Israel has announced it is pulling its thousand troops out of a West Bank refugee camp, but like the Terminator, has promised it will be back.
While this week marks a horrific escalation, for 18 months the Israeli military have been raiding refugee camps throughout the occupied West Bank, waking up communities in the middle of the night. Nearly 500 people have been killed, 50 of them children.
As a Palestinian thousands of kilometres away, I can’t stop looking at the faces of the 11 youths who were shot and killed during the raid on Jenin this week – the youngest was only 16 and the oldest 23. My three children are this age – I can barely imagine the horror of suddenly having your child ripped away, a child you have loved to the brink of adulthood, all the hopes you hold extinguished by a soldier of the Israeli occupation.
All of these youths were born after the Oslo Accords, after the famous handshake on the White House lawn 30 years ago. Under that plan Palestine was supposed to be an independent state before these boys had even started school, but instead they lived every single day of their short lives with Israel’s military and its apartheid laws controlling every aspect of their lives – from their birth certificates through to the moment of their deaths.
Read the article by Nasser Mashni (APAN) on Pearls and Irritations.