I had hoped to bring you some information from the
Towards Peace and Justice in Palestine and Israel Conference which occurred last weekend. Unfortunately, due to work I haven't had time to write on it this week.
Instead, I'm going to relate a story which I received yesterday from an Irishman, Shane O'Conner, who is currently in the West Bank with a videocamera. To briefly place this in context Shane's story emanates from the West Bank town of 40,000+ inhabitants named Qalqilya.
"Yesterday, well, less than 2 hours ago I was in Qalqilya in the North of Palestine to film the Wall at its worst, at least that was what we thought we were going to do!
I have not been to bed yet because we had to try and get our film out to the international media and we worked on it all through the night, I have just arrived back in work now after travelling for a good few hours of crossing through checkpoints this morning.
We left (myself and Magne) at 5.30 am. Yesterday after capturing some amazing footage of this really ugly piece of architecture where the wall literally wraps around this city of Qalqilya, smothering it and cutting it off from the agricultural land that surrounds and belongs to the people living in the city and also cutting it off from other parts of the West bank, we found ourselves under fire.
It was half way through the day when the Israeli military came into the town with about 20 jeeps and heavily armoured hummers (just like you see in Iraq everyday because they are also American vehicles) and just started to open fire on the streets and shoot at the houses. The military excuse for such an act of terror is simple, 'We were looking for a wanted person in the city'. Yesterday they claimed to be looking for a member of the Al Aqsa brigade. They eventually found him in his family home, the special forces made their way into the family home through sheer military might, terrorising the neighbours and the family, shelling the house itself. They ransacked the house, physically beat up the brother and father of the 'wanted person' and then left. We know this because we went to the house and interviewed the family and neighbours minutes after the Israeli forces left.
It was heart wrenching to be honest to witness the aftermath of such an operation. Young kids were crying and the adults were distressed and distraught. We were told that one child was killed during the four hour ordeal in the city but it turns out in the end that he was shot three times in the back but survived. We went to the hospital to check up on him and talked with his family and the doctors after he came out of the operating theatre. Four young boys were badly injured during 'the operation', as the Israeli military like to call it.
All were shot, some with live rounds, some with rubber bullets it is suspected. We filmed the boys in the hospital but it felt horrible to be doing so, it was an intrusion but it was a welcome one, by the families, by the hospital staff and by the boys themselves. It seemed as though they felt that nobody else cared and so they wanted somebody to tell the story of the day. This is why I may be boring you with this long mail.
Partly to release some of my own guilt for not following these stories up enough and partly because I know that you may be the only group hearing about this incident outside of this horrible situation. One boy was my brother Emmet's age, he was awake and even talked to us briefly through a local journalist that spoke English, he was in pain but he showed us proudly his bullet wound on his upper arm, close to his shoulder. Sadly we know that if he had died, he would simply become another child statistic and fatality of this dirty conflict, his parents would be mourning over just another lost sole, his friends would just have more anger and ammunition against the Israeli soldiers. What happens to the soldiers that carry out such attacks? How do they feel after shooting four young boys in one afternoon? I really don't know but I would love to hear the situation justified on their side and then put this to the international community to decide if they had the right to carry out such crimes.
We were fairly safe most of the time because we had a local TV crew beside us most of the time. They seemed to know what they were doing but were a lot braver than I wanted at times. It seems as though they were fairly used to such episodes. We are not but sadly becoming quite familiar with the procedures. I'm not afraid to admit that I was scared at many stages throughout the filming. There was one occasion that a bullet went straight by my head and rebounded off a metal door a meter behind me. It was a surreal moment, I could actually feel the air of the bullet pass by me and it was head height which makes it even more frightening. After this I made it my business to keep my distance and get to a roof to continue filming.
The young boys and even some grown up men continued to throw stones at the armoured jeeps and hummer as they paraded though the Palestinian streets. It seemed to go on for infinity but in reality was the best part of four hours. There were hundreds of bullets, tear gas grenades, sound bombs and smoke bombs fired throughout this period. It is a wonder that more people were not injured. Hours before, we had been commenting on how well the streets looked compared to many other run down and littered streets we have seen in the West bank but after the day that we witnessed the streets were in complete tatters. They were filled with burned out metal trash cans over turned to act as blockade's, burning tires, cars and literally thousands of rocks and stones that were used to throw at the Israeli jeeps. It was just another sad sight of the sad day that was in it.
During the height of the tension, the Israeli soldiers were shooting live ammunition in the streets right in front of us and we managed to capture a lot of this on film. The difficulty is getting it out of here so people like you can see it. I will try and send some of the photos that we also took during the day. The other local camera man with me was confronted by the soldiers while standing next to me filming, they gave him a choice, give them the tape that he was using to record this injustice or face arrest or even being shot, he handed over the tape and I ran from sight knowing that I was the only one with this footage. I came back minutes later after hiding the tape and loaded my video camera with a new one.
We stayed up last night in a local TV studio to edit the footage and get it sent to Reuters news agency; they told us they would hope to use it today. I am knackered tired now but I want to write a story on the incident because before tomorrow it will be old news and something new, some new worse incident will have taken place of course. This is life here right now. I look forward to getting a good break soon but I look forward more to the day that this does not happen anymore and the people under occupation and under siege also have a long break to get on with their lives."
This is an aerial photograph of Qalqilya and The Wall taken in 2003. The only way in or out for the entire town's inhabitants is an Israeli controlled gate where you see the vertical white line in centre right of the photo:
Published by Paul.
