Alya Zoabi has advocated for countless Palestinian families whose loved ones have been attacked, or killed, by the Israeli forces. But the injustice of the Israeli system hit home last month when her own brother was beaten and arrested by Israeli police in Jerusalem.
Israeli forces have killed five Palestinians over the past week, and 17 Palestinians since the start of 2022. Of the 17 Palestinians killed, three were children.
A young Palestinian girl was one of several Palestinians to be brutally assaulted by Israeli police forces in occupied East Jerusalem on Monday, as hundreds of Muslims gathered in the city to commemorate a religious occasion. Videos and photos flooded social media on Monday, showing armed Israeli forces brutalizing Palestinians outside the Damascus Gate area of the Old City in East Jerusalem.
Tensions are flaring again in Sheikh Jarrah as right-wing Israeli lawmakers and Jewish settlers continue to incite violence ahead of the looming displacement of another Palestinian family from the occupied East Jerusalem neighborhood. Scuffles ensued over the weekend after the far- right Israeli lawmaker, Itamar Ben Gvir of the Religious Zionism alliance, “opened” an office in Sheikh Jarrah, on the property of the Salem family, who are under threat of expulsion.
A 75-year-old Palestinian man from the village of Umm al-Khair in the South Hebron Hills in the occupied West Bank died on Monday, after succumbing to wounds he sustained when he was run over during an Israeli police raid last week.
Members of the Salhiya family in the occupied East Jerusalem neighborhood of Sheikh Jarrah faced off against Israeli police on Monday morning, as Israeli forces attempted to forcibly remove them from their home. A number of the young men in the family barricaded themselves on the roof of the home in an effort to stop the removal, and several news outlets quoted Mahmoud Salhiya as saying that he would set himself on fire and blow the house with the gas tank if the eviction was carried out.
Videos and photos of Israeli police violently suppressing Palestinian Bedouins in the Naqab have been flooding social media, as the campaign to #savethenaqab gained momentum amidst growing Israeli efforts to forcibly expel Palestinians from their lands.
Israeli prosecutors filed an indictment for reckless manslaughter against a border police officer for his role in the fatal shooting of Eyad al-Hallaq in May 2020. Al-Hallaq family’s attorneys said that while this was “an important step,” the charge was “not sufficient to achieve even a small part of justice.”
Israeli forces are rounding up Palestinians en masse inside Israel and the occupied Palestinian territory as part of what Israeli police are calling “Operation Law & Order”, following two weeks of Palestinian uprisings over Israeli aggressions in Jerusalem, Sheikh Jarrah, and Gaza.
Itaf Anabtawi says that she called the police to take her son Munir, 33, to the psychiatric hospital, where he was a patient, for urgent treatment. Police say Munir attacked them, and they killed him in self defense. “They didn’t have to shoot him the way they did,” Munir’s aunt, Siham, tells Mondoweiss. “It was an execution. They executed him.”