Hundreds of Palestinians were injured and dozens were hospitalized on Friday night across the city of Jerusalem, as Israeli forces stormed the Al-Aqsa Mosque compound and continued to crackdown on protests against the imminent evictions of Palestinians in Sheikh Jarrah. The violence that erupted on Friday was the culmination of weeks of rising tensions in the city and across the occupied Palestinian territory.

Israeli forces shot and killed Palestinian teen Saeed Odeh on Wednesday night in the Nablus district in the northern occupied West Bank. “Israeli forces routinely unlawfully kill Palestinian children with impunity, using intentional lethal force against Palestinian children when they pose no threat,” said Ayed Abu Eqtaish of Defense for Children International – Palestine.

Palestinians in the village of Burin were just sitting down to end their daily Ramadan fast when they noticed smoke rising on the outskirts of the eastern part of the village. As the evening unfolded they were forced to watch as the night sky lit up their village with orange flames and clouds of smoke. By the time the settlers and soldiers retreated, and the residents were able to put out the fires, the damage had already been done. “That land was planted with hundreds of olive trees, many of them were more than 70 years old,” Walid Saeed, 70, a local farmer in Burin, tells Mondoweiss. “There is no way to describe how we feel in Burin after what happened. This land, these trees, they are our whole lives, our heart and soul. They mean everything to us.”

Dozens of Palestinians in the occupied East Jerusalem neighborhood of Sheikh Jarrah, who were set to be forcibly removed from their homes on Sunday, May 2, were given four more days by the Israeli Supreme Court to “reach an agreement” with the very settlers who have been attempting to force them from their homes for decades now. Members of the six families who are fighting to remain in their homes said they “firmly reject” the terms of such an agreement, “for these are our homes and the settlers are not our landlords.”

Recent racist anti-Palestinian riots in Jerusalem show that settler-colonial violence is fundamental to Israeli society.

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.

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.

By opposing and prohibiting funding to many of the Israeli policies of military occupation that violate the human rights of the Palestinian people, and by increasing the transparency around US weapons flows to Israel, Representative Betty McCollum’s latest bill is the boldest effort ever by Congress to ensure that the United States is no longer complicit in Israel’s denial of freedom to five million Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

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.”

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.”