Ashraf Abu Rahma
Ashraf Abu Rahma (also known as Ad-Daba’a) is a Palestinian human rights defender and peaceful protester against the Israeli wall in Bi’lin, which cuts off Palestinian farmers from access to their land and which has been condemned as illegal by the International Court of Justice. The human rights defender has been a persistent actor in the peaceful mobilization against illegal settlement expansion in Bil’in alongside other international, Palestinian, and Israeli activists.
Human rights defenders in the OPT are subjected to acts of harassment, restrictions on freedom of movement, stigmatisation, abductions, long periods of arbitrary detention usually under administrative detention orders, illegal searches of their homes and offices and killings. Many of the violations are state-sanctioned, or if not sanctioned at the highest levels of the Israeli political and military establishment, then condoned by the ongoing policy of impunity which permeates the military and judicial system in relation to the OPT. In some instances Israeli settlers have also been the perpetrators of violence against human rights defenders.
