Israeli Defense Forces Fire on Non-Violent Protesters and Wound Nobel Peace Laureate Mairead Maquire

The protesters were unarmed and peacefully protesting the separation wall that is being built through the village of Bilin in the West Bank cutting Palestinian villagers off from their farmland and their neighbors. The Palestinians have already lost two-thirds of their land.

The interpreter that Mairead Maquire was walking with on her way to the protest spot told her that the wall cut him off from 10 acres of land that he had owned and that the Israeli authorities confiscated after they built the separation wall. The olive trees which were on the confiscated land were uprooted and taken to Israeli settlements in Jerusalem to be planted.

The protesters which consisted of Palestinian members of parliament, Israeli peace activist, local villagers and several hundred international peace activist from over twenty countries approached the separation wall. Israeli defense forces attacked the crowd with gas canisters and rubber-covered steel bullets. Mairead Maquire who was participating in the protest was shot in the leg by an Israeli soldier who was only twenty meters away. This happened as she was trying to help another protester move to the back of the protest. After receiving some treatment from the medics she moved back to the front line and the protesters were being attacked with gas canisters again. She sustained a severe nose bleed and had to be taken by stretcher to an ambulance to get treated. She said, “I never in all my years of activism witnessed anything so vicious as from the Israeli military.”

The source for this piece was the April 23, 2007 Democracy Now show.