Dear Friends of PACE,
Dear Friends of the Palestinian people,

Since the beginning of the uprising, 28 days ago, many Palestinian localities have been subject to strict curfews. Such localities, as the old city of Hebron and the village of Hewara (near Nablus), have suffered tremendously from this measure. Reports from the besieged villages and city reveal that the people are in great danger. Their food supplies are diminishing, and many families do not have basic food supplies. They can eat once a day only, and their meal consists of light soup and bread. Pregnant women have pregnancy interruptions because they cannot receive necessary medical care. Schools in these localities have been closed ever since the beginning of the uprising. Further more, at night, the Israeli army and the settlers shell the civilian houses through helicopters and tanks which causes a lot of damage in the simple buildings making them inhabitable, especially at this cold and rainy time of the year. During one of these attacks that took place a day before yesterday a 60 year old man, and a father of 5 children was killed in Hebron.

Since the beginning of the Intifada the Israeli occupation army imposed a strict closure on the Palestinian cities, villages and refugee camps. This closure means that the people cannot go from one place to another for work, study, visit relatives or to hospital. For a person who works on daily basis, not being able to reach work means that there is no money to buy food for the family, and in general a medium Palestinian family is a family of seven persons. Studying has also become rather a difficult task especially for university students. On one hand you have students who cannot leave their places of residence. Other students are delayed or forbidden from reaching their classes by at least one of the successive Israeli check points. Most Palestinians have lost family direct contacts, the only means of communications between members of a family is the telephone, and this increases the stress and psychological pressure on the people. Sick people are not always able to reach hospitals, or cannot reach one on time. Many Palestinian lives have been lost because an ambulance could not reach the patient, or because the ambulance needed something like sixty minutes to reach a hospital which is only five minutes away; at each roadblock, soldiers swing open the vehicle doors and peep inside. In fact the only persons who are free to travel from one place to another are the settlers.

The irrational aggression of the Israeli occupation army does not know any limits. In addition to the closure, the shelling by helicopters and tanks, and the attacks of the armed settlers against the Palestinian civilians every where. The demolishing of Palestinian houses to "better protect" the Jewish settlers, the Israeli occupation army has destroyed large areas of agricultural lands which are the main source of food for the Palestinian population. In the Gaza strip alone they destroyed more than 200 acres of cultivated land. In other places the Israeli occupation army and the settlers are hindering the people from harvesting their olive trees, which is a major product in Palestine on the income of which many families depend for a whole year. In fact in some cases the Israeli occupation army just solves the "problem" by uprooting the Olive trees.

The latest project of the evil newly formed Israeli unity government, a military government in fact, is the separation between the Israelis and the Palestinians. What the two Israeli generals, Barak and Sharon, mean is the creation of bantustans. The Palestinians will be confined in isolated zones the total area of which will not exceed 40% of the area of the West Bank and Gaza Strip. Each zone will have one or more access gates as the only passageways for Palestinians and their merchandise, of course controlled by the Israeli occupation army. This is the only solution these two faces of Zionism, Barak and Sharon, can accept for the Palestinian problem; because they cannot incarcerate all Palestinians they decided to imprison them, each where he/she lives.

After all this the USA, which considers itself the defender of human rights and freedom all over the globe, decides that the Palestinians are responsible. In fact they are not different from the late Israeli prime minister Golda Meir who declared that she could not forgive the Palestinians because they made Israeli soldiers shoot them. The Israeli occupation army is killing the Palestinians, demolishing their houses, destroying their crops, sacking their lands, pushing them to starvation, imprison those who could survive, and the USA is asking the Palestinians, the offended, to stop the offensive carried out by Israel. The Palestinians now believe that the International law and human values are just a philosophic exercise.

The PACE Team