Ramallah, 13 January 2013 - At 1 am on 13 January 2013, Israeli Occupying Forces (IOF) raided and arrested 130 people at the newly erected village of Bab Al-Shams.

 

Merely 48 hours after Bab Al-Shams was erected, over five hundred IOF soldiers stormed the area, and arrested the entire village, brutally attacking the activists with batons and the butts of their guns and ransacking the campground.

 

Those arrested were then taken en masse to Qalandia checkpoint, where they were subsequently released. During the raid 20 people were injured, five of whom required hospitalization due to IOF attacks.

 

Bab Al Shams is a village built on the land of Za’yem, intended to create “Palestinian facts on the ground” as a response to the continued expansion of illegal Israeli settlements, specifically those planned for the area known as E1. Over the last two days Palestinian and international activists had erected 20 steel-frame tents and had been camped out until the IOF raid.

 

E1 has immense strategic importance, as it represents 12,000 square meters of undeveloped Palestinian land. Israel’s planned illegal settlement construction in E1 will completely sever East Jerusalem from the rest of the West Bank, as well as cutting the West Bank in two. There are currently over 500,000 illegal Israeli settlers living on Palestinian lands.

 

Addameer condemns the arrest and detention of Palestinian activists and human rights defenders whom are exercising their right to resist occupation and colonization and calls on the international community to pressure Israel until all settlements which are built on Palestinian lands are removed, including East Jerusalem, and Israel ends it occupation.

 

 

 

*Write to your own elected representatives urging them to pressure Israel to stop arresting human rights defenders