According to an Israeli source, the IDF and Shabak made a major arrest yesterday in the Palestinian village of Awarta of three residents suspected of involvement in the Itamar murders of five members of the Fogel family. This is connected to, but in addition to the arrest of well over 100 residents of the village, including 100 women alone, in an attempt to smoke out those responsible. Further, Israeli media are reporting (Hebrew and in English) a coordinated campaign of pogrom-like activity involving destruction of home furnishings and ransacking of entire homes by the security forces.
This from Ynetnews:
Yaakov Manor, a left-wing activist who visited the village on Sunday, recounted one such raid in a Palestinian home.”The soldiers entered rooms and broke furniture, broke a washing machine belonging to the family and a refrigerator as well. The soldiers tipped over oil containers and broke closets,” he said.
Road-blocks prevent access to the village via roads or highways. Some village lands have been “requisitioned” by the military and transferred to surrounding settlements in further acts of collective punishment which are forbidden by international law.
The only thing we have to be thankful for is that the three suspects, whose identity isn’t yet known to me as the detention is under gag order, weren’t summarily executed as is common in such situations. The likely reason for this is that these detainees may possess knowledge that would lead to others involved in the attack. It isn’t helpful to an investigation to murder suspects who can lead you to the bigger fish. I’m also guessing that in light of the bonanza of pro-Israel hasbara generated by the Goldstone revelations, it wouldn’t exactly look good for Israel to continue behavior that was excoriated in the original Gaza war human rights inquiry chaired by the judge.
Another indication of major sensitivity on the part of the Israeli censor regarding activities in Awarta is the removal of an eye-witness account by Israeli human rights activist Hagit Back of her visit to the village. And in a further indication of the capriciousness of censorship her article is available in full (in Hebrew) and uncensored here.
Other Israeli media reports have noted vaguely the existence of a gag and the increasing urgency and intensity of the investigation (Hebrew) into the murders, leading a reader to expect that such arrests and possible resolution of the case might be imminent.
This takes “disgusting” to new highs. Whatever can we do to make these travesties known to the US public and to well-disposed Congresspersons (if any) so they can speak these events into the Congressional record.
Well, considering that Congress is about to enact a resolution that would make retracting the Goldstone report a priority of U.S. policy, I doubt we’ ll find much sympathy there.
Pogrom-like activity? You mean, the IDF went into some house of innocent civilians and killed them all? Or have you confused the bully with the victim, and this is actually the house of a someone suspected in relation to the massacre at Itamar?
Rating,
There have been mass and indiscriminate arrests in Awarta, and people’s houses have been trashed. Last week they arrested one hundred women en masse, as Richard has already pointed out in his blog post. They were entering houses seemingly at random and even pulling women off the street. Even if we could assign some meaningful security purpose to this type of arrest, how are we going to account for smashed windows and torn-up furniture? For food that was pulled out of the fridge and dumped on the floor?
When settlers from Itamar attacked and killed Farid Nasasreh, two arrests were made. Two. The arrested people were later released, with the authorities saying that they didn’t have the evidence to build a case against them – in spite of the presence of eyewitnesses, none of whom were even interviewed. Now that settlers from Itamar have been killed, it is somehow justifiable to tear through a village like a military hurricane and arrest everything that moves. From this you can conclude one of two things: either the lives of some murder victims carry more value than the lives of others, or that making life miserable for Awarta’s residents is a higher military priority than catching the killer of the Fogel family. I would go with the second.
“One of the families that had their home raided is the family of Muhammad Fawsi Awwad. At 4 am, while Muhammad was sleeping in his brothers home, Israeli soldiers awoke his sleeping wife and six children by throwing sound bombs threw every window of the house. After entering the house, the soldiers forced the family to go outside and to sit on the ground while they were still in their pyjamas. One of the daughters, Halaa, who is six years old, was kicked by the soldiers in the process. Her brother, Amjad, 19 years old, was locked inside the bathroom where he had to stay for six hours, while the soldiers completely destroyed his family’s home from the inside. International activists who came to the house after the soldiers had left witnessed the devastation: windows, mirrors and photo frames had been smashed, wardrobes and beds were broken, the washing machine made useless, the bathroom sink was completely demolished, school books were ripped into pieces and oil poured into the sugar supply.”
http://mondoweiss.net/2011/04/israel-arrests-14-year-old-girl-among-600-700-arrested-so-far-in-the-west-bank-village-of-awarta.html
The picture above looks like the Awwad family’s bathroom sink ripped off the wall and smashed to the floor. (No doubt you will claim it resisted arrest, so its destruction was entirely its own fault.)
Not so hard to see who the bully here is, is it?
I mean the IDF went into an entire village of almost all innocent people & treated them all as if they were enemies of the state, arrested over 100, destroyed homes & generally ran rampant as Cossacks used to do among Jewish shtetlach in Ukraine. Is this something you’re proud of? Is it necessary to find killers by using collective punishment on everyone in the village? This is pure gratuitous violence & terror masquerading as deterrence.
Pogrom is not simply a massacre Rating. The way Israeli Jews have behaved towards Palestinian Arabs is in no way different than the Jews were/are complaining to have been treated in Russia, Poland, Germany, France etc. In a way Israeli Jews have lost the right to use the term anti-Semitism and complaining about racial/religious mistreatment. Can a settler, who has been torturing his/hers Arab neighbours using all possible means for decades, move to for example France and demand that he/she is not treated “badly” because of his religion/race? Of course the settler can do it, but on what on moral basis? The settlers can’t use in their defence that old “we were ordered to do what we did”.
Israeli Jews in general have not been the innocent victims, they have been the majority who is acting and has acted in the same way Russians, Poles, Germans etc did in the past centuries. The main difference between the situation now in Israel/Palestine and with Jews in Europe is/was that Palestinians (Israeli Arabs + occupied (slaved) Arabs) do not form the best educated and wealthiest population group in the country, which the Jews were before WW2.
The Itamar murders is naturally a big human tragedy, but the ways Israel is trying to find the guilty are in no way something a civilized democratic country does. Let us assume that we in Finland would have a big Jewish village and near it a “real” Finnish town, where a Finnish family gets murdered. At once the media would be full of speculations how the Jewish terrorists have cold-bloodedly murdered a nice Finnish family. The police with help of military would go in the Jewish village and arrest 100 Jewish women, destroy homes etc. What should we call that “inspection”?
http://www.maannews.net/eng/ViewDetails.aspx?ID=377850
“Change” the names and other details of the article above to Jewish ones and then answer what would the world’s reaction be if Jews were treated as Israeli Jews are now treating the Palestinians?
Israel has painted itself in the corner with this murder. They can “find” the “guilty” only from one population group (=Palestinians) and best for the Jewish “system” would be that the “guilty” would be killed during the arrest, so they would not have to reveal the “evidence”. If the murderer would be a Jew or non Palestinian that would be catastrophe for Israel’s image and self confidence. That is no option for that country, which is becoming more and more violent against the outside world and against non-Jews.
I honestly do not understand what purpose it serves to go about vandalising homes like that, destroying property, humiliating people. It will only further antagonise Palestinian population and further turn international public opinion against Israel. Maybe, it’s the work of some idiot teenage soldiers, but then where are the commanders? Don’t they realize that these stories will come out and gravely damage the image of the IDF? Or is it a planned campaign of harassing the Palestinians as collective punishment by the most moral army in the world?
Requisitioning lands and transferring them to the settlements as a punishment for a murder, even before the murderer has been found and convicted, — what kind of rule of law is that? Despicable, shameful and sick.
@Leonid Levin
Actually, Leonid, I believe it serves exactly the purpose you suggest: destroying property, humiliating people and antagonizing Palestinian population. These IDF morons do these things because they can get away with doing them. Israel is becoming a rogue state. As for causing grave damage to the image of the IDF, this kind of behaviors is fairly routine and the only people who know or care about it are those of us who already know the crimes committed every day by Israeli soldiers and settlers – and politicians. If these animals were anything other than Israelis there would be international outrage and condemnation. With Israel it’s just business as usual, and led by the U.S. they are given a free pass to continue treating Palestinians like animals.
It will be clear to the whole world, that these murders cannot be blamed on two students. It is for sure, they were tortured to confess murders they did not made. Why the Zionist Jews do not ask an international committee to invest the crime? Maybe they are afraid their lies will be in the open.