[Yinekol]

Al Salamu 'Alaykum wrwb.

http://shiningblades.blogspot.com/20...g-mosques.html

Wa'alaykum salam.

[Yinekol]

Israel Destroys Mosque in Bedouin-Palestinian Town of Rahat
Sunday, 07 November 2010 16:05 Tania Kepler for the Alternative Information Center (AIC)
In another direct assault against the country’s Bedouin-Palestinian community, Israeli police demolished a mosque in the Negev Bedouin city of Rahat during the evening hours of Saturday, 6 November. Hundreds of policemen and Israeli Land Administration (ILA) authorities, in addition to tractors and ambulances, descended upon the city and demolished the mosque, citing Israeli police claims that the structure was built illegally.

Southern District Police Chief Commander Yochanan Danino, who supervised the operation, said, "We acted with resolve to enforce the rule of law and relayed a message that Israel Police will not ignore illegal activity while remaining sensitive to the Muslims' feelings," reported Ynet News.

Hundreds of residents protested the demolition and Israeli police used tear gas to disperse the crowd, detaining five. The Rahat municipality has called for a general strike in wake of the demolition.

"We could have reached a compromise and the razing could have been delayed, but this is a wicked government," Rahat Mayor Faiz Abu Sahiban said.

“Seeing the mosque being destroyed is infuriating. They would never destroy a synagogue,” said Rahat resident Younes Abu Janem.

Israeli law enforcement officials said that members from "the Islamic Movement acted with defiance all the way: they were given an option to construct the building nearby but they rejected it, they didn't obtain building permits, and connected illegally to the electricity grid. Their attempts to protest the demolition attracted few people," reported the Jerusalem Post.

According Mayor Abu Sahiban, the act was a direct offense against all Muslims, and the "police should act responsibly and use its discretion."

"They should at least postpone the demolition until after the holiday," Sahiban said, adding that the act was a "flagrant violation" of Rahat's jurisdiction. "We have four mosques that were built without due permit, so they can demolish them all."

Rahat, located in the Negev and founded in 1972, currently has a population around 52,000, but numbers are growing as the Jewish National Fund, the Israeli Land Administration (ILA) and the government strengthen efforts to remove the Bedouin from their land. 2010 has seen a number of particularly aggressive actions on the part of the Israeli government.

The Bedouin village of El Araqib has suffered repeated harsh blows at the hands of Israeli authorities in the last several months. The ILA has destroyed the village six times in the past four months, with police arresting residents. While destructions and constant fear of homelessness has prompted some of the El Araqib villagers to move to Rahat, it now seems Israeli authorities will target them there as well.

The ILA is the government branch responsible for managing 93% of the land in Israel, which the country considers public domain. They have a history of uprooting olive trees in Palestinian villages and trying to plant forests as part of a plan to “green” the Negev, while making the nomadic lifestyle for the Bedouin impossible and pushing them to cities like Rahat, where employment is low and their traditional way of life impossible.

"If they continue to destroy it, we will rebuild the mosque over and over again," said Yusuf Abu Jama, leader of the northern branch of the Isalmic Movement in Rahat.

"Now we are unified, the northern branch and the southern branch [of the Islamic movement]. Today, Arab people from all over the country will come to show their solidarity."

Rahat residents began rebuilding the mosque on Sunday, with dozens honoring the site of yesterday’s destruction with worship.

[Yinekol]

Al-Khalil, July 15, IRNA -- A prominent Islamic leader in Palestine
has revealed that Zionist authorities have destroyed as many as 2,000
mosques and scores of churches since the creation of the Zionist state
in 1948.
Sheikh Ra'ed Salah, leader of the Islamic movement in Israel, said
in an interview with the `Voice of Palestine' radio Sunday that the
Zionists carried out a systematic campaign to destroy and obliterate
the religious sites of Muslims and Christians in Israel.
"They wanted to bury Islamic and Christian history in this land,"
Salah said.
He pointed out that no more than a hundred mosques and few
churches were left intact, adding that many of the spared mosques were
actually converted into `restaurants, nightclubs, bars, and even
animal pens by Jewish authorities'.
He disclosed that in some cases, the Zionists filmed pornographic
scenes inside a mosque, as in the Safad mosque.
Sheikh Salah pointed out that the Israeli authorities were still
refusing to allow Muslims to pray at many mosques throughout
Palestine.
"They wish to wipe out anything and everything non-Jewish," he
said.

[Yinekol]

Today's Jewish settlers more closely resemble cattle rustlers or bandits than pioneers. Or even more accurately, they bring to mind the violent thugs from "The Wire," an HBO drama that takes place on the brutal streets of Baltimore. [A criminal rolls through a neighborhood wearing a flak jacket and carrying a shotgun casually thrown over his shoulder. Is this Baltimore or Hebron?] Or perhaps "The Sopranos," another HBO series, replete with savage beatings and offhand killings.

Jewish settler/hooligans torched a West Bank mosque in the Palestinian village of Beit Fajar, south of Bethlehem, charring copies of the Qur'an and prayer carpets, on Oct. 4, a month after the launch of new, and short-lived, peace talks in Washington, DC. This was the fourth arson attempt on Muslim holy places in two years. Indeed, from January 2009 through August 2010, Israeli settlers in the West Bank perpetrated 84 acts of arson involving olive groves, homes and farm buildings. Vigilante settlers have left behind Hebrew graffiti with the words "revenge" or "price tag," referring to their campaign against outpost evacuations or the temporary freeze on settlement expansion. Settlers are turning the bucolic hills and fields of Palestine into the Wild West Bank.

In 1994 Baruch Goldstein, a New York-born Jewish settler, walked into Hebron's Tomb of the Patriarchs, or the Ibrahimi Mosque, and gunned down Muslim worshippers, killing 29 and wounding another 150. His deadly rampage triggered a period of settler violence in the occupied territories that continues to this day. His grave, in the adjacent and illegal Jewish settlement of Kiryat Arba, has become a pilgrimage site for Israeli extremists.

According to the Israeli human rights organization B'Tselem, Israeli civilians killed 49 Palestinians from Sept. 29, 2000 to Aug. 31, 2010. "Settlers block roadways, so as to impede Palestinian life and commerce, shoot solar panels on roofs of buildings, torch automobiles, shatter windowpanes and windshields, destroy crops, uproot trees, beat shepherds, abuse merchants and owners of stalls in the market. Some of these actions are intended to force Palestinians to leave their homes and farmland, and thereby enable the settlers to gain control of them."

American donors finance this settler project.

Palestinian families gather every year in the fall to harvest olives and picnic with their neighbors. Olive trees are a major commercial crop for Palestine, and many families depend on them for their livelihood. The trees grow at a rate of 1 to 2 feet a year, reaching a height of 20 to 40 feet after about 40 years. They generally live for about 400 years, but many are known to be 700 or 1,000 years old. To Palestinians the olive tree is a symbol of Palestinian steadfastness to their land.

During recent olive harvests, Israeli settlers have targeted both Palestinians and their beloved olive groves. This past October West Bank Palestinians from Turmus Aya and Al-Mughayer, north of Ramallah, arrived to pick olives—only to discover their olive trees bored into and poisoned, with branches drooping and the olives shriveled and black, instead of plump and green or purple. Settlers from the illegal Israeli outpost on top of a nearby hill had used chemicals to kill other trees last year.

Residents of Burin, near the Yitzhar settlement in the northern West Bank, say settlers throw stones to keep them from working on their land. This October border police and Israel Defense Forces troops, as well as Palestinian police, tried to guard villagers during the harvest. According to Sarit Michaeli, spokeswoman for B'Tselem, which monitored the olive harvest, the settlers have a "new strategy," which is to steal the olives right before they're harvested. They take advantage of the fact that everyone knows the times when the guards are to be posted, she told the Israeli daily Haaretz. "In a number of places where Palestinians are not allowed for the rest of the year, when they come on the days allocated to them, they find the olives have disappeared," she said.

Hundreds of trees have been stripped of olives this year, according to Rabbis for Human Rights, an Israeli organization that tries to help farmers. Members of a new unit from the Palestinian Authority's Ministry of Agriculture worked to document villagers' complaints, counting poisoned trees and taking samples for testing.

Believe it or not, Israel is now recruiting police officers from the very same settler communities that have been tormenting Christians and Muslims in the West Bank. According to a startling report by Jonathan Cook published in the Palestine Chronicle, their new special officer training course includes seven months of religious studies in Elisha, an extremist West Bank settlement. "Although all the settlements are illegal under international law, Elisha is one of dozens of wildcat settlements also illegal under Israeli law," Cook observes. More than 300 settlers are reported to have expressed an interest in the course so far.

"A right-wing settler activist, Hor Nizri, who has clashed with the police in the past over the evacuation of settlements, has been put in charge of recruiting young settlers," Cook writes. "He told the Yediot Aharonot newspaper that the program was 'a historic reconciliation,' adding: 'We want to fill the ranks of the police as we fill the ranks of the army.'

"His comments have sparked concern among Palestinian groups inside Israel that the program is the first phase of an attempted settler 'takeover' of the police, replicating their growing dominance of sections of the army."

Israel released its first official figures on the number of settlers in Israeli military combat units in September. About a third of all officers in such units are settlers, up from only 2.5 percent in 1990s.

"Is it really credible that these religious extremists who have been educated to hate Palestinians in the West Bank are going to behave differently when they police our communities inside Israel?" asks Jafar Farah, the director of Mossawa, an advocacy center for the Palestinian minority inside Israel. A settler police force roaming the Wild West Bank defies the imagination.

Radical rabbis in extremist settlements help inspire settler brutality. Two rabbis in Yitzhar, near Nablus, recently published a book, The King's Torah, which sanctions the killing of non-Jews, including children. The authors write: "There is justification for killing babies if it is clear that they will grow up to harm us."

On Oct. 16, in his weekly Saturday night sermon, Israeli Sephardic leader Rabbi Ovadia Yosef said non-Jews or Goyim "were born only to serve us. Without that, they have no place in the world; only to serve the People of Israel." Embarrassed American Jews quickly condemned those racist remarks, but Rabbi Yosef is the spiritual leader of Israel's pro-settler and ultra-religious Shas Party, an increasingly powerful group in Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu's ruling coalition. Settlers listen to their radical rabbis.

At the end of Laura Ingall's Little House on the Prairie, her family is told that the land on which they built their log cabin, along with their well and fields, must be vacated by the settlers because it is not legally open to settlement. Pa agrees to leave the land and move the family to "the Banks of Plum Creek" in Minnesota before the Army forcibly evicts them.

That's something nearly 500,000 Israelis who live in the illegal settlements of the West Bank and East Jerusalem should be doing right now. Ma and Pa—or Ima and Aba—need to be figuring out where they'd like to settle next. To paraphrase journalist Helen Thomas, settlers need to move back inside Israel's pre-1967 borders, or return to the streets of Moscow, Baltimore, New York and New Jersey—preferably without their torches and rifles.

Delinda C. Hanley is news editor of the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs.

http://www.wrmea.com/component/conte...west-bank.html

[Yinekol]

They strike in the dead of night, setting fire to mosques and daubing their walls with "Price Tag" graffiti, the defiant slogan of Israeli settlers waging a vigilante campaign branded as "un-Jewish" by President Shimon Peres.

The "price-taggers" have vowed to avenge any move by Israeli authorities to uproot settlement outposts built in the occupied West Bank without Israeli government permission.

Dozens of those outposts, which Israel has repeatedly promised its main ally, the United States, to remove, remain on lonely West Bank hilltops on land to which many settlers claim a Biblical right and where Palestinians want to build a state.

On some of the few occasions when Israeli army bulldozers have torn down structures at the outposts, Palestinian villagers have awoken the next morning to find a local mosque charred by fire and with the now-familiar graffiti on its walls.

Israeli leaders have condemned the incidents. But no one has been charged in the three arson attacks in the West Bank over the past year, an indication, Palestinians say, of indifference by a right-wing government that includes pro-settler parties.

Now the "Price Tag" campaign has widened to include vandalism at an Israeli army base in the West Bank and the torching of two mosques, one this week in a Bedouin village inside Israel, touching a nerve among the country's leaders and the public.

At stake is the delicate fabric of co-existence between Israel's Jewish majority and its Arab minority, which makes up some 20 percent of the population.

"Israel had better know that it will pay for this," said a resident of Tuba-Zangariya in the Galilee, where a mosque was burned on Monday, prompting dozens of Israeli Arabs to take to the streets and hurl rocks at police, who responded with tear gas.

Graffiti left at al-Nur mosque suggested the "price-taggers" were responding to the deaths of a settler father and baby killed last month when their car overturned in the West Bank after Palestinians threw rocks at it.

FIRST CHARGES

Police said they had set up a special task force to deal with the "price taggers" and announced on Thursday that they had arrested a suspect in the Tuba-Zangariya case.

In another potential breakthrough against the militants, three settlers were charged in a court in Jerusalem on Wednesday with planning to set fire to a West Bank mosque.

In addition to assaults on mosques, militant settlers have been blamed for a string of car burnings and the uprooting of hundreds of olive trees and grapevines on Palestinian property.

Some Israeli human rights activists link an increase in such incidents in recent months to tensions over a Palestinian application for statehood at the United Nations, which is strongly opposed by Israel and its U.S. ally.

The "Price Tag" campaign is widely believed to be the work of a clandestine group of young settlers in unauthorized outposts where journalists are not welcome.

Security officials say such close-knit groups are tough to infiltrate, making it difficult to prevent mosque attacks or find out who carried them out.

But Avraham Dichter, a former chief of Israel's internal security agency, the Shin Bet, told Reuters the time had come to move against militant settlers, whom he described as "miserable people with a terrorist mindset."

Dichter said that while not as lethal as a Jewish group that killed three Palestinians and wounded dozens in a series of attacks in the 1980s, the recent incidents were still alarming.

Attacks on particularly sensitive places, such as the Jerusalem holy site that Jews call Temple Mount and Muslims revere as Haram al-Sharif (Noble Sanctuary), could swiftly trigger a new wave of Palestinian violence, he said.

"You can find yourself in no time in the middle of an Intifada, not because there were fatalities but just because a very important and sensitive target was hit," Dichter said.

FEELING BETRAYED

Itamar Ben Gvir, a settler leader in Kiryat Arba, one of the most hardline Jewish settlements, told Reuters the attack on the Galilee mosque should have come as no surprise.

"The writing was on the wall, because a population that feels that they are being abandoned, harmed and kicked over and over again, it is only natural that individuals from within that population will come out and commit incidents," he said, in apparent reference to moves against unauthorized outposts.

The Galilee arson attack was swiftly condemned by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Peres rushed to inspect the mosque, where residents were weeping over charred holy books.

"Un-Jewish, illegal, immoral and (it) brings heavy shame upon us," Peres, a Nobel peace prize laureate, said.

Peres's visit was a sign of Israeli concern that any future torching of mosques inside Israel could inflame its Arab citizens, who have long complained of discrimination.

Many Israelis are worried about more violence as Israeli Arabs mark the anniversary this month of the killings of 13 young protesters by Israeli police in October 2000 when a Palestinian uprising was raging in the West Bank and Gaza.

Mainstream settler leaders have also voiced concern at the militants within their ranks, fearing their actions will tarnish the movement whose settlements on land Israel captured in a 1967 war are deemed illegal in international law.

"Price tagging represents the biggest damage to our future. It is immoral. It is un-Jewish. I couldn't use harsher words," said Naftali Bennett, head of the Yesha (settler) Council.

"We are talking about a few hundred people living mainly in the northeastern area. I urge the police to arrest these guys and throw them in jail," he told a group of foreign reporters.

But Menachem Landow, a former officer in a Shin Bet division that investigates threats posed by Jewish extremists, said the settler leadership should do more to rein in the radicals.

"One of the things that bothers me is that the leaders of the settlements are constantly condemning (the attacks). The condemnation is not enough -- they need to cooperate with the security services, help them, because without the help from the surroundings no intelligence source has a chance," Landow said.

(Editing by Jeffrey Heller and Alistair Lyon)

They strike in the dead of night, setting fire to mosques and daubing their walls with "Price Tag" graffiti, the defiant slogan of Israeli settlers waging a vigilante campaign branded as "un-Jewish" by President Shimon Peres.

The "price-taggers" have vowed to avenge any move by Israeli authorities to uproot settlement outposts built in the occupied West Bank without Israeli government permission.

Dozens of those outposts, which Israel has repeatedly promised its main ally, the United States, to remove, remain on lonely West Bank hilltops on land to which many settlers claim a Biblical right and where Palestinians want to build a state.

On some of the few occasions when Israeli army bulldozers have torn down structures at the outposts, Palestinian villagers have awoken the next morning to find a local mosque charred by fire and with the now-familiar graffiti on its walls.

Israeli leaders have condemned the incidents. But no one has been charged in the three arson attacks in the West Bank over the past year, an indication, Palestinians say, of indifference by a right-wing government that includes pro-settler parties.

Now the "Price Tag" campaign has widened to include vandalism at an Israeli army base in the West Bank and the torching of two mosques, one this week in a Bedouin village inside Israel, touching a nerve among the country's leaders and the public.

At stake is the delicate fabric of co-existence between Israel's Jewish majority and its Arab minority, which makes up some 20 percent of the population.

"Israel had better know that it will pay for this," said a resident of Tuba-Zangariya in the Galilee, where a mosque was burned on Monday, prompting dozens of Israeli Arabs to take to the streets and hurl rocks at police, who responded with tear gas.

Graffiti left at al-Nur mosque suggested the "price-taggers" were responding to the deaths of a settler father and baby killed last month when their car overturned in the West Bank after Palestinians threw rocks at it.

FIRST CHARGES

Police said they had set up a special task force to deal with the "price taggers" and announced on Thursday that they had arrested a suspect in the Tuba-Zangariya case.

In another potential breakthrough against the militants, three settlers were charged in a court in Jerusalem on Wednesday with planning to set fire to a West Bank mosque.

In addition to assaults on mosques, militant settlers have been blamed for a string of car burnings and the uprooting of hundreds of olive trees and grapevines on Palestinian property.

Some Israeli human rights activists link an increase in such incidents in recent months to tensions over a Palestinian application for statehood at the United Nations, which is strongly opposed by Israel and its U.S. ally.

The "Price Tag" campaign is widely believed to be the work of a clandestine group of young settlers in unauthorized outposts where journalists are not welcome.

Security officials say such close-knit groups are tough to infiltrate, making it difficult to prevent mosque attacks or find out who carried them out.

But Avraham Dichter, a former chief of Israel's internal security agency, the Shin Bet, told Reuters the time had come to move against militant settlers, whom he described as "miserable people with a terrorist mindset."

Dichter said that while not as lethal as a Jewish group that killed three Palestinians and wounded dozens in a series of attacks in the 1980s, the recent incidents were still alarming.

Attacks on particularly sensitive places, such as the Jerusalem holy site that Jews call Temple Mount and Muslims revere as Haram al-Sharif (Noble Sanctuary), could swiftly trigger a new wave of Palestinian violence, he said.

"You can find yourself in no time in the middle of an Intifada, not because there were fatalities but just because a very important and sensitive target was hit," Dichter said.

FEELING BETRAYED

Itamar Ben Gvir, a settler leader in Kiryat Arba, one of the most hardline Jewish settlements, told Reuters the attack on the Galilee mosque should have come as no surprise.

"The writing was on the wall, because a population that feels that they are being abandoned, harmed and kicked over and over again, it is only natural that individuals from within that population will come out and commit incidents," he said, in apparent reference to moves against unauthorized outposts.

The Galilee arson attack was swiftly condemned by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Peres rushed to inspect the mosque, where residents were weeping over charred holy books.

"Un-Jewish, illegal, immoral and (it) brings heavy shame upon us," Peres, a Nobel peace prize laureate, said.

Peres's visit was a sign of Israeli concern that any future torching of mosques inside Israel could inflame its Arab citizens, who have long complained of discrimination.

Many Israelis are worried about more violence as Israeli Arabs mark the anniversary this month of the killings of 13 young protesters by Israeli police in October 2000 when a Palestinian uprising was raging in the West Bank and Gaza.

Mainstream settler leaders have also voiced concern at the militants within their ranks, fearing their actions will tarnish the movement whose settlements on land Israel captured in a 1967 war are deemed illegal in international law.

"Price tagging represents the biggest damage to our future. It is immoral. It is un-Jewish. I couldn't use harsher words," said Naftali Bennett, head of the Yesha (settler) Council.

"We are talking about a few hundred people living mainly in the northeastern area. I urge the police to arrest these guys and throw them in jail," he told a group of foreign reporters.

But Menachem Landow, a former officer in a Shin Bet division that investigates threats posed by Jewish extremists, said the settler leadership should do more to rein in the radicals.

"One of the things that bothers me is that the leaders of the settlements are constantly condemning (the attacks). The condemnation is not enough -- they need to cooperate with the security services, help them, because without the help from the surroundings no intelligence source has a chance," Landow said.

(Editing by Jeffrey Heller and Alistair Lyon)

They strike in the dead of night, setting fire to mosques and daubing their walls with "Price Tag" graffiti, the defiant slogan of Israeli settlers waging a vigilante campaign branded as "un-Jewish" by President Shimon Peres.

The "price-taggers" have vowed to avenge any move by Israeli authorities to uproot settlement outposts built in the occupied West Bank without Israeli government permission.

Dozens of those outposts, which Israel has repeatedly promised its main ally, the United States, to remove, remain on lonely West Bank hilltops on land to which many settlers claim a Biblical right and where Palestinians want to build a state.

On some of the few occasions when Israeli army bulldozers have torn down structures at the outposts, Palestinian villagers have awoken the next morning to find a local mosque charred by fire and with the now-familiar graffiti on its walls.

Israeli leaders have condemned the incidents. But no one has been charged in the three arson attacks in the West Bank over the past year, an indication, Palestinians say, of indifference by a right-wing government that includes pro-settler parties.

Now the "Price Tag" campaign has widened to include vandalism at an Israeli army base in the West Bank and the torching of two mosques, one this week in a Bedouin village inside Israel, touching a nerve among the country's leaders and the public.

At stake is the delicate fabric of co-existence between Israel's Jewish majority and its Arab minority, which makes up some 20 percent of the population.

"Israel had better know that it will pay for this," said a resident of Tuba-Zangariya in the Galilee, where a mosque was burned on Monday, prompting dozens of Israeli Arabs to take to the streets and hurl rocks at police, who responded with tear gas.

Graffiti left at al-Nur mosque suggested the "price-taggers" were responding to the deaths of a settler father and baby killed last month when their car overturned in the West Bank after Palestinians threw rocks at it.

FIRST CHARGES

Police said they had set up a special task force to deal with the "price taggers" and announced on Thursday that they had arrested a suspect in the Tuba-Zangariya case.

In another potential breakthrough against the militants, three settlers were charged in a court in Jerusalem on Wednesday with planning to set fire to a West Bank mosque.

In addition to assaults on mosques, militant settlers have been blamed for a string of car burnings and the uprooting of hundreds of olive trees and grapevines on Palestinian property.

Some Israeli human rights activists link an increase in such incidents in recent months to tensions over a Palestinian application for statehood at the United Nations, which is strongly opposed by Israel and its U.S. ally.

The "Price Tag" campaign is widely believed to be the work of a clandestine group of young settlers in unauthorized outposts where journalists are not welcome.

Security officials say such close-knit groups are tough to infiltrate, making it difficult to prevent mosque attacks or find out who carried them out.

But Avraham Dichter, a former chief of Israel's internal security agency, the Shin Bet, told Reuters the time had come to move against militant settlers, whom he described as "miserable people with a terrorist mindset."

Dichter said that while not as lethal as a Jewish group that killed three Palestinians and wounded dozens in a series of attacks in the 1980s, the recent incidents were still alarming.

Attacks on particularly sensitive places, such as the Jerusalem holy site that Jews call Temple Mount and Muslims revere as Haram al-Sharif (Noble Sanctuary), could swiftly trigger a new wave of Palestinian violence, he said.

"You can find yourself in no time in the middle of an Intifada, not because there were fatalities but just because a very important and sensitive target was hit," Dichter said.

FEELING BETRAYED

Itamar Ben Gvir, a settler leader in Kiryat Arba, one of the most hardline Jewish settlements, told Reuters the attack on the Galilee mosque should have come as no surprise.

"The writing was on the wall, because a population that feels that they are being abandoned, harmed and kicked over and over again, it is only natural that individuals from within that population will come out and commit incidents," he said, in apparent reference to moves against unauthorized outposts.

The Galilee arson attack was swiftly condemned by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Peres rushed to inspect the mosque, where residents were weeping over charred holy books.

"Un-Jewish, illegal, immoral and (it) brings heavy shame upon us," Peres, a Nobel peace prize laureate, said.

Peres's visit was a sign of Israeli concern that any future torching of mosques inside Israel could inflame its Arab citizens, who have long complained of discrimination.

Many Israelis are worried about more violence as Israeli Arabs mark the anniversary this month of the killings of 13 young protesters by Israeli police in October 2000 when a Palestinian uprising was raging in the West Bank and Gaza.

Mainstream settler leaders have also voiced concern at the militants within their ranks, fearing their actions will tarnish the movement whose settlements on land Israel captured in a 1967 war are deemed illegal in international law.

"Price tagging represents the biggest damage to our future. It is immoral. It is un-Jewish. I couldn't use harsher words," said Naftali Bennett, head of the Yesha (settler) Council.

"We are talking about a few hundred people living mainly in the northeastern area. I urge the police to arrest these guys and throw them in jail," he told a group of foreign reporters.

But Menachem Landow, a former officer in a Shin Bet division that investigates threats posed by Jewish extremists, said the settler leadership should do more to rein in the radicals.

"One of the things that bothers me is that the leaders of the settlements are constantly condemning (the attacks). The condemnation is not enough -- they need to cooperate with the security services, help them, because without the help from the surroundings no intelligence source has a chance," Landow said.

(Editing by Jeffrey Heller and Alistair Lyon)

[Yinekol]

GAZA CITY (IPS) - “The mosque was just 100 meters from our house,” said Mohammed, a resident of Beit Hanoun in the northern Gaza Strip. “We prayed there every day, five times a day. But it was more than a house of prayer.”

Mohammad was speaking about one of the 34 mosques completely destroyed during Operation Cast Lead, the 23-day Israeli attack on Gaza in 2008-2009.

The Israeli bombing on 4 January 2009, which flattened the Omar Ibn Abdul Aziz mosque in Beit Hanoun, also damaged numerous surrounding homes and the local sports club. “The blast sent rubble to our house,” Mohammed recalled. “Now we have go to one 15 minutes away, one we don’t know intimately.”

According to Hassan Saifi, a representative of the ministry for religious affairs in Gaza, a quarter of the Strip’s 800 mosques were damaged or destroyed in the Israeli attack on Gaza.

“Two hundred damaged mosques is a shocking amount,” Saifi said. “Among those, 34 throughout the Gaza Strip were completely destroyed.

“Especially in Gaza’s north, which was hit the hardest, completely destroying 15 mosques, the bombing of mosques inflicted many civilian casualties,” Saifi added, noting that the northern part of Gaza had a higher proportion of Palestinian refugees living in densely-inhabited camps.

“Mosque walls are frequently also the walls of the many homes packed around it. So when mosques are bombed, many homes are bombed at the same time.”

Girls killed in their sleep

With many mosques destroyed and over 150 more badly damaged by Israeli bombings, many in Gaza believed the destruction was intentional.

“The Israelis used state-of-the-art warplanes and unmanned drones with precision visual equipment,” Saifi said. “They destroyed many of our mosques during the very first days of their attacks. They obviously intended to destroy our mosques, irrespective of those living next door or praying within.”

The Palestinian Center for Human Rights (PCHR) has compiled details on a number of the mosques struck, noting that many of the Israeli attacks on mosques came within the first week of the attack.

On 28 December 2008, Israeli warplanes bombed the Imad Aqel mosque in the Jabaliya refugee camp, killing five young girls, aged four to 17, who were sleeping in their home next to the mosque. Another 17 civilians were injured in the bombing and many of the cheaply built cement-walled, asbestos-roofed homes surrounding the mosque were destroyed or badly damaged.

The Ibrahim Maqadma mosque in Jabaliya was hit by a drone-fired missile in January 2009, PCHR has reported, injuring more than 30 and killing 15 civilians, among them four children. Some of the victims were praying at the time of the attack.

The targeting of mosques, along with other civilian areas, contravened international law, including the Geneva Conventions.

“The Zionist occupation state doesn’t respect churches and mosques, nor any international law,” Saifi said. “They bombed the UN food storage warehouse, UN schools and attacked the Red Cross, even though these are international organizations.”

Israel’s destruction of civilian infrastructure during the attack on Gaza stretched beyond mosques. It included the targeting of kindergartens, schools, hospitals, ambulances, cars, homes and universities.

The bombings also affected Gaza’s historical buildings and sites, among them the Nasser mosque in Beit Hanoun. Built in 736 AD, the mosque was hit in an Israeli bombing on 2 January 2009, completely destroying it.

“It was a historic building and should have been preserved,” Saifi said. “Like any historical site in the world, our relics also must be protected as heritage sites for all of the world, not just for Palestine.”

Gaza’s ministry for religious affairs has calculated that the cost of rebuilding Gaza’s mosques will exceed $13.5 million. Under the Israeli-led siege, which bans imports of construction materials and which for the past five years has caused many international donors to freeze or reduce their funding for Gaza, little rebuilding has actually taken place.

“Some people and organizations have donated money and materials, via the tunnels from Egypt,” said Saifi. “After two and a half years we have begun building just ten of the mosques destroyed throughout the Gaza Strip.”

‘Built by my grandfather’

“As poor as most Palestinians in Gaza are, people give what they can, however little, because mosques are important to their daily lives.”

Since January 2009, Palestinians in Gaza accustomed to praying in their local mosques have resorted to praying in mosques further away or in makeshift mosques of wire fencing and plastic sheeting.

As religious centers worldwide serve as meeting places for family and friends, mosques also serve roles beyond places of prayer.

“Anyone traveling or away from their home can enter the mosque to drink water, use the bathroom, rest and pray,” Saifi said.

In Beit Hanoun, Mohammed spoke of how important his local mosque was to his family. “My grandfather built it decades ago and neighbours contributed what they could. Some gave money, some gave materials like stones, doors, or whatever they could offer. It was a part of us and our community.”
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