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Iyad Khairi Hallak 32, may 30 2020 |
15 june 2020
Dozens of Jewish settlers escorted by police forces entered the Aqsa Mosque in Occupied Jerusalem and desecrated its courtyards on Monday morning.
According to Jerusalemite sources, hordes of settlers entered the Mosque through al-Maghariba Gaza and toured its courtyards under tight police guard.
Extremist rabbi and former MK Yehuda Glick was seen among a group of settlers giving a lecture about the alleged temple mount.
Meanwhile, the Israeli occupation police detained on the same day four Jerusalemite young men from Wadi al-Joz neighborhood on a charge of fending off rabbi Glick about 10 days ago after he entered the mourning house of martyr Iyad al-Hallaq, an autistic local young man who was shot dead recently by police officers.
Jerusalemite citizens who witnessed the incident accused Glick of seeking to create a “provocation” by going to the Halak family home in the Wadi al-Joz neighborhood, where there were mourners, although he knew that the local residents despise him.
According to Jerusalemite sources, hordes of settlers entered the Mosque through al-Maghariba Gaza and toured its courtyards under tight police guard.
Extremist rabbi and former MK Yehuda Glick was seen among a group of settlers giving a lecture about the alleged temple mount.
Meanwhile, the Israeli occupation police detained on the same day four Jerusalemite young men from Wadi al-Joz neighborhood on a charge of fending off rabbi Glick about 10 days ago after he entered the mourning house of martyr Iyad al-Hallaq, an autistic local young man who was shot dead recently by police officers.
Jerusalemite citizens who witnessed the incident accused Glick of seeking to create a “provocation” by going to the Halak family home in the Wadi al-Joz neighborhood, where there were mourners, although he knew that the local residents despise him.
5 june 2020
by Gideon Levy
The fatal police shooting of an autistic Palestinian man highlights - yet again - the grotesque inequalities that have come to define the Israeli state
Iyad al-Halak left his house at about six that morning. His family says he was in a good mood. Video from a security camera not far from his house shows him walking along, holding a garbage bag. He always took out the trash when he left home in the morning.
Halak was on his way to the care facility where he had been going every morning for the last six years. He entered the Old City of Jerusalem through the Lion’s Gate and proceeded along King Faisal Road, the start of the Via Dolorosa. He was headed for the Elwyn El-Quds centre for people with special needs, a few hundred yards from the Lion’s Gate, near the entrance to the Al-Aqsa plaza.
World in ruins
Halak never reached his destination last Saturday. Israeli border police began chasing him, shouting: “Terrorist! terrorist!” The reason is unclear. They fired on him, evidently hitting him in the leg. Panicked, he ran into a garbage room alongside the road in an attempt to hide.
His counsellor from the Elwyn center, Warda Abu Hadid, likewise on her way to the centre, also tried to hide in the garbage room from the police and their gunfire.
Three border police officers quickly arrived at the doorway to the garbage room. Halak was lying on his back on the filthy floor. His counsellor saw that his leg was bleeding. The three policemen stood there, guns drawn, and screamed at Halak: “Where’s the rifle? Where’s the rifle?”
Abu Hadid, his counsellor, was yelling back at them, in both Arabic and Hebrew: “He is disabled! He is disabled!” Halak was yelling: “I am with her! I am with her!” This went on for about five minutes, until one of the police officers fired his M-16 towards Halak at close range. A bullet hit him near the waist and struck his spine, damaging various internal organs on the way - killing him on the spot.
Thus ended the short life of Iyad al-Halak, a Palestinian young man with autism whose face was that of an angel. He was 32 and the apple of his parents’ eye. They cared for him with utmost devotion all those years, and now their entire world is in ruins.
It is not hard to imagine what would have happened if a Palestinian had executed, in similar fashion, an Israeli with special needs. But when the victim is Palestinian, nearly everything is permissible.
Killed for being Palestinian
In recent years, at least four other Palestinians with similar disabilities have been fatally shot by soldiers or police. A couple of weeks before Halak was killed, Israeli security forces killed Mustafa Younis, a Palestinian citizen of Israel with a psychiatric impairment, at the entrance to Sheba Medical Center, one of the largest hospitals in Israel, after Younis stabbed a security guard.
Younis could have been arrested, but an approach imported from the occupied territories into Israel dictates that live fire is the preferred first option for security forces, instead of a last resort.
But let’s be clear: the fact that these victims were mentally impaired is not the point. They were not killed for being disabled; they were killed for being Palestinian.
Dozens of Palestinians have been killed by Israeli forces over the past year, one of the quietest in the history of this bloody conflict. In nearly every case, they posed no threat to anyone; nearly all could have been arrested, or at least wounded, rather than killed.
Two days after Halak’s killing, his grieving father told me that when he was informed his son had been injured, he knew he had been killed. “The Israeli military and the Israeli police never just injure, they only kill,” Halak’s father said in his mourning tent in the Wadi Joz neighbourhood.
Among the Palestinians killed in the occupied territories in recent months have been young women who tried using scissors to attack armed security forces at checkpoints; young men who tried to stab a soldier but managed barely to scratch one; people in cars who damaged military vehicles, maybe accidentally, maybe as intentional attacks; youths who threw stones and sometimes Molotov cocktails that neither injured anyone nor caused any damage; unarmed protesters and people trying to slip into Israel; and some who had done nothing at all, nor planned to do anything - people like Iyad al-Halak, the young man whose mother called him an angel.
Media collaborators
It is no coincidence that within Israel proper, almost all the people wrongly victimised by Israeli police - who become more violent with each passing year - have been Palestinian citizens of Israel. Sometimes they are Ethiopian Jews. Every time a car thief, or a demonstrator, or someone whose behaviour is deemed suspicious, or somebody else altogether is fatally shot by police, it nearly always turns out that they are Arab.
This is not about the occupation, nor about terrorism. This is about the featherlight touch of the finger on the trigger when the target is Palestinian. There is nothing cheaper in today’s Israel than the lives of Palestinians.
The media is the most contemptible collaborator with the occupation and with racism in Israel. The Israeli media whitewash each wrongful killing, launder it, justify it, so long as the victim is Palestinian.
Media coverage of these events is minimal. The message is: a dead Arab, no story there … nothing of interest, or nothing of importance, or both.
Even in a case as shocking as the execution of Halak, media coverage is hardly appropriate. The story is generally marginalised or simply ignored. Israelis do not want to hear about it, and the media prefer not to trouble them.
These same media, meanwhile, raucously magnify every instance of injury to a Jew, turning it into an epic tale of apocalypse, magnified to a decibel level that is difficult to fathom.
Impunity for Israeli forces
Next, of course, comes the matter of punishment. In general, when Palestinians are killed by Israeli forces, either no investigation is launched, or an investigation is announced but subsequently buried or terminated inconclusively. The message to soldiers and policemen is clear: kill them, and nothing bad will happen to you.
Meanwhile, there is the ever-present brainwashing in Israel that includes the dehumanisation and demonisation of Palestinians. Every Palestinian is a terrorist bombing waiting to happen, unless proved otherwise. Every Palestinian killed is killed legitimately, and all their executioners were under lethal threat.
Even the language that describes these deaths in the Israeli media tells a different story when the victim is a Jew as compared with a Palestinian. A Palestinian is never “murdered” by a soldier or a settler. A Jew killed by a Palestinian is always “murdered”, even if the soldier is brutally invading a family’s home without justification in the middle of the night.
This cloak provided by the media’s cooperation and brainwashing, together with the nonexistent punishment and the racist values so thoroughly imprinted on the Israeli consciousness, creates a situation in which human life becomes worthless.
No peace without equality
If an Israeli soldier or policeman were to shoot a dog tomorrow, the shooter would almost certainly be punished more harshly than if he had shot a Palestinian. In the media, too, the death of a stray dog is typically a bigger story than a dead Palestinian.
Shooting any living thing is, of course, prohibited - but when a dead dog creates more of a furore than the death of a Palestinian, something is seriously wrong.
Here, perhaps, lies the crux of the key to change, the prospects for which are continually receding: so long as the lives of Palestinians are so devalued by Israelis, who simultaneously are sworn to protect the sanctity of Jewish lives, no political solution will have traction - even if one should someday be achieved.
Given values that hold life cheap, dehumanise the “other”, and blindly justify killing him while ignoring his victimisation, there can be no equality in consciousness, without which peace can never come.
Truly, this is the fundamental thing: that they and we are equal human beings with equal rights - and how remote and unrealistic this vision seems today.
The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Eye.
Gideon Levy
Gideon Levy is a Haaretz columnist and a member of the newspaper's editorial board. Levy joined Haaretz in 1982, and spent four years as the newspaper's deputy editor. He was the recipient of the Euro-Med Journalist Prize for 2008; the Leipzig Freedom Prize in 2001; the Israeli Journalists’ Union Prize in 1997; and The Association of Human Rights in Israel Award for 1996. His new book, The Punishment of Gaza, has just been published by Verso.
The fatal police shooting of an autistic Palestinian man highlights - yet again - the grotesque inequalities that have come to define the Israeli state
Iyad al-Halak left his house at about six that morning. His family says he was in a good mood. Video from a security camera not far from his house shows him walking along, holding a garbage bag. He always took out the trash when he left home in the morning.
Halak was on his way to the care facility where he had been going every morning for the last six years. He entered the Old City of Jerusalem through the Lion’s Gate and proceeded along King Faisal Road, the start of the Via Dolorosa. He was headed for the Elwyn El-Quds centre for people with special needs, a few hundred yards from the Lion’s Gate, near the entrance to the Al-Aqsa plaza.
World in ruins
Halak never reached his destination last Saturday. Israeli border police began chasing him, shouting: “Terrorist! terrorist!” The reason is unclear. They fired on him, evidently hitting him in the leg. Panicked, he ran into a garbage room alongside the road in an attempt to hide.
His counsellor from the Elwyn center, Warda Abu Hadid, likewise on her way to the centre, also tried to hide in the garbage room from the police and their gunfire.
Three border police officers quickly arrived at the doorway to the garbage room. Halak was lying on his back on the filthy floor. His counsellor saw that his leg was bleeding. The three policemen stood there, guns drawn, and screamed at Halak: “Where’s the rifle? Where’s the rifle?”
Abu Hadid, his counsellor, was yelling back at them, in both Arabic and Hebrew: “He is disabled! He is disabled!” Halak was yelling: “I am with her! I am with her!” This went on for about five minutes, until one of the police officers fired his M-16 towards Halak at close range. A bullet hit him near the waist and struck his spine, damaging various internal organs on the way - killing him on the spot.
Thus ended the short life of Iyad al-Halak, a Palestinian young man with autism whose face was that of an angel. He was 32 and the apple of his parents’ eye. They cared for him with utmost devotion all those years, and now their entire world is in ruins.
It is not hard to imagine what would have happened if a Palestinian had executed, in similar fashion, an Israeli with special needs. But when the victim is Palestinian, nearly everything is permissible.
Killed for being Palestinian
In recent years, at least four other Palestinians with similar disabilities have been fatally shot by soldiers or police. A couple of weeks before Halak was killed, Israeli security forces killed Mustafa Younis, a Palestinian citizen of Israel with a psychiatric impairment, at the entrance to Sheba Medical Center, one of the largest hospitals in Israel, after Younis stabbed a security guard.
Younis could have been arrested, but an approach imported from the occupied territories into Israel dictates that live fire is the preferred first option for security forces, instead of a last resort.
But let’s be clear: the fact that these victims were mentally impaired is not the point. They were not killed for being disabled; they were killed for being Palestinian.
Dozens of Palestinians have been killed by Israeli forces over the past year, one of the quietest in the history of this bloody conflict. In nearly every case, they posed no threat to anyone; nearly all could have been arrested, or at least wounded, rather than killed.
Two days after Halak’s killing, his grieving father told me that when he was informed his son had been injured, he knew he had been killed. “The Israeli military and the Israeli police never just injure, they only kill,” Halak’s father said in his mourning tent in the Wadi Joz neighbourhood.
Among the Palestinians killed in the occupied territories in recent months have been young women who tried using scissors to attack armed security forces at checkpoints; young men who tried to stab a soldier but managed barely to scratch one; people in cars who damaged military vehicles, maybe accidentally, maybe as intentional attacks; youths who threw stones and sometimes Molotov cocktails that neither injured anyone nor caused any damage; unarmed protesters and people trying to slip into Israel; and some who had done nothing at all, nor planned to do anything - people like Iyad al-Halak, the young man whose mother called him an angel.
Media collaborators
It is no coincidence that within Israel proper, almost all the people wrongly victimised by Israeli police - who become more violent with each passing year - have been Palestinian citizens of Israel. Sometimes they are Ethiopian Jews. Every time a car thief, or a demonstrator, or someone whose behaviour is deemed suspicious, or somebody else altogether is fatally shot by police, it nearly always turns out that they are Arab.
This is not about the occupation, nor about terrorism. This is about the featherlight touch of the finger on the trigger when the target is Palestinian. There is nothing cheaper in today’s Israel than the lives of Palestinians.
The media is the most contemptible collaborator with the occupation and with racism in Israel. The Israeli media whitewash each wrongful killing, launder it, justify it, so long as the victim is Palestinian.
Media coverage of these events is minimal. The message is: a dead Arab, no story there … nothing of interest, or nothing of importance, or both.
Even in a case as shocking as the execution of Halak, media coverage is hardly appropriate. The story is generally marginalised or simply ignored. Israelis do not want to hear about it, and the media prefer not to trouble them.
These same media, meanwhile, raucously magnify every instance of injury to a Jew, turning it into an epic tale of apocalypse, magnified to a decibel level that is difficult to fathom.
Impunity for Israeli forces
Next, of course, comes the matter of punishment. In general, when Palestinians are killed by Israeli forces, either no investigation is launched, or an investigation is announced but subsequently buried or terminated inconclusively. The message to soldiers and policemen is clear: kill them, and nothing bad will happen to you.
Meanwhile, there is the ever-present brainwashing in Israel that includes the dehumanisation and demonisation of Palestinians. Every Palestinian is a terrorist bombing waiting to happen, unless proved otherwise. Every Palestinian killed is killed legitimately, and all their executioners were under lethal threat.
Even the language that describes these deaths in the Israeli media tells a different story when the victim is a Jew as compared with a Palestinian. A Palestinian is never “murdered” by a soldier or a settler. A Jew killed by a Palestinian is always “murdered”, even if the soldier is brutally invading a family’s home without justification in the middle of the night.
This cloak provided by the media’s cooperation and brainwashing, together with the nonexistent punishment and the racist values so thoroughly imprinted on the Israeli consciousness, creates a situation in which human life becomes worthless.
No peace without equality
If an Israeli soldier or policeman were to shoot a dog tomorrow, the shooter would almost certainly be punished more harshly than if he had shot a Palestinian. In the media, too, the death of a stray dog is typically a bigger story than a dead Palestinian.
Shooting any living thing is, of course, prohibited - but when a dead dog creates more of a furore than the death of a Palestinian, something is seriously wrong.
Here, perhaps, lies the crux of the key to change, the prospects for which are continually receding: so long as the lives of Palestinians are so devalued by Israelis, who simultaneously are sworn to protect the sanctity of Jewish lives, no political solution will have traction - even if one should someday be achieved.
Given values that hold life cheap, dehumanise the “other”, and blindly justify killing him while ignoring his victimisation, there can be no equality in consciousness, without which peace can never come.
Truly, this is the fundamental thing: that they and we are equal human beings with equal rights - and how remote and unrealistic this vision seems today.
The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Eye.
Gideon Levy
Gideon Levy is a Haaretz columnist and a member of the newspaper's editorial board. Levy joined Haaretz in 1982, and spent four years as the newspaper's deputy editor. He was the recipient of the Euro-Med Journalist Prize for 2008; the Leipzig Freedom Prize in 2001; the Israeli Journalists’ Union Prize in 1997; and The Association of Human Rights in Israel Award for 1996. His new book, The Punishment of Gaza, has just been published by Verso.
Israeli police on Thursday evening broke into the family home and mourning tent of Palestinian martyr Eyad al-Hallaq in Wadi al-Jouz neighborhood in Occupied Jerusalem.
Local sources said that the Israeli police violently searched the home and the mourning tent, which sparked confrontations with Palestinian neighbors.
At least two Palestinian citizens were arrested by the Israeli police during the attack.
Local residents said that moments before the police raid, Israeli extremist rabbi Yehudah Glick attempted to storm al-Hallaq’s mourning tent before he was confronted and driven out of the place by angry youths. Glick was reportedly transferred to the hospital.
Al-Hallaq’s family stressed that they will never accept any condolences over the unjustified murder of their son from any Israeli side.
Eyad al-Hallaq, a 32-year-old Palestinian with autism, was cold-bloodedly murdered by Israeli police forces a few days ago in Jerusalem’s Old City while he was on his way to his special education school. video
Local sources said that the Israeli police violently searched the home and the mourning tent, which sparked confrontations with Palestinian neighbors.
At least two Palestinian citizens were arrested by the Israeli police during the attack.
Local residents said that moments before the police raid, Israeli extremist rabbi Yehudah Glick attempted to storm al-Hallaq’s mourning tent before he was confronted and driven out of the place by angry youths. Glick was reportedly transferred to the hospital.
Al-Hallaq’s family stressed that they will never accept any condolences over the unjustified murder of their son from any Israeli side.
Eyad al-Hallaq, a 32-year-old Palestinian with autism, was cold-bloodedly murdered by Israeli police forces a few days ago in Jerusalem’s Old City while he was on his way to his special education school. video
3 june 2020
The Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR), on Tuesday, stressed that Israel must swiftly develop to a full, independent, impartial, competent and transparent investigation into Israeli forces’ killing of a Palestinian man with a mental disability in Jerusalem, stating that: “those responsible must be held to account.”
A press statement issued by OHCHR said that the United Nations has for years documented and publicly reported on the routine use of lethal force by Israeli Security Forces against Palestinians, in Gaza and in the West Bank.
There are very low levels of accountability for the use of force by Israeli security forces against Palestinians, with a handful of indictments in relation to hundreds of killings over the past five years, said the statement.
OHCHR said that the use of force that does not comply with those principles and results in the death amounts to an arbitrary deprivation of life. Security forces in policing operations must use the least force possible to address any situation. “Non-lethal means in the case of Eyad would have saved his life”.
“International law is clear: law enforcement officials may only resort to lethal force when strictly necessary, meaning as a response to an imminent threat of death or serious injury, and in accordance with the principle of proportionality.”
Secrecy around rules of engagement does not allow an independent assessment of their compliance with Israel’s obligations under international law, nor the compliance with the rules by the security force personnel in the case of Eyad.
Where lethal force appears to be routinely the first rather than the last resort, the killing of people like Eyad is likely to occur, mistaken or otherwise, said the statement.
“While lessons must be learned from Eyad’s killing, the primary response must be accountability.”
The UN Human Rights Office extended its condolences to the family and friends of Eyad.
Eyad al-Hallaq, who suffered from a partial movement disability and was mentally disabled, was walking from his home in Wadi al-Joz neighbourhood to a vocational training centre for persons with special needs, few hundred meters away, in Jerusalem’s Old City.
He had been tracing the same path every morning to the centre for six years. Monitoring by the UN Human Rights Office suggests Eyad was shouted at by Israeli Security Forces.
Because of his disability he panicked and ran, hiding in a dumpsite and called for his teacher, who was nearby. While events are still to be fully clarified, it appears Eyad was killed by shots of live ammunition to the upper body while he was on the ground.
Israeli Security Forces personnel involved, claimed they suspected he was carrying a gun. No weapon appears to have been found.
A press statement issued by OHCHR said that the United Nations has for years documented and publicly reported on the routine use of lethal force by Israeli Security Forces against Palestinians, in Gaza and in the West Bank.
There are very low levels of accountability for the use of force by Israeli security forces against Palestinians, with a handful of indictments in relation to hundreds of killings over the past five years, said the statement.
OHCHR said that the use of force that does not comply with those principles and results in the death amounts to an arbitrary deprivation of life. Security forces in policing operations must use the least force possible to address any situation. “Non-lethal means in the case of Eyad would have saved his life”.
“International law is clear: law enforcement officials may only resort to lethal force when strictly necessary, meaning as a response to an imminent threat of death or serious injury, and in accordance with the principle of proportionality.”
Secrecy around rules of engagement does not allow an independent assessment of their compliance with Israel’s obligations under international law, nor the compliance with the rules by the security force personnel in the case of Eyad.
Where lethal force appears to be routinely the first rather than the last resort, the killing of people like Eyad is likely to occur, mistaken or otherwise, said the statement.
“While lessons must be learned from Eyad’s killing, the primary response must be accountability.”
The UN Human Rights Office extended its condolences to the family and friends of Eyad.
Eyad al-Hallaq, who suffered from a partial movement disability and was mentally disabled, was walking from his home in Wadi al-Joz neighbourhood to a vocational training centre for persons with special needs, few hundred meters away, in Jerusalem’s Old City.
He had been tracing the same path every morning to the centre for six years. Monitoring by the UN Human Rights Office suggests Eyad was shouted at by Israeli Security Forces.
Because of his disability he panicked and ran, hiding in a dumpsite and called for his teacher, who was nearby. While events are still to be fully clarified, it appears Eyad was killed by shots of live ammunition to the upper body while he was on the ground.
Israeli Security Forces personnel involved, claimed they suspected he was carrying a gun. No weapon appears to have been found.
