Saturday, April 21, 2007
The Zionists Committed A Holocaust Against My Family
© By Khalid Amayreh, for thepeoplesvoice.org
No catalogue of Israel’s Nazi-like criminality against the Palestinian people can be complete without the story of Hussein Abu Kweik, whose family was wiped out by the Israeli army in a failed attempt on his life nearly five years ago.
On 4 March, 2002, shortly afternoon, Abu Kweik’s wife, Bushra, drove the family car to collect their three children from two Ramallah schools, the al-Mughtarebin (Expatriates) school for males and the Al-Fajr al Jadid (the New Dawn) school for females.
Neither the Kweiks nor, indeed, their children had the faintest idea that their car was being closely watched and is about to be targeted by an Israeli tank taking position at the nearby hilly Jewish colony of Psogot.
Hussein, now 48, knew that the Israelis might arrest him for affiliation with Hamas’s political wing and for making a lot of interviews with the local and international media on Hamas’s behalf.
But it never occurred to him, as he says “ that they would assassinate me, let alone exterminate my entire family for making statements to the media and for criticizing the Israeli occupation of my country.”
As Bushra collected Aziza, 14, Baraa 13, and Muhammed 9, she drove back home at al Ama’ari refugee camp in Ramallah’s southern suburbs as she did everyday.
She was only a few hundreds meters away from home when an Israeli Merkava tank fired two large artillery shells at the car, reducing it to a huge fireball. Bushra and her three kids were annihilated immediately as their charred, dismembered remains protruded from the twisted metal of their Mitsubishi- 2000.
The exploding shells killed two more children who were traveling in an adjacent car. The two victims were identified as Shayma Ezzidin al Masri, 4, and her cousin, Arafat Ibrahim al Masri, 16 years old. (Eleven more Palestinians were killed on that day, including a medical doctor named Khalil Suleiman in Jenin, when the ambulance he was riding was hit with an artillery shell).
Following the massacre, the Israeli occupation army said the killing of the Abu Kweik’s family and other civilians was not “deliberate” and happened as a result of “faulty intelligence.”
The Occupation army spokesman suggested that their target was Hussein Abu Kweik himself , not his family.
Earlier, Israeli political and military leaders had warned that they would target “the militants and their families.” On 4 March, 2002, the BBC quoted Israeli Prime Minister and certified war criminal Ariel Sharon as telling the Israeli parliament, the Knesset, that Israel was fighting “a harsh war against a cruel and bloodthirsty enemy” and that “heavy losses must now be inflicted on the Palestinians.”
On the run
With his wife and their thee children annihilated and only a small child, Hafez, spared, Hussein Abu Kweik felt that he was living on a borrowed time and that he had to go underground in order to maximize his chances of remaining alive.
His apprehension was vindicated several times as crack Israeli soldiers stormed his home, terrorizing his elderly mother, who since then developed has become diabetic and lost nearly completely her eyesight, and savagely vandalizing property, furniture and house appliances.
“We want to kill Hussein so that he will join his wife and children,” the soldiers would tell the old lady.
“They would commit every conceivable act of barbarism, including throwing bombs and explosives inside the living room just to make us suffer.” In one instance, Israeli soldiers blasted with explosive the interior of the house, inflicting a lot of damage. Normally, the pretext in such circumstances is to kill “terrorists” who may be hiding inside. However, the real reason is to wreak damage and material losses on the Palestinians.
Eventually, on 28 July, 2002, less than four months after the extermination of his family, Hussein was arrested.
He spent 58 days “of intensive interrogation and torture” at the Russian Compound Lockup in West Jerusalem during which “every sadistic form of harm” was applied against him for the purpose of extracting confessions from him.
“They would get furious whenever I invoked their crime against my family, they would warn me not to mention ‘this story’ again.”
According to Abu Kweik, whom this writer met and interviewed him on 11 April, 2007, an Israeli Shin Beth officer code-named Abu Yosef (nearly all Israeli Shin Bet interrogators assume fictitious Arab nicknames) admitted that there was no logical justification for murdering Abu Kweik’s family, except to make the Palestinians suffer.
“I told Abu Yosef that I read the Quran, the New and Old Testaments and never saw a more barbaric and more criminal people. I told them ‘suppose that I was the biggest criminal in the world, what was the guilt of my innocent wife and children to deserve this brutal death at their hands’?"
The interrogators’ response was usually that “this is war, and that in war no holds are barred and that everything was fair in love and war.”
And when Hussein sought to retort by saying, for example, that even the Nazis would have made the same argument, the interrogators would be further enraged and would warn me not to compare “the Jews with the Nazis.”
In 2003, when Abu Kweik was prosecuted before an Israeli army court, the military attorney couldn’t prove that he was involved in “acts of terror,” especially “serious violations” that, from the Israeli view point, would have justified the decision to assassinate him and murder his family.
Still, he was given a 4-year prison sentence on secondary charges, including “affiliation with the political wing of a hostile organization” and “acting as spokesman for Hamas,” and similar routine charges.
Kweik’s imprisonment term expired in August 2006. However, the Shin Beth, which has the final say in everything pertaining to the Palestinians, decided to give him eight more months of “administrative detention” because he “constituted a threat to the security of the region.”
On 1 April, 2007, he was freed, and allowed to return to his home at the al-Amaari refugee camp.
Hafez, his remaining son, now 11, is having mild-to-moderate symptoms of emotional trauma and needs psychological rehabilitation. He is almost morbidly attached to his father and experiences nightmares and other psychological disorders stemming from the trauma of witnessing the brutal death of his mother and siblings.
Hussein Kweik has since re-married, but he still can’t get over his haunting catastrophe.
“What happened to my family defies linguistic description. The Jews committed a holocaust against my family. And after wiping out my family, they arrested me and exposed me to physical and psychological tortured and unjustly kept me in inhuman conditions for close to 5 years.
“If there are Nazis in this world, it is the Zionists; if there is evil in this world, nobody embodies it more thoroughly than do the Israelis. They are devils in human forms, they are evil, satanic.”
Kweik is trying “as much as possible” to recuperate from the seemingly irremediable nightmare.
He says he now wants to devote more time to rebuild his life and rehabilitate his son.
Asked if he would sue the Israeli state for murder, Kweik, after a moment of silence, said: “you know, there is no justice in this world. Besides, Justice and Israel is a contradiction in terms.
People who commit these ghastly crimes can’t be counted upon to be just.”
But he did appeal to “conscientious jurists and lawyers around the world” to help him obtain “some semblance of justice from the evil state.”
“I know that had my wife and children been Jewish or American, I would probably receive millions of dollars in compensation. But we are Palestinians and much of the so-called enlightened world treats us as lesser human beings. Even animals in other countries probably have more human rights than we are allowed to …Isn’t this what the Jews and America want”?
Asked further what he would tell the Israeli tank crew who fired the two artillery shells that killed his family.
“I wouldn’t want to see them. But on the Day of Judgment, my wife and children would confront these killers and ask them…Why did you kill us?”
Immoral world
Abu Kweik says he is embittered not only by the mass murder of his family, but also by the silence and indifference of much of the world toward Israel’s “genocidal crimes against our people.”
“I can’t understand how these states and governments which claim to be enlightened and civilized could remain silent in the face of what Israel has been doing to us?
“Are they blind, are they deaf, are they dumb, don’t they have senses? Or are they just simply hypocrites and liars?”
No catalogue of Israel’s Nazi-like criminality against the Palestinian people can be complete without the story of Hussein Abu Kweik, whose family was wiped out by the Israeli army in a failed attempt on his life nearly five years ago.
On 4 March, 2002, shortly afternoon, Abu Kweik’s wife, Bushra, drove the family car to collect their three children from two Ramallah schools, the al-Mughtarebin (Expatriates) school for males and the Al-Fajr al Jadid (the New Dawn) school for females.
Neither the Kweiks nor, indeed, their children had the faintest idea that their car was being closely watched and is about to be targeted by an Israeli tank taking position at the nearby hilly Jewish colony of Psogot.
Hussein, now 48, knew that the Israelis might arrest him for affiliation with Hamas’s political wing and for making a lot of interviews with the local and international media on Hamas’s behalf.
But it never occurred to him, as he says “ that they would assassinate me, let alone exterminate my entire family for making statements to the media and for criticizing the Israeli occupation of my country.”
As Bushra collected Aziza, 14, Baraa 13, and Muhammed 9, she drove back home at al Ama’ari refugee camp in Ramallah’s southern suburbs as she did everyday.
She was only a few hundreds meters away from home when an Israeli Merkava tank fired two large artillery shells at the car, reducing it to a huge fireball. Bushra and her three kids were annihilated immediately as their charred, dismembered remains protruded from the twisted metal of their Mitsubishi- 2000.
The exploding shells killed two more children who were traveling in an adjacent car. The two victims were identified as Shayma Ezzidin al Masri, 4, and her cousin, Arafat Ibrahim al Masri, 16 years old. (Eleven more Palestinians were killed on that day, including a medical doctor named Khalil Suleiman in Jenin, when the ambulance he was riding was hit with an artillery shell).
Following the massacre, the Israeli occupation army said the killing of the Abu Kweik’s family and other civilians was not “deliberate” and happened as a result of “faulty intelligence.”
The Occupation army spokesman suggested that their target was Hussein Abu Kweik himself , not his family.
Earlier, Israeli political and military leaders had warned that they would target “the militants and their families.” On 4 March, 2002, the BBC quoted Israeli Prime Minister and certified war criminal Ariel Sharon as telling the Israeli parliament, the Knesset, that Israel was fighting “a harsh war against a cruel and bloodthirsty enemy” and that “heavy losses must now be inflicted on the Palestinians.”
On the run
With his wife and their thee children annihilated and only a small child, Hafez, spared, Hussein Abu Kweik felt that he was living on a borrowed time and that he had to go underground in order to maximize his chances of remaining alive.
His apprehension was vindicated several times as crack Israeli soldiers stormed his home, terrorizing his elderly mother, who since then developed has become diabetic and lost nearly completely her eyesight, and savagely vandalizing property, furniture and house appliances.
“We want to kill Hussein so that he will join his wife and children,” the soldiers would tell the old lady.
“They would commit every conceivable act of barbarism, including throwing bombs and explosives inside the living room just to make us suffer.” In one instance, Israeli soldiers blasted with explosive the interior of the house, inflicting a lot of damage. Normally, the pretext in such circumstances is to kill “terrorists” who may be hiding inside. However, the real reason is to wreak damage and material losses on the Palestinians.
Eventually, on 28 July, 2002, less than four months after the extermination of his family, Hussein was arrested.
He spent 58 days “of intensive interrogation and torture” at the Russian Compound Lockup in West Jerusalem during which “every sadistic form of harm” was applied against him for the purpose of extracting confessions from him.
“They would get furious whenever I invoked their crime against my family, they would warn me not to mention ‘this story’ again.”
According to Abu Kweik, whom this writer met and interviewed him on 11 April, 2007, an Israeli Shin Beth officer code-named Abu Yosef (nearly all Israeli Shin Bet interrogators assume fictitious Arab nicknames) admitted that there was no logical justification for murdering Abu Kweik’s family, except to make the Palestinians suffer.
“I told Abu Yosef that I read the Quran, the New and Old Testaments and never saw a more barbaric and more criminal people. I told them ‘suppose that I was the biggest criminal in the world, what was the guilt of my innocent wife and children to deserve this brutal death at their hands’?"
The interrogators’ response was usually that “this is war, and that in war no holds are barred and that everything was fair in love and war.”
And when Hussein sought to retort by saying, for example, that even the Nazis would have made the same argument, the interrogators would be further enraged and would warn me not to compare “the Jews with the Nazis.”
In 2003, when Abu Kweik was prosecuted before an Israeli army court, the military attorney couldn’t prove that he was involved in “acts of terror,” especially “serious violations” that, from the Israeli view point, would have justified the decision to assassinate him and murder his family.
Still, he was given a 4-year prison sentence on secondary charges, including “affiliation with the political wing of a hostile organization” and “acting as spokesman for Hamas,” and similar routine charges.
Kweik’s imprisonment term expired in August 2006. However, the Shin Beth, which has the final say in everything pertaining to the Palestinians, decided to give him eight more months of “administrative detention” because he “constituted a threat to the security of the region.”
On 1 April, 2007, he was freed, and allowed to return to his home at the al-Amaari refugee camp.
Hafez, his remaining son, now 11, is having mild-to-moderate symptoms of emotional trauma and needs psychological rehabilitation. He is almost morbidly attached to his father and experiences nightmares and other psychological disorders stemming from the trauma of witnessing the brutal death of his mother and siblings.
Hussein Kweik has since re-married, but he still can’t get over his haunting catastrophe.
“What happened to my family defies linguistic description. The Jews committed a holocaust against my family. And after wiping out my family, they arrested me and exposed me to physical and psychological tortured and unjustly kept me in inhuman conditions for close to 5 years.
“If there are Nazis in this world, it is the Zionists; if there is evil in this world, nobody embodies it more thoroughly than do the Israelis. They are devils in human forms, they are evil, satanic.”
Kweik is trying “as much as possible” to recuperate from the seemingly irremediable nightmare.
He says he now wants to devote more time to rebuild his life and rehabilitate his son.
Asked if he would sue the Israeli state for murder, Kweik, after a moment of silence, said: “you know, there is no justice in this world. Besides, Justice and Israel is a contradiction in terms.
People who commit these ghastly crimes can’t be counted upon to be just.”
But he did appeal to “conscientious jurists and lawyers around the world” to help him obtain “some semblance of justice from the evil state.”
“I know that had my wife and children been Jewish or American, I would probably receive millions of dollars in compensation. But we are Palestinians and much of the so-called enlightened world treats us as lesser human beings. Even animals in other countries probably have more human rights than we are allowed to …Isn’t this what the Jews and America want”?
Asked further what he would tell the Israeli tank crew who fired the two artillery shells that killed his family.
“I wouldn’t want to see them. But on the Day of Judgment, my wife and children would confront these killers and ask them…Why did you kill us?”
Immoral world
Abu Kweik says he is embittered not only by the mass murder of his family, but also by the silence and indifference of much of the world toward Israel’s “genocidal crimes against our people.”
“I can’t understand how these states and governments which claim to be enlightened and civilized could remain silent in the face of what Israel has been doing to us?
“Are they blind, are they deaf, are they dumb, don’t they have senses? Or are they just simply hypocrites and liars?”
Labels: Khalid Amayreh
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Dear Khalid,
Another heart-breaking story that we read with tears as if it were unique but such things are happening to the Palestinians every single day. Thank you for everything you do in your fight for justice. I've reposted your story in full on our discussion forum, with added illustrations by Ben Heine. Is that alright with you? Proper credit and links were given.
Peace...
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Another heart-breaking story that we read with tears as if it were unique but such things are happening to the Palestinians every single day. Thank you for everything you do in your fight for justice. I've reposted your story in full on our discussion forum, with added illustrations by Ben Heine. Is that alright with you? Proper credit and links were given.
Peace...
# posted by 
: 2:28 AM
: 2:28 AM 
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