The Palestine you don't know

• About Cemetery:

The Israeli government withholds unknown numbers of bodies of Palestinian and Arab war victims, killed throughout the years of struggle, confrontation, and opposition. For this purpose, the Israeli Authorities created, in addition to morgues, cemeteries called the “Cemetery of Numbers”. Only four of them have been identified to date.

These secret cemeteries are formed with bare graves surrounded by stones. A mere metal plate with a number for identification, instead of a name, figures on top of each grave. Grave stones are non-existent. Files, which are organized to each number and contains personal information of the buried victim, has been covert by the Israeli Army.

In the last few years, Israeli and international investigative journalists have found evidence on the existence of four such cemeteries:

1. A cemetery located near the Banat Yacoub Bridge in a military area bordering Israel, Lebanon, and Syria. Allegedly it contains approximately 500 graves of Palestinians and Lebanese killed in 1982 and onward.
2. A cemetery located in a closed military area between Jericho and Adam Bridge on the Jordan River. It is surrounded by a wall with an iron gate and a billboard inscribed “A Cemetery for the Dead of the Enemy”. It contains more than one hundred graves bearing numbers from 5003 to 5007. It is unknown whether they are serial numbers assigned to individuals or, as Israel claims, administrative codes unrelated to the real number of buried bodies.
3. The Cemetery of Refedeem in the Jordan Valley. Details unavailable.
4. The Cemetery of Shuheitar, located near Wadi Al Hamam, a village north of Galilee between Mount Ariel and the Lake of Galilee. Most of the bodies in this cemetery belongs to war victims killed in the Jordan Valley battles in the years 1965 to 1975. In the north side of this cemetery, 30 graves are divided between two rows, while the remaining 20 are situated in the central area. Shamefully, all these graves are sandy and shallow, which when exposed to rain, allows bodies to be vulnerable and dragged by stray animals.

The Cemetery of Numbers are a slur to the dignity of mankind for both the dead and the living. Their existence contravenes international humanitarian laws. It is a loud cry calling for an intervention from the international public opinion. The bodies of the innocent must be retrieved, and their families must be granted the right to give their family members and loved ones a decent burial in line with national traditions and religious rites.(x)

• Ceremony planned for return of bodies

RAMALLAH (Ma’an) — A ceremony will be held Thursday at the presidential headquarters in Ramallah to mark the repatriation of the bodies of 91 Palestinians, the minister of detainee affairs said.
Israel announced May 14 it would return 100 bodies interred in numbered graves as a “gesture” to President Mahmoud Abbas.
Issa Qaraqe said 91 bodies will arrive at the compound at 3 p.m. Thursday, where a military honor ceremony will be held for the deceased, their families, attended by the president and PLO officials.
The remains will then be transferred to families, including 12 bodies which will be sent to families in the Gaza Strip.
Seventeen bodies will be buried in a mass grave in Ramallah because their families could not be identified, Qaraqe said.
The family of Nasser al-Buz, who is on the list of Palestinians to be returned, told Ma’an they would demand a DNA test to verify his identity.
Al-Buz, who founded the Black Panther military wing of Fatah, disappeared near the Jordanian order in 1989. Wanted for years, he was on his way to Jordan, his brother Ahmad told Ma’an.
Ahmad said his family would not bury Nassar without proof of his identity, adding that they had not heard any news of his brother since he disappeared.
“After all these years of waiting, it’s our right to make sure that what we bury is really our brother,” he said.
Since the 1960s, Israel has withheld the bodies of hundreds of Palestinians, interred in numbered, rather than named, graves in a cemetery in the Jordan Valley.

• see also Members of “Savoy” Operation Returning After 37 Years

The mass arrest campaigns conducted by the IDF beginning March 2002, within just a few months, resulted in the detention of approximately 15 000 Palestinians, mostly men, but also women and children. In a blink of an eye, entire villages were emptied of all men over the age of 15. Israeli imposed curfews also prevented those whom had been released from reaching their families for several days, leaving many families unsure as to whether their loved ones had been released, rearrested or killed.

Arrest can happen anywhere and everywhere: at home (often followed by the ransacking of family homes, threats against family members and sometimes the destruction of the house), on streets or roads, at Israeli checkpoints, and, as was witnessed during the most recent Israeli invasions, in any public or private place.

Upon arrest, detainees are usually handcuffed and blindfolded. They are not informed of the reason for their arrest, nor are they told where they will be taken. Physical abuse and humiliation of the detainee by Israeli forces is common. Based on numerous sworn affidavits, detainees have reported that they have been submitted to attempted murder, rape, thrown down stairs while blindfolded, amongst many other forms of physical abuse. During the arrest, detainees have often been forced to strip in public before being arrested. Family members have also been forced to remove their clothes in house to house arrest campaign raids.

see previous post about Palestinian Airlines

 Palestinian Airlines is back in the skies after being grounded for seven years by the deepening enmities of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Once hailed as a symbol of Palestinian statehood dreams, the carrier is a tiny operation, with just two 48-seat turboprop planes, two weekly flights and a borrowed hub in Egypt.

But Palestinians say just being on the map again is what matters.

“My hands were shaking when I bought the ticket … and it said the name of the carrier is Palestinian Airlines,” said recent passenger Zuhair Mohammed, a 38-year-old teacher from Gaza.

The 15-year-old airline’s fortunes have been closely tied to the quest for a Palestinian state.

In the late 1990s, when Palestinians appeared on the verge of a statehood deal with Israel, Palestinian Airlines operated from Gaza International Airport, flew tens of thousands of passengers a year to Middle Eastern destinations and planned to expand to Europe.

Those ambitions were crushed by the outbreak of a Palestinian uprising against Israeli occupation in September 2000, following the collapse of US-led peace talks. Over the next year, Israeli troops destroyed the Gaza airport, and Palestinian Airlines was forced to move its base to Arish, an Egyptian coastal resort about 60 km from Gaza.

Seven years ago, the airline stopped flying altogether after its reservoir of passengers dried up. It had mainly served Gazans who, starting in 2005, could no longer reach Arish because of increasingly frequent Israeli closures of Gaza’s borders.

The closures accompanied an Israeli troop withdrawal from Gaza in 2005 and intensified with the capture of an Israeli soldier by Gaza militants a year later and the violent takeover of Gaza by the Islamic militant Hamas in 2007.

Until last year, the vast majority of Gaza’s 1.7 million residents were locked inside the territory, in part because Egypt went along with Israel and largely kept its Rafah border terminal with Gaza closed.

After the ouster of Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak in 2011, Rafah gradually reopened and Gazans are now able to travel, though restrictions remain, particularly for men under 40, who need Egyptian security clearance.

Palestinian Airlines once again had potential customers. On 9 May it resumed operations, starting with biweekly flights between Arish and Marka Airbase in the Jordanian capital of Amman. The new route means Gazans no longer have to travel to Cairo, some 350 km (215 miles) from their territory, to board planes.

Mustafa Abu Dan, a Palestinian civil servant, on Sunday bought four tickets at a Gaza City travel agency for a flight to Amman. He said he’s pleased to be saving time and money, but he worried that Gazans and their travel plans will always vulnerable to political upheaval.

“Rafah is the only gate for us to the world now, but still it’s linked to the political developments in Egypt,” said Abu Dan, 32. “I voice my hope to have our own airport again so we can travel without problems, like others.”

In one of the many political twists of Palestine air travel, the carrier is owned by the Palestinian Authority, the West Bank-based political rival of Gaza’s Hamas rulers.

Gaza and the West Bank lie on opposite sides of Israel, which has banned virtually all movement between the two territories. Palestinians hope that one day they will be united into a state, with East Jerusalem as its capital. All three were captured by Israel in the 1967 Mideast War.

The West Bank does not have an airport, and Israel is unlikely to approve Palestinian Authority plans to build one, citing security concerns. West Bank residents have to fly from neighboring Jordan.

Palestinian Airlines operates two Fokker 50 turboprop planes, remnants of the original fleet that also included a since-retired Boeing 727. The Fokkers were donated by the Netherlands and the 727 by Saudi Arabia.

During the years of idleness, Palestinian Airlines leased one of the Fokkers to an Egyptian carrier, Memphis, whose logo is still painted on the plane. The other plane is marked by black, red and green stripes on the tail, the colors of the Palestinian flag.

On Sunday, the Amman-Arish flight carried 27 passengers, and 44 were booked on the return trip later in the day. The flight takes an hour and 35 minutes, more than double the time needed for the direct route over Israel. The airline does not have permission to cross Israeli air space, said regional director Azmi Samaan.

Airline officials said flights to Saudi Arabia for Muslim pilgrims from Gaza are set to begin later this week, and routes to the United Arab Emirates and Turkey are being planned.

The airline hopes it will eventually turn a profit, but for now national pride and making life easier for the Gazans are more important, said Samaan.

“We want the Palestinian flag to continue flying,” he said in an interview at Marka Airbase. “This is part of the independent state, to have an airline, no matter what it will cost us.”

He acknowledged that the airline also represents the many setbacks over the years for Palestinian statehood hopes. When Gaza’s airport was inaugurated in 1998, thousands cheered it as a milestone toward independence.

This time around, flights resumed with little fanfare.

Samaan said it’s better than not flying at all.

“At least, we are there,” he said. “We are in the market.”

(x)

 Israel has already violated the terms of the agreement addressing the demands of approximately 2,000 Palestinian political prisoners just over one week since they ended their historic mass hunger strike .

25-year-old Mahmoud Sarsak is on his 70th consecutive day of hunger strike today .Akram Rikhawi remains on hunger strike as well, currently on his 46th day.

see this report by adammer