David Rolstone's Letters from Palestine

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Monday, 12 January 2004 - Jeeps

Hi Jane and All,

It has been a few days since I last wrote a report but that unfortunately does not mean that the Army has given up the operation here in Nablus. On the contrary the violence has continued daily, earlier in the week the Israeli army said that it had not finished its operation in Nablus and it would continue. So every day the army has entered the city distributing leaflets calling for the wanted men to give themselves up, people have been shot and killed each time. Three days ago a jeep suddenly arrived at our end of Balata camp as we were about to leave for Nablus, it just parked in the road doing nothing. At the other end of the camp I could see lots of smoke in the sky. Two of us decided to stay and watch the jeep and Erik and myself went to investigate the smoke. When we arrived we could see that a tank was pouring out smoke and covering the Mosque in a dense cloud of evil smelling smoke. From where we were we could not tell what was happening so we moved through the back alleys and came out above the tank. As far as we could tell there was nothing going on and although the tank was supported by jeeps they did not seem to be deploying troops. Eventually we made our way up on to the roof of a house to see if we could see if there were more tanks on Jerusalem road as people had said there were. There was only one solitary jeep. We then returned to our house to find that that jeep was now right outside surrounded by black engine oil. At first I assumed that it had been thrown at the jeep by the children, the jeeps engine sounded very rough and was making a lot of noise. When it finally tried to drive away the engine stalled and would not restart! All the engine oil had run out. They were in need of rescue and obviously feeling very vulnerable as they started shooting with live ammunition wounding two people; one in the leg and one in the shoulder. Another jeep arrived and laid down a smoke screen, when it cleared we could see that the jeep had inadvertently been towed into an open manhole and was now tilted over at a considerable angle and well stuck! A Humvee now appeared and another smoke screen was set up when it finally cleared the army was gone and an ambulance had taken the wounded to hospital. That morning I had done my laundry which now stank of tear gas and smoke!

Yesterday while I was in Nablus we had word that the army was in Askar so we made our way there. It was late afternoon and they had occupied a house during the previous night but we only became aware of the fact after lunch. It was decided that two of us would go and try and talk to the soldiers so Samantha and I approached the house and started to call out to the soldiers, we had wanted some of the Palestinians to come and control the children but they did not think it was necessary. As soon as we arrived children also arrived making things difficult but eventually we managed to speak with the soldiers and they agreed that if we brought food they would let us in to see the family. When we returned with the food children also followed us. When the soldiers came to open the door they realized that the children were there and someone up in the house threw down a sound bomb which frightened the hell out of us but did manage to get rid of the children! The soldiers had now changed their mind about letting us in and we were only allowed to hand in the food to two very nervous gun toting soldiers. Later that night they left and today when we talked to the family we learnt that two families totaling 14 people had been held in one room for 15 hours, the soldiers had delivered our food to them but not told them who it was from. The house had been occupied on the same date last year for some reason and when told this by the family the soldiers had said that next year they would drink coffee with them in Jerusalem! Not sure what was meant by that.

Today we saw two men arrested; the first was a taxi driver who was dragged out of the taxi and taken away leaving the taxi in the middle of the road without keys. Erik and I helped to bump it to the side of the road, no one knew why this had happened just another random piece of harassment? The second man was at Azmut checkpoint where Erik and I were doing checkpoint watch, when the man asked the soldiers why he was not being allowed through and they started pushing him and he pushed back, any sort of resistance is not tolerated and he was handcuffed and eventually taken away.

I'm not sure how many more people have been killed since my last report but at least two that I have heard of. Also two UPMRC ambulance drivers have been injured by the soldiers at checkpoints around Nablus; one was from Jenin who was beaten up and the other was my friend Fieraze who had his leg badly crushed at the Beit Furik checkpoint by the gate being forcibly pushed against him. He is unable to walk at the moment and is in considerable pain but the leg is not broken and he hopes to be back at work in a couple of weeks. We also started removing a road block which we hope to complete once we are able to remove the large concrete blocks that are part of it, yesterday we could not budge them due to there weight, we are now working on that problem.

Hope to be a bit more punctual and regular getting out reports, in Peace Dave

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