Not Just A Slogan On A T-shirt


Some selections...

"[T]wo-thirds of the 621 children killed at checkpoints, in the street, on the way to school, in their homes, died from small arms fire, directed in over half of cases to the head, neck and chest - the sniper's wound".

- Dr Derek Summerfield, reporting on the results of a four-year field study in the occupied Palestinian Territories for the British Medical Journal. (cite)

Photo: T-shirt printed for members of an IDF elite unit who had completed sniper training, reads "The smaller they are - The harder it is!".
Source: Dead Palestinian babies and bombed mosques - IDF fashion 2009 (Ha'aretz); via Mondoweiss.

"The Smaller They Are, The Harder It Is!" [Quote]


Sixteen-year-old Asma Mughayer (back row, left, in this family photo from the Sydney Morning Herald) and her thirteen-year-old brother, Ahmed (front row, left) were shot dead while hanging out laundry on the roof of their home in Rafah, on the morning that the IDF launched a major attack ("Operation Rainbow") on the Tel al-Sultan refugee camp where they lived, on 18 May 2004.

The IDF said of their deaths: "A preliminary investigation indicates they were killed by a bomb intended to be used against soldiers. It was set outside a building by Palestinians to hit an Israeli vehicle". But the Mughayer family said that the children had not been killed by a bomb, but shot by an Israeli sniper, operating out of a neighboring building.

An Australian journalist visited the Mughayer house, and found no signs of an explosion there, though he did find bullet holes on the roof, made by bullets which seemed to have been fired from the neighboring building. He visited the neighboring building, and found that its occupants had been held prisoner by an Israeli sniper team that had operated out of their house on the morning that Asma and Ahmed were killed, and left behind MRE wrappers and ammunition boxes (labelled in Hebrew) .

Mughayer2 British journalists who examined the children's bodies at the morgue (AP Photo - Kevin Frayer) found no signs of injuries except for a single bullet hole through the head.

After the British and Australian journalists published their findings, the IDF announced it would hold an internal investigation into the death of the Mughayer siblings. But six months later, while world attention was distracted by a new, large-scale invasion of the Gaza Strip refugee camps, the IDF quietly dropped its investigation.

The following year, some of the soldiers who took part in Operation Rainbow gave their testimonies to the Breaking the Silence exhibition. They testified that they had killed innocent Palestinian civilians, under orders from their superiors to kill any Palestinian they encountered, armed or not. They were concerned, in retrospect, that they were guilty of carrying out illegal orders, and one of them knew what had happened in the specific case of Asma and Ahmed Mughayer, who the IDF assured us were blown up by a Palestinian bomb:

According to Rafi, an officer in the Shaldag, an elite unit connected to the air force, the whole mission was about revenge. "The commanders said kill as many people as possible," he said.

He and his men were ordered to shoot anyone who appeared to be touching the ground, as if they might be placing a roadside bomb, or anyone seen on a roof or a balcony, as if they might be observing Israeli forces for military reasons, regardless of whether they were armed.

Asma Moghayyer, 16, and her brother Ahmed, 13, were shot as they went to collect clothes from a rooftop washing line. The Israeli army insisted the children had been blown up by a roadside bomb. However, journalists visiting the morgue saw only single bullet wounds to the head.

The truth, said Rafi, was that they were shot by an Israeli soldier following clear orders to shoot anyone on a roof regardless of their role in the conflict.

Rafi says that his overriding impression of the operation was "chaos" and the "indiscriminate use of force". "Gaza was considered a playground for sharpshooters."

-- Israeli Soldiers Tell of Indiscriminate Killings by Army and a Culture of Impunity by Conal Urquhart; 6 Sept 2005.


Photo: T-shirt printed for members of an IDF elite unit who had completed sniper training, reads "The smaller they are - The harder it is!".

Source: Dead Palestinian babies and bombed mosques - IDF fashion 2009 (Ha'aretz); via Mondoweiss.

"The Smaller They Are, The Harder It Is!" [3]


Till we confirm the kill
"Another paediatrician and another baker
Got a bullet in the face from a paratroopers unit
All day we search houses and kill children"

- Extract from a song of an Israeli paratroopers' unit that participated in Operation Calm Waters in Nablus, beginning of 2004.

On 16 September 2005, the Israeli newspaper Yediot Ahronot published an interview with the commander of the IDF paratroopers unit that came up with that song. "Commander R" described the extraordinarily permissive open-fire rules under which his unit operated when they were based in Nablus, which on some nights mandated the killing of any Palestinian who happened to be seen on the street:
"My team killed six innocent people, or probably innocent," says "R", a commander in an elite paratroopers' unit. "We would joke about it and give them code names: the baker, the woman, the child, the old man, the drummer. Some of them by mistake, but as I see it, they were simply executed on illegal orders.

"There were many nights on which we received orders that whoever we see on the street between two and four in the morning is sentenced to death [dino mavet]. Those were the exact words..."

"The Baker, whose death provided such a source of amusement for the Israeli soldiers who killed him was a 25-year-old Palestinian named Ala Adin Masud Adawiya. He was walking to his job at the a-Silawi Bakery in Nablus at about 3:00am on 18 December 2003 when he was shot once by an IDF sniper, then eight more times from close range as he lay wounded on the ground by IDF soldiers who arrived on the scene in a Jeep to "confirm the kill". Adawiya was shot because, unbeknown to him, he was walking to work on one of the nights when soldier R's paratroop unit had received orders that whoever we see on the street between two and four in the morning is sentenced to death...

Of the six codenames Commander R's unit assigned to the people they killed, "The Baker" is the easiest to identify, and the circumstances of his death are easiest to reconstruct, largely because the unusual brutality of his death attracted the attention of human rights groups and international journalists. He was killed in an IDF operation called Calm Waters, which ran from 16 December 2003 to 6 January 2004, the purpose of which was ostensibly to capture one wanted man, Naif Sharekh. Nineteen Palestinians were killed in the course of the operation, fifteen of them (including Adawiya) were unarmed civilians, six of them were children. There were indications that two of the dead (again, including Adawiya) had been killed execution style when they were already wounded, and this is what prompted journalists and civil rights groups to investigate the deaths. It is because of their involvement that we know much more about the death of Ala Adawiya than we do about most Palestinians killed by the IDF.

In addition to that of the paratrooper R, who was involved with the sniper team that fired the first shot, eyewitness testimony is available from a second IDF soldier who watched the killing from the house opposite the sniper's nest; also from a 50-year-old Palestinian woman, As'ad Hanun, who lived in the house in front of which Ala Adawiya was killed; and from Adnan Soso, the ambulance driver who was summoned after the first shot was fired. These last three witnesses all saw the "confirmation of kill" procedure carried out.

The incident began when the IDF sniper team used the "worm procedure" to tunnel their way undetected to the house they intended to use as their sniper position. This is the trail they left behind the through neighboring houses when they left the following morning:

Soldier R testifies:
The next man was the baker. We entered the Old City in Nablus, and as usual the open-fire regulations were that every man walking on the street at night is sentenced to death...

That night we took over a house in an excellent position, and about four in the morning the sharpshooters' position identified a man walking with a bag. I saw him on Jami'at al-Kabir Street with the bag in his hand. I went down to report, and the sniper, a friend of mine, was on duty. I reported to the commander who reports to the company commander. The order was "take him down." And so a man fell, 70 metres from his house.

That shot wounded Ala Adawiya in the chest, and woke As'ad Hanun, who called an ambulance. The ambulance arrived within three minutes, at which point Adawiya was still conscious, sitting up, and calling out that he was hurt. A jeep drew up from the nearby IDF command post, and stopped a few metres from where Ala Adawiya was sitting. Over the course of the next several minutes, the soldiers inside fired 8-10 individual shots at Adawiya, then dropped two grenades on the body, to ensure he was dead.

Having checked the contents of Adawiya's bag, which was found to contain nothing more dangerous than some floured-dusted clothing and pita bread, the soldiers permitted Adnan Soso to remove the body to Rafidia Hospital. Upon arrival, it was examined by Dr Samir Abu Zarour, who reported that Ala Adawiya had been shot between eight and 10 times, including twice in the face and once in the testicles, and had a series of fragmentation wounds in his legs.

Ala Adawiya's only crime was that he was a Palestinian whose job required him to arrive at work very early in the morning, and on the way to that job he happened to unknowingly cross the path of an IDF unit under orders to kill anyone they saw. But Soldier R said in conclusion: This thing was never investigated. The regiment commander cheers us up. 'Listen guys, don't be demoralised. This man wasn't just walking around innocently.' Of course he didn't have any substantive information - 'Be assured that anyone walking round the Casbah at that hour is no friend of Zion. He probably had a terrorist agenda, and you performed a good job'...

Further information on the killing of Ala Adawiya is available here.

Photo: T-shirt printed for members of the IDF's Haruv Battalion, reads: "We Won't Chill Till We Confirm The Kill".

Source (via Mondoweiss): Dead Palestinian babies and bombed mosques - IDF fashion 2009 (Ha'aretz):

"We Won't Chill Till We Confirm The Kill" [3]


No one deluded himself that the Palestinian Ministry of Culture, which takes up five of the eight floors of a new building in the center of El Bireh, would be spared the fate of other Palestinian Authority offices in Ramallah and other cities - that is, the nearly total destruction of its contents and particularly its high-tech equipment.

After all, Israel Defense Forces troops were deployed in the building for about a month...

On the evening of Wednesday, May 1, when the siege on Arafat's headquarters was lifted and the armored vehicles and the tanks had rumbled out, the executives and officials of the ministry who had rushed to the site did not expect to find the building the way they had left it.

Employees of the local radio and television station, Amwaj, also hastened to the scene, as did the employees of the local television channel, Istiqlal, which take up three stories of the building.

But what awaited them was beyond all their fears, and also shocked representatives and cultural attaches of foreign consulates, who toured the site the next day.

In other offices, all the high-tech and electronic equipment had been wrecked or had vanished - computers, photocopiers, cameras, scanners, hard disks, editing equipment worth thousands of dollars, television sets. The broadcast antenna on top of the building was destroyed.

Telephone sets vanished. A collection of Palestinian art objects (mostly hand embroideries) disappeared. Perhaps it was buried under the piles of documents and furniture, perhaps it had been spirited away. Furniture was dragged from place to place, broken by soldiers, piled up. Gas stoves for heating were overturned and thrown on heaps of scattered papers, discarded books, broken diskettes and discs and smashed windowpanes.

In the department for the encouragement of children's art, the soldiers had dirtied all the walls with gouache paints they found there and destroyed the children's paintings that hung there.

In every room of the various departments - literature, film, culture for children and youth books, discs, pamphlets and documents were piled up, soiled with urine and excrement.

There are two toilets on every floor, but the soldiers urinated and defecated everywhere else in the building, in several rooms of which they had lived for about a month. They did their business on the floors, in emptied flowerpots, even in drawers they had pulled out of desks.

They defecated into plastic bags, and these were scattered in several places. Some of them had burst. Someone even managed to defecate into a photocopier.

The soldiers urinated into empty mineral water bottles. These were scattered by the dozen in all the rooms of the building, in cardboard boxes, among the piles of rubbish and rubble, on desks, under desks, next to the furniture the solders had smashed, among the children's books that had been thrown down.

Some of the bottles had opened and the yellow liquid had spilled and left its stain. It was especially difficult to enter two floors of the building because of the pungent stench of feces and urine. Soiled toilet paper was also scattered everywhere.

In some of the rooms, not far from the heaps of feces and the toilet paper, remains of rotting food were scattered. In one corner, in the room in which someone had defecated into a drawer, full cartons of fruits and vegetables had been left behind. The toilets were left overflowing with bottles filled with urine, feces and toilet paper.

Relative to other places, the soldiers did not leave behind them many sayings scrawled on the walls.

Here and there was the candelabrum symbols of Israel, stars of David, praises for the Jerusalem Betar soccer team.

Someone had forgotten to take his dog tag with him. His name is recorded in the newspaper's editorial offices.

Now the Palestinian Ministry of Culture is considering leaving the building the way it is. A memorial.

-- Someone even managed to defecate into the photocopier, by Amira Hass; Ha'aretz, 6 May 2002. (h/t Angry Arab)

"If You Believe It Can Be Fixed, Then Believe It Can Be Destroyed!" [3]


A mother and son, both American citizens, were savagely beaten last week by Israeli security at the Israeli entry point from Jordan: Allenby Bridge. The victims were 47 year old Tina Hannouneh and her 17 year old son...

Hannouneh, who was born in the West Bank, moved to Arizona in 1986, where she now works as banker. She and her son Michael had come to Palestine, on a holiday, to visit friends and family. The incident occurred because 17 year old Michael, who suffers form a chronic heart condition, was listening to his i-pod.

Tina Hannouneh1

Tina underwent surgery last week in Beit Jala. Afterwards, she spoke to PNN about her ordeal:

"We were entering through security when a guy dressed as a civilian approached Michael. He grabbed Michael's neck with his right hand and reached for the i-pod with his left hand, shouting `give me that' in Arabic."

Michael, who has spent most of his life in the US, does not speak or understand Arabic. He was unaware that the man choking him was a security officer, and refused to give him the mp3 player. Hannouneh added, "The security officer was not wearing a uniform. My son couldn't have recognized him as army or police. He payed $400 for that i-pod, he's not just going to give it to anybody."

Confused and bewildered about what was happening, Michael held on to his i-pod. It was then that the officer became violent. Hannouneh explained that "the guy punched him, dropped him to the ground, and started banging his head against on the floor." She continued, "He shouted in Arabic `you can't say no to a police officer.'"

After trying to protect her son, the officer turned on Hannouneh. She commented, "As hard as he could he hit my face. I fell to the floor and hit my head on the metal bar in the security fence. I have two stitches and my nose is really smashed. My shirt and my pants were covered in blood".

Tina Hannouneh2

The terrorized family's ordeal only came to an end when other officials realized they were American. Like all Palestinians, Hannouneh and her son were victims of institutional racism at the heart of the Israeli security service. Hannouneh told PNN, "They did this to me because of the color of my skin, because I'm Palestinian". She continued, "I can't even travel through the checkpoint and complain to the US Consulate in Jerusalem because I am Palestinian. It's humiliating".

Adi Dagan, from Machsom Watch, an Israeli human rights organization that monitors checkpoints, told PNN: "To them she is just a Palestinian. Palestinians are without protection. In 2004 we documented 100 complaints of violence and we only received about 10 responses, sometimes soldiers are punished, but often nothing happens. This is what ordinary Palestinians go through everyday."

-- American family brutally assaulted at Israeli checkpoint; PNN, 17 Jul 06. (via After Downing Street).

"Let Every Arab Mother Know That Her Son's Fate Is In My Hands!" [3]


New widower Shukri al-Makadama lies on the floor of his brother's house, lighting cigarette after cigarette. His neck is encased in plaster, due to a possible fractured vertebra caused by a wall falling on top of him. He mourns his dead wife and moans in pain.

Staring at the ceiling, he quietly describes - in fluent Hebrew, from all the years he worked in Tel Aviv - the events of that terrible night when the Israel Defense Forces destroyed his house and his world, and killed his wife - Noha al-Makadama, a mother of 10, who was in her ninth month of pregnancy.

Late one night last week, the army came to demolish the house of the family of teenage terrorist Sami Abdel Salam, who was shot dead on February 9 after he and several others started shooting at IDF soldiers in the El Bureij refugee camp in Gaza. In the process, they also demolished the homes of seven other families - without warning and while the residents were inside. Before she lost consciousness, Noha, who was due to give birth any day, managed to shout to her husband to protect the children and to hand him the small purse that held the money she was saving for a washing machine. He shows us the blue purse, still full of coins.

Noha was buried alive under the rubble of her house last Monday, and her unborn child died with her. Brigadier General Gadi Shemani, the Gaza division commander, said the next day that the IDF has "no evidence" of the woman's death and thereby exempted himself and his soldiers from any responsibility for the despicable killing. Defense Minister Shaul Mofaz said something similar and just as outrageous at the cabinet meeting. So, as a service to the defense minister and the division commander, the full story of the killing of Noha al-Makadama and her unborn child, crushed to death when their home was demolished by the IDF, is hereby presented�

-- 'Save the children, Shukri!', by Gideon Levy; Ha'aretz, 12 Mar 2003.


My army killed a woman in her ninth month of pregnancy. I know that, her husband knows that, her brother knows that, her kids know that, the hospital team at Dir-El- Balakh knows that, those who dug her grave and covered it know that.

Only my army does not know. Brigadier General Gadi Shamani, the man in charge of the Gaza Strip, notified us publicly that "evidence was not found" for the Palestinian claim.

"Evidence was not found..." What a perfect bureaucratic phrasing. An under-clerk in the customs office would not have phrased it better. Probably Reduction Form AC/6416, for the sum of 1 FCP (Fetus Carrying Palestinian) was not filled out properly.

Following, Mister Brigadier General, please find enclosed the evidence: The name of the buried was Nuha Al-Makadma, and she was 33 at the time of her death. Nuha, RIP, was buried alive in her house, in front of her husband and children.

You could easily identify the house; this is the ruin next to the other ruin that your soldiers demolished deliberately. Her husband's name, by the way, is Shukri, and for an unknown reason he has been very sad lately. Perhaps because he saw his wife's body at the hospital, namely - found the evidence to account for the fact that she is dead. The fetus in her womb died with her (attached Enemy-Fetus Termination form in three copies).

A dead fetus is a very unpleasant thing from the explanatory aspect. Therefore, Mister Brigadier General, it is worthwhile for you to quickly find evidence that Nuha's womb was indeed a munitions cache, in which a potential Sha'hid was hidden, caught attached with his navel to a bleeding cord. There is no doubt that the majority of the Israeli people will eagerly buy the evidence brought forth. They are good at that.

-- Evidence Hereby Submitted, by B. Michael; Yediot Ahronot, 7 March 2003. (link)


Photo: A sharpshooter's T-shirt printed for members of the Shaked Battalion of the IDF's Givati Infantry Brigade. The design depicts a pregnant Palestinian woman with a bull's-eye superimposed on her belly, with the slogan, in English, "1 shot, 2 kills.".

Source: Dead Palestinian babies and bombed mosques - IDF fashion 2009 (Ha'aretz); via Mondoweiss.

"One Shot - Two Kills" [1]


Aviv: "I am squad commander of a company that is still in training, from the Givati Brigade. We went into a neighborhood in the southern part of Gaza City. Altogether, this is a special experience. In the course of the training, you wait for the day you will go into Gaza, and in the end it isn't really like they say it is. It's more like, you come, you take over a house, you kick the tenants out and you move in. We stayed in a house for something like a week.

"Toward the end of the operation there was a plan to go into a very densely populated area inside Gaza City itself. In the briefings they started to talk to us about orders for opening fire inside the city, because as you know they used a huge amount of firepower and killed a huge number of people along the way, so that we wouldn't get hurt and they wouldn't fire on us.

"At first the specified action was to go into a house. We were supposed to go in with an armored personnel carrier called an Achzarit [literally, Cruel] to burst through the lower door, to start shooting inside and then ... I call this murder ... in effect, we were supposed to go up floor by floor, and any person we identified - we were supposed to shoot. I initially asked myself: Where is the logic in this?

"From above they said it was permissible, because anyone who remained in the sector and inside Gaza City was in effect condemned, a terrorist, because they hadn't fled. I didn't really understand: On the one hand they don't really have anywhere to flee to, but on the other hand they're telling us they hadn't fled so it's their fault ... This also scared me a bit. I tried to exert some influence, insofar as is possible from within my subordinate position, to change this. In the end the specification involved going into a house, operating megaphones and telling [the tenants]: 'Come on, everyone get out, you have five minutes, leave the house, anyone who doesn't get out gets killed.'

"I went to our soldiers and said, 'The order has changed. We go into the house, they have five minutes to escape, we check each person who goes out individually to see that he has no weapons, and then we start going into the house floor by floor to clean it out ... This means going into the house, opening fire at everything that moves , throwing a grenade, all those things. And then there was a very annoying moment. One of my soldiers came to me and asked, 'Why?' I said, 'What isn't clear? We don't want to kill innocent civilians.' He goes, 'Yeah? Anyone who's in there is a terrorist, that's a known fact.' I said, 'Do you think the people there will really run away? No one will run away.' He says, 'That's clear,' and then his buddies join in: 'We need to murder any person who's in there. Yeah, any person who's in Gaza is a terrorist,' and all the other things that they stuff our heads with, in the media.

"And then I try to explain to the guy that not everyone who is in there is a terrorist, and that after he kills, say, three children and four mothers, we'll go upstairs and kill another 20 or so people. And in the end it turns out that [there are] eight floors times five apartments on a floor - something like a minimum of 40 or 50 families that you murder. I tried to explain why we had to let them leave, and only then go into the houses. It didn't really help. This is really frustrating, to see that they understand that inside Gaza you are allowed to do anything you want, to break down doors of houses for no reason other than it's cool.

"You do not get the impression from the officers that there is any logic to it, but they won't say anything. To write 'death to the Arabs' on the walls, to take family pictures and spit on them, just because you can. I think this is the main thing in understanding how much the IDF has fallen in the realm of ethics, really. It's what I'll remember the most."

"One of our officers, a company commander, saw someone coming on some road, a woman, an old woman. She was walking along pretty far away, but close enough so you could take out someone you saw there. If she were suspicious, not suspicious - I don't know. In the end, he sent people up to the roof, to take her out with their weapons. From the description of this story, I simply felt it was murder in cold blood."

Zamir: "I don't understand. Why did he shoot her?"

Aviv: "That's what is so nice, supposedly, about Gaza: You see a person on a road, walking along a path. He doesn't have to be with a weapon, you don't have to identify him with anything and you can just shoot him. With us it was an old woman, on whom I didn't see any weapon. The order was to take the person out, that woman, the moment you see her."

...

Ram: "What I do remember in particular at the beginning is the feeling of almost a religious mission. My sergeant is a student at a hesder yeshiva [a program that combines religious study and military service]. Before we went in, he assembled the whole platoon and led the prayer for those going into battle. A brigade rabbi was there, who afterward came into Gaza and went around patting us on the shoulder and encouraging us, and praying with people. And also when we were inside they sent in those booklets, full of Psalms, a ton of Psalms. I think that at least in the house I was in for a week, we could have filled a room with the Psalms they sent us, and other booklets like that.

"There was a huge gap between what the Education Corps sent out and what the IDF rabbinate sent out. The Education Corps published a pamphlet for commanders - something about the history of Israel's fighting in Gaza from 1948 to the present. The rabbinate brought in a lot of booklets and articles, and ... their message was very clear: We are the Jewish people, we came to this land by a miracle, God brought us back to this land and now we need to fight to expel the gentiles who are interfering with our conquest of this holy land. This was the main message, and the whole sense many soldiers had in this operation was of a religious war. From my position as a commander and 'explainer,' I attempted to talk about the politics - the streams in Palestinian society, about how not everyone who is in Gaza is Hamas, and not every inhabitant wants to vanquish us. I wanted to explain to the soldiers that this war is not a war for the sanctification of the holy name, but rather one to stop the Qassams."

    -- Shooting and Crying by Amos Harel; Ha'aretz, 20 Mar 2009 (Israeli soldiers who served in the Israeli attack on Gaza, Dec 2008-Jan 2009 discuss their experiences).

Photo: T-shirt printed in January 2009 for members of the "Night Predators" demolitions platoon from Battalion 13 of the IDF's Golani Brigade. T-shirt depicts a devil detonating a charge that destroys a mosque. An inscription above it says, "Only God forgives."

Source: Dead Palestinian babies and bombed mosques - IDF fashion 2009 (Ha'aretz); via Mondoweiss.

"Only God Forgives"