Israeli Soldiers assault US citizens (Part 1)

(Ramallah, Palestine, 5 May 2002)-- The following is an email written by Huwaida Arraf, one of the founders of the International Solidarity Movement (ISM) and regular contributor to Live from Palestine. Updates to follow. [AB]

Friends,

We succeeded to get foodstuffs and “international protection” into the Church of the Nativity! If you haven’t yet seen the reports, please see below.

The 13 of us that were detained after the action have just been released for a few hours, I think. We were 8 guys and 5 ladies. After over 7 hours of being detained and questioned by the Israeli military, we were finally hand-cuffed and escorted out of Bethlehem. At the Bethlehem checkpoint, the guys and girls were divided. The five ladies were pushed into the floor of a police jeep and our legs were bound. The Israeli police officers drove around for a while then stopped and pulled one girl out - Ida Fasten, from Sweden, cut her loose and left her, in the middle of we don’t know where, by herself. We were horrified! They had taken all of our phones and identification, and it was 2am. When I protested leaving a foreign woman out in the middle of unfamiliar territory in the middle of the night, with no phone and no ID, I was physically assaulted -- slapped hard in the face by one of the officers. Both officers in the jeep refused to give us their names and badge numbers, despite repeated requests.