Democracy Now Reports On Yet Another Attack On Peace Activists

When these vehicles are approaching us, Brian and I are standing in the street making ourselves as visible as possible, which is normal procedure for us; we are standing with our hands in the air and we have the vehicles visible to us and we are visible to the vehicles for 10 or 15 seconds before they suddenly opened fire at us -- in our direction and in front of our feet from a distance of about 50 meters.

Of course these bullets bounce into the ground and they come in straight towards us.

There is no doubt that they knew who we were; there were no Palestinians in the area who could have been their target -- they were firing directly on us.

I have read a report from the Israeli army spokesperson stating that there was a firefight taking places between Palestinians and the Israeli army, but to me, that is an outrageous lie to cover up the circumstances of the attempted murder of an international activist. What I can say about it is this; we have people out in the city and there were clashed between children -- and I emphasize, children -- throwing stones at armored vehicles earlier in the day, but they took place in a totally different area of the city and they had ended at least one hour before this incident took place. I emphasize again, at this point, when the armed personnel carrier opened fire on us, me and Brian are the only people visible on that street. They are not under any kind of attack from anyone, not even children throwing stones. They were driving in a slow manner and the situation is calm, to us the situation is very normal for Palestinian conditions, so I was actually very surprised that they opened fire on us at this particular moment. There was really nothing going on.

As in the other recent cases, it appear either there has been a deliberate policy change to attack peace activists or the frightened and frustrated 19 year old Israeli soldiers have taken it upon themselves to decide international observers and peace activists are the enemy.