December 04 , 2001

No Mosque Attack, Semi-Normal Day for Bethlehem

11:00pm. (Actually 9AM Dec 5. My ISP is having big trouble. I haven't been able to get online since morning yesterday. That's frustrating, especially when I am trying to update erroneous information about the mosque bombing. But I should be grateful just to have any connection. Perhaps my ISP was hit by the attack yesterday, since the servers are located in Ramallah.)

I found more information about the Bethlehem Mosque bombing today. Actually a mosque was not bombed. The blast occurred in a building beside the mosque. Two men were killed in the explosion. Israelis said they had nothing to do with it, and speculated that the two men were building a bomb. Neighbors said perhaps they discovered the material and were curious. No one is sure exactly what happened, but two young men are dead.

The day in Bethlehem was relatively normal. I was told the checkpoint remained closed, although I did not go there myself. At PCR, we worked on publicizing some of the activities going on in other parts of the West Bank. People in other regions contact us and tell us what is going on there. We evaluate the "newsworthiness" of the information and channel it to various media agencies. Today we passed along information to Al Jazeera, BBC, and Reuters. We also posted an event on our PCR Media Alert website (click here to visit my project site).

On Tuesdays I teach an English class to a group of 15-17 year-old girls from a local school. The school called today expressing some concern over the security of the region, so we canceled class.

After some discussion with our "Internet for Advocates" students, we decided to hold our evening class. Tonight we covered linking pages, adding meta tags, and including email links.

Other parts of the West Bank were not so fortunate today. In Ramallah an Israeli missile destroyed a PNA building. War planes and gunship helicopters delivered a pretty good beating to other areas too.