[This is a roundup of news articles and other materials circulating on Palestine and reflects a wide variety of opinions. It does not reflect the views of the Palestine Page co-editors or of Jadaliyya.]
The Occupation Forces
How Israel is Waging War on Palestinians in Area C A new report in the Israeli publication Haaretz has shed fresh light on Israel's intensifying demolition campaign in Palestinian communities, leading to a stark conclusion: Israel is conducting a war against the very existence of Palestinians in Area C, sixty percent of the occupied West Bank.
'Between fire and fuel': Palestinians in Jerusalem Town Face Eviction Orders Israel operates pursuant to a law that stipulates that all real estate owned by Jews in the city (both east and west) before 1948 must be returned to the original Jewish owners or their heirs. The reason settler groups, backed by the government, target Silwan and have infiltrated it, is due to the town’s proximity to the Old City and its religious and historic importance, which has given Israel’s process of seizing homes in this area an ideological aspect.
Gazans are Sentenced to Death, Says Euro-Med Monitor at HRC The Euro-Mediterranean Human Rights Monitor described in an oral statement before the Human Rights Council yesterday the unilateral sanctions by some countries against the civilian population as "a lethal weapon that may lead to the death of civilians, especially in light of the unprecedented risks posed by the Corona pandemic."
Israeli Forces Halt Construction of Poultry Farm, Retaining Walls in Bethlehem Youth activist Ibrahim Awad-Allah told WAFA an Israeli military force stormed an area to the north of the village of al-Walaja and handed two local residents notices ordering them to stop the construction work on a poultry farm and retaining walls.
Israel Makes Hundreds of Palestinians Homeless During Pandemic Since March, when the first COVID-19 cases were confirmed in the occupied West Bank, Israeli Forces have demolished or confiscated almost four hundred Palestinian structures. That is almost sixty-five per month–the highest average in four years. So far this year, Israel has forcibly displaced about seven hundred Palestinians–most of them during the pandemic and half of them children.
Domestic Policy
Palestinian Factions Fatah and Hamas to Hold Talks in Ankara Palestinian party Fatah, which dominates the Palestinian Authority government in the occupied West Bank, will meet a Hamas delegation in the Turkish capital of Ankara on Tuesday as follow-up from a meeting earlier this month of the heads of Palestinian factions. The two rivals will discuss ending the internal division from when the Hamas movement took control of the Gaza Strip in 2007 after a pre-emptive coup by Fatah.
Pandemic Strains Rafah’s Health Services In 2015, the Palestinian Authority stated that it had allocated twenty-four million dollars so that new medical facilities could be built in Rafah. This sum was supposed to come from aid promised by various governments after Israel had caused devastation during its 2014 attack on Gaza. Earlier this year, the government of Qatar announced that it would soon implement a twenty-four million dollars project aimed at providing Rafah with a hospital. A site covering about five acres has been identified and the cornerstone has been laid. Construction work has, however, been delayed amid the COVID-19 pandemic.
Gaza: Available COVID-19 Swabs are Enough For 48 Hours Only Ayman al-Halabi, director of the Support Medical Services Department at the Ministry of Health in the Gaza Strip, stated that the ministry suffers from severe shortage in the number of swabs used to examine the emerging corona virus.
Palestinian Security Forces Arrest Supporters of Abbas Rival Dahlan Palestinian security forces arrested more than half a dozen supporters of an exiled Palestinian politician who some have accused of involvement in the United Arab Emirates deal to forge ties with Israel, a spokesman for his faction said.
‘A glimpse into the chaos’: How Israel’s COVID-19 Policy Neglects Palestinian Citizens Israel entered a weeks-long lockdown on Friday to stem a second wave of the coronavirus. As is in other parts of the world, statistics are showing that minority communities, in this case Palestinians, are being disproportionately affected by the pandemic. Six months into the outbreak, there is still a lack of reliable and easily accessible information in Arabic.
Knesset Rejects Bill to Ensure Full Equality Between All Israeli Citizens The Israeli parliament, the Knesset, has rejected a bill presented by Yousef Jabareen on behalf of the Arab Joint List intended to ensure full equality for all of Israel’s citizens, regardless of their ethnicity or religious affiliation. Jabareen presented his bill in advance of the twentieth anniversary of the Aqsa Intifada, which has become a cornerstone in the collective consciousness of Israel’s Arab citizens, who make up twenty per cent of the population. They suffer from institutional discrimination, exclusion, and hostility.
Foreign Policy
Explainer: Where do Arab States Stand on Normalizing Israel Ties? Various reports have shown that some Gulf Arab states have established covert ties with Israel in recent years, with some relationships dating back to the 1990s, when the US-brokered Oslo Accords was signed between Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization. Other countries have seemed less reluctant to publicize their relations with Israel, including Oman and Sudan, whose officials have met Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in recent years.
‘No peace’ in Middle East Without End to Israeli Occupation: Abbas Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas has harshly rebuked the normalization agreements signed by the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain with Israel at the White House, saying that peace in the Middle East region is only possible after Israel’s withdrawal from the occupied territories and recognition of Palestine’s rights to establish a state with East Jerusalem as its capital.
Palestine Renounces Arab League Council Chair to Protest Israel Normalization Palestine decided on Tuesday to give up its right to chair the council of the Arab League in its current session in response to the normalization deal between the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain and Israel. Palestinian Foreign Minister Riyad al-Maliki said, however, that Palestine will not withdraw from the Arab League's ruling body, of which the Palestinian Liberation Organization has been a member since 1976, because its withdrawal “will create a vacuum.”
Settlers and Illegal Settlements
Israeli Settlements Continue, Imposing Israeli Sovereignty Two days before the signing of the signing agreements, the occupation government approved the establishment of 980 new settlement units in the settlement of Efrat, which is built on citizens’ lands, south of Bethlehem, which is part of the process of annexation and the gradual theft of the occupied Palestinian land. This comes in advance of the ceremony of signing the agreements between the United Arab Emirates, the Kingdom of Bahrain and the government of Israel in the White House under the auspices of the American administration to deliver a message that it is proceeding with the annexation plan and the theft of Palestinian lands.
Chelsea Owner Abramovich ‘donated $100m’ to Israeli Settler Group Roman Abramovich, owner of English Premier League football club Chelsea, donated seventy-four million pounds to an Israeli settler group that displaces Palestinians from occupied East Jerusalem, an investigation by BBC Arabic found.
Israel Approves Construction of Nearly 1,000 New Settler Units in West Bank Israeli officials have approved plans for the construction of nearly one thousand new settler units in the West Bank in blatant defiance of international condemnation of Israel’s land grab and settlement expansion policies in the occupied Palestinian territories.
Fundraising For Israeli Terrorist Exposes Deep-rooted anti-Palestinian Racism Deep-rooted anti-Palestinian racism is endemic across large segments of Israeli society. This was demonstrated yet again when an Israeli crowdfunding campaign raised over 1.38 million shekels (equivalent to 310,000 pounds) in just five days last week for the legal appeal fund of Amiram Ben Uliel, the Israeli terrorist who received three life sentences for killing three members of the Palestinian Dawabsheh family five years ago.
Boycott, Divest, and Sanction Movement
Omar Barghouti is a Threat to Israel’s ‘universal security’ Per Israeli Lawmaker In 2016, then Minister of Transport and Intelligence Israel Katz, proposed “targeted civil eliminations” of BDS leaders. He said this at an anti-BDS conference sponsored by the centrist Israeli daily Yediot Aharonot. At the same event, Minister of Interior Aryeh Deri said that he was seeking ways to revoke Barghouti’s residency. Barghouti married a Palestinian citizen of Israel, and lives under residency status in the city of Acre.
Racist to Deny Us Right to Oppose Zionism, British Palestinians Tell Labour A group of leading British Palestinians have condemned what they say is a shrinking space in Labour to criticize Zionism and oppose Israeli policies. In an open letter to the party on Friday, the group rejected Labour’s recent attempts to conflate anti-Zionism with anti-Jewish hate, insisting on “the right of Palestinians to accurately describe our experiences of dispossession and oppression.”
Law and Prisons
ICC Closes Door on Gaza Flotilla Probe A panel of judges at the International Criminal Court has dismissed an appeal over the chief prosecutor’s decision not to proceed with an investigation into Israel’s deadly attack on a ship in international waters in 2010. Israeli soldiers fatally wounded ten people aboard the Mavi Marmara after raiding the ship, which was part of a civilian flotilla aiming to break the ongoing siege on Gaza.
Palestinian Women Suffer Sexual Abuse in Israeli Prisons: Report A group of Palestinian women has reported sexual abuse, including exposition to extreme body searches, by Israeli prison officials and interrogators at detention centers across the occupied territories. Dena Karmi, forty-one, a Palestinian woman, who spent sixteen months in an Israeli prison, told Turkey’s official Anadolu news agency on Monday that she was subjected to sexual harassment for two days at the interrogation facility run by the regime’s internal security agency, known as ISA, at Shikma Prison in Ashkelon.
Palestinian Prisoner From Hebron Completes 18 years in Israeli Jails A Palestine prisoner serving a sentence of thirty years in Israeli jails for resisting its occupation completed today eighteen years behind bars, according to the Detainees and Ex-Detainees Commission. The commission said Fathi al-Najjar, from the southern occupied West Bank district of Hebron, has been denied a much-needed medical treatment and examination by the Israeli prison administration despite Najjar’s deteriorating health condition.
Fears Over Most Vulnerable Palestinian Prisoners Amid Coronavirus The detainees’ commission has called on the Red Cross and the WHO to intervene to release prisoners who may be more susceptible to the coronavirus. According to the commission, there are five thousand Palestinians currently held in Israeli prisons, including seven hundred who are sick.
Environment, Economy, and Other
Second Grape Market Sheds Light on Farming Industry And Farmers’ Suffering The Second Grape Market, opened over the duration of four days in al-Khader town west of Bethlehem, represented an opportunity for Palestinian farmers to market their grape products at a time when they face problems marketing their land products for political and local reasons.
The EU and the Ministry of Agriculture Support Palestinian Farmers in Marketing Their Products Locally “Agricultural development remains a key requirement for a future independent Palestinian state. This is part of our contribution towards maintaining the prospects of the two-state solution,” said the European Union Deputy Representative Maria Velasco. The European Union is supporting the agricultural sector in Palestine with an emphasis on promoting an agribusiness in enabling the environment and mitigating the increasing risks for agriculture-based livelihoods, especially in Area C and the Gaza Strip.
Culture and Art
Bethlehem Joins UNESCO Learning Cities Network The Palestinian National Committee for Education, Culture and Science announced that Bethlehem became a member of the UNESCO Global Network of Learning Cities, an international network that supports and improves the practice of lifelong learning in the world’s cities by promoting policy dialogue and peer learning among member cities; forging links; fostering partnerships; providing capacity development; and developing instruments to encourage and recognize progress made in building learning cities.
A Palestinian Saga of Patriarchy And Occupation Sexual and gendered practices in Arab society stand at the core of this novel with Abulhawa going full force in her attack on patriarchy: With the exception of the Palestinian underground heroes of both sexes, most gendered interrelations in the novel are weighted against males. Sexual encounters are portrayed as emotionally sick, inhumanely cruel, and morally deviant. It is a full-blown anti-patriarchal attack, so much so that the second consistent track in the narrative, that of Israel’s Zionist settler-colonialist assault on all things Palestinian, nearly loses its violent edge in comparison.