The prospect of holding long awaited legislative elections in Palestine is quickly slipping away, as Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas is expected to announce that the elections, which have been 15 years in the making, will be delayed. The move comes as internal rifts continue to grow within Abbas’ Fatah party, with multiple contenders challenging the official slate presented by Abbas and his inner circle.
Human Rights Watch, one of the global leaders in documenting and combating human rights abuses around the world, released a report on Tuesday accusing Israel of the crime of apartheid. Echoing the findings of leading Israeli human rights group B’Tselem, which released its own report accusing Israel of apartheid earlier this year, the report says Israel “methodically privileges” Israeli Jews over Palestinians through discriminatory policies.
Palestinians in Jerusalem are reeling from a night of racist, anti-Arab violence that left over a hundred Palestinians wounded and dozens detained, following an ultra-right wing Israeli demonstration in the city during which Jewish mobs chanted “death to Arabs.”
In a matter of just two weeks, six Palestinian families, numbering 27 people, from the occupied East Jerusalem neighborhood of Sheikh Jarrah will be thrown out of their homes and into the street, and replaced with Israeli settlers. Now residents are doubling down on the campaign to #SaveSheikhJarrah.
It’s been more than 500 days since Amnesty International staffer Laith Abu Zeyad has left the boundaries of the occupied West Bank, due to an Israeli ban based on secret evidence. “It’s absurd that me and my lawyers are being forced to defend myself and argue against secret evidence that we have not even seen ourselves,” Abu Zeyad told Mondoweiss after the court hearing on April 6th. “The judge said the onus was on us to challenge the evidence, but we don’t even know what it is.”
The Biden administration has announced its plans to reinstate millions of dollars in aid to UNRWA, nearly three years after the Trump administration halted US funding for the agency. While Biden’s moves so far have been praised by the Palestinian leadership, the administration has made clear that it will not reverse some of the most controversial of Trump’s policies, including moving the US embassy to Jerusalem, or oppose normalization agreements between Israel and other Arab nations in the region.
UNRWA employees wear face masks outside a UN clinic in Deir El-Balah, in the center…
Itaf Anabtawi says that she called the police to take her son Munir, 33, to the psychiatric hospital, where he was a patient, for urgent treatment. Police say Munir attacked them, and they killed him in self defense. “They didn’t have to shoot him the way they did,” Munir’s aunt, Siham, tells Mondoweiss. “It was an execution. They executed him.”
B’Tselem researcher Nasr Nawaja’a tells Mondoweiss that intimidation from Israeli settlers and the Shin Bet has increased since a video he recorded showing the arrest of Palestinian children made international headlines. In fact, just a few days after the video of the boys’ detention was published, Nawaja’a says he was summoned for interrogation by the Shin Bet, Israel’s internal intelligence agency, and was warned to “not make any more trouble for the army.”
After months of delays, the Palestinian Authority (PA) began its public coronavirus vaccination campaign this week, albeit to a very slow start.