Israeli soldiers assaulted, on Wednesday at dawn, a blind Palestinian man who also suffers from a kidney disease, after invading his home in Doha town, south of Bethlehem, in the occupied West Bank. “We first thought that they were thieves, and they started beating me up while shouting at me ‘we are the Israeli Defense Force’,” Monther Mezher said.

A Palestinian teen, Hassan Nabil Ahmed Nofal, 17, died on Tuesday in Gaza, four days after he was struck in the head by a teargas canister fired by Israeli soldiers during the Friday protests for the Great March of Return.

Palestinian teen boys Hasan Shalabi, 14, and Hamza Shteiwi, 18, were the latest victims of lethal Israeli gunfire during the weekly protest Friday, the 46th week of the Great Return March. Seventeen others were wounded by live fire, including four medics and two journalists.

On January 30, Israeli soldiers shot and killed, a Palestinian girl, 16, at the Zaim military roadblock, east of occupied Jerusalem, reportedly after she “attempted to stab them.” The Israeli Police claimed that the child, Samah Zoheir Mubarak, 16, was carrying her schoolbag when she “pulled a knife and attempted to stab the soldiers,” when the officers fired several live rounds at her.

A Palestinian was shot dead by Israeli fire during demonstrations along the Gaza border Friday, the health ministry in the enclave said. Ehab Abed, 25, was “killed by Israeli occupation fire east of Rafah.”

The United States Agency for International Development (USAID) will end all its projects in the occupied West Bank and the besieged Gaza Strip on January 31st following the US administration’s decision to cut funding to the Palestinians, Dave Harden, former USAID Mission Director and Managing Director of the Georgetown Strategy Group, confirmed on Thursday.

Last week, the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs released statistics ahead of the new year that showed a 69 percent increase in settler attacks on Palestinians in 2018 compared to 2017. OCHA recorded 265 incidents in which Israeli residents of the West Bank allegedly targeted Palestinians or their property. In total, 115 Palestinians were injured in those attacks and 7,900 trees and 540 vehicles were destroyed.

Days after the New York Times said Israel’s killing of a Gaza medic was a possible war crime, Israeli forces targeted medical personnel at the Gaza fence on January 4 and wounded 6 of them, including one who was hit with a teargas canister while he was in an ambulance, the Palestinian Centre for Human Rights reports.

PNN: “According to Israeli information and reports, settler attacks on Palestinians classified as hate crimes have increased by 60%, from the previous year of 2017. Data indicate that, in 2017, there were 79 cases of aggression, but 2018 recorded 127 cases, which means approximately one assault every three days, to include the puncturing of car tires, the uprooting of trees, racist slogans painted on walls, physical assault, killing and assaulting animals.”

IMEMC reports: “An Israeli court sentenced the mother of a Palestinian who was killed by the army last year to eleven months in prison for what the military prosecution described as ‘incitement on social media.'”