LATEST NEWS : Stop the Wall offices hit in late night raid

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February 8th, 2010

Late last night Occupation forces raided the Stop the Wall offices in Ramallah.

Part of the mounting repression of the anti-Wall movement, this attack on the Campaign offices comes after arrests of Stop the Wall staff and an dramatically increasing number of grassroots activists struggling against the Wall

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Urgent: Stop the Wall offices raided

Posted by RORCoalition on Mon, 02/08/2010 - 10:57

Eyewitnesses told Stop the Wall that yesterday night at 1 am some 10 military jeeps, hummers and an armoured bus belonging to the Israeli military and their intelligence services invaded Ramallah and came to the Stop the Wall offices.

They raided the offices and searched them for three hours. They confiscated computer hard disks, laptops, video cameras and paper documentation, CDs, video cassettes.

This attack on the Stop the Wall offices comes after Jamal Juma’, the coordinator of Stop the Wall, and Mohammad Othman, youth coordinator with Stop the Wall, had been arrested and released after significant international – including official European - pressure.

Currently, there are some 40 anti-Wall activists for their grassroots mobilizing and international advocacy efforts in Israeli jails.

Only the night before, the Israeli military had arrested two international human rights defenders from their homes in Ramallah, who were supporting the Palestinian call for human rights with their activism in the International Solidarity Movement (ISM).

Stop the Wall considers this as part of the continuous attack on the popular grassroots movement and the struggle of the Palestinian human rights defenders for Israeli accountability.

We call on the international community, and in particular the European Union, to step up pressure on Israel to ensure respect of international law and human rights and end its repression of Palestinian and international human rights defenders working on the ground.

Stop the Wall urges the European Union to:

Continue and intensify its efforts to protect human rights defenders in Palestine through all available channels and the swift development of more effective protection mechanisms;

Review the EU-Israel Association Agreement in light of Israel’s blatant violation of Article 2 (Human Rights Clause) of the Agreement and the failure of the political dialogue between the EU and Israel to achieve any tangible progress in terms of respect of human rights by Israel; as a first step we ask the EU to condition the negotiation of a new Action Plan within the framework of the EU-Israel Association Agreement on an end to Israeli repression of human rights defenders and implementation of international law and human rights by Israel;

Bear in mind that the root cause of the repression – the struggle by human rights defenders against the Wall and the occupation – has to be tackled. Therefore, we call on the European Union and its member states to ensure respect for the advisory opinion of the International Court of Justice on the illegality of the Wall. The adoption of this opinion through UN General Assembly resolution ES-10/15 has been fully supported by the European Union.