I got this from Gush Shalom (Israeli Peace Bloc) Date sent: Sat, 08 Jun 2002 21:10:21 +0200 From: Elana Wesley There will be a hearing at 12 noon on Sunday June 9 in the District Court on Salah-a-din Street in East Jerusalem near (or just opposite?) the Ministry of Justice to decide the fate of the three internationals, Darlene Wallach, US citizen; Josie Sandercock, UK citizen; and Makoto Hibino, Japanese citizen. These three were part of the group of eight internationals arrested on Saturday evening May 31 in the Balata Refugee Camp where they were serving as observers and human shields and were accompanying Palestinians to the clinic and to the hospital. They were also entering Palestinian homes to try to moderate the behavior of Israeli troops who were moving from house to house by blasting holes in the walls. They offered to walk in front of the soldiers so that instead of going through the walls, they could go through the doors. Their presence served as an important moderating influence. They had been encountering Israeli soldiers and officers throughout the day of Saturday May 31 and had been told by one officer that they were in Balata on their own responsibility. No one said anything about their presence being illegal there let alone tried to make them leave or arrested them. However, at around 5:30pm they encountered a group of eight soldiers at the end of a narrow alleyway. The soldiers beckoned them to approach, which they did waving their passports on high to show the soldiers that they were internationals. After conversing with the soldiers for about half an hour, trying to convince the soldiers to allow the group to pass, the soldiers became more aggressive. Three soldiers came and closed them off from behind and began forcing them forward to the end of the alleyway where an army truck was waiting. The army is not allowed to arrest internationals - only the police are. Nevertheless, they were forced into the truck and taken to the Ariel police station where they were held overnight. Eventually, they were brought to the Nevei Tirza Women's Prison and the Ma'asiyahu Prison for Men, both in Ramle. There, pressure was applied on them to let themselves be deported. Those who agreed were or will be sent back home, supposedly without any limitations being put on their possibly returning at some later date to Israel and the territories. Three of the eight, those mentioned above, have chosen to fight their case in the District Court. Both Darlene and Josie have been on a hunger strike since being brought to the Ramleh prison one week ago. It should be noted that they have not been charged with any illegal actions so far. They had met and conversed with Israeli soldiers and officers throughout the day in Balata and had never been asked to leave the area. One of their meetings with an officer is recorded on a video, with someone prepared to testify as to its authenticity, in which an Israeli officer tells them that they are in Balata on their own responsibility. He too did not tell them they had to leave. A Palestinian attorney, Mahmoud Jabarin, who works for LAW (the Palestinian Society for the Protection of Human Rights and the Environment) will be defending them along with Gaby Lasky, an Israeli attorney who works for the Public Committee Against Torture in Israel. YOUR PRESENCE IN THE COURTROOM WILL MEAN A LOT TO THOSE THREE INTERNATIONALS AND TO ALL WHO CARE ABOUT THE PROTECTION OF HUMAN RIGHTS. IF YOU CAN POSSIBLY COME, THE COURTROOM WHERE THE HEARING WILL BE HELD IS ON THE THIRD FLOOR, THE FIRST COURTROOM YOU REACH. UNFORTUNATELY, WE DON'T HAVE THE NAME OF THE PRESIDING JUDGE, ONLY THE LOCATION OF THE COURTROOM. Again, the location is the Jerusalem District Court on Salah-a-Din Street next to (or opposite) the Ministry of Justice. The time of the hearing is 12 noon tomorrow on Sunday June 9. [2] Annie Higgins and Caoimhe Butterley report from Jenin -recorded by Adam Keller- [Last night we talked with two members of the International Solidarity group who managed to enter Jenin a few hours after the army invaded it last Wednesday - Annie Higgins, an American from Chicago, and Caoimhe Butterley of Ireland. You can call them at 972-(0)51-589761.] "(...) The main thing we can do is to help keep some basic medical services going. The army is halting ambulances for thorough searches even when we are present, but still it seems to make a difference when they encounter a person from a Western country. Just when the army got into the city center we were in the hospital and heard of a car being shot at by a tank, and the driver being wounded. I [Caoimhe] went with the ambulance. When we got near the scene, the ambulance itself came under fire. I got out, with my hands raised high in the air, and approached the soldiers, walking slowly. I tried neither to provoke them not to appear frightened or intimidated. I talked in a matter of fact manner and tried to reason with them. They said that the driver had not been wounded but had gotten away from the car. After some discussion they allowed me to come near the place. It seems they were telling the truth, the car was empty and there were no signs of blood. Later we found that the driver had found refuge in a nearby house. (...) Making contact with soldiers definitely helped later, when the ambulance went to pick up an elderly man from one of the villages, who had trouble with the pacemaker in his heart. Our presence and our urging the soldiers about the danger to the man's life helped to make searches shorter, and we got him to the hospital in time. But it does not always work. There were the four men who were shot at by a helicopter gunship and severely wounded while they were travelling in a car at Jaba village, a few kilometres utside Jenin. We are still not sure if they were specifically targeted or just had the worst of bad luck. Anyway in this case the soldiers were very suspicous and made long searches, with the result that one of the wounded died who might have been saved if we had got him to the hospital in time. The other three were afterwards arrested by the army and taken away(...) I had been spent some time in Jenin in March, and got to know some people quite well. I had not been here in April, when the big horrors happened. At that time I had been in Ramallah, besieged inside Arafat's compound. I am not sure it had been the right decision to concentrate all the internationals there. When I got back here in May I found that two of my friends had been killed, they both bled to death. I am haunted by the thought that if I had been here at the time, going with the ambulances as I am doing now, I might have saved them. (...) The behaviour of the army seems rather erratic. They go out of the city and in again, there does not seem to be any clear pattern. So far they did not carry out large-scale arrests, though the inhabitants are expecting it to happen soon and of course it makes the people very nervous and insecure. Sometimes the tanks are in one neighborhood, then in the next. Sometimes they enforce the curfew, sometimes they don't. Sometimes they shoot at people which they find in the street without announcing a curfew first. The people just never know what to expect. The people in the refugee camp observe the curfew less than those in Jenin proper, perhaps because they had been through so many terrible hardships already that they became totally fatalistic, perhaps just because despite the widespread destruction there are still in the refugee camp many narrow alleys which provide people some shelter from the tanks. (...) There is very much random shooting going on. The other day, I passed two tanks which were just shooting into the empty streets. Nobody was shooting at them and they did not seem to aim at anything in particular, just a few shots here and a few there completely at random. I managed to ask one of the soldiers why they were doing this. He said 'We are shooting at buildings, not at people'. When I remarked that there were people inside the buildings who could be hurt, he just said 'You can be sure that we know what we are doing', and refused to talk further."