A Palestinian teenager is suspected of carrying out a stabbing and shooting attack in the northern occupied West Bank on Sunday, leading to the death of an Israeli soldier and settler, and renewed tensions across the Palestinian territory. Israeli politicians immediately sought to capitalize off the violence.
In what may signal a major break in longstanding US policy, the State Department referred to the occupied Syrian Golan Heights as “Israeli-controlled,” as opposed to the usual “Israeli-occupied,” for the first time in their 2018 human rights report published Wednesday. In the report, the State Department also failed to refer to the West Bank and Gaza Strip as occupied territories.
Following Israel’s expulsion of the TIPH observer group from Hebron last month, a group of Palestinian activists from the city formed their own team of observers to fill in the gaps. Mondoweiss followed the team around one morning, and in the span of half an hour, the group, including our cameraman, were attacked and harassed by Israeli settlers, while one international activist who was filming the altercation was arrested by police.
Footage of Israeli soldiers violently beating and insulting a Palestinian father and son during an arrest in January was released on Tuesday by an Israeli district court, according to Haaretz. In the video, filmed by one soldier, four soldiers from the ultra-Orthodox Netzah Yehuda battalion are seen repeatedly beating the blindfolded and handcuffed father and son over the head, kicking them, and hitting them with their weapons.
For the first time in AIPAC’s history, the lobby group has invited a senior leader of the Yesha Council, an umbrella organization of municipal councils of Israeli settlements in the West Bank, to speak at its annual convention in Washington, D.C. this month.
The Palestinian Authority announced Sunday that it will be implementing a series of austerity measures in the wake of a major budgetary crisis, following a dispute with Israel over payments to families of Palestinian prisoners in Israeli jails.
Just hours after chairman of the far right Otzma Yehudit, or “Jewish Power” party, Michael Ben Ari was approved by Israel’s Central Election Committee to run for the Knesset on Wednesday, the same committee disqualified the joint Arab slate Balad-United Arab List from running. The committee also ruled to prevent Ofer Cassif, a Jewish representative in Hadash, from running. The claim against Cassif was, that he “denied the existence of Israel as a Jewish state.”
Mondoweiss speaks with Palestinian lawyer and political analyst Diana Buttu about the demise of the Joint List, and the challenges facing Palestinian politicians and voters in an increasingly right-wing political atmosphere in Israel. “The Jewish Power Party and the Kahanists have a much more negative influence outside of the country than inside,” Buttu says. “Not that people here don’t view them negatively, but for Palestinians, there really is no substantive difference between Jewish Power Party and Gantz.”
The US Government today folded the former US consulate in Jerusalem, which served Palestinians, into the Embassy led by ambassador and settler-advocate David Friedman in what Hanan Ashrawi of the PLO called “an act of political assault on Palestinian rights and identity.”
UK Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn called for Britain to cease arms sales to Israel following a UN report that the Israeli army’s actions against Palestinian protesters in Gaza’s Great March of Return could amount to war crimes. “The UK government must unequivocally condemn the killings and freeze arms sales to Israel,” Corbyn tweeted Friday.