Jewish Boat to Gaza overpowered and captured by Israeli Navy: Jewish Boat to Gaza
1. Arrival in Ashdod and possible release
The passengers and crew of the Irene arrived the port of Ashdod in Israel in the custody of the Israeli Navy.
The Irene, which was towed into port by Israeli Navy boats, was met by a group of peaceful protestors on the beach of Ashdod port. The Israeli passengers and crew were separated from the foreign nationals (from the UK, USA and Germany) aboard the boat. The Israelis were questioned in Ashdod, whilst the foreign nationals were taken to Holon.
The legal team have visited the Israelis and have reported to us that the most of them were treated well, although Yonatan and Itamar, were separated and taken onto a Naval boat, where Yonatan was tasered, and both Yonatan and Itamar were restrained with handcuffs before being led off. Yonatan is now doing well, as is Reuven, who there was great concern about as he does suffer from a heart condition.
The lawyer reports that the Israeli members of the crew will be released today, although all their phones and cameras have been confiscated in case they contain images that may be a security risk. It may take up to two weeks to return them.
The lawyer is now on route to Holon, to visit with the foreign nationals. We have received reports that the UK members of the crew refused Consular advice and support so that they would not be deported until they had confirmed the safe release of the Israeli nationals from the Irene. The FCO confirmed that support will still be available to them if they require it.
It is believed that all the crew and passengers will be released tonight, but we will let you know when we have official confirmation.
The foreign nationals are being held by the Israeli Immigration Police (OZ) at Hatzoref 5 in Holon, if any journalists or well wishers in the area would like to go and support their release.
FURTHER UPDATE SINCE THE TIME OF WRITING THIS
2. Foreign Nationals denied access to their legal representatives
We have just received a call from the legal team in Israel.
The lawyers had made all the necessary negotiations and had all the required paperwork required to visit the foreign nationals held by the Israeli Immigration Police (OZ) at Hatzoref 5 in Holon.
When the legal team arrived, they were told that they needed to submit a formal request via fax in order to visit them. The legal team’s office then sent through a fax request but it was rejected (we are not currently clear why it was refused but will report more as we hear it).
The legal team were then advised to contact the Israeli Foreign Office, however the Foreign Office has currently refused to speak to them. We are currently phoning the relevant Consuls and Embassies to inform them that there are foreign nationals who are being held by the OZ and are being refused access to their legal representatives.
If you want to help, please contact the Foreign Office in the UK, USA and Germany and their Embassies or Consulates in Israel and state your concern that there are citizens being held by the Israeli Immigration Police OZ without access to their legal representatives.
Israeli navy diverts Gaza-bound yacht: The Guardian
Naval personnel board boat carrying 10 Jewish activists who were trying to break sea blockade
Jewish activists leaving Cyprus yesterday on their Gaza-bound yacht which was forcibly diverted by the Israeli navy today. Photograph: Reuters
The Israeli navy today boarded a yacht carrying 10 Jewish activists who were attempting to break the sea blockade around Gaza, forcibly diverting the vessel to the nearby port of Ashdod.
“There was no resistance, no violence,” an Israeli military spokeswoman said. “Before we boarded, we twice asked the captain not to cross the international line into Gaza waters but he refused.”
Contact with the passengers and crew via satellite phone was cut off.
The boat, the Irene, sailing under a British flag, was carrying 10 Jewish passengers and crew from Israel, Britain, the US and Germany.
It was also carrying cargo, including medical supplies, fishing equipment, textbooks and children’s toys, which the Israeli authorities said they would transfer to Gaza by land from Ashdod.
Shortly before the takeover, Miri Weingarten, media adviser to the Irene, spoke to the British captain, Glynn Secker. He reported that the boat was flanked by a small military boat bearing machine guns and a naval frigate, with which he was in contact.
The crew and passengers were warned that they were close to restricted waters and would not be allowed to proceed. They were told the Israeli passengers would be held legally liable.
Secker reported that the mood on board the Irene was high-spirited. All on board had pledged to resist the Israeli troops passively rather than physically.
Among the passengers are an Israeli Holocaust survivor, an Israeli whose daughter was killed in a suicide bombing in 1997, and a former Israeli air force pilot.
The boat’s sponsors include the UK organisation Jews for Justice for Palestinians, which is supported by Marion Kozak, the mother of the Labour leader, Ed Miliband.
The interception comes almost four months after Israeli naval commandos boarded a flotilla of ships to prevent it reaching the Gaza Strip, which has been under blockade by Israel for over three years. Nine Turkish activists were killed in the bloody assault, on 31 May.
The Irene is the first boat to get close to Gaza since the May flotilla despite a number of pledges to send aid by sea to the besieged territory. The Free Gaza Movement, which helped organise the flotilla, is planning a further attempt this autumn.
Since the assault on the flotilla, Israel has agreed, under international pressure, to ease the blockade of Gaza, allowing in a wide range of food and goods. However, badly needed construction materials are still limited, exports are still banned, and there is no free movement of people from Gaza into Israel.
Netanyahu is failing to create a climate for peace: Haaretz Editorial
The wealth of experience that has accrued since the Oslo Accord was signed 17 years ago shows that peace is not made at festive ceremonies, and formal agreements alone do not ensure reconciliation. Leaders need the support of their people to generate change.
The construction freeze in the settlements was intended to convince Palestinians that Israel really intends to end its occupation of the territories. The wealth of experience that has accrued since the Oslo Accord was signed 17 years ago shows that peace is not made at festive ceremonies, and formal agreements alone do not ensure reconciliation. Leaders need the support of their people to generate change.
The Palestinian leadership, headed by President Mahmoud Abbas and Prime Minister Salam Fayyad, has been impressively successful at persuading Palestinians to abandon the armed struggle in favor of an effort to create a flourishing civil society. But after many years of living under occupation and violence, the Palestinians will need quite some time to achieve economic, and especially employment, independence.
Until then, thousands of Palestinian breadwinners from the West Bank will have to continue seeking work in Israel. Today, some 25,000 Palestinians have permits to work in Israel (and about an equal number work in the settlements). Every morning, they get up early to get to building sites and fields throughout Israel.
Over the last few weeks, Haaretz journalist Avi Issacharoff and photographer Daniel Bar-On have documented the disgraceful conditions at the Qalandiyah and Bethlehem checkpoints into Israel. Many Palestinians reach these crossings only after being delayed for security checks at one of dozens of internal checkpoints all over the West Bank.
Defense officials say that only a negligible number of terror attacks have been carried out by Palestinian laborers who entered Israel legally. And Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu talks a great deal about the importance of “economic peace,” by which he means that improving the lives of residents of the territories is the best guarantee of peace and security.
Netanyahu should therefore order the defense establishment to allocate the necessary resources, and to provide clear instructions to its people on how to behave, so as to ease passage from the West Bank into Israel and treat our neighbors with respect. A change of attitude toward the Palestinians is an essential condition for peace and reconciliation.
EDITOR: Israel operates web destructve software!
The new unit of the Israeli army seems to attack again in the viral world of the ethernet:
Welcome to the 1 October edition: The Guardian Weekly
Is state-sponsored cyber attack the new front for warfare? How Facebook users felt when the site went out. Sunshine amid the rains brings laughter and sharing in Bhutan. And we listen to you on sports coverage.
The “most refined pieces of malware ever discovered” are quietly at work undermining critical infrastructure in some of the world’s most volatile places. So say security experts as they describe the Stuxnet computer worm, which is believed to be targeting industrial complexes, one of them thought to be nuclear, mostly in Iran. To make things worse, some of these experts believe the destructive software is the product of a national government – the suggestion is Israel.
A state-sponsored cyber attack? It could be espionage on a new front, and an indication of the way warfare may well be waged in the future.
In keeping with that front-page technology theme, our finance page profiles entrepreneur Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook founder, who has morphed from college geek to social supremo. We also report on the evening Facebook vanished from the web. Were you bereft? On the lighter side, our comment page details the rules of internet friendship and how virtual economies could alter global labour markets.
The review section visits Africa, and ten infants first profiled by the Guardian five years ago. One is thriving, one has died and the others struggle daily. The Guardian will follow the fates of this group through to 2015, the target set for achieving the United Nations’ millennium development goals.
Our Letter From column is exceptionally good this week. It’s a slice of life from Bhutan, where a rare day of sunshine during the rainy season inspires a spirit of laughter and sharing.
From south-east Asia, we look at the Green School in Bali, where youngsters learn how to lead a sustainable life. And Nature watch takes us to Wenlock Edge, where, as autumn creeps across Britain, the land is bothered by the plough.
On the books pages, our reviewer welcomes a devastating inquiry into the Vatican child abuse scandal. Shortcuts reports that Canada’s Inuit and their seal skins may save Scotland’s traditional sporran.
Finally, in the sports section, after several weeks of testing out different columns and copy, we bring you both the Sports Roundup and a rather cheeky blogpost, this week in the form Guardian columnist Marina Hyde. Thanks to all the readers who emailed about the way in which we use this space. I enjoyed the conversation. Please feel free to sign in and leave comments on the end of this item.
Mahmoud Abbas delays decision on whether to quit Middle East peace talks: The Guardian
Palestinians will consult the Arab League before reacting to Israel’s refusal to extend the West Bank settlement freeze
Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian president, signalled yesterday that he will not rush to decide whether to abandon peace talks after Israel refused to renew a temporary freeze on settlement construction in the occupied West Bank.
Speaking in Paris, Abbas said there would be no “quick reactions” before he consults the Arab League next week. “After this series of meetings, we might publish a position that clears up the position of the Palestinian and Arab people after Israel has refused to freeze settlements,” he told reporters, after talks with the French president, Nicolas Sarkozy.
An extension for “three or four months” would give the sides a chance to discuss the core issues, Abbas added.
Sarkozy said he “deplored the decision to resume settlement construction just as the talks were finally and concretely under way”. William Hague, the foreign secretary, meeting his Israeli counterpart, Avigdor Lieberman, at the UN in New York, said he was “very disappointed”. George Mitchell, the US special envoy, is due back in Jerusalem today to seek a way out of the crisis.
Abbas’s caution reflects the high stakes following the Israeli prime minister’s failure to extend a 10-month moratorium on building. Abbas and other Palestinian spokesmen had warned that they could not negotiate unless it was renewed.
Direct negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians were relaunched under US auspices this month with an ambitious pledge by President Barack Obama to reach agreement within a year. Expectations for success have been low, but collapse at this early stage would be a grave blow to US prestige and risk a slide into violence on the ground.
Abbas’s plans to consult foreign ministers of the 22-member Arab League in Cairo next Monday will mean a big diplomatic role for Egypt and Jordan, which have peace treaties with Israel, as well as for Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states, which do not. All have insisted a settlement freeze is a test of Israeli intentions.
Hamas, the Islamist movement which controls Gaza and opposes talks with Israel, is also piling pressure on Abbas. “I call on my brothers at the Palestinian Authority, who had stated they would not pursue talks with the enemy [Israel] if it continued settlement construction, to hold to their promise,” said Khaled Mishal, the movement’s Damascus-based leader. “To negotiate without a position of strength is absurd.”
The US is pressing Syria to resume peace talks with Israel as part of its push for broad settlement between Arab countries and Israel. The US secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, met the Syrian foreign minister, Walid al-Moallem, to push for negotiations. The State Department said Clinton was the first secretary of state to meet Syria’s top diplomat in three years, although special Mideast envoy George Mitchell has made several visits to Syria in the past year.
On the West Bank, the al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade, the armed wing of Abbas’s Fatah movement, has already threatened to teach Israeli settlers “unforgettable lessons” if construction resumes. Four settlers were killed before talks resumed.
Israeli media reported that bulldozers had started work at the settlement of Ariel near Nablus. Ground-levelling was also under way in settlements near Ramallah and Hebron. But Israeli settlers were being urged to avoid provocative actions.
EDITOR: Al Ahram Weekly is back!
After three weeks of being off air, AHW has returned to the virtual world! The fallout of the PhotoshopGate is yet to be discussed fully.
Talks now uncertain: Al Ahram Weekly
Israeli-Palestinian talks once again appear on the brink of collapse over the illegal settlements, writes Khaled Amayreh i n Ramallah
Israel and the Palestinian Authority (PA) continue to assert near diametrically opposed stances with regards to virtually all core issues, including conditions for the continuation of talks.
This week, PA President Mahmoud Abbas, who is coming under a hail of criticisms from Palestinian and Arab quarters for succumbing to Israeli and American bullying, has warned that he won’t continue “a single day” of direct peace talks with Israel if the latter refuses to extend an eight-month settlement expansion freeze, due to expire next week.
Abbas was quoted as saying that talks will only continue as long as the settlement freeze continues. Abbas reiterated his uncharacteristically strong stance after colleagues in Fatah and the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) warned that they wouldn’t be able to support continued talks with Israel while settlement expansion in the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, was underway.
Abbas’s colleagues in the Fatah and PLO executive committees argued that conducting peace talks with Israel in the shadow of Jewish settlement expansion would make a mockery of the PA and the entire Palestinian cause and portray the PA as “being subservient to Israel and the US and oblivious to Palestinian national interests”.
Abbas’s statements came a day after Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu said Israel would resume settlement building in the West Bank and occupied East Jerusalem upon the expiry of the settlement freeze 26 September.
While Netanyahu continues to insist on Palestinian recognition of Israel as a Jewish state, Palestinians interpret a formal recognition of Israel as a Jewish state to imply a total or semi-total negation of the right of return for more than five million Palestinian refugees, uprooted from their homes and villages in 1948 in what is now Israel. Moreover, such recognition could also imply giving Israel the right to expel the large Palestinian minority in Israel that constitutes more than 23 per cent of the overall population.
In addition to demands for recognition of the “Jewishness” of Israel, Netanyahu has once again said that in the context of any final peace agreement with the Palestinians Israel must have the right to deploy forces along the Jordan River. The Palestinians reject this demand on the grounds that such a deployment would nullify Palestinian sovereignty and allow Israel to perpetuate its occupation and control of the West Bank.
In addition to the main sticking point, namely vowing to resume settlement activities, Israeli officials have introduced the so-called “Pollard affair” as one more bargaining chip in talks with the Palestinians. Although the Palestinians have nothing to do with the US imprisonment of Israeli spy Jonathan Pollard, jailed in 1987 for spying for Israel, Israel has consistently demanded that he be freed in return for concessions to the Palestinians, such as releasing Palestinian political prisoners languishing in Israeli jails, as if the US is somehow in league with Hamas.
This week, unnamed sources in the Israeli prime minister’s office reported that Netanyahu had already approached Washington with a deal to continue the moratorium on settlement construction in the West Bank for another three months in return for the release of Jonathan Pollard. Israeli sources said Netanyahu would seek to convince the Americans that releasing Pollard would help the Israel government sell concessions pertaining to the settlement freeze to members of his cabinet and also to the settlers.
Meanwhile, hawkish Israeli Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman has been calling for the ethnic cleansing of Israel’s non-Jewish — especially Arab — citizens if the latter don’t recognise the supremacy of Jews over non-Jews in Israel. One Arab leader, a former member of the Israel Knesset, retorted: “We were here hundreds of years before this Ashkenazi thug immigrated to our land from a distant land a few years ago. Besides, it is obvious that Lieberman is trying to mimic and even emulate the Nazis who also demanded that German Jews recognise the mastery of Germans over non- Germans throughout Germany.”
Palestinian sources close to the peace talks have intimated that Israel is planning to introduce a host of “red herring” issues in order to confuse and exhaust Palestinian negotiators. These distractions reportedly include compensation for “Jewish refugees” from the Arab world and the possibility of placing them on an equal footing with Palestinian refugees, and purging Arab textbooks of “anti-Semitism”. For the Palestinians, such demands are simply Israeli propaganda stunts.
Jewish Gaza-bound activists: IDF used excessive force in naval raid: Haaretz
Activists aboard Gaza-bound ship ‘Irene’ counter IDF version that the vessel was taken over in a peaceful manner.
Israel Defense Forces soldiers used excessive force while taking over a Gaza-bound aid ship organized by Jewish and Israeli activists, the boat’s passengers said Tuesday, countering the military’s official version claiming that the takeover had been uneventful.
A boat with 9 Jewish activists aboard sets sail from Famagusta harbor in the Turkish-occupied north of ethnically divided Cyprus in a bid to breach Israel’s blockade of Gaza, Sept. 26, 2010
Photo by: AP
Earlier Tuesday the IDF reported that Israeli naval commandos peacefully boarded the Jewish aid boat attempting to break a naval blockade on Gaza, saying “IDF naval forces recently boarded the yacht ‘Irene’, and it is currently being led to the Ashdod seaport along with its passengers.”
However, testimonies by passengers who were released from police questioning later in the day seemed to counter the IDF’s claims, with Israeli activist and former Israel Air Force pilot Yonatan Shapira saying that there were “no words to describe what we went through during the takeover.”
Shapira said the activists, who he said displayed no violence, were met with extreme IDF brutality, adding that the soldiers “just jumped us, and hit us. I was hit with a taser gun.”
“Some of the soldiers treated us atrociously,” Shapira said, adding that he felt there was a “huge gap between what the IDF spokesman is saying happened and what really happened.”
The former IAF pilot said he and his fellow activists were “proud of the mission,” saying it was organized “for the sake of a statement – that the siege on Gaza is a crime, that it’s immoral, un-Jewish, and we have a moral obligation to speak out. Anyone who stays silent as this crime is being committed is an accessory to a crime.”
Eli Usharov, a reporter for Israel’s Channel 10 affirmed Shapira’s version of the events, telling Haaretz that the takeover was executed with unnecessary brutality.
“They used a taser gun against Yonatan. He screamed and was dragged to the military boat,” Usharov said, adding that both Yonatan and his brother Itamar were handcuffed.
The Channel 10 reporter also said that the activists managed to have a serious heart-to-heart conversation with the troops once they were all placed on board the military vessel, and that “overall the atmosphere was good.”
Reuben Moscowitz, a Holocaust survivor who took part in the mission, expressed his disbelief that “Israeli soldiers would treat nine Jews this way. They just hit people.”
“I as a Holocaust survivor cannot live with the fact that the State of Israel is imprisoning an entire people behind fences,” Moscowitz said, adding that “it’s just immoral.”
“What happened to me in the Holocaust wakes me up every night and I hope we don’t do the same thing to our neighbors,” Moscowitz said, adding that he was comparing “what I went through during the Holocaust to what the besieged Palestinian children are going through.”
Israel kills as it talks: Al Ahram Weekly
Even while peace talks shakily resume, Israeli forces attack and kill unarmed Palestinians, writes Khaled Amayreh in the West Bank
Palestinians protest against the Israeli-Palestinian negotiations, in the West Bank city of Nablus, last week
Israeli occupation forces have killed a Palestinian man in the northern West Bank in what eyewitnesses and neighbours described as “a cold-blooded murder” and “extrajudicial” execution.
The murder took place at the Noor Shams Refugee Camp on 17 September in an area that is supposed to be under the control of the Palestinian Authority (PA).
The family of Eyad Abu Shilbaneh said Israeli soldiers showered the 38-year-old Islamic political activist with bullets, even though he posed no threat to the soldiers.
“He was just waking up from sleep, he was unarmed and he showed no resistance; they could have arrested him had they wanted to,” said his wife. “They came to assassinate him, not to arrest him.”
Israeli authorities have not denied Mrs Abu Shilbaneh’s account completely. An Israeli army spokesman acknowledged that the man was unarmed and that he posed no threat to the soldiers. However, the spokesman claimed that the kept his hands to his back, which raised the soldiers’ suspicion. The spokesman was silent when asked why the soldiers didn’t just “neutralise” him instead of killing him.
Hamas castigated the “evil murder,” saying that the victim was an oblation, or kind of offering, to the resumption of futile peace talks between Israel and the PA. “This crime aims at eradicating resistance against the Israeli occupation in order to pave the road for carrying out a larger conspiracy against the Palestinian people,” said Sami Abu Zuhri, a leading Hamas spokesman in the Gaza Strip.
Abu Zuhri said Hamas would respond to the “the gruesome crime” which he said would never succeed in breaking the will of Palestinian resistance.
While PA officials, including Western-backed Prime Minister Salam Fayyad, denounced the assassination as counterproductive to the “peace process”, Hamas accused the Fatah-dominated Ramallah-based government of colluding with Israel in carrying out the killing. “The assassination of Shelbaneh also reveals the ugly face of the Fatah authority which is collaborating with the occupation in killing him,” said Hamas in a leaflet.
Similarly, the Jihad organisation made the same accusation, saying that the assassination was “committed under the cover of negotiations with Israel and amid PA efforts to harass the men of the resistance.”
Thousands of people from the Tulkarem area took part in Abu Shelbaneh’s funeral, which observers suggest showed that Hamas was still a popular movement in the West Bank. For their part, PA security agencies deployed dozens of agents to photograph and film participants in the procession, probably to arrest and interrogate them later.
On Monday, 20 September, the PA security apparatus detained and reportedly mistreated Abdel-Rahman Zeidan, a Palestinian MP representing Hamas’s political arm. According to reliable sources, PA soldiers raided Zeidan’s home, vandalised furniture and used abusive language during the raid.
According to Palestinian law, MPs are supposed to enjoy “immunity” from arrest and abuse by the security agencies. A PA spokesman admitted that, “No arrest warrant has been issued against MP Zeidan.” The “abduction” of Zeidan was strongly condemned by Palestinian Legislative Council Speaker Aziz Duweik, who called on Arab parliamentarians to condemn the harsh treatment being meted out to their colleagues in the West Bank at the hands of the PA that receives hundreds of millions of dollars in aid from Arab states.
The PA has lately stepped up persecution of Islamist MPs, mainly as a reprisal for the strengthening of Hamas’s rule in the Gaza Strip. Local and human rights sources spoke of “provocative raids” on Islamist MPs’ homes and unjustified arrests of near relatives. An especially ugly incident of this nature occurred recently in the small town of Shoyokh near Hebron when PA troops raided the home of MP Samira Halayqa, arresting her son and later her husband who were placed in solitary confinement for several weeks.
Ordinary citizens in the West Bank wonder why the Palestinian security agencies don’t face the Israeli occupation army or even protect themselves when attacked by Israeli troops. The latest killing at Noor Shams was the latest of a series of murderous crimes committed by the Israeli army against Palestinian civilians. Last week, the Israeli army murdered a 90- year-old Gazan and his teenage nephew who were tilling their land not far from the border fence between Israel and the Gaza Strip.
Indeed, thousands of Palestinians, mostly innocent civilians, have been killed knowingly and deliberately by the Israeli army during the past few years. Only a few soldiers have been disciplined for the killings. Meantime, the outgoing Israeli chief of staff, Gabi Ashkenazi, has warned that violent “clashes” could break out between Israeli occupation forces and Palestinian resistance activists if peace talks collapse.
Ashkenazi, speaking before the Knesset Foreign Affairs and Defence Committee, told lawmakers, “We must be prepared for every possibility. The Palestinians have very sober expectations regarding progress, whereas in Israel, tensions exist among the Jewish population and the aspiration to end the construction freeze in settlements.”