<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Driving in Palestine now is more dangerous than ever.<\/p>\n
Yesterday, I drove from Ramallah to Dura, a village near Hebron to attend the funeral of Ahed, my friend\u2019s baby sister, who had just become a mother. She was shot by an Israeli sniper. A heartbreaking loss.<\/p>\n
If I could use Israel\u2019s apartheid roads designated for settlers, it would be an 80-90 minute drive, but it took me four hours.<\/p>\n
Why?<\/p>\n
First, we\u2019re forced to take segregated Palestinian only roads which make it a 2.5 hour drive because of checkpoints.<\/p>\n
But these days, it\u2019s even worse as Israel has imposed an even more strict strangulation policy over the West Bank, which means even some of those segregated roads are blocked and there are 10 times as many checkpoints.<\/p>\n
Taking this drive outside our village\/cities of residence is extremely dangerous for three reasons:<\/p>\n
\u2022 Settler attacks<\/strong>: Israeli settlers are in rampage mode, and you don\u2019t know when you could get hit by a rock or bullet from one of their raging mobs.<\/p>\n \u2022 Soldiers at the end of a wrong turn<\/strong>: There are no signs for which \u201croads\u201d are currently opened or closed for us\u2014you have to guess or stop to ask locals every few miles. If you make a wrong turn and end up face to face with soldiers, they can shoot you, and claim you attacked them.<\/p>\n \u2022 Arrests for social media posts<\/strong>: If you\u2019re stopped at a checkpoint, soldiers these days are taking folks\u2019 phones and checking their WhatsApp, Telegram and Instagram. If you have a message standing in solidarity with Gaza, or anything the Israeli soldiers see as offensive, they\u2019ll beat you to a pulp, and could even arrest you. My friend Diala, a human rights lawyer, was just arrested at one of these checkpoints this evening. We don\u2019t know why, but it likely relates to her work and messages they found on her phone about it.<\/p>\n On my end, driving back at night was a nightmare, mainly because I had a friend in the car and was worried about him.<\/p>\n As we drove back, these historically busy streets were ghostly empty because nobody is taking the risk of driving at night unless absolutely necessary.\u00a0Every turn I\u2019d take, I\u2019d slow down to a crawl to make sure there was no trigger happy soldier or angry settler ready to pounce.<\/p>\n I got lucky, for although we waited at a checkpoint for an hour, the soldiers got bored and literally opened the checkpoint for all the cars to pass without any security check\u2014proof they\u2019re using these checkpoints arbitrarily as collective punishment.<\/p>\n In Dura, I saw where Ahed was shot.<\/p>\n The soldiers had stormed her village as part of their intimidation tactics in the West Bank to keep people anxious. Ahed ran to her roof to warn her husband to come home. An Israeli sniper shot her in the head.<\/p>\n As I drove home, thinking of Ahed, her heartbroken family, the families of my friends in Gaza, all the souls we\u2019ve lost, and how easy my life could be taken for simply driving across my ancestral lands to help my friend in her grief.<\/p>\n It shouldn\u2019t have to be said, but our lives are precious. They\u2019re beautiful. They\u2019re equally worthy of joy and basic dignity.<\/p>\n I\u2019m committed to one day being able to drive across my people\u2019s ancestral land a free man, surrounded by my liberated people.<\/p>\n If Israel\u2019s death machine is haunting us around every corner, we might as well live fighting for a life worth dying for.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" A Twitter post by Fadi Quran reveals the reality on the ground these days trying to get around the West Bank.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":13,"featured_media":31294,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[8,51],"tags":[399,3347,3348,1288,1440],"coauthors":[2165],"class_list":["post-31291","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-column","category-tmr-weekly","tag-checkpoints","tag-driving-in-the-west-bank","tag-israeli-soldiers","tag-palestine","tag-ramallah","entry"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\n
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