Palestinian girl wounded by Israeli troops dies in hospital {edit}

[Englander]

Palestinian girl wounded by Israeli troops dies in hospital, officials say

The Associated Press
Published: January 19, 2007

JERUSALEM: A Palestinian girl critically wounded by Israeli security forces troops was taken off life support and died Friday, hospital officials said.

Yael Bossem-Levy, a spokeswoman for Hadassah Hospital in Jerusalem, said Abir Aramin, 10, was declared clinically dead Thursday and taken off life support early Friday morning.

Aramin was hit in the head and critically wounded by a stun grenade thrown by Israeli security personnel during a demonstration against Israel's separation barrier in the West Bank town of Anata, near Jerusalem, on Tuesday.

Her father, Bassam Aramin, 37, was among the founders of Combatants for Peace, a group of former Israeli and Palestinian fighters who work for a peaceful solution to the conflict. The family was unavailable for comment.

Israeli police spokesman Moshe Fintzy said police have opened an investigation into the girl's death.

Link;
InternationalHeraldTribune

[Scurrilous]

1. Ten-year old girl brain dead after border police shooting (01/18/07)

<snip>

"Abir Aramin, ten years old, who was wounded by an Israeli border policeman Tuesday the 16th, was announced brain dead this morning at the Haddasa Ein Karem hospital and is being examined by a committee to determine whether or not to unplug her from life support machines.

Bassam Aramin, the girl’s father, is a member of Combatants for Peace, the Israeli-Palestinian peace organisation. Israeli and Internationals supporters have gathered at the girls School in Anata to express their solidarity and protect the traumatised students from the ongoing threat of the Israeli border police.

Hassan, a sixteen-year old student who witnessed Abir’s injury and carried her back to the girls school stated “the students of the girls school and the boys school had both just come out of an examination. A border police jeep approached the gathering of girls. The girls were afraid and started running away. The border police jeep followed them in the direction in which they were retreating. Abir was afraid and stood against one of the shops at the side of the road, I was standing near her. The border policeman shot through a special hole in the window of the jeep that was standing very close to us. Abir fell to the ground. I picked her up and took her to the girls school. I saw that she was bleeding from the head.”

According to Avichai Sharon of Combatants for Peace and a friend of the family “The Israeli border police have been entering Anata frequently when students go and return from school for the last year and eight months. This began with the construction of the Wall near Anata, supposedly in order to protect the construction workers from the students, but construction of the wall was completed over a month and a half ago”. According to Wael Salameh, a close friend of the family and a member of Combatants for Peace, “This week border police would invade the village twice a day when the students were going and returning from school.”

http://www.palsolidarity.org/main/2007/01/18/abir-shooting-pr/

[Tom Joad]

2. This is what happens when Palestinians protest nonviolently.

They pay a very high price. I do believe in this kind of protest, but for those who naively think, or deceptively suggest, that it will be met with quick changes in the murderous modus operandi of the IDF here is but one example of many hundreds that make quite clear that it will not. This is the murderous violence Palestinians can expect when protesting nonviolently.

Abir's murder is unknown in the West. Unlike campaigns of nonviolence led by King, when the innocent are murdered by the opponents, there are no headlines, only a strange silence. This makes it possible for such atrocities to continue unabated.

We can stop that here.
Abir Aramin, Presente!

[oberliner]

5. Throwing rocks is nonviolent?

She came from the West Bank village of Anata where Israel is building a section of its West Bank barrier.

Palestinians say she was with two other girls in the village when an Israeli border police vehicle drove past.

Stones were thrown in the direction of the police, who responded with tear-gas and stun-grenades. The girl was hit in the head.

The border police have launched an investigation.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/6278929.stm

[Englander]

3. The tragic death of an activist's daughter

By Donald Macintyre in Anata, West Bank
Published: 20 January 2007

They lay on the school principal's table, the relics of 10-year-old Abir Aramin's last, fatal, journey: the black plastic shoulder bag containing the sixth-grade maths text book, cheerfully decorated with Sindy dolls, which she had taken for last-minute revision before her exam that morning; the bars of Cadbury's Dairy Milk and Biskrem she had bought in the little grocery shop across the street when it was over. Sawsan Halwe, head of Anata Girls' School, recalled how after what she said was a "big boom", Abir had been carried, bleeding and unconscious, into a classroom. She tried to describe Abir in normal times: "She was lovely. Her teachers liked her, she had good grades. She was a very active student."

But then Abir has an unusual father. Bassam Aramin, 39, had been an active Fatah militant in his youth, ready to kill for the Palestinian cause, and jailed for seven years for attempting to do so. Yet today he is energetic in Israeli-Palestinian dialogue and closely associated with the Peres Centre's Jewish-Arab sports programmes.

Last April, Mr Aramin helped to found "Combatants for Peace" - a unique organisation of former Israeli soldiers and ex-Palestinian gunmen who have renounced violence and are devoted to the cause of ending the occupation by peaceful methods alone. A mere 10 months later, Mr Aramin has had his beliefs tested to the outer limit, by a grief he could never imagine. Yesterday at Jerusalem's Al Aqsa Mosque he buried Abir, his younger daughter, killed by what he and every resident of Anata is convinced was fire at lethally close range - probably, they believe, a rubber-coated bullet from an Israeli border police jeep.

http://news.independent.co.uk/world/middle_east/article2169225.ece

[oberliner]

4. Girl allegedly killed by Border Police may have been hit by rock

Police pathologists on Sunday ruled out rubber-coated bullets as the cause of death of a 10-year-old Palestinian girl during a Border Police raid on her West Bank village last Tuesday.

According to police sources, Abir Aramin's wounds were caused by a "blunt object, perhaps a stone thrown from close-range or even the recoil of a stun grenade."

"The injuries that caused her death were not caused by a pin-point blow, but by a broad blow to the skull that is not characteristic of rubber-coated bullet ," they added.

http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/816044.html

[Englander]

6. Anonymous police sources?

Anonymous sources from the org that is most likely responsible for the murder of a 10-yr girl?
Anonymous police sources that are frantically spinning about the actual findings of the pathologist
report?

The autopsy was performed last Friday at the Institute of Forensic Medicine in Abu Kabir, with a pathologist hired by Aramin's family in attendance. But while it demonstrated that Aramin was killed by a blunt object  a conclusion with which the family's pathologist concurs  the findings have thus far been insufficient to determine the exact cause of death, because part of her skull, containing vital clues, was removed during the operation that she underwent after being wounded last Tuesday. on Monday, the pathologists are supposed to receive the results of two computer tomography (CT) scans that she underwent last Tuesday just before the operation, one at Mokassad Hospital in East Jerusalem and one at Hadassah Hospital, Ein Karem, and the pathologists are hoping that these results will help them to pinpoint the cause of death.


Thus is another Muhammad al-Durrah-style incident created, because there might be some doubt about
who is responsible for the killing of Abir Aramin, the police force that is most likely responsible
is able to evade that responsibility, & the myth is created that what happened didn't really happen.
Even if it was 100% proven that Abir was hit by a "rubber" bullet the chances of any conviction
occuring are slim to non-existant.

[Englander]

7. Poetry from MIFTAH;

A Little Girl Called Abir
Date posted: January 20, 2007
By Rami Bathish for MIFTAH

It is difficult to imagine the sense of loss and bitterness that has been eternally engraved in the heart and mind of Abir’s parents. She is a ten year-old Palestinian girl from Al-Salam neighbourhood in east Jerusalem, who died yesterday as a result of the fatal wounds she sustained to the head at the hands of the Israeli army earlier this week. Abir’s name means “fragrance” in Arabic, and her neighbourhood means “peace.” Her legacy, unmistakably universal, will always be acknowledged as “an innocent victim of Israel’s occupation of the Palestinian territories.”

Abir was injured outside her school in the area of Anata when Israeli border police opened fire and unleashed terror on a group of school children peacefully protesting the construction of Israel’s Annexation Wall in the area, ironically created to “prevent the killing of innocent Israelis.” She suddenly fell to the ground as a result of fractures to her skull when the troops threw stun grenades close to her small and fragile body. She was rushed to hospital, but efforts to save her innocent life came to no avail.

Abir is one of 955 children below the age of 18 killed by Israeli military forces since September 2000; the lives of her parents have become another tragedy among thousands of Palestinian families who will forever long for the lost smile of their loved ones; the freshness of their Abirs.

The slogan “end the occupation” has come to represent more than merely a political stance, or even a legal right. Ending Israel’s illegal occupation of the Palestinian territories, Palestinian cities, towns, villages, refugee camps, and Palestinian lives essentially and desperately appeals for the minimal right to live without the potential threat of getting shot, getting injured, getting arrested; it means appealing for the right to send our children to their schools or playgrounds without the horrific possibility of marching in their funerals the next day, or spending agonising sleepless nights while they languish in prison, or lay in a hospital bed struggling to keep their lives.

http://www.miftah.org/Display.cfm?DocId=12500&CategoryId=3