ISRAELI forces raided Nablus overnight on Wednesday without coordinating with Palestinian Authority security services, say Palestinian officials.
According to security coordination protocol which is part of the Oslo Accords, Israel’s military liaison department must notify its Palestinian counterpart when Israeli forces enter Area A.
Israeli military vehicles raided the Tunis and Rafidia neighbourhoods of Nablus and Balata refugee camp without notifying the Palestinian liaison department.
Security officials said this is the first time in years that Israeli forces have entered Area A without first coordinating with Palestinian security forces. After notification, Palestinian security forces withdrew officers from the street and public places until the Israeli military activity finished.
A Palestinian security official said that the unprecedented Israeli action reflects a new trend against the Palestinian Authority. Locals said that during the raids Israeli soldiers dropped match boxes in the streets with a phrase in colloquial Arabic reading ‘Beware! Hamas is inflaming the West Bank’.
Hamas has repeatedly criticised PA security coordination with Israel as a ‘crime’. But last week, PLO leader Mahmud Abbas said that security coordination with Israel was in the Palestinians’ ‘interest’ and pledged there would be no new intifada, or uprising.
The Israeli forces’ action in Tunis, Rafidia and Balata coincided with overnight raids of over 200 homes in the Nablus village of Awarta. Locals reported soldiers forcing dozens of men into the street and threatened to hold them under administrative detention.
The soldiers damaged furniture and other belongings during the inspections and detained 25-year-old Ayman Hani Darawsha and several other unidentified men.
Not long after, Israeli soldiers early Thursday morning shot and injured a Palestinian man before taking him into custody in the town of al-Samu, south of Hebron, according to locals.
Witnesses claim that Israeli soldiers shot 44-year-old Ismail Ahmad al-Hawamda in the foot at a checkpoint in the town. He received treatment at Soroka Hospital in Beersheba.
Israeli forces claim that soldiers stopped al-Hawamda at a checkpoint and opened fire after he tried to run away. The previous day, 18-year-old Younis al-Rjoub was shot in the abdomen by Israeli forces in Kharsa south of Hebron.
An Israeli military spokeswoman claimed that dozens of Palestinians ‘hurled rocks and molotov cocktails’ at Israeli forces, who responded with ‘riot dispersal means and live fire’.’
Also in Nablus, Israeli forces stormed Awarta and carried out a raid campaign into approximately 90 per cent of the town’s homes. Local witnesses said the homes were stormed and savagely searched, with five arrests reported during the raids.
Large Israeli forces also broke into Azzoun town in Qalqilya and searched a number of homes and detained dozens of citizens for a short period, claiming that three settlers had disappeared in the town.
All the raids preceded Thursday’s funeral of Mustafa Husni Aslan. Medical sources said the 22-year-old died from wounds he sustained during clashes with Israeli soldiers in Qalandiya refugee camp the previous Friday.
Aslan was shot in the head and then taken to Ramallah Public Hospital before being moved to Hadassah hospital in Ein Karem upon his family’s request.
Immediately after being shot, Aslan was declared ‘clinically dead’, which caused shock and confusion among people in Qalandiya refugee camp. It later became clear, however, that he had not passed away at that time and he was pronounced dead on Wednesday.
• Palestinian prisoner Ayman Atabish is suffering serious health complications as he enters the 119th day of a hunger strike to protest his illegal detention without charge or trial.
He was transferred on Wednesday from Tel Aviv Sourasky Medical Centre (Ichilov hospital) to Tel Hashomer hospital. The Palestinian Prisoners Society said that Atabish began hunger strike action on February 28.
The detainee has been diagnosed with cardiovascular disorders, breathing problems and numbness in his limbs. He is also suffering from heart, kidney and stomach problems, and visual impairment.
Concerns over Atabish’s life have increased, especially as this is the third time the detainee has been on hunger strike.
Atabish went on a 105-day hunger strike in 2013 to voice his disapproval over the random administrative prison term issued against him without charges. The strike ended in an agreement which Israel later broke by issuing new administrative detention orders against him.
Meanwhile, 63 Palestinian prisoners suspended a hunger strike on Tuesday, which they had observed in Israeli jails since late April, one of their lawyers said.
Shawqi al-Ayasa, the minister of prisoner affairs for the newly-formed Palestinian unity government, confirmed the suspension of the hunger strike, saying a major portion of prisoners’ demands had been met.
Some 5,000 Palestinians are being held in Israeli jails, with nearly 300 in administrative detention.
l Villagers of al-Araqib, a Bedouin community in the Negev desert in the south of present-day Israel, have vowed to remain after it was razed to the ground by state authorities for the sixty-ninth time since July 2010.
This demolition marked the first time police destroyed homes erected within the cemetery area of the village. Approximately 350 police officers and special forces encircled the village at 9:30am and rounded up inhabitants in the makeshift mosque.
Homes were bulldozed to the ground in about three hours and the rubble cleared away by 4:30pm. Police then forcibly entered the makeshift mosque, arresting seven Bedouin and Jewish Israeli activists, amongst them two minors.
Authorities demolished the mosque’s minaret and then emptied water tanks. Before the police left, they loaded the tanks onto trucks and took them away, leaving villagers, amongst them many children, without water in high temperatures.
Villagers were forced to sleep in the open with only trees and the sky as shelter. Police are permanently stationed outside the cemetery.
‘We have no water, no beds, no kitchen, no bathroom. We have nothing but we are staying,’ said Haqima Abumadegham al-Turi, mother of nine. Al-Araqib is one of 35 unrecognised Bedouin villages in the Negev.
The Israeli state does not recognise the right of the Bedouin to live on the lands of al-Araqib and does not provide any basic services to them such as water or electricity.
Despite a protracted and ongoing legal battle between the village and the Israel Land Authority over ownership of the land, a government master plan sees al-Araqib classified as a recreational area. The Israel Land Authority and the Jewish National Fund have begun planting a forest on the Bedouin’s ancestral lands.
The village was first demolished on 26 July 2010, when roughly 300 people were left homeless.
Since January 2011, twenty people have remained, building their homes within the village’s cemetery area.
While demolition continued for structures built outside the cemetery perimeter, inside it the families found a safe haven. All this changed on 21 May this year when police handed eviction orders to Sheikh Sayah al-Turi, head of the village.
Despite a successful appeal by the village’s lawyer against the eviction orders, police lodged a new request, this time for a demolition order. The Israeli state was pushing the court to allow demolition of the homes before it was due to convene to discuss the new request.
As the village lawyer challenged the police’s request for permission to demolish that morning, state authorities ran against the clock to complete destruction of all homes before the district court ordered a halt to the operation.
Activists present at the scene say that police prevented villagers from showing them the court order and continued with the demolition, in contempt of the judge’s decision.
