It has been an overly sombre week in terms of regional politics – specifically with the capture of Karadzic, the alleged deal-cutting shenanigans of Mladic, and the sycophantic musings of the British prime minister - so a more positive post is definitely over due.

Alas, not just yet; the week is not quite over, and so I must post on a distressing issue highlighted earlier this week, which occured in Nil’in, a village in the West Bank of Palestine.

On 7 July, a 27-year-old Palestinian demonstrator, Ashraf Abu Rahma, was stopped by Israeli soldiers, who proceeded to cuff, blindfold, and beat him for approximately 30 minutes.

Abu Rahma had been protesting the construction of the illegal Apartheid Wall which runs alongside the village.

After the assault, a group of soldiers and border policemen led him to an army jeep.

What happened next was caught on camera by a 14-year-old local girl, and disseminated by the human rights watchdog, B’Tselem.

The video clip shows a soldier aim his weapon at the demonstrator’s legs, from about 1.5 meters away, and fire a rubber coated steel bullet at him.

Abu-Rahma stated that the bullet hit his left toe and that he received treatment from an army medic before being released by the soldiers.

As part of their “Shooting Back” project, B’Tselem has distributed around 100 cameras to Palestinians throughout the West Bank over the last year, as part of their “Shooting Back” project.

According to Oren Yakobovich, who coordinates B’Tselem’s video department, the initiative is taking human rights regulation in the region to a new level:

We had field researchers in every big city in the West Bank — taking testimonies, written testimonies. And we did some films about the reports that we were taking out, but there was kind of frustration that I felt all the time, or we felt in B’Tselem, because we know from written testimony that a lot of things are happening, and we don’t really manage to see them. It was becoming hard, harder, more and more during the years, to bring new information or new visuals to the media and to grab public attention. And we looked for a different point of view, a new point of view, and this is how we decided to start giving cameras to these people that live in these places. [Source]

Since the launch of the program some of the videos depicting abuse by settlers sparked a national debate earlier this year after they were broadcast on Israeli television, and to date, there has been a downturn in the number of attacks, as the camera acts as a deterrent to violence between Israeli settlers and local Palestinians.

While the Israeli authorities have so far taken no action against the settlers in certain cases, despite video evidence, charges have been made in other cases.

On 8 June 2008, near the village of Susya outside Hebron, an amateur Palestinian videographer captured images showing a gang of young male settlers – with faces obscured – attacking several Palestinian farmers with wooden clubs.

According to Yakobovich, the police have since arrested three people based on the footage.

However, as can be anticipated, the videographers oftentimes find themselves enveloped in the wrath of their subjects.

During the filming of the attack on the Palestinian farmers, Nasser a-Nawaj’ah, coordinator of B’Tselem’s Shooting Back project in the Southern Hebron Hills, was assaulted by Israeli soldiers arriving at the scene, and the film was torn from his camera.

The actions were, nevertheless, filmed by Muna a-Nawaj’ah, and the horrorfying events were brought to light.

The Shooting Back program is, then, a much needed and cunning ploy; by empowering local communities to take action, events that would otherwise never reach the wider medium are aired.

While such attacks are abhorrent, it is reassuring that justice continues to fight back.

[Images via: B'Tselem]