with the knowledge that any among us can reach out, organize, and act to change the entire world. Time and again, history demonstrates that even the greatest of tyrannies can crumble to the ground when confronted with an organized and determined resistance.

Join us, whether in whole or in part. Join the Free Gaza Movement, the International Solidarity Movement, and the BDS Movement. Join us and other campaigns in the struggle for justice for Palestine. We need volunteers to do research and writing, web updates, translation, graphic design, local organizing in their communities, and much more.

Become part of the resistance.

We are often told that resistance is either unwarranted or impossible. Liberal apologists for Israel, such as Thomas Friedman, are constantly demanding that Palestinians lay down their arms, all the while exhorting Israelis to pick them up in ever increasing acts of violence and degradation.

When faced with violence in our world, our elites tell us that we have two - and only two - choices: capitulate to the violence, or go to war. Of course, which of these two choices is the right and proper course of action depends on who you are. Faced with Palestinian violence, Israelis must, rightly and properly, go to war. Faced with Israeli violence, Palestinians must, rightly and properly, capitulate. In Tel Aviv and Washington D.C. this is called "moral clarity:" the supposed necessity of pursuing Israeli security through deliberately creating massive insecurity among Palestinians. This is lunacy.

But even mainstream "peace" movements in the West try to delegitimize resistance by calling on both Palestinians and Israelis to renounce overt acts of violence, equating Palestinians who commit suicide bombings with Israelis who send F-16s, D9 military bulldozers, and Apache attack helicopters to level entire neighborhoods.

The problem is that the usually random and individual acts of violence by Palestinians against Israelis are not equal to the myriad structural oppressions and cruelties imposed on Palestinians through Israeli government policies. No Palestinian fighter jets bomb Israeli cities - because Palestine has no fighter jets. No Palestinian bulldozers demolish Israeli homes - because Palestine has no military bulldozers. No Palestinian soldiers invade Israeli neighbourhoods, terrorizing the populace - because there is no Palestinian army. The conflict in Palestine is a war of Israeli state terror against a largely unarmed and defenceless civilian population.

Even immoral and self-defeating acts of violence against Israeli civilians (such as some suicide bombings are) cannot be equated with the daily humiliations, terror, and death that Israel inflicts on Palestinians by deliberate policy. Contrary to its presentation in the mainstream media, this conflict is neither a righteous war against evil Arab terrorists, nor a religious or ethnic dispute between two opposing and equally self-justified groups of people. The Israeli/Palestinian conflict is the struggle of two irreconcilable and unequal causes: the struggle of an oppressed people for freedom, justice, and self-determination against their oppressors' struggle to maintain (and even expand) their domination. Under these circumstances resistance is not only a right - it's a moral imperative.

This is not to say that any and all acts of resistance are acceptable. Clearly they are not. But it grows tedious to continually hear well-meaning, but otherwise clueless, Westerners try to equate the two sides of this conflict. I am past tired of hearing white people passively whine, or shrilly demand, "Where is the Palestinian Gandhi?"

With respect, just because some people have chosen to remain ignorant of the long and deep history of Palestinian nonviolent resistance - from the 1936 Boycott to Bil'in today - does not mean that it does not exist. The Free Gaza Movement struggles in solidarity with an already vibrant Palestinian civil resistance.

Similarly, the other criticism of resistance - that it is futile - is equally mistaken. There is a widespread delusion among many that Israel and the Israeli lobby are simply too powerful to be challenged, let alone defeated. This is not the case.

On June 30th 2009 Israeli Occupation Forces forcibly boarded one of our boats, the SPIRIT OF HUMANITY, and kidnapped 21 human rights workers and journalists who were on their way to deliver much needed humanitarian and reconstruction supplies to besieged Gaza, including Nobel peace prize laureate Mairead Maguire and former U.S. Congresswoman Cynthia McKinney. They were held in jail for a week before being deported.

Though we were stopped on this particular voyage, it was not a "failure." In the month after our boat was hijacked, over 100,000 news stories, essays, blog entries, action alerts, and radio and television segments were made on Israel's violent response to our mission. It's true that the ordeal of our 21 volunteers pales in comparison to the 11,000 Palestinian political prisoners held in Israeli prisons. The seizure of our small cargo of 3 tons of medical aid and reconstruction kits is insignificant in light of the $4 billion (USD) of aid promised to Gaza - aid that has not and will not be delivered because of the Israeli blockade.

But that too misses the point. By choosing to violently confront and kidnap unarmed human rights workers on a mission of mercy, Israel publicly demonstrated both the illegality and the absurdity of the Gaza siege. The siege is abjectly not about "security." No one could possibly have believed that our small boat was a physical threat to Israel,

This public demonstration of the siege's illegality resulted in record action at the governmental level as well. Both the Irish and Greek governments formally intervened to protect their citizens and property. Despite having no diplomatic relationship and refusing to recognize the legitimacy of Israel's government - the King of Bahrain personally & successfully intervened to force Israel to immediately release the five Bahraini human rights workers kidnapped from the SPIRIT. The British parliament held a formal debate on the issue, and even the U.S. State Department was forced to hold a national conference call on for family and friends of the kidnap victims, as well as for Arab-American civil rights groups.

This was unprecedented, but it's not enough.

The Free Gaza Movement started our small part in this struggle in 2006. We began on hope alone. Many thought it couldn't be done, yet we did it. We broke through the Israeli blockade. We will sail again, and we are absolutely determined to reach the Gaza Strip on our next voyage. We intend to non-violently escalate our response. By sending a cargo ship, we will escalate the challenge to the blockade by bringing in significant amounts of banned reconstruction materials. By sending more boats on our next mission, we will significantly escalate the logistical difficulties Israel faces should they decide to violently attack us again. By sending even more parliamentarians, dignitaries, journalists, and human rights workers to accompany the boats, we will significantly escalate the political difficulties Israel faces should they decide to violently attack us again.

The journey to Gaza is dangerous. The Israeli navy rammed our flagship, the Dignity, when we attempted to deliver medical supplies to Gaza during their vicious assault in December/January. In June, they hijacked our small boat and kidnapped everyone on board. Israel has even threatened to open fire on our unarmed ships, rather than allow us to deliver humanitarian and reconstruction supplies to the people of Gaza.

But the risks we take on our voyages are insignificant compared to the risks imposed every day upon the people of Gaza.

The purpose of nonviolent direct action and civil resistance is to take risks - to put ourselves "in the way" of injustice. We take these risks well aware of what the possible consequences may be. We do so because the consequences of doing nothing are so much worse. Any time we allow ourselves to be bullied, every time we pass by an evil and ignore it - we lower our standards and allow our world to be made that much harsher and unjust for us all.

Israel can threaten our boats and passengers - we will keep coming. Israel can illegally disrupt our communications and navigation systems - we will keep coming. Israel can open fire around our boats, or attempt to ram and sink them. Israel can choose to forcibly board and highjack our boats, and abduct our volunteers.

It doesn't matter. We will keep coming. Armed only with the love of justice, and in the rite of resistance - we will go to Gaza again and again and again, until this siege is forever shattered and the people of Gaza have free access to the rest of the world.

-----
Ramzi Kysia is an Arab-American essayist and an organizer with the Free Gaza Movement. If you would like to support these efforts, please visit www.FreeGaza.org, or email donations[at]freegaza.org. If you would like to volunteer with Free Gaza, please send an email to volunteer[at]freegaza.org

"Agitating for Freedom: Anniversaries, Dreams and Persistence"

2009-07-21T14:53:00.000-07:00

USA, July 21, (Pal Telegraph) "If we wait for it to work itself out, it will never be worked out! Freedom only comes through persistent revolt, through persistent agitation, through persistently rising up against the system of evil." – Martin Luther King

This July 22, marks the fourth anniversary of my website, but I did not establish the 'blog' until October 8, 2005, when I wrote:

It was about six months ago that I heard Charlie Rose on his PBS show say something like;

"We have yet to begin to imagine the potential of the Internet."

When I began writing for WeAreWideAwake/WAWA about three months ago, I imagined it would be an instrument to provoke thought, engage a dialogue and stimulate American's to do something about the state of our Union and for all our sisters and brothers in Israel Palestine.

I had hoped to be challenged by some conservative and many fundamentalist Christians, but so far, they remain mute. Perhaps, they just haven't read me, so if you know of any right wing neo-con Christian types I would appreciate any connections you can make with WAWA. Debate is great and all opinions are welcome but no mean-spiritedness will be posted.

Imagine the potential of the Internet. [end]

I still am imagining, but have had no luck engaging USA Christians, but have managed to get myself censored/banned/deactivated and deleted from Reverend Jim Wallis's Belief Net blog, Facebook, The Democratic Underground and the DAILY KOS.

Not one of the powers to be of the above sites has bothered to reply to my inquiries as to why was I censored/banned/deactivated and deleted, but I have 'blogged' all about it and the links are accessible through the home page of my site.

I also have a link that tells me daily, what countries are hitting on my site, and the USA Government and Military are considered a country on that link. In the last few months of the Bush Administration, Big Brother dropped out of the top 30 of over 75+ countries that hit on WAWA; but ever since February 2009, when I began contacting President Obama and Secretary of State Clinton to do something to help free Vanunu, Big Brother has hovered in the top twenty [Israel is consistently in the top ten.]

But, after five months of agitating them and never receiving any reply and because this is the 4th anniversary of my membership in the New Fourth Estate-which equates to activist reporters- I established a Soapbox Alert to Obama and Biden @

http://www.congress.org/congressorg/issues/alert/?alertid=13764921&content_dir=ua_congressorg

That link will be alive for thirty days and for every one of them, I will use it to email Obama and Biden and remind them that on April 21, 2004, upon emerging from 18 years in a tomb sized cell, Mordechai Vanunu said:

"I am not harming Israel. I am not interested in Israel. I want to tell you something very important. I suffered here 18 years because I am a Christian, because I was baptized into Christianity. If I was a Jew I wouldn't have all this suffering here in isolation for 18 years. Only because I was a Christian man."

It was in May of 2005, just prior to my first [now 7] trips to Israel Palestine that I phoned Mother Agapia Stephanopolous, a Russian Orthodox nun and the administrator of the Orthodox School of Bethany in Jerusalem. I was inspired by her bold words to Congress about The Wall and also, I wanted to schedule an appointment with her for spiritual direction.

Mother Agapia is the sister of ABC News commentator, George Stephanopolous, and she had passionately informed Congress about the fact that, “Israel is destroying the local Christian community.”

On April 18, 2005, Robert Novak’s article “Walling off Christianity” reported on the nun and how East Jerusalem had been cut off from the rest of the West Bank. Mother Agapia predicted, “It is only a matter of time before Christians and Muslims will be unable to survive culturally and economically.”

Mother Agapia spoke bluntly about the nine yards high wall of Israeli concrete that have “shattered” the Christian communities.

She said, "I witness the strangulation of East Jerusalem, and the deprivation of her non-Jewish residents’ religious rights every day. Even the United States seems to have been taken in by Israeli spin."

On my very first afternoon in Jerusalem, on June 12, 2005, the nun met me at the Ambassador Hotel in East Jerusalem and I told her that I hadn’t been taken in by the spin, but what could I possibly do? She had no answer-but when I returned to USA I established WAWA/WeAreWideAwake.org with hope to raise awareness of what the USA media was not reporting and what the government did not want we the people to know about-such as the Christian EXODUS from the Holy Land and the ongoing persecution of Vanunu-an ex-Orthodox Jew baptized Christian just days before being kidnapped by the Mossad on September 30, 1986.

But, I did not know any of that on the afternoon when I met Mother Agapia on the first day of my first trip to occupied east Jerusalem. The very first thing I told her about was of the surreal experience I had that very morning while wandering around in the Old City.

I had landed in Tel Aviv with ten other members of the interfaith Olive Trees Foundation for Peace just a few hours before dawn on that Sunday morn. We all checked into the Ambassador Hotel, a fifteen minute walk from the Old City and although they all crashed, I was wide awake. As soon as the sun rose I began to explore, and although I have no sense of direction and only understand English, I wandered around the Old City, which was eerily empty the closer I came to site of the Pool of Bethsaida and when I tread upon that ground, I experienced déjà vu, which was more real than imaginary.

Background:

Between 2000 and 2001, I was a first year student in the Episcopal Diocese of Orlando’s Formation Program for Spiritual Directors. I knew going into the program I would never be hanging out a shingle as a Spiritual Director that I was there because of the curriculum; to deepen my prayer life and study the lives of the saints. That is also when I became uncorked as a writer and began going on spiritual retreats.

On the second night of the second retreat in that program, we had a guided meditation on the story of Jesus at the Pool of Bethsaida.

There were seven of us in the class and we were instructed to close our eyes, listen to the story and allow our imagination to lead us to respond to the character that resonated most deeply to us.

Our leader prefaced the story from John 5:1-6, by telling the legend of the angel from heaven who would descend and agitate the waters of the Pool of Bethsaida.

Only the first leper, blind, or invalid who made it into the water would receive a healing. One day while Jesus was there, he walked by a man who had been paralyzed for thirty-eight years.

Jesus asked him, “Do you want to be healed?”

The man answered he had no friends to help him get into the water first.

Jesus asked him again, “Do you want to be healed?”

Our leader then went silent, and in my imagination I was immediately upon the back of that agitating angel.

I hadn’t thought of that experience until I found myself at the site of the Pool of Bethsaida and what triggered the memory of that guided meditation was the recollection of a dream I had had a few weeks after that day we call 9/11.

In my dream I had stood at the edge of a dried up pool where crumbling stone columns were overgrown with vines and weeds and scores of doves and pigeons nested and flew. To my right was a large shade tree, but to my left I saw a few square squat dwellings with large satellite dishes attached to them. I remembered thinking the moment I woke up from that dream what a strange place it was, but then I quickly forgot all about it.

That is, until the afternoon of June 12, 2005, when I found myself standing at the edge of a dried up pool where crumbling stone columns were overgrown with vines and weeds and scores of doves and pigeons nested and flew. To my right was a large shade tree, but to my left I saw a few square squat dwellings with large satellite dishes attached to them. What a strange place I thought, how could it be that I had seen this scene in a dream a few weeks after that day we call 9/11?

On the afternoon of my very first day in Jerusalem, after I told Mother Agapia about my dream and what I had seen at the Pool of Bethsaida, she shrugged and smiled, then told me about the Jerusalem Interfaith Peace Conference with satellite link to the world that was happening the Sunday after the Thursday I was scheduled to return to the USA.

I knew immediately that I needed to attend and after saying goodbye to Mother Agapia, I phoned my husband to get his OK, changed my flight plans and on June 26, 2006, I attended the world wide satellite linked Interfaith Peace Conference at Jerusalem’s Notre Dame Cathedral.

Dan Rather moderated from Washington DC and the Holy Land interfaith panel were all moderates attempting to reclaim the battlefield of ideas from extremists on both sides.

Reverend Theodore Hessburgh, President Emeritus University of Notre Dame began the evening by stating, “The Peace of the world begins in Jerusalem.”

Dr. Tsvia Walden, Board of Director of the Peres Center and Geneva Initiative said, "There is a need for a third party in the negotiations that could enable both sides to trust each other. There are more people in this region interested in making concessions, they all want peace so desperately."

Rania Kharma, Coordinator of World Bank emergency services to the PA, reminded everyone, “We all need to be the bridges to our leaders that justice, equality, and human rights will bring peace. Give people justice and they will reward you with peace.”

Sheik Imad Falouiji warned, “Religions must go back to their origins. God commands us to love each other and live together. This Holy Land was given to all people. This land is on fire. There is an occupation that must be removed. The language of peace cannot succeed without justice for all.”

The Rt. Rev. Bishop Riah Abu Assal affirmed, “Peace is an act. Blessed are the peacemakers not the peace talkers. Peace is possible in the Holy Land. The root cause for the lack of peace since 1967 is the occupation. For peace to make progress in the Middle East we need to deal with the root cause...Religion was not meant to bring death. All those involved in searching for peace should commit themselves to work for justice and truth.”

Throughout the entire evening, I kept remembering what President Bush promised in his Second Inaugural Address: “In the long run, there is no justice without FREEDOM. There can be no human rights without LIBERTY. All who live in tyranny and hopelessness can know the United States will not ignore your oppression or excuse your oppressors. When you stand for liberty, we stand with you.”

I also wondered what Bush would say to the video message Vanunu taped three days prior as to where WMD's could actually be found in the Middle East:

Cut and paste the link to view that Message on YouTube:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eKTX3vrHQOE

On 24 April 2004, Uri Avnery wrote:

"This week it became clear that the Americans are full partners in the creation of Israel's "nuclear option". How was this exposed? With the help of Mordecai Vanunu, of course. …The Security Establishment has not stopped harassing him even after he has sat in prison for 18 years, 11 of them in complete solitary confinement – a treatment he himself described on leaving the prison as "cruel and barbaric". After he was "set free", far-reaching restrictions were imposed on him (e.g. he is forbidden to leave the country, is restricted to one town, cannot go near any embassy or consulate, may not talk with foreign citizens). All this under the colonial British emergency regulations that were condemned at the time by the leaders of the Jewish community in Palestine, as "worse then the Nazi laws".

"Everybody understands that he has no more secrets. What can a technician know after 18 years in jail, during which technology has advanced with giant steps?...it becomes clear what the security establishment is really afraid of. Vanunu is in a position to expose the close partnership with the United States in the development of Israel's nuclear armaments.

"This worries Washington so much, that the man responsible in the State Department for "arms control", Under-Secretary John Bolton, has come to Israel in person for the occasion. Vanunu, it appears, can cause severe damage to the mighty super-power…By the way, this John Bolton is an avid supporter of the group of Zionists neo-cons who play a central role in the Bush theater. He opposes arms control for the United States and its satellites, and was installed in the State Department against the wishes of the Secretary of State himself." http://www.fromoccupiedpalestine.org/taxonomy/term/226

"If we wait for it to work itself out, it will never be worked out! Freedom only comes through persistent revolt, through persistent agitation, through persistently rising up against the system of evil." – Martin Luther King

Eileen Fleming, A Feature Correspondent for The Palestine Telegraph and Arabisto.com
Founder of WeAreWideAwake.org
Author of "Keep Hope Alive" and "Memoirs of a Nice Irish American 'Girl's' Life in Occupied Territory"
Producer "30 Minutes with Vanunu" and "13 Minutes with Vanunu"

"Israeli soldiers reveal dreadful war crimes in Gaza"

2009-07-15T02:34:00.000-07:00

Wednesday, 15 July 2009 01:41 Added www.Paltelegraph.com

Gaza, July 15, (Pal Telegraph) - A group of soldiers who took part in Israel's assault in Gaza say widespread abuses were committed against civilians under "permissive" rules of engagement.

The troops said they had been urged to fire on any building or person that seemed suspicious and said civilians were sometimes used as human shields.One soldier said: "You feel like an infantile little kid with a magnifying glass looking at ants, burning them."

Breaking the Silence, a campaign group made up of Israeli soldiers, gathered new anonymous accounts from 26 soldiers.

The picture that emerges from the testimonies, which have been seen by The Independent, is one of massive fire power to cover advances and rules of engagement that were calculated to ensure, in the words attributed to one battalion commander, that "not a hair will fall of a soldier of mine. I am not willing to allow a soldier of mine to risk himself by hesitating. If you are not sure, shoot."

The first eye-witness accounts of the war by serving Israeli reservists and conscripts describes the Israeli use of Palestinian civilians as "human shields". They detail the killing of at least two civilians, the vandalism, looting and wholesale destruction of Palestinian houses, the use of deadly white phosphorus, bellicose religious advice from army rabbis and what another battalion commander described to his troops as "insane firepower with artillery and air force". The reports amount to the most formidable challenge by Israelis since the Gaza war to the military's own considered view that it conducted the operation according to international law and made "an enormous effort to focus its fire only against the terrorists whilst doing the utmost to avoid harming uninvolved civilians".

They are contained in testimonies from about 30 soldiers that were collected by Breaking the Silence, an army veterans organisation that seeks to "expose the Israeli public to the routine situations of everyday life in the occupied territories". Although the organisation has collected hundreds of testimonies from ex-soldiers before, this is the first time that it has done so from serving soldiers so soon after the events they describe.

They tell how:

* Unprecedentedly loose rules of engagement were put in place to protect Israeli troops. One soldier said his brigade commander and other officers made it clear that "any movement must entail gunfire". He added: "I don't remember if the brigade commander said this or someone else. I' m not sure. No one is supposed to be there. If you see any signs of movement at all, you shoot. These, essentially, were the rules of engagement. Shoot if you like if you are afraid or you see someone, shoot." Another soldier said his battalion commander had said the operation was not "a limited confrontation such as in Hebron, and not to hesitate if we suspected someone nor feel bad about destruction because it is all done for the safety of our own soldiers... if we see something suspect and shoot, better hit an innocent than hesitate to target an enemy". One soldier said the "awareness of each soldier going in is simply... a light finger on the trigger. You see something and you're not quite sure? You shoot".

* Houses were systematically demolished. Despite official accounts that homes were only destroyed for strictly "operational" reasons, one reservist, a veteran of the conflict in Gaza since before 2005, said "I never knew such fire power" used by tanks and helicopters for the "constant destruction" of houses. The soldier said that some houses had been destroyed for normal operational reasons, such as because they had been booby trapped or used by militants to fire from, or had contained tunnel openings. But he said others were destroyed for the "day after" - to make a "very large" area "sterile", to allow better "firing capacity, good visibility and control" once the operation was over. This meant, demolishing houses "not implicated in any way, whose single sin is that it is situated on a hill in the Gaza strip" .

* A civilian man between 50 and 60 who was unarmed but carrying a torch was shot dead after the unit's commander ordered his soldiers not to fire warning shots but to hold their fire until he was 50m away. The soldier said the company commander announced over the radio after the incident: "Here's an opener for tonight". The soldier said that the commander was challenged over why he had not authorised deterrent fire when the man was further away: "He didn't agree and couldn't give a damn, and finally the guys felt that even if they could take this up with the higher echelons it wouldn't be effective." Another soldier said his unit commander shot dead an old man hiding with his family under the stairs of a house. While the soldier said that the killing of the man was a mistake, it had happened as the unit entered the house using live fire.

* Palestinian human shields - or "johnnies" as they were termed by soldiers on the ground - were suborned to enter surrounded houses ahead of troops, including houses known to contain armed militants. One account corroborates the story of one such human shield that was exposed in The Independent, that of Majdi Abed Rabbo in Jabalya in northern Gaza, who was ordered three times to enter a house to report on the condition of three armed Hamas militants inside.

* Military rabbis prepared troops for battle. One soldier said an army rabbi had "aimed at inspiring the men with courage, cruelty aggressiveness, expressions as 'no pity. God protects you. Everything you do is sanctified'... there were specific scenarios discussed... but from the context it was pretty obvious he came to tell us how aggressive and determined we need to be, that we must win because this is a holy war". Leaflets distributed at military synagogues had stated that "the Palestinians are like the Philistines of old, newcomers who do not belong in the land, aliens planted on the soil which should clearly return to us".

* Mortars - rarely if ever used in Gaza before - were widely deployed. They included 120mm mortars of the sort that killed up to 40 civilians outside the UN el-Fakhoura school in Jabalya which was being used as a shelter, and in a nearby house. One soldier explained that while "with light arms you've got an 80 per cent chance of hitting the target with your first shot, with mortars it is much less". Another said: "I finally understood. We were firing at launcher crews in open spaces. But it didn't take much to aim at schools, hospitals and such. So I see I'm firing literally into a built-up area. I don't know to what degree it was still inhabited because the army made considerable attempts to get people to leave. But I understand that... [tails off]."

The testimonies appear to reinforce evidence from Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International and journalists who visited battle zones just after the war in January that white phosphorus was used for purposes other than "marking", "range-finding" and "smoke screening". Those purposes included to ignite homes suspected of being booby trapped.

Houses that troops occupied were vandalised. One testimony stated: "One of the soldiers... opened the child's bag... he took out notebooks and ripped them. One guy smashed cupboards for kicks out of boredom. There were guys arguing with the platoon commander before we left the house why he wouldn't let them smash the picture hanging there..." A reservist soldier said that there was a "big difference between the way we treated the contents of the house and the way the regulars did. The regulars wouldn't take care even of the most basic sanitary stuff like going to the toilet, basic hygiene. I mean you could see that they had defecated anywhere and left the stuff lying round".

A spokeswoman for the Israeli Defence Forces (IDF), Lieutenant-Colonel Avital Leibovitz, sought to challenge the motives and credibility of the report. She said "more than a dozen" military police investigations were under way into incidents that took place during Operation Cast Lead. While the IDF continued to operate according to "uncompromising ethical values", it was ready to investigate allegations of misconduct but not on the basis of anonymous testimonies which she could not be sure were from soldiers.

The Israeli human rights lawyer Michael Sfard said the report showed that the Gaza operation violated the "number one principle in international laws of war": that of distinguishing between the civilian population and combatants.

Yehuda Shaul, a founder of Breaking the Silence, said the group had names and details for all the testimonies - all of which had been taped - and that anonymity was to protect the testifiers from any disciplinary or criminal proceedings. The army already knew the name of at least one, he said.

Gaza invasion: Witnesses on the front line

On military briefings ahead of the invasion

"We talked about practical matters... but the basic approach to war was very brutal, that was my impression... He said something along the lines of 'don't let morality become an issue. That will come up later'. He had this strange language: 'Leave the nightmares and horrors that will come up for later, now just shoot'... The basic approach was that there were no chances taken. If you face an area that is hidden by a building, you take down the building. Questions such as 'who lives in the building?' are not asked."

On problems with identifying targets for bombing

"It got to the point where we would try to report to field intelligence about a figure sticking out its head or a rocket being launched, and the girl [at field intelligence] would ask, 'Is it near this or that house?' We'd look at the aerial photo and say, 'Yes, but the house is no longer there'. 'Wait, is it facing a square?' 'No more square.'... Later I went in to the look-out war-room and asked how things worked, and the girl-soldiers there, the look-outs, resented the fact that they had no way to direct the planes, because all their reference points were razed... It's highly possible that now the pilot will bomb the wrong house."

On the rules of engagement

"[The Brigade commander] went so far as to say this was war and in war, no consideration of civilians was to be taken. You shoot anyone you see. I'm paraphrasing here, not literally quoting, but the gist of the matter was very clear."

On the rabbinate's role in the conflict

"The rabbi said we are actually conducting the war of 'the sons of light' against 'the sons of darkness'. This is in fact a statement with highly messianic language... It turns the other side as a generality into 'sons of darkness' while we become 'sons of light'. There is no differentiation which we would expect to find between civilians and others. Here is one people fighting another people, with all the messianic implications. But that's the point: this is also religious propaganda. In other words, the army is not a revival meeting. They do not put on a uniform in order to be Judaized."

On soldiers' responsibility

"Anything we did there, we'd answer ourselves: there's no other choice, but this is how we shirk our responsibility. You bring yourself to this kind of deterministic situation, a moment that I have not chosen, where I no longer have any responsibility for my own actions. Even if your choice is the right one, you must admit you chose it. You have to admit you chose to go into Gaza. As soon as you did, you've brought people into a moral twilight zone, you've forced them to handle dilemmas and part of that confrontation failed. As soon as you say 'there is no other choice', you're shirking your responsibility. Then you don't need to investigate, to look into things."

Independent

Breaking the Silence http://www.shovrimshtika.org/index_e.asp

"Breaking: Demos, actions in support of kidnapped peace activists across Europe"

2009-07-01T16:16:00.000-07:00

Gaza-london, July 2, ( Pal Telegraph) - The European campaign to end the siege on Gaza (ECESG) called today for international human rights organizations and lobbying groups to organize large protests in front of Israeli embassies across Europe in solidarity with activists of Freegaza Movement. Activists onboard the humanitarian boat were kidnapped by Israeli naval forces while they were sailing in a peaceful mission to end the siege. The call aims at creating factual movements on the ground to release "the spirit of humanity" activists

The boat was boarded by highly-profiled people like Mairead Maguire, winner of a Noble Peace Prize and a former U.S. congressperson, Cynthia McKinney. The vessel was forcibly take to one of the Israeli seaports under direct threats from Naval boats.

Maguire, winner of a Noble Peace Prize was taken against her will and isolated from the rest of the team. The Israeli army didn't care about neither her old age nor her position. Two activists were released only while the rest are in Israeli detention of Ramalah. The exemplary punishment against the activists is a small glimpse of what's happening to 12 thousand Palestinians in Israeli jails.

ECESG is organizing today a number of protests in various European countries to call on releasing the kidnapped peace activists. Protests would be held in Demnark, Italy, Holland and Sweeden

Sameh Habeeb, spokesman of (ECESG), said that the issue is not only showing solidarity for the activists but also for 1.5 million Palestinians trapped in the Gaza strip with no basics.

According to Habeeb, the way Israel treated the activists show the confusions and fluctuation of Israeli policies towards facing the non-violent resistance actions. The boat was only carrying humanitarian needs, toys for children and small quantities of cement.

" We are going to start mobilizing the mainstream in Europe on popular and official levels. The campaign would form a front of politicians and MPs to release the activists and ending the siege on Gaza".

Ramy Abdu, member of the campaign said that ECESG is working to lobby European MPs to participate in future trips of Freegaza movement. He revealed that some MPs and politicians would be on board of future boats.

He said that contacts are being made at the moment to urge MPs to participate and some of them expressed readiness towards the idea.

"MOHAMMED OMER; ONE YEAR AND COUNTING"

2009-06-26T05:25:00.000-07:00

Palestine, June 26, (Agance Global) - June 26, 2008 is a day I will never forget. For the events of that day irrevocably changed my life. That day I was detained, interrogated, strip searched, and tortured while attempting to return home from a European speaking tour, which culminated in independent American journalist Dahr Jamil and I sharing the Martha Gellhorn Journalism Prize in London - an award given to journalists who expose propaganda which often masks egregious human rights abuses.

I want to address the denials from Israel and the inaccurate reporting by a few journalists in addition to requesting state of Israel to acknowledge what it did to me, prosecute the members of the Shin Bet responsible for it and put in place procedures that protect other journalists from such treatment. Since 2003, I've been the voice to the voiceless in the besieged Gaza Strip for a number of publications and news programs ranging from The Washington Report on Middle East Affairs to the BBC and, Morgenbladet in Norway as well as Democracy Now! These stories exposed a carefully-crafted fiction continuing control and exploitation of five-million people. Their impact, coupled with the reporting of others served to change public opinion in the United States and Europe concerning the dynamics of Israel and its occupation of Palestine .

After receiving the Martha Gellhorn prize I returned home through the Allenby Bridge Crossing in the Occupied West Bank between Jordan and Israel. It was here I was detained, interrogated, and tortured for several hours by Shin Bet and border officers. When it appeared I may be close to death an ambulance was called to transport me to a hospital. From that day my life has been a year of continued medical treatments, pain - and a search for justice.

Lisa Dvir from the Israeli Airport Authority (IAA), the agency responsible for controlling Israel's borders in an June 29th article by Mel Frykberg for the Inter Press Service stated, "the IAA was neither aware of Omer's journalist credentials nor of his coordination."

The statement is wholly inaccurate and impossible on two counts. First, because I'm Palestinian, I am unable to enter Israel or leave Gaza , even through the Rafah border with Egypt , without Israeli permission, something quite difficult to get. Each time I've left Gaza for speaking tours required substantial lobbying and political maneuvering by several governments. In 2006, it was the American governments who ultimately won my visa. In 2007 the Dutch Parliament invited me back to speak to the Standing Committee on Foreign Affairs and in 2008 when it was announced I won the Martha Gellhorn Prize, several European countries requested Israel grant me a visa but it was MP Hans Van Baalen of the Netherlands who, with great efforts, secured and guaranteed my passage out of Gaza and Israel, as well as the return for both the 2007 and 2008 trips on the condition I travel and be escorted by members of the Dutch Embassy in Tel Aviv while within Israel or the occupied West Bank. Therefore I was under diplomatic escort with the full knowledge of the Israeli government when I arrived at Allenby on June 26th. In fact Israeli security had blocked my re-entry for four days, causing me to miss a family wedding and wait in Jordan .

Secondly Dvir's claim that the IAA didn't know I was a journalist is proved false by the actions of the Shin Bet and border police. During the interrogation an Israeli security personnel searching my belongings repeatedly asked ‘Where's the money from the prize, Mohammed?' The prize is only given to journalists. Not only were they fully aware I am a journalist. They knew exactly how much I received, for what and where.

Dvir further perjured herself when she claimed, "We would like to know who Omer spoke to in regard to receiving coordination to pass through Allenby. We offer journalists a special service when passing through our border crossings, and had we known about his arrival this would not have happened." Her denial shocked a Dutch diplomat in Tel Aviv who had confirmed with the state permission for me to cross on June 26. Again, I was traveling under diplomatic escort and when I asked to phone the escort - waiting on the other side of the terminal - Shin Bet's response was they knew and didn't care.

While not admitting that the interrogation and torture took place, Divr then dismissed any actions by the Shin Bet as out of her department's control: "I'm not aware of the events that followed his detention, and we are not responsible for the behavior of the Shin Bet." But the Israeli Airport Authority, Divr's department, like most port authorities, is responsible for border security and those who enforce that security in Israel are members of the army and the Shin Bet.

Unfortunately Dvir's diversions were just the beginning. In the days following my detention and torture, the Israeli Government Press Office acknowledged that despite traveling under diplomatic escort I was searched "due to suspicion that he had been in contact with hostile elements and had been asked by them to deliver items to Judea and Samaria (Occupied West Bank)." This has been mentioned and quoted in different papers. Like everyone else entering, my bags were x-rayed and cleared multiple times excluding the possibility I was carrying some type of contraband. And I was traveling in the Dutch Embassy's car directly to Erez crossing with Gaza , as communicated to the Israeli authorities. There was zero possibility of me delivering ‘items' to anyone.

Confronted with the medical reports and injuries including bruised ribs Israeli officials told the BBC on July 1, 2008 that, "He lost balance and fell, for reasons unknown to us," other officers suggest, "Mr. Omer had a nervous breakdown due to the high temperature."

Despite the attempts at denials, the emergency medical technician who sat in the back of the ambulance with me reported, "We noted fingerprints on his neck and chest," the type bruising caused by excessive force often used in forensics to identify an attacker.

When Associated Press reporter Karin Laub called me on my cell phone for an interview after my ordeal, I detailed how I was stripped and held at gunpoint. Her reply? "Go on," she stated. "This is normal about what we hear happening at Ben Gurion Airport . It's nothing new."

Torture, strip searches and holding award winning journalists or any other human beings at gun point is normal at Israel 's largest airport? Ms. Laub's apathy continued. In her article for the Associated Press on June 29th she wrote that she interviewed "Dr. Husseini who claims there were no signs of physical trauma."

There's only one problem with this. This Dr. Husseini never treated me. The Minister of Health in Ramallah confirmed that Husseini never made any such statement to the AP reporter. For reasons known only to her, Ms. Laub appears to have fabricated this comment and purposely ignored the medical reports and the statements by the attending paramedics - counter to journalistic ethics and standards upheld by the Associated Press. Despite this, no independent investigation toke place.

Meanwhile the Jerusalem correspondent for the Los Angles Times, Ashraf Khalil, conducted an investigation into my case and noted in his article on November 3, 2008, that my medical records describe: "Tenderness on the anterior part of the neck and upper back mainly along the right ribs moderate to severe pain," and "by examination the scrotum due to pain varicocele (varicose veins in the spermatic cord) at left side detected and surgery was decided later." Fevers and falls do not cause such distinctive marks. Kicks, punches and beatings do. Continuing Khalil explains that, "Paramedic Mahmoud Tararya arrived in a Palestinian Red Crescent Society ambulance and said he found Omer semiconscious with bruises on his neck and chest. Tararya said Israeli security officers were asking Omer to sign "some sort of form written in Hebrew. The paramedic said he intervened, separated Omer from the soldiers and loaded him into the ambulance, where he remained semiconscious for most of the trip to a hospital."

Khalil notes in his article that Richard Falk, the U.N. human rights official wrote to Verhagen, the Minster of Foreign Affairs of The Netherlands and stated: "I have checked out Mr. Omer's credibility and narrative of events, and I find them fully credible and accurate."

Recovering mentally and physically from torture and interrogation is far from easy. This should not happen to anyone. My objective is for my case to focus attention on universal human rights, the right of freedom of expression and freedom of movement. There are places in this world where these freedoms do not exist. Israel insists it is not one of those places, but both the government and the complicity of individual journalists in covering up what they did to me prove otherwise. Ironically, the day the Shin Bet chose to detain, interrogate and torture me - June 26 - is the date set aside by human rights groups as the International Day Against Torture.

Mohammed Omer has reported for numerous media outlets, including the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, Pacifica Radio, Electronic Intifada, The Nation, and Inter Press Service; he also founded the Rafah Today blog. He was awarded the 2007 Martha Gellhorn Prize for Journalism.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

A CALL FOR ACTION...... From DesertPeace

Today,the 26th of June marks the one year anniversary of the near beating to death and torture of Mohammed Omer. He was returning to his home in the Rafa Refugee Camp in Gaza from a trip to Europe where he was the recipient of a prestigious award for journalism. A complete recap of the events that took place upon his entry to Israel on his return trip can be read HERE. Mohammed was escorted on his return trip by Dutch diplomats of Her Majesty's embassy in Tel Aviv. After his torture and beatings, those same diplomats returned with him to the Erez Crossing where he continued on to a hospital in Gaza. Kennith Ring had the following to add to the situation in a brilliant report that he wrote about the situation. He interviewed Mohammed while he was in the hospital in Gaza.... By clicking HERE, you can read the full report.
The investigation referred to still has not been launched after a complete year. Mohammed is presently in the Netherlands where he is still receiving medical treatment as a result of his injuries. He is scheduled to undergo surgery one more time in the very near future.

It is now up to YOU to do something about the situation. We ask that you write to the local representative of the Government of the Kingdom of the Netherlands, DEMANDING that they put pressure on the Israeli government to bring the criminals involved in this case to justice. It was Dutch Government representatives that were witness to this horrendous act, it is their responsibility as human beings to help bring justice in this case and to help guarantee that this never happens again to anyone.

It is extremely urgent that residents of Israel and Palestine take part in this letter writing campaign. All contact information is available below.... worldwide.

Thank you for your efforts and watch this site for updates on the situation.

*********************************************
Contact info for Royal Netherlands Embassies WORLDWIDE (alpabetical)

Royal Netherlands Embassy in Buenos Aires, Argentina
Edificio Porteno II
Olga Cossenttini 831, piso 3
(C1107BVA) Buenos Aires
Argentina
City: Buenos Aires
Phone: (54-11) 4338-0050
Fax: (54-11) 4338-0060
Web Site: http://www.mfa.nl/bue-es/
Email: bue@minbuza.nl

The Royal Netherlands Embassy in Canberra, Australia
120 Empire Circuit
Yarralumla ACT 2600
Canberra, Australia
City: Canberra
Phone: +61 (0)2 6220 9400
Fax: +61 (0)2 6273 3206
Web Site: http://www.netherlands.org.au
Email: can@minbuza.nl

Royal Netherlands Embassy in Vienna, Austria
Opernring 5/7
A-1010 Vienna
Austria
City: Vienna
Phone: +43 (1) 589 39
Fax: +43 (1) 589 39 - 265
Web Site: http://www.mfa.nl/wen
Email: nlgovwen@eunet.at

Royal Netherlands Embassy in Dhaka, Bangladesh
Road nr. 90, House 49
Gulshan II
Dhaka, Bangladesh
City: Dhaka
Phone: +880-2-8822715-18
Fax: +880-2-8823326
Web Site: http://www.netherlandsembassydhaka.org
Email: dha@minbuza.nl

Royal Netherlands Embassy in Brussels, Belgium
Avenue Herrmann-Debrouxlaan 48
1160 Brussel
City: Brussels
Phone: (+32) 02 679 17 11
Fax: (+32) 02 679 17 75
Web Site: http://www.mfa.nl/bru-fr
Email: bru@minbuza.nl

Embassy of Netherlands in Cotonou, Benin
Avenue Pape Jean Paul II
Cotonou
Benin
City: Cotonou
Phone: 00-229-21- 30 04 39 / 30 21 39
Fax: 00-229-21- 30 41 50
Web Site: http://www.mfa.nl/cot/ambassade
Email: cot@minbuza.nl

Embassy of Netherlands in La Paz, Bolivia
Avenida 6 de Agosto 2455
Edificio Hilda, piso 7
La Paz, Bolivia
City: La Paz
Phone: +591 2 2444040
Fax: +591 2 2443804
Web Site: http://www.mfa.nl/lap-es
Email: lap@minbuza.nl.

Royal Netherlands Embassy in Sarajevo, Bosnia
Grbavicka 4
71000 Sarajevo
Bosnia-Herzegovina
City: Sarajevo
Phone: (+387) (0)33 562 600
Fax: (+387) (0)33-223 413
Email: sar@minbuza.nl, sar-ca@minbuza.nl

Embassy of Netherlands in Brasilia, Brazil
SES - Qd. 801, Lote 05
CEP 70405-900
Brasilia - DF - Brasil
City: Brasilia
Phone: +55 (0)61-3961.3200
Fax: +55 (0)61-3961.3234
Web Site: http://www.mfa.nl/bra
Email: bra@minbuza.nl

Royal Netherlands Embassy in Bulgaria
Oborishte Street 15
1504 Sofia
Bulgaria
City: Sofia
Phone: (+359) 02-8160300
Fax: (+359) 02-8160301
Web Site: http://www.mfa.nl/sof-en/
Email: sof@minbuza.nl

Royal Netherlands Embassy in Ottawa, Canada
Constitution Square
Building 350 Albert Street,
suite 2020
Ottawa, ON K1R 1A4
Canada
City: Ottawa
Phone: +1 613 237 5030
Fax: +1 613 237 6471
Web Site: http://www.netherlandsembassy.ca/
Email: nlgovott@netherlandsembassy.ca

Royal Netherlands Embassy in Santiago, Chile
Apoquindo 3500 Piso 13
Las Condes, Santiago
P.O. Box:
Casilla 56-D
Santiago, Chile
City: Santiago
Phone: (+56) 2-7569200
Fax: (+56) 2-7569226
Web Site: http://www.holanda-paisesbajos.cl/
Email: stg@minbuza.nl

Embassy of Holland, Netherlands in Bogota, Colombia
Carrera 13 No. 93-40 Floor 5
Apartado Aereo 4385
Bogota
Colombia
City: Bogota
Phone: (+57) 1-638 4200
Fax: (+57) 1-623 3020
Email: bog@minbuza.nl

Embassy of Netherlands in San Jose, Costa Rica
Oficentro Ejecutivo La Sabana
(detras de la Contraloria)
Tercer Edificio, Tercer Piso
Apartado 10,285
1000 San Jose, Costa Rica
City: San Jose
Phone: +506 296 1490
Fax: +506 296 2933
Web Site: http://www.nethemb.or.cr
Email: nethemb@racsa.co.cr

Royal Netherlands Embassy in Zagreb, Croatia
Medvescak 56
10000 Zagreb
Croatia
City: Zagreb
Phone: + (385) 1 4642 200
Fax: + (385) 1 4642 211
Web Site: http://www.mfa.nl/zag-en/
Email: zag@minbuza.nl

Royal Netherlands Embassy in Nicosia, Cyprus
34 Demosthenis
Severis Avenue
P.O. Box 23835
1686 Nicosia,
Cyprus
City: Nicosia
Phone: +357-22-873666
Fax: +357-22-872399
Web Site: http://cyprus.nlembassy.org/
Email: nic@minbuza.nl

Embassy of the Kingdom of the Netherlands in Prague
Gotthardska 6/27
160 00 Praha 6, Bubenec
Czech Republic
City: Prague
Phone: (+420) 233 015 200
Fax: (+420) 233 015 254
Web Site: http://www.netherlandsembassy.cz/
Email: nlgovpra@ti.cz

Royal Netherlands Embassy in Copenhagen, Denmark
Toldbodgade 33
1253 Copenhagen K
Denmark
City: Copenhagen
Phone: (+45) 33 70 72 00
Fax: (+45) 33 14 03 50
Web Site: http://www.nlembassy.dk/
Email: kop@minbuza.nl

Royal Netherlands Embassy in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic
Max Henriquez Urena #50
(tussen Av. Lincoln en Av. Churchill)
P.O. Box 855
Ens. Piantini
Santo Domingo
City: Santo Domingo
Phone: (+1 809) 262-0320 (Ambassade)
Fax: (+1 809) 565-4685
Web Site: http://www.holanda.org.do/
Email: STD@minbuza.nl

Royal Netherlands Embassy in Cairo, Egypt
18, Hassan Sabri
11211 Zamalek
Cairo, Egypt
City: Cairo
Phone: +20-2-7395500
Fax: +20-2-7365249
Web Site: http://www.hollandemb.org.eg/
Email: az-cz@hollandemb.org.eg, kai-ca@minbuza.nl

Netherlands Embassy in Helsinki
Erottajankatu 19 B
00130 Helsinki
Finland
P.O. Box 886
00101 Helsinki, Finland
City: Helsinki
Phone: +358 9 228 920
Fax: +358 9 228 92 228
Web Site: http://www.mfa.nl/hel/
Email: nlgovhel@kolumbus.fi

Royal Netherlands Embassy in Paris, France
7-9 rue EBLE
75007 Paris
France
City: Paris
Phone: 01.40.62.33.00
Fax: 01.40.62.34.56
Web Site: http://www.amb-pays-bas.fr/
Email: ambassade@amb-pays-bas.fr

Royal Netherlands Embassy in Berlin, Germany
Monastery route 50
10179 Berlin
Germany
City: Berlin
Phone: +49 30 20956-0
Fax: +49 30 20956-441
Web Site: http://www.niederlandeweb.de/
Email: nlgovbln@blnnlambde

Royal Netherlands Embassy in Athens, Greece
Leof. Vass. Konstantinou 5-7
106 74 Athens
Greece
City: Athens
Phone: +30 210 7254900
Fax: +30 210 7254907
Web Site: http://www.mfa.nl/ath
Email: ath@minbuza.nl

Royal Netherlands Embassy in Guatemala
16 Calle 0-55, Zona 10
Edificio Torre Internacional
Nivel 13, Guatemala
City: Guatemala
Phone: (502)- 2381 4300
Fax: (502)- 2381 4350
Web Site: http://www.embajadadeholanda-gua.org/
Email: nlgovgua@intelnet.net.gt

Royal Netherlands Embassy in Budapest, Hungary
Budapest
Fuge utca 5-7
1022
Hungary
City: Budabest
Phone: 336-6300
Fax: 3265978
Web Site: http://www.netherlandsembassy.hu/en/
Email: bdp@minbuza.nl

Royal Netherlands Embassy in New Delhi, India
6/50 F, Shanti Path
Chanakyapuri
New Delhi 110021
City: New Delhi
Phone: +91-11-24197600
Fax: +91-11-24197710
Web Site: http://www.mfa.nl/nde-en/
Email: nde@minbuza.nl

Royal Netherlands Embassy in Jakarta, Indonesia
Jl. H.R. Rasuna Said Kav.
S-3, Kuningan Jakarta 12950
Indonesia
City: Jakarta
Phone: +62-21-524 8200
Fax: +62-21-570 0734
Web Site: http://indonesia.nlembassy.org/
Email: jak@minbuza.nl

The Royal Netherlands Embassy, Tehran
Sonbol Street #7 Farmanieh
City: Tehran
Phone: 0935 2111299
Email: teh@minbuza.nl

Embassy of Netherlands in Repubic of Iraq
Park Al-Sadoun
Hay Al-Nidhal 103
Street No. 38, House No.10
Baghdad, Iraq
City: Baghdad
Phone: 00-964-1-7782571 / 00-873-762953520
Email: bad@minbuza.nl

Royal Netherlands Embassy in Dublin, Ireland
160 Merrion Road
Dublin 4
Ireland
City: Dublin,
Phone: 00-353-1-2693444
Fax: 00-353-1-2839690
Email: dub-info@minbuza.nl

Royal Netherlands Embassy in Tel Aviv, Israel
Beit Oz 14, Abba Hillel St
Ramat Gan 52506
City: Tel Aviv
Phone: 03-7540777
Fax: 03-7540748
Web Site: http://www.netherlands-embassy.co.il
Email: nlgovtel@012.net.il

Netherlands Embassy in Rome, Italy
Via Michele Mercati, 8
00197 Rome
Italy
City: Rome
Phone: +39 06 32286.001
Fax: +39 06 32286.256
Web Site: http://www.mfa.nl/rom-nl
Email: rom@minbuza.nlwww.olanda.it

Embassy of the Kingdom of Netherlands in Amman, Jordan
22 Ibrahim Ayoub Street (former name: Embassy Street)
4th Circle
(opposite the offices of the prime minister in the Alico building)
Amman, Jordan
City: Amman
Phone: 00962 - 6 - 5902222
Fax: 00962 - 6 - 5930214
Web Site: http://www.netherlandsembassy.com.jo/
Email: amm-info@minbuza.

Royal Netherlands Embassy in Kuwait
Jabriyah, Area 9, Street 1, House 76
P.O. Box 21822
Safat 13079
State of Kuwait
City: Safat
Phone: 00.965.531.2650 / 1 / 2 / 3
Fax: 00.965.532.6334
Web Site: http://www.mfa.nl/kwe/
Email: KWE@minbuza.nl

Embassy of the Kingdom of the Netherlands in Beirut, Lebanon
Netherlands Tower
Charles Malek Avenue,
Opposite Centre Sofil
2073-0802 Achrafieh
1100-2190
City: Beirut
Phone: 00-961-1-204663
Fax: 00-961-1-204664/00-961-1-339393
Web Site: http://www.netherlandsembassy.org.lb/
Email: nlgovbei@sodetel.net.lb

Embassy of the Kingdom of the Netherlands in Luxembourg
6, rue Sainte Zithe
L-2763 Luxembourg
City: Luxembourg
Phone: +352 22 75 70
Fax: +352 40 30 16
Web Site: http://www.mfa.nl/lux
Email: lux@minbuza.nl

Embassy of the Netherlands in Skopje, Macedonia
Leninova 69-71
1000 Skopje
Macedonia
City: Skopje
Phone: +389 91 129-319/+389 2 3109-250
Fax: +389 2 3129-309
Web Site: http://www.nlembassy.org.mk/
Email: nethemb@mt.net.mk, SKO@minbuza.nl

Netherlands Embassy in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia
7th Floor, South Block. The Ampwalk
218, Jalan Ampang
50480 Kuala Lumpur
Malaysia
City: Kuala Lumpur
Phone: 00-60-3-21686200
Fax: 00-60-3-21686240
Web Site: http://malaysia.nlembassy.org/
Email: kll@minbuza.nl

Embassy of Netherland in Mexico
Avenida Vasco de Quiroga 3000
Edificio Calakmul, piso 7
Colonia Santa Fe
01210 Mexico D.F.
City: Mexico City
Phone: (+52) 5552589921
Fax: (+52) 5552588138
Web Site: http://www.paisesbajos.com.mx
Email: nlgovmex@nlgovmex.com

Embassy of Netherlands in Rabat, Morocco
40 Rue de Tunis,
Quartier Tour Hassan,
Rabat, Maroc
Potal Address:
B.P. 329, Rabat, Maroc
City: Rabat
Phone: +212 37 219600
Fax: +212 37 219665
Web Site: http://www.ambassadepaysbasrabat.org/
Email: nlgovrab@mtds.com

Royal Netherlands Embassy of Wellington, New Zealand
P.O.Box 840
Cnr. Ballance & Featherston Street
Wellington
City: Wellington
Phone: +64 04 471 6390
Fax: +64 04 471 2923
Web Site: http://www.netherlandsembassy.co.nz/
Email: WEL@minbuza.nl

Royal Netherlands Embassy in Oslo, Norway
Oscarsgate 29
0244 Oslo
Norway
City: Oslo
Phone: +47 23 33 36 00
Fax: +47 23 33 36 01
Web Site: http://www.netherlands-embassy.no/
Email: nlgovosl@online.no

Royal Netherlands Embassy in Warsaw, Poland
Ul. Kawalerii 10
00-468 Warsaw
Poland
City: Warsaw
Phone: 00-48-22-5591200
Fax: 00-48-22-8402638
Web Site: http://www.mfa.nl/war-en/
Email: war@minbuza.nl

Embassy o Netherlands in Moscow, Russian Federation
Kalashny pereulok 6
131000 Moscow
Russia
City: Moscow
Phone: +7 495 7972900
Fax: +7 495 7972904
Web Site: http://www.netherlands.ru
Email: mos@minbuza.nl

Embassy of Netherlands in Madrid, Spain
Avenida Comandante Franco, 32
28016 Madrid
Spain
City: Madrid
Phone: 91 353 75 00
Fax: 91 353 75 65
Web Site: http://www.embajadapaisesbajos.es/
Email: mad-info@minbuza.nl

Royal Netherlands Embassy in Stockholm, Sweden
Gotgatan 16A
Stockholm
P.O. Box 15048
104 65 Stockholm
Sweden
City: Stockholm
Phone: (+46) (0)8 556 933 00
Fax: (+46) (0)8 556 933 11 (general)
Email: sto@minbuza.nl

Royal Netherlands Embassy in Bern, Switzerland
Seftigenstrasse 7
3007 Bern, Switzerland
City: Bern
Phone: +41-(0)31-350 87 00
Fax: + 41-(0)31-350 87 10
Web Site: http://www.nlembassy.ch/
Email: ben@minbuza.nl

Embassy of Netherlands in Damascus, Syrian Arab Republic
Abou Roumaneh
Al-Jalaa Street
Imm Tello
Damascus
Syria
City: Damascus
Phone: 00-963-11-3336871
Fax: 00-963-11-3339369
Email: dmc@minbuza.nl

Embassy of Netherlands in Vatican
Piazza Della Citta Leonina 9/ II
00193 Rome
City: Vatican City
Phone: 00-39-06-6868044
Fax: 00-39-06-6879593
Email: vat@minbuza.nl

Royal Netherlands Embassy in Ankara, Turkey
Hollanda Caddesi 3
06550 Yildiz
Ankara, Turkey
City: Ankara
Phone: (0312) 409 18 00 visa: (0312) 409 18 20
Fax: (0312) 409 18 98
Web Site: http://www.mfa.nl/ank-en
Email: ank@minbuza.nl

Embassy of the Kingdom of the Netherlands in Kyiv, Ukraine
Kontraktova Ploshcha 7
01901 Kyiv, Ukraine
City: Kyiv
Phone: +38 044 4908 200
Fax: +38 044 4908 209/267
Web Site: http://www.netherlands-embassy.com.ua/
Email: kie@minbuza.nl

Royal Embassy of Netherlands in Abu Dhabi, UAE
Hamdan Street
Al Masaood Tower
6th floor, Suite 602
P.O. box 46560
Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates
City: Abu Dhabi
Phone: (+971) 2- 6321920
Fax: (+971) 2- 6313158
Web Site: http://www.netherlands.ae/index.htm
Email: abu@minbuza.nl

Royal Netherlands Embassy in London, England (UK)
38 Hyde Park Gate
London SW7 5DP
England, UK
City: London
Phone: 0044-(0)20-75903200
Fax: 0044-(0)20-72250947
Web Site: http://www.netherlands-embassy.org.uk/

Embassy of Netherlands in Washington DC, U.S.A.
4200 Linnean Avenue, NW,
Washington DC 20008 - USA
City: Washington DC
Phone: (202) 244-5300
Fax: 202-362-3430
Web Site: http://www.netherlands-embassy.org/homepage.asp

Embassy of Netherlands in Montevideo, Uruguay
Leyenda Patria 2880 2o. piso
11300 Montevideo
Uruguay
City: Montevideo
Phone: +598 - 2 - 711 2956
Fax: +598 - 2 - 711 3301
Web Site: http://www.holanda.org.uy/index.html
Email: mtv@minbuza.nl

Embassy of Netherlands in Caracas, Venezuela
Edificio San Juan, Piso 9
Avenida San Juan Bosco
con 2a Transversal
Altamira, Caracas
Venezuela
City: Caracas
Phone: +58-(0)-212-276-9300
Fax: +58-(0)-212-276-9311
Web Site: http://www.mfa.nl/car/homepage
Email: car@minbuza.nl
**********************************
Contact info for the United States http://www.netherlands-embassy.org/location.asp

Contact info for Great Britain http://www.netherlands-embassy.org.uk/passports/index.php?l=1&i=46&d=

Contact info Internationally http://www.dutchgovernment.com

/index.htm Contact info for the Internet challenged (easy links) Selected areas in the United States..... all others can be found HERE
California (North)
Netherlands Consulate
San Mateo, CA
650-403-0073 (phone)
650-403-0075 (fax)
sanfrancisco@ncla.org (email)
Please call or e-mail us for an appointment.Jurisdiction: Consulate-General Los Angeles
Honorary Consulate: YES
Consul: Mr. Douglas J. Engmann
Vice Consul: Mr. Johan P. Snapper
California (South)
Consulate-General
Los Angeles, CA
310-268-1598 (phone)
310-312-0989 (fax)
los@minbuza.nl (email)
Please call or e-mail us for an appointment.Jurisdiction: Consulate-General Los Angeles
Honorary Consulate: NO

District of Columbia Netherlands Embassy
Washington, DC
202-244-5300 (phone)
202-362-3430 (fax)
was@minbuza.nl (email)

Jurisdiction: Embassy Washington
Honorary Consulate: NO Illinois Consulate-General Chicago
Chicago, IL
312-856-0110 (phone)
312-856-9218 (fax)
chi@minbuza.nl (email)
Please call or e-mail us for an appointment.

Jurisdiction: Consulate-General Chicago
Honorary Consulate: NO Massachusetts Netherlands Consulate
Boston, MA
617-542-8452 (phone)
617-542-3304 (fax)
nl.govbos@verizon.net (email)
Office hours are Monday - Friday from 10.00 am until 1.00 pm.

Jurisdiction: Consulate-General New York
Honorary Consulate: YES
Consul: Mr. Hans Gieskes New York Consulate-General
New York, NY
212-246-1429 (phone)
212-333-3603 (fax)
netherlandsnyc@cgnewyork.org (email)
Please call or e-mail us for an appointment.

Jurisdiction: Consulate-General New York
Honorary Consulate: NO

Selected areas in Great Britain .... all others can be found HERE Address:
Embassy of the Kingdom of the Netherlands
38 Hyde Park Gate
London SW7 5DP
United Kingdom
tel.: 0044 (0)20 7590 3200
fax: 0044 (0)20 7225 0947.
london@netherlands-embassy.org.uk

Netherlands Consulate Manchester
Apex House
266 Moseley Road
Levenshulme
Manchester M19 2LH
Tel: 0161 - 248 2390
Fax: 0161 - 248 2401
E-mail: mieke.slater@harvesthousing.org.uk

Israel and Palestine
Address
Beit Oz, 13th floor
14 Abba Hillel Street
Ramat Gan 52506
Tel: +972 3 75 40 777
Fax: +972 3 75 40 748
E-mail : nlgovtel@012.net.il
The Representative Office in Palestine
Visiting Address:
12, Holanda Street
(off Nablus Road)
El-Bireh, Ramallah
Click here for a map of the location
Mailing Address:
P.O. Box 1899 Ramallah
P.O. Box 54706 Jerusalem
Tel.: 02-2406639 / 2409797
Fax: 02-2409638

The article first appeared on: AG http://www.agenceglobal.com/Article.asp?Id=2042

"Life after death in Gaza"

2009-06-12T09:53:00.000-07:00

Gaza, June 12, (Pal Telegraph) - There were several reasons why Moeen Deeb left his satisfying $800-a-month job as a telephone engineer at PalTel not long after the end of Operation Cast Lead in January. But one was an inability to cope with the daily, pitying, looks of his workmates. "I did go back to work but I couldn't continue," he says. "People saw me as someone who had lost all his family. I had a big feeling they were thinking of me as someone who would always need support."

Though Mr Deeb, 40, is not the self-pitying type, the reaction of his colleagues was understandable. For among the many thousands of Gazans bereaved by the war, few lives can have been as shattered as his.

Alerted by phone, he had rushed back from work on the afternoon of 6 January to find the family home in Jabalya hit by two Israeli 120mm mortar shells in the same series of attacks that killed up to another 30 civilians outside the UN Al Fakhoura school a mere 100 metres away. The 11 dead included five of his six children, aged between four and 22, his wife, his mother, one of his brothers, two of his nephews, and a niece.

Five months later, Mr Deeb, is struggling to adapt to his unfathomable loss. He says he has lost 40lbs since 6 January. "I don't eat normally and I don't sleep at night." But he adds that life has to go on. "We have to deal with what is on the ground," he says. He was one of the survivors interviewed last week by South African judge Richard Goldstone, currently conducting an investigation ordered by the UN Human Rights Council into possible war crimes by Israel and Hamas during the Gaza operation. An earlier inquiry ordered by the UN secretary general Ban Ki-moon and led by the respected former British head of Amnesty International Ian Martin – with which Israel co-operated but then rejected as "patently biased" – found that the "undisputed" cause of the deaths of civilians in the vicinity was the Israeli mortars which landed outside the school and in the Deeb compound. Mortars, rarely if ever used in Gaza by the Israeli military before, are widely regarded as less accurate than artillery fire.

Mr Deeb also left work because of the responsibility he felt for his now fatherless 23-year-old nephew, confined to a wheelchair after losing both his legs in the attack. "I am responsible for everyone," he says. Adjustment has also been painfully slow for Mr Deeb's surviving son, Bakr, 18. Having left school in the tenth grade, Bakr hasn't got a job - though he has recently got his driving licence and the possibility of being a taxi driver. "And he has a fiancée now, which has given him something to be busy about. It could compensate in some way." The fiancée is only 16 and Mr Deeb had wanted the couple to wait, but has allowed them to marry next year now that, "everything has been turned upside down".

Money is less of a problem for Mr Deeb than it is for most other Gazans. Along with a friend, he invested his early retirement pay-off in a small plastics venture in Egypt. He says it brings in a better return than his salary and allows him to stay at home to help look after the family of his dead brother Samir – though not yet enough to afford the scarce cement needed to repair the gaping hole in the wall left by one of the shells.

Like others in his position, he says he has received €1,000 for each dead person from the Hamas de facto government along with $2,500 a head from the Palestinian Authority in Ramallah. Mr Deeb, who is still seeking to sue Israel through an Israeli-Arab lawyer in Nazareth, explains: "I accepted but none of it compensates for even a fingernail of my children," adding that he has not spent a penny of the money. "There is a future to think of," he says. One about which Mr Deeb is anything but optimistic.

Back in February when he first spoke to The Independent Mr Deeb explained that he used to be a member of the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine – the very first faction to endorse a two-state solution back in the seventies. Then he said taht all he wanted was, "for the Israelis to get out of all Palestine". Now he is calmer he says: "I would accept two neighbouring states." Although he believes America has the power to pressure Israel – which he calls the "51st American state" – he doubts it will happen and he equally complains that the Hamas government lacks a "political horizon".

Yet there is something remarkable about the capacity of some bereaved Gazans to cope with their losses. Maysa Samouni, 20, was one of those who say they were ordered the previous day by Israeli troops to take shelter in the warehouse in which 29 civilians – mainly Samounis – were killed by Israeli shelling early on the morning of 5 January, when three of her husband's male relatives ventured out of the door to bring an uncle to what they thought was safety.

Mrs Samouni, whose husband Tawfiq was killed and whose one-year-old daughter Jumana lost three fingers, gave precise – and often inevitably gruesome – testimony by telephone to the Israeli human rights organisation Btselem the next day: testimony which has held up in every subsequent inquiry by reporters and human rights organisations.

One shell killed the three men, and as Tawfiq, a former bulldozer driver who was trying to make ends meet by running a grocery business from his home, ran to help, another missile hit the roof, killing another 26 people. Even today she swiftly corrects a reporter's reference to 30 being killed in one of the worst events of the war. "It was 29," she says, adding of her testimony, "details are important."

She says the worst moment afterwards was going back to see the destroyed houses of the family she married int. "I didn't recognise it," she says. Matter of factly, she says of the first shell: "I am sure the Israelis had orders to shoot and kill anything that moved. The men [who stepped outside the building] were wearing sweaters. Maybe they thought they were resistance." Mrs Samouni, now living with her parents, adds, "It took me a month to cope with the new situation. But then I had no other option but to continue with the rest of my life. You have to look to the future. Nothing will come back. The dead are not going to come back to life." So Mrs Samouni will now go to Al Aqsa university to study English full-time in September.

Equally resilient in his own way is Khalil al Jadili 16, whose two legs were amputated after what the family insist was a "random" shelling attack which at 3.10pm on 16 January killed his younger bother Mohanad, 8, and destroyed with shrapnel the left eye of another brother Abdel Hadi, 15, as they all sat in their grandmother's house across from their own home in the crowded Bureij refugee camp in central Gaza. Before leaving through Egypt for the Czech Republic where he hopes to have artificial legs fitted, Khalil, who had been a keen footballer and basketball player before the attack which changed his life, said: "I hope to come back walking." Although his mother Nabila, 39, says Khalil, has been "very angry" a lot of the time since then, all the family, including Khalil, smile cheerfully in the presence of visitors and joke about Khalil's recent decision to take a photograph of himself having cardboard "legs" fixed to his stumps and clothed them in jeans. "I wanted to see what I would look like with artificial legs," he explains." Nabila shows a mobile phone picture of Mohanad's dead body, and says "He was just a baby." But even then she remains calm.

The family, who long to move to a bigger house where the now wheelchair-bound Khalil can have his own room, are desperately poor and his father Amr says he no longer pushes the cart around the local streets – by hand and not even with a donkey – from which he used to sell brushes and cleaning fluid. Because of the two-year- old blockade, he says, "I have no products to sell." But though exhausted by the endless struggle to secure passports and treatment abroad for his two injured sons, he admits it has at least kept him busy. "I seem to be running all the time," he says. Meanwhile Mrs Samouni will continue to take her daughter Jumana to see her in-laws every week. "After all, she belongs to them too," she says. It is perhaps the only moment she shows her sadness. "I was happy with the Samounis," she says. "I had good relations with them."

Independent

Speaking Gaza> Sameh goes Dutch

2009-06-04T08:53:00.000-07:00

Holland, June 4, (Pal Telegraph)- Christine de Vos brought journalist Sameh Habeeb to the Netherlands. Habeeb is one of those young Palestinians who, despite formidable hindrances, tries to give meaning to his life. He has become a journalist and photographer, and is the founder of the English-language Palestine Telegraph, one of the best and most comprehensive Palestinian news sources at the moment. He has made it his life’s work to tell the world how the situation is in Palestine, but especially in Gaza, where he is from.

During the war, he did a lot of work for foreign television channels, because their correspondents were unable to enter Gaza. He did it willingly. But he also saw how some Western media did their work, such as EenVandaag (a Dutch news and current affairs program). It put in an order for images of Palestinians who used civilians as human shields. He had to disappoint them by telling them that these images do not exist. He is often confronted with requests for stereotypical images that conform to the image we have here. Frightening screaming and masked Hamas fighters are easy to sell, but no one wants the images of mutilated bodies. It is not easy to maintain your integrity when you want to work and you need the money. That is one of the reasons he has started his own media outlet.

To begin with, he visited Rotterdam, a city that does a lot for Gaza. With a presentation, facts, photos and a film. It was “heavy” for even the more experienced people, of whom there were many in the audience. Even when you think you know everything, the photos of people shot to pieces, with their legs gone, and the film, of dead and wounded children, are shocking. Behind me a woman sat sobbing quietly.

Habeeb is not inclined to let us get away with the weak notion that it is very unpleasant, but what can we do? And no wonder, as he was not only in Gaza during the siege preceding the war – when civilian deaths and attacks were already taking place – but also during the war itself. In Shifa Hospital, he witnessed the wounded and the dead being carried in, the screaming of the people, the blood in the corridors, and the moans of the dying. He will not forget this for the rest of his life. But the worst is: the world knew, and did nothing. And still does very little.

The following Monday, I accompanied Sameh. He had several meetings in Amsterdam; with the people of United Civilians for Peace; and with his old friend from Gaza, Mohammed Omer, who is receiving treatment here for his injuries sustained as a result of the abuse he received from the Israeli border police when he wanted to return to Gaza.

This is also typical for their existence; just trying to leave Gaza is a terrible trial. Habeeb succeeded after several attempts and is now in England on a visitor’s visa. He has an invitation to do his Masters at a university there, but to obtain an extended visa he would first have to return to Gaza to apply for it again. He laughs cynically. This is how much cooperation you receive in Europe. Apparently no one wants to take into account that Gaza is occupied and besieged, and that you cannot enter it or leave it. Even the trip to the Netherlands was a risk because he was warned that he might not be able to enter England again. And then? He shrugs his shoulders. No idea. Perhaps stay in the Netherlands illegally, perhaps be extradited to Israel; as a Palestinian you seem to be fair game.

I have not heard from him since; I assume that he is in England again.

In the evening he gave a presentation for a group of medical students of the Academic Medical Center in Amsterdam. Here too, people were speechless after the presentation – although Habeeb had left out the most gruesome photos this time. Some of the students will be going to the West Bank soon. Loes Kleijn, who is accompanying them, was worried it would give them the impression that they would be encountering dead babies on a daily basis. That is Gaza. Not the West Bank. Although even there, it is terrible enough.

http://anjameulenbelt.sp.nl/weblog/2009/06/02/sameh-goes-dutch/#more-13842

By Anja Meulenbelt, a Dutch feminist, writer and senator for the Socialist Party.

"Obama's speech in cairo in text"

2009-06-04T08:33:00.000-07:00

Cairo, June 4, (Pal Telegraph) - I am honoured to be in the timeless city of Cairo, and to be hosted by two remarkable institutions. For over a thousand years, al-Azhar has stood as a beacon of Islamic learning, and for over a century, Cairo University has been a source of Egypt's advancement.

Together, you represent the harmony between tradition and progress. I am grateful for your hospitality, and the hospitality of the people of Egypt. I am also proud to carry with me the goodwill of the American people, and a greeting of peace from Muslim communities in my country: assalaamu alaykum.

We meet at a time of tension between the United States and Muslims around the world - tension rooted in historical forces that go beyond any current policy debate. The relationship between Islam and the west includes centuries of co-existence and co-operation, but also conflict and religious wars. More recently, tension has been fed by colonialism that denied rights and opportunities to many Muslims, and a cold war in which Muslim-majority countries were too often treated as proxies without regard to their own aspirations. Moreover, the sweeping change brought by modernity and globalisation led many Muslims to view the west as hostile to the traditions of Islam.

More/http://www.paltelegraph.com/middle-east/77-middle-east/1020-obamas-speech-in-cairo-in-text

"6 Palestinian fishermen abducted in Gaza"

2009-06-04T08:28:00.000-07:00

Gaza, June 4, (Pal Telegraph) - Gazan territorial waters - At around 9 am, six Palestinian fishermen were abducted by the Israeli Navy whilst fishing in Palestinian territorial waters. The fishermen are reported as being;

Adham Al - Habil 21, Mohammed Al - Habil 21, Ahmed Al - Habil, Maher Abu Sultan 25, Mohammed Al - Arayshi, and Sadam Bakar.
The fishermen embarked from Gaza port at 8 am, in a trawling vessel owned by Abu Adham. At around 9 am when they were 3 miles from shore, and 0.5 km south of the "K" area (a designated no-fishing area in the Oslo Accords), they reported that an Israeli gun boat had approached, fired at them, and demanded that they turn of the boats engine. Communication with the fishermen was then lost.

It is believed that all of the fishermen have been abducted, and that their boat has been seized. Several fishermen that were recently abducted in similar circumstances, but have now been released, had reported that at the time of their abduction, the Israeli Navy threatened that "If we see Abu Adham's boat in the sea again, we'll seize it and arrest all the fishermen."

In the last few months, the Israeli Navy have escalated their campaign of persecution against the Palestinian fishermen. Of particular note is the recent spate of abductions. Since the declaration of a cease-fire in January of this year, and prior to today, 40 abductions of fishermen have been reported, and 17 fishing boats have been seized or stolen. About 10 of these boats have been returned but with damages and equipment missing.

Abu Adham's trawling boat was one of three boats seized by the Israeli Navy in November 2008. 15 of the fishermen aboard along with three members of the International Solidarity Movement were also abducted. Following a court case filed by PCHR, Al Mezan, and the ISM the 3 vessels were returned - although damaged and with equipment missing. On the 7th May 2009, one of these boats (belonging to Abu Rami) was again seized by the Israeli Navy and its crew abducted. Israel is refusing to return this boat.

Along with Abu Adham's vessel, it now appears that two of the trawlers stolen by the Israeli Navy in November 2008, are again in Israeli hands.

ISM - Gaza Strip

"Open Letter from Gaza to the Government and People of Spain"

2009-05-30T18:03:00.000-07:00

Gaza, May 30, (The Pal Telegraph) - We write to you as Palestinians from Gaza to express our dismay at the proposal of the Spanish parliament to restrict the universal jurisdiction of Spain, particularly with regard to breaches of international humanitarian law. The proposal called for the existing legislation to be modified so that cases may only be pursued if they involve Spanish victims or if the accused is present on Spanish soil.

At approximately midnight on 22 July 2002, an Israeli Air Force fighter jet dropped a 2,000 lb bomb on the densely populated Daraj neighborhood of Gaza city. The main target of the attack was the family home of Salah Shehada, Commander of the military wing of Hamas. The bomb killed Shehada and an additional seventeen civilians, including his wife, his daughter, eight children (including a 2-month old baby), two elderly men, and two women. In addition, seventy seven people were injured, eleven houses were completely destroyed and thirty two houses damaged, leaving many families homeless.

The Government of the State of Israel confirmed that it was fully aware that Shehada's wife and daughter "were close to him during the implementation of the assassination ... and there was no way out of conducting the operation despite their presence." The practice of wanton willful killing of civilians exemplified in this extra-judicial assassination is not an isolated incident. It is one instance in an ongoing, comprehensive policy targeting us the civilian Palestinians of the Gaza strip and systematically denying us our rights to movement, work, medical care, study, livelihood and increasingly life itself.

In spite of Israel's alleged unilateral withdrawal from the Strip, it still maintains a permanent military presence in Gaza's territorial waters and controls the movement of people and goods onto the strip by land, air or water in addition to movement within the strip through targeting anyone entering the "no go" zone designated by the Israeli military. Israel also continues to control Gaza's population registry. Yet, Israel claims that it is no longer the occupying power in the Gaza strip and uses this excuse in addition to the results of 2006 democratic election to intensify it's policy of siege and lethal attacks on us, Gaza's civilians.

On the 29th of February 2008 Matan Vilnai, Deputy Defense Minister of the State of Israel, threatened us with a bigger Shoah (holocaust) and lived up to his word. During the following Israeli military assault on the Gaza Strip conducted in February 2008 dubbed as "Operation Hot Winter" The Israeli Occupation Forces killed 107 Palestinians including 64 children. The European Union, including Spain, not only refrained from taking action against the State of Israel for its policy of systematic mass murder, but announced its intent to upgrade its relations with the State of Israel. This announcement was the green light Israel needed to continue and escalate its policies, resulting in January 2009 assault on besieged Gaza.

The 1.5 million Palestinians in the besieged Gaza Strip, 80 per cent of whom are refugees expelled from their homes by Zionist forces in 1948, were subjected to 22 days of relentless Israeli state terror, whereby Israeli warplanes, in a repeat of what happened at Al-Darraj on 22.July.2002, systematically targeted civilian areas, reducing whole neighborhoods and vital civilian infrastructure to rubble, including several run by the UN, where civilians were taking shelter. International human rights organizations are now calling for a war crimes investigation into Israel's military assault on Gaza in which the Israeli Occupation Forces killed 1,440 Palestinians of whom 431 were children, and injured 5380.

One ray of hope for us in this time was the decision of Judge Fernando Andreu of the Spanish Audencia Nacional (National Court) to continue the investigation into the events surrounding the al-Daraj bombing of July 2002. We consider this decision a manifestation of Europe's promise and commitment to the principle of "never again" to stand by in silence while ethnic cleansing is taking place. We have hope that it will serve as a deterrent to other would be war criminals.

If the Spanish parliament's resolution calling on the government to limit Spain's universal jurisdiction mechanisms is accepted, it will lead to continued impunity for war criminals and complicity with future war crimes including the ongoing collective punishment and genocide directed against us, the civilian population of the Gaza strip.

Signed by:

-The One Democratic State Group - Gaza

-University Teachers' Association in Palestine - Gaza

-Palestinian Student's Campaign for the Academic Boycott of Israel
-Arab Cultural Forum - Gaza

-Al-Quds Bank for Culture and Information Society

-Society Friends for Rehabilitation of Visually Impaired

"The new Refugees in Gaza still homeless"

2009-05-28T03:09:00.000-07:00

Palestine, May 27, (Pal Telegraph) - All of Amer Aliyan's hopes of rebuilding his life are placed in a carefully folded sheet in his wallet, a document that for the foreseeable future in Gaza is nothing but a worthless piece of paper.

"I'm waiting for the reconstruction, but I know it will take time," the 36-year-old says.

This is a gross understatement in the besieged and impoverished Gaza Strip where an Israeli blockade is preventing the rebuilding effort after the devastation caused by a brief but deadly war at the turn of the year.

Aliyan's house was one of several thousand destroyed during the massive 22-day onslaught unleashed by Israel on the Islamist Hamas-run Gaza in December in response to militant rocket and mortar fire from the enclave.

Since the end of the war, the unemployed dry cleaner has lived under canvas with his wife and five children in one of 93 tents set up on the outskirts of the Beit Lahiya refugee camp in northern Gaza.

The paper secreted inside his wallet is the official attestation that his home was destroyed, and it is a document that will entitle him to funds for rebuilding once the reconstruction starts.

But that is unlikely to begin any time soon, and until it does the thousands of Gazans who like Aliyan lost their homes in the war will just have to fend for themselves.

Reconstruction is a non-event not because there is a lack of demand. Some 4,100 houses was destroyed during the war, as were 48 government buildings, 31 police stations and 20 mosques, among others.

Nor is it for lack of money -- in coffers worldwide sit a whopping 4.5 billion dollars that donors pledged to the Palestinians in March, most of it towards reconstruction in Gaza.

The rebuilding is not able to get under way because of the blockade Israel imposed on Gaza in June 2007 when Hamas, a group pledged to the destruction of the Jewish state, seized the enclave in a deadly takeover.

The billions of dollars in pledges remain where they are because the international community refuses to release the money directly to Hamas, branded as a terror organisation by Israel and much of the West.

The blockade, under which only essential humanitarian goods are allowed into the territory sandwiched between Israel and Egypt, means building materials stay on the outside, as Israel says they can also be used to make rockets.

In a bid to get around these restrictions, Gazans have dug dozens of tunnels under the border with Egypt that are used to bring in supplies, including construction materials such as cement, paint and wood.

The resulting trade is brisk, but limited and dangerous. The hastily dug tunnels often collapse, burying smugglers alive. The Israeli military still targets them in occasional bombing raids.

Because of the blockade the price of building materials has skyrocketed. A bag of cement now costs 220 shekels (56 dollars, 40 euros) compared with 20 shekels previously.

But the cement is of low quality, according to Hadj Salim who operates one of the tunnels, and it cannot be used to mix construction-grade concrete.

Other vital materials such as the steel rods used to reinforce concrete in buildings are too long to fit through the tunnels, Salim says.

With construction at a standstill, the newly homeless residents of the Gaza Strip where the vast majority of the 1.5 million population depends on foreign aid have had to make do.

By Djallal Malti

AFP

"On TV: Israeli siege kills baby aged 2"

2009-05-13T15:19:00.000-07:00

"On TV: Israeli siege kills baby aged 2"
www.paltelegraph.com

Gaza Strip, May 14, (Pal Telegraph) - A new Palestinian child died in a very dramatic scene documented on the T.V. A baby child aged 2 suffered a svere siege that doubled by siege until he died today.

Aljazeera's reporter, Tamer Al meshal, reveals one of the miseries resulting in the Israeli siege on Gaza strip. Feras As'ad Al Mazlom, an infant aged 2, a sole child for newly married couples As'ad and Amal.

Infant Feras who was born with a heart defect, he had to spend more time in a hospital bed rather than his loving parents' arms. He never played nor enjoyed his innocent life like others.

Llike many others, Feras pays his precious life for the siege. The hospital and equipment were not able to rescue him nor could his parents move him to Egypt for treatment. However, the hospital managed to coordinate and transfer him to an Israeli hospital.

With such hope, the father suffered so much trying to get permits for both his wife and son to cross borders, which he did at the end. The father moved like crazy to make the needed documents for Feras so he travels for treatment.

Unfortunately, as they were on the way to pick their child and head to Eriz to Israel for treatment, they received an excruciating phone call saying that their own son was no longer alive and there's no need to take him anywhere.

It was minutes or rather seconds between the life and death for Feras. This baby, didn't fight Israelis, never shot at them, nor fired a rocket rather, his only fault was, "a child born in Gaza"

Thousands of Palestinian like Feras still on the waiting list of death. Israel is hindering there from getting their basic right of treatment. Those patients' rights are highly recognized and guaranteed by the 4th Geneva convention and al humanitarian law. However, Israel still don't confess all these charters regarding humanity.

See the death of Feras here: http://www.aljazeera.net/Channel/KServices/SupportPages/ShowMedia/showMedia.aspx?fileURL=/mritems/streams/2009/5/13/1_913686_1_12.wmv

Special report:
Nancy AL Buhisi
Sameh A. habeeb

"Now it’s your turn"

2009-05-06T17:50:00.000-07:00

london-Gaza, May 7 (Pal Telegraph) -For months now I have been trying to make sense of what happened in Gaza. And yet I never know where to start or how to find the one story that says everything that needs to be said about what happened-and still is happening-to us.

I have many accounts to choose from and pictures as well. I am a photojournalist, you see, and I have been documenting in words and pictures the shortages of food and electricity that preceded the attack and continue to this day, and the many civilians who were killed, maimed, or made homeless during those terrible 22 days in late December and early January.

I have collected many accounts of bravery and despair under extremely trying circumstances. My house was exposed to shrapnel from Israeli rockets. Without power, I had to walk around four kilometers (about two and a half miles) in the middle of this cruel attack, simply to charge my laptop in order to get the truth out. Now it's your turn. I am asking you now to carry my story forward.

The US government is planning to pour more money-billions of dollars-to continue this madness. Tell them what happened in Gaza and ask them to investigate. Ask them to find out for themselves what happened with the money they sent. Our streets are littered with "made-in-the-US" ammunitions; our schools with "made-in-the-US" phosphorus.

Ask them to make sure that the story of Louay does not repeat itself. I met him in a hospital. His grandmother was beside him trying to make him feel better. When I spoke with him, he did not know that that he had lost his eyesight and that his brother was killed in an attack on his father's car. He told me what had happened to him, then he concluded, "I need you to help me recover quickly so I can go to school again and play with some of my friends. I don't know if they are alive or not." These are the words and the courage of an eight-year old.

We can do better than this.

Sameh Akram Habeeb

PS. PS. Want to read more about my work and see the world with the eyes of a Palestinian in Gaza?
Go to http://www.paltelegraph.com/. I started The Palestine Telegraph/PT as a professionally driven online newspaper envisioned by a few thoughtful Palestinian youths in Gaza. They were inspired to do something to change their world. Check it out.

"NAKBA 2009 - Melbourne remembers"

2009-05-05T23:08:00.000-07:00

Australia, May 6 (Pal Telegraph) - For this year's Nakba commemoration, Australians for Palestine and Women for Palestine are presenting something rather different from the usualexhibitions and public lectures.

The UK's most renowned playwright Caryl Churchill was so shocked by the horrors being visited on the Palestinians inGaza during Israel's 3-week bombardment that she wrote a play to juxtaposethis human suffering with the same human suffering that happened in adifferent time, a different place and to another people.

She called theplay "Seven Jewish Children" and its packed-out performances in London and then New York, where the controversy over Rachel Corrie's play still
lingers, have countered the critics wanting to label it anti-Semitic and an evocation of the dreadful blood libels against Jews in a long distant past.

The London play premiered in London on 6 February and was performed by nine Jewish actors. It opened in New York on 16 March and Jewish film reviewers have said that the play is "sensitive", "penetrating", "beautiful". Rebecca
Vilkomerson from the Jewish Peace News said: "I've read it three times (it only takes about five minutes), and each time it has brought me to tears.

As someone living in Tel Aviv, raising two daughters, struggling with when and how and what to tell them--I found it devastating and true."

Its Australian premiere is in Melbourne on 18 May and we would like you to judge for yourself. It will be performed by the brilliant British actress Miriam Margolyes who is currently the star lead in the Melbourne show "Realism" and Australia's own iconic Max Gillies and highly acclaimed performers Tony Llewellyn-Jones, John Leary and Alison Bell.

Please mark this event in your diaries as something not to be missed. The play is only 10 mins, but it will leave you reeling.

Two Palestinian films will follow the performances. The first film is the new "This Palestinian Life" by Phillip Rizk about ordinary Palestinians' non-violent struggle against Israel's occupation and stealing of Palestinian
land.

Rizk made headline news around the world this year when he was arrested by Egyptian state security agents and held for four days after he took partin a march in support of Gaza. The second film is the moving "La Terre
parle Arabe - The Land speaks Arabic" by Maryse Gargour, a most fitting way to remember the Nakba and the catastrophic repercussions that the uprooting
of a people has had to this day.

Visit http://www.australiansforpalestine.com
which we hope will continue to bring you news and commentaries on Palestine as well as the activities being undertaken in support of Palestine here in Australia.

By Sonja Karakr

Transcript One of My Talks in the UK

2009-04-25T04:02:00.000-07:00

Steve Farley: Can we move on, colleagues, I�m conscious of time. There will be an opportunity at about 12:45 to come back to this, and there will be discussions later on. I want to take Sameh Habeeb first, who is a photojournalist with an eyewitness account of what went on in Gaza, and then Brian Campfield from NIPSA, and also the president of the Trades Council, and then Eamon McMahon from the ICTU. That�s a fairly tight timetable but I think it was important to give Manawel the opportunity and for you to ask him questions, it�s very rare that we get this direct opportunity. So Sameh if we hand over to you?

Sameh Habeeb: yes

[applause]

Sameh: I see just a row of people that I�ve never met, because this is my first time to meet more people from the West Bank. We are not able, we are not allowed

Manawel: [in Arabic]

Sameh: Yes, and only here, in Britain, the reason, our troubles is uniting us. It�s my second time here in Liverpool to speak on the situation in the Gaza Strip, I�ve got 15 minutes which is not enough at all, to speak about 3 years of siege and the last war. But I will try to recount and compress things to come out with something good, and I would love to address your eagerness to know about the political situation in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank. So I would try to get some more extra minutes but I will try to be 15. I�ll be speaking about the siege and about the war in Gaza and after the war, exactly. I just came out of Gaza Strip directly after the war, and I managed by a miracle to get out of Gaza.

I am 23 years old, my name is Sameh Habeeb, I�m a journalist and a humanitarian in the Gaza Strip. I gave up everything and came out to England to speak with the PSC, I have toured most of the cities here, more the English people themselves. When I came into the country, I was denied by your government first, and then I applied and applied and I got the visa, and then when I tried to leave Gaza, I had not managed successfully to go out quickly, but after a time I have left Gaza and I�m here. And the problem, I don�t know how to get back to Gaza. If I get back to Egypt, they will deport me back to the UK, and the UK will not accept me as a refugee. So I don�t know where to go after I finish, my visa is to be finished by August. I�m not speaking about my own problem, but I�m speaking about the people. It�s the story of the people. I managed to get my freedom but a million and a half are still trapped, experiencing the economics and mayhem imposed by the Israelis.

The siege was imposed really now more than 3 years. The siege was imposed 3 years ago and it�s the basis of the total collapse now, including the health sector, the industrial sector, the agricultural sector, construction, infrastructure, crossings, transport. These things and many other things are destroyed in the Gaza Strip. Health sector, when I came I have written this number but now this number 370 people killed, sentenced to slow death because Israel is not allowing to leave for treatment, and not allowing enough medications to get into the Gaza Strip, they are sentencing people to slow death. And imagine where a woman tries to leave and she has a cancer, and they tell her she is a security threat in Israel, a patient with a cancer is a security threat.

The economy is totally collapsed. We don�t have an economy in the Gaza Strip at all. Most of our manufacturing systems, factories totally rely on Israel in terms of bringing the goods and raw materials. Luckily, maybe you are because you have a chance to pressure Israel and make this BIG campaign, with the PSC and other people, but in Gaza we are obliged to get their bullets, to get their shells, and we don�t have any choice because we would love to put this pressure, but we cannot.

We have more than 4,000 factories totally stopped at the moment, not operating, in which thousands of people turn to be jobless, they don�t have any kind of income at the moment, and totally dependant on the UNRWA. The unemployment rate is more than 67% at the moment, and the poverty rate is more than 85% in the Gaza Strip, and the rest of the people do face severe troubles in getting their days. More than 1,100,000 of them totally rely on the UNRWA in getting their food supply. And the UNRWA itself is not finding easy access to its goods and humanitarian aid coming through, because you will notice the statement in my presentation that the UNRWA is always under the attack of the Israeli state. As for our imports and exports, we are not allowed to export our goods, but we are allowed to import their goods. For example the flowers, strawberries and other small products in the Gaza Strip, we are not allowed to export these things. And when we managed for example to export something of the flowers, at the end of the day the cartons, they are written Made in Israel. They steal even our goods, inside, when its in Gaza.

The construction and infrastructure sector, for 3 years, a house is never built, a road is never built, a school is never built, a hospital is never built, nothing is being built, until this moment, and after the war we have more than 60,000 refugees, living in the mosques, in public places, and in camps, and Israel is not allowing at the moment the construction materials to enter the Gaza Strip, causing a big problem for these people, UNRWA is supplying food because some of them didn�t have an alternative, some of them went to live in the mosques. These mosques were hit already, so they want to leave them, because they have taken this mosque as a refuge, but they didn�t know that this mosque was hit.

Spare parts not allowed for the water, fresh drinking water, so we have a big problem to drink water. More than 100,000 people do face big troubles in getting fresh drinking water. And sewage water is leaking into the Mediterranean because Israel is not allowing spare parts for the sewage system to get into the Gaza Strip, even they have destroyed some of these sewage water wells in time of war, and more than 77 million litres of sewage water is leaking into the Mediterranean, killing the fish resources destroying the sea. And the sea is something else. It�s not only killing fish, it�s also taking control of the whole Gaza shore. And now they�re bringing your troops, bringing the Nato, bringing the British troops, they�re already circulating in the sea off Gaza.

The power blackout is still taking place in Gaza. Gaza has 3 main sources of power, one is from Egypt, one is from Israel, and one is our key power plant. This key power plant was hit in 2006 when the soldier who came to fight the Palestinians was captured by some Palestinian fighters. This was hit, and resulted in a big power shortage in the Gaza Strip, so we relied on electrical generators and the share we were getting from Israel. Israel tried to control the share we were getting, sometimes they give us power, sometimes they do not give us power, and Egypt, what we get from Egypt is not enough, we have troubles, so most of the Gaza Strip is facing big troubles in terms of power. Imagine a hospital with no power, imagine a school with no power, an institution, all these things cause severe trouble and we are still not able to deal with this trouble.

For example, a hospital, the Shifa hospital in Gaza was in bad need, in time of war, because a power blackout hit most of the Gaza Strip. So the guys there tried to bring some of the fuel for the generators but they didn�t find fuel. So they were forced to take fuel from the ambulances to the generators.

Fuel, they allow some tens of thousands of litres, and the others they do not allow. And the crossings, they were taking control of the fuel crossings, another crazy policy imposed on us. Crossings and fuel removing, this is something that we never experienced in the Gaza Strip.

Freedom is a right that we have to practice, like other countries. But in Palestine, not just in Gaza but in West Bank, everywhere in Palestine we are not allowed to practice this freedom. And immediately they said that they have pulled out from the Gaza Strip and we gave you this freedom. I was on the BBC yesterday debating with an Israeli professor yesterday, and he said �you are sending rockets to Israel, you are killing our people, and we have pulled out.� And I told him how they have pulled out of Gaza. �You have taken some of the settlers from the inside of Gaza and you have encircled the Gaza Strip, you have destroyed the airport, the seaport, took control of the crossings, and the air, and nothing, there is no freedom they are speaking about�. They are trying to exaggerate by a policy of lies and propaganda against those poor people in Gaza. Israel has control of the 6 crossings, in which nothing gets in or out, except by their will. Even the goods that they are allowing, they are not allowing the quantity of aid to Gaza, in the normal time before the siege there was a need for more than 5 � 600 trucks of humanitarian aid, food and secondary things. But in time of siege, they started to decree this, and sometimes the crossings were totally closed, and then they allowed 15, 40, up to 150 maximum out of 600 trucks. So the price of the commodities went high, and people are not affording that, because they are jobless, hundreds of thousands of them are jobless at the moment.

And there is a very ironic story of the goods getting into the Gaza Strip. When they didn�t allow the goods to get into the Gaza Strip, they gave them a kind of a choice. If you apply to have 10 trucks of flour, then you have to forget about 5 trucks of stationery, and this really happened and the UNRWA is a witness about that. People at the schools, last school year, because Israel is not allowing clothing or allowing stationery, they were asking and the UNRWA intervened, to allow clothing and to allow stationery, but didn�t, they said �we can send you some 10 trucks if you forget about some other 10 trucks from other committees�.

The Gaza tunnels, why the Gaza tunnels? They have blockaded the borders, they have taken control of the crossings, they didn�t allow the goods. We were forced to dig the tunnels. We have more than 13,000(?) tunnels. It�s not for smuggling weapons. Maybe some of these tunnels are being used to smuggle weapons and it�s the right of the Palestinians to resist the occupation

[applause]

Most of those, most of them who work in the tunnels are well educated people, most of them got BA and Masters. More than 200 of those digging in the tunnels died through the attacks from Egypt, from Israel, and from other problems while digging into these tunnels.

The war in Gaza, it wasn�t a war, but a genocide, an entire genocide against everything. There was a big psychological war, no shelters, no food, no water, no power, no fuel, no medicines, nothing in time of war in the Gaza Strip. And they have launched a psychological war from Day 1, in which they have dropped tens of thousands of leaflets. They have asked the people to leave the border areas to other areas but unfortunately they didn�t tell the people where to go, because the border is totally closed and the sea is totally controlled by the Navy forces, and the soldiers came into the Gaza Strip. So the people tried to flee inside the Gaza Strip. But they were hit and they were killed. And when they tried to kill some of the commanders of Hamas, they have killed many other people. When they have hit the Hamas Interior Minister, and as you know the assassination policy is even forbidden, it is not allowed, they have killed that guy, and they have killed more than 20 people with him, they have killed ... from Hamas, they have killed his family, the children and the people around him. If you are going to travel with him you are going to have the highest hi tech... They were targeting everybody. They are not targeting Hamas people as such, they have targeted all the people.

Attacking the United Nations, they have attacked the United Nations with phosphorus bombs, they have killed the people, massacred the people, at Fakhoura school more than 45 people had fled their houses, destroyed houses in the North, to Jabalia. But they were destroyed and they were killed, more than 45, most of them women and children were killed in that school. And another school, I went to the story and made the story, was hit, 3 people were going to the toilet, 10 people were going to the toilet at midnight, they were hit by the drone and killed. The drones, by the way, it�s being supported by your government.

Israel by the way, after they attacked the school, they have attacked the UNRWA. They were saying, Israel�s Foreign Minister was saying you do not have a humanitarian crisis in Gaza. But she did not speak about how it works in there. Because they were allowing 150 trucks a day in time of war, and not allowing the crossings to open totally as before the siege. And they have allowed some trucks but they have stored these trucks as you see in the UNRWA compound. This is a bag of flour burning in the UNRWA compound.

They have destroyed hospitals, schools, everything. Ok, I�m trying to finish now, a small story. This guy had 3 children, female children, hit by the Israelis. Two of them were killed and the third is totally paralyzed, and his mother as well, when the paramedics tried to rescue him the ambulance was blown up.

Samouni massacre, it was a family, it was a massacre in which more than 29 people were killed, they were calling on the radio stations, calling on the UNRWA, calling �please save us� while they were shelled by 3 shells, most of the people were killed and most of them who were sick they are still having some troubles.

My last story, he fled to the school but he didn�t die there like some of his comrades. But when he went back to his area to bring some clothing and food he got hit by the drone in which he is totally blind and his brother was killed, his father was injured.

And it�s not only humans. Others suffered from the Israelis. It�s cows. They have killed the cows. But it�s by snipers, it�s not by rockets. As you see, these cows were hit by the bullets.

It�s not only about cows. They have massacred and destroyed a big farm of more than 60,000 chickens in the Gaza Strip.

So they have destroyed the sea, by the sewage water, and they have killed the people of Gaza. They have killed the animals, they have killed the birds, they have killed everything, they have destroyed the schools.

Thank you indeed for giving me this chance.

Speaking about my photos: Remember the Children of Palestine

2009-04-23T23:32:00.000-07:00

A new Palestinian patient dies due to siege

2009-04-21T18:21:00.001-07:00

Gaza Strip, April 22, 2009, (Pal Telegraph) - Siege on the Gaza Strip is still chasing Palestinians into the grave. A Palestinian man in his mid fifties died an hour ago due to inability to access needed medication and treatment.

Nai'm El Ejla, 58, turned severely sick directly after the war on Gaza. Doctors in Gaza failed in diagnosing his case, presenting vague, general symptoms untol his death.

He was stuck on the border with Egypt many times. He tried to travel to Israel for treatment but these efforts were denied.
Ebrahim, 24, journalist from Gaza and son of Mr. Nai'm reported for the Palestine Telegraph of his father's death.

"We tried to give him treatment but we failed. He is Shaid (Martyr) of siege. Doctors in Gaza were not able to help him. We tried to send him to Egypt but we failed until his health conditions deteriorated.

Finally, we managed to get him a medical referral from Gaza hospitals but this didn't rescue him. Egyptian authorities didn't allow him even to get into the hospital. He died at the hospital door as doctors and Egyptian authorities refused to treat him. " Ebrahim said while crying.

The El ejla family is waiting for the victims remains to arrive in Gaza. Nai'm is still in the Egyptian territories. The number of siege victims increases to reach 323 people.

Lack of access to medical treatment threatens Palestinian lives daily. All hospitals and clinics in Gaza report severe shortages of medicines and equipment. Stocks of basic medications are 50% low.

Medicines to treat diabetes, heart disease, asthma and other chronic diseases are not available. Access to Oncologists or dialysis is non-existent. A poignant problem given high cancer rates resulting from the Israeli army use of depleted uranium coated munitions
Sterilized supplies are short by 30%.

Diagnostic testing supplies are down by 40%, directly affecting patients health. Even children's incubators are affected by the shortages.

Hospital equipment desperately needs spare parts and maintenance. The siege prevents supplies from being replenished. Shipments are frequently blocked or delayed at border crossings.
Continued power cuts and blackouts have damaged hospital equipment and information systems.

Urgent Appeal: In Gaza a Siege fire instead of Ceasefire

2009-04-08T05:11:00.000-07:00

Actions strongly required as borders are severely restricted...
Patients still dying and death toll 313 as no exit, no enough medicines...
Tens of thousands displaced...
Re construction not allowed...
Extreme poverty and unemployment paralyzing life...
Freedom of Movement is a taboo...

The European Campaign to End the Siege on Gaza, (ECESG) calls upon all International Organization working on the Gaza Strip to intervene immediately. The siege is not only suffocating the people of Gaza, depriving them of basic necessities, it is also breaking international law. In the wake of the siege, which even after three years shows no sign of abating, numerous international condemnation desperate plea have been shamelessly rejected by the Israeli authorities.

Crossings operate with low capacity while thousands of basic commodities are still denied entry into Gaza. Many promises have been made to improve the living conditions, which thus far, has not materialized.

In a statement during a recent press conference by the Operations director of United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestinian refugees in the Near East (UNRWA), described the situation as ‘wholly and totally inadequate’. He further went on to say ‘the situation was having a devastating impact on the physical circumstances and the mindsets of the people living there.“We need access; it’s the number one issue, it’s the number two issue, it’s the number three issue,” said John Ging at a Headquarters press conference this afternoon. “Until and unless we can get humanitarian assistance in, in an unfettered way, we can’t even begin recovery and reconstruction

ECESG is striving desperately for an immediate solution for thousands of Palestinians, whose perpetual refuges status is further exacerbated by the siege, who are again made “New refugees" as their houses were either partially or totally damaged. A considerable number of them live in schools, public hostels while other are scattered in humble camps set by International organizations. Israel, despite the so-called ceasefire does not allow cement, iron, raw materials for reconstruction of Gaza.

Border Crossing and freedom of movement continue to be a severe obstacle. Israel allows a third of the quantities of goods from trucks which number 500 to 600 a day to enter Gaza. As one can imagine the protracted siege combined with the extreme poverty, where 85% are below the poverty line, have greatly precipitated the suffering.

School conditions have greatly worsened as large numbers of students return to their tiny classrooms. No new schools are being built and no improvements have been made. Additionally, medical facilities were not built and improvements were never made since the start of the siege. According to the Palestinian ministry of health in Gaza, a dangerously large number of medicines and medical equipments are no longer available. Around 313 people have died due to lack of medicines

In Charm El Sheik, the world leaders promised 4 billions of aid to Gaza however borders are still closed and the siege stands with disregard to unanimous condemnation.

ECESG requests that all International organizations take reasonability towards removing the Gaza siege.

Sameh A. Habeeb

European Campaign to End the Siege on Gaza

Press Officer and Researcher

E-mail: sameh.habeeb@prc.org

Website: www.savegaza.eu

100 Crown House, London, UK

NW10 7PN

Tel: +44 (0) 20 8453 0919

Fax: +44 (0) 20 8453 0994

Israeli MANIACS Attack Palestinian Civilians

2009-04-05T15:35:00.000-07:00

PLZ: PROMOTE THEIS NEWSPaper: Web: www.Paltelegraph.com
Gaza, April 6, 2009 (Pal Telegraph)- Part of the ongoing Israeli measures in Jerusalem, hundreds of Israeli settlers attacked Al-Sadya neighborhood in east Jerusalem. The attackers tried to storm houses of Al Jabir family.

Bloody clashes erupted in the area as the settlers backed by Israeli army on Sunday evening surprisingly came into the area. Hundreds of Palestinians gathered in challenge of settlers who tried to advance into the area.

Israel escalated its repressive bloody actions as a new fundamental mayor, Nir Barka, reached the office lately.

The attacks of the unleashed settlers resulted in 10 Palestinians wounded and 4 Palestinians captured by Israeli army.

The mayor has requested the demolition of tens of Palestinian houses in Kafir Silwad to minimize the Palestinians in occupied Jerusalem.

More than 150 Israeli settlers armed by guns and heavy military means attacked Hebron city. Many houses were stormed in towns of Jabir, Wadi Nasara and Wadi Ehsan near the holly mosque of Abarahm.

Lately, 4 Palestinian shops were occupied by the MANIAC settlers in the old market of Hebron City. Dogs, animals and other means are being used by Israeli settlers to force Palestinians to leave their houses.

Thousands of Hicaters were confiscated as successive Israeli government implemented plans of Judaization Jerusalem. Thousands of houses were occupied and tens of Israeli settlers forcibly dwelled in the occupied houses.

Haaretz said that new rightist Israeli government is to encourage the settlement expansion across the West Bank and Jerusalem. It's expected that a new big plan to be set into practice to tie Malli Admim settlement and occupied Jerusalem. The plan which included more than 3600 housing utilities was frozen upon harsh pressure from U.S. administration.

============================
Sameh A. Habeeb,
Photojournalist, Peace Activist &
Founder of The Palestine Telegraph Newspaper
London, United Kingdom
UK Mob:0044- (0) 7949725139
Gaza Mob: 00972599306096
Sameh.habeeb@gmail.com
Skype: Gazatoday, Facebook: Sameh A. habeeb
www.gazatoday.blogspot.com
Photos:http://picasaweb.google.com/sameh.habeeb

Eye Witness from Gaza: Sameh Habeeb Speaking Tour

2009-03-25T15:49:00.000-07:00

A first-hand account of what has happened and is still happening in Gaza from Sameh Habeeb, Palestinian photojournalist from Gaza

Wednesday 25th March Southampton – 7:30pm University: lecture Room A, Nuffield Theatre

Thursday 26th March Plymouth University 7:30pm

Saturday 28 March 7:30pm - Calstock Village Hall, Calstock, Tamar Valley

Monday 30th March – 8pm Walthamstow -Harmony Hall, Truro Road E17 7BY, London

Tuesday 31st March Liverpool 7pm - Quaker Meeting House, School Lane, L1 3BT

Thursday 2nd April Manchester - 7pm – Cross Street Chapel, Cross Street

Friday 3rd April Durham/Newcastle area - 7pm Council Chamber, Civic Centre, Newcastle Road, Chester-le-Street