West Bank's Daily Tragedies, Notorious Ansar Prison Reopened Via NY Transfer News * All the News That Doesn't Fit source - abunimah@yahoo.com April 27, 2002 *Across West Bank, daily tragedies go unseen (The Guardian) *Ansar 3: Israeli Prison an Emblem of Shriveled Hope (LA Times) Ali Abunimah http://www.abunimah.org ******************************************************************** Across West Bank, daily tragedies go unseen Suzanne Goldenberg reveals the extent of abuses against civilians in Israel's four-week military offensive The Guardian April 27, 2002 Arif Said Ahmed's life ended at 5.05am on April 9 when two Israeli helicopter gunships soared over the hillside, firing a rocket at him and his cousin Naif as they walked home from morning prayers. The helicopters returned, firing their machine guns for several terrifying minutes as Arif's wife, Samira, stumbled out to their bodies with her infant daughter. Mother and daughter were saved from serious injury by her brother Farooq, who flung himself over them. A bullet pierced his side and fragments ripped his leg. That was the beginning of the invasion of Dura, a village south-west of Hebron which marks the southernmost extent of the Israeli army's offensive in the West Bank. The Jenin refugee camp, whose physical erasure has come to symbolise the devastation and death inflicted by the Israeli army in the past four weeks, lies at the northern extremity of the territory. While the world has been preoccupied with the camp, the stories beginning to unfold from the Palestinian cities, towns, refugee camps and villages that lie between Jenin and Dura show that the Israeli army has been engaged in systematic abuse the length of the West Bank. "Jenin is not so different from any of the other attacks," said Peter Bouckaert, a senior researcher at Human Rights Watch. "The focus of the international community has been on events in Jenin, but equally serious violations took place in Ramallah, particularly, and in Nablus." The most grievous abuses break down into four categories: the killing of Palestinian civilians, the denial of medical care, the wanton des truction of civilian property, and the use of Palestinian civilians as human shields for house-to-house searches. Human rights organisations have not even begun to investigate the raids on the smaller West Bank towns and villages such as Dura. The scale of the offensive, the biggest since Israel occupied the West Bank in 1967, is too forbidding, as is its use of a military curfew to deny international organisations access. The first human rights field worker, from the Israeli group B'Tselem, reached Dura on Thursday, when the village had been under curfew for 17 days. The first civilian deaths B'Tselem recorded were those of Arif Said Ahmed, 34, a teacher and the acting imam of the local mosque, and Naif Said Ahmed, 33, who was his cousin and brother-in-law. After dawn prayers they had paused outside the mosque to smo13ke a cigarette when the rocket killed them. Their bodies were not removed for 36 hours. Despite his serious injuries, Farooq Said Ahmed was rounded up with the other Palestinian men of the village, propped up by two other men. One asked the soldiers for a doctor. "The soldier told him in Arabic: 'Whoever is dead is dead, and whoever is injured can wait'," he said. The army allowed an ambulance through 10 hours later, by which time his jeans were so soaked in his own blood that he considered wringing them out. It took three hours to reach the hospital, he said. Twice soldiers shot at the ambulance, and twice they stopped it, unloading him on his stretcher, prodding his injured leg until he yelled in pain, and flipping him over on his face to check for weapons on both occasions. Nothing that happened in Dura is extraordinary in the context of the past month. Six Palestinians were killed - three wanted militants and three civilians - two houses were blown up, hundreds of men were rounded up and a few men were used as human shields. Human rights organisations accuse the Israeli defence force of failing in its duty to the Geneva conventions to "refrain from deciding to launch any attack which may be expected to cause incidental loss of civilian life, injury to civilians, damage to civilian objects, or a combination therefore which would be excessive in 13relation to the concrete and direct military advantage anticipated". The Israeli army spokesman Captain Jacob Dallal said: "Considering the type of war we are engaged in we have done very, very well to protect civilians. "This is a war being conducted in an urban setting. We are not on a hilltop fighting another army. We are fighting an army of terrorists, and terrorists hide in civilian areas." In Arrabah, south-west of Jenin, a pair of helicopter gunships fired on Mohammed Nabil Hardan and his wives, Amal and Jamila, killing all three as they walked home from their fields. Jamila was five months pregnant. A few minutes later they fired a rocket at the barn where Mohammed's father, Nafeh Abed Hardan, 67, was sleeping, wounding him in the hand and the foot. The foot may have to be amputated. "I swear I don't know why," he said. "There was no reason for them to kill my son and his wives, and if I knew they were going to fire on the barn, I certainly would not have slept there." During the siege of the Nablus casbah, doctors used a mosque as a mortuary and hospital. It was strewn with the stained mattresses of the wounded who bled their lives away. Two dozen corpses lay there for six days, stacked up like firewood, before a chaotic evacuation on April 8. "If the Israelis are calling it a military zone, and not allowing others in, there is an obligation to provide aid to friend and foe," said Hanna Megally, director of Human Rights Watch. "They can prevent medical aid coming in for military reasons, but they have to provide it themselves." Capt Dallal said: "There have been very many cases where we have allowed the ambulances to go through, but the drivers say they are afraid of shooting." He also denies that the army caused unwarranted destruction, saying the buildings destroyed were used by snipers. But the fighting devastated much of the West Bank. In the Nablus casbah several historic buildings with 2ft-thick stone walls, including a soap factory, were reduced to mounds of rubble. In the Balata refugee camp, homes were destroyed as punishment. The army blew up four houses near the entrance of the camp. One belonged to the Badawi family, whose two sons were commanders in a Palestinian militant group. Ramallah, the seat of Yasser Arafat's administration, was another destruction zone. This was where the army established its pattern of compelling male civilians to walk in front of soldiers when they were hunting the Palestinian militants and police. On March 30, Israeli soldiers exchanged fire with more than 20 Palestinian policemen and threw grenades into their hideout in a third-floor flat in a town centre building. Moments later Nader Mansi, 22, an architecture student, was ordered to enter the building and approach the flat to see if the policemen would surrender. In Jenin refugee camp the following Friday, Ali Mustafa Abu Siria, 43, an Arabic teacher, was marched from his flat in handcuffs and at gunpoint and forced to walk ahead of troops and 13 army sniffer dogs seeking gunmen. He went to 11 houses before he was shot in the kneecap. "As soon as I knocked on the door, a bullet was fired at me," he said. Capt Dallal emphatically rejected the term "human shield", though he admitted that Palestinian civilians were used as "guides". On the eve of the arrival of a UN team to investigate the nine-day battle for Jenin, such disputes about terminology, and what really happened in the refugee camp, will likely grow more heated. 13Samira, wife of the dead Arif Said Ahmed, would like to welcome the team to Dura. "I believe this mission should visit every place in Palestine. The behaviour of the Israeli army was savage, and it didn't distinguish between Jenin, Hebron, Dura or any other place." ******************************************************************* Israeli Prison an Emblem of Shriveled Hope; Mideast: Camp that held Palestinians in the first intifada has reopened, reviving a painful past. By MARY CURTIUS Los Angeles Times April 27, 2002 JERUSALEM--Israelis knew it as Ketziot. Palestinians called it Ansar 3. Both believed that the sprawling prison camp in the Negev desert was a painful piece of their shared past that they had left behind forever. But in the midst of Operation Defensive Shield, Israel's massive military sweep through the West Bank, the Israeli army announced that it had reopened Ketziot, closed six years ago as Israel and the Palestinians began implementing the 1993 Oslo peace accords. For many on both sides of this increasingly bloody and bitter conflict, there is no more powerful symbol of the death of hope here than the rebirth of Ketziot. Opened in 1988, Ketziot grew to be the single largest detention center for Palestinians arrested during their first revolt against Israel's military rule in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. Thousands of Palestinians were held in the camp's tents at any one time. Many of them were academics, professionals, poets and political activists who were never charged with crimes. Ketziot became the subject of countless Palestinian poems, novels, plays and other writings. The camp's vast size, its remoteness and the harsh conditions there made it a potent symbol for Palestinians. They named it Ansar 3 after the prison camp that Israel opened during its 1982 invasion of Lebanon. Nearly 10,000 Palestinian, Lebanese and other prisoners were housed in the original Ansar, named for the Lebanese village it was built near. Ansar 2 was a prison Israel established in the Gaza Strip. But it was Ansar 3 that captured the imagination of Palestinians. "And Ansar will sing its intifada/To the intifada beyond/And the horizon still faces them/And the songs of praise to the martyrs/Pouring sunlight into the chest/And my heart, oh Ansar/My heart is not consoled," ends the poem "Exodus to Ansar 3," written by Al Mutawakil Taha, a Palestinian poet who served 18 months in Ketziot in the 1980s. Men on both sides who lived through Ketziot's first incarnation, and who still remember the heroes' welcomes the last prisoners released from the camp received when they were bused back to their communities in Gaza and the West Bank, have expressed dismay that it is once again housing Palestinian prisoners. "It feels like we are on a roller coaster that is taking us back to times we all wanted to leave behind and we don't have control over the direction we're heading," said Ron Krumer, who in the 1980s served in the Israeli military bureaucracy that ran civil affairs in the West Bank. "Ansar 3 was established to break Palestinian morale and to stop the first intifada, and it was a failure," said Nabhan Khreisheh, a Palestinian imprisoned in Ketziot for six months in 1988 on unspecified charges. "Now they want to try again to break our morale, to punish Palestinians who are politically active. "In reopening Ansar, they are saying to the Palestinians, 'Look where your leadership has brought you.' But I do not think it will work this time either," Khreisheh said. The Israeli army denies that it had any political motivation for reopening the prison. For the army, the move was purely practical. With the collapse of the peace process and the outbreak of the current intifada in September 2000, arrests of Palestinian militants surged. Detention centers to house Palestinian prisoners were overcrowded even before the latest military offensive. One week after Operation Defensive Shield began in late March, the army started transferring Palestinian prisoners from Ofer prison, in the West Bank, to Ketziot, about 30 miles southwest of the desert city of Beersheba, not far from the border with Egypt. More than 4,000 Palestinians have been arrested since March 29, according to an army spokesman. Of those, 1,700 were still being held at the beginning of this week. Among the detainees are 385 Palestinians who are being administratively detained--held without being charged--for six months. The army says the number of administrative detainees is higher than it has been since the first intifada, which lasted from 1987 until 1993. Prisoners began arriving at Ketziot on April 10. Human rights organizations believe that about 300 Palestinians are now being held there. Echoing complaints about the U.S. detention of Al Qaeda and Afghan fighters at the Guantanamo Bay naval base in Cuba, several rights groups have charged that the transfer of West Bank Palestinians to a prison inside Israel violates the Fourth Geneva Convention, which prohibits holding prisoners in a country other than their own. "We have complained to the attorney general, and if we don't like his answer to our complaints, we will go to the High Court of Justice," said Hannah Friedman, executive director of the Israeli Public Committee Against Torture in Israel. Friedman said prisoners complain that they do not have enough blankets and that they are sleeping on thin pads on the ground. Food, she said, is inadequate, and water is scarce. But an army spokesman dismissed reports of poor conditions at the prison. "Everything is being done according to international law," said Capt. Jacob Dalal. The army refused a request from The Times to tour the camp. After his release from Ketziot in 1989, Taha, the Palestinian poet, told an Israeli interviewer that many of his fellow prisoners had been radicalized by their experiences in the camp. But he said he had come out convinced that coexistence was the only option. He recalled an incident in which an Israeli contractor who had arrived to build a fence in the camp happened to bring his children with him. "They were all small and cute," Taha said. "All of a sudden, all the prisoners in Ward 5 came out of their tents and stood by the fence just to watch the kids." The men, he said, saw in the faces of the Israeli children the faces of their own children, from whom they had been separated for months. The emotional encounter, Taha said, "was a moment of light for me. I wrote a poem to the Israelis which says that we love your children and we yearn for them to go hand in hand with our children to the springs of peace and love." In a telephone interview this week, Taha, who runs a poetry workshop in the West Bank city of Ramallah, said he still believes that his vision of coexistence is realistic. "Until now, I believe it," he said. "But how can I persuade my child to love the Israeli child when my children saw soldiers enter my neighbor's house and destroy it?" [ENDS] MAILING LIST INSTRUCTIONS: Your e-mail address is considered private and will not be passed to any third party by either me or Yahoo Groups who hosts my mailing list. 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