Sunday, April 18, 2004
Biddu Day One
We sat for maybe 45 minutes watching the brave young kids fight tear gas, and by now rubber bullets, with stone after stone. Ambulances came and went as some were overcome by the gas and others were shot in the head by rubber bullets. And then it happened.
We were sat high up in the hills almost half a mile away from the soldiers and shebab sitting and chatting about how we can peacefully protest in these conditions when we heard a whooshing noise. None of us could place it at first but we thought it might be a bullet. We dismissed the idea as we couldn’t hear gunfire and what on earth were we doing to deserver being shot at? After we heard the whooshing noise a couple more times we get nervous and walked up another field to a big house where several villagers were sat. Five minutes later and the noise came again, closer this time. Now the Palestinians looked nervous. That is definitely bullets but where are they coming from? We can’t hear any shooting. We moved closer to walls and trees and looked around but we were very exposed up here and we had nowhere to go.
I guess it wasn’t until the Palestinian in the field below dropped to the floor that we knew for sure. Clutching his chest 24 year old Diyya Abed Al Kareem fell to the floor. He has been shot in the chest. They were shooting at us. Somewhere amongst those soldiers was a sniper and he was using a silencer. Against villagers and internationals sat in a field long after being violently dispersed somehow they felt they had to shoot someone?
Mark’s follow-up with picture and video can be found here. In a civilised country the evidence would be overwhelming that Diyya Abed Al Kareem was extra judicially assassinated for the high crime of being Palestinian.
The Israeli army’s sole justification for the continued use of live ammunition seems to be rooted in the premise that rocks can kill. And while the practice draws criticism, as it did from state comptroller Eliezer Goldberg in a 108 page report released in October 2003, to my knowledge no line of demarcation has ever been formally drawn. It doesn’t seem to matter if one person throws a rock at an army or scores of shebab were to advance on a lone soldier at an outpost, the Israeli army reserves the right to put a bullet in your head for throwing that stone.
Even if I were able to transcend that absurdity and accept the farcical notion that a well-equipped army confronted by shebab is entitled to use live ammunition in self-defence clearly something entirely sinister occurred in this case.