Palestinian lives matter.

We ask our Foreign Office to intervene with Israel to ensure the return of the bodies of Dr Mai Afana and Ahmed Eriqat (killed at Israeli military checkpoints near Abu Dis, Palestine) so the families can bury them.

And to support human rights and oppose the apartheid situation in Palestine/ Israel that has seen 10,000 Palestinians killed by Israeli soldiers and settlers in the past 20 years (figs from B’tselem and Wafaa Agency).

(The young mother on the right in the pciture is Dr Mai Afana who was killed at Hizma Checkpoint on 16th June 2021), with her young daughter.)

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Two young people from Abu Dis have been killed at Israeli military checkpoints within a year of each other.  The Israelis have kept both of their bodies, preventing the families from saying goodbye and burying them. But this is part of a much bigger picture of killings.

AHMED ERIQAT

On 23rd June 2021, we give our condolences again to the family of Ahmed Eriqat,  one year after we heard the awful news that - on his sister’s wedding day -  a young man from Abu Dis had been shot by an Israeli soldier at the Container Checkpoint south of Abu Dis and was lying on the ground, given no help until he bled to death. Following this appalling tragedy, the Israeli army did not return his body and his family are still campaigning to be able to bury him.

DR MAI AFANA

Just under a year after Ahmed Eriqat, the community in Abu Dis heard on 16th June 2021 of the checkpoint killing of a young a young lecturer, Dr Mai Afana, who had left her young daughter with her mother and set off for work in Ramallah but did not get past Hizma checkpoint. The Israelis have also taken her body and not returned it to the family (she is now apparently among 81 bodies being held by Israel) and her community are convulsed with grief.

‘DEATHPOINTS’

In neither of these cases do the local community believe the Israeli army who say that these young people were trying to attack soldiers; they say this excuse is part of a pattern along with shooting people, allowing them to bleed to death, granting impunity to their killers and holding their bodies from their families. They say this often happens at the Israeli military checkpoints which are widespread across the West Bank in civilian areas and which, they say, should be referred to now as ‘deathpoints.’

HUGE NUMBER OF KILLINGS

Each of these deaths is a real human tragedy, and we understand that the Palestinians refuse to be numbers…  but it is important to have an idea of the scale of the killings and realise that this is systematic. It seems that demonstrators on June’s racist 'flag march' in Jerusalem meant what they said when they shouted “Death to Arabs”.   The occupation is killing people by blocking ambulances and denying medical treatment, by stress and trauma in very many ways, but if we just look at direct killings,  we find that 10,000 (ten thousand) Palestinians have been killed by the Israeli military and settlers in the past 20 years. This includes the assaults on Gaza but also many others - an average of five hundred killings a year – or ten per week (Of course the deathly nature of this apartheid situation goes back very much further than 2000). Source: the websites of B’tselem (Israeli human rights organisation) and Palestinian statistics via Wafa’ Agency.