To Palestinian widow Nayfa Shatat, a mother of 11, this city?? biggest Islamic charity is a lifeline. It gives her daughters a first-class education and sustains her family with food coupons.
To Israel, the Islamic Charitable Association is a front for the militant Hamas, promoting the movement?? violent ideology in its private schools and funding militant activity against Israel.
Now the Israeli military says it will close down the association?? operations, which include a boarding school for 600 disadvantaged children, several day schools, a bakery and a women?? sewing cooperative.
PHOTO: AP
Early on Wednesday, Israeli army troops raided the sewing workshop, seizing sewing machines and bolts of cloth, witnesses said. The army said the workshop was used to raise money for militants.
It?? part of an intensified crackdown on Hamas by Israel and the West Bank government of Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas. Hamas violently seized control of Gaza from Abbas??forces last June and neither Israel nor Abbas want to see a repeat in the West Bank.
In recent months, Israeli troops and Abbas??forces have gone after West Bank charities, moneychangers, women?? cooperatives and media outlets with suspected ties to the militants. But closing the Hebron association is delicate because it serves thousands of children.
The closure would deny services to the poor at a time when Abbas??government is not always able to fund an alternative.
Hamas has built up a large network of schools, clinics and welfare offices in the past two decades, deepening its roots in Palestinian society as a key provider of social services.
The closure might hamper Hamas??ability to deliver services, but will also taint Abbas, political scientist Salah Abdel Jawad said.
??srael is weakening Palestinian society,??he said. ??srael isn?? strengthening Mahmoud Abbas this way.??br />
The association?? attorney, Abdel Karim Farah, has appealed the closure orders, but the Israeli Supreme Court hasn?? set a hearing date. Officials in the Abbas government said they were also trying to reverse the closure order.
Shatat said she?? be lost without the charity.
?? can?? provide for my children the way the association does,??said Shatat, who lost her husband to cancer two years ago.
Shatat said that without the boarding school, her daughters would be married off once they hit their late teens because she cannot afford to educate them.
At the boarding school, students get a free education, meals, food coupons for their families and transportation home every weekend.
Israel accuses the association of teaching Islamic extremism and of financing violent acts.
Association staff say they aren?? a Hamas front.
They say the association was founded in 1962, five years before Israel captured the West Bank, and that it registered first with Israel?? military government and later with the Palestinian Authority.
The charity has assets valued at about US$10 million, including a cattle farm, rental apartments, bakeries and commercial real estate, Farah said. It also receives millions of dollars from donors in wealthy Gulf states to help cover monthly costs of US$635,000.
The boarding school has received outside help.
Volunteers from Christian Peacemaker Teams, a group of US and Canadian pacifists, sleep in the dorm in shifts in hope of deterring the army from shutting down the facility.
??e are convinced there is no connection between the charity and Hamas,??said Art Arbour, a retired school principal from Canada.
A fire caused by a burst gas pipe yesterday spread to several homes and sent a fireball soaring into the sky outside Malaysia’s largest city, injuring more than 100 people. The towering inferno near a gas station in Putra Heights outside Kuala Lumpur was visible for kilometers and lasted for several hours. It happened during a public holiday as Muslims, who are the majority in Malaysia, celebrate the second day of Eid al-Fitr. National oil company Petronas said the fire started at one of its gas pipelines at 8:10am and the affected pipeline was later isolated. Disaster management officials said shutting the
US Vice President J.D. Vance on Friday accused Denmark of not having done enough to protect Greenland, when he visited the strategically placed and resource-rich Danish territory coveted by US President Donald Trump. Vance made his comment during a trip to the Pituffik Space Base in northwestern Greenland, a visit viewed by Copenhagen and Nuuk as a provocation. “Our message to Denmark is very simple: You have not done a good job by the people of Greenland,” Vance told a news conference. “You have under-invested in the people of Greenland, and you have under-invested in the security architecture of this
Japan unveiled a plan on Thursday to evacuate around 120,000 residents and tourists from its southern islets near Taiwan within six days in the event of an “emergency”. The plan was put together as “the security situation surrounding our nation grows severe” and with an “emergency” in mind, the government’s crisis management office said. Exactly what that emergency might be was left unspecified in the plan but it envisages the evacuation of around 120,000 people in five Japanese islets close to Taiwan. China claims Taiwan as part of its territory and has stepped up military pressure in recent years, including
UNREST: The authorities in Turkey arrested 13 Turkish journalists in five days, deported a BBC correspondent and on Thursday arrested a reporter from Sweden Waving flags and chanting slogans, many hundreds of thousands of anti-government demonstrators on Saturday rallied in Istanbul, Turkey, in defence of democracy after the arrest of Istanbul Mayor Ekrem Imamoglu which sparked Turkey’s worst street unrest in more than a decade. Under a cloudless blue sky, vast crowds gathered in Maltepe on the Asian side of Turkey’s biggest city on the eve of the Eid al-Fitr celebration which started yesterday, marking the end of Ramadan. Ozgur Ozel, chairman of the main opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP), which organized the rally, said there were 2.2 million people in the crowd, but