The past few months have witnessed a worrying increase in Israeli settler attacks, many of which have turned deadly. Those attacks are continuing on a daily basis in the West Bank, with full impunity for the settlers.
Israeli forces killed 20 Palestinians, including nine children in an airstrike on the northern Gaza Strip on Monday evening, the Ministry of Health in Gaza reported, as tensions escalated over Israeli aggression at the Al-Aqsa Mosque compound in Jerusalem. During the day Monday, hundreds of Palestinians were injured as Israeli forces continued their assault on the Al-Aqsa Mosque compound in occupied East Jerusalem, following several days of police violence and protests in the city.
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.
Bilal Bawatneh, Azzam Amer, and Khaled Nofal are the latest Palestinian victims in a spate of settler violence that has rocked the occupied West Bank in recent weeks, with new accounts of settler attacks on Palestinian civilians being reported in Palestinian and Israeli media nearly every day.
The Israeli settlers in the Nablus district are notoriously violent, and are routinely recorded as attacking Palestinians and their property year round. But once the olive harvest comes around every year, settlers typically focus their attacks onto Palestinian farmers and their olive trees.
It has been one month since Israel’s unofficial July 1st deadline to annex the West Bank passed. According to data gathered by Mondoweiss from local Palestinian news reports, from July 1st to the 31st, there were at least 25 reported incidents of Israeli settlers attempting to seize Palestinian land, setting up new outposts, attacking Palestinians, vandalizing Palestinian homes, mosques, and vehicles, and burning down Palestinian crops and agricultural lands.
15-year-old Mohammed Abdel Karim Hamayel was killed by Israeli forces as he participated in a sit-in to defend Palestinian land from Israeli settlers in the West Bank.
In Hebron last weekend, religious settlers attacked the family of Imad Abu Shamsiyeh, who is famous for filming an Israeli soldier murdering a Palestinian man, and his 1-1/2-year-old grandson was struck in the head with a rock.
David Kattenburg reports on the testimony of Yakov Berg, the CEO of Psagot Winery in the occupied West Bank, in a case pending before Canada’s Federal Court regarding the labeling of products made in the occupied territories. Berg says labeling his wine as anything other than a ‘Product of Israel’ would be discriminatory and antisemitic.
Since returning to Palestine last year after studying in the U.S., Hareth Yousef has been exploring the mountains and lands around Kobar, his family’s ancestral village in the West Bank. On one of those hikes he visited an abandoned farm known as Katilia, which his grandparents used to plant before an Israeli settlement known as Nahliel was built near there in 1984. Yousef writes about these trips, and what they have meant to him and his family.