city:umm al-fahm

The wall of insanity -

Israel has opted for another wall, this time around Gaza. Israel will pay for it

Gideon Levy Aug 13, 2017
read more: ▻http://www.haaretz.com/opinion/.premium-1.806489

The next time a cap gun is fired or a toy balloon is launched at Israel from the Gaza Strip, the army will start building a steel dome over the Strip to prevent it. The ceiling will also cut off the territory from the sky. After all, we’re talking about national security. When the first crack forms, and another balloon is launched or cap gun fired, the defense establishment will proceed to the next phase: flooding the Gaza Strip with water until it is completely submerged. After all, we’re talking about Israeli security.
Until that happens — the plans have already been drawn up — the modest, hard-up Israeli army is making do with smaller measures: It’s building a new “barrier” around the Strip, the father of all the fences and the mother of all the walls with which Israel is surrounding itself, six meters high and reaching tens of meters underground. Israel is becoming a state with a wall at its heart: There’s nothing it likes more than to surround itself.
History is replete with megalomaniacal rulers who built palaces. For now, Israeli megalomania settles for walls. The separation barrier and the border fence, the Good Fence on the Lebanese border and the bad fence, the entire country is fences. Just give defense officials an excuse and they will surround us with a fence costing billions. For that, money can always be found.
The fence of horrors on the Egyptian border to keep out African refugees and the separation wall facing barefoot residents of the Deheisheh refugee camp in the West Bank. Now it’s the turn of the Gaza border fence to stop tunnels from being dug under the fence that it is replacing. Next thing you know, there will be an electronic fence around the Israeli-Arab city of Umm al-Fahm, in response to the terrorism emanating from there as well.
The chief of the Southern Command made the announcement, the military correspondents quoted him slavishly and Israel responded with either a yawn or a Yes!. The method is tried and true: First you create a demon (the tunnels); then you find it a megalomaniacal solution. And there you have it, another $800 million Zionist project, to be built by workers from Moldova and asylum seekers from Africa. There we have it: another wall.

3 Palestinian citizens of Israel, 2 police officers killed in Jerusalem shooting
July 14, 2017 9:19 A.M. (Updated: July 14, 2017 12:58 P.M.)
▻http://www.maannews.com/Content.aspx?ID=778072

http://www.maannews.com/Photos/439384C.jpg

JERUSALEM (Ma’an) — Three Palestinian citizens of Israel and two police officers — also Palestinian citizens of Israel — were killed during an armed confrontation in the Old City of occupied East Jerusalem early on Friday morning.

According to Israeli police spokesman Micky Rosenfeld, three Palestinians carried out a shooting attack at the Lions’ Gate entrance to the Old City at around 7:00 a.m. on Friday, critically injuring two Israeli police officers, who were taken to hospitals for treatment, and lightly injuring another.

Israeli forces then heavily opened fire towards the Palestinians as they headed inside the Al-Aqsa Mosque compound, injuring the three, who were left on the ground bleeding while medics were reportedly prevented from approaching them, witnesses told Ma’an.

Witnesses told Ma’an that the Palestinians entered Lions’ Gate on a motorcycle and shot at the police officers at point-blank range, before heading inside the Al-Aqsa Mosque compound through the Gate of Remission — known in Arabic as Bab al-Huttah — where Israeli forces shot them at close range.

Israeli police spokeswoman Luba al-Samri later identified the shooters as Muhammad Ahmad Muhammad Jabarin , 29; Muhammad Hamid Abd al-Latif Jabarin , 19; and Muhammad Ahmad Mufdal Jabarin , 19 — all Palestinian citizens of Israel from the Palestinian-majority town of Umm al-Fahm. Al-Samri added that none of the three men had previously had a “security” record.

Rosenfeld reported early on Friday afternoon that the two critically injured officers had succumbed to their wounds while in the hospital, identifying them as Hail Stawi, 30, and Kamil Shakib Shinan, 22 — two Druze citizens of Israel from the villages of Maghar and Horfish respectively.(...)

#Palestine_assassinée

No exit: An Israeli Arab city’s second-class status Umm al-Fahm has roads that lead to nowhere and until two years ago no public transportation at all.
By Tali Heruti-Sover | Apr. 26, 2015 Haaretz
▻http://www.haaretz.com/news/national/.premium-1.653323

On one side of the Arab city of Umm al-Fahm is a two-lane road that ends suddenly — the money ran out — and on the other side is the main exit, a bottleneck that narrows even further the closer it gets to Route 65, the main highway that runs through Wadi Ara.

A visit to the second largest Arab city in Israel, where 53,000 residents live, in the Wadi Ara area of northern Israel illustrates the impasse faced by many Arab towns in the country.

The afternoon we visited traffic flowed easily. But that’s not the case during rush hour at 5:30 a.m., seven days a week, when some 20,000 drivers try to leave town.

“It takes 20 to 45 minutes [to get out],” says Saliman Mahamid, the long-serving city engineer. “Every resident knows that in order to get to work they must make it through the traffic jam, and 12 hours later they will get stuck on the way back,” says Mahamid, noting that over 50% of the population works out of town. “People work all over the country so they leave early, but everyone sits in the same unbearable traffic jam. There is no city in Israel, certainly not of this size, where the exit and entrance are controlled by one small traffic light. I assume that in a Jewish city of the same size they would have already dealt with the matter,” he says.

It seems Mahamid is right: Over 10 million shekels ($2.5 million) was invested recently in another interchange for the second largest neighborhood in Hadera, Givat Olga, where some 12,000 residents suffered from an infuriating, but much smaller, traffic jam. Today they enjoy a new and impressive road that connects to the coastal road (Highway 2). In Umm al-Fahm, by comparison, they will wait — and not because there are no plans, which there have been for decades. This traffic jam is the parable and moral of the story of generations of Israeli governments whose actions are defined by discrimination and Chelm-like stupidity.