Hebron / al-Khalil

About CPT Hebron/al-Khalil

At the invitation of the Hebron municipality, CPTers set up a project in 1995 to address assaults by Israeli settlers and soldiers on Palestinians in the months before the assassination of Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin.  In subsequent years, the team’s focus has included the Israeli military confiscation of Palestinian land, demolition of Palestinian homes, and the violence stemming from the Second Intifada.

Hebron/Al-Khalil (map) is located 30 km (19 mi) south of Jerusalem, and is home to around 165,000 Palestinians, as well as 500 Israeli settlers concentrated in Hebron’s Old City. 

The Oslo 2 Hebron protocol partitioned Hebron/Al-Khalil into two distinct zones, H1 and H2.  H1 is administered by the Palestinian Authority and contains 120,000 Palestinians.  In H2, which includes  the heart of Hebron's Old City, the Israeli military restricts the movement of more than 30,000 Palestinians while allowing 500 Jewish settlers to move freely.

CPT maintains an active nonviolent presence in the H2 zone of Hebron/Al-Khalil focusing on accompaniment, documentation, and human rights reporting. 

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HEBRON REFLECTION:  They left their mark everywhere

Her dropped head, her clasped hands, her sad face continue to haunt me.  I ask myself how anyone could endure this kind of pain, especially a mother.

I sat in a stupefied silence as the fifty-six-year-old woman told us about the invasion of her home last October.  Soldiers had awakened the family and their relatives next door by banging on the door at 12:00 a.m.  They then ordered the families out of their homes, locked the women and young children in the shop next door, handcuffed and blindfolded the men and adolescent boys, and told them stand in front of a shop.  

In the next twelve hours, the Israeli military shot and killed two Palestinian men accused of killing four settlers.  Afterwards soldiers entered the same house, although neighbors said the family had no connection to the killings, shot randomly into the bed, through the blankets, under the bed, into the windows, doors, and table.  I wept within when the mother pointed out a beautiful blanket meant to be a wedding gift for one of the sons and his wife, now riddled with bullet holes.

The aggression did not end there.  While forty to fifty military vehicles blocked the streets outside, two bulldozers demolished the part of the house where a newly married son lived with his wife.   They then destroyed another part of the complex prepared for another son soon to be married.  Furniture and remains of furniture now hung from the skeletal frameworks, where once a multi-family building stood.

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AL-KHALIL (HEBRON) ACTION ALERT: Fast with the prisoners of Palestine

May 11th, 2012
in:

CPTnet
11 May 2012
AL-KHALIL (HEBRON) ACTION ALERT: Fast with the prisoners of Palestine

On Monday 7 May 2012, the Israeli High Court of Justice denied the petition of two hunger-striking Palestinians against their administrative detention, meaning the Israeli authorities have never charged them with any crime or given them a trial.  The two prisoners continue their hunger strike, are now on their seventy-fifth day, and are in critical condition.  Their attorneys said they were not allowed to see classified material that the state had cited as grounds for imprisonment.

One thousand six hundred prisoners joined the hunger strike and are now in their twenty-fourth day.   The prisoners are demanding an end to administrative detention, solitary confinement and other punitive punishment measures taken against Palestinian prisoners, including the denial of family and lawyer visits, especially to prisoners from the Gaza Strip to whom the Israeli authorities have denied family visits since 2007.

Prisoners have  face harsh collective punishment from the beginning of the hunger strike.  Some have received fines between 250 (€50) and 500 (€100) shekels for each day of their  strike.  In Naqab prison, prisoners are experiencing daily random inspections that last for approximately forty to fifty minutes.  These inspections include cell and body searches.  In addition, prisoners are no longer permitted to leave their rooms for the daily break period. 

This 15 May 2012 marks the 64th anniversary of the Nakba, when pre-Israeli state paramilitary forces expelled hundreds of thousands of Palestinians from their homes and land in 1948.  The annual Nakba fast this year is focusing on the plight of the prisoners.  CPT Palestine is gravely concerned about the health of the prisoners and in an act of solidarity, team members will be joining the fast.  The  team invites you to join the fast from 7:00 a.m. on 15 May.

AL-KHALIL (HEBRON): Israeli military demolishes cistern in Beqa’a Valley

May 7th, 2012
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At 8:30 on the morning of 2 May 2012, the team received a call from a friend in the Beqa’a valley to inform the Christian Peacemaker Team in Hebron the Israeli military was destroying his cousin’s reservoir. Two CPTers went to the valley. Upon arriving, they saw two army vehicles, two intelligence service vehicles, and a power shovel digging up the ground on the hill below the friend’s house and filling dump trucks with this material. The friend told them to follow the truck.

AL-KHALIL (HEBRON): Israeli military demolishes dairy farm

May 2nd, 2012
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On May Day, 1 May, at 7:45 a.m., the Christian Peacemaker Team in Hebron received a phone call from Noah al-Rajabi in Bani Naim.  Al-Rajabi reported that the army and bulldozers were demolishing his cousin’s home and threatening to demolish the family’s farm. He urged CPT to come and to call the media and other internationals to bear witness to what was happening.  Two CPTers arrived at the main road near the house and saw six military jeeps, three police vehicles, and three intelligence service vehicles at the site.  Initially, the Israeli authorities prevented CPTers from approaching the scene. When they asked soldiers why they were demolishing the farm, a soldier replied, “Because we are the army.”

AL-KHALIL (HEBRON) REFLECTION: Not for Sale

April 20th, 2012
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 On 5 April 2012, I accompanied our neighbor, Afifah *, as she tried to talk to the settlers who were protesting outside a house in a Palestinian neighbourhood from which the Israeli authorities had evicted them so she could understand their view of the situation.

A settler refused to speak to her when she requested a conversation.  Upon enquiring why, he told her that he did not speak to anti-Semites. Afifah told him that they were both from the same origins.  The settler abruptly pronounced that he was referring to me and that CPT was an anti-Semitic organization.  Afifah told him that she had known CPT for many years and did not think that its members were anti-Semitic.  He replied that he had read the CPT website, that everything they posted was anti-Semitic and that they were Jew-hating Christians. 

AL-KHALIL (HEBRON) REFLECTION: Holy Saturday--Entombed in Hebron

April 7th, 2012
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Hebron is a sacred place because of the cave/tomb of Abraham and Sarah, Rebecca and Isaac, Jacob and Leah.  Today Hebron feels entombed by the Israeli military occupation and colonization.  It is a Holy Saturday that has lasted over forty-five years.  No resurrection in sight—but somehow the winter of all hopes and dreams bears the seeds of a, maybe far off, spring of justice and freedom.  I offer two stories of occupation: one of oppression, one of hope.

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Events

Title Start: End:
Palestine / Israel delegation Tue, 05/22/2012 Mon, 06/04/2012
Palestine / Israel delegation Tue, 10/02/2012 Mon, 10/15/2012
Palestine / Israel delegation Tue, 11/06/2012 Mon, 11/19/2012