Unarmed Palestinian confronts Israeli soldiers during protest near Jelazon refugee camp, north of Ramallah, West Bank. Credit: Mel Frykberg/IPS

By Mel Frykberg
RAMALLAH, West Bank, Mar 17 2015 (IPS)

As soon as the truck carrying Israeli dairy products entered Ramallah’s city centre it was surrounded by Palestinian activists who proceeded to remove and trash almost 20,000 dollars’ worth of mainly milk and yoghurt.

The driver of the truck, a Palestinian from the nearby Qalandia refugee camp, and an Israeli employee fainted after watching helplessly.

The goods, already paid for by Palestinian shopkeepers, were smashed up and stomped on before they were spread all over the street in front of the Palestinian police stationed at the traffic circle.

Activists from the Palestinian Authority (PA)-affiliated Fatah movement are behind a boycott of Israeli goods throughout the West Bank.“The strength of the grassroots organisations’ action against Israel is not going to go away anytime soon and will only continue to grow in strength internationally” – Professor Samir Awad of Birzeit University

The boycott follows the withholding by Israel of millions of Palestinian tax dollars in retaliation for the PA advancing plans to take Israel to the International Criminal Court (ICC) for alleged Gaza war crimes and abuses in the West Bank.

“We have entered the second phase of the campaign which is confiscating and damaging these goods,” said Abdullah Kamal, who is the leader of the campaign.

Several weeks earlier, the campaign had involved Kamal and his associates making the rounds of shops in Ramallah and ordering shopkeepers to rid their stores of Israeli produce and being warned not to purchase any more. Similar moves are under way in other cities of the occupied West Bank.

Although the Palestinian territories are not a huge part of Israel’s domestic market, the move is part of a number of grassroots campaigns of defiance by Palestinians against Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and its siege of Gaza.

“The local boycott by Palestinians is peaceful and a way of exerting some pressure on Israel even if it not very strong,” Professor Samir Awad, a political scientist from Birzeit University near Ramallah, told IPS

“The least Palestinians can do is not finance the occupation.”

A more serious development, from Israel’s point of view, was a recent vote by the Palestine Liberation Organisation’s (PLO) executive committee in favour of discontinuing security coordination with Israel’s intelligence and security services.

Palestinians have long accused the PA of being Israel’s sub-contractor to the occupation and the Israelis rely on this security coordination to prevent another Palestinian uprising and control armed resistance.

A final decision on breaking off security coordination lies with PA President Mahmoud Abbas.

“The situation on the ground is getting serious and it is possible that Abbas could make this decision before the end of the month,” Fatah member Murad Shitawi told IPS.

“We will not accept the continuing occupation with its economic and security implications,” said Shitawi, who is the coordinator of protests in the northern West Bank village of Kafr Qaddoum, and who was recently released from an Israeli jail.

Every Friday, dozens of villages throughout the West Bank and Gaza take part in protests against Israel’s expropriation of Palestinian land and the occupation despite the huge toll this has taken on Palestinians in terms of the number wounded and killed.

Shitawi pointed out that four or five years ago there were only a few villages taking part in regular protests on a weekly basis.

“Now there are many and the protests are not limited to Friday.”

Another act of Palestinian defiance has been the repeated building of protest tents and villages in Area C of the West Bank, 60 percent of the territory, in protest against Israel’s forced removal of Bedouins and other Palestinians who have lived there for centuries.

Israel has designated Area C off limits to Palestinians and exclusively for Israeli settlers, which is illegal under international law.

One of these protest camps near the village of Abu Dis, just outside Jerusalem, has been rebuilt 10 times after Israeli security forces rased it, confiscated equipment and arrested and assaulted activists who had encamped there.

Furthermore, Palestinian grassroots activists are also working in conjunction with their international supporters, and with Israeli peace groups, to up the pressure on Israel as the international Boycott, Disinvestment and Sanctions (BDS) campaign continues to strengthen.

A growing number of global businesses, church and university groups and artists are either refusing to visit Israel, do business with Israeli companies involved in the West Bank, or are boycotting Israeli institutions operating abroad.

Israel Apartheid Week, “an international series of events that seeks to raise awareness about Israel’s apartheid policies towards the Palestinians and to build support for the growing BDS campaign” was held in a number of capitals across the globe during March.

Israeli peaceniks and grassroots activists have been among some of the most vocal critics of their government’s policies towards the Palestinians, spawning a number of organisations which take part in the weekly protests.

Groups such as Ta’ayush, Breaking the Silence, Ir Amim and Rabbis for Human Rights seek to educate people about the realities of life under occupation.

Some of them also accompany Palestinian farmers trying to cultivate their land under continued settler harassment.

“The strength of the grassroots organisations’ action against Israel is not going to go away anytime soon and will only continue to grow in strength internationally,” Awad told IPS.

“The PA will also continue with its plans to take Israel to the ICC and should Israel continue to withhold Palestinian tax money indefinitely, the PA could collapse and the result would be chaos.” (END/2015)

Edited by Phil Harris

Syrian refugee schoolchildren being taught in the Shatila Palestinian refugee camp. Credit: Shelly Kittleson/IPS

By Shelly Kittleson
BEIRUT, Aug 1 2014 (IPS)

The Shatila Palestinian camp has no library, nor does adjacent Sabra or Ain El-Hilweh in the south. And, after recent statements by Lebanon’s foreign minister, some fear that the thousands of Syrian refugee children within them will soon have even slimmer chances of learning to read and write.

The United Nations stated earlier last month that Syrian refugees would total over one-third of Lebanon’s population by the end of 2014, and that at least 300,000 refugee children were not enrolled in school.

In early July, Foreign Minister Gebran Bassil said that no assistance should be given to Syrian refugees as “all this aid – be it food, shelter or health care – encourages Syrian refugees to stay in Lebanon, while what we want is to encourage their speedy exit.”“The overcrowded breezeblock camps are filled with school-age children from across the [Lebanese-Syrian] border, suffering from psychosocial disorders, nutritional problems and limited possibilities for enrolling in Lebanese educational institutes

During his time as energy minister in the previous government, Bassil had said that Syrians should be seen as a “threat to the safety, economy and identity of the country.”

Tangled electrical wires droop dangerously low and posters of Syrian president Bashar Al-Assad are prominent alongside those of Palestinian ‘resistance’ leaders and ‘martyrs’ in the Lebanese capital’s camps, where refugees are said to have initially been welcomed.

Lebanon’s security forces do not enter the 12 officially registered Palestinian camps in the country despite withdrawal from a 1969 agreement granting the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) control over them.

Several Syrians told IPS they feel more comfortable there than they would in areas controlled by Hezbollah, which is fighting alongside the Syrian regime and whose political wing is part of the government.

With 10,000-20,000 having arrived since the conflict began, refugees from Syria now outnumber the original inhabitants of Beirut’s Shatila camp, set up in 1949 to shelter stateless Palestinians.

The overcrowded breezeblock camps are filled with school-age children from across the border, suffering from psychosocial disorders, nutritional problems and limited possibilities for enrolling in Lebanese educational institutes.

There than the capacity of the public school system capacity, the most obvious hurdle for refugee children, says Fadi Hallisso, co-founder and general manager of the Syrian-run NGO Basmeh & Zeitooneh which works in the camp, is that Syrian public schools teach in Arabic while their Lebanese counterparts use either French or English.

Destitute or missing parents leading to the need to work or beg to survive, transport costs and war-induced trauma are other factors at play, and the problem is compounded by nutritional deficiencies.

A UNICEF study found earlier this year that severe acute malnutrition had doubled in certain parts of the country between 2012 and 2013. It noted that almost 2,000 children under the age of five were at risk of dying if they did not receive immediate treatment, while even milder states of malnutrition stunt children’s physical and mental growth.

Basmeh & Zeitooneh has set up a school in Shatila for about 300 students using the Lebanese curriculum taught by Syrians and Palestinians, who are paid between 400 and 700 dollars a month, according to Hallisso, “which no Lebanese teacher would be willing to work for.”

The facilities have been newly renovated and are in a building with a Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) clinic and dispensary on the second floor.

The organisation is trying to get funding for a small library where the children can come, read, consult reference works, use computers and find a space open to them with generator-powered electricity.

Maria Minkara, who works with Hallisso, told IPS that it would be open to both Palestinian and Syrian schoolchildren and that not a single library exists in the entire area housing tens of thousands of inhabitants.

Many of the children, she noted, live in dark, unhealthy environments, cut off from the power grid with no physical space in which to study. A walk through the crowded camps makes this obvious.

The Joint Christian Committee for Social Service in Lebanon, another organisation working with refugees, recently succeeded in obtaining permission for about 120 Syrian refugee children from its school in the Ain El-Hilweh camp near Sidon to return to Damascus for their 9^th grade and Baccalaureate exams, Executive Director Sylvia Haddad told IPS. Over 83 percent of them passed, she said.

Haddad admitted that several students’ families had refused to allow their children to go back to Syria out of fear of the regime, but said that “’they are regretting that decision very much now.”

Stressing that all politics and religion were kept out of the instruction of refugee children, Haddad said that questions on the curriculum being used by the group were referred to Abu Hassan, a Palestinian inhabitant of the camp who in the manner of militia fighters in the region uses an alias preceded by ‘Abu’ (‘father of’).

Abu Hassan said he had fought in the Palestinian ‘resistance’ in the past but declined to say with which faction, and denied that any pro-regime rhetoric was contained in the textbooks.

Abu Hassan was allowed to accompany the students to Damascus and back, but recent changes in Lebanese law make it harder for Palestinians fleeing Syria to enter Lebanon. Amnesty International published a report last month denouncing the restrictions, which require ‘pre-authorisation’ from the government or a residency permit.

Regulations regarding Syrian refugees also changed at the beginning of June, limiting entry to those coming from areas near the Lebanese border where fighting is under way and stipulating that refugees who cross back into Syria forfeit the right to return.

(Edited by Phil Harris)

Mosul refugees just arrived at the newly set up camp in Khazar. Credit: Jewan Abdi/IPS

By Jewan Abdi
KHAZAR, Iraq, Jun 15 2014 (IPS)

“People with long beards and dressed like Afghans broke into our neighbourhood after they had bombed it. We were lucky to escape from that nightmare,” Aum Ahmad, a46-year-old woman from Mosul – 400 km northwest of Baghdad – told IPS from the recently set up Khazar refugee camp, 25 km east of the besieged city.

“The fighters spoke classic Arabic to each other so it was obvious to everyone that they were from outside Iraq,” she added, while striving to organise her belongings inside the blue tent she and her family will have to share with fellow refugees.

They are just a few among the 500,000 that, according to the U.N. Refugee Agency (UNHCR), have left Mosul in recent days after the city was taken over by Sunni insurgents on June 10.

An estimated 300,000 of them [refugees from Mosul] are reportedly seeking shelter in the Iraqi Kurdistan Region, the closest thing to a state of their own the Kurds have ever had, and which has remained almost untouched by the on-going violence in the rest of the country.An estimated 300,000 of them [refugees from Mosul] are reportedly seeking shelter in the Iraqi Kurdistan Region, the closest thing to a state of their own the Kurds have ever had, and which has remained almost untouched by the on-going violence in the rest of the country.

However, only those with family members or sponsors who can provide accommodation are allowed to enter Erbil, the administrative capital of Iraqi Kurdistan, 390 km north of Baghdad.

Samia Hamoud,a 48-year-old mother of eight children, was not lucky enough to be among the latter. She says she will stay in the camp because she is worried about her children´s safety.

“My street was full of bodies but nobody could retrieve them back because of the snipers,” recalls Hamoud, who said that she lost her husband in the shelling of Nabi Yunus district, on the eastern bank of the Tigris river which bisects the city.

Many sources are giving full credit for the fall of Mosul to the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS), a Jihadi group formerly linked to Al Qaeda that is today claiming territory in both countries.

However, Hamoud described the assailants as ”Sunni militiamen in plain civilian clothes.”

“They were well organised. On our way out, they were manning checkpoints and checking people´s passports and IDs through laptops with an internet access. I guess they were looking for men who had any relation with the Iraqi security forces,” she added.

Hamoud´s testimony does not bear out the theory that gives full credit to ISIS for the victory in Mosul.

The governor of the city, Atheel al Nujaifi, also escaped when militants attacked Mosul. Speaking from Erbil, he told IPS that there are also groups “other than ISIS” behind the attack and that a “Sunni-armed group should be set up to fight the extremists.”

“The Iraqi Sunnis were the first victims of Al Qaeda-linked groups just after the invasion in 2003,” underlined the senior official, who hopes for a decentralised Iraq.

Alongside other cities in Western Iraq, Mosul also hosted massive demonstrations from December 2012 until March 2013. Iraq´s Sunni population is variously estimated to be between 20 and 40 percent of Iraq’s population of 32 million. They have been complaining of increasing marginalisation by the predominantly Shia political leaders.

Ghanim Alabed was one of the most visible faces of the protests in Mosul. The 40-year-old accountant had moved to Erbil in April after the demonstrations dragged the west of the country into unprecedented chaos since the peak of sectarian violence between 2006 and 2008.

“The fall of Mosul is the victory of the revolution,” Alabed told IPS Saturday from his residence in Erbil. “It has been thanks to a joint operation by Islamic groups such as Ansar al-Sunna, the Mujahideen Army, but also the Army of the Men of the Naqshbandi Order (JRTN), a group set up in 2006 after the execution of Saddam Hussein, and allegedly commanded by Izzat Ibrahim al Duri, a top military commander and a vice president in the Hussein government. In fact, Mosul was the country´s last stronghold for the Baath party of Iraq´s ousted ruler Saddam Hussein.

Alabed ensured that many of the refugees who had left Mosul are now back, and that roadside blocks across the city have been removed so that locals can move “freely and unmolested.”

“They are celebrating victory back home after getting rid of Maliki´s occupation forces,” said Alabed, adding that he is planning to go back to his native Mosul “in the forthcoming days.”

Many analysts still wonder how a city of two million could fall just in a few hours. Local Sunni insurgent groups had never shown such power since the country´s invasion. On the other hand, ISIS fighters have struggled in vain to take over much smaller Kurdish villages in northeast Syria for over two years.

Salem, a former soldier who did not want to disclose his full name, shared his own experience:

“We were betrayed by our own captains and commanders. When we realised they had all left, we changed our uniforms for plains clothes and followed suit,” the 35-year-old told IPS while he queued in Erbil for a flight ticket to Baghdad.

Salem had served in Mosul for over three years and, as most of the soldiers deployed in Iraq´s predominantly Sunni west, he is also Shiite. He said he could not figure out whether the attackers were ISIS fighters or local Sunni militants.

“Why should I bother to defend a community that hates us?” added the former soldier from Samawa – 260 km southeast of Baghdad. “In fact, I reckon many people in Mosul are very happy about all this.”