American roots artist makes his Palestine debut

Bill Kirchen and his band perform at Ma`an studio in the southern West Bank
city of Bethlehem, 22 November 2010. (Maan Images)

BETHLEHEM (Ma'an) -- Grammy-nominated American roots musician Bill Kirchen made his Palestine debut Monday, in a special performance highlighting his week-long tour through the occupied West Bank.

The guitarist, singer, and songwriter, who has performed for audiences in the US and around the world for more than 40 years, was in Bethlehem for a workshop in a refugee camp after a televised performance at Ma'an studio.

In the region on behalf of the US Consulate General in Jerusalem's Palestinian-American cultural exchange program, Kirchen said he was looking forward to meeting local musicians to "find a common ground and play together."

  

Kirchen's performance Monday was one of several in Jenin, Ramallah, Nablus, and East Jerusalem introducing his band's unique mix of “rockabilly,” which includes elements of rock, blues, and bluegrass.

"We call it roots music," Kirchen said. "We draw on the blues that came over from Africa originally and settled in the southern states in the US. Music that started in England, ballads that started in England and morphed into American culture music.

"It comes under the general heading of roots rock ‘n’ roll, I think, best, with a lot of country influence and some boogie-woogie, some swing influence. Music that's drawn from the roots of music that, if it's American music, ended up in America."

His visit is funded by a performing arts initiative grant from the US Department of State, and received special funding from the US Consulate and America House, both of which are located in occupied East Jerusalem.

"It's really a pleasure for us to host Bill Kirchen and his band," Frank Finver, the US consul for press and cultural affairs, told Ma'an. "They've been here a few days, and we don't want them to leave."

Finver said the US hosts programs "very often. We try to bring American artists -- musicians, dancers, visual artists, and guests speakers -- to really show what America's all about, to exchange cultural ideas and learn about Palestinian culture."

Kirchen is accompanied by his band, including vocalist Louise Kirchen, percussionist Jack O’Dell, and bassist Maurice Cridlin. The group will share the stage with Palestinian rock group Sheibat for performances in Jerusalem and Ramallah.

Kirchen performed a community concert at Cinema Jenin and Al-Hambra Palace in East Jerusalem, and will close out the tour Tuesday at the Movenpick Hotel in Ramallah. The event is free and open to the public. Doors open 7:30 p.m.

Israeli missile strike injures 4 family members -- 1 only 2 years old -- celebrating holiday

A Palestinian man surveys the damage from the previous day`s Israeli airstrike in
the Gaza town of Deir Al-Balah on 20 November 2010. (Jared Malsin)

By Jared Malsin

DEIR AL-BALAH, Gaza Strip (Ma'an) -- The most intense Israeli airstrikes in months disrupted what had been a quiet holiday for one Gaza family.

Sulaiman Abu Mustafa, an olive and eggplant grower with a small farm near the border with Israel outside of Deir Al-Balah, was celebrating the Eid Al-Adha holiday with his family in his yard when the strike took place. Abu Mustafa's uncle and aunt were visiting -- there were around 20 people outside the house.

At 3 p.m. an Israeli F-16 fired a missile at an empty house across the street, blasting chunks of concrete into the air, then hurtling down on Abu Mustafa's house. He said the family scrambled to take shelter behind their house, but had no time to react.

The concrete chunks injured four people, including Abu Mustafa's mother, who was wounded in the abdomen, and his brother who was struck in the head. His two year old son who was also hurt, he said.

Abu Mustafa's home and yard was strewn with debris from his neighbor's house that came crashing through his roof, leaving perforations in the ceiling. One of the walls was also cracked by the force of the explosion.

Abu Mustafa said he called an ambulance, but the family was forced to wait a half hour for help to arrive. Because their house is only 400 meters from the Green Line, emergency responders have to request permission from the Israeli army, via the Red Cross, to enter the area.

The Israeli military said launched four separate airstrikes on Gaza on Friday—three in the afternoon and one late at night—in response to a series of rockets fired into Israel from Gaza. According to Israeli news reports, the shelling included homemade projectiles, mortars, and one Grad missile, and caused no injuries. This barrage in turn, was in response to an Israeli airstrike that killed a member of the Army of Islam militia, and his brother, in the middle of Gaza City at sundown on Wednesday.

In a statement announcing the airstrikes on Friday, the Israeli military said it was bombing "terror-linked sites" in Deir Al-Balah and Khan Younis.

Abu Mustafa emphatically denied that there was any activity by Palestinian armed groups in the area. "This area is very calm, the people here are peace-loving. This land is farmland, and the people here subsist off of what they grow on their farms, like olives."

He told Ma'an: "I heard on the news that Israel said it was targeting terrorists who fired rockets, resistance or terrorists or I don't know what, and the Army of Islam. There is no truth in these words."

He added that, unlike many other areas directly along Gaza's border with Israel, there have been very few incident of soldiers firing on farmers. Abu Mustafa's farm lies adjacent to an Israeli military position, including a remotely-operated gun turret, and a gate in the border fence used by military forces to enter the Strip.

Abu Mustafa said that the house that was the target of the missile was owned by the Sharufa family, who live primarily in Gaza City, and only visit the farmhouse once or twice a month. When Ma'an visited, all that remained of the two-story house was a crater.

Identities of those injured in the Deir Al-Balah bombing:

1. Roqaya Abu Mustafa, 53
2. Wijdan Abu Mustafa, 29
3. Abdel Aziz Abu Mustafa, 20
4. Ibrahim Abu Mustafa, 2

Video: Israeli Occupation Forces kidnap teen in Bil'in home overnight

Israeli occupation soldier abducts Palestinian children.

RAMALLAH (Ma'an) -- A 16-year-old boy was kidnapped from his family home in the central West Bank village of Bil'in overnight, Israeli military officials confirmed.

Officials from the village popular committee said armored military jeeps and personnel carriers entered the area at approximately 2:30 a.m., stormed the home of Adeeb Abu Rahmah, who was detained 17 months earlier, and arrested his son Mohammed, blindfolded him and took him to a waiting jeep.

According to a statement from the village popular committee, witnesses described a group of masked soldiers forcefully entering the house without showing a warrant.

An Israeli military spokesman said the teen was arrested on "suspicion of participation in violent and illegal riots."

The spokesman said allegations made by the popular committee that photographer Haitham Khatib was assaulted by soldiers as he documented the detention were misplaced.

Khatib "disturbed the soldiers during a regular arrest campaign," he said, adding that he was asked to leave. When he refused and continued photographing, the spokesman said, "he was removed from the scene." 

HERE'S A VIDEO FROM THE INCIDENT:

 

Israeli army continues to abduct children and use them as human shields, Defence for Children International reported. 

A few days before a Palestinian farmer was beaten by Israeli soldiers after he asked them to open the agricultural gate and allow him access to his farm land.
 

Related Videos: 

• Israeli Occupation Soldiers Detaining Children 
• Palestinian Child vs. Israeli Soldier 

EU: Israel failed to ease blockade of Palestinian territory

EU foreign policy chief Catherine Ashton visits a UN warehouse in Jabaliya refugee
camp in the Gaza Strip on 18 March 2010. (Maan Images)

BRUSSELS (Ma'an) -- Israel has failed to live up to its commitments on easing the blockade on the Gaza strip, the European Union's foreign policy chief Catherine Ashton said Monday.

Israel pledged to loosen its grip on the Palestinian enclave in June, reacting to the international outcry caused by its at-sea shooting in late May of nine Turkish activists, who were trying to break the blockade.

But five months on, Ashton said there were not enough goods flowing in to meet the humanitarian and reconstruction needs of the territory, which is ruled by Hamas, the radical group classed as a terrorist organization by the EU and the United States.

"Gaza remains a source of great concern for me ... at the present time, we think that what's happened with Gaza is unsatisfactory, the volume of goods is not increasingly as significantly as it needs to," she said, speaking on behalf of all EU foreign ministers.

She also urged Israel to allow exports out of Gaza and to let in construction material that the local United Nations agency (UNRWA) wants to use to rebuild schools.

"It is absolutely essential that the economy is allowed to recover and that people are allowed to invest in their futures," Ashton pointed out.

The EU's top foreign policy official spoke as Israeli-Palestinian peace talks remained in limbo, following the expiry in September of an Israeli freeze on new settlement activity on occupied Palestinian land in the West Bank and East Jerusalem.

"Not surprisingly there is a lot of concern with the current lack of progress and with the ongoing settlement activities," Ashton commented.

Israeli soldiers beat Palestinian farmer

Israeli occupation forces abduct a Palestinian child.

SALFIT (Ma'an) -- A Palestinian farmer said he was beaten by Israeli soldiers on Friday morning, after he asked them to open the agricultural gate and allow him access to his farm land in the northern West Bank village Az-Zawiya, west of Salfit.

Mu'taz Ribhi Abu Nab'a, 22, said the incident occurred at 11:30 a.m., as he waited to cross the gate to his land, on the far side of the separation barrier.

A force made up of men and women refused to let him through the gate. Instead, he said, soldiers beat him, strip-searched him and hand-cuffed him before transferring him to a military base.

Abu Nab'a further said that female soldiers humiliated him and took photos with him.

When he asked an Israeli officer why he was being beaten and humiliated, the young farmer said, he was told "Because you deliberately disturbed us and made us go to the gate early in the morning." Abu Nab'a said the officer in charge then accused him of attempting to break down part of the barrier. The farmer said he denied the charge and informed the soldier that he knew there were monitoring cameras which would have documented him.

He also told the soldier he had a permit issued by Israeli authorities giving him permission to access his land.

According to Abu Nab'a, soldiers ultimately freed him in Hebron, more than 60 kilometers south of his home town, but only after he was served with a summons ordering him to go the Israeli intelligence office in Tulkarem on Monday for further interrogation.

An Israeli military spokeswoman said she could not look into the report without the Palestinian's ID number.

Related Videos: 

• Israeli occupation forces abduct patients from hospital at night 
• Israeli soldiers beat Palestinians 
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Israel army showed 'intent to kill' in Gaza shelling of two teens and grandfather

Walid Abu Oda holds flachettes, metal darts, from a shell that killed his son Ismail,
16. In addition, his son`s friend Hussam Abu Sayed, 17, and Ibrahim Abu Sayed,
91, died in the attack in the northern Gaza Strip on 12 September 2010.
(MaanImages/Jared Malsin)

By Jared Malsin

BEIT HANOUN, Gaza Strip (Ma’an) -- On 13 September, a day after Israeli tank shells decapitated his 16-year-old son, Walid Abu Oda went back to his family's northern Gaza farm in a vain search for the head.

Asked how he was coping with the loss, he said, "How do you think it feels to lose a son, to see your son without his head?"

The killing of Walid's son, Ismail Abu Oda, along with his friend Hussam Abu Sayed, 17, and his grandfather Ibrahim Abu Sayed, 91, is raising questions about whether Israel has taken sufficient strides to bring it's army into compliance with international humanitarian law.

The incident was similar to previous incidents, such as those described in judge Richard Goldstone's UN-mandated report on Israel's winter war on Gaza. Human rights groups say the September killings and others only underscore the importance of implementing the report's call for investigations and accountability.

A lack of credible investigations, by Israel or international bodies, into these and other allegations makes it likely that Israeli soldiers will continue to violate the laws of war in Gaza. The dearth of probes "makes it very easy for the soldiers and the commanders first to shoot and second to get away with it," said Mahmoud Abu Rahmah, a spokesman for the Gaza-based Al-Mezan Center for Human Rights.

Immediately following the shelling, the Israeli military announced it was merely “returning fire” at “suspects” who, they claimed, fired rocket-propelled grenades at Israeli forces.

Initial reports in the Israeli media repeated the military’s claims verbatim. "Shells kill three as IDF targets militant on Gaza Strip border,” declared the headline that ran in the next day’s edition of Haaretz.

“1 terrorist dead, 4 wounded in IDF response to Gaza attack,” reported The Jerusalem Post. Ynet: “IDF on Gaza incident: Suspects tried to fire anti-tank rockets." Not to be outdone, the settler-run Arutz Sheva announced: “IDF Kills Two in Firefight with Gaza Terror Infiltrators.”

While Haaretz identified the three victims as a grandfather and two teenagers, the other news portals simply reported, as fact, that the three were “suspects,” “militants,” “terrorists.”

Two days later the military backtracked, admitting what Palestinian witnesses had said all along: the three were civilians.

Brig. Gen. Eyal Eisenberg would later clarify in a statement sent to journalists that "we understand from a re-creation that we undertook that the three casualties were not involved in act of terror." The statement insisted, however, that one of the Palestinians had picked up an RPG launcher and aimed it at Israeli forces stationed along the border.

The case yielded a number of questions: Why did the army initially declare the three to be militants? Why did the Israeli soldiers decide to shoot in the first place?

The Israeli military did not respond to repeated requests for answers to these and other questions.

In Gaza, witnesses, relatives of the victims, and human rights experts told Ma’an that there was no basis for Israel’s claims that the three appeared to pose a threat to military forces.

All these sources stressed that the three victims visited the border area nearly every day, and were known to the soldiers stationed there. They also point out that the area where the shelling took place is in plain view of army installations on the northern border, a fact that Ma’an verified in a visit to the site. Ma'an found no evidence that anyone in the area was holding an RPG-launcher.

Eid killings

Ismail Abu Oda had been a quiet kid who attended prayers at the local mosque, and while he had only a ninth-grade education, was a talented mechanic: “He could spend 10 days in a [mechanic’s] shop and gain 10 years’ worth of knowledge,” his father says. He was saving money to buy a motorcycle.

Walid Abu Oda recounted the day, the third day of the Eid Al-Fitr holiday that marks the end of Ramadan.

The day of the shelling, Ismail and Hussam decided to accompany the elderly shepherd to his land, bringing chicken with them to make a barbeque to mark the holiday. “As I had promised my son, I bought them chicken,” he said. Walid did not join the three because he was attending a religious festival in Gaza City.

He said the two teens arrived around 10 a.m., sitting and talking while the elderly man, Ibrahim Abu Sayed, the owner of the land, watched over the sheep. They lit a fire and grilled the chicken.

Late in the afternoon, Walid Abu Oda said, the first tank shell fell, still some distance from the three. (The Al-Mezan Center said this first shell landed some 200 meters away.)

“My son called and said the rockets were coming,” Abu Oda said. He left the festival, in Gaza City, and rushed to return to Beit Hanoun. After the first call, he said, “I had a feeling that I had lost my son.”

When a second shell exploded closer to the group, the three began herding the flock of 30 sheep into a barn, in order to evacuate.

A third shell then exploded, hitting the wall of the barn.

“When I was near Jabaliya I got another call.” It was a relative calling to say his son had been killed.

“I saw my son in the hospital morgue, without a head,” Abu Oda said. Ismail had been decapitated by flachettes, small metal darts contained in certain tank shells used by Israel. He showed Ma’an some of the flachettes that had been found near the bodies, along with a fragment of the tank shell.

The two boys and the grandfather were dead. All but one of the 30 sheep were slaughtered.

Investigations carried out by Al-Mezan confirmed Abu Oda’s account. Abu Rahmah, the Al-Mezan spokesman, recently conducted a field visit in connection with the probe that found Israeli forces fired two shells toward the three Palestinians before the deadly shot.

The third shot was a shell containing flachettes, he confirmed, that hit the brick wall of a sheep barn where one of the teens was attempting to bring the sheep to shelter.

“The young man got the sheep and put them in the barn. He was closing the door when the shell hit him.”

“The shell hit a brick wall. This helped the splinters [flachettes] go back in the opposite direction and hit the two men,” Abu Rahmah said. The other two were standing 12 to 15 meters northeast of the barn when the shell exploded.

“The selection of the weapon and the way it was used gives us some info about the intent,” he added. “There is evidence that the intent was to kill the three persons with three shells.”

Photos taken that day by a Belgian photojournalist show the bodies laying in the morgue wrapped in white cloth. Hussam Abu Sayed, wearing an orange shirt, dried blood coming from his mouth and ears, a chunk of the skull missing above his right eye. Ibrahim Abu Sayed’s head was apparently intact except for a deep puncture in the right cheek.

Victims' 'familiar faces'

Muhammad Abdel Aziz Abu Oda operates a farm adjacent to the area where the three were killed. His farm, where he grows olive and lemon trees, is the last human encampment on the edge of the “buffer zone” where anyone who enters is shot on sight by the Israeli army.

Abu Oda told Ma’an he comes to his land every day in coordination with the Israeli military. He also said that the three victims of the 12 September shelling visited the area every day. “The soldiers knew them,” he said in an interview on his land bordering the buffer zone.

Al-Mezan's Abu Rahmah also confirmed this impression, saying the three would have been “familiar faces” for the soldiers stationed on the border.

He claimed Palestinian guerillas never came to the area because it lies in plain sight of the watchtowers along the border.

Ismail Abu Oda’s father also said that he had never known of fighters visiting the area where the killings took place. “If my son had worked with the resistance, I would not be sad; I would be proud,” he said.