ERROR 404 ▼⭕️La police #Israélienne a violemment agressé un jeune #Palestinien originaire de #Tayibe, dans la région du Triangle, à l’intérieur des territoires de 1948.
oatmeal[translation] Hundreds of Jews and Arabs Participated in a War Testimony Conference Held in Tayibe
[…] "So they tell me to catch two teenagers because they are 'connected' - meaning connected to Hamas. Then they took them to protect us from attacks. They released them in Rafah, so apparently they weren't really involved in the fighting. At this stage, you stop believing everything the intelligence tells you, because you can say about any person in Gaza that they are somehow connected to Hamas. After all, Hamas was the government."
[1/1]
Hundreds of Arabs and Jews participated in a "War Testimonies" conference held yesterday (Saturday) in #Tayibe, initiated by "Peace Partnership". At the conference, activists and representatives of organizations revealed testimonies from the field about the atrocities of the war in the Gaza Strip, the West Bank, and Israel. Among the speakers at the conference were Dr. Lina Qasem from Physicians for Human Rights, Guy Ben-Yehuda from Breaking the Silence, Yonatan Zeigen from the Parents Circle Families Forum and son of the late Vivian Silver, Ariel Moran from Jordan Valley activists, and Attorney Sari Houriya - a Hadash activist from Shfaram who was arrested at the beginning of the war for publishing a Facebook post. The audience included Knesset members Aida Touma-Sliman, Ofer Cassif, and Ahmad Tibi, Secretary-General of the Communist Party of Israel Adel Amer, and Abd al-Rahim Bishara, Deputy Mayor of Tayibe who welcomed the conference participants on behalf of the municipality.
The conference was moderated by Nasrin Morkus, one of the leaders of "Peace Partnership" and Secretary-General of the Democratic Women's Movement in Israel (TANDI). In her opening remarks, Morkus said: "When the state does not do its job - to document, investigate, and accuse those responsible for war crimes - we, Jewish and Arab peace activists, need to take its place and collect the testimonies." In this context, Morkus mentioned the important investigations conducted by "Sikha Mekomit", B'Tselem, Physicians for Human Rights, and #Haaretz newspaper on crimes and human rights violations during the war.
The first speaker, Dr. Lina Qasem from Physicians for Human Rights, revealed harsh testimonies from Palestinian medical teams operating in the Gaza Strip. According to her, Israel used the destruction of health infrastructure in Gaza as a weapon in the war, which led to an enormous number of casualties due to the inability to provide them with basic medical assistance.
According to the testimonies, doctors in Gaza are forced to invent new ways to provide medical treatment under fire, without basic medical materials and equipment. There is also a great shortage of doctors and trained medical personnel, many of whom were killed in bombings. The remaining medical teams suffer from exhaustion and despair. "The doctor decides who will live and who will die, because there is such a shortage. This causes psychological trauma for doctors who studied to save lives," Dr. Qasem emphasized. According to her, the health crisis in Gaza has caused enormous mortality of thousands who did not die directly from the bombings, but from chronic or unrelated diseases because they did not receive proper medical treatment. This situation has multiplied the number of innocent people dying from illness and doubled the number of wounded who die from their injuries.
In Israel, on the other hand, Arab doctors and medical staff members experience "persecution for any word of identification with their people's pain, and people are afraid to complain and be exposed. Next to them are nurses, doctors, medical teams who publish calls to kill all Gazans, and the hospitals have no problem with that," said Dr. Qasem.
Use of Civilians as Human Shields
Guy Ben-Yehuda, a representative of Breaking the Silence, said that since the beginning of the war, dozens of soldiers have been coming to the organization sharing unprecedented stories from what's happening in Gaza. A central characteristic emerging from their testimonies is the change in attitude towards the Palestinian civilian population. Under the new policy of "zero casualties for our forces", soldiers are allowed to risk the lives of Palestinian civilians to reduce the risk to forces operating in Gaza. According to Ben-Yehuda, during the war, a new method developed for using Palestinian civilians as human shields. This is a method similar to the infamous "neighbor procedure".
Ben-Yehuda shared a testimony: "So they tell me to catch two teenagers because they are 'connected' - meaning connected to Hamas. Then they took them to protect us from attacks. They released them in Rafah, so apparently they weren't really involved in the fighting. At this stage, you stop believing everything the intelligence tells you, because you can say about any person in Gaza that they are somehow connected to Hamas. After all, Hamas was the government."
Pogroms in the Jordan Valley
Ariel Moran, an activist accompanying shepherding communities in the Jordan Valley, talked about the increasing settler violence in recent months. According to him, settlers began to infiltrate Palestinian settlements at night to instill fear and try to expel the Palestinians from the land. "They enter between houses, inside houses, breaking, stealing, and frightening. They turn on floodlights in the middle of the night. This is a practice designed to break the shepherding population, and the army backs the settlers in 90% of cases," he said.
Often, violent settlers even threaten communities with weapons - a phenomenon that has escalated since the outbreak of the war. As a result, since October 7, about 20 communities have been forced to leave their homes. At the request of the shepherding communities, since the outbreak of the war, Israeli activists have begun to sleep in the settlements to help protect against settler attacks. Teams of activists are in the field every day, updating by phone when a violent event develops and rushing to the scene to offer help.
According to Moran, the presence of activists in the field sometimes helps prevent or moderate settler violence: "In the best case, our arrival causes the event to stop, because it's just a few isolated youths. Sometimes we arrive and physically separate between settlers and Palestinians, and also get hit ourselves. Still, the settlers are a bit more careful with us because they know the police treat us differently than Palestinians. We use documentation, but there is risk and people have been attacked and injured. We have an activist with serious injuries, I and others have been injured less severely."
Moran added: "The first time as an adult that someone hit me was there, in the Valley, when a rabbi from a settlement hit me. It's clear that if a Palestinian was in my place at the same place, instead of a dislocated finger he would have ended up with a more severe hospitalization. We are privileged even when we get beaten."
Sherifa Zuhur