Scenes of chaos erupted in Gaza City on Wednesday, after UNRWA — the UN agency responsible for providing services for Palestinian refugees — announced that it would be laying off hundreds of its employees following massive US budget cuts this year. One Palestinian man, an employee at UNRWA, attempted to set himself on fire.
Israeli forces shot and killed a 15-year-old Palestinian boy in Deheisha refugee camp in an overnight raid early Monday morning near in the southern occupied West Bank city of Bethlehem.
“In my experience, nothing really changed with this law. The discrimination has always been evident since the inception of the state,” Amran Abu Houf says of the law defining Israel as the nation-state of the Jewish people. From lack of services in Arabic to discriminatory planning and housing policies, Israel has always favored Jews over Palestinians.
Critics of the Israel’s occupation can now be banned from giving presentations to school children, according to a law passed Monday night by Israel’s parliament, the Knesset. A spokesperson for the Israeli human rights group B’Tselem said he plans on ignoring the law.
After two Palestinian teenagers has been killed, and hundreds more wounded by Israeli airstrikes in Gaza, an Egyptian-led ceasefire was called on Saturday night between Israel and the Hamas and Islamic Jihad movements, who had fired several rockets into Israeli territory, injuring at least three people. Saturday’s Israeli onslaught on the besieged Gaza strip marked the most intense daytime assault on the coastal enclave since Israel’s 2014 offensive which left nearly 2,000 Palestinians dead.
The Irish senate has voted in favor of a bill banning the importation of products from illegal Israeli settlements in the occupied Palestinian territory, paving the way for the country to become the first EU nation to enforce a boycott of Israeli settlement goods.
Last month, the Israeli Knesset voted to disqualify a bill proposed by the Balad party that called for Israel “to be defined as a state of all its citizens” before it even reached the Knesset floor for deliberation. Yumna Patel interviews Balad MK Jamal Zahalka about the party’s motivation behind proposing the bill, its significance in the current Israeli political climate, and the consequences of the outright rejection of the bill and what it represents: “Israel has to decide, if they want a Jewish or a democratic state. They cannot have both.”
Just outside the walls of the Old City in occupied East Jerusalem, a years long demographic battle between the Israeli state and Palestinian residents of the city has found new life in recent weeks. Last week Israel advanced a bill allowing residential settlements to be built inside areas zoned for national parks in East Jerusalem. Jawad Siyam of the Wadi Hilweh Information Center tells Mondoweiss: “This is all done with the intention of emptying Jerusalem of Palestinians and part of the plans to make Jerusalem a Jewish-majority city.”
Today, Israeli forces shot 21-year-old Izz al-Din Tamimi at least two times with live ammunition and killed him during confrontations that erupted following an Israeli military raid on the village of Nabi Saleh in the occupied West Bank. Family member Nawal Tamimi told Mondoweiss, “After Izz al-Din was killed, I went to his mother’s house to pay my respects, and she told me that two days ago soldiers came to her house and told her ‘we will kill your son and leave you crying.'”
Last week, Egyptian President Abd al-Fatah al-Sisi announced the opening of the Rafah border crossing with Gaza for the entire month of Ramadan, which he said was “in order to ensure the easing of the burdens on the brothers in the Gaza Strip.” Mondoweiss spoke to several Palestinians — students going abroad to study or in search of jobs, people traveling to reunite with families, and injured protesters seeking treatment in Jordan — as they waited for their chance to leave Gaza. The journey out of Gaza is far from simple, as only a select number of Palestinians with permission are allowed to leave.