Israeli police forced out the Siyam family from their home in the heart of occupied East Jerusalem last week, the final chapter in their 25-year legal battle against a powerful settler organization.

The family’s defeat represented much more than just another eviction. It was intended to land a crushing blow against the hopes of some 20,000 Palestinians living in the shadow of the Old City walls and Al Aqsa mosque.

Dozens of families in the Silwan neighborhood have endured the same fate as the Siyams, and the Israeli courts have approved the imminent eviction of many hundreds more Palestinians from the area.

But, unlike those families, the Siyams’ predicament briefly caught public attention. That was because one of them, Jawad Siyam, has become a figurehead of Silwan’s resistance efforts.

A US House Democrat’s resolution in support of the two-state solution has been amended to remove references to the Israeli occupation and settlement activity, reports the Times of Israel. The amended bill also claims attempts by Palestinians to achieve statehood outside of negotiations with Israel as is unacceptable.

In April, California Democrat Alan Lowenthal introduced House Resolution 326, a symbolic resolution that reaffirmed the US’ commitment to resolving the Palestinian-Israeli conflict through a two-state solution.

The original text highlighted “the special relationship between the US and Israel” and how the US “remains unwavering in its commitment to help Israel address the myriad challenges it faces.” It also mentioned the long history of US presidents seeking a two-state solution and how “delays to a political solution… pose a threat to the ability to maintain a Jewish and democratic state of Israel.”

Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu yesterday criticised the US deal of the century and emphasised the importance of supporting Palestinian rights, Turkish news agencies reported.

During his speech at the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) executive committee meeting held in Saudi Arabia, Cavusoglu said sustainable peace cannot be achieved by disregarding the Palestinians’ dignity and ignoring “the just and legitimate aspirations of the Palestinian people.”

Referring to the US economic workshop held in Bahrain last month, he said: “Economic projects and plans cannot replace the need for dignity, justice and freedom. And no project can succeed without a just peace.”

He added: “Expansion of illegal settlements continues throughout the occupied Palestinian territory, including in and around Al-Quds, as well as in the West Bank. This is a deliberate attempt to undermine the two-state vision.”

Israeli Jewish settlers have set up mobile homes on the Palestinian lands in the Jordan Valley in the occupied West Bank, Shehab news agency reported yesterday.

Palestinian rights activist Aref Daraghma said that the mobile homes were set up in Abu-Qandoul neighbourhood, located in Al-Maleh Valley.

He stated that the settlers installed wires around an area called Al-Mirmala, to which the settlers opened a street a couple of days ago.

A number of British Members of Parliament have slammed the killing of Palestinian medics at the hands of Israeli forces in the occupied Gaza Strip.

On 15 July, an Early Day Motion (EDM) entitled “Health Workers in Gaza” was tabled in Parliament.

The EDM begins with a condemnation of “the killing of healthcare workers in Gaza and in particular the recent killing of Gaza paramedic Mohammed Al-Jedaili”, who, the motion adds, was “the fifth Palestinian health worker to be killed by Israeli forces in just over a year”.

The motion then “notes that according to the World Health Organisation more than 750 health workers in Gaza were also injured between 30 March 2018 and 31 May 2019.”

The context for the timeframe is the Great March of Return, and the efforts taken by Israeli forces to violently suppress its associated demonstrations.

In the face of sustained attacks by US authorities on the right to engage in boycotts against Israel, Congress member Ilhan Omar introduced a resolution on Tuesday that seeks to protect that right.

She also explicitly offered her support for BDS, the nonviolent boycott, divestment and sanctions campaign that aims to pressure Israel to respect Palestinian rights the way similar global grassroots pressure helped end apartheid in South Africa.

Palestinian boycott campaigners welcomed Omar’s resolution.

“It affirms the right of all activists and people of conscience to advocate for human rights through boycotts against systems of oppression,” Hind Awwad, spokesperson for the Palestinian BDS National Committee said.

Two days later – 15 December 2001 – Israeli forces invaded Jabaliya refugee camp in northern Gaza.

Yousif’s cousin approached me around noon that day and immediately told me that Yousif had been killed. An Israeli soldier had shot him in the head. Yousif was two weeks shy of his 11th birthday.

It was the first time that a friend of mine had died. I had no idea how to express myself, especially given that our last conversation had been an argument.

So I just stayed silent.

Yousif was killed on the eve of Eid al-Fitr. When I went to his funeral, his mother Aisha wept as she showed us the clothes Yousif had planned to wear at Eid.

We fully expect the House to draft a resolution condemning her for bigotry following this news.

Rep. Ilhan Omar has introduced a resolution supporting the BDS movement against Israel, an effort once described by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi as “bigoted” and “dangerous.”

Representative Ilhan Omar (D., Minn.) will introduce a resolution this week declaring support for the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement, which seeks to elevate the Palestinian negotiating position vis-a-vis Israel through an international pressure campaign.

“We are introducing a resolution . . . to really speak about the American values that support and believe in our ability to exercise our first amendment rights in regard to boycotting,” Omar told Al-Monitor. “And it is an opportunity for us to explain why it is we support a nonviolent movement, which is the BDS movement.”

Nasser al-Buhaisi had just graduated from college.

The 22-year-old obtained a degree in religious law from Gaza’s Al-Azhar University during June. One day later, he died.

Al-Buhaisi had been paralyzed due to a road accident in 2006. He had studied hard despite being in intensive care.

His determination made me reflect on the situation facing people with disabilities in Gaza. The situation is never easy but becomes far more difficult when Israel attacks vital services – as it did a few months ago.

Israeli Jews are overwhelmingly rightwing and do not want Palestinians in their government as ministers or part of the governing coalition because they question Palestinian loyalty to the state, one of the country’s leading political scientists says. Benjamin Netanyahu has the inside track to remain prime minister because he supports the “Jewish identity” of the state, she says. And anyone who expects a liberal Zionist to gain power is deluded. The left is a “marginal” factor in the Israeli election in September.

The only thing Palestinians and Jews in Israel agree about is: The Trump peace plan is going nowhere.

The Israeli occupation authorities have transformed the images of joy, play and education that should be the norm for Palestinian children into a shocking number of violations committed by the army against them in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. Around 1.3 million Palestinian children in the West Bank are affected daily by Israel’s policy of arrest and detention, as well as attacks by gunfire, beatings and illegal settlers. Another 1 million children in Gaza are considered to be the most affected by the restrictions imposed by the occupation. This includes the siege, aggression and multiple military offensives. Children under the age of 15 make up 42 per cent of the entire population in the Gaza Strip; Israel has basically assassinated their childhood.

Writing in The Jewish Journal under the title, “A Spillover Crisis: How Gaza’s Water Shortage Affects Israel”, Dominik Doehler explains the direct link between Gaza’s water problems and Israel.

Doehler offered a scientific explanation behind the besieged Strip’s water crisis, but when it was time to assign responsibility, something went wrong. Instead of recognising how Israel’s war and protracted siege destroyed Gaza’s infrastructure, the writer blamed the “ongoing conflict between Hamas and the Palestinian Authority” for Gaza’s suffering.

“Today, those who pay the price of the conflict between the Palestinian factions are the two million people in Gaza,” Doehler writes, without any mention of Israel’s primary role in any of this.

On July 17, the House Foreign Affairs Committee will begin to mark up a number of measures including a resolution that condemns the Global Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions Movement (BDS Movement). Despite concerns about the bill being constitutional, it’s currently supported by 70% of the Democratic Caucus.

As we reported, the young Jews of IfNotNow are doing what many activists have long called for: they are making Palestine an issue in the Democratic race by posting videos of young people asking candidates if they would bring pressure on Israel to end the occupation. The group has gotten evasive answers from Joe Biden and Beto O’Rourke; a No from Cory Booker; a Yes from Pete Buttigieg; and nervous affirmation from Elizabeth Warren.

The big surprise of the IfNotNow campaign is how much rage it is provoking from the Israel lobby, which has long had a place inside the Democratic Party.

The group Democratic Majority for Israel has issued a “WARNING” to Democratic candidates that a “strongly anti-Israel organization” is having young people “run up to” candidates and ambush them with an occupation question, before “trumpet”-ing the politicians’ answer on-line. (Ah, democracy.)

It’s happening, but slowly. Surveying the special issue of the Palestine-Israel Journal devoted to the threat that the hallowed two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict may be in jeopardy – or, as the issue’s title has it, “at a dangerous crossroads” – one gets the feeling of half-hearted, almost desperate assertions that the two-state solution is the only plausible one.

Throughout history, students have been at the forefront of important movements advocating for fundamental changes in society.

In the 1970s and 1980s, the anti-apartheid movement gained traction on university campuses in the UK and the US, with various demonstrations taking place and calls to divest from companies doing business in apartheid South Africa. At the University of California, Berkeley, students were successful in campaigning for divestment, and in 1986 the university voted to withdraw $3.1 billion worth of investments in the apartheid state.

In a move designed to shock Israeli settlers in the West Bank into action, activists from the right-wing settler organization “Regavim” hung Palestinian flags along the main West Bank settler roads last week.

Regavim claims that there is a Palestinian take over of Area C and that the Israeli government is not doing enough to fight it. The organization’s PR stunt, shown in the video below, was in their own words “an in-your-face challenge to the ????? (Knesset) to enforce the law and halt the de facto creation of a terrorist state in the heart of Israel.”

Palestinians lose about 60 million hours of work per year, due to check points and restrictions imposed, by the Israeli occupation, on Palestinian movement between the towns and villages of the West Bank, the Applied Research Institute (ARIJ) reported Monday, according to Al Ray.

ARIJ estimated the loss at about $ 270 million per year, according to the wage of workers per hour, in addition to extra fuel consumption at about 80 million liters per year, estimated at $ 135 million.

The consumption of the vehicle, which runs at a very low speed for long periods (1 – 10 km / h), according to certain calibrations, is about 0.049 liters / minute and 0.035 liters / minute for diesel engines and gasoline, according to the Institute.

The consumption of this amount of fuel leads to an increase in carbon dioxide emissions, by about 196 thousand tons per year.

The history of Zionism begins with contacts to the most violent ideologies, the most racist regimes and dictatorships and continues to this day as a thread through history. Rarely is it pointed out that Zionism is the official colonial settler colonial ideology of the “Jewish state”, which by definition is a thoroughly anti-Semitic ideology. Just the terms Israel as the “Jewish state” of the “Jewish people” or the audacity to speak out of this definition for all Jews worldwide. Not to mention the Zionist claim to call the illegal settlement policy and colonization of the state “Jewish value”. These “values” have always been based on the cooperation and support of fascist, right-wing and anti-Semitic, racist regimes and persons.

Israel is “moving rapidly” towards annexing parts of the Palestinian West Bank and tough rhetoric from Israeli politicians could presage a “dramatic” step in the coming months, United Nations investigator Michael Lynk told Mondoweiss.

Speaking by phone from Amman, the capital of Jordan, during a week-long fact-finding visit to the region, Lynk said that Israel’s settlement-building on Palestinian land was at its “highest level in recent years”.

“It’s moving much more rapidly and on the horizon is something much more dramatic,” said Lynk, the UN’s special rapporteur for the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territory.

Israeli soldiers shot a Palestinian child in the head with live ammunition at close range at around 3pm today during a protest against settlement expansion in the town of Kafr Qaddum, northern West Bank. Abdul Rahman Yasser Shteiwi, 10, was rushed to Rafidia hospital in Nablus and was operated on immediately. The leader of the popular resistance committee in Kafr Qaddum, Murad Shtaiwi, told ISM that doctors found over 70 bullet fragments lodged in the child’s brain. An X-ray scan of Abdul’s skull (pictured below) appears to show dozens of metal pieces throughout his brain. The 10-year-old is in a critical condition,

The logic here for those who had read the study was confusing. The new research had nothing to say about the genetic history of Jews or Palestinians or the connection those modern populations have to the land. (Though the word "Palestinian" comes from "Philistine," Palestinians are not thought of as the descendants of Philistines; it appears that Netanyahu was using this unrelated point to launch into his argument.)

“To me it seemed like it just provided another opportunity—even if it's just tangential—to take a swipe at Palestinians,” says Michael Press, an independent scholar who studies the presentation of archaeology in Israel and the occupied Palestinian territories. “It's hard to blame the authors much here since Netanyahu's use of the study really was a non-sequitur.” (The authors of the study did not wish to comment but are preparing a formal response.)

We are as critical of the New York Times as anyone, but we need to salute the superb report in the newspaper by David Halbfinger on a liberal Zionist trip for American Jews to see the occupation. Titled, “Touring the Israeli Occupation: Young U.S. Jews Get an Unflinching View,” the July 10 article offered horrifying glimpses of Palestinian conditions in Susiya and Hebron that left the young Jews staggered.

The article was about a very lukewarm tour of the occupation indeed, by the Zionist group J Street, which wants the visitors to engage in Israel advocacy back home, and wants to influence the more rightwing Jewish trips to Israel, notably Birthright, to stop off in Palestine.

But the thrust of the article was that one day’s exposure to the desolation of occupation caused two young Jews to question Zionism itself.

Who gave the order and is the operation legal? These are the questions that remain after Hagar Shezaf’s excellent investigative report in Haaretz a week ago: “Burying the Nakba: How Israel Systematically Hides Evidence of 1948 Expulsion of Arabs.”

Shezaf outlines how, since the mid-2000s or early 2010s, Malmab, the Defense Ministry’s secretive security department, has systematically culled from Israeli archives documents that paint the state’s conduct toward Palestine’s Arabs, particularly during the 1948 war, in bleak colors. In vaults, it hides away documents describing expulsions and massacres by various pre-state militias and then Israeli soldiers during that war and in subsequent years.

Palestinians run to take cover from tear gas canisters fired by Israeli troops during clashes on the Gaza-Israel border, east of southern Gaza Strip city of Khan Younis, July 12, 2019. At least 40 Palestinians were injured on Friday during clashes with Israeli soldiers in eastern Gaza Strip, close to the border with Israel, medics said.

Abu-Walid Dajani, 75, is embarking on what he calls the battle of his life: To prevent the Imperial Hotel from being closed down and taken over by the Ateret Cohanim organization that runs a yeshiva and settles Jews in the Old City and East Jerusalem.

The walls of the Old City of Jerusalem can be seen through the window of Dajani’s office in the Imperial, they seem almost close enough to touch. The office walls bear pictures of former Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser and a young Jordanian King Hussein, together with family pictures going back a century. The hotel is located in a vast, grand building on Omar Ibn al-Khattab Square, by the Old City’s Jaffa Gate.

Official in PFLP terror group says Egyptian mediators conveyed message during talks, with Jerusalem also offering more work permits, other benefits

After 24 years of back and forth in an Israeli court, this Palestinian family was forced out of their home in occupied East Jerusalem.

At least 74 Palestinians were wounded in Israel’s crackdown on the 66th Friday of the Great March of Return and Breaking the Siege in the Gaza Strip, the Palestinian Centre for Human Rights (PCHR) has said.

According to the rights group, the wounded included 23 children, two women, two journalists and two paramedics.

The Great March of Return began on 30 March 2018, calling for an end to Israel’s ongoing siege on Gaza and reinforcing the right of return. Since then, Israel has killed 306 protesters and wounded around 17,000 others.

We have grown accustomed to the enemy’s threats to retaliate and its assertion of the concept of deterrence. We have monitored Israel’s behaviour for decades and found that it relies on its air force — its long arm — and its special forces, which work behind the lines constantly to prevent the establishment of various power bases that might pose a threat to its security and existence.

By means of its weapons, the determination of its people and their faith and willingness to make sacrifices, this enemy recoils, hesitates and apologises. The statement made by the Israeli army spokesperson this week about the “misunderstanding” which led to a Hamas operative being shot dead in Gaza was, to all intents and purposes, an apology to the resistance made out of fear of its response. It is the nearest the Israelis will come to making an outright apology. However, the Zionist spokesperson has not changed, though, and will not do so; it is the Palestinians who have changed.

Under pressure from Israel lobby groups, a Canadian church canceled an event celebrating a scholarship award in honor of the iconic Palestinian writer Ghassan Kanafani.

The event, organized by the US-based Palestinian Youth Movement, was scheduled to be held at Trinity St. Paul’s United Church in Toronto on 13 July.

Kanafani, a communist, intellectual and novelist, was a spokesperson for the Marxist-Leninist PFLP party. He was murdered by an Israeli Mossad car bomb in Lebanon in July 1972.

Along with the extremist Jewish Defense League, which has a long history of violent threats, racism and harassment against Palestinian activists in Canada, Israel advocacy group B’nai Brith Canada bragged about its role in the cancellation and smeared Kanafani as a “terrorist.”

B’nai Brith said it would “continue to investigate” PYM’s scholarship program and threatened that it will “take all possible steps to thwart it.”

Several illegal Israeli colonialist settlers invaded, Friday, Khirbat Samra Palestinian village, in the West Bank’s Northern Plains, and occupied irrigation wells.

Palestinian human rights activist, Aref Daraghma, said the colonists, occupied all the Palestinian wells, and prevented the farmers from using them, before using the water for their cows.

Daraghma added that the colonists prevented the Palestinians from using the well to feed their sheep, and planted trees in Khallet Hamad area, near the tents of local shepherds, in preparation to occupy the lands.

Christian leaders on Thursday protested the sale of properties owned by the Greek Orthodox church to a Jewish pro-settlement group in mainly Palestinian areas of Israeli-annexed East Jerusalem.

Israel's top court gave final approval on June 11 to the 2004 sale of three buildings located in east Jerusalem's Old City to businesses linked to the Ateret Cohanim organisation.

The group works to "Judaise" East Jerusalem in its entirety by purchasing real estate in Palestinian areas through front companies.

US Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib took a swipe at American lawmakers who are seeking to criminalise the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) campaign, in a tweet denouncing the move as “unconstitutional”.

Tlaib, who is of Palestinian descent, made the trenchant remarks on Twitter while sharing an article concerning an Israeli park in the Galilee that has introduced measures which critics and human rights group say is reminiscent of apartheid South Africa. A non-Jewish lawyer and her infant were barred from entering the public park last week triggering a legal battle over whether local authorities in Israel can segregate citizens on the basis of race.

A new war between Israel and Palestinian factions in the occupied Gaza Strip “is not far away”, and will be “will be deadlier and more destructive than any previous” offensive, according to a report by the Jerusalem Post’s military correspondent.

According to the analyst, Israeli officials “have repeatedly said that any future war with [Hamas]…will have to have a clear and decisive win by the Israeli military so that the other side will think twice about going to war in the future.”

The Military Chief of Staff, Lieutenant-General Aviv Kochavi, “has already approved operational combat plans and recently set up an administrative unit to handle the formation of a list of potential targets in the coastal enclave for when the next war breaks out,” the Post reported.

Israeli opposition politician Benny Gantz, the leader of Blue and White Party and former military head, declared on Thursday that he does not intend to remove settlers from the occupied West Bank.

In radio interviews, Gantz affirmed that his party is in favour of “striving for an agreement” so long as it is based on “strict adherence to the security arrangements and, of course, our historical right to the State of Israel, the Jordan Valley, the settlement blocs, and of course Jerusalem”.

“There is no return to the 1967 lines,” he added.

Gantz also clarified that any “arrangement” that emerges in the context of peace talks would ultimately be “brought to the people for decision” (i.e. a referendum).

A battle is underway in Ireland to ensure that a ban on imports from Israel’s settlements in the occupied West Bank will not be vetoed.

Legislation to introduce such a ban has received majority support in both houses of Ireland’s parliament, the Oireachtas. Yet the country’s government is expected to try and wreck the legislation by invoking the little known “money message” provision.

“Money messages” rely on a clause in the Irish constitution which states that no law involving the expenditure of public finance will be enacted unless it has been signed by the taoiseach, the country’s prime minister.

A paper drawn up by Michael McDowell, a prominent Irish lawyer and politician, insists that the legislation banning Israel’s settlement goods does not require approval via a “money message.”

Israeli Prime Minister Benyamin Netanyahu pledged on Wednesday not to dismantle even the remotest Jewish settlement in the West Bank, in a message to settlers ahead of September's general election.

Israeli media had speculated that after US President Donald Trump handed Netanyahu valuable political prizes by recognising Jerusalem as Israel's capital and its annexation of the Golan Heights, Trump might expect concessions in return when he finally unveils his long-awaited proposals for Israeli-Palestinian peace.

"We shall not allow the dismantling of any settlement in any peace plan," Netanyahu told an audience at the settlement of Revava in the Israeli-occupied West Bank.

Tuesday July 9th marked the fifteenth anniversary of the International Court of Justice (ICJ) decision to declare the Israeli separation wall in occupied Palestinian territory as illegal under international law.

Israel began construction of the separation wall, known by many as the Israeli “Apartheid Wall”, in 2002 in the middle of the Second Intifada. Israeli officials said the wall was a necessary “security precaution against terrorism” from Palestinian attackers coming from the West Bank.

But with the construction of the wall, came unprecedented demolitions of Palestinians homes along the planned route, massive land confiscations, and the division of dozens of Palestinian communities along the Green Line.

Netanyahu went on to reference the Biblical mention of a place called Caphtor, thought to be modern-day Crete, where the Philistines allegedly migrated from before arriving in Palestine.

He went on: “There’s no connection between the ancient Philistines & the modern Palestinians, whose ancestors came from the Arabian Peninsula to the Land of Israel thousands of years later.”

“The Palestinians’ connection to the Land of Israel is nothing compared to the 4,000 year connection that the Jewish people have with the land,” the premiere concluded.

Palestinian activists and supporters were quick to tear down Netanyahu’s comments which they said were setting a dangerous precedent for the denial of Palestinian human rights.

Ali Abunimah, journalist and co-founder of the Electronic Intifada news website called Netanyahu’s comments a “warning sign of genocide.”

The Electronic Intifada is publishing the first photos of the police spy who infiltrated a Palestine solidarity group in the UK 15 years ago.

As we reported in December, the spy was an officer with the “anti-terrorist” Special Demonstration Squad.

During his time undercover in the London chapter of the International Solidarity Movement between 2004-2007, he gave his name as “Rob Harrison.”

His real name is not yet known, but the cover name was released in December by an independent official inquiry into undercover policing.

The barring of a lawyer and her infant from a public park in the Galilee last week has triggered a legal battle over whether local authorities in Israel can segregate citizens on a racial basis.

Human rights groups have warned that the ban marks a growing trend by local authorities representing the Jewish majority towards explicit separation of public space in ways reminiscent of apartheid South Africa.

An Israeli court will have to decide whether it is reasonable for Afula, a city in the country’s north, to deny non-residents entrance to the main local park, which includes a playground, a small zoo, basketball courts and a running track.

The restriction amounts to a ban on Palestinian citizens from surrounding communities using a public resource, according to Adalah, a legal human rights group representing Israel’s Palestinian minority, one in five of the country’s population.

Israel is isolating Palestinian universities by forcing international scholars to leave their academic positions in the occupied West Bank.

Two Palestinian human rights groups, as well as Birzeit University, are calling on Israel to lift restrictions preventing international academics from working in the West Bank and to publish “a clear and lawful procedure for issuing entry visas and work permits.”

Israel’s policy of denying internationals entry to the West Bank, as well as refusing and failing to process visa extension applications in a timely manner, has affected dozens of scholars working at Palestinian universities.

Israeli occupation forces shot and fatally wounded a young Palestinian man, reportedly at close range, as the month of June came to a close.

Israel claimed that Muhammad Samir Ubeid, 20, had thrown lit firecrackers at police during confrontations in the occupied East Jerusalem neighborhood of Issawiyeh on 27 June.

Ubeid’s body was held by Israel until 1 July.

Shortly before Ubeid was killed, residents of Issawiyeh protested against weeks of police raids on the village.

In 2018 If Americans Knew made a 15 minute video exposing Israel’s projects to censor the Internet. YouTube removed our video. We tried again. This time YouTube restricted it. Now we’re trying yet again. See version #3 below of “How Israel Censors the Internet”.

We wonder if this time the video will escape censorship, or whether Israel partisans will succeed once again in their efforts to impede Americans’ access to facts that Israel doesn’t want Americans to know…

Illegal Israeli settlers have called for the death of a Palestinian who was wrongly accused of raping a seven-year-old Israeli girl, spraying graffiti on walls in his West Bank village and vandalising cars.

The graffiti was discovered yesterday in Deir Qadis, a Palestinian village northwest of Ramallah in the occupied West Bank. The village is home to Mahmoud Katusa, a 46-year-old Palestinian who was wrongly accused of raping a young Israeli girl and released last month after charges against him were dropped.

Written in Hebrew, the graffiti read “the death penalty is necessary for Mahmoud Qadusa,” while several cars parked in the village were also vandalised, the Times of Israel reported.

The Israeli daily noted that this is not the first such incident, pointing to an attack on the nearby village of Sinjil where cars were found with their tyres slashed and graffiti spray-painted on the walls read: “we give them jobs and they rape.”

Israeli police this morning forced a Palestinian family out of their house in the Silwan neighbourhood of occupied East Jerusalem, WAFA reported.

Silwan-based Wadi Hilweh Information Centre posted a video showing occupation forces and settlers storming the house and assaulting the family members to seize their home. The centre reported that the Siyam family refused to comply with the eviction order and at least one family member was detained. Jawad Siyam is the director of the Wadi Hilweh Information Centre and was detained in Silwan along with three other Palestinians in the neighbourhood.

The Siyam family had been battling a right-wing Israeli settlement group for 25 years to remain in their family home. The Elad Association is notorious for its efforts to encourage Jewish settlement in Silwan, located just outside the Old City and Al-Aqsa Mosque compound. Elad also confiscated money raised to help the Siyam family fight their eviction order, Haaretz reported on Monday.

An Israeli court has overturned the conviction of a Jewish settler filmed stoning Palestinian cars in Hebron, the occupied West Bank, reported Haaretz.

According to the Jerusalem Magistrate’s Court judge, the decision was taken following a report by the probation officer claiming that the accused “takes responsibility for committing the crime”.

Instead, the right-wing activist was sentenced to pay 400 shekels ($112) in compensation to two Palestinian car owners whose vehicles were vandalised.

The case goes back to 2014, when settler activist Noam Federman and his son Oved “hurled rocks at parked Palestinian cars”, allegedly in response to having stones thrown at them by Palestinians.

It won’t just be Jeffrey Epstein that will be on trial in the months ahead. As this scandal unfolds, the entire U.S. legal system will be on trial, and if justice does not prevail many Americans will lose faith in the system for good.

And of course the rest of the world will be watching too, and so what are they supposed to think about us if we are not able to put Epstein and all of his dirty friends in prison? As I detailed in part three of this series, the evidence against Jeffrey Epstein and his partners in crime is mounting. If Jeffrey Epstein is put behind bars that will be a step in the right direction, but it will not nearly be enough.

Israeli occupation authorities have issued 432 administrative detention orders against Palestinians since the start of 2019, the Palestine Prisoners’ Centre for Studies (PPCS) reported yesterday.

The PPCS’ spokesman Riyadh Al-Ashqar said that the number included 294 renewed orders and 138 new orders.

He noted that the orders ranged from between two and six months.

Al-Ashqar said that the continuous Israeli detention of Palestinian prisoners without trials is a clear violation of international laws and conventions.

The African Group has called on the United Nations (UN) to hold Israel accountable for its crimes against Palestinians.

The African Group – sometimes known as the Group of African States – is a regional assembly within the UN comprised of 54 member states from the African continent. It represents 28 per cent of all UN members.

The group yesterday addressed the 41st session of the United Nations Human Rights Council (UNHRC) in Geneva, Switzerland, one item of which discussed the human rights situation in the occupied Palestinian territories (oPt).

The group’s representative, Andre da Conceicao Domingos of Angola, called for the international community to act to end Israel’s now 52-year-old occupation and the blockade it has imposed on the Gaza Strip since 2007, as well as to end Israel’s illegal settlement project, imprisonment of Palestinians and policy of collective punishment.

The Israeli government is set to press mobile phone companies to improve coverage for illegal settlements in the occupied West Bank, reported business news site Globes.

According to the report, “one of the first tasks” for incoming Minister of Communications David Ansalem “is dealing with the poor mobile reception in Judea and Samaria [occupied West Bank].”

US Special Representative for International Negotiations, Jason Greenblatt, has said that the White House is to reopen the PLO’s office in Washington if Israeli-Palestinian talks resume.

In an interview with the Palestinian daily Al-Ayyam published yesterday, he said: “The PLO office in Washington can be reopened once negotiations are resumed.”

“The PLO office could have been kept open if it was involved in a peace process,” he said, noted that it was closed “because President Abbas threatened Israel with going to the ICC.”

Regarding the closure of the consulate in Jerusalem, he said: “We have a responsibility to American taxpayers. If we have a diplomatic mission in Jerusalem because we have now recognised that Jerusalem is the capital of Israel, the presence of two diplomatic missions in Jerusalem is a waste of money from taxpayers.”

Harris was moving when she talked about how as a child, “my sister and I had to deal with the neighbor who told us her parents [said she] couldn’t play with us because we were Black.” She recounted that as a little girl, she was a member of only the second racially integrated class in her public school.

She touted her record fighting for civil rights as attorney general of California and defended the Voting Rights Act and the Civil Rights Act, and called for passing an Equality Act.

But whatever her record in the US, Harris’ support for freedom, civil rights and equality does not extend to one group of people systematically and violently denied them: Palestinians.

Nearly 250 left-wing activists who donated money to help a Palestinian family in East Jerusalem’s Silwan neighborhood may discover that their money has ended up with the right-wing group Elad, which seeks to evict the family.

Elad has obtained a lien on tens of thousands of shekels that the 241 activists donated for the Siyam family, on the grounds that the family owes it money. The lien requires an Israeli crowdfunding site, IsraelGives, to freeze the bank account where the money raised to help the Siyam family is deposited.

Public remembers failed mission by a special IDF force mostly because Hamas uncovered it

Newly published army probe unveils how Israel's cover was blown, the evacuation happened and evidence left behind was destroyed

Following a legal battle and three years of waiting, Israel gave Gaza fisherman Abdul-Muti al-Habil his fishing boat back. Al-Habil is one of 21 Palestinian fishermen whose boats were recently returned after Israel confiscated them, claiming they had breached the allocated fishing zone.

But the fishermen are not ready to rejoice just yet. They may have gotten their vessels back, and their livelihood, but according to the representative of the Strip's fishermen, the boats were returned without their motors and nets, and some of them are visibly damaged.

Nazareth is the largest of the Palestinian communities in Israel that survived the Nakba, or catastrophe, of 1948, which forced most of the native population out of the bulk of their homeland and replaced it with a Jewish state. Today, one in five Israeli citizens are Palestinian.

The city and its immediate environs include the highest concentration of Palestinian Christians in the region. But it has long suffered from the hostility of Israeli officials, who have starved Nazareth of resources to prevent it from becoming a political, economic or cultural capital for the Palestinian minority.

The city has almost no land for growth or industrial areas to expand its income base, and Israel has tightly constrained its ability to develop a proper tourism industry. Most pilgrims pass through briefly to visit its Basilica of the Annunciation, the site where the angel Gabriel reputedly told Mary she would carry Jesus.

The coupling between the Trump administration and the Netanyahu government has created some iconic, unforgettable pictures. But none can compete with the messianic radiance on the face of the U.S. ambassador to Israel, David Friedman, when he was breaking down a fake wall with a sledgehammer in the tunnels under Jerusalem’s Silwan neighborhood.

That picture was more powerful than a thousand conferences in Bahrain. I’ve met tourists who’ve come down with Jerusalem Syndrome; they weren’t dangerous, but no one thought to make them an ambassador.

In response to the criticism, Friedman tweeted: “Fake News: ‘Friedman uses sledgehammer to destroy wall under Palestinian homes.’ Real News: ‘Friedman uses sledgehammer to break ceremonial cardboard wall to open once-in-a-century archeological discovery.’”

Israel has a secret department which makes critical documents disappear, especially documents related to what the Palestinians refer to as the Nakba of 1948, the year that marks the foundation of the state of Israel and the displacement of more than 750,000 Palestinians from their villages, towns and cities in lands that make up the border of Israel.

An investigative report by Haaretz revealed that an Israeli Defense Ministry department called the “Director of security of the Defense establishment” or MALMAB (its acronym in Hebrew) is tasked with wiping out archives on Nakba, or catastrophe in Arabic, which opposes the Israeli version of the event.

The protection of Palestinian civilians could be improved by the deployment of UN-mandated armed forces or unarmed observers, a beefed-up UN civilian presence or expanded UN assistance, Secretary-General Antonio Guterres wrote in a report on Friday.

The United Nations General Assembly requested the report in a resolution adopted in June that condemned Israel for excessive force against Palestinian civilians and denounced the firing of rockets from Gaza into Israeli civilian areas.

The Jews behind the protest say about themselves, “we are #JewsAgainstICE because #NeverAgainMeans never again for anyone.” This sounds good enough to me and I have no criticism of the official objective behind this humanist protest. Yet the Jewish nature of the gathering raises some crucial and necessary questions:

Are these Jewish protestors willing to describe Gaza as a concentration camp?

Will the Jewish activists protest in front of the Israeli embassy invoking the holocaust, pointing out that the Palestinians are subject to long-term genocidal policies?

Will these Jewish protestors allow gentile pro Palestinian activists, for instance, to equate Israel with Nazi Germany or maybe invoke the holocaust is a Jews-only domain?

Well, thank the powers that be that that’s over.

The Manama Peace to Prosperity conference promised little and delivered nothing. There was some shouting and posturing, but overall the performance fizzled.

It was not, however, merely a botched exercise in futility.

It was a show of unadulterated cynicism.

Even the messianic glint in Jared Kushner’s eyes cannot mask the fact that none of the US peace trifecta that the White House has deployed to deprive Palestinians of their rights really believes this shambles could have any traction whatsoever.

The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) removed, at the request of the state of Palestine, Bethlehem’s Church of the Nativity from UNESCO’s list of endangered world heritage sites following restorations.

The holy city's Arab Palestinian character is an important part of its world-renowned diversity

The grandson of iconic South African leader Nelson Mandela has condemned attempts by UK Lawyers for Israel (UKLFI) to shut down London’s Palestine Expo event, at which he is slated to speak this weekend.

A statement issued today by Nkosi Zwelivelile Mandela and the Royal House of Mandela read: “We wish to express our outrage and disgust at the intimidation tactics of the U.K. Lawyers for Israel. We say to them and all who seek to deny our basic human rights such as freedom of expression – hands off BDS, hands off Palestine Expo.”

The statement came after it was revealed that UKLFI – a pro-Israel legal group – has made several attempts to cancel Palestine Expo, which will take place at the Olympia London this weekend. UKLFI claimed that the organisers of the Palestine Expo – UK-based NGO Friends of Al-Aqsa – are “major promoters” of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement.

Silverstein appealed to Facebook, using their own definition of “hate speech”, to argue that his post does not fit the criteria, since he was not directly attacking Israeli settlers as much as reporting a fact the Israeli court itself agrees upon: these particular settlers had used fraudulent means to obtain the land.

This is not Silverstein’s first suspension. As he told MEE: “I have been suspended by Twitter and Facebook a number of times. I’ve also had individual posts censored without being suspended.” On one occasion, he said, an Israeli professor at a university that specialises in training engineers for the Israeli air force organised “a mass reporting of my FB account, claiming it was fake”.

Four years ago, historian Tamar Novick was jolted by a document she found in the file of Yosef Vashitz, from the Arab Department of the left-wing Mapam Party, in the Yad Yaari archive at Givat Haviva. The document, which seemed to describe events that took place during the 1948 war, began:

“Safsaf [former Palestinian village near Safed] – 52 men were caught, tied them to one another, dug a pit and shot them. 10 were still twitching. Women came, begged for mercy. Found bodies of 6 elderly men. There were 61 bodies. 3 cases of rape, one east of from Safed, girl of 14, 4 men shot and killed. From one they cut off his fingers with a knife to take the ring.”

Israel wants to restore calm to the South, but at the same time is preparing for a wide-scale military campaign inside the Gaza Strip, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said on Wednesday.

Netanyahu’s comments came after he convened a security cabinet meeting at the IDF Gaza Division headquarters to discuss the situation in the Strip, followed by a meeting with local and regional council heads, some of whom left the meeting in protest.

Two Israeli officials have proposed a “solution” for the Gaza Strip which includes another massive military offensive against the enclave and moving the Palestinians to Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula, Arabi21.com reported on Sunday. The end of the government led by Mahmoud Abbas is also suggested in a report published by the Jerusalem Institute for Public and State Affairs.

The purpose of the proposal is to make the humanitarian crisis in Gaza even worse, prompting a military confrontation. Its authors are Shimon Shapira, a former military secretary to Israel’s Prime Minister, and Shlomi Fogel, an official who has proposed numerous initiatives related to the Arab world. The phase which would follow the offensive would be based on economic and commercial development for Sinai backed by Egypt.

In ongoing Israeli attacks on Occupied East Jerusalem, Israeli forces also abducted 3 Palestinians & ransacked dozens of homes, hospitals and clinics, assaulting physicians, nurses & patients… part of Israel’s effort to create a “National Garden” in the area… Soldiers shot 21 year old, in the heart from close range.

On Friday evening, Israeli soldiers, including undercover officers, invaded the Islamic Industrial School for Orphans, in the Old City of occupied Jerusalem, and stopped an educational activity held by the General Union of Palestinians Writers.

Media sources said the school was about to hold a poetry festival, dubbed as “Yes To Peace, No To War,” and shut it down.

The activity was organized by several Palestinian poets in occupied Jerusalem, and was meant to encourage the students to read and write, and to help them realize their potentials and talents.

The sources added that the soldiers, accompanied by undercover police officers, stormed the school just minutes before the festival was supposed to start, and shut it down.

Announcement that Oman to be first Gulf state to open embassy in Palestinian territories coincides with US-led economic workshop in Bahrain.

Ali Abunimah discusses Jared Kushner's presentation of his peace plan's economic portion in Bahrain this week. He dangled fifty billion dollars for the Palestinian economy, but no freedom, political rights, nor an end of the Israeli occupation

These are the not-so-prescient words of Jeffrey Goldberg, named this week the new chief editor of the 159-year-old Atlantic Magazine, one of the most famous journalistic institutions in U.S. history.

The openly-Zionist Goldberg moved to Israel nearly 25 years ago and served in the Israeli Defense Forces. Since then, he has been the opening speaker for numerous Zionist functions, including the American Jewish Committee conference and Zionism 3.0.

Most garishly, he worked as a prison guard at Ktzi’ot, Israel’s largest detention camp for Palestinian political prisoners, where he boasted of helping beat Palestinian political prisoners. Ktzi’ot is one of Israel’s largest detention camps and has long been criticized for its inhumane conditions, which include frequent beatings, lack of drinking water and forced labor.

Over the weekend, the White House released “Peace to Prosperity,” the economic component of its so-called Deal of the Century.

It calls for $50 billion in “investments” spread over 179 projects. Half the money would be spent on Palestinian infrastructure over 10 years, with the rest spread between Egypt, Lebanon and Jordan.

It will supposedly include a $5 billion transportation corridor between the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip and another $2 billion in the Palestinian tourism sector.

Calls for the annexation of the Occupied West Bank are gaining momentum in both Tel Aviv and Washington. But Israel and its American allies should be careful what they wish for. Annexing the Occupied Palestinian Territories will only reinforce the current rethink of the Palestinian strategy, as opposed to solving Israel’s self-induced problems.

Encouraged by the Donald Trump administration’s decision to move the US Embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, Israeli government officials feel that the time for annexing the entirety of the West Bank is now.

In fact, “there is no better time than now” was the exact phrase used by former Israeli Justice Minister, Ayelet Shaked, as she promoted annexation at a recent New York conference.

According to documents released by the White House, the economic aspect of Donald Trump’s peace plan between Palestine and Israel includes granting $9 billion to Egypt, half of which is in the form of soft loans.

The documents revealed that $50 billion will be dedicated to the economic part of the deal of the century, which will be invested in the revival of the Palestinian territories, as well as Lebanon, Jordan and Egypt.

The US President’s advisor and son-in-law Jared Kushner will announce the details of the first phase of the peace plan during the workshop on “Peace for Prosperity” in Manama, Bahrain, on 25 and 26 June.

Hanna Issa, the Palestinian Authority’s (PA) Secretary-General for the Islamic-Christian Council for Jerusalem and the Holy Places, has announced that the number of illegal Israeli settlements in the occupied Palestinian territories (oPt) has reached 503, with 474 located in the West Bank and 29 in East Jerusalem.

In a press release today, Issa also stated that the illegal settlers living in these settlements number over one million, adding that the settler population is increasing at a far higher rate than the population growth rate of Israel itself.

Palestinian Authority (PA) Finance Minister Shukri Bishara yesterday revealed that international donations to the authority have declined by 60 per cent in the past six years.

This came during an urgent meeting held in Egyptian capital Cairo for Arab finance ministers to discuss ways to assist the PA, which is thought to be on the brink of financial collapse. Bishara called for Arab states to raise a financial safety network worth $155 million a month, Al-Watan Voice reported.

Bishara also stated that international donations to the PA have decreased substantially, from over $1 billion in 2013 to less than $450 million in 2018 – a 60 per cent decrease.

The British government licensed arms deals worth over £14m ($17.8m) to Israel last year even as Israeli soldiers were accused of intentionally firing on Palestinian protesters at the Gaza border in what the UN says may be potential war crimes.

Weapons approved for sale included ammunition, components for assault rifles, and other types of arms which could be used for repression, according to newly released details from the Department of International Trade (DIT), compiled by the Campaign Against the Arms Trade (CAAT).

Analysts have rebuked the economic part of the United States's Middle East peace plan for failing to address the main problem that has heavily curbed the Palestinian economy - the 52-year-old Israeli military occupation over the Palestinian territories.

The economic plan was released by the White House on Saturday and is set to be presented during a US-led workshop in Bahrain on June 25-26.

When the document was released, many noticed that the 40-page plan was void of any political context with the words "occupation", "freedom", "equality", "blockade" missing.

"The absence of those words is actually quite glaring and it's very indicative of what they see is the issue," Diana Buttu, a Haifa-based analyst and former legal adviser to Palestinian peace negotiators, told Al Jazeera.

The White House published the economic section of its peace plan for the resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict dubbed the "deal of the century". The teased plan suggests investing $50 billion over 10 years to boost the Palestinian Authority's economy, but gives no hints about political solutions to the conflict.

Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov has slammed the US for palnning to use secretely-developed ideas to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, ignoring the existing international agreements.

Benjamin Netanyahu, who on Sunday toured the West Bank with John Bolton, said he will listen to US peace proposals – but added that “any future agreement” with Palestine must guarantee an Israeli presence in the Jordan Valley.

Footage posted on Sunday showed Israel’s prime minister and the US national security adviser overlooking the Israeli-occupied area from an aircraft and on the ground, with Netanyahu seen giving Bolton an excursion.

Foxtrot, the movie that Israel doesn’t want you to see.

The Jerusalem Center of Socio and Economic Rights, Monday, warned of the escalation of Israeli demolitions in occupied Jerusalem, noting it bears the nature of a collective form of punishment. The director of the center Zeyad al-Hamouree warned, in a statement, that the Israeli municipality and civil administration are carrying out demolitions in Qalandia, Sur Baher, Silwan and al-Bustan neighborhoods. He explained that Israel plans to demolish wide parts of Palestinian facilities to build Israeli facilities, noting the Israeli plans to establish the so-called National Park in Arrababh neighborhood. He stressed, according to Al Ray, that the next phase in Jerusalem is so difficult, especially regarding residential buildings. He said that dozens of demolition orders are carried out without warning.

A $50 billion plan for Palestine’s economy that hinges on peace with Israel has been revealed by Donald Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner. He calls it the “opportunity of the century” but a chorus of Palestinian groups disagrees.

Speaking to Reuters on Saturday, Kushner dangled the multibillion proposal separately from the central –political– part of US President Trump’s Israeli-Palestinian peace deal plan. He said he did so on purpose to let people “digest” the “less controversial” side of the plan before the political details finally land.

The former chief of Israel’s intelligence agency Mossad, Shabtai Shavit, has said that Israel does not want peace and that, if it had, it would have made peace with the Palestinian Authority (PA) long ago.

Shavit gave his remarks to Israeli daily Maariv, reiterating that if Israel wanted peace it would have discussed it in economic and infrastructure terms that serve the interests of both parties, Arab 48 reported yesterday.

However, Shavit said that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu does not see the PA as a negotiating partner and therefore refuses to develop relations with the authority. “Do you know any other head of an Israeli government who did not talk with the Palestinians?” he asked.

Shavit also claimed that Netanyahu stopped speaking to the PA under pressure from the Israeli right-wing, who he claimed “would lynch him in the city centre” if he opened discussions today.

Hamas yesterday stressed that the Palestinians have enough power and resilience to undermine Israel.

Marking the 63rd Friday of the Great March of Return, Hamas spokesman Abdel-Latif Al-Qanou said “our people have enough power, resilience and willingness to undermine all [Israeli] projects.”

He added: “The Palestinians are sticking to their land and are able to fight all plans aimed at liquidating the Palestinian cause.”