Today, October 12, 2009, Mehdi Sa’id Abu Ayyesh finally succumbed to his injuries in a hospital in Hebron. He was shot in the head with live ammunition, believed by his doctors to have been a .22 caliber bullet fired with a ruger rifle, which the Israeli military insists is “non-lethal”, on the evening of March 4, 2009 outside his home during an Israeli military invasion. Israeli forces said he threw rocks at them. He was taken to the hospital in Hebron, where he remained in a coma with bullet fragments in his brain, until his now-emaciated body finally rejected the ventilator and … Continue reading

Kobi Snitz, a long-time activist with the Israeli group Anarchists Against the Wall, and a personal friend of PSP, begins a 20 day prison term for an arrest in 2004 in which he tried to prevent a home demolition in the Palestinian village of Kharbatha, in the Ramallah District. He is the first Israeli activist to be tried, convicted, and forced to serve time for demonstrating in the Occupied Territories. His statement (from yesterday) is below:

‘Tomorrow I will start a 20 day prison term. It is a result of an attempt to prevent a house demolition in kharbatha. As you probably know 20 days is nothing compared to the time many Palestinian teenagers have to do. Unlike them, … Continue reading

On Friday, Palestinian residents of the Ramallah-District village of Ni’lin, accompanied by Israeli and international activists, totaling around 100 participants, met after noon prayers and marched towards the newly-constructed concrete wall in the agricultural fields of the village. One group of demonstrators began defacing the wall, and taking apart the barbed-wire fence adjacent to it, both illegally constructed on Ni’lin land and preventing the residents from reaching their privately-owned agricultural land.
Israeli soldiers responded with tear gas and sewage-smelling spray for several hours. Later in the afternoon, when much of the demonstration had dispersed, Israeli soldiers inexplicably resorted to using live ammunition. A young reporter with Press TV from Ni’lin, Mohammed Amireh, was grazed in the leg with … Continue reading

Some 100 Palestinians, 50 internationals and ten Israelis gathered this Friday in the village of Ma’asara for a wedding march, which was combined with the weekly anti-wall demonstration in order to highlight the severe personal and social implications of the occupation, the oppression and the wall. Demonstrators accompanied a couple that got married just the night before and two other couples disguised as newlyweds all the way across the village, with marriage songs and protest slogans interchanging and completing each other. Coming close to the end of the built area of the village the couples left to prepare themselves for the next part of the wedding-protest.

The rest … Continue reading

Monday, July 13, 2009, PSP received reports that farmland in Saffa area of Beit Ommar had been set on fire by settlers from neighboring Bat ‘Ayn. Initially, a PSP committee member and the mayor of Beit Ommar went into the valley, owned by Abu Jabber Soleiby, to assess the damage. In the afternoon, when the fire had still not be put out, international activists arrived with a large group of Beit Ommar residents along with media representatives. Fire trucks from Hebron initially could not reach the fire from the Beit Ommar/Saffa side and there were only two tools available to fight the fire, … Continue reading

Mohammed “Hamude” Abu Maria, long-time committee member of the Palestine Solidarity Project, was released from Qetziot prison after 8 months of Administrative Detention, where he was held without charge or trial. Hamude was welcomed home Wednesday afternoon by fireworks and dozens of friends and community members, as well as by his three children, 8 year-old Thikra, 5 year-old Qais and 3 year-old Shahed, as well as by his wife, Feryal.

Hamude was the last of three PSP committee members to be arrested and held in Administrative Detention, a tactic used to intimidate and attempt to quell PSP’s anti-occupation work. While PSP continued its struggle throughout the imprisonment of three of its key organizers in the last year, we are … Continue reading