Yesterday, Palestinian refugees living in Syria approached the armistice line between Syria and Israel in the occupied Golan Heights to commemorate the Naksa, the day Israel occupied the West Bank, Golan and Gaza Strip. Reports show that 23 people were killed by live fire by Israeli snipers, however Israel claims that the protesters were responsible for their own deaths by ignited landmines.
Eyewitnesses claim that Israel began shooting live ammunition with the intent to kill as soon as the protesters came within sight of the fence barrier. Only later were other nonlethal means of crowd dispersal used. Salman Fakhreddin, a political activist and the public relations officer of Al-Marsad, the Arab Center for Human Rights in the Golan, said in an interview:
Yesterday, hundreds of refugees from Syria — Palestinians and Syrians — marched to the ceasefire line near Majdal Shams in a place called the Valley of Tears. We usually use this place for families [living opposite of the ceasefire line] to meet each other and to speak to each other with loudspeaker on all days of the year. Yesterday, it was a demonstration in memory of the war of ‘67 and the occupation of the Golan, West Bank and Gaza and Sinai. When these people reached the ceasefire line, the Israeli forces were well prepared with snipers. They were there already and they began firing live bullets and they killed and injured hundreds of people. Twenty-three people were killed yesterday.
One of them was Inas Shreitah of the Yarmouk refugee camp. She was a fourth year English literature major at the University of Damascus. God rest her soul.
Another eyewitness writes:
I watched them marching toward the border. Row upon row of them in the hot, bright sun. They marched without guns, without tanks and missiles -- although some, like the shepherd boy David, did pick up a few rocks to hurl into the impossible distance.
I watched them stream down the green hill toward the heaps of dirt and wire. I saw them, old and young, walk toward the occupied land. I saw them come closer -- close enough for the heavily-armed occupying force to have them in range.
From a distance -- behind the barbed wire, with the occupiers, where the cameras that showed the scene were set -- I heard the dull pops and parps of the guns as they fired. I saw the marchers kept streaming down the hill, although the first wave was now breaking in disarray. I heard the guns again. I saw some marchers fall, others scramble back, and still more coming down.
Pop. Pop. Parp. The dull sounds, intermittent, careful. The bullets whizzed across the distance -- the impossible distance, which no stone could traverse. The bullets threw up clouds of dirt, they struck flesh. I saw bodies twisting and going down. The march became a rescue party. The dead and wounded were lifted onto sheets and stretchers as the bullets kept coming: dull, intermittent, careful. Pop. Pop. Parp.
The others killed yesterday were:
Mohammed Said (Khan el Sheikh camp)
Mahmoud Swan (Khan el Sheikh)
Ala' el Wahsh (Khan El Sheikh)
Majdi Zeidan (Nairab Camp)
Mohammed Isa (Aleppo)
Ahmed Rashdan (Yarmouk camp)
Said El Ahmed (Dir'a)
Mohammed Jreidi (Rafidin Camp)
Ramzi Said (Yarmouk)
Zakariya Abul Hasan (Yarmouk)
Fayez Abbasi
Fadi Nahhar (Khan El Sheikh)
Jihad Awad (Khan El Sheikh)
Wasim Dawah (Yarmouk)
Thaer el Adel ((Jirmana)
Shadi Husein (Jirmana)
Ibrahim Isa
Subhi Miswada
Wasim Sa'diya (Yarmouk)
Ayman Hasan (Yarmouk)
Mahmoud Al 'arajeh (Yarmouk)
Ali Ashmawi (Yarmouk)
The Israeli military had a choice and it chose to kill these Palestinian and Syrian refugees because Israel will not allow them to return to their homeland because they are not Jewish.
Fakreddin observes:
We have been trying for several years with the ideas of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. to develop a culture of nonviolence, to develop a popular struggle against Israeli colonialism here. This is the way to invite others to join, to demonstrate against the Israelis in their embassies, in their companies. In many cases, we can invite others to stop investing in Israel or to pull investments from Israeli settlements in the West Bank and the Golan.
This is the only way to gather an international struggle in peaceful ways. This is our duty as human beings and this is the duty of other free people in this world. To feel free, people have to help others to be free.