Latest news on Palestine…
1) Jewish Settlers sneaked into the West Bank village of Faraata, over night, set fire to two Palestinian cars and wrote racist graffiti on the local properties. They also wrote “Price Tag” on some of the walls, which is actually the name of a Jewish terror group that targets Palestinians in the occupied territories and inside Israel.
2) Director of the Palestine Prisoner’s Society (PPS) Office in Tubas Kamal Bani-Odeh reports today that Israeli forces rammed a military jeep into a Palestinian man (Mustafa Abu Siaj) during a raid in Tubas.
3) 3 Palestinian rights activists acquitted of charges after protesting against Israeli war crimes during a 2017 event at Humboldt University in Germany. Majed Abusalama, a Palestinian journalist from Gaza, Ronnie Barkan, an Israeli-Jewish human rights defender and Stavit Sinai, an Israeli-Jewish anti-colonial scholar and philosophy teacher, were charged with trespassing and assault after they challenged Aliza Lavie, a member of the Yesh Atid party and leader of the anti-BDS movement in the Israeli Knesset. The protestors called Ms Lavie “a representative of a criminal apartheid state,” and pointed out her involvement in the 2014 Gaza massacre by shouting “the blood of Gaza is on this woman’s hands.” Mr Barkan and Mr Abusalama were cleared of all charges, Ms Sinai was found guilty of “attempted assault” even though she was the one who was punched in the face as she was removed from the lecture hall.
4) Unanimous win for Palestinian-American congresswoman, Rashida Tlaib, in the Detroit Democratic primary election. Tlaib gained nearly 2/3rds of the vote.
5) The student led ‘Apartheid Off Campus’ (AOC) campaign has successfully persuaded SOAS University of London and the University of West London (UWL) to pull out of an exchange programme with Israel’s Hebrew University of Jerusalem — partially built on occupied Palestinian land.
6) On Tuesday, a group of Israeli settlers decided to illegally squat on privately-owned Palestinian lands in the Northern Plains of the occupied West Bank. They installed water tanks and planted trees in Ehmayyir village.
7) Israeli bulldozers demolished three Palestinian houses and a barber shop in the East Jerusalem neighbourhood of Silwan today. Another man was forced to tear down his own home in order to avoid having to pay exorbitant charged by Jerusalem Israeli municipality. Mohammad Alon and seven-members of his family are now homeless. Alon had no opportunity to appeal or delay the decision and had actually been trying to get a permit for eight years (permits generally are not granted to Palestinians).
8) Israeli forces carried out pre-dawn raids in a number of Palestinian homes and detained 19 people last night. Raids are conducted on an almost daily basis now, they do not require search warrants and they can detain anyone, including women and children. Local activists report that these raids are designed to terrorise over 3 million Palestinians living in the West Bank and there are currently about 5,700 Palestinians languishing in Israeli detention facilities.
9) Israeli forces uprooted about 100 palm trees in the Palestinian village of al-Jiftlik in the Jordan Valley today. The 5,500 residents of Al-Jiftlik depend on agriculture and livestock for their main source of livelihood but Israel has severely restricted access to water which has seriously impacted agriculture in the area. Israel has also seized about 6,750 acres of land belonging to the village in order to construct illegal settlements, as well as a military base and ‘settler-only’ by-pass Roads.
10) In another Israeli land grab today Israeli bulldozers, escorted by Israeli forces, levelled a large area of land in the city of Dura in Hebron to make room for settlement expansion adjacent to the existing illegal Israeli settlement of Negohot.
