Sunday, 8 April
3:30 pm
Friends Meeting at Cambridge
5 Longfellow Park
Cambridge, MA
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/events/439065979859007/

Join the Massachusetts Against Hewlett Packard campaign for our last event before the April 23rd hearing and vote in the Cambridge City Council on our resolution for Cambridge to stop buying from HP companies.

We are hosting a panel and discussion with three amazing speakers who will be talking about the role HP Inc. and HP Enterprise play in violence against and denial of rights to Palestinians, immigrants, and people who are or have been incarcerated in U.S. prisons. Following the panel and discussion, we will break into working groups so attendees can start taking action help us win on April 23rd!

See you there and, please, SHARE WIDELY!

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The Massachusetts Against Hewlett Packard campaign is a local component of an international effort to compel HP companies to end their support for violence and oppression around the world through economic boycotts and divestment. Massachusetts Against Hewlett Packard is bringing a resolution to a hearing and vote in the Cambridge City council on Monday, April 23rd which, if passed, would require the city to end all purchasing and procurement from Hewlett Packard companies until these companies terminate their support for oppression of and violence against Palestinians, immigrants in the US, and people targeted by the US prison system.

Saturday, 7 April
4:00 pm
Piazza Cavour
Milan, Italy
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/events/443851709379864/

The attacks on Palestinian civilians demanding the Right to Return continues. 20 murdered civilians will not stop the desire for liberation!

Prosegue la repressione contro i civili palestinesi che chiedono il Diritto al Ritorno nelle proprie terre.

20 civili assassinati non fermano la volontà di liberazione e di un futuro certo.

Saturday, 14 April
1:00 pm
Israeli Embassy – London
2 Palace Green
London, UK
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/events/241571633082997/

Protest outside the Israeli embassy as part of a weekend of action for Palestinian political prisoners in solidarity with the Palestinian struggle for return and liberation (including https://www.facebook.com/events/156553131709390/ on Tuesday 17th April – Palestinian Prisoners Day). Israel’s vindictive approach to arrests and imprisonment has continued with the jailing of over 300 Palestinian children; regularly subjected to torture, solitary confinement, and other harsh and inhumane conditions.

Join us with banners, flags, placards and voices!

Free all Palestinian Political Prisoners!
Zionism is Racism!
Boycott Israel!
Victory to the Palestinian Resistance!

(Organised by Victory to the Intifada and Samidoun – Palestinian Prisoner Solidarity Network)

More than 6,400 Palestinian political prisoners today are locked up by Israeli occupation, including 62 female prisoners and over 300 child prisoners; regularly subjected to torture, solitary confinement, and other harsh and inhumane conditions. Over the past 3 years the number of child prisoners has doubled. In December alone, following Trump’s announcement on Jerusalem, Israeli occupation forces detained around 450 Palestinian children.
Imprisonment has always been a weapon of colonialism in Palestine. From the British colonisers who suppressed Palestinian revolts through mass imprisonment, home demolitions, and execution – and who first imposed the “emergency law” of administrative detention used against Palestinians today – to the Zionist colonisers who for 70 years have imposed a system of occupation, apartheid, criminalisation, racism and dispossession upon the Palestinian people.

In February 2018, hundreds of Palestinian prisoners under administrative detention have launched an open – ended boycott of refusing to attend military court hearings,

“I don’t want a lawyer or any legal representation due to the fact that administrative detention is an illegal policy that denies me my freedom. There are no charges against me and my detention is based on a secret file that is controlled by the Israeli intelligence. I don’t want to be part of such proceedings in this place which lacks all forms of justice. I request for my lawyer to retreat from this hearing. (Salah Hamouri, (33), human rights worker – imprisoned under administrative detention – Jerusalem).

Many Palestinian prisoners have engaged in hunger strikes in the past, demanding freedom and justice. They continue to put their bodies, health, and lives on the line daily in direct confrontation with an occupation from behind bars.

Palestinian prisoners are not only victims of an unjust and oppres¬sive legal/military structure – they are part of an entire people seeking their freedom and liberation, including the end of occupation, the right of return of Palestinian refugees, and full rights for all Palestinians.

Dozens of Palestinians remain in solitary confinement and administrative detainees’ sentences have been repeatedly renewed. Palestinian Prisoners continue to struggle, and in their words, are “calling on free people across the world to do everything in their power to support them in their struggle for rights.”

Join us on a series of events standing in solidarity with Palestinian political prisoners and the Palestinian struggle for return and liberation.

Wednesday, 18 April
7:30 pm
Academy Plaza Hotel
10-14 Findlater Place
Dublin, Ireland
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/events/906453462848890/

Palestinian Child Prisoners in Apartheid Israel’s Prisons

with Nery Ramati, Human Rights attorney from Israeli law firm Gaby Lasky & Partners (The legal team representing Palestinian child prisoner Ahed Tamimi)

Wednesday 18th April 2018
7.30pm, Academy Plaza Hotel, 10-14 Findlater Place (off O’Connell Street), Dublin 1

700 children detained and prosecuted every year. ‘Institutional’ torture. Forced confessions. ‘Systematic’ human rights rights violations.

Every year, hundreds of Palestinian minors undergo the same scenario. Israeli security forces pick them up on the street or at home in the middle of the night, then handcuff and blindfold them and transport them to interrogation, often subjecting them to violence en route. Exhausted and scared – some having spent a long time in transit, some having been roused from sleep, some having had nothing to eat or drink for hours – the minors are then interrogated. Completely alone, cut off from the world, without a lawyer or other guardian present they are interrogated in manner that often involves threats, verbal abuse and physical violence. Its sole purpose is to get the minors to ‘confess’ or provide ‘information’ about others.

They are then taken to the military court for a remand hearing. In the vast majority of cases, the military judges approve remand, even when the only evidence against the minors is their own confession. These military courts, which are only used to try Palestinians, have a 99.7% conviction rate and have been repeatedly criticised by human rights groups as failing to meet international standards for a fair trial. The facts and figures all demonstrate that the righst of Palestinian minors’ are being regularly and systematically violated by Apartheid Israel.

About the Speaker

Nery Ramati is an attorney and partner in Gaby Lasky and Partners Law Office, a leading human rights office in Israel, specializing in freedom of expression and protest, and Ahed Tamimi’s lawyers.

He has been representing Palestinian, Israeli and international human rights and anti-occupation activists in Israel’s military (Occupied Palestinian Territories) and civil (State of Israel) courts for almost a decade. Mr. Ramati has been representing leading human rights defenders and activists from the Palestinian villages of the popular struggle movement, such as Bi’ilin, Nabi Saleh, Beit Ummar, Qadom and others. One of his most important achievements is raising the awareness worldwide on the issues of the ill-treatment of the Palestinian minors (children) in the military court system.

Organised by Dublin branch of the Ireland-Palestine Solidarity Campaign

Saturday, 7 April
1:00 pm, Worcester, MA City Hall
455 Main St
Worcester, MA
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/events/194822901124425/

Join us in Worcester for a Rally in Solidarity with Gaza after the Land Day Massacre

The 30th of March, Land Day, was first inscribed in Palestinian history in 1976, when a mass, popular uprising in occupied Palestine ’48 confronted land confiscation and expropriation at the hands of the settler-colonial Zionist state.

On that day in 1976, six Palestinians were killed as they protested in a general strike against the ongoing Nakba, after thirty years of repression and dispossession. Their names have become indelibly inked in Palestinian history and the history of those who struggle around the world – Kheir Mohammad Salim Yasin, Khadija Qasem Shawahneh, Raja Hussein Abu Rayya, Khader Eid Mahmoud Khalayleh, Muhsin Hasan Said Taha and Raafat Ali Al-Zheiri – shot down as they marched to defend their land.

Last week, in besieged Gaza, occupied Palestine, tens of thousands of marchers rose up once again in a mass, popular march commemorating that day 42 years ago with today’s demand to liberate the land, centering the right to return of Palestinian refugees – the Great March of Return. Over 70 percent of the Palestinian population in Gaza are refugees denied their right to return to their homes, lands and villages for 70 years.

And once again, the Israeli state revealed its nature, shooting down 16 martyrs of the land and return in another Land Day massacre, 42 years after the first. The day began with the killing of Palestinian farmer Omar Samour by an Israeli tank shell. This latest murder of a Palestinian farmer further illustrates the unending drive to seize Palestinian land and attack Palestinian productive capacity and self-sufficiently, farmers in Gaza have been under severe attack. The so-called “buffer zone” imposed on farmers in Gaza has seized 30 percent of the land, including the most fertile. Indeed, Palestinian fishers and Palestinian farmers have particularly borne the brunt of repeated Israeli fire, attacks and murders, aimed at eliminating Palestinian self-sufficiency even in the narrow Gaza Strip, hemmed in by sky, land and sea by deadly occupation forces.

And as thousands of Palestinian refugees in Gaza massed in a popular march near the illegitimate colonial barrier and so-called “borders” imposed by the occupation state, occupation forces and sharpshooters opened fire directly on popular demonstrators calling for their rights – for return, liberation, an end to the siege. Their names are now also immortal in Palestinian history and the history of those who struggle – Naji Abu Hajir, Mohammed Kamal Al-Najjar, Wahid Nasrallah Abu Samour, Amin Mansour Abu Muammar, Mohammed Naeem Abu Amr, Ahmed Ibrahim Ashour Odeh, Jihad Ahmed Fraina, Mahmoud Saadi Rahmi, Abdel Fattah Abdel Nabi, Ibrahim Salah Abu Shaar, Abd al-Qader Marhi al-Hawajri, Sari Walid Abu Odeh, Hamdan Isma’il Abu Amsha, Jihad Zuhair Abu Jamous, and Bader al-Sabbagh.