Photo: LAZAR SIMEONOV
NOVACT joins the different calls and campaigns and calls for an international response to the constant violations of human rights by Israel, especially with regard to the right of expression and peaceful demonstration.
The Palestinian human rights defender Salah Khawaja has been arrested arbitrarily, without access to lawyer and under serious threat of ill-treatment by the Israeli forces for more than one week, as Front Line Defenders has denounced.
The dawn of October 26th, the Israeli army arrested Salah Khawaja in his house in the center of Ramallah after registering his home and cause various damages, as reported by the Prisoners Support and Human Rights Organization Addameer.
The arrest took place in area A under Palestinian civil and security total control, according to the Oslo peace agreements but that however Israel constantly violates realizing raids and arrests in there. In addition, Khawaja was been transferred to Petah Tikva detention centre that, besides being known as on of the hardest Israeli places of interrogation, is outside of the Palestinian occupied territory in 1967, which clearly violates Geneva Conventions.
Salah Khawaja, 46 years old, is a human rights defender who started his fight in his village Nil’in, is a member of the coordination committee of Stop the Wall Campaign and is part of the secretariat of the Boycott National Committee. Currently, he is also a leader of the young Palestinian National Initiative party (PNI, known as Al Mubadara) led by Mustafa Bargouti which has already declared that “this arrest is clearly directed at all activists who peacefully struggle for their rights”. In fact, as published in La Directa, Khawaja has been arrested at least in 8 occasions since he was 15 years old with prison sentences from 12 days to 5 years.
In addition to the alerts and press releases that have already been produced, the whole political environment of Khawaja has begun to mobilize campaigns, which NOVACT joins, asking the fulfillment of international law, the immediate release of Khawaja, the international presence in the trial scheduled for next Sunday November 6th and an international response especially with regard to the arbitrary arrests and ill-treatment by Israel, and other. The coordinator of the Popular Struggle Coordination Committee (PSCC), Munther Amira, stated that however “this arrest would not stop popular struggle and will continue to expose Israel in front of the world as an apartheid state that keeps violating human rights”.
