Gideon Levy . Halloween Came Early This Year for Palestinians in Isawiyah
It was an operation
aimed at improving the inhabitants’ quality of life and perhaps it
might even be defined by those who led it as a humanitarian operation.
In the dark of night, hundreds of Border Police and members of the
regular police force who participated in it, accompanied by K-9 dogs,
brutally invaded the homes of hundreds of inhabitants, pulled 51 of them
out of their beds, cuffed their hands behind their backs and took them
to detention, without an explanation.
According to Amer Aruri, a field researcher for the B’Tselem
human rights organization, 25 of the arrestees were minors. Their
parents stood for hours this week, anxious and frightened, at the
entrance to the police lockup in Jerusalem’s Russian Compound, waiting
for signs of life from their children. Presumably the arrests of their
children were also aimed at improving their quality of life.
On
the night between Sunday and Monday, the forces invaded. According to a
police press release, Operation 700 was a combined effort that included
police as well as municipal personnel, detentions as well as
improvement of the city’s appearance, collection of taxes as well as a
search for drug dealers, arrests of stone-throwers as well as removal of
piles of trash, and eradication of graffiti as well as removal of signs
that endangered the lives of locals. In short, Halloween in Isawiyah, a
well-to-do and tumultuous East Jerusalem
neighborhood (called a village by its inhabitants), located on Mount
Scopus at the foot of Hadassah University Hospital and across from the
Hebrew University campus. It was here only last week that parents
refused to send their children to class due to Israeli police activity
near the neighborhood’s school.When we arrived during the day on Monday,
people thronged the streets and everyone was grateful to the police,
the Border Police and the other occupation forces for their devoted
action the previous night. Just to make certain that the rejoicing would
not spill out beyond the borders of the merry neighborhood, police
forces manned all its entrances, performing random security checks on
those who entered or left.
A
member of Isawiyah’s neighborhood committee, Mohammad Abu Hummus, told
us that such operations are conducted toward the end of every year, and
their main aim is for the tax authorities and the Jerusalem Municipality
to collect residents’ accumulated debts.
The
morning after the nighttime operation, we followed in the fighters’
footsteps to visit some of the homes they had invaded. At the edge of
the neighborhood, beneath the fence surrounding the hospital, live
members of the extended Darwish family. Tareq Darwish opened the door to
his home in an undershirt, revealing muscles and tattoos on his arms.
He is a 44-year-old bus driver, the father of six, who had gone to sleep
the previous night at 1 A.M. About two hours later, he tells us, he and
his wife Tahrir were awoken by loud banging on the door of their
first-floor apartment. By the time he gathered his wits about him, two
Border Policemen were already standing in his living room. They came in
through the back door, which hadn’t been locked. Four more Border
Policemen and two civilians were standing at the front door, accompanied
by a police dog.
“Are you Tareq?” they asked him. “We are the police. We want Yusuf.”
Yusuf is the couple’s 21-year-old son.
“Why are you asking about Yusuf,” asked Tareq.
“We have a court warrant for his arrest. He is wanted for questioning.”
The
policemen showed Tareq the warrant. Yusuf was detained for a week about
three years ago on suspicion of having thrown stones. Now he was still
asleep in the room he shares with his 11-year-old sister, Tala.
Yusuf had gone out the previous night and had come home only a short while beforehand.
Tala
awoke with a start: A dog and armed policemen were moving around in her
room. The youngest child, Darwish, 4, kept sleeping in the adjacent
room.
The
police told Yusuf they were taking him in and ordered him to get
dressed. His sisters Batool, 16, and Hadil, 13, woke up in alarm. Their
father tried to calm them, telling them the police had just come to take
Yusuf. They bound the young man’s hands behind his back with plastic
handcuffs and went out into the darkness. Every so often, a police
helicopter lit up the sky over Isawiyah.
The
policemen and dog were in Tareq and Tahrir’s home for less than half an
hour. They conducted a brief search, did not cause any damage to
property and did not explain why Yusuf was under suspicion. On Monday,
Tahrir went to the Russian Compound and tried (in vain) to see her son
and find out what had happened to him. Tareq stayed home with the other
children.
Tareq’s
uncle, Uthman, 55, lives on the floor above them with his wife Jihad,
48, and their family. After the police left Tareq’s house with Yusuf,
the police went up to the second floor. The apartment here is full of
decorative objects – animals sculpted from wood, ceramics and glass
items.
The
furniture in the living room and the kitchen equipment are modern, and
signal wealth. A photograph of Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah hangs
in the kitchen, next to the refrigerator.
Jihad
wears a head scarf and traditional clothing. When we stop by, she tells
us Uthman had gone to the Russian Compound that morning to find out
what had happened to their youngest son, Amir – a 15-year-old
10th-grader whom the police had also arrested. The forces had arrived
just before 4 A.M., after having finished their business downstairs.
Suffering from anxiety
Uthman
and Jihad Darwish have five children. Their son Fadi, 23, has been in
prison, having served five months of a nine-month sentence for
stone-throwing, after having previously been on probation for a similar
offense. Jihad had gone to sleep at around 11 P.M. on Sunday night and
woke up to the sight of six Border Policemen and a dog in her living
room.
In
this case, too, the police had come in through the back door, which was
unlocked; two men in civilian clothing accompanied the force. Jihad
says she hadn’t heard a thing before that: not the noise of the
helicopter circling overhead, nor the policemen who had entered the home
of Tareq downstairs. What awakened her were the shouts outside:
“Darwish, Darwish!” One of the men in civilian clothing asked her: “Why
did you leave the back door open?” And she replied: “If you leave the
house, I will lock it.”
The
Border Policemen went into the bedroom where Amir and his 21-year-old
brother Rami (who recently returned to his parents’ home after
separating from his wife) were sleeping, and asked Jihad which of them
was Amir, ordering her to wake him because they were taking him in.
“Just
last week you arrested him,” she told them and they responded, “Today
we won’t take him to the police station near the post office. Today we
are taking him to interrogation room No. 4 at the Russian Compound.”
Amir
had been arrested the previous month on suspicion of stone-throwing and
detained for five days. His mother said that after his release, he had
suffered from anxiety for about two weeks, withdrew to his room and only
slept in his parents’ bed, even sleeping a lot during the day.
This time, he awoke in his bed to the sight of the police and a dog. He told his mother he thought he was dreaming.
Jihad
helped her son get dressed; the police dog was barking at him. She says
Amir did not show his emotions and appeared not to be alarmed, but she
is very worried about him. She says the police did not show her an
arrest warrant and did not explain why they were taking him. Nor did she
ask. The police handcuffed Amir from behind and took him away.
A
report entitled “Unprotected: The Detention of Palestinian Teenagers in
East Jerusalem,” which was published this month by B’Tselem and Hamoked
– Center for the Defense of the Individual, states that the authorities
violate the rights of hundreds of East Jerusalem teens who are arrested
every year.
From
16 sworn statements taken during the preparation of the report, it
emerges that the youths are invariably wrested out of their beds and
questioned without prior consultation with a lawyer and without the
presence of their parents, as required by law. The right to remain
silent is often not explained to them, and they are not even told what
the suspicions against them are. They are detained in harsh conditions,
with their remand extended time after time, even after the interrogation
has ended.
The
authors of the report see these violations as part of an overall policy
that aims to encourage residents of East Jerusalem to leave the city.
The
Isawiyah Facebook page lists the names of the 51 residents who were
arrested early Monday morning. Some were released later on Monday, while
others were brought to court this week to have their remand extended.
For
her part, Jihad, who is usually a very reserved woman, says she wants
Israelis to know what happened on Sunday night in her home, which was
not damaged by the intruders.
However,
there was slight damage in an apartment down the street, at the home of
Amira Darwish and her daughters. When we arrived, the women of the
house were busy washing the carpets and hanging them out to dry on the
balcony. Grandmom Amira, 72, is away at a family wedding in the United
States. This morning, they had already managed to repair the door to her
room after Border Policemen had burst in to conduct a search.
The
bed in Amira’s room has been turned upside down and the contents of the
closets scattered over the floor. It was toward the end of Operation
700 when the forces arrived here, at 8:30 A.M.
The
women here say the police told them they were looking for drugs. They
were searching for their nephew, Mohammed, but he was already at work in
Beit Shemesh. He was due to go in for police questioning on Tuesday.
The
Jerusalem Police District provided this statement on their website:
“Hundreds of police and Border Police forces acted on the night between
Sunday and Monday in Isawiyah, in the context of Operation 700, as part
of an extensive and combined police operation to locate and arrest
persons who disturb the peace, in addition to a wide-ranging enforcement
effort, while improving the quality of life of residents of the
neighborhood. The arrests of the 51 suspects were carried out in
parallel with the involvement of municipality personnel, who operated in
the area to dispose of accumulations of trash and safety hazards,
remove signs that were hanging in a way that endangers pedestrians,
erasing graffiti and dealing with street lighting. ... All those
arrested were brought in for continued investigation in the district’s
units. Later they will come before the court.”
Pictures of municipal workers painting crosswalks in Isawiyah accompany the statement on the Israel Police website.
Commenti
Posta un commento