Anata is a Palestinian suburb in the occupied West Bank, just a few minutes drive and one Israeli military checkpoint away from the centre of Jerusalem. The streets are dusty, mostly unmade and crowded with half-finished concrete tower blocks housing modest apartments like the one Abir lived in with her five brothers and sisters and her parents, Bassam and Salwa. Today, on the sitting room wall above the television, next to her photograph, hang the successful results from her maths exam.
{josquote}"According to them, everything about this case is complicated; according to me, it is simple. I want to put on trial the whole occupation - not just for one person killed but the whole system, the orders of who to shoot."{/josquote}
At least six witnesses have given testimony about what happened that morning in Anata. They described an Israeli border police vehicle drawing up in the street. Some said a group of young boys threw stones at the police. Then, the witnesses say, they heard a blast and saw Abir fall to the ground. When they picked her up she was bleeding heavily from a head wound. She was taken by car to a nearby hospital and later, because she carried an Israeli identity card, thanks to her Jerusalem-born mother, she was rushed to the Hadassah hospital in western Jerusalem. She spent nearly seven hours in surgery but her injuries were too severe. She died two days later.
Witnesses maintained that Abir was hit by a rubber-coated bullet fired by one of the policemen. They gave their testimony to Michael Sfard, a prominent Israeli human rights lawyer, who was also given a rubber-coated bullet found at the scene, and passed it on to the investigators. The Israeli border police held an investigation and questioned some of their forces, but in July the police wrote a brief letter to Sfard saying there was not enough evidence to bring charges against anyone for her death.
There the story of the short life of Abir Aramin might have ended, had it not been for her remarkable father, Bassam, and his friends.
"According to them, everything about this case is complicated; according to me, it is simple," said Bassam, a slight man with combed, dark hair, an angular face and a quiet tone. "I want to put on trial the whole occupation - not just for one person killed but the whole system, the orders of who to shoot."
Bassam, 39, was born in a village near Hebron, in the southern West Bank. As a young teenager, he fell in with a group of boys who wanted to challenge the Israeli military occupation. First they sewed together their own Palestinian flags and hung them from trees near their school at a time when it was illegal to fly the flag. They graduated to throwing stones at military vehicles until the day they found a small cache of old Jordanian weapons near their home. They planned an attack but left Bassam out - he had a limp from polio, which, as far as his friends were concerned, made him a liability. Eventually, at the age of 17, Bassam and the other boys were arrested. He was jailed for seven years. "It was like our university. We didn't know anything before jail," he said. Behind bars he joined the Fatah movement, became schooled in the Palestinian national struggle, was beaten by prison guards and then took the decision to turn his back on militancy.
His change of heart came after a screening one night in jail of a film with the first images he had seen depicting the Holocaust. "I started to compare this film and the things I was watching on the television during the first intifada. I saw we are the same: we are the victim of the victim," he said. He went on to have long arguments with his Israeli jailers about the Middle East conflict. "It was a long process. I learned that with dialogue you can change the minds of extremists, but that just fighting brings only a cycle of action and reaction."
Two years ago Bassam, who now works at the Palestinian national archives in Ramallah, and a handful of like-minded former prisoners began meeting with a group of Israelis, former soldiers who had turned against the occupation and refused to serve in the territories. Last year they formed the group Combatants for Peace and began giving lectures to young Israelis and Palestinians about their experiences. "When I speak to the Israelis, I want to tell them that when they go to the army they should look at the Palestinian people as people, not all as suspects," he said. There are now around 200 Israeli ex-soldiers and Palestinian ex-fighters in the group.
Then came Abir's death, the most severe test of their commitment to the project. When Abir was injured, some of the first people to arrive at her hospital bedside were Bassam's new Israeli friends, among them 25-year-old Avichay Sharon, a former infantryman in the occupied territories. Like Bassam's many other supporters, Sharon believes Abir was killed by a rubber-coated bullet, and he helped bring the Palestinian witnesses to the Israeli investigators. "It was kind of expected when they closed the case," he said. "We didn't expect the system would try to really deal with this."
A total of 861 Palestinian children have been killed by Israeli forces since the second intifada broke out in 2000, according to B'Tselem, an Israeli human rights group (119 Israeli children were killed by Palestinians in the same period). Few of the cases have been investigated. Yesh Din, another Israeli rights group, said its survey of crimes committed by Israelis against Palestinians in the West Bank in the past two years showed 90% of investigations had gone uncompleted.
Sharon noted that a month before Abir died, a 13-year-old Jewish Israeli girl was murdered in her school in the Golan Heights. Despite disputed evidence, the police made a swift arrest and began to prosecute. He argued that Abir and other Palestinian cases do not get the same attention from investigators.
"The question we have to ask is: if it had been the other way around, if a Jewish Israeli girl of 10 or 11 had been killed, would they have acted the same way?" he asked.
The Border Police told Sfard there was not enough evidence to prosecute anyone for Abir's death. Nonetheless, he believes the police were responsible. "I believe it was not an intentional killing, but it was done recklessly. Policemen were shooting in the vicinity of a school, during a break when children were out, and they [the police] were not in life-threatening danger. I think Abir was killed in criminal circumstances," he said.
He said the investigation file shows the police did not begin their inquiry until 48 hours after the incident, which limited the chance of getting evidence from the scene. Police officers said stones had been thrown at them from two areas in Anata, which Sfard believes were both far from where Abir was walking. He said the police did admit using rubber-coated bullets around Anata on that day, though not at the spot where Abir was hit. Although a rubber-coated bullet was found on the ground that day, this is not conclusive, since the bullets do not carry the same identifying scars as standard ammunition.
Israel's justice ministry said in a statement that the case was investigated by the police district responsible for the occupied West Bank. "There was no proof that the death had been caused by shooting, and in the area at the same time there were stones being thrown ... and therefore there was no other choice than to decide to close the case," it said. Sfard has lodged an appeal against that decision.
In his apartment, Bassam has several photographs of Abir and a poster on the wall next to her exam results. He insists his campaign will get the case reopened, with charges brought against whoever killed his daughter.
"I keep saying she was just a child, not a fighter, and the issue here is not political," he said. "We are just at the beginning."