Damascus once again was rocked by Israeli airstrikes Sunday night, with Syria saying its anti-air defenses were active in confronting a wave of "enemy rockets" from the direction of the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights.

In a rare acknowledgement of the attack, Israel confirmed in was behind it, and linked it to rocket fire from the Palestinian territory, Gaza. The Israeli army said in a statement that it targeted Islamic Jihad leaders living in Damascus.

"In the Adeliyah region, outside of Damascus, an Islamic Jihad compound was struck, used as a hub of Islamic Jihad's activity in Syria," the statement said. "Israeli military planes targeted Islamic Jihad targets in Gaza" it said further.

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is not the product of ancient ethnic hatreds. It is the tragic clash between two peoples with claims to the same land. It is a manufactured conflict, the outcome of a 100-year-old colonial occupation by Zionists and later Israel, backed by the British, the United States and other major imperial powers. This project is about the ongoing seizure of Palestinian land by the colonizers. It is about the rendering of the Palestinians as non-people, writing them out of the historical narrative as if they never existed and denying them basic human rights. Yet to state these incontrovertible facts of Jewish colonization — supported by innumerable official reports and public and private communiques and statements, along with historical records and events — sees Israel’s defenders level charges of anti-Semitism and racism.

Israeli settlers on Monday morning destroyed Palestinian wheat fields with poisonous chemicals near al-Sakout village in the northern Jordan Valley.

Human rights activist Aref Daraghmeh said that Israeli settlers sprayed about 12 dunums of wheat fields with poisonous pesticides destroying and burning crops.

Daraghmeh said that settler attacks on Palestinian farmlands in the Jordan Valley fall in line with a large-scale scheme by the Israeli authorities aimed at forcing the Palestinians out of the area.

The US has effectively denied entry to Eyal Weizman, founder of the research group Forensic Architecture.

Forensic Architecture, based in the UK, uses groundbreaking methodologies such as digital forensics and spatial analysis to expose human rights abuses. The group has published several investigations concerning Israeli violations against Palestinians.

Weizman, who holds Israeli and British passports, was due to travel to the US for Forensic Architecture’s first major survey in the country at Miami Dade College’s Museum of Art and Design. The exhibition, titled Forensic Architecture: True to Scale, opened on Thursday and runs through late September.

Israeli fighter jets launched air strikes on suspected Islamic Jihad positions in Syria, the Israeli military said on Monday, after the militant group and Israel exchanged rockets and air strikes around Gaza.

Israeli forces hang the body of a Palestinian man from a bulldozer

Israeli forces use a bulldozer to push blocks of cement at Palestinian protesters in the West Bank

Over the last week, pedestrians and drivers in Tel Aviv caught a glimpse of an especially disturbing billboard that had been posted across the city. The billboard, erected by the far-right group, Israeli Victory Project, showed Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas and Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh blindfolded and on their knees on a backdrop of destruction. The caption read: “Peace is only made with defeated enemies.”

SOURCE: MINT PRESS
TEL AVIV — Since the International Criminal Court (ICC) announced it would investigate war crimes committed by Israel in the Gaza Strip and occupied West Bank last December, Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has been attempting to rally Israel’s allies in a multilateral effort to stop the ICC’s probe.

Those efforts have now left Netanyahu “optimistic,” with the embattled Prime Minister reportedly telling members of his cabinet that Israel’s efforts to lobby other countries against the ICC case is paying off, according to a recent report published by Reuters. “We are struggling against this [proceeding] and, at our side, I must say, are many friends around the world [which] joined the U.S. in a steadfast stand alongside Israel,” Reuters quoted Netanyahu as saying.

The Grand Mufti of Yemen and head of Yemen Scholars Association says Saudi Arabia sees no obstacle to granting the entire Palestine to Jews, describing such an approach as the principled policy of the Riyadh regime.

“Saudi Arabia's fundamental position is that there is no obstacle to granting Palestine to the Jews," Sheikh Shams al-Din Sharaf al-Din said at a conference of Yemeni scholars entitled “Rejection of Trump’s deal and prohibition of normalization with the Zionist enemy” in the capital Sana’a on Thursday.

The pro-Israel lobby group AIPAC used to pride itself on doing its business in the dark. We work most effectively as a “night flower,” AIPAC operative Steve Rosen once explained to Jeffrey Goldberg.

Those days are now over, maybe forever. The rightwing group is controversial in ways that it never wanted to be.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told American Jews that he and the Trump administration are moving ahead with plans to remap the West Bank to give Israel sovereignty over large portions of occupied territory, and Palestinians are going to have to live with that plan “whether they accept it or not.”

Netanyahu’s discussion of Palestinian submission to the “radical” and “historic” terms of the Trump “peace plan” including annexation of all “Jewish communities” and military control of the West Bank sounded very much like surrender.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is confident he can block the International Criminal Court (ICC) from launching an investigation into alleged war crimes committed by his country against the Palestinians in the occupied territories.

While Israel is not a signatory to the ICC, it has sought to undermine the efforts of the international body by lobbying governments friendly to the Zionist state to support its campaign to disrupt the court’s investigation.

One prisoner was hospitalized for kidney failure and 11 broken ribs. Another had his genitals bitten by a security dog while a third man was left wheelchair-bound and unrecognizable.

Two Palestinian youths were injured with live fire during clashes with Israeli soldiers in al-Duheisha refugee camp in southern Bethlehem early Friday morning, as reports emerged of an Israeli army commander making repeated threats in recent weeks to make “all youth in the camp disabled.”

Local sources said that two youths were shot and injured in the legs during clashes that erupted after Israeli forces raided the camp in Friday’s predawn hours.

After lengthy delays, the United Nations finally published a database last week of businesses that have been profiting from Israel’s illegal annexation and settlement activity in the West Bank.

The UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Michelle Bachelet, announced that 112 major companies had been identified as operating in Israeli settlements in ways that violate human rights.

Aside from major Israeli banks, transport services, cafes, supermarkets, and energy, building and telecoms firms, prominent international businesses include Airbnb, booking.com, Motorola, Trip Advisor, JCB, Expedia and General Mills.

The Israeli Prison Services (IPS) has decided to reduce food amounts and many other services offered to Palestinian prisoners inside Israeli jails, Palestinian Prisoner Club (PPC) revealed on Monday.

In a statement, the PPC announced that this step is part of Gilad Erdan’s Committee, which decided in 2018 to cancel all the achievements that the prisoners gained throughout their struggle with the IPS.

The Head of the Popular Committee against the Siege in the Gaza Strip said on Monday that the Israeli siege of the Palestinian territory has pushed the youth unemployment rate up to 70 per cent.

Jamal Al-Khudari, MP, pointed out in a media statement that the ongoing Israeli siege has entered its fourteenth year and resulted in the closure of dozens of factories, companies and workshops.

An eight-year-old Palestinian boy lost his left eye on Tuesday, a few days after being shot by Israeli police with a rubber-coated steel bullet after he stepped out from a restaurant in occupied East Jerusalem.

According to the boy's family and eyewitnesses, Malek Issa was deliberately shot between the eyes on Saturday after he bought a sandwich in the East Jerusalem village of Issawiya.

Medics said the impact of the shooting was so severe that Issa may have suffered brain damage.

The U.S. mainstream media, with the New York Times in the lead, is covering up a shocking feature of the Netanyahu/Trump annexation plan that would strip 350,000 to 400,000 Palestinian citizens of Israel of their citizenship. The “denationalization” proposal is a crime against humanity, but the American press is ignoring it.

Thabet Abu Rass lives in the affected area, a predominately Palestinian part of northeast Israel known as “The Triangle,” where he heads an organization devoted to promoting peace between Israel’s Jewish and Arab citizens. Here’s how he translated the denationalization proposal:

US President Donald Trump's so-called deal of the century on the decades-old Israeli-Palestinian conflict is meant to liquidate the Palestinian cause, says the secretary general of Lebanon's resistance movement Hezbollah.

“It is not a deal. It is Trump’s proposal in order to eradicate the Palestinian cause. None of the Palestinian factions would approve the plan. This is fundamental to frustrating the US scheme,” Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah said in a televised speech broadcast live from the Lebanese capital city of Beirut as he addressed supporters on Sunday afternoon.

A UN agency published a report on Wednesday accusing Israel of imposing an “apartheid regime” of racial discrimination on the Palestinian people, and said it was the first time a UN body had clearly made the charge.

Israel’s foreign ministry spokesman likened the report, published by the UN Economic and Social Commission for Western Asia (ESCWA), to Der Stürmer – a Nazi propaganda publication that was strongly anti-Semitic.

The report concluded that “Israel has established an apartheid regime that dominates the Palestinian people as a whole”. The accusation – often directed at Israel by its critics – is fiercely rejected by Israel.

Israeli occupation authorities have started construction work on a new road that would link the illegal Jewish settlements of Eli and Shilo in the north of the occupied West Bank with the Jordan Valley.

Ghassan Daghlas, a Palestinian official in charge of the settlements file in the northern West Bank, told Wafa news agency yesterday that the settler-only road is about eight kilometres long, and passes through fertile agricultural lands in the Palestinian villages of Duma, Telfit, Qaryut and Al-Mughair, south of Nablus all the way to the village of Fasayil in the central Jordan Valley.

Israeli settlers set fire to a classroom last night in the occupied West Bank village of Einabus, in the latest apparent "price tag" attack on Palestinian communities, students and teachers told Middle East Eye.

Rateb Nassar, the deputy headmaster of the affected school, told MEE that Israeli settlers came from the nearby illegal settlement of Yitzhar, and threw burning materials inside one of the classrooms.

The assailants also spray-painted racist and anti-Arab slogans on the walls, threatening to kill Palestinians and burn their properties, he added.

“This is the most dangerous attack the school has witnessed, and it indicates that more settler attacks are to come," Nassar said.

The Trump administration has dealt another blow to the the flailing Palestinian Authority (PA) in the form of more budget cuts, this time to the PA’s security forces.

The State Department released its congressional budget request for 2021 on Monday; noticeably missing was funding for the Palestinian Security Services, which has received bipartisan support in congress for 27 years.

Last year, the US provided the Palestinians with an estimated $35 million for their security services.

Since President Trump took office, the US has been steadily cutting humanitarian and economic aid to the Palestinians, plunging the PA and other organizations like UNRWA into deep financial crises.

Had Edward Said been alive to witness the sordid spectacle of the Trump administration’s announcement of the so-called Deal of the Century, there is little doubt he would have been disgusted.

But he would not have been surprised.

After Palestine Liberation Organization leader Yasser Arafat signed the Oslo accords with Israel in 1993, Said saw, with his typical lucidity and foresight, the damning implications of this supposed peace treaty.

In the wake of the optimism that the deal engendered in some quarters, Said commented scathingly that the accords were “more flawed” and “more unfavorably weighted than many had first supposed.”

The US will not request Israel recognise the State of Palestine as part of its “peace deal” for the Middle East, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said in the cabinet meeting yesterday.

“We are already in the process of mapping the territory that according to the Trump plan will be part of the State of Israel,” the Times of Israel reported Netanyahu saying at a Likud campaign event in the illegal Ma’ale Adumim settlement on Saturday night.

“This will not take a lot of time and we will complete this,” he added, without giving more detail about how and when this will happen.

In January, US President Donald Trump unveiled his long-advertised Israeli-Palestinian peace plan at a press conference attended by American and Israeli officials. The deal de-facto recognises Tel Aviv’s claims to sovereignty over Israeli settlements in the West Bank, considered a violation of international law by the UN.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has said his country is in the process of mapping areas of the West Bank that would be subjected to an extension of Israeli sovereignty, following the publication of US President Donald Trump’s peace plan to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, The Times of Israel reported.

“We’re already in the process of mapping the territory that according to the Trump plan will be part of the State of Israel”, Netanyahu reportedly said during his party’s campaign event on Saturday. “This won’t take a lot of time and we’ll complete this”.

Iman Abu Tayem was six months pregnant when Israel attacked Gaza in November.

She became increasingly frightened on the second day of that attack. The sound of explosions near her home in the town of Bani Suhaila got louder.

One blast in the evening was so powerful that it made her fall to the floor.

Approximately 15 minutes later she lost consciousness. Muhammad, her husband, noticed that she was bleeding and called an ambulance.

She was brought to Abu Yousef al-Najjar hospital in the city of Rafah.

“I woke up in the hospital and my whole body was in pain,” Iman said. “The first question I asked my husband was if my baby was ok. My husband did not answer and I fainted again.”

By that time, Muhammad already knew that Iman had suffered a miscarriage. The hospital staff had told him the bad news about three hours after Iman was admitted during the early hours of 14 November.

The Festering Conflict

But dreams can only support a position so far, especially when a dream runs up against the full ugliness of formal subjugation of one nation by another nation. Palestinian nationalism will not go away. It will not be bought off with enticements in glossy brochures about economic development. Support for it will not be abandoned by other Arabs — as demonstrated by the firm position on the subject that Saudi King Salman has repeatedly expressed. Regardless of what is done in future years by whatever passes for Palestinian leadership, terrorists and other extremists will continue to exploit for their own purposes an unresolved Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

A week into the official unveiling of the Trump Administration’s “Deal of the Century,” there is no lack of analysis of how this “vision for peace to prosperity” legitimizes Israel’s numerous crimes, while fulfilling the country’s aspirations for acceptance into the region. And as we denounce this vision, it must be emphasized that it does not propose much that is novel, as much as it merely sets up an official, contractual framework for transgressions that are already “facts on the ground.”

President Donald Trump's national security adviser warned Palestinians on Wednesday that Israeli settlements will continue to expand because rising anti-Semitism around the world means more Jews will immigrate to Israel.

Israeli police injured 10 worshippers and detained three others after storming Jerusalem’s flashpoint Al-Aqsa Mosque Friday morning, an official said, Anadolu reports.

The Israeli police forced their way into the mosque and shot rubber-coated metal bullets at the worshipers, the official with Jerusalem Islamic Waqf, an organization responsible for overseeing the city’s Islamic and Christian sites, told Anadolu Agency.

This is the third Friday in a row that Israeli police stormed Al-Aqsa Mosque and attacked worshippers after morning prayer.

The US Department of Education has opened two separate investigations into the University of California at Los Angeles because of events that discussed advocacy for Palestinian rights.

The investigations have been prompted by complaints filed by Israel lobby groups, which allege that Palestine-related education or advocacy on campus is inherently anti-Semitic and discriminates against Jewish students.

They follow US President Donald Trump’s executive order, signed in December, which allows mere accusations of anti-Semitism against campus critics of Israel to result in lengthy inquisitions by the government.

Much of Donald Trump’s long-trailed “deal of the century” came as no surprise. Over the past 18 months, Israeli officials had leaked many of its details.

The so-called “Vision for Peace” unveiled on Tuesday simply confirmed that the US government has publicly adopted the long-running consensus in Israel: that it is entitled to keep permanently the swaths of territory it seized illegally over the past half-century that deny the Palestinians any hope of a state.

The White House has discarded the traditional US pose as an “honest broker” between Israel and the Palestinians. Palestinian leaders were not invited to the ceremony, and would not have come had they been. This was a deal designed in Tel Aviv more than in Washington – and its point was to ensure there would be no Palestinian partner.

Lots of hysteria about the border,

Here’s a story that’s not being told.

Israeli defense contractor turning US reservation into a total surveillance prison camp.

“Field proven” on Palestinians.

This reservation is first – and you’re next.

Damage caused by aerial herbicide spraying conducted by Israel on three consecutive days (January 14-16) along Gaza’s perimeter fence has become visible on crops in the Strip. Individuals working with London-based research agency Forensic Architecture collected samples from fields located east of Jabalya, in northern Gaza, at distances of 100, 200, 400 and 600 meters from the fence. The damage to the crops is clearly visible on the samples they collected. According to local farmers, dunams more of parsley, peas, wheat, barley, spinach and other produce were destroyed entirely. The effect of the spraying appears several days after the spraying is conducted.

White House senior adviser Jared Kushner said Washington wants Israel to wait until after its March 2 election before making any moves towards settlement annexation in the West Bank, following the announcement of a U.S. peace plan.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who has hailed the U.S. proposal, told reporters on Tuesday that he would ask his Cabinet next week to approve applying Israeli law to Jewish settlements in the West Bank.

On Tuesday, he called the plan “win-win,” though to whom the second win goes is hard to say.

The first is undoubtedly Israel’s, of whom the only thing that is being asked is a four-year settlement freeze while Palestinian statehood is negotiated.

Outside this exhausting demand to do less, Israel gets: all (or near enough) its settlements, all of Jerusalem, control over borders, uncontested military control over the whole area of historic Palestine, some one-third of the West Bank and the removal of any possibility that Palestinians who were expelled in 1948 could ever claim a right of return or even compensation for the lands and homes and years that were stolen from them.

It is little wonder that a beaming Benjamin Netanyahu, the incumbent Israeli prime minister who stood next to Trump as he presented the plan, looked more smug than ever.

It is true that Jared Kushner’s father had to give Harvard a $2.5 million bribe to get him admitted there, but the younger Kushner isn’t actually stupid. The internet is abuzz with comment about Kushner’s interview with CNN’s Christiane Amanpour, during which he disrespects Palestinians. As one commenter noted acidly on Twitter: “How to Negotiate A Peace Plan Step #1: Insult One of the Parties.”

Israeli soldiers patrolling a future Palestinian state should not be considered occupying powers, according to David Friedman.

The US ambassador to Israel, who is closely aligned to the Israeli settlement enterprise, suggested that US troops patrolling cities is various parts of the world were no different to Israeli troops walking the streets of Palestine.

“The United States has military presence all over the world. We have presence in Germany, Japan, South Korea, Philippines, I mean…none of those countries consider themselves occupied by the United States and certainly don’t consider ourselves to be occupiers,” said Friedman.

Yet again, the leader of a 'civilised' western democracy has told millions of Palestinians that we have no rights

A new wave of struggle has to start now for equal rights in one state on all of the land of historic Palestine

When Donald Trump announced his “peace plan” this afternoon, rightwing lobbyists for Israel crowded the room, including Sheldon and Miriam Adelson, John Hagee, Joe Lieberman, Malcolm Hoenlein, Alan Dershowitz, and Ron Lauder.

But if rightwing supporters love Trump’s plan to give Israel sovereignty over much of the West Bank, including Jerusalem, liberal and centrist American Zionists are horrified. They regard the plan as an existential threat to “the Jewish democracy.” These Israel supporters say the plan will move Israel toward annexing much of the West Bank, thereby ending any possibility of a two-state solution and leading to a binational state in which Palestinians will demand equal rights.

These Zionists are responding with alarm and rage to the plan and, joined by many leading Democrats, announcing plans to fight its implementation.

After much anticipation and with great ceremony, on Tuesday US President Donald Trump presented his plan for Middle East peace.

It’s “a great plan,” Trump had already said a few days ago, though he may just have been humoring his son-in-law Jared Kushner, its chief architect.

On Tuesday, he called the plan “win-win,” though to whom the second win goes is hard to say.

The first is undoubtedly Israel’s, of whom the only thing that is being asked is a four-year settlement freeze while Palestinian statehood is negotiated.

A right-wing Israel advocacy group has accused progressive professors at a Brooklyn, New York, community college of anti-Semitism.

It is threatening faculty members with legal action based on their perceived support of Palestinian rights.

These accusations are part of an expanding attack on students and faculty at US universities by Israel lobby groups trying to criminalize Palestine solidarity organizing by conflating criticism of Israel with anti-Jewish bigotry.

The Lawfare Project is representing a right-wing professor at Kingsborough Community College who had worked with the group to file a lawsuit against the college in 2016.

The Lawfare Project also threatened to sue members of faculty in October 2018.

US President Donald Trump will finally unveil his ‘great’ plan for peace in the Middle East before Israeli leaders visit Washington next week. While the Palestinians may not like it, it will be good for them, Trump said.
Trump has long teased the existence of a plan that would resolve the long-running dispute between Israel and the Palestinians, reportedly developed by his son-in-law Jared Kushner. Its release, however, has been repeatedly delayed.

On the way to an event in Florida on Thursday, Trump told reporters on board Air Force One that he intends to make the plan public ahead of next week’s visit to Washington by Israel’s caretaker prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his chief rival Benny Gantz.

"It's a great plan," said Trump, "It's a plan that really would work."

Technology developed in the context of the occupation is used by Israel’s seemingly benign precision agriculture industry. This civilian application allows Israeli military companies to promote “a sanitized version of their repressive technologies” as tools to combat climate change and world hunger.

Israeli agritech companies “develop and market smart irrigation systems, crop protection solutions and specialty fertilizers to farmers across the world, raking in billions of dollars in annual sales, while enjoying a positive ‘green’ image,” Who Profits states.

This industry contributes to agriculture in West Bank and Golan settlements, as well as the de-development of the Palestinian economy.

The Jordan Valley, the main agricultural region in the West Bank, is under full Israeli military control.

Dmytro Kuleba, Ukraine’s Deputy Prime Minister for European and Euro-Atlantic Integration, has been in Washington lobbying for the additional military assistance. He has had considerable success, particularly as there is bipartisan support in Congress for aid to Kiev and also because the Trump Departments of Defense and State as well as the National Security Council are all on board in countering the “Russian threat” in the Black Sea. President Trump signed the NDAA last week, which completed the process.

Christians from around the world have arrived in the West Bank town of Bethlehem ahead of Christmas day, while hundreds of Palestinian Christians from Gaza have been blocked by Israel from undertaking the pilgrimage.

Over 3.5 million tourists visit the city during this time, queuing to visit the grotto inside Bethlehem's Church of the Nativity, believed to be the exact site where Jesus was born.

Palestinian tourism minister Rula Maaya told AFP it had been a good year, but fewer Christians from the Gaza Strip were in attendance than in previous years.

Wadie Abunassar, an advisor to and spokesman for church leaders in the Holy Land, said out of the 951 applications from Gazans so far, only 192 had been granted.

This comes after Israel announced on Sunday that it will allow Christians in the Gaza Strip to travel to Jerusalem and the West Bank for Christmas, reversing an April decision to ban them from leaving the besieged Palestinian enclave.

In November, Israel conducted a series of air strikes on the Gaza Strip after it assassinated a senior Islamic Jihad commander and his wife.

The Palestinian armed group retaliated to the assassination by launching a barrage of rockets into Israel, before the two parties agreed on a ceasefire following joint Egyptian and UN mediation.

‘All that’s left are their school uniforms’: Israeli air strike kills eight Palestinian relatives
Read More »
During the two days of air strikes, at least 34 Palestinians were reported killed and more than 100 wounded.

No Israelis were killed during the same time period.

The deadliest of these attacks was carried out on the home of the al-Sawarka family, killing eight members of the family, including children.

A week after the strike, a ninth member of the family, Mohammed al-Sawarka, died from injuries sustained in the bombing.

Palestinian survivors of the 2014 war welcome the International Criminal Court's investigation into Israel, but ask why it has taken so long.

They wouldn't bring back our children'
Ahed Bakr, a father, grandfather and uncle of four children who were killed on a Gaza beach in a deadly attack on 16 July 2014, says it is "promising that there are finally international steps taken to at least recognise Israel's crimes against Palestinians after all this silence".

"What have they been waiting for, for more than five years, to finally take action? Everything was already documented by cameras," he says.

Ahed Atef Bakr, 10, Zakariya Ahed Bakr, 10, Mohammad Ramiz Bakr, 11, and Ismail Mahmoud Bakr, aged nine, were killed when Israeli forces shelled a beachfront in the west of Gaza City, during Operation Protective Edge.

A full investigation into alleged war crimes in the Palestinian Territories is to be launched by the International Criminal Court’s chief prosecutor, prompting a fierce backlash from Israel.

Fatou Bensouda said the probe could result in charges against both Israelis and Palestinians.

“I am satisfied that ... war crimes have been or are being committed in the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, and the Gaza Strip,” she said in a statement on Friday.

Bensouda added that because the Palestinian Territories had requested the intervention of the court she did not need to request approval from judges to start an investigation.

However, she has asked the ICC’s pre-trial chamber to rule on what geographical location it can investigate. The probe will be launched pending a decision on geographical jurisdiction.

Citing transcripts of Israel Police interrogations, British newspaper The Telegraph says the group is operating out of Istanbul, where at least 11 senior Hamas members are now living, with the Turkish president only telling the group to stay away from his own country's institutions

The prime minister's statement came shortly after the International Criminal Court Prosecutor Fatou Bensouda said she would open a full investigation into "the situation in Palestine" as it had been determined that war crimes had been committed there.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has slammed the International Criminal Court's intention to probe the situation in Palestinian territories. According to Netanyahu, the ICC has no jurisdiction to conduct an investigation in Palestine.

"The court has no jurisdiction in this case. The ICC only has jurisdiction over petitions submitted by sovereign states. But there has never been a Palestinian state," Netanyahu said on Friday.

The court's prosecutor Fatou Bensouda earlier in the day said that she would not require the authorisation of the Pre-Trial Chamber to launch the investigation as Palestine had asked for a probe

The US Ambassador to the United Nations Security Council, Kelly Craft on Wednesday slammed United Nations Security Council Resolution 2334 issued in 2016, which demands Israel immediately halt settlement activity in the occupied Palestinian territories including East Jerusalem.

Speaking at the Security Council headquarters in New York, Craft described the resolution as “one-sided” and “unfairly critical of Israel”; reiterating the full support of the US administration for Israeli settlement expansion in the occupied Palestinian territories.

Since 1967, hundreds of Palestinian bodies have been held by Israel: some in freezers, and others believed to be in the notorious “cemeteries of numbers”. Families of the martyrs have been trying to bring them back home.

Yet, the first demand of Palestinians is not for Israel to return our bodies; it is to stop killing us in the first place. Stop taking land, displacing families, incarcerating entire generations, and enabling a foreign population to take over what little remains of Palestinian cities, only to punish anyone who says “enough”.

One of the first bills to be introduced by Britain’s new Conservative government will reportedly stop "local authorities from boycotting individual companies", a move described as targeting the Palestinian-led boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) movement.

The Conservative Party election manifesto did indeed pledge to “ban public bodies from imposing their own direct or indirect boycotts, disinvestment or sanctions campaigns against foreign countries”, on the grounds that such moves “undermine community cohesion”.

It often seems that Israel’s actions in the West Bank are spurred by little more than a desire to compensate for lost opportunities and settle old scores, and Hebron is no exception writes Miko Peled.