Israeli forces fired on a nonviolent march near the West Bank village of Bilin, injuring Nobel Peace laureate Mairead Maguire with rubber bullets and tear gas. Maguire says she was invited to attend a conference in the village, outside Ramallah. After giving a speech, she participated in a nonviolent demonstration with Palestinian members of parliament, Israeli peace activists, local villagers, and several international peace activists.

As the activists walked up to the separation wall they were viciously attacked by the Israeli military which threw gas canisters and fired rubber-covered steel bullets. The wall is a sign of Israeli oppression which does not necessarily separate Palestine from Israel, but isolates and divides Palestinian land itself. The wall currently cuts through the village where the protest took place. “The Palestinians have lost two-thirds of their land,” Maguire said. “When I was walking along that road, my interpreter from the press conference earlier in the day told me that he had owned ten acres of land on the other side of the wall, that the Israeli authorities had moved in, confiscated his land, uprooted his olive trees, which are 400 years old, and taken the olive trees to Jerusalem, and they were planted in Israeli settlements in Jerusalem.”

After being hit with a bullet in the leg, Maguire was attended to by ambulance medics. She then went back to the front line to rejoin the peace activists when tear gas was released into the crowd once more, giving her a severe nosebleed which had to be treated again by the medics.

Maguire won the Nobel Peace prize in 1976 for her work in Northern Ireland when she helped bring 30,000 women together to petition for peace between republican and loyalist factions. In regards to the treatment of the Palestinians by the Israeli’s, Maguire said; “I witnessed there a Palestinian woman, maybe around in her sixties, and an old Palestinian man with blood on his face. These were over twenty-five unarmed peace people who had been viciously attacked by the Israeli military. And it was a completely peaceful protest. It was absolutely unbelievable. I never in all my years of activism witnessed anything so vicious as from the Israeli military.”

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