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PALESTINE: ISRAELI GAS ATTACKS TAKE HEALTH TOLL ON WEST BANK VILLAGERS

by David Bloom

Witnesses and officials in Jayyous, a farming village in the occupied West Bank, say a series of unprovoked tear-gas attacks by Israeli troops in recent weeks have taken a grave toll on residents' health. The attacks come with a further tightening of Israeli military control of the town.

Shareef Omar Khaled of the Jayyous Land Defense committee noted that even though Israel's "separation wall" has now completely cut off the town from its agricultural lands, the Israeli army has clamped a still tighter noose on Jayyous, imposing a checkpoint at the town's entrance, and controlling all traffic coming in and out. Shareef reports that soldiers frequently enter to the village and throw tear gas, and that many residents have developed respiratory problems.

Shareef Omar reports that pregnant women in the village are suffering miscarriages as a likely result of the gas. Animals are suffering unprecedented spontaneous abortions at a greater rate, with reports that 30 sheep recently aborted because of a gas canister dropped on a farmer's barn.

An international witness recently visiting Jayyous reports that two to three times a day in the week prior to his April 28 arrival, Israeli soldiers drove into town, shooting tear gas and harrassing residents. The witness reports that "soldiers had teargassed the town's school, forcing children to evacuate their classrooms and sending one female teacher to the hospital for a day." Villagers report that such incursions have worsened since the Israeli assassination of Hamas leader Sheikh Ahmed Yassin in Gaza one month earlier.

Another international volunteer reports on the effects of the gas on a developmentally disabled young man, named Loay, who was hospitalized, and lost ten kilos in 10 days. "It was through his blood tests that the doctors informed him that his difficulties stem from the effects of the tear gas. There is hope that Loay will fully recover, but not without physical therapy and time."

On March 28, the same international reported: "Two nights ago, they used more than 30 tear gas cannisters. It has been reported than an infant was badly affected and had to be taken to the emergency room. It was also reported that women had to go to the small clinic here in the village the morning after this attack due to having pain in their chests. It seems that the feeling in the village is that...this particular tear gas was stronger and more potent than recent times... I found myself coughing and my eyes tearing up more than 30 minutes after the soldiers shot off their tear gas bombs. This could have been due to either the high number of cannisters let off, or it could have been because the gas was of a different potency. We will never know."

On March 27, the Red Cross reportedly came to the village and interviewed several people who had suffered from the tear gas. The Red Cross continues to monitor the gas attacks, and is said to be preparing a report on the issue.

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FAROUK ABDEL-MUHTI FREE AT LAST

PALESTINIAN IMMIGRANT ACTIVIST BACK IN NYC

Farouk Abdel-Muhti kissed the ground at New York's La Guardia Airport as he ended 718 day in immigration detention on April 12--just hours after being freed from an Atlanta penitentiary. Federal Judge Yvette Kane, in Harrisburg, PA, issued an order on April 8 directing the government to release the New York-based Palestinian immigrant activist within ten days, calling him a "stateless man," and therefore not deportable.

Abdel-Muhti, born in Ramallah in the West Bank in 1947, had been jailed since April 2002 on the basis of a 1995 deportation order. His legal team had agrued he could not be legally deported back to Palestine in the forseeable future. Judge Kane agreed, finding that Abdel-Muthi made "substantial" efforts to obtain travel documents to leave the United States, to no avail.

Abdel-Muhti was seized on April 26, 2002, at his home in Queens by the Absconder Task Force, a joint federal-state immigration enforcement unit. His arrest came a month after he began working regularly at New York's non-commercial WBAI Radio, arranging interviews with Palestinians in the Occupied Territories.

Abdel-Muhti has lived in the US without official immigration status for over 30 years. Because he left the West Bank before the Israeli takeover in 1967, he cannot recieve travel documents from either Israel or the Palestine Authority. Kane wrote that Abdel-Muhti "has sought travel documents from Jordan, Israel, Palestinian authorities, Honduras and Egypt. All efforts have been unsuccessful due to his unique position as a Palestinian-born individual who is ineligible for either Israeli or Palestinian identification numbers. Government efforts have likewise been fruitless."

The Supreme Court's 2001 ruling in Zadvydas v. Davis mandates the release of immigration detainees who prove to be undeportable after six months. Abdel-Muhti's detention ultimately lasted nearly 24 months--with over 250 days in solitary confinement. But the government refused to release him or grant bond--first claiming it was on the verge of deporting him, then arguing that the Zadvydas limits should not apply because he had obstructed his own removal by intentionally confusing his identity.

The court rejected this claim, with Judge Kane calling the government's repeated demands for more information about his identity "a Kafkaesque exchange." She especially cited a last-minute government request that he submit the same type of Israeli visa request that Israel had rejected in his case some 30 years ago.

On April 5, just three days ahead of Kane's ruling, federal authorities flew Abdel-Muhti from a county jail near Harrisburg to a federal penitentiary in Atlanta, GA, hundreds of miles from his friends, family and supporters in the New York area. Up to this point, he had been kept at county facilities in New Jersey and Pennsylvania, and the move to Atlanta raised feras that he would be "disappeared" into the federal prison system. Instead, he was placed on a flight back to New York. Activists, who had held weekly vigils for his release at New York's Federal Building, hailed this as a victory.

(Committee for the Release of Farouk Abdel-Muhti: www.freefarouk.org)

See also WW3 REPORT #97: 97.html#warhome1

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Special to WORLD WAR 3 REPORT, May 15, 2004
Reprinting permissible with attribution

WW3Report.com


Reprinting permissible with attribution.