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Casualties of the Lifting of the CurfewsWednesday 10 Apr 2002
author: The Palestine Monitor
summary
As the Israeli army has reoccupied Palestinian towns and cities in the West Bank they have imposed complete 24-hour curfews for days at a time. Occasionally they lift the curfew to enable the civilian residents who are trapped in their houses without water, electricity, telephones or food, to buy provisions.
The Palestine Monitor, A PNGO Information Clearinghouse
Casualties of the Lifting of the Curfews
10th of April
As the Israeli army has reoccupied Palestinian towns and cities in the West Bank they have imposed complete 24-hour curfews for days at a time. Occasionally they lift the curfew to enable the civilian residents who are trapped in their houses without water, electricity, telephones or food, to buy provisions.
However, despite the lifting of the curfew at the ‘high military level’, on the ground it would appear that leaving home is still fraught with danger for most Palestinians.
The day before yesterday when the Israelis lifted the curfew in the Bethlehem area, Yousef Iyad, 43 and his wife, Jameleh left their seven children at home in Deheishya refugee camp to make a brief trip to buy food. On the way Israeli soldiers opened fire on the car shattering the window and shooting out a tyre. Jamelah suffered wounds to her face, from the flying glass. Terrified they sought refuge in a house in the street. The curfew was re-imposed; the parents now are separated from their children including
their two-month-old baby, who is breast-fed. This means that since yesterday he has not been fed – and is left in the care of his siblings and neighbours. The eldest, who is 18, is desperate to reunite the baby with his mother – and said, “if no one helps me I will have to break curfew to
get him to my mother – he is crying and hungry.”
This is not the first time Israeli soldiers have shot at people when the curfew was lifted. On April the second the Israeli soldiers in the downtown Ramallah opened fire on a 14-year-old Kindi Amin Qutamey, shooting him in the leg with live ammunition.
In another example, on the 8th of April, a newly married man, in his early 20s, was driving home in the Ramallah neighbourhood, Im As-Shariyet, when the curfew was re-imposed; a sniper positioned in the Arab Nation College
shot him with four bullets – he died immediately from the shot to his head.