Eyewitness Report : Days and Nights of Rage in the West Bank Over Gaza Slaughter

international | rights, freedoms and repression | news report

Tuesday December 30, 2008 09:17

by TD - Free Palestine Campaign

Karen Abu Zayd, commissioner of the UN Relief and Works Agency says Israel responsible for breaking truce with Gaza (Haaretz)

From white hot anger to silent, sometimes sobbing, despairing empathy, one is torn apart over here, from being an unwilling participant in, what amounts to, a snuff movie to witnessing and hearing about Israeli barbarism, where medieval torture is visited on a helpless people with the world as voyeur and where the coup de grace is never administered, but threatened in a "bigger Shoah" than Israel's, one doesn't have an alternative but to grow stronger for Palestine.

Funeral procession A'raft Al-Khawaja

When the news of the attack on Gaza first trickled in in the form of text messages, there was shock and mounting anger in the Jerusalem, Sheikh Jarrah Protest Tent where I was at the time, as the number of dead and wounded increased exponentially, one wanted to do something and do it immediately and it was pell mell to the Damascus Gate in the Old City where a demonstration was supposed to happen but did'nt - the area being saturated with IDF and Israeli police, but the same was true of Hebron where the PA in shameful collusion with the Israeli Occupation Forces was vigorously suppressing the demonstrations, injuring their people in the process, the Palestinian youth, the Al-Shabab, when I got there, were locked in David V Goliath sling-shot combat with the IOF, (The Jesh, as they are known to them). from what I witnessed, the IOF were relatively restrained in their use of tear gas and so called rubber bullets, not so, in the village of Ni'lin, west of Ramallah where a 20 year old protesting nursing student, A'raft (Arafat) Al-Khawaja was murdered with a bullet to the head, Mohammad Al-Khawaja (no relation as far as I can gather) was seriously injured with another bullet to the head and another protestor was shot in the back - east of Ramallah, in Silwad, 17-year-old Muhammad Hamid was murdered with three IOF gunshot wounds to his abdomen and chest. On Sunday, with its share of maimed and terrorised, Bil'in (near Ni'lin) protested in solidarity with Gaza at the nearby Annexation Wall that thieves some 60% of its land.

Yesterday, I attended A'raft's funeral and it was so sad.

A'raft's father at 12 o'clock position of wreath