In May 2017, Donald Trump became the first sitting US president to visit the Western Wall. Now other international officials are following suit– despite the fact that it is illegally-annexed territory. A report from Raphael Ahren of the Times of Israel.

At Israel’s Checkpoint 300 in occupied Bethlehem, thousands of Palestinian workers queue for hours, starting at 3 am. The frantic clamouring has resulted in suffocation and broken ribs, and conditions have gotten worse in recent months, Al Jazeera reports.

The mayor of Hebron, Taysir Abu Sneina, held the Israeli army responsible for the death of a brother and sister, aged four years and 18 months, who died in a fire in their home, in the southern West Bank city of Hebron, after the military delayed Palestinian fire trucks and Red Crescent ambulances, at two roadblocks in the city.

The underground excavations carried out by Israeli settlers beneath Palestinian buildings in the East Jerusalem neighborhood of Silwan have caused landslides following the last winter storm. One slide has undermined a wall on a playground, and could be life-threatening.

Israeli soldiers assaulted, on Wednesday at dawn, a blind Palestinian man who also suffers from a kidney disease, after invading his home in Doha town, south of Bethlehem, in the occupied West Bank. “We first thought that they were thieves, and they started beating me up while shouting at me ‘we are the Israeli Defense Force’,” Monther Mezher said.

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.

Palestinian teen boys Hasan Shalabi, 14, and Hamza Shteiwi, 18, were the latest victims of lethal Israeli gunfire during the weekly protest Friday, the 46th week of the Great Return March. Seventeen others were wounded by live fire, including four medics and two journalists.

On January 30, Israeli soldiers shot and killed, a Palestinian girl, 16, at the Zaim military roadblock, east of occupied Jerusalem, reportedly after she “attempted to stab them.” The Israeli Police claimed that the child, Samah Zoheir Mubarak, 16, was carrying her schoolbag when she “pulled a knife and attempted to stab the soldiers,” when the officers fired several live rounds at her.

The United States Agency for International Development (USAID) will end all its projects in the occupied West Bank and the besieged Gaza Strip on January 31st following the US administration’s decision to cut funding to the Palestinians, Dave Harden, former USAID Mission Director and Managing Director of the Georgetown Strategy Group, confirmed on Thursday.

Last week, the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs released statistics ahead of the new year that showed a 69 percent increase in settler attacks on Palestinians in 2018 compared to 2017. OCHA recorded 265 incidents in which Israeli residents of the West Bank allegedly targeted Palestinians or their property. In total, 115 Palestinians were injured in those attacks and 7,900 trees and 540 vehicles were destroyed.