Palestinian boy fatally shot

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Naalin is the site of frequent protests against Israel's controversial separation barrier. Tuesday's demonstrations involving a number of boys and young men centred around a makeshift fence constructed by Israeli forces to prevent protesters from reaching bulldozers clearing land for the barrier, Farah Khawaja, a protest organizer, told the Associated Press.

Israeli troops fired tear gas and rubber bullets to disperse demonstrators trying to scale the fence. By late afternoon, the clashes had subsided, but several teenage boys remained in the area and kept throwing stones, Khawaja said. He said soldiers fired more tear gas and then live bullets.

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Israeli settlers attack Palestinian children, CPTers, on journey home from summer camp.

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At 1:50 pm, on Sunday, 27 July, Israeli settlers attacked Palestinian children between the ages of six and fifteen and Christian Peacemaker Team (CPT) members Joel Gulledge and Jan Benvie, who were accompanying them as they walked to their village of Tuba. The children had been attending summer camp in At-Tuwani.

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Palestinian house set ablaze by settlers

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Nablus – Ma'an – A gang of settlers from Yitzhar settlement, to the south of Nablus in the West Bank, set fire to a Palestinian house in the village of Burin in the early hours of Monday morning.

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This guy got off easy

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A Canadian student who took part in a protest against the security wall Israel's building in the West Bank has been arrested and faces deportation from the Jewish state.

Victor McDiarmid, a volunteer for the International Solidarity Movement, had been living in the West Bank for nearly a month when he was arrested Wednesday at a demonstration by women from the village of Nilin, where Israel plans to build the next section of its security barrier.

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13 year-old maimed in Tulkarm

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A 13-year-old boy was maimed on 7 June by what appeared to be Israeli unexploded grenade he had found three days before in the fields near his home in Tulkarm Camp, while collecting grass for the goats.

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More mischief by settlers

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Earlier Thursday, Palestinian security officials said that more than 20 settlers had attacked another Palestinian village in the West Bank, Burin, smashing cars and windows and cutting electricity wires

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Testimony: Israeli police severely beat Palestinian student in Tel Aviv

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The short policeman told them not to hit me outside. They told me to get into the car. I asked them why, and they said, "You're under arrest." I got in the back seat of the car, and the two tall policemen sat on either side of me. The short policeman got in the driver's seat. They closed the windows and told me to sit on the floor. The car drove off. The tall, dark-skinned policeman cuffed my hands behind my back. They hit me in the head, slapped me very hard, and kicked me all over my body. There was hardly any room, and I couldn't move at all. One of them hit me on the head with a plastic bottle full of water.

My head and body hurt a lot. I had trouble breathing because of the blows and the way I was sitting. I almost choked. While beating me, they swore at me, calling me a "son of a bitch" and "Arab bastard" and saying, "apologize."

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Israeli troops fatally shot two Palestinian youths, aged ten and seventeen, this week in a village known for its nonviolent resistance.

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Israelis wound 3 Palestinians at boy's funeral

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RAMALLAH, West Bank, July 30 (Reuters) - Israeli troops wounded three Palestinians in the occupied West Bank on Wednesday in a clash with protesters at the funeral of a 10-year-old boy killed a day earlier, Palestinian medics said.

They said the Israelis had shot the three with rubber bullets while fighting stone-throwing protesters.

The governor of Ramallah, Said Abu Ali, said an autopsy on the boy killed on Tuesday near the West Bank village of Nilin showed he had been shot in the head by live fire.

"There was a big hole in his head and we couldn't save his life," said Salah Khawaja, a 39-year-old medic who was at the scene. He said the boy had been shot at close range.

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Soldiers charged with assault yelled 'Arabs must die'

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Two soldiers serving as security guards at a facility used by the Navy's elite commando unit were indicted on Thursday on charges of racially-motivated aggravated assault. The two are accused of attacking a group of Israeli Druze youths at an Atlit beachfront two weeks ago.

According to the indictment, one of the soldiers called out: "They are Arabs, they must die" during the attack. Two other soldiers from their unit, who also took part in the attack, were indicted on charges of aggravated assault.

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From: Saskatchistan | Registered: Feb 2003  |  IP: Logged

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Seriously ill Palestinian patients are being pressured to collaborate with Israeli intelligence by informing on militant and other activities in return for being allowed out of Gaza for medical treatment a report says today.

Israel's domestic intelligence agency, Shin Bet, is playing an increasingly important role in determining whether patients should be allowed to keep hospital appointments in Israel or the West Bank.

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Beatings of Palestinians by radical religious settlers, protected by the Israeli army and police, are a common occurrence in this dangerous city, where Jewish settlements nudge into the heart of a community of about 120,000 Arabs. What happened next was shocking even by the violent standards of Hebron however.

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Human rights group B'Tselem, which exposed the incident – shown on Israeli television after being videoed by a Palestinian woman in the village – said yesterday: "The army treats the shooting at point-blank range of a bound man [only] as inappropriate behaviour. It disgraces the values which it pretends to uphold."

And Yesh Din, the legal action group representing Mr Abu Rahmeh's family, pointed out that if the officer had been "caught smoking a joint" he would have suffered the worse penalty of a prison sentence and dishonourable discharge.

It added: "This case proves once again that the military judicial system views harming innocent citizens as a public image problem and not as a moral issue."

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In sum, right and left were partners to the act. The nationalist-messianist fervor and the desire to end the War of Independence merged into the momentum for occupation: The entire right and most of the left - We have returned to the land of the Judges and the kings of the Davidian dynasty, said defense minister Moshe Dayan emotionally in the summer of 1967 - bear joint responsibility for the gradual creation of the disaster in which Israeli society is wallowing.

Since it was impossible to take control of the lands legally, a mafia-like culture of theft, lies and deception developed in the territories, in which the various government authorities are still wallowing, from ministers in tailored suits to the last of the policemen sweating on the highways. Contrary to the rules of international and Israeli law, contrary to elementary rules of justice, contrary to all logic and every genuine Israeli interest, broad areas were confiscated for the sake of the settlers and huge sums were poured in.

But over the years, the golem has risen up against its creator: When the public finally realized that if the Jewish national movement does not absorb universal foundations of human rights, democracy and the rule of law it will doom itself to destruction, a force had already arisen over the Green Line that now threatens to drown all of Israel.

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Zionism's dying between Hebron and Yitzhar

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This summer, at age 24, I was honored to learn that I had become the youngest journalist to receive the Martha Gellhorn Prize for Journalism, named for the famed American war reporter and awarded to journalists who counter propaganda with the truth.

Although Israel has sealed Gaza's 1.5 million Palestinians in what many now call the world's largest open-air prison, Dutch MP Hans Van Baalen lobbied the Israeli government to let me leave Gaza to receive my award in person.

Upon my return from London, I was surrounded by Israeli security officers. I was stripped naked at gunpoint, interrogated, kicked and beaten for more than four hours. At one point I fainted and then awakened to fingernails gouging at the flesh beneath my eyes. An officer crushed my neck beneath his boot and pressed my chest into the floor. Others took turns kicking and pinching me, laughing all the while. They dragged me by my feet, sweeping my head through my own vomit. I lost consciousness. I was told later that they transferred me to a hospital only when they thought I might die.

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The Nation

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Last week the BBC carried video footage of a Jewish settler attack on Palestinian farmers in the West Bank. The attack was filmed thanks to a video advocacy project arranged by the Israeli human rights organisation B'Tselem. The aim of the project is to empower Palestinian families and increase public awareness of their harassment. The over 100 cameras distributed by B'Tselem give Palestinian communities the opportunity to document attacks by Israeli soldiers and settlers in a medium that is less likely to be ignored or disputed by Israeli authorities than oral testimony.

The video depicts three people, an old couple and their nephew, being lynched by four youths near the village of Susia, south of Hebron. The BBC should be applauded for giving the story major coverage on its World News service. Jewish settler violence towards Palestinians is widespread but is rarely given widespread media coverage.

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The Guardian

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Of late, there has been a steady stream of brutal assaults carried out by settlers against their Palestinian neighbours in the West Bank, right under the noses of the lackadaisical army. The phenomenon is, sadly, nothing new; what has brought the story back into the spotlight are the efforts of human rights groups, such as B'Tselem to film the violence and document the shocking reality on the ground – which is why, it seems, the authorities are so keen to clamp down on their activity in the region.

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According to Hafez Nupal, on Monday at around 6 pm he and his son were working in their fields when two settlers riding an ATV approached. "One of them yelled 'what are you doing on this land? God gave us this land and no Arab dog will set foot on it'," he recounted.

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Israel's enduring use of Palestinian collaborators to entrench the occupation and destroy Palestinian resistance was once the great unmentionable of the Middle East conflict.

When the subject was dealt with by the international and local media, it was solely in the context of the failings of the Palestinian legal system, which allowed the summary execution of collaborators by lynch mobs and kangaroo courts.

That is beginning to change with a trickle of reports indicating the extent of Israel's use of collaborators and the unwholesome techniques it uses to recruit them. "Cooperation," it has become clearer, is the very backbone of Israel's success in maintaining its occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip

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According to the Israeli branch of Physicians for Human Rights, the Shin Bet is exploiting the distress of these families to pressure them to agree to collaborate in return for an exit permit.

Last month, the group released details of 32 cases in which sick Gazans admitted they were denied permits after refusing to become informants.

One is Shaban Abu Obeid, 38, whose pacemaker was installed at an Israeli hospital and needs intermittent maintenance by Israeli doctors. Another, Bassam Waheidi, 28, has gone blind in one eye after he refused to co-operate and was denied a permit.

But these cases are only the tip of an enormous iceberg. Those Palestinians who refuse to collaborate have every interest in making their problems public. By contrast, those who agree to turn informant have no such interest.

As with other occupation regimes, Israel has long relied on the most traditional way of recruiting collaborators: torture.

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Arab driver held after Akka riots

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Arab politicians said that the arrest was politically motivated and demanded Jamal immediate release.

"I am sure some Jews also drove on Yom Kippur. Will the police arrest them?" Abbas Zkoor, an Arab member of parliament from Acre, asked.

While Ahmad Tibi, another MP, said: "It is the first time anyone is arrested for harming religious sensitivities.

"Police caved in to pressure from the fascist right which demanded his arrest, demonstrating it is a Jewish, racist and idiotic police.

"I wonder if the Israeli government will in future arrest Jews who eat or drink in mixed cities during Ramadan," he said in reference to the Muslim month of fasting.

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The Angry Arab has an interesting comment on this farce:

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The events in `Akka are just incredible. Imagine if this was in a Muslim country: imagine if a Muslim community was offended because a Christian driver drove through the neighborhood. Under such a scenario the Security Council would have met, and the US congress would have cried out.

The US media are largely ignoring the clashes: or dismissing them as "sectarian clashes" as the New York Times has done. Sometimes you feel that Zionists would really like for the entire Arabs of the Middle East to relocate away from the region so as to not offend the religious sensibilities of the state.

And that lousy Arab driver: how he appeared trembling as if he were a slave before an Israeli official committee offering the Israeli investigators to whip him if they so decide. A what unto the nations?

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If that's the kind of company you want to keep, I'm sure their are plenty of boards out there where the posters make cracks about Paradise and virgins, and where they buttress their islamophobic politics with verses from the Quran and Hadith.

[ 15 October 2008: Message edited by: just one of the concerned ]

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If that's the kind of company you want to keep, I'm sure their are plenty of boards out there where the posters make cracks about Paradise and virgins, and where they buttress their islamophobic politics with verses from the Quran and Hadith.

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I don't care what prophet originally uttered "light unto nations" 2500 years ago.

Arch-Zionist David Ben-Gurion, not some wacko from littlegreenfootballs.com, claimed on its founding that THE STATE OF ISRAEL was to be a light unto nations.

How many different ways do I have to say this?

And what is wrong with "the company I keep" by the way? That As'ad fellah may be angry and an Arab, but he's probably still a decent family man.

[ 15 October 2008: Message edited by: al-Qa'bong ]

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After Obama wins, Democrats should be at the forefront of making this case, and being very clear about where we stand as liberals on this question of Muslim-baiting.

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In the mean time...

[ 15 October 2008: Message edited by: Cueball ]