A Palestinian teen, Hassan Nabil Ahmed Nofal, 17, died on Tuesday in Gaza, four days after he was struck in the head by a teargas canister fired by Israeli soldiers during the Friday protests for the Great March of Return.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu announced last week that he would be expelling the Temporary International Presence in Hebron (TIPH), an international observatory task force that monitors Israeli human rights violations in the occupied West Bank city of Hebron. Other rights groups operating in the city now fear their work will be subject to further scrutiny, and settlers in the city might feel more emboldened in their attacks on Palestinian residents.
During a three period last November Christian Peacemakers Team Palestine observed on two separate occasions the Israeli military entered two Palestinian schools. Two students were removed from the premises of a school and transported in a military vehicle to an Israeli police stations.
Gaza photographer Mohammed Asad has just turned away from the fence protest Friday when he felt a sting on his cheek and his camera strap jerk and saw Mohammed al Jahjuh, 16, writhing on the ground Al Jahjuh had been killed by an Israeli sniper. Asad narrowly escaped death, but his $2500 Canon camera was destroyed. He will borrow equipment, he vowed, to return to the protests. Israelis don’t understand “the Palestinian’s stubborn brain.”
Two 15-year-old Palestinian boys, Shadi Farrah and Ahmad Al-Zaatari, were released on Thursday after almost three years of imprisonment by Israeli authorities in different juvenile detention centers. The two Jerusalemite minors were arrested at a bus stop in the city of Jerusalem in December 2015 and were later accused of “possessing sharp tools and endangering public security”, a claim that the families deny to this day.
In a first, US Ambassador to UN Nikki Haley declared that she would vote against a resolution condemning Israel’s control of Syrian Golan since 1967. Israel took the land for strict reasons of greed, as then Defense Minister Moshe Dayan conceded, though the illegal occupation is rarely mentioned in the US press.
Benjamin Netanyahu’s recent statement, “Empires have conquered and replaced entire populations and no one is talking about it,” is yet another fascistic justification for ethnic cleansing from Israeli leaders. It goes back a long ways, and it has support from the worst regimes in the world.
Maen Abu Hafez, 24, was born in Brazil to a Palestinian father from the Jenin Refugee Camp, and he has lived in the camp since he was 3 years old. However, Israel never issued his family an ID card establishing their residency in the West Bank and Abu Hafez is now facing deportation to Brazil after a routine traffic stop. Despite being Palestinians and living in an area under the control of the Palestinian Authority, the lives of the Abu Hafez family, and hundreds of families like them — a Palestinian married to a foreign spouse and their children — are in the hands of the Israeli government, who has control over the Palestinian population registry.
Human Rights Watch reports arbitrary detention and systematic abuse in Palestinian jails, prisons and interrogation sites across the West Bank and Gaza.
In Gaza, the medical system is near collapse, reports the Health Advisory Council of Jewish Voice for Peace. A Palestinian Center for Human Rights video shows that Israeli forces at the Gaza fence used excessive force against medical staffers, which resulted in the killing of 3 paramedics and the injury of about 103 medical staffers.