Tuesday, March 3
On the way to worship in the morning, a jeep full of Israeli border
policed pulled up alongside a man with a push cart piled with sesame
bread and began shrieking at him for no discernible reason. As the
soldiers drove on, hooting with laughter, CPTer Margaret Purchase
said, "Haram," (roughly translatable as "shame on them") to the
pushcart vendor. The man quietly responded, "Allah kabeer"--(God is
great.)

A journalist friend told the team that almost 150 young men had been
arrested for throwing stones in the Hebron area on the previous day.
Israeli troops entered the area at the head of the city controlled by
the Palestinian authority (H1) and trashed someone's house. According
to the journalist, the Israeli soldiers arrested one of the
inhabitants of the house after he attempted to call the Palestinian
police.

Later in the day, the same journalist alerted CPTers to a home
demolition of the Al Atrash family that had occurred south of Hebron
(see previous release.)

Wednesday March 4, 1998
Returning from an Arabic lesson in Bethlehem, Mark Frey walked in
front of the Israeli settlement of Beit Hedassah where a group of six
soldiers with whom CPT has had past dealings stopped a young
Palestinian male on a bike, made him get off and go stand by the wall.
Frey stopped and said to the soldiers, "OK, we've all been through
this routine before."

One soldier said, "You CPT are like super glue on us."
Frey: "Is that bad?"
Soldier: "We are only doing our jobs."
Frey: "This is OUR job. Why did you stop this boy?"
Soldier: "Because you are here."
Frey: "We don?t want this to happen. I will leave then." [At this
point the soldiers allowed the boy to leave.]
Soldier: "Wait, I will stop another, I will stop a teenager."
Frey: "Why?"
Soldier: "I want you to wait here in the nice sunshine and take off
your coat."

Frey continued to talk to them, asking them questions about their
soldiering, explaining a little about CPT. The soldiers, occupied in
conversation, did not stop the teenager. Frey wished them a good
day and left.

In a news release from an Israeli settler organization that promotes
peaceful coexistence between settlers and Palestinians, CPTers read
that a member of the TIPH (Temporary International Presence in Hebron)
official observers had slapped a settler child outside the Israeli
settlement of Beit Hadassah. After investigating the report, team
members were told that the Arabic papers had written that a settler
boy had sprayed urine in the face of a TIPHer. Friends who were
present at the time of the incident said that as TIPH monitored
soldiers detaining young Palestinian men in front of Beit Hedassah, a
young settler boy standing between two soldiers sprayed a continuous
stream of water into the face of a TIPH monitor from a ?super soaker?
spray gun. According to the same friends, the TIPH monitor grabbed
the child's arm to stop him from spraying water, at which point the
child's mother intervened. Eventually the TIPHers had to retreat into
their car as settler children from Beit Hadassah threw rocks at them,
breaking a window. Settler adults prevented the car from pulling away
until the IDF intervened.

Friday, March 6
On an early evening patrol Mark Frey and Rich Meyer witnessed a
group of settler kids pestering a Palestinian man on Shuhada Street.
The soldiers at the checkpoint appeared to tell the kids to quit
the harassment -- but the kids jeered at them and kept pestering the
Palestinian man. The soldiers waited until the group passed them,
then they called the Palestinian man back. He came back, but instead
of the soldiers checking his papers, they all stood there a minute
until the kids had moved on, and then the Palestinian man went on his
way.

Later, Pierre Shantz and Meyer were on patrol and witnessed five
Palestinian men being checked. They were released, and continued
walking up Shuhada Street. A minute and two hundred feet later, they
were stopped again at the next checkpoint. Shantz said to the
soldiers, "Don't you have radios" These guys were just checked.
Can't you call that other checkpoint?" After a minute, the soldiers
took one man aside, and told the others to leave, back the way they
had come. When they said they wanted to wait for their friend, the
soldier yelled at them to leave. So the detainee's friends walked
back down the street, and were again detained and searched at the
previous checkpoint.

Sunday, March 8
During a meeting in Jerusalem with Jeff Halper from the Israeli
committee Against Home Demolitions, Rich Meyer, Dianne Roe, and
Kathleen Kern received a frantic call from the Al Atrash family.
Meyer and Roe left for Qilqis--a village directly south of Hebron-- to
investigate and found that nearly 100 soldiers and settlers had
earlier converged on the Al Atrash family demanding th