The photos above are from a protest today in Al-Walaje, a Palestinian village in the occupied West Bank just outside of occupied East Jerusalem.
The Jewish settlement of Gilo faces Walaje and has been stealing village land to expand. And Palestinian popular committees organize protests against the bulldozers.
Today the geneticist Mazin Qumsiyeh was arrested along with a half dozen other people. Many photos by a witness are here.
Pictured above is a village activist named Sheerin Al-Araj. What a brave and noble-looking woman! She resisted arrest and they put the bracelets on her. She kept resisting and Qumsiyeh’s wife says they sprayed a substance in her face to subdue her, shown in the second photograph.
The several prisoners were taken to a Bethlehem checkpoint and then on to a jail. They were kept handcuffed and were pressed to sign a paper with Hebrew writing on it.
The report we got states: “Every one of them refused to sign as advised by a Palestinian lawyer who was present there. While detained there, they tried to speak to the soldiers about international law, but the soldiers were saying that they don’t give a f— about international law and you people and they only care about obeying orders. Mazin reasoned to them that German soldiers were also obeying orders during the Nazi regime. The Israeli solders responded by saying that German soldiers would have shot you by now.”
