Bilin

Today was the most vicious demonstration that I've seen in Bilin with huge amounts of tear gas and sound bombs, bullets flying around. I was quite shocked by how easily the Israeli army gets scared and how it reacts.

The demonstration started as usual and as always was peaceful, approaching the checkpoint which the soldiers had already come through. Pretty quickly a large number of people crossed the barbed wire to the fence and the soldiers came through and started throwing sound bombs all over the place, even at people who were not trying to cross the barbed wire fence. Others who came up and those who were already there were pushed about a little bit. This is how it carried on for an hour, with no Palestinians being violent towards the soldiers. So far so good, the demonstration was as normal and eventually got called off.

However the reason for calling it off was the massive invasion of the IOF into the village, something that they normally do but today they took over a number of houses. The villagers supported by internationals and entered the houses and demanded the soldiers left. In one house the soldiers did but in another they called in reinforcements. These reinforcements attempted to arrest a Palestinian, fired off huge amounts of tear gas and sound bombs. They also beat a number of people close by and at least one person was hit badly by rubber bullets, causing damage. This person was sitting on the ground at the time. There was no justification for these actions - although the protesters were vocal they were never ever violent towards the soldiers. Why the soldiers reacted in the way they did? Fear probably, though there was absolutely nothing to fear, these demonstrations have been going on almost 2 years now and have never been violent. Except for times when the Israeli Army infiltrated them and were violent.

A huge amount of tear gas was thrown up and my eyes were streaming for ages afterwards. I couldn't believe the way the soldiers reacted.