Half a year, and nearly 54,000 cases of the virus later, the devastating effects that the coronavirus pandemic has had on the Palestinian economy and society are just now becoming clearer.
Israeli authorities have announced a temporary freeze on home demolitions in occupied East Jerusalem, following legal pressure amidst a rise in the demolition of Palestinian homes during the COVID-19 pandemic.
While the rate of COVID-19 infections in Israel has skyrocketed in the last week, Palestinian health officials are reporting more promising numbers, with the Ministry of Health reporting an 80% recovery rate among COVID-19 patients in Gaza, the occupied West Bank, and East Jerusalem.
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Like the rest of the world, Palestine has been hit hard with the coronavirus. The city of Bethlehem in particular has perhaps been impacted the most by the pandemic. At any given time of year the streets of Bethlehem’s Old City are filled with tourists from all over the world, but now shops have been closed and the streets are empty. According to local experts, short-term losses as a result of COVID-19 have reached up to 500 million dollars in Bethlehem alone, and people here are wondering if life will ever return back to normal.
After more than a decade of political strife, rival Palestinian factions Fatah and Hamas have agreed to hold elections for the first time in Palestine in nearly 15 years.
The Palestinian Minister of Health Mai al-Kalia told the Voice of Palestine radio on Tuesday that Israel “obstructed” the entry of 100,000 COVID-19 testing swabs that were destined for the West Bank. As a result, the Ministry will only have enough swabs to last them for three days, after which time the West Bank would run out.
As part of COVID-19 series in Palestine, Yumna Patel traveled to the Jordan Valley to see what life is like for Palestinians there as they fight two battles: one against the coronavirus, and one against annexation. “In this area, the occupation is even worse for us than the coronavirus pandemic. The occupation has taken advantage of the coronavirus pandemic to take over more land in the Jordan Valley,” Motaz Bisharat, a Palestinian activist based in the northern Jordan Valley tells Mondoweiss.
It’s been six months since the lives of Palestinians in the occupied West Bank were…
Five years after the vicious arson attack that killed 18-month-old Ali Dawabsheh, his parents Saad and Riham, and orphaned his then four-year-old brother Ahmad, one of the Israeli settlers responsible for their deaths was sentenced to three consecutive life sentences in prison.