17 days of curfew in Dura & Appeal about Tulkarem area
GUSH SHALOM - pob 3322, Tel-Aviv 61033 - http://www.gush-shalom.org/
April 25, 2002


[This mail is about what escaped so far the public eye. While the international attention concentrates on what happens in the big cities, many towns and villages on the West Bank are still suffering from uninterrupted closure and curfew. We ask you to forward this message to the addresses in the end and to others whom you can think of, or to send to these addresses your own text.]

[1] 17 days of curfew in Dura
[2] Appeal about Tulkarem area, by Yitzhak Laor

[1] 17 days of curfew in Dura
The town of Dura, near Hebron on the southern West Bank, has today undergone its seventeenth consecutive day of complete Israeli occupation. Tens of thousands of people, in Dura and dozens of outlying villages around it, remain imprisoned in their homes under tight curfew with no end in sight, suffering from severe disruption of medical services and lack of food. Even in the occasional few hours when the curfew is lifted, the army maintains a tight closure and prevents access to the nearby city of Hebron . In the course of these two and half weeks of curfew, six inhabitants of Dura were killed and dozens wounded in confrontations with the soldiers. At the center of the town, the local station of the Palestinian Police resumed its pre-Oslo role as center of the military occupation. The Israeli flag flies on top of it, and hundreds of Dura inhabitants had been arrested and taken inside the building for
questioning. Nobody knows exactly what is going on inside. 

A week ago, the government of Israel claimed that its armed forces had been pulled out of all the Palestinian areas occupied in the recent invasion - except for Bethlehem and part of Ramallah. So, Dura should have been evacuated at least five days ago. Somehow, the soldiers occupying it never heard of it.
                                               *

[2] Appeal about Tulkarem area, by Yitzhak Laor

There is a danger of humanitarian disaster in areas which are far and remote  from the media interest, and with the total destruction of institutions and PA's apparatus. Villages around Tulkarem are under a constant curfew, some of them for more than a month. I spoke today to ex-mayor of Tulkarem, Mr. Saber Ares, and his wife, Mrs. Ares, both live in the village of Shufee. To those of you who don't have the "picture": these are the villages who are part of Barak "generous plan of annexation".

I tried to collect more information, and the more I hear the more I am sure there is a real danger that together with "dovish" call inside Israel for "separation", this area, which doesn't have many settlements within it,  is a candidate for a policy which will make life of the villagers unbearable.

Two trucks with food that the town of Teybeh had sent last Saturday were stopped by the army, and unlike in different areas did not reach the villages.

North and north east to Tulkarem the villages Shweikke,  Atil, Bala'h, Enabta, are either still under curfew, or under strict closure. A journalist had told me that in some of those villages he saw, even before the last attack, real lockers on gates that were constructed. All those villages are not being able to go to their central town for medical and other services.
 

As these areas are classified B, according to the Oslo accord, they are under full control of the IDF.

The villages of Beit Lyd, Sur, Safarin, Shufee, Faru'n, and a whole group of the Kufeyrat, that is Kufr Jamal, Kufr Abush, Kufr Zibad, and other villages which in the middle of them the Israelis built the settlement of Avnei Kheffetz and Sali't, ARE UNDER CURFEW.

Not only these villages, together with the refugees of Nur Shams and Tulkarem. Are prevented to enter to Israel, to work, they are also  not allowed to travel to the east, that is to areas near Nablus.

Please remember, this is the humanitarian disaster in the process that nobody speaks about.

The people there need help, either from Palestinians that collect information about the devastation over there, or Israelis, that can ring the bells (and stop the racist call for "separation" which in Dutch means Apartheid, but in practice means starvation), and scream: let them live like human beings.

Those villages might not have computers, or maybe they do. We don't know. They are all beyond the public talk, but they do talk about hunger.

yitshac@post.tau.ac.il
                         

 

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