Israeli forces killed unarmed Palestinian Saba Obaid, 23, yesterday during the weekly Friday protest in the occupied West Bank village of Nabi Saleh. He was shot in the upper body by a sniper and was pronounced dead shortly after in the hospital due to internal bleeding.
The Jahalin Bedouin in Jabal al-Baba face imminent demolition. Mersiha Gadzo reports: “Forty-two-year-old Atallah Mazara’a from the Jahalin Bedouin tribe recalls a time when residents were free to move, unhindered by concrete walls and unobtainable permits. Such a scenario today remains a distant dream, even though Jerusalem is only 2.5 miles away. Now, Bedouin communities stand in the way of the E1 zone, which would expand settlements from Ma’ale Adumim to occupied East Jerusalem.”
Hundreds of Palestinians gathered at the Rafah border crossing between Gaza and Egypt over the weekend, waiting for their turn to be let through the checkpoint. The three-day opening allowed medical patients, students, and travelers with foreign passports to cross. With huge numbers of Palestinians desperate to leave Gaza, travelers typically pay an exorbitant amount of money to local brokers who coordinate their passage with Egyptian authorities. It’s been reported previously that Egyptian authorities ask for bribes of up to $10,000. Mondoweiss spoke with some hopeful travelers about their experience trying to get across the border from Gaza to Egypt while they waited in line.
David Friedman, Donald Trump’s nominee as the next U.S. ambassador to Israel, may be controversial in the United States, but Israelis see him as a “warm Jew” who will restore amity between the countries’ governments. Both Friedman and Trump have been big supporters of Beit El, a settlement just north of Ramallah, and Shay Alon, the mayor of Beit El, says Trump made “an excellent choice”: “Friedman is a warm Jew who identifies with the roots of the state of Israel and Judaism. He is in the know of all things that have to do with our hold on the settlements, on Israel, and Judea and Samaria in particular.”
“We betrayed the legacy of the Holocaust when we’re committing acts like this,” Professor Yair Auron says. “To sell weapons to Serbia or to Rwanda during the genocide is similar to selling weapons to Nazi Germany during the Second World War. No country has the right to do it and especially not Israel.” Auron, a professor of Holocaust and genocide studies at the Open University of Israel, is on a mission to bring Israeli officials complicit in the Bosnian genocide to account.
One-month-old Jowan Abu al-Qi’an will most likely be the last person born in the village of Umm al-Hiran in the Negev desert. The house that her family built out of stone will be demolished, and the Bedouin village will soon be razed to the ground to make way for the new Jewish community “Hiran.” “We’d like to live together. We told them that it’s OK for us to live with Jews, but the court said no. This place is just for Jewish people,” Umm al-Hiran resident Hassan Abu al-Qi’an says.