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News
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Written by CFAS
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Wednesday, 08 September 2010 08:07 |
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 | September 6, 2010
Imprisoned Palestinian leader Ahmad Sa'adat will be returning to court in mid-October 2010 challenging his isolation and the isolation of Palestinian political prisoners in Israeli prisons. Write letters today and take action from October 5-15, 2010 in support of Palestinian prisoners' struggle for freedom - demand an end to isolation!
Ahmad Sa'adat, the General Secretary of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, has been held in isolation in a series of prisons since March 16, 2009, with his isolation renewed again and again by occupation courts. He has been transferred from prison to prison, and is currently held in the isolation section of Ramon prison in the Naqab desert. Within these isolation units, Sa'adat has been placed further inside a separate isolation unit where he is confined without access even to the other prisoners in isolation, and deprived of basic human rights. His personal books have been confiscated and he is allowed access to newspapers only once or twice weekly. He is denied access to English and Arabic language newspapers and allowed only Hebrew-language media.
He has been repeatedly denied family visits - his wife, Abla, has been allowed only two visits during his entire period in isolation - as well as legal visits, and barred from purchases at the prison canteen, including cigarette purchases. In the prison yard, Sa'adat has been held handcuffed and in ankle shackles and allowed only one-hour of exercise/recreation. The Prison Administration is attempting to criminalize the human and social relationship between fellow Palestinian prisoners, and between the prisoners and their families outside.
Sa'adat has led in the struggle against isolation, engaging in a nine-day hunger strike in 2009 in protest of isolation. Isolation is damaging and destructive to the mental and physical health of Palestinian prisoners, and is being used as a political weapon in order to punish and isolate Palestinian prisoner leaders. Some prisoners have been subject to isolation for years at a time, with severe effects. Take action now to fight isolation and demand the freedom of Ahmad Sa'adat and all Palestinian prisoners!
TAKE ACTION TODAY!
1. The Campaign in Solidarity with Ahmad Sa'adat ( http://www.freeahmadsaadat.org/october.html ) in Palestine is calling upon all supporters to write letters to the Israeli Prison Service and demand they end the practice of isolation, end human rights violations, and free Palestinian prisoners. Send an email to the Bureau of the Minister of Public Security at
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and to the Public Complaints Department at
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, and copy the following: Mr. Benjamin Netanyahu, Prime Minister, Office of the Prime Minister, 3, Kaplan Street, PO Box 187, Kiryat Ben-Gurion, Jerusalem, Israel, Fax: +972- 2-651 2631, Email:
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Mr. Menachem Mazuz, Attorney General, Fax: + 972 2 627 4481; + 972 2 628 5438; +972 2 530 3367
Brigadier General Avihai Mandelblit, Military Judge Advocate General, 6 David Elazar Street, Hakirya, Tel Aviv, Israel, Fax: +972 3 608 0366, +972 3 569 4526, Email:
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,
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Permanent Mission of Israel to the United Nations Office and Specialized Institutions in Geneva, Avenue de la Paix 1-3, 1202 Geneva, Fax: +41 22 716 05 55, Email:
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You may use our online form at: http://www.freeahmadsaadat.org/action3.html.
2. Write a letter to Ahmad Sa'adat. Letters of support are important and demonstrate solidarity with Ahmad Sa'adat and Palestinian prisoners - let him know that the world is demanding his freedom. Email the Campaign to Free Ahmad Sa'adat at
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with your letters, or use our contact form at: http://freeahmadsaadat.org/contact.html. We will send all letters received to Palestine. We also encourage you to write to him directly using this address: Ahmad Sa'adat, Ramon Prison, Ramon area, PO Box 699, Postal Code 80600, Israel.
JOIN THE WEEK OF ACTION, OCTOBER 5-15, 2010!
1. October 5-15, 2010 will be international days of action in support of Ahmad Sa'adat and Palestinian prisoners and against isolation. Join us! Hold an event, protest or action in your city. Email the Campaign to Free Ahmad Sa'adat at
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to be added to the global list of actions.
2. Distribute the Free Ahmad Sa'adat flyer: http://www.freeahmadsaadat.org/saadat-flyer.pdf in your town, city, event or location! Bring the flyers to events and activities, or hold a flyer distribution at a public place.
3. Protest outside the Israeli embassy or consulate in your location( http://www.mfa.gov.il/MFA/About+the+Ministry/Diplomatic+missions/Web+Sites+of+Israeli+Missions+Abroad.htm) and demand the immediate freedom of Ahmad Sa'adat and all Palestinian political prisoners.
Ahmad Sa'adat has been imprisoned since 2002 in the prisons of the Palestinian Authority, held under U.S. and British guard, until his abduction by the Israeli occupation forces on March 14, 2006 by an occupation military raid on Jericho prison. On December 25, 2008, he was sentenced to thirty years inside the occupation prisons. He is a member of the Palestinian Legislative Council and one of the foremost Palestinian national leaders held inside the occupier's jails.
Ahmad Sa'adat and nearly 10,000 Palestinian prisoners are daily on the front lines, confronting Israeli oppression and crimes. Today, it is urgent that we stand with Ahmad Sa'adat and all Palestinian prisoners against these abuses, and for freedom for all Palestinian prisoners and for all of Palestine! |
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Written by By Middle East Monitor
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Friday, 26 February 2010 19:29 |
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25 February , 2010
Middle East Monitor A new law in Israel makes it a crime to commemorate what Palestinians call the "Nakba", the "catastrophe" of their dispossession by the creation of the Zionist state in 1948. The Knesset, Israel's parliament, has passed "The Nakba Draft Law" after just one reading. Penalties will be imposed on anyone showing signs of sadness and mourning within the (undefined) borders of Israel on 15 May; Palestinians remember on that day the creation of the refugee crisis that remains after 62 years. Hebrew radio reported this week that the law is intended to stop people mourning on what is Israeli Independence Day; commemorative acts are, it is claimed, tantamount to "denying the Jewish character of Israel [and] insulting the symbols of the state". The radio noted that the fines might amount up to three times the expenditure of commemorative programmes. According to one commentator, it is ironic that this law has been passed at a time when Israel is complaining about attempts to "de-legitimise" the Zionist state. Here is an example of Israel's own "de-legitimisation" of the Palestinians, their land and their culture, he said. |
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Written by Jazeera
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Friday, 06 November 2009 07:38 |
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 | | Most of the report's criticism was directed towards Israel's conduct during the Gaza offensive [AFP] |
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The United Nations General Assembly has adopted a UN-sponsored report which says Israel committed war crimes during last winter's military assault on the Gaza Strip. The Goldstone report, which accuses both Israel and Hamas of war crimes, has already been endorsed by the UN Human Rights Council, which sponsored the fact-finding commission. The General Assembly on Thursday voted by a margin of 114 to 18 to adopt the report after debating it for two days. Forty-four member-nations abstained from voting. The report calls on both Israel and the Palestinians to investigate accusations of human-rights violations during the 22-day conflict in December and January. The debate at the General Assembly, which began on Wednesday, was called for by the Arab UN group, with the backing of the 118-member Non-Aligned Movement (Nam). Offensive conduct Most of criticism in the report, compiled by a fact-finding panel led by Richard Goldstone, a South African judge, was directed towards Israel's conduct during the offensive, in which human rights organisations say about 1,400 Palestinians - many of them women and children - were killed. Thirteen Israelis, including three civilians, were killed over the course of the war. Al Jazeera's Kristen Saloomey, reporting from the UN in New York, said on Wednesday: "The Palestinians put forward this resolution with several co-sponsors knowing that they have the support to have it passed in the General Assembly. "This is really an attempt to keep the Goldstone report alive. The resolution endorses the report and also attempts to force it upon the Security Council, by getting the secretary-general involved." Riyad Mansour, the Palestinian observer to the UN, said the report concluded that the Israeli military onslaught "was planned in all of its phases as a deliberately disproportionate and systematic attack aimed at punishing, humiliating and terrorise the Palestinian civilian population". 'One-sided mandate' Mansour warned that efforts by Israel and its supporters to discredit the UN report and its authors would not deter Arab states from following up the recommendations "in all relevant international forums, including the Security Council and the International Criminal Court, until the realisation of justice with the accountability of the perpetrators of these crimes and violations". Gabriela Shalev, Israel's UN ambassador to the UN, hammered Wednesday's debate at the UN as "yet another campaign against the victims of terrorism, the people of Israel". "The Goldstone report and this debate do not promote peace. They damage any effort to revitalise negotiations in our region. They deny Israel's right of self-defence, " she told the assembly. "From its inception in a one-sided mandate, the Gaza fact-finding mission was a politicised body with predetermined conclusions, " she added. US House vote The US House of Representatives on Tuesday dismissed the report as being "irredeemably biased" against Israel. The house voted in favour of a non-binding resolution calling on Barack Obama, the US president, to maintain his opposition to the report. Goldstone last week sent a letter to the US House of Representatives saying that the text of the US resolution had "factual inaccuracies and instances where information and statements are taken grossly out of context". He offered several rejections and clarifications of the ideas expressed in the resolution. In response to Goldstone's criticism, three parts of the resolution were amended on Tuesday to clarify that Goldstone had sought an expansion to the commission's mandate so that his team could investigate claims that Hamas had violated international law during the Gaza war. The Goldstone report accused Israel of using "disproportionate force" and of deliberately targeting civilians. The report called for cases to be referred to the ICC in The Hague if Israel and Hamas do not investigate the war crimes allegations against them within six months. Hamas has agreed to hold such an investigation, but Israel has not. | Source: | Al Jazeera and agencies |
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Written by BBC
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Tuesday, 15 September 2009 21:17 |
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BBC Tuesday, 15 September 2009 18:37 UK
Richard Goldstone comments on 'crimes' committed by Israeli and Palestinian forces
There is evidence that both Israeli and Palestinian forces committed war crimes in the recent conflict in the Gaza Strip, a UN report says. It accuses Israel of deliberately using "disproportionate force" in the three-week operation in December and January. The report also condemned rocket attacks by Palestinian groups, which sparked the Israeli offensive. Palestinians and human rights groups say more than 1,400 Gazans were killed, but Israel puts the figure at 1,166. Three Israeli civilians and 10 Israeli soldiers were also killed. The report said Israel must be held accountable for its actions during the war, a process which could lead to the conflict being referred to the International Criminal Court.
Israel, which had refused to co-operate with the UN fact-finding team, said the report was "clearly one-sided".
It reiterated that it was "committed to acting fully in accordance with international law and to examining any allegations of wrongdoing by its forces". The investigation, led by South African judge Richard Goldstone, found evidence "indicating serious violations of international human rights and humanitarian law were committed by Israel during the Gaza conflict", a UN statement said. Israel also "committed actions amounting to war crimes, and possibly crimes against humanity".
The report accuses Israel of imposing "a blockade which amounted to collective punishment" in the lead-up to the conflict. It "concludes that the Israeli military operation was directed at the people of Gaza as a whole, in furtherance of an overall and continuing policy aimed at punishing the Gaza population, and in a deliberate policy of disproportionate force aimed at the civilian population," said the UN statement. Statement by the Israel military that its operation involved very few errors showed, said the report, that its failure to distinguish between military and civilian targets was "the result of deliberate planning and policy decisions". 'Arbitrary arrests' The report found there was also evidence that Palestinian groups had committed war crimes, and possibly crimes against humanity, in their repeated rockets and mortars attacks on Israel. It said there launching of rockets which "cannot be aimed with precision at military targets" breaches the fundamental principle of sparing civilian lives.
"Where there is no intended military target and the rockets and mortars are launched into civilian areas, they constitute a deliberate attack against the civilian population," it said. It called for the immediate release of Gilad Shalit, the Israeli soldier seized in a Palestinian raid in 2006 and taken to Gaza. Both the Israeli and Palestinian authorities are criticised for the treatment of their own civilians during the conflict. Israel's interrogation of political activists and repression of criticism of its activities had "contributed significantly to a political climate in which dissent was not tolerated", it said. Meanwhile, the alleged "arbitrary arrests" and "extra-judicial executions" of Palestinians by the authorities in both Gaza and the West Bank were also criticised. The 574-page document recommends that authorities in both Israel and Gaza be required to investigate the allegations and report to the UN Security Council within six months. Israel says it has carried out more than 100 investigations into allegations of abuses by its forces - most were dismissed as "baseless" but 23 criminal investigations are still pending. The Israeli military says troops acted lawfully during the conflict. It has admitted to a small number of errors - such the deaths of 21 people in a wrongly targeted house - but said these had been "unavoidable" . The full report - which is based on 188 interviews, more than 10,000 pages of documentation and 1,200 photographs - will be presented to the UN Human Rights Council at the end of this month. Eight months after the conflict, very little reconstruction has taken place in Gaza because of the strict Israeli-imposed blockade which bans all but essential supplies from entering the enclave. The stated aim of the blockade is to weaken Hamas's leadership but aid agencies say it serves only to punish the civilian population. UN officials have repeatedly urged Israel to end its blockade of the Hamas-controlled territory. |
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Written by Agence France Presse
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Tuesday, 25 August 2009 10:26 |
digg_url = 'http://www.paltelegraph.com/palestine/gaza-strip/1973-gazans-reminded-of-suffering-during-ramadan'; digg_title = 'Gazans reminded of suffering during Ramadan'; digg_bodytext = ''; digg_bgcolor = '#ffffff'; digg_window = 'new';
 August 24, 2009 (Pal Telegraph)- When Dalal Abu Aisha breaks the Ramadan fast this year the chairs once occupied by her parents and three sibl-ings will sit empty, a nightly reminder of last winter's war in the Gaza Strip.
The 14-year-old was the sole survivor when an Israeli tank shell struck her home during the 22-day offensive over the new year that killed hundreds of Palestinians and flattened vast swathes of the besieged territory. As Muslims across the world gather in the coming weeks to break the fast with lavish feasts and holiday sweets, Palestinians like Dalal will be reminded of loved ones lost during the fighting.
The shy teenager will not speak about what happened to her family, but Umm Adel, an aunt who is helping to raise her, says the scars run deep. "Now that Ramadan is here it reminds Dalal of the early-morning meals, the breaking of the fast with her family and the presents she used to receive from her father," she says. "She always seems distracted. She spends a lot of time on the Internet or watching television. She is a very smart child but her studies have suffered." Her uncle Rashad says this is the worst Ramadan the family has ever seen, with widespread shortages and sky-rocketing prices at the local market. "The war has added so much to our grief; it's more than we can bear," he says. "Dalal's life is hard, just like all the children of the martyrs." More than 1,400 Palestinians and 13 Israelis were killed during the three-week war, which Israel said was aimed at halting Palestinian rocket fire from the territory ruled by the Islamist Hamas movement. In a rubble-strewn wasteland on the outskirts of Gaza City, Almaza Samuni and her father fast in a tent pitched on the ruins of their house. This is the first year the 13-year-old won't spend afternoons cooking with her mother and her six siblings, all of whom were killed by Israeli shelling. "Ramadan is hard without them," she says. "I'm sad because my mother is not around to make the meals for breaking the fast, and my father was wounded so he can't work." In the aftermath of the war the Samunis earned the grim distinction of having lost the most family members -- 29 in all, many of them children -- and eight months afterwards their homes and farms remain completely destroyed. Since the Islamist movement Hamas seized Gaza in June 2007, Israel and Egypt have sealed the territory off from all but basic goods. International donors have pledged billions of dollars for reconstruction, but the sanctions and political infighting among the Palestinians has prevented the money from reaching those who lost their homes. Even those whose homes and loved ones were spared by the fighting have faced rolling shortages and the highest prices in memory, as they have had to rely on goods smuggled in through tunnels along the border with Egypt. As a result, the festive Ramadan lamps that line the streets of cities across the Muslim world are in Gaza largely confined to store-fronts. Sami, a 40-year-old father of seven, says the little money he is able to scrape together will have to go for supplies for the coming school year. "People in Gaza never know when the next disaster is going to come and how they are going to deal with it," he says. "Most people are without work and without a source of income." Shopowners, meanwhile, say that while they are able to fill their shelves with goods smuggled from Egypt they have few customers. Ibrahim Samuni, Almaza's father, says he is determined to rebuild his house one day. But this year he is resigned to fasting in his tent under the sweltering August sun. "The month of Ramadan opens the wound and reminds us of what we've suffered," he says. "My wife, my children, my siblings and my uncles were all killed and their houses were destroyed ... There are no more happy days."
Source: Agence France Presse
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