sound bombed

Went to Bilin demo as most internationals do pretty much every Friday. It was slightly more aggressive than usual recently, the soldiers had already come over the fence in order to take on the Palestinians who arrived and started pushing them around straight away and even a few internationals were pushed and shoved.

The Palestinians made their protest, a few people who threw rocks were quickly told that this was a peaceful demonstration and that they should stop immediately. The Palestinians then attempted to cross the barbed wire fence in order to get right up to the 'security' fence which they managed in one or two locations. The soldiers were quick to come and soon the Palestinians were spread out along the wall.

I went with one or two in order to make sure they were OK with one or two Israelis and as the barbed wire was being pulled a sound grenade was thrown and exploded quite close to me as I was moving away. However its pretty pathetic and didn't create much noise and my ears rang for a bit but that was all. One Palestinian actually managed to get trough the fence which caused the soldiers to get really annoyed and started to push and attack various people who were not involved with that. At this point the demonstration was called off and we returned around the village with tear gas and rubber bullets being exchanged with stones in the village.

All in all this was the most aggressive demonstration I've been on. You were never expecting the soldiers to do anything too stupid though a few people have cuts and bruises but you never feel completely safe.

There are some South African activists here at the moment who say that Apartheid in South Africa is child's play to the scenes the witness today. This is interesting as people often say that calling the wall an apartheid wall does a disservice to the South Africans who lived through the apartheid there.

On our journey back to Tel Rumeida an Arab who was sharing our taxi - he had tried to go to Jerusalem with his wife and children and they had all been allowed through but he had not been. When we got to his destination he jumped out of the car and returned with about 20 oranges for us, for no reason whatsoever!

Hanukkah tomorrow in Tel Rumeida, likely to be very quiet or very rowdy. I'll take this chance to wish a happy Hanukkah to any Jews who may be reading this!

؛PS a sound bomb is a grenade that on impact makes a large noise and releases some smoke, its designed for crowd dispersal