The Palestinian Ministry of Health confirmed that the man, 45-year-old Atef Hanaysheh, was shot with live ammunition in the head during a protest against settlement expansion and the confiscation of Palestinian-owned land in the village of Beit Dajan.
“We are turning people away, very sick people, because we have nowhere to put them,” a nurse who asked to remain anonymous told Mondoweiss. “At this point it’s like we were waiting for people to die just so that someone else can take their bed or their ventilator.”
On Wednesday, Israeli forces arrested five Palestinian children, ranging between the ages of 8 and 13, in the South Hebron Hills as they picked the seasonal wild flowers to bring back home to their families. Eyewitnesses say the children were first attacked by Israeli settlers, and then detained by Israeli soldiers at the settlers’ demand. “This was obviously an attempt by the settlers to intimidate the boys by using the soldiers,” eyewitness Basel Adrah tells Mondoweiss. “They didn’t steal or damage anything. All they were doing was picking akoub. Is this a crime?”
Palestinian-Americans were turned back from an Israeli vaccination clinic at a checkpoint outside Ramallah because they held Palestinian ID cards, and the U.S. Embassy won’t help them. “It would be different if all U.S. citizens here were being treated the same,” Wafaa Jallaq tells Mondoweiss. “But when Israel, or being Israeli, is basically the distinction between who gets vaccinated and who doesn’t, that’s when it becomes frustrating. The U.S. has let go of its responsibility towards its citizens in the West Bank.”
A new field report from Palestinian human rights group Al-Haq released this week details the numerous human rights violations that occurred throughout Palestine, particularly in the occupied West Bank, during 2020 — violations that the group said were exacerbated by, and spurred on, by the ongoing coronavirus pandemic.
This week will mark the one year anniversary since the first cases of the coronavirus were reported in Palestine, and a state of emergency was declared in the occupied West Bank city of Bethlehem, where Palestine’s COVID-19 outbreak began. One year later Palestine’s COVID-19 nightmare seems to only be getting worse. Cases are surging in the West Bank, causing health officials to declare a third wave of the virus, as many hospitals across the territory reach maximum capacity.
Palestinian politician Khalida Jarrar was arrested from her home in the occupied West Bank city of Ramallah on October 31, 2019, and has since been held in Israeli detention without charge or trial, under Israel’s widely condemned policy of administrative detention.
In a report published on Tuesday, Forensic Architecture and Palestinian human rights organization Al-Haq claim that Erekat was executed despite posing no imminent threat to the soldiers’ lives at the time, and was additionally denied medical attention by Israeli authorities after he was shot.
While Israel sends its vaccines abroad, and coordinates the purchase of vaccines to Syria, the millions of Palestinians living under Israeli occupation are still being left out of the state’s inoculation plans.