A 60-year-old Palestinian woman suffered a fatal heart attack overnight between Tuesday and Wednesday when Israeli army soldiers raided her home in the village of al-Zubeidat, north of Jericho in the northeastern occupied West Bank. Official Palestinian Authority (PA)-owned Wafa news agency reported that Hamda Zubeidat, 60, suffered a heart attack after Israeli soldiers threw a stun grenade at her house during a raid on the town.
Scores of Palestinians suffered tear gas inhalation as Israeli forces suppressed protests of Trump’s decision to recognize Jerusalem as the Israeli capital. Soldiers responded to a protest at al-Aida camp “by showering” it with gas, Ma’an reports. Last month, a UN official, Pierre Krähenbühl, said “health experts suggests residents of Bethlehem’s ‘Aida camp are exposed to more tear gas than any other population surveyed globally.”
Since the start of this year, 20 Palestinian patients from the Gaza Strip died due to an Israeli ban on their travel, Israeli newspaper Haaretz has revealed.
Dean Issacharoff, a former army lieutenant and member of Breaking the Silence, says he beat a Palestinian stone-thrower in the West Bank town of Hebron while trying to handcuff him in 2014. The Israeli Justice Ministry claims the event never happened and that Issacharoff had made a “mendacious claim.” Achiya Schatz, a spokesperson for Breaking the Silence, says. “This was a politicised investigation, made-to-order for the elimination of opposition (voices).”
The State Department threatened Friday to close the Palestinians’ Washington office unless they enter into direct negotiations with Israel. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson has determined that the Palestinians have run afoul of a condition in the law that allows their mission to the U.S. to function which prohibits the Palestinians from requesting the International Criminal Court, or ICC, to prosecute Israelis for crimes against Palestinians.
Speaking to a conference on settler population growth in the West Bank titled “On the Way to a Million,” Jerusalem Affairs Minister Ze’ev Elkin dismissed the idea of a Palestinian state, “Halas [‘enough’ in Arabic] with the story of two states. There is no other option but the state of Israel, certainly between the Jordan [River] to the [Mediterranean] sea there will be one state.”
Reuters reports on Palestinian couples who can only live together in a slum, “When 23-year-old Yacout Alqam, a resident of East Jerusalem, first met her fiancé, she loved that he was ‘very kind. Very free. Everything.’ There was just one catch: ‘The problem of identification cards,’ said Alqam, the wide smile on her small frame fading.”
Over the past year, some 16,000 applications to leave Gaza have piled up at the Israeli Liaison Office and still await a reply.
Tom Rollins reports for Al Jazeera: “Yarmouk camp remains open to the dead and closed to the living. This is the ironic reality in the southern Damascus camp for Palestinian refugees, which has been under partial or total siege since late 2012, barring most residents from exit and re-entry. Yarmouk has all but emptied since then, with multiple attacks causing mass displacements. Hundreds of Palestinians have died in and around Yarmouk in recent years, either as a result of starvation or a lack of access to medical supplies. But through a complex bureaucratic process, those who died outside of the camp have been able to secure burial within its borders.”
At least seven Palestinians were killed, and 12 others were wounded after Israeli forces blew up an underground tunnel between the southern Gaza Strip and Israel on Monday. “We will exercise our right to respond – this is our duty,” Daoud Shehab, a leader in the Islamic Jihad movement, told Al Jazeera, adding that it is a legitimate right of resistance groups to respond.