Dear friends,
I know I sent an e-mail out just 2 days ago, but yesterday I faced the scariest and most disturbing situation yet. I'm extremely drained at the moment and apologize for not wanting to write more, but I will attach our press release about yesterday below (pictures at bottom if they come through on e-mail. Otherwise, they should be posted on our website soon - www.iwps.info).
The only thing I want to say is that it's hard to keep perspective on things here. I'm so used to Israelis with guns (soldiers and settlers) that they don't faze me anymore. I forget that they're real sometimes. In the moment yesterday, standing with women and children as the soldiers yelled, ran at us with tear gas, and cocked their guns, I was quite scared. But afterwards, I think about the soldiers who opened the back of their jeep to point their guns one more time as they were leaving, and it seems like a video game or movie to me. Or just a bunch of young boys with toys. Which is, ultimately, what it is. It's just that these toys can kill…
Anyway, read on…
Press Release – Press Release – Press Release – Press Release
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
REPORT: Three hundred men rounded up and detained in Kufr Eyin. Approximately 25 arrests were made.
On Thursday October 23 at 8:30 a.m., IWPS office got a call from a man in Qurawat Bani Zeid, saying that six Israeli jeeps and Armored Personnel Carriers (APC) had moved into the town. The man requested our presence. At 10:30 four IWPS workers arrived at a nearby village and walked across a roadblock to access the area, witnessing a number of jeeps passing on the road. We entered Kufr Eyin, population 1,500, and were told the army was now there. Moments later, a formation of approximately 40 soldiers marched down a hill and into a waiting APC. Further up the hill, a military incursion was in progress. Israeli army jeeps and more APCs were parked in front of the village school. Several men, blindfolded and handcuffed, were being led into one of the APCs. We were told that Israeli soldiers were holding all of the men in the village between the ages of 14-40 in the schoolyard. As IWPS workers watched, the soldiers herded frantic mothers and children back away from the arrest scene. For approximately 1/2-3/4 hour, the soldiers kept the villagers back from witnessing the arrests, often times yelling, threatening the women with tear gas, and chasing them back towards their homes, with rifles pointed at them. The army vehicles left at 11:30 a.m. with the men they had arrested.
We spoke with witnesses, one of whom had been held in the schoolyard since 6:00 a.m. He relayed the following information: At 2:00 a.m., the soldiers surrounded the village. Shots and explosions were heard. Between 4:00-5:00, the army announced curfew through loudspeakers of roving jeeps, ordering all men between 14-40 to present themselves at the school. Shortly afterwards, they conducted house-to-house searches, looking for men. He said there were 33 military cars and 300 soldiers involved in the operation, one soldier per Palestinian. Three hundred men were herded into the schoolyard, their identifications checked in groups of 10. Eight did not have Palestinian I.D.'s and were immediately blindfolded and sequestered. Thirteen others were ultimately blindfolded and arrested as well, and estimated the total men arrested to be between 20-25. The majority remaining were made to sit against the wall of the school ard in the sun from approximately 6:00-11:30 a.m. The witness said the soldiers provided some water for the men, but they were given no food and limited bathroom use.
The soldiers had constructed barbed wire pens inside the schoolyard, drilling holes in the concrete for the poles, then stringing barbed wire to divide the yard into three sections. They destroyed a door and windows inside the school. One young man was hit by a border policeman in the stomach, struck with both rifle and fist, when he asked to use the bathroom. They had also demanded the detainees give their phone numbers to the soldier, and on a number of occasions, when men claimed to have no phone, the same soldier would read the phone number out loud, as if to show the men that they could hide nothing from the army.
The witness reports that Kufr Eyin has been under heavy surveillance for the past 10 days. A curfew has been enforced three times in the past week; people with olive trees have been prohibited from harvesting their crops.
IWPS workers witnessed damage to the school following the release of approximately 275 men and boys. A window was broken, and there was a watermelon-sized hole in the thick concrete wall adjacent to the rooftop door, which lay in rubble off its hinges on the ground. The soldiers had left their trash, and ripped several of the school's posters from their walls.
