Latest news on Palestine…
1) Jewish Settlers, under military protection, stormed through al-Walaja village, near Bethlehem city, today. The village has previously been hit with a military order to expropriate their water spring.
2) Gaza’s only power plant shuts down on Tuesday, after fuel shipments were blocked by Israel. Israel has closed all crossings for goods and fuel to Gaza, where its 2 million residents who rely mostly on Israel for their energy needs, were already struggling to get six hours of electricity a day and are regularly hit by 10-hour power cuts.
3) Israel’s indiscriminate bombing of Gaza appears to have targeted a refugee camp that holds over 90,000 refugees in an area less than 1km/sq. This includes a United Nations Relief and Works Agency school, set up to support about 1,000 Palestinian refugee children. The school appears to have been targeted by a guided missile last week but, thankfully, it did not explode. However the school had to be closed down in order to remove the unexploded device and for repair work to be carried out.
4) A 16yr old Palestinian boy was shot and killed and 2 other boys (aged 14 and 15) were wounded by Israel snipers in the West Bank yesterday. The Israeli military claim that Mohammad Damer Hamdan was planning to attack Israeli cars. It’s understood that Hamdan was detained by Israeli forces after he’d been shot and seriously wounded and later died of his injuries. The chairman of Hamdan’s local council later reported that the 3 boys were simply near a road being used by Jewish settlers when they were shot by Israeli soldiers.
5) ‘Palestine Action’ strike again. Palestine Action activists, hit the London sites of Israel’s biggest arms company, Elbit Systems, again today. Apparently they’ve targeted 3 of Elbit’s UK bases so far (Elbit have 10 UK bases in total) and sprayed them with red paint.
6) Israeli forces shot and killed 2 Palestinian men within hours of each other earlier this week. One of the victims was a deaf man who was shot because he was unable to hear orders to stop at an occupied West Bank checkpoint. The other man was shot outside the Al Aqsa Mosque for allegedly stabbing an Israeli soldier. The video below,posted by a US news agency, appears to be immediately after the incident and shows the Israeli soldier sitting up and being attended to before then being carried off on a stretcher. Immediately after that you see the Palestinian man, left on his own, to bleed out on the floor. You then see an obvious edit in the video before it shows the medics eventually arriving to attend the Palestinian man, which gives the impression that they arrived pretty quickly after the Israeli soldier had been stretchered away. However the Palestinian Red Crescent Society (similar to the Red Cross) later issued a statement to say that their teams had been prevented from accessing the area in order to see to the Palestinian man before he succumbed to his injuries.
7) Haaretz reports that a Palestinian BDS Activist, whose home was raided by 20 Israeli soldiers, with dogs, in the middle of the night about two weeks ago, terrorising his wife and 3 young children, has been released from detention without charge.
8) Israeli forces teargassed and violently repressed Palestinian protesters during an anti-annexation demonstration in Tulkarm, Palestine. Reportedly, dozens of protesters were injured for defending their land.
9) The official Twitter page of the Palestinian Mission to the UK posted a video today (see below) showing what they claim to be Israeli occupation forces breaking into the Al Maqasid hospital in East Jerusalem, ransacking medical equipment and tear-gassing patients and medical staff.
