Day Four - Nablus

Wednesday was spent in Nablus in the Northern half of the West Bank. The landscape around Nablus is some of the best in Palestine. On the way there we saw many of the illegal Israeli settlement farms that are built on some of the most fertile Palestinian land. They are easily identifiable by their intensive farming methods, lots of plastic sheeting and modern irrigation systems. The illegal produce from the settlement farms finds its way into supermarkets in the UK. Tesco, Waitrose and Sainsburys stock produce from illegal settlements despite the UN declarations of their illegality. See the following website for more details:
http://www.bigcampaign.org/

Happily there were also Palestinian farms in evidence, like this one, being tended by Bedouin labourers.

We began the day at An-Najah University. The campus was funded by a Saudi Prince and is quite impressive. They have very modern facilities and we spent a few minutes watching a volleyball game.

We got talking to some of the students who were showing us around. I asked one guy how long he had been studying for and he responded that he had started his course 8 years ago. He had been detained by the Israelis in a prison camp without a proper trial for 5 years. A huge proportion of young men in Palestine are detained by the Israelis at some point in their life.

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Political Prisoners

The wholesale imprisonment of young men has been a major part of Israel's aggression against Palestinians since 1948. There are currently around 10,400 Palestinians in Israeli prisons.

Many children are imprisoned by Israeli forces just for throwing stones. Under the 4th Geneva convention, the population of an occupied territory (West Bank & Gaza) has the following rights:

1. Not to be subject to physical coercion or torture.
2. Not to be sentenced without a 'regular trial' (legal representation etc.)
3. Not to be detained or imprisoned outside the occupied territory.
4. Not to be interned without trial except for 'imperative security reasons'.

Israel flouts every one of these international requirements. The military courts in which prisoners are tried are there to uphold the occupation rather than administer any justice.

Detainees are typically forced to confess under varying levels of torture (beatings, stress positions, psychological torture etc.) and then hauled before a military court that rubber stamps the conviction brought by the army. Degrading treatment and humiliation is the norm (humiliating full body searches and confiscation of personal property are typical).

In 3 of the prison camps, Palestinians are held in tents all year round. The tents are designed to hold 20 but in practice many more are crammed into them. These camps are in the desert where the heat in summer is unbearable and the winters are freezing cold.

Israel continued with the British practice of 'administrative detention' that effectively gives them the power to imprison anyone they like, without a trial, for whatever period they like. 'Administrative detention' allows the Israeli army to bypass the court system altogether and Palestinians can be imprisoned for several years without any trial and without family visits for prolonged periods. The worst offence that these people have committed is being involved in the resistance against an illegal occupation of their homeland. Those suspected of serious involvement in the resistance are usually summarily executed by Israeli death squads. These executions are often carried out by use of disproportionate force (ie unmanned aerial drones or heavy artillery fire) which often kill civilian bystanders or, more commonly, the target's family in the process.

These summary executions are not reserved just for those actively involved in resistance. In 1987, the artist who created the Handala character (shown here) was executed on our very own streets here in London. A young man was arrested on suspicion of his murder and turned out to be an agent of the Israeli intelligence service, Mossad. Mossad refused to co-operate with the enquiry and no one was ever convicted. Handala represents the long suffering of the Palestinians, in particular those who experienced the full trauma of the Nakba, and remains an iconic image.



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We were taken by the students to the martyrs cemetery in Nablus. Here are buried the boys and young men killed during the second intifada. Nablus was bombarded heavily by the Israeli army in 2002.

The resistance against the Israeli invasion was centred around the old city (as with most Palestinian towns). The Israeli army found it so difficult to break through the defences of the militias here that they eventually decided to go straight through the houses on the perimeter of the old city with an armoured bulldozer. Here you can see a house that was entirely demolished (only now being rebuilt). An entire family of 8 were killed here in their sleep. Their memorial is also shown here (click on the pictures to enlarge them).

We moved on to Balata refugee camp. Balata camp is the most overcrowded we visited. There are 25 thousand people crammed into a space of 1 sq km. The buildings are built very tall and very close together. They are so close together that daylight barely reaches the tiny alleyways between the houses. One resident told us that when people die here, their bodies must be carried out to the main street as coffins will not fit down the alleyways into the houses.

The camp is raided often by Israeli forces and residents subjected to psychological torment by the use of 'sound bombs' in the middle of the night. There are many children living here and the cramped conditions and lack of daylight cause an unusually high level of psychological problems compared with other refugee camps within Palestine.