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The Defense Ministry has recommended a partial lifting of the embargo on the Gaza Strip as a goodwill gesture toward the Palestinians to spur talks to free a long-held captive soldier, Israeli media reported Friday. (more…)

If only I could laugh. Israel mulls loosening its death grip on Gaza and they dare to refer to it as a goodwill gesture? I cannot even begin to comment on the staggering arrogance of this notion. Disgusting.

Nineteen foreign activists of the pro-Palestinian Free Gaza Movement were being held in Israel awaiting deportation on Thursday, two days after the Israeli Navy seized control of their boat off Gaza. (more…)

After ransacking three homes Israeli forces blasted into a fourth through the back door. They threw rocks at the door and windows, report witnesses. A 16 year old high school student had begun a summer job with his father as an apprentice carpenter. Israeli soldiers took the teen from his bed: no shoes and in his underpants. The boy’s parents pleaded with the Israeli soldiers that their child be allowed to dress. Soldiers claimed they were only taking the 16 year old for a “minute or two.” His family has not seen him since, reports the International Women’s Peace Service, a humanitarian mission based in the West Bank’s Salfit. (more…)

Israel has pledged to pay compensation for material damage it caused by shelling UN property during its Gaza offensive more than six months ago, a UN official said on Friday. (more…)

“They told us ‘go west or we will shoot you,’” says Ashraf Sadallah. “Initially, we refused, so they began shooting very close all around our boat.” (more…)

Those steps would probably include permitting Israeli airplanes to fly in Arab airspace and establishing limited ties. (more…)

Of course, as the New York Times well knows… controlling Palestinian air space is hardly a new idea. The Israeli terrorist military has controlled Palestinian skies since before 1967. What I’m sure the Times intended to report was that Israel wants to continue its mechanisms of control… And don’t even discuss the near daily illegal flights over Lebanese and Syrian airspace. Regional bully?

Gaza Civilians Killed by Israeli Drone-Launched Missiles

The security company also dictates the quantity of items allowed: Five pitas, one container of hummus and canned tuna, one small bottle or can of beverage, one or two slices of cheese, a few spoonfuls of sugar, and 5 to 10 olives. Workers are also not allowed to carry cooking utensils and work tools. (more…)

A 17-year-old Palestinian girl has been killed in Gaza by Israeli fire.
After initial denials, Israeli army officials said the girl was killed by Israeli troops during a clash with Palestinian militants on Thursday. (more…)

The aim of these laws is to impose the Israeli nationalist creed by coercion. It’s really that simple. Over the last decade, the Knesset has experienced several bursts of legislative activity seeking to restrict freedom of opinion and expression on the questions of the Jewishness of the state and the right to resist occupation. The advocates of these laws are indefatigable. If the proposals fail to pass through any of the necessary stages, they are resubmitted over and over again in the hope of wearing out their opponents. (more…)

Israel’s defence ministry has proposed legalising 60 existing homes at a Jewish settlement in the occupied West Bank, and building another 240 homes at the site, despite US calls for a halt to settlement growth. (more…)

It apparently takes American pressure to get the Israeli military to allow 350 cows into Gaza today — the first in nine months. This, it should be noted, is for 1.5 million human beings. (more…)

When US President Barack Obama called on Palestinians to practice nonviolence, I laughed just like Mahmoud. Palestinians like Mahmoud have never needed to be told about nonviolence. The English word may be unfamiliar but the steadfast, daily acts of resistance known as nonviolence are nothing new. In the south Hebron hills, Palestinians face Israeli soldiers and violent Israeli settlers who are illegally expanding their settlements and attacking Palestinians, including children walking to school. In response to this profound injustice, Palestinians are organizing demonstrations, refusing to comply with military orders, filing complaints against settlers, and courageously working their land despite the risk of arrest and attack. They don’t need President Obama to tell them to practice nonviolence. (more…)

Activists campaigning for an end to Gaza’s blockade by Israel will sail to the Hamas-run enclave from Cyprus despite the presence of the Israeli navy, they said on Thursday. (more…)

If either party has a claim on protection from the other side’s violence, the Palestinians surely have the more reasonable claim. They have suffered by far the most violence in the long conflict. And Israel will certainly keep a massive margin of military superiority no matter what the future brings. Imagine the United States insisting that Cuba or Haiti must be demilitarized because its army might threaten the very existence of America. That’s how absurd this Israeli fear seems to most Palestinians. (more…)

The UN said 128 Palestinians, including 66 children and 34 women, were displaced from this agricultural land, deep inside the occupied West Bank and barely a few miles from the border with Jordan. Eviction orders still hang over dozens more farmers in the area, all of whom live close to three Israeli agricultural settlements which are among many built along the fertile Jordan valley. The demolitions drew little international attention: they happen often and these farmers are remote and poor, at the bottom of the Palestinian social scale. (more…)

Little wonder the Palestinians sounded sorely disappointed: Netanyahu gave no commitment to end the occupation, reiterated Israel’s determination to retain the whole of Jerusalem as its “united capital”, rejected any possibility of a compromise on Palestinian refugees, and even had fulsome praise for the Jewish settlers in the West Bank whom he called “Israeli pioneers”. (more…)

“This particular settlement is not one that I envision ever being abandoned, or changed over into a Palestinian territory,” Carter said. “This is part of the close settlements to the 1967 line that I think will be here forever.” (more…)

The Land of Israel Faithful group said Monday it has a plan to construct 30 new outposts in the West Bank over the summer, in response to Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu’s speech a day earlier in which he said that no new settlements would be built and no additional land would be expropriated for settlement development. (more…)

This speech was nothing new or interesting on Netanyahu’s behalf. The man is a racist and his speech reflected this very clearly. It was aimed simply at reassuring his fellow extremists in Israel (and in the settlements) that he is not about to “sell-out” to Washington. I won’t go into his ridiculous distortions of history because the are easily refuted by anyone with the most basic appreciation for the facts.

The thrust of his speech had to do with the Palestinians recognizing Israel—not merely as a state with an inherent right to exist (as Israel had previously demanded), but as a specifically Jewish state with a right to exist. The second point of his speech had to do with his vision for a Palestinian state, namely a demilitarized enclave subordinate to Israeli security needs.

To the first point, this is fluff. Israel is unprepared to recognized the West Bank as a specifically Muslim or Palestinian entity (and it shouldn’t in any case). But Israel cannot bring itself to recognize the basic right to Palestinian existence even without silly ethnic or religious predicates. So demanding the Palestinian leadership to recognize Israel as a specifically Jewish state is intended simply to undermine peace negotiations by precluding discussion over the right to return for the 1948 refugees. After all, why should Israel negotiate over refugees if the Palestinians have themselves granted legitimacy to Jewish apartheid? So on the issue of recognition, Netanyahu has only further radicalized Israel’s position.

On the second point regarding Netanyahu’s vision of a Palestinian state, we can clearly see Bibi’s racist outlook. For him, any future Palestinian state must be demilitarized and subordinated to Israeli security interests. He did not mention Israel’s intention of holding onto the Jordan Valley… probably because his position has not deviated from Sharon’s. Israel will continue to surround the remaining fragments of the West Bank by securing the Jordanian border and controlling entry and exit rights to the region. As agreed under the Oslo Accords, Israel will retain the sole rights to Palestinian airspace and will likely continue to operate the heavily militarized Jerusalem-Allenby Bridge highway (which is blocked for Palestinian use).

But all this misses the main assumption upon which his arguments are based: Israel’s needs are fundamentally superior the needs of Palestinians. As the director of ADL Abraham Foxman remarked:

“[Netanyahu's] willingness to talk about a Palestinian state as long as it is based on Palestinian acceptance of the Jewish state and is demilitarized and no threat to Israel should now provide the framework for moving the peace process forward and for easing potential tensions between the U.S. and Israel,” said Foxman. (more…)

Given the stark disparity in the balance of powers, isn’t it intuitive to demand Israel demilitarize? Of course, this is not even up for discussion. The victims of colonialism must do as their imperial masters dictate. That a future Palestinian state could pose a real threat to Israel is laughable. Israel’s military dominance is so horrifically overwhelming, there is no question of Israel’s security being seriously challenged. But you have to understand that Israeli lives are more important than those of Palestinians and Netanyahu knows this very well. It is for this reason, he knows that his demands will be well-respected in the United States and much of the international community will also sympathize with his ‘reasonable’ appeal.

So in the end, we are left with a painful problem. 1,400 slaughtered Gazans cannot compete with a single injury from rocket-fire in Sderot (let alone a death). And a single Israeli soldier weighs more heavily on the hearts of the world than 10,000+ Palestinian prisoners ineligible for civil rights and held under military law, mostly without charges brought before them. In his speech, Netanyahu is able to ignore the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians in 1948, to justify the ongoing oppression in the occupied territories and to blame the victims of imperialism for their suffering because he knows that in the scheme of things, Palestinian hopes for self-determination and peace come second to Israel’s right to colonization, dispossession and brutality.

Gaza: No right to life

A Border Guard officer who shot and killed a Wadi Ara man during a police chase in January 2006 was acquitted of manslaughter on Monday. (more…)

The prime minister’s declaration that Jerusalem will remain he “undivided capital” of Israel – only Israel – slammed the door before the entire Muslim world. And his Hebron is solely the city of the Jewish patriarchs; the Arabs have no such rights at all. The Palestinians can have a state, but only if those foreign invaders show us they know how to eat with a fork and knife. Actually, without a knife. (more…)

After four pages filled with detailed charts of the number of grams and calories of every type of food to be permitted for consumption by Gaza residents (broken down by gender and age), comes this recommendation: “It is necessary to deal with the international community and the Palestinian Health Ministry to provide nutritional supplements (only some of the flour in Gaza is enriched) and to provide education about proper nutrition.” Printed in large letters at the end of the document is this admonition: “The stability of the humanitarian effort is critical for the prevention of the development of malnutrition.” (more…)

The implication of the system of purchasing targeting information for drone strikes is that there is “no guarantee” that the people being targeted are officials of al-Qaeda or allied organizations, he said. (more…)

Ill-treatment and torture of Palestinian children (more…)

“Two Years of Gaza Closure by the Numbers.” (more…)

Though Mr Deeb, 40, is not the self-pitying type, the reaction of his colleagues was understandable. For among the many thousands of Gazans bereaved by the war, few lives can have been as shattered as his. Alerted by phone, he had rushed back from work on the afternoon of 6 January to find the family home in Jabalya hit by two Israeli 120mm mortar shells in the same series of attacks that killed up to another 30 civilians outside the UN Al Fakhoura school a mere 100 metres away. The 11 dead included five of his six children, aged between four and 22, his wife, his mother, one of his brothers, two of his nephews, and a niece. (more…)

Former Gaza Division Commander Brig.-Gen Moshe “Chico” Tamir plans to appeal a military court decision on Thursday to demote him to the rank of colonel for permitting his underage son to drive an IDF dune buggy and attempting to cover-up a subsequent accident. (more…)

But for participating in the massacre of 1,400 Palestinians—now that’s a whole different story.

The security cabinet decided on Wednesday that any opening of crossings into the Gaza Strip would be linked to progress in the case of kidnapped soldier Gilad Schalit. (more…)

Yeah, and the rockets are tied to the 10,000 kidnapped Palestinian prisoners.

Israeli forces seized four Palestinian children during a raid the West Bank village of Hizma, northeast of Jerusalem early on Wednesday morning. (more…)

The years of closed borders has severely crippled Gaza’s health sector, denying patients vital medicines, replacement parts for hospital equipment, access to outside medical care, and preventing the entrance of outside expertise. Moreover, Gaza’s civilian infrastructure was devastated during Israel’s three week assault on Gaza (December 2008-January 2009), making the treatment of patients within the tiny coastal territory near impossible. (more…)

“Just as it devastates Palestinian families, the continuing humanitarian crisis in Gaza,” said Obama, “does not serve Israel’s security.” That was all. The killing of 1,300 people in what is now a concentration camp merited 17 words, cast as concern for the “security” of the killers. This was understandable. During the January massacre, Seymour Hersh reported that “the Obama team let it be known that it would not object to the planned resupply of ’smart bombs’ and other hi-tech ordnance that was already flowing to Israel” for use in Gaza. (more…)

[Israeli] military sources said that Monday’s incident was the most complicated one the soldiers have had to deal with since the end of Operation Cast Lead. (more…)

Israeli authorities ordered a Palestinian to demolish his own home in the Old City of Jerusalem on Tuesday. (more…)

“We feel proud that we found a way to defy the situation,” said Najar. “It is difficult, but we must survive. When people see this collective punishment against them they have to find ways to live their lives.” (more…)

The Human Sciences Research Council of South Africa (HSRC) has released a report confirming that Israel is practicing both colonialism and apartheid in the Occupied Palestinian Territories (OPT). (more…)

In letter to defense administration heads Yesh Din reports of alarming increase in number of attempts to uproot or damage Palestinian farmers’ trees as part of settlers’ efforts to ‘achieve political goals through terrorists acts’ (more…)

The so-called Israeli Regional Committee for Construction and Planning in Haifa, issued orders for the evacuation and demolishing 25 Arab stores in the Market area, near the main road of Wadi Ara, in Um Al Fahim Arab town. (more…)

He said about 150 Palestinians, some as young as 14, were bound, blindfolded and detained at the village school during the operation, which lasted from 3am to 3pm. He was told it was aimed at preventing village youths throwing stones against nearby settler roads. It was clear many of the people detained had done nothing wrong, but they were held to gather intelligence, he said. (more…)

Lt.-Col. Avinoam Stolevitch, commander of the 13th Battalion, told Army Radio that future assaults of this sort would put Hamas at risk of a second Operation Cast Lead. (more…)

“The only way to fight a moral war is the Jewish way: Destroy their holy sites. Kill men, women and children (and cattle),” Friedman wrote in response to the question posed by Moment Magazine for its “Ask the Rabbis” feature. Friedman argued that if Israel followed this wisdom, there would be “no civilian casualties, no children in the line of fire, no false sense of righteousness, in fact, no war.” (more…)

I don’t know what is more disturbing: the guy’s rhetoric or the “Ask the Rabbis” feature.

Israel has refused to cooperate with investigation of its conduct during an offensive on Gaza earlier this year, depriving Judge Richard Goldstone and his team access to military sources and victims of ongoing rocket attacks. (more…)

Israel consistently complains that the UN fails to investigate rocket attacks against Israeli civilians while it unduly criticizes the Jewish state—yet now it comes out that Israel is blocking these investigations!

Israeli forces on Monday killed four gunmen from Gaza who attacked an army patrol along the Gaza border in one of the most audacious raids since Israel ended its military campaign in the Palestinian coastal strip in January. (more…)

When has Isabel Kershner ever described Israeli attacks as “audacious”? Israeli attacks are always “anguished retaliation” in the Times…

A Palestinian protestor was killed and another sustained wounds after being shot by Border Guard forces during an anti-security fence protest in Naalin, Palestinian sources said. (more…)

Israeli Maj. Gen. Giora Eiland, a leading “three-state” advocate who was also featured at the Jerusalem conference in May, claimed that “the area between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea is too small to create two viable states”. (more…)

The Israeli ministry of Interior gave its approval to plans that want to demolish a kindergarten and wholesale market in East Jerusalem to construct a new hotel. (more…)

The two, Muhammad Samman and Ahmed Yassin, were killed in a pre-dawn raid carried out by Abbas’s security forces on a building where they were hiding. Three policemen and the owner of the building, Abdel Nasser Basha, were also killed in the raid, which was described as one of the bloodiest intra-Palestinian incidents in the West Bank in recent years. (more…)

That leaves Gaza suspended in a state of misery that defies easy categorization. It is, of course, crowded and poor, but it is better off than nearly all of Africa as well as parts of Asia. (more…)

The Pentagon is prepared to leave fighting forces in Iraq for as long as a decade despite an agreement between the United States and Iraq that would bring all American troops home by 2012, the top U.S. Army officer said Tuesday. (more…)

An Israeli tourism poster is being pulled from the London subway after the Syrian Embassy complained that the map on it appeared to show the Golan Heights and Palestinian territories within Israel’s boundaries, officials said Friday. (more…)

Inside Gaza it is a different story. The modern “terminal” of blast-proof glass and hi-tech detectors, manned by efficient clerks, is a kind of brutal joke. It funnels the few permitted to cross into Gaza out of its polished hall and into a tunnel that has lost its roof, then spits them out into an area of ruins, overlooked by a blank concrete wall capped with watchtowers. (more…)

Israel allows only food, medicine and detergent into the Gaza Strip. Thousands of items, including vital products for everyday activity, are forbidden. Altogether only 30 to 40 select commercial items are now allowed into the Gaza Strip, compared to 4,000 that had been approved before the closure Israel imposed on Gaza following the abduction of Gilad Shalit, according to merchants and human rights activists. The number of items changes according to what is determined by The Coordinator of Government Activities in the Territories. COGAT has refused the PA representative’s request for an updated list of the items permitted into Gaza in writing, and passes the information only via the telephone. Gaza merchants are forbidden to import canned goods, plastic sheeting, toys and books, although the United Nations Relief and Works Agency and other aid organizations are permitted to bring them into the strip. (more…)

Hatim Abdul-Qader, Jerusalem Affairs advisor to the Palestinian Prime Minister, stated that the Ateret Cohanim Zionist group is planning, in collaboration with the Jerusalem Municipality, to build homes for Jewish settlers on top of Palestinians homes demolished by the municipality. (more…)

Motorola, Caterpillar, Veolia, the Tesco supermarket chain, and other companies across the world that do business with Israel are suffering losses due to a global boycott in support of Palestinian rights. (more…)

Umm Abdullah cannot remember the last time she was able to feed meat to her eight children. She does know that for the past week the single meal she cooked for them each day consisted only of lentils. And that on one day, she had received aid coupons from the United Nations, which she subsequently sold to buy tomatoes and eggplant at the local market. (more…)

War Crimes Against Children: new report on the 313 children killed during Gaza offensive

Israel’s achievements over the past sixty-one years are undeniable, and the officials responsible for the rebranding campaign won’t have any trouble finding artists, athletes, scientists and entrepreneurs to write feel-good stories about. But the dark side of the story won’t go away — 40-plus years of an increasingly brutal occupation, the construction of the apartheid wall (or if you prefer,”separation fence”), much of outside the 1967 borders, thousands of dead Palestinian civilians, a series of failed wars since 1982, and the repeated squandering of genuine opportunities to make peace. (more…)

The Israeli government is quietly implementing a development plan that aims at transforming the area known as the “Holy Basin” – land both inside and just outside the walled Old City – into a major “Biblical Kingdom”, the aim of which is to strengthen Israel’s hold over the whole of the city. (more…)

“In Israel there is no death penalty except for one law regarding Nazi criminals — and Nazi criminals only.” (more…)

Sure, there’s no death penalty if we are talking strictly about judicial sentencing… But Israel extra-judicially assassinates hundreds of Palestinians each year. These people are hunted down by Israel and killed based on actions deemed criminal by the local Israeli military commander. There are no trials, no charges and no oversight. To borrow Angry Arab’s favorite reference) No death penalty my potato!

One night at a dinner party in Jerusalem in 1977, I heard a young Israeli talking about the Arabs in terms which chilled my blood. “In the next war,” he said, “we’ve got to get the Palestinians out of the West Bank for good.”…Now, suddenly, I found myself meeting Israelis committed to the creation of a greater Israel embracing the West Bank, who were utterly heedless of the fate of its inhabitants. The Palestinians were perceived as losers, a mere incidental impediment to the fulfilment of Israel’s historic territorial destiny. By a curious quirk, that young Israeli whom I heard enthuse about emptying the West Bank of Arabs was Binyamin Netanyahu, today his country’s prime minister. (more…)

Israel’s air assault on Gaza began with attacks on the Strip’s main police stations, including one in Rafah’s densely populated Junaina neighborhood which left twenty-five officers dead. Over the course of the war, approximately two hundred and fifty civilian policemen would be killed and every major police office damaged or destroyed, according to figures provided by the Ministry of the Interior.

When it became clear that policemen were being targeted, officers were ordered to don plain clothes uniforms and continue their patrols carrying sticks rather than guns to avoid detection. Trestle-table desks were set up amidst the rubble of bombed police stations to maintain the administrative network of law enforcement in the Strip, and the thirteen thousand-strong police force continued to function. “We would not allow the Israeli aggression to bring chaos to our streets,” says Ihab Al-Ghusain, a spokesperson for the Ministry. “We simply made the best of what we had.” (more…)

Two soldiers from the Givati Brigade are in Military Police custody for allegedly stealing a Palestinian credit card during Operation Cast Lead in the Gaza Strip earlier this year. According to the allegations, the soldiers – who were arrested on Thursday – stole cash as well as a credit card from a home during the operation and later used it to withdraw cash from ATMs in Israel. (more…)

As the children stood on the hillside chanting “Death to all Arabs”, the Israeli soldiers showed the farmers and human rights observers a military order declaring their farmland to be a “closed military zone”, and forced them off their land at gunpoint. (more…)

The United States is promoting a peace plan for the Middle East involving a “57-state solution” in which the entire Muslim world would recognize Israel, Monday’s Times of London quoted Jordan’s King Abdullah as saying. “We are offering a third of the world to meet them with open arms,” the king said. “The future is not the Jordan River or the Golan Heights or the Sinai, the future is Morocco in the Atlantic and Indonesia in the Pacific. That is the prize.” (more…)

So let me get this straight… Before Israel is required to abide by international law and end it’s oppression of the occupied Palestinian population, 57 “Muslim” states (mostly as unrelated to Israeli-Palestinian issues as Indonesia) must make a symbolic acknowledgment of Israel’s existence? This must be a new record for Israel’s record of avoidance and rejectionism.

Dozens of Palestinian and foreign activists sporting protective face masks demonstrated on Friday against the “occupation flu” from Israel they said was worse than swine flu. (more…)

The U.S. general directing training for Palestinian security forces said U.S. funds for the program would help reduce the IDF presence in the West Bank. Gen. Keith Dayton, addressing the annual Washington Institute for Near East Policy conference on Thursday, said the funds he is seeking for 2009 would be used “to explore options to reduce the IDF footprint,” referring to the Israel Defense Forces. Dayton did not say how much he is seeking, but reports say it is $130 million — almost as much as the $161 million allocated to the program over the last two years. In its annual congressional lobbying blitz this week, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee urged lawmakers to sign on to letters that backed appropriations for the program. (more…)

The government and settler organizations are working to surround the Old City of Jerusalem with nine national parks, pathways and sites, drastically altering the status quo in the city. The secret plan was assigned to the Jerusalem Development Authority (JDA). (more…)

‘88% of prisoners in Palestinian jails being held without trial’ (more…)

Israel delivers a list of “undesirables” to Mohammed Dahlan and his minions round them up. By the way, how many of the 10,000 Palestinian prisoners in Israeli jails are being held without trial?

I watched them returning and saw a young settler stop and look around. I was afraid that he intended to do something, and right then, while I was thinking that, he picked up a stone and threw it at the car of my uncle Muhammad Nabih D’ana, who lives next-door. His car, a 1981 Subaru, was parked opposite his house. I saw and heard the rear window of the car shatter. I shouted, in Hebrew, to the settler, “What are you doing here?” Then, the soldiers aimed their rifles at my house, and one of them ordered me to shut up and stay inside. Other settlers began to throw stones at parked cars. I heard the stones strike the cars. I watched the settlers as they passed by my house, and then I went to the front door and continued to shout at them. I heard my uncle Muhammad D’ana and other neighbors shouting from their houses, but nobody went outside. (more…)

The country’s gates were closed to the UN fact-finding mission headed by Jewish South African Richard Goldstone, as if it were Zimbabwe or North Korea, as if it had much to hide. The president brusquely rebuked the UN’s Ban Ki-moon and suggested he visits Auschwitz, until eventually the secretary general was forced to shrink from supporting his organization’s damning report.

Anyone who dared investigate and report was branded anti-Semitic. (more…)

Under an eight-year plan, worth 75m shekels a year (£12m), a series of nine national parks, trails and tourist sites based on apparent Jewish historical spots would be established, most under the control of settler groups working together with the Israeli government. The sites would also create a link to Jewish settlements in East Jerusalem and the West Bank. The parks would be a “biblical playground” built on public and private land and would be fenced in, the group said. (more…)

Three years ago in Jerusalem, I met a very bright couple in their late 40s, who had emigrated from Russia a decade earlier. When we began to speak of the Palestinians, the husband said: “In my Russian village in 1920, there was trouble with guerrillas. Budenny’s Cossacks came. They burnt the village from which the guerrillas came. The guerrillas returned twice more. The Cossacks burned two more villages. Then there was no more trouble with guerrillas.” This was the culture from which these two highly-educated Israelis came. They asserted that the Budenny method was the only proper one by which to address Hamas, Hizbollah and Fatah. The policies of recent Israeli governments suggest that their view is widely shared. (more…)

Only 13% of the Bethlehem area is under the control of the Palestinian Authority – a new report released by the United Nations Office for Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs on Thursday said. (more…)

His “crime” was trying to stop a military bulldozer from destroying the homes of Palestinian Bedouins from Um El Hir in the South Hebron region. These Palestinians have been under Israeli occupation for almost 42 years; they still live without electricity, running water and other basic services and are continuously harassed by Jewish settlers and the military – two groups that have united to expropriate Palestinian land and that clearly have received the government’s blessing to do so. (more…)

“My wife and our four daughters and I were living with family, but it was overcrowded, impossible. We knew we had to build a home of our own,” Shaar said. “We waited over two years for cement but because of the siege there is none available. What could we do, wait forever?”

So he decided to do it with mud. (more…)

The match marks the 60th anniversary of the United Nations UNRWA agency for Palestinian refugees. But instead of a normal squad of 22, Hamzeh had to be content with 16. And seven of those from the Gaza Strip needed three days to get into Belgium, held up by Israeli checkpoints and administrative burdens to get travel permits, he said. (more…)

The PA ministry of prisoners and ex-prisoners’ affairs in Gaza has accused Tuesday the Israeli occupation authorities of kidnapping 345 Palestinian citizens, including 40 minors during the past month of April. (more…)

Israeli authorities transferred ailing 60-year-old detainee Ahmad Al-Qiq from the Ar-Ramlah Hospital to the Ofer Detention Center near Ramallah despite the move meaning he can no longer receive adequate care, his family said Monday. (more…)