The Palestinian Prisoners Club (PPC) shows that the number of arrests in the occupied West Bank since the beginning of the genocide on Gaza on 7 October, 2023 reached more than 12,000 people which included all segments of Palestinian society, in addition to the arrest of dozens of Palestinian workers and thousands from Gaza.
The PCC explained that the arrest campaigns were accompanied by field executions, direct shooting before arrest, and/or threats to do so, in addition to severe beatings, field investigations that affected hundreds, use of police dogs, and the use of citizens as human shields and hostages.
“This is in addition to the widespread acts of vandalism that affected homes, the confiscation of belongings, cars, money, gold jewelry and electronic devices, in addition to the demolition and bombing of homes belonging to prisoners in the occupation’s prisons,” the Club added.
These arrest campaigns are made in the light of the total aggression launched by the Israeli occupation against the Palestinian people, as a retaliatory operation that falls within the framework of the crime of collective punishment, according to the Palestine Information Center.
The arrest operations constituted, and still constitute, the most prominent fixed and systematic policies used by the occupation to undermine any escalating resistance against it.
Al-Qassam Brigades announced its fighters excuted a complex ambush, Friday, targeting three Israeli Merkava 4 tanks through Al-Yassin 105 shells and seven Israeli soldiers in a house with a TBG shell near the Abed intersection in the Al-Janina neighborhood east of Rafah city.
The Al-Qassam Brigades said they killed and wounded the Israeli foot soldiers and afterwards targeted a D9 military bulldozer with a Tandem shell, which led to it catching fire.
After returning from the battle lines, the Al-Qassam Mujahideen reported that a Zionist tank of the Merkava 4 type was targeted with a Al-Yassin 105 shell near the Al-Bashiti nursery in the Al-Janina neighborhood as well according to Jo24.
Optimistic reports of advancements in negotiations between Israel and Hamas, with Egypt, Qatar, and US mediation, over a ceasefire deal has been reported as Hamas sent Egypt the names of those Israeli prisoners destined to be released during the first phase.
This coincides with intensive Israeli attacks on the Gaza Strip. In the past 12 hours, Israel killed three people as a result of an airstrike near Halabi Junction in Jabalia Al-Balad, northern Gaza Strip. Israeli quadcopters also fired heavily at citizens attempting to reach their homes in the Safatwi area, west of Jabalia.
“Sometimes a homeland becomes a tale. We love the story because it is about our homeland and we love our homeland even more because of the story.”
On Day 3 of Israel’s genocidal assault on the Gaza Strip, intellectual and writer Professor Refaat Alareer said in a live interview from the besieged enclave “I’m an academic. Probably the toughest thing I have at home is an Expo marker. But if the Israelis invade … I’m going to use that marker to throw it at the Israeli soldiers, even if that is the last thing that I would be able to do.”
Nearly three months later, on 6 December, 2023, Alareer was killed in an Israeli airstrike on his sister’s home in northern Gaza. The activist’s sister, Asmaa, along with three of her children, and his brother Salah, with his son Mohammed, were among those also killed in the attack.
As a professor, poet and writer, Alareer’s pen was his weapon. And it continues to defend and tell the story of his people.
Iconic Poem
His poem, If I Must Die, written in 2011 and shared on X a month before his death, has become an iconic reminder of the Palestinian struggle for liberation from Israeli occupation and oppression.
“If I must die, you must live, to tell my story, to sell my things, to buy a piece of cloth and some strings…If I must die, let it bring hope, let it be a tale” the actor Brian Cox delivered a passionate rendition of the poem published by the Palestine Festival of Literature.
On December 4, two days before his death, Alareer wrote in a post on X: “I wish I were a freedom fighter so I die fighting back those invading Israeli genocidal maniacs invading my neighborhood and city.”
“The building is shaking,” he added. “The debris and shrapnel are hitting the walls and flying in the streets. Israel has not stopped bombing, shelling, and shooting. Pray for us. Pray for Gaza.”
Over a year later, his words echo as the bombing, shelling, and shooting continue unabated.
To date, a total of 44,612 Palestinians have been killed, and 105,834 wounded, according to Gaza’s Ministry of Health.
We Are Not Numbers
As the beloved professor of Literature and Creative Writing at the Islamic University of Gaza and co-founder of the We Are Not Numbers project, Alareer inspired a myriad of young people in the enclave to own their narrative and tell the story of Palestine based on their experiences.
In a TED talk delivered in 2015, Alareer impressed upon preserving oral history and how “stories make us.”
“I realize I am the person I am today because of the stories” told to him by his mother and grandmother, he said, “because my mum was teaching me values, etiquette, to love people, to love my life, to love my country at the same time.”
“Stories are also important in our lives as Palestinians, as people under occupation, as native peoples on this land, not only because they make us, they shape us, they make us the people we are but also because they connect us with our past, they connect us with our present, and they prepare us to the future,” shared Alareer.
He said his grandmother “told us stories (about) when she was a kid, when she was a newly married wife who would spend months plowing her land, harvesting the crops, the land that now we don’t own because it was occupied.
“Although the land is physically occupied, it still lives in our memories, still lives in our hearts, because we can easily visualize this.”
‘Tell Us Stories’
Concluding his talk, Alareer encouraged the audience to “beg” their parents and grandparents to “tell us stories” and share them with “our kids.”
“Because if we don’t do that, if the story stops there, we’re betraying ourselves, we’re betraying the story, we’re betraying our parents and grandparents, and we’re betraying our homeland,” he emphasized.
Born on September 23, 1979, in Shejaiya in Gaza City, Alareer said in a media interview that “every move I took and every decision I made were influenced (usually negatively) by the Israeli occupation”.
“As a kid, I grew up throwing stones at Israeli military Jeeps, flying kites, and reading,” he also said.
‘Gaza Writes Back’
Alareer edited several books, including ‘Gaza Writes Back’ and ‘Gaza Unsilenced’, which according to Palestine Chronicle editor, Ramzy Baroud, “allowed him to take the message of other Palestinian intellectuals in Gaza to the rest of the world.”
“Sometimes a homeland becomes a tale. We love the story because it is about our homeland and we love our homeland even more because of the story,” he wrote in ‘Gaza Writes Back’.
The Geneva-based group, Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor, said Alareer’s killing was “apparently deliberate” and called for an investigation into his death.
“The apartment where Refaat and his family were sheltering was surgically bombed out of the entire building where it’s located, according to corroborated eyewitness and family accounts,” the organization said in a statement.
This came after weeks of death threats that Refaat received “online and by phone from Israeli accounts.”
His Legacy
Husband to Nusayba, Alareer was also a father of six, who had their home bombed previously by Israel in 2014, killing over 30 of his and his wife’s family members, according to Euro-Med Monitor.
Not long after her father’s death, Alareer’s eldest daughter, Shaymaa, gave birth to her first child.
She wrote a note to her deceased father, as conveyed by the Resistance News Network through their Telegram channel:
“I have wonderful news for you, and I wished I could convey it to you face-to-face, handing your first grandson to you… This is your grandson Abdul Rahman, whom I have always imagined you holding. But I never thought that I might lose you too soon, even before you could meet him.”
In April, Shaymaa was killed in an airstrike on her family’s apartment in Gaza City along with her husband and infant son.
‘Haunted by Horrors’
As with many Palestinians who fought and died fighting for a liberated Palestine in which ever manner they could, Alareer’s contribution to that struggle lives on.
In honor of his memory, and to mark the first anniversary of Alareer’s killing, Shahd Ahmad Alnaami, a contributor to We Are Not Numbers writes:
So many of us still hold our phones, read your poems — not losing hope, but
we’re tired of sleeping in fear, tired of being displaced, living in tents,
haunted by horrors that linger in our minds. A missile pierced the silence, burning all the tents —
including you. I have not forgotten. Nights become nightmares, children cry from the cold,
their laughter, once bright, now a distant echo. We yearn to return, free from fear. When
will these bloody nights end? When will this tragedy stop? When will our normal lives return, and our distant dreams come true?
We keep asking, “Will this pass?” And remember how you used to say, “It shall pass… I keep hoping it shall pass…”
Still, we wait for the day peace will dawn, and a new chapter open its bleary eyes.
(The Palestine Chronicle)
– Nurah Tape is a South Africa-based journalist. She is an editor with The Palestine Chronicle.
The Israeli newspaper Maariv stated that the incoming US President Donald Trump is putting intense pressure on Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to bring the exchange deal of prisoners closer.
It added that the talks are proceeding not only on one or two channels. But negotiations on Gaza are moving along three channels:
Exchange deal
A military channel aimed at ending the war, a political channel aimed at maturing into an exchange deal, and a humanitarian channel for talks related to restoring the Gaza Strip and returning life to normal.
It stressed that the three channels are complementary to each other and are in the hands of the Egyptians.
It stressed that the main points of the agreement stipulate that the Israeli army must stop the war in stages and gradually withdraw from the Gaza Strip. The Rafah crossing will be opened to allow hundreds of aid trucks to enter every day, and Israel will release hundreds of security prisoners and receive prisoners. The implementation of the interim agreement will be supervised by America and other countries, as in Lebanon.
What plan?
According to the newspaper, in recent weeks, the Egyptians have been working away from the spotlight to bring Hamas and the Palestinian Authority closer together develop a plan to establish a new government entity in the Gaza Strip once a ceasefire is declared.
The proposal talks about a body to manage the civilian affairs of the Gaza Strip and will be staffed by 10 to 15 professionals who are not affiliated with any movement, and with an already official name: “The Social Committee to Support the Residents of Gaza”.
Its no coincidence the Egyptians have given it this title, nor the “unity government”, although it will operate under the Palestinian Authority in Ramallah. The Egyptians chose this name to be accepted by the Israeli government.
The newspaper stressed the agreement document the Egyptians extracted from Hamas and the Palestinian Authority is an achievement in itself and the Israeli government will have to decide soon whether handing over the Gaza Strip to this committee is acceptable to it or not according to Al Rai Al Youm.
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