Dear friends,
you may or may not be aware of the campaign to free five teenage boys from the Palestinian village of Hares in the Occupied West Bank. Hares is a small village I know well as it is the village where the International Women's Peace Service was located for seven years before our team moved to the neighbouring village of Dier Istiya. It is located in the middle of what is known as the "Ariel settlement bloc" and came under regular attack from the Israeli military at the beginning of the second intifada. The Israeli occupation forces still continue to regularly harass the village, invading and arresting Palestinian youth and other residents.
The five Hares boys - Mohammad Suleiman, Ammar Souf, Mohammed Kleib, Tamer Souf, and Ali Shamlawi - are currently facing life imprisonment for a crime that never happened. They are being held in Israeli prison charged with 25 counts of attempted murder for alleged stone-throwing, with no evidence whatsoever. The boys have been labelled as “terrorists” before any objective investigation even took place.
They’ve been condemned in the Israeli media as guilty even before they “confessed” to stone-throwing under torture. They’ve been denied any sort of justice in the Israeli military court system that convicts Palestinian children at a 99.7% rate, not unlike that of the world’s worst totalitarian regimes of the 20th century.
You can read the full story/background to their arrest and their imprisonment here
The Hares Boys, like all Palestinians, have the right to live their young lives without that regime cutting them short in a mock judicial process.
You can join the campaign to free the boys checking out the Free the Hares Boys website and Facobook page. Importantly, the Free the Hares Boys website has a page called “What You Can Do” which outlines how you can take action and support the boys.
You can visit the website here. The Hares Boys facebook page is here: Free the Hares Boys.
There is also a petition calling for the five boys to be freed. Please sign and share with your social media and other networks. You can find the petition here.
There has also been some media coverage of the boys' arrest on Mondoweiss and Al Jazeera.
For more information on Palestinian child prisoners, see: Addameer and Defence of Children, Palestine.
In solidarity, Kim
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FREE THE HARES BOYS!
Ammar Souf
Ali Shamlawi
Mohammed Suleiman
Mohammed Kleib
Tamer Souf
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