Bloody Tanks

November 18^th, 2006

Today, in a parking compound of tanks, APCs and military bulldozers just 5 km from the Gaza border across from Beit Hanoun, a group of Israeli activists (Anarchists against the Wall) has managed to "take over" the tools of war and call for their dismantling. Here are some pictures...

Preparations:

making vegan fake blood

our banner says: "dismantle the murder machines"

Arrival:

after waiting for hours and hours, we sneaked into the tanks parking area...

...and straggled to climb on top of the monsters.

The police and army were immediately there, threatening to use violence, but politely

Here we are:
We could see Gaza City just in front of us, it's houses rising in the flat plain. The army's reconnaissance baloons turned over our heads, and blasts from heavy weaponry went on and on in the distance.

We have brought pictures of the wounded and dead from the previous attacks on Beit Hanoun, cut-out cardboard figures of dead bodies, a few dead-body dolls and lots and lots of fake vegan blood...

We expected to be immediately attacked by the soldiers, and we have discussed ways of appearing non-threatening to them, of stalling until the police would arrive to arrest us... To our surprize, the police has arrived immediately and kept the angry soldiers away. When we declined to leave, they collected our IDs and started a long process of figuring out the legal options... That gave us the time to make our point more visible...

Some of us held on to the two monsters we took over, and the others spread throughout the compound, taping the images of the victims unto the machinery that was used against them...

A unit of young conscripts was marched over from a nearby military camp, to "clean" the tanks from those horrid images. We called out to the soldiers, as they were tearing the pictures into pieces: "take a look! - this is your doing!" - "what is this for? go home, let's put an end to all that killing..." and back to chanting: "in Sderot and in Gaza, girls want to live".

soldiers being rushed to the compound

Bulldozers too are tools of death in Gaza

When we have finally left the place, we left behind a few souvenirs to the soldiers who might return to operate the monsters on the next morning...

During the entire time, the attacks on Gaza never stopped. Qassam rockets were fired again into Israel later that evening. Two more people were reported dead by Israeli attacks that day.



Many of the pictures here (all those with a stamp) are by the fabulous photogragher-activists' collective activestills, see more of their pictures here. All other pictures are mine.

See also: Ha'aretz report, TV Channel 10 report (Hebrew), Ilan's report, Adam Keller's, Story in Arabic and picture from Al Quds Palestinian newspaper, and the campaign's website.