Rifat kassis
Human Rights Advocate
RIFAT KASSIS
wed, 9 september 2009
18h30 for 19h00
Afro-Middle East Centre(AMEC)
Call: Moss – 082 809 8533 Read More »Rifat kassis
Israel steals body parts Palestinians
By Khalid Amayreh
(source: IOL)
"I don’t know for sure why they are refusing to hand him over to us to bury him,” Fawzi told IOL about the body of his slain son.
RAMALLAH – The controversy triggered by a Swedish newspaper report about Israel’s harvesting of Palestinian organs has salted the wounds of many Palestinian families haunted by the memories of loved ones who suffered the same fate.
“They claimed they came to arrest him, but in truth they came to murder him, which they did,” Walid Masalmeh, a resident of the small West Bank town of Dura, 10 kilometer west of Al-Khalil (Hebron), said about his relative Bassam.
In 1995, Bassam was killed by the Israeli army at the village of Beit Awwa, located near the former armistice line between the West Bank and what is now Israel.
“But 24 hours later they returned the body with a huge scar running from the chin to the lower abdomen,” Walid remembers.“They took all the vital organs, including the heart, kidneys, Liver. Then they stuffed the empty cavities with garbage before sewing him up.”
Several other Palestinians gave a similar narrative, recounting how they received the bodies of their murdered relatives, mostly men in their early twenties, with vital organs taken away by the Israeli authorities.Israeli occupation authorities don’t deny that the bodies of victims were returned to their respective families minus the internal organs, but claim that the organs were disposed of as part of routine autopsy operations.
The elders view of the middle east
By Jimmy Carter
(source: Washington Post)
During the past 16 months I have visited the Middle East four times and met with leaders in Israel, Egypt, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Syria, the West Bank and Gaza. I was in Damascus when President Obama made his historic speech in Cairo, which raised high hopes among the more-optimistic Israelis and Palestinians, who recognize that his insistence on a total freeze of settlement expansion is the key to any acceptable peace agreement or any positive responses toward Israel from Arab nations.
Late last month I traveled to the region with a group of "Elders," including Archbishop Desmond Tutu, former presidents Fernando Henrique Cardoso of Brazil and Mary Robinson of Ireland, former prime minister Gro Brundtland of Norway and women’s activist Ela Bhatt of India. Three of us had previously visited Gaza, which is now a walled-in ghetto inhabited by 1.6 million Palestinians, 1.1 million of whom are refugees from Israel and the West Bank and receive basic humanitarian assistance from the United Nations Relief and Works Agency. Israel prevents any cement, lumber, seeds, fertilizer and hundreds of other needed materials from entering through Gaza’s gates. Some additional goods from Egypt reach Gaza through underground tunnels. Gazans cannot produce their own food nor repair schools, hospitals, business establishments or the 50,000 homes that were destroyed or heavily damaged by Israel’s assault last January.
We found a growing sense of concern and despair among those who observe, as we did, that settlement expansion is continuing apace, rapidly encroaching into Palestinian villages, hilltops, grazing lands, farming areas and olive groves. There are more than 200 of these settlements in the West Bank.
An even more disturbing expansion is taking place in Palestinian East Jerusalem. Three months ago I visited a family who had lived for four generations in their small, recently condemned home. They were laboring to destroy it themselves to avoid much higher costs if Israeli contractors carried out the demolition order. On Aug. 27, we Elders took a gift of food to 18 members of the Hanoun family, recently evicted from their home of 65 years. The Hanouns, including six children, are living on the street, while Israeli settlers have moved into their confiscated dwelling.
Israels war on Palestine
By Brian Cloughley
(source:intifada-palestine.com)
Israel’s war on the Palestinians will continue with the support of Washington. Obama is a good, decent man. But with enemies like AIPAC and its Congressional pawns, he hasn’t a hope of achieving justice for Palestinians in the occupied territories of their own country
President Obama is trying to find a way out of the Israel-Palestine predicament. He can’t resolve it, because that is beyond anyone except Israelis, and they are not going to permit the problem to be dealt with in accordance with international law and human decency. Such a course would mean that Israelis would have to evacuate the 121 settlements, housing over a quarter of a million people, and scores of “outposts” they have built illegally on Arab-owned land.
Aluf Benn, editor-at-large of Israel’s Haaretz newspaper, observed in a recent New York Times opinion piece that “as far as most Israelis are concerned, Mr Obama has made a mistake in focusing on a settlement freeze. For starters, mainstream Israelis rarely have anything to do with the settlements; many have no idea where they are, even when they’re a half-hour’s drive from Tel Aviv.”
The obvious riposte to this is that “mainstream Israelis” most certainly should know the locations of the illegal settlements. To Benn it seems that because “most Israelis” are ignorant of the whereabouts of stolen Palestinian lands, then President Obama “is mistaken” to propose a settlement freeze. What nonsense.