Day: 13 July 2021

A Palestinian resident of occupied East Jerusalem proceeded last night to demolish his own house in Silwan neighborhood under pressure from the Israeli West Jerusalem municipality, which said the house was built without a permit and therefore should be demolished, reported WAFA correspondent.

Mohammad Nassar al-Husseini proceeded to tear down his house at Wadi Qaddum quarter in Silwan to avoid paying exorbitant costs that could exceed $60,000 if the Jerusalem municipality carries out the demolition on its own.

Using the pretext of building without a permit, which is rarely granted to Palestinians in the occupied city, the Israeli municipality has condemned hundreds of Palestinian-owned houses as part of a policy aimed to restrict Palestinian expansion and number in occupied Jerusalem.

At the same time, the municipality and government build tens of thousands of housing units in illegal settlements in East Jerusalem for Jews with a goal to offset the demographic balance in favor of the Jewish settlers in the occupied city.

Source: Palestinian New & Info Agency

The Israeli occupation forces today set up mobile homes on a 3-dunum area to the east of the occupied southern West Bank city of Hebron in what Palestinians fear is a prelude to building an illegal settlement outpost, reported WAFA correspondent.

He said the homes were set up on a piece of land owned by local resident Mahmoud Jaber, noting that the land is located near the illegal Israeli settlement of Kiryat Arba.

He said the forces fenced off the land in what residents fear it may be a step to establish a new Israeli settlement outpost.

Source: Palestinian New & Info Agency

The UN Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian Territory occupied since 1967, Michael Lynk, condemned the demolition by Israel of the homes and property belonging to the Palestinian Bedouin community of Humsa al-Bqai’a, in the northern Jordan Valley of the occupied West Bank.

On 7 July, the Israeli Civil Administration – the arm of the Israeli army which administers the occupation of the West Bank – accompanied by military troops, demolished 27 residential shelters, animal structures and water tanks, and confiscated the community’s belongings.

According to reports, 11 households – comprising around 70 people, including 35 children – were displaced. Among the sequestered possessions were food, water and clothing, leaving the community without shelter and sustenance in the summer heat of the Jordan Valley.

The community appears to be at a high risk of forcible transfer, Lynk said. Prior to the demolition, the Israeli Civil Administration had proposed to transfer the community to a different location.

“This demolition is both unlawful and heartless,” said the human rights expert. “As the occupying power, Israel is strictly forbidden from destroying Palestinian property unless it is absolutely required by military necessity during active armed operations.

“The forcible transfer of the inhabitants of Humsa al-Bqai’a is also strictly prohibited as a grave breach and a potential war crime under the Fourth Geneva Convention.”

Israeli forces demolished 55 structures in Humsa al-Bqai’a in February 2021. Eleven of the structures demolished this week were provided to the community as an international humanitarian response following the February 2021 demolitions. Humsa had also been razed by the Israeli military in November 2020.

“Humsa al-Bqai’a is one of a number of Palestinian herding communities in the Jordan Valley,” said the expert. “These communities are extremely vulnerable, both because they have limited access to water, sanitation, education and electrical power, and because the Israeli military has seized large swaths of their traditional lands for military firing zones.

“In contrast, the illegal Israeli settlements in the Jordan Valley are left undisturbed by the military. This progressive seizure of Palestinian lands, together with the protection of the settlements, is a further consolidation of Israel’s de facto annexation of the West Bank.”

So far in 2021, the Israeli authorities have demolished, seized or forced people to demolish at least 421 Palestinian-owned structures, including 130 donor-funded, displacing 592 people, including some 320 children across the West Bank, the UN Office of the Coordinator for Humanitarian Affairs says.

“The discriminatory Israeli planning regime in the occupied Palestinian territory results in a coercive atmosphere, where property demolitions, or the threat of demolitions, drives Palestinians away from their homes, lands and livelihoods,” Lynk said.

“We again call on Israel to immediately halt its property demolitions in the occupied territory, to ensure that its actions are strictly compliant with its international humanitarian and human rights obligations and to provide protection for, rather than displacement of, the protected population.”

The Special Rapporteur implored the international community to take meaningful accountability measures to ensure that Israel complies with its legal obligations.

“Criticism without consequences has rarely reversed illegal Israeli conduct in the past,” he said. “Accountability has to rise to the top of the international community’s agenda. Only by imposing an escalating cost to Israel’s illegal occupation will there be the prospect that these injustices will end.”

Source: Palestinian New & Info Agency

Minister of Foreign Affairs and Expatriates Riyad Malki today welcomed the position of the High Representative of the European Union for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy Josep Borrell who stressed the importance of resolving the Palestinian-Israeli conflict based on the principle of the two-state solution.

Maliki considered this position consistent with United Nations resolutions, and the terms of reference of the peace process, and provides the opportunity to launch real peace process and negotiations.

He stressed that solving the Palestinian issue is the natural and right gateway to achieving security, stability and normal relations in the region.

Borrell said during a meeting of the Council on Foreign Relations of the European Union that he expects Israel to offer a political perspective to end the conflict with the Palestinians.

“To find a solution with the Palestinians can only contribute to Israel’s security,” he said. “A credible engagement, a stronger relationship with Israel needs to revive a path towards peace and justice for Israelis and Palestinians both alike. We remain ready and willing to support both in the efforts to rebuild a meaningful political process.”

Borrell said that he listened to Israel’s Foreign Minister Yair Labid about how to improve the everyday life of the Palestinians in order to improve cooperation and working together towards resuming the holding of Association Council meetings if the conditions are met.

“For this, we need, on one hand, to reach a consensus among Member States and, on the other hand, Israel has also to do its part,” he said.

Source: Palestinian New & Info Agency

A total of 99 new coronavirus cases were recorded in Palestine in the last 24 hours and one death, today said Minister of Health Mai Alkaila.

She said in her daily report on the pandemic in Palestine that 82 new cases were recorded in the Gaza Strip and one death, while 92 patients have recovered.

The West Bank recorded 17 new cases and 21 recoveries.

Alkaila said 13 corona patients are getting treatment in hospitals, while six are in intensive care units.

She also said that 461,265 people have been vaccinated against the disease in the West Bank and 91,427 in the Gaza Strip.

A total of 98.4 percent of the overall coronavirus cases since its outbreak in Palestine in March of last year have recovered while 0.5 percent are still active as 1.1 percent have died.

Source: Palestinian New & Info Agency

Israeli army bulldozers today demolished stone fences, razed lands and uprooted trees in the village of Qusra, to the south of the occupied West Bank city of Nablus, according to Ghassan Daghlas, who monitors colonial settlement activities in the northern West Bank.

He told WAFA that a number of Israeli bulldozers demolished stone fences and a water well and uprooted olive and grape trees in the southern areas of the village.

He added that these areas are owned by citizens from the village and that the bulldozers have razed 10 dunums of lands reclaimed in 2015.

No reason was given for the army action.

Source: Palestinian New & Info Agency

On 8 July, the Israeli Supreme Court, in a sharply divided ruling of 5-4, accepted a petition against an amendment to a 2015 law considered as vengeful for denying social benefits to parents of Palestinian minors convicted of offenses classified as security or committed with “nationalist motivations”, primarily stone-throwing.

The petition challenging the law was submitted in April 2016 by Adalah – The Legal Center for Arab Minority Rights in Israel, together with Hamoked: Center for the Defense of the Individual, Addameer – Prisoner Support and Human Rights Association, and Defense for Children International-Palestine.

The Court held that the law disproportionately violates the constitutional right to equality. As a result, it froze the law for a year to allow the Israeli parliament, the Knesset, to address its flaws, and to find alternative legislative measures that would not infringe on the right to equality.

Passed in November 2015, the amendment denied social welfare benefits to Palestinian families, mostly from East Jerusalem, whose children (under age 18) are convicted and incarcerated in Israeli prisons for certain security offenses with “nationalist motivations”. Under the amendment, the parents of such children, were stripped of benefits including child allowances, supplementary employment payments, and alimony payments for the duration of their children’s prison sentences. Most of these cases involved stone-throwing, a practice commonly used by Palestinian children and youth during protests.

The law had a clear discriminatory impact, effectively amounting to the establishment of two separate penal codes – one for Palestinian children and another for Israeli-Jewish children, said Adalah in a press release. Social welfare benefits for Palestinian families whose children were convicted of stone-throwing were revoked, while Israeli Jewish families whose children committed much more serious crimes maintained the same benefits.

Moreover, this arbitrary distinction not only equates to unlawful discrimination but constitutes collective punishment and even revenge on Palestinian families through the denial of these benefits, said the rights organization.

Adalah Attorney Sawsan Zaher, who represented the petitioners, stated in response to the ruling: “It is clear that there is no constitutional possibility to defend this vindictive law, which produces one legal code for imprisoned Palestinian children and another law for other minors in criminal proceedings. Social welfare benefits must not be used for deterrence or as punitive measures, as this is contrary to the most basic principles of criminal law, especially since the amendment was deliberately approved to discriminatorily apply to Palestinian minors. This ruling comes after repeated opportunities given to the State to cancel or amend the defects in the law. No more opportunities should be given to the state to exercise the same unacceptable reasoning.”

Source: Palestinian New & Info Agency

Suha Ghassan Jarrar, 31, the deceased daughter of Khalida Jarrar, a former member of the Palestinian Legislative Council and a senior member of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine who is incarcerated by Israel, was laid to rest today in Ramallah in the absence of her mother.

Jarrar, 31, a research and advocacy officer at Palestinian human rights organization al-Haq, died of a heart attack at her home in Ramallah on Sunday evening.

The Israel Prisons Service announced on Monday that it would not allow the mother, Khalida Jarrar, a jailed senior member of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), to attend her daughter’s funeral.

Prior to that, rights groups, as well as Arab Israeli lawmakers, had asked Israeli Public Security Minister Omer Barlev to grant Jarrar a furlough to attend her daughter’s funeral. Dozens of demonstrators also protested for Jarrar’s release outside the Ofer military court on Monday evening.

In an obituary, Al-Haq said that Suha was “a fierce advocate for the rights of the Palestinian people to self-determination, freedom, and dignity”.

Al-Haq said it sent an urgent appeal to the United Nations calling for the “immediate and unconditional” release of Jarrar from Israeli prisons to bid farewell to her daughter.

Jarrar is serving a two-year sentence over her membership of the Popular Front for Liberation of Palestine, and is due to be released in a few weeks.

The 58-year-old politican has been arrested numerous times and held in Israeli administrative detention, under which Palestinians from the West Bank and Gaza Strip are detained without charge or trial for a period of up to six months.

Jarrar was first arrested in 1989 and held for a month without trial. In her second detention in 2014, she was sentenced to 15 months in prison. She was eventually released in February 2019, before being arrested again nine months later.

Source: Palestinian New & Info Agency

Palestinians today held a sit-in in the West Bank city of al-Bireh demanding the release of a 60-year-old health official held by Israel.

Palestinians organized a sit-in in front of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) premises in the city in protest of the ongoing detention by Israeli occupation authorities of the General Manager of the Health Work Committees (HWC), Shatha Odeh.

Odeh was detained in a predawn Israeli military raid in the Ramallah city neighborhood of Ein Misbah on Wednesday, July 7. Her vehicle was seized during the raid.

Weeks earlier, the occupation forces ransacked HWC office, confiscated its properties and documents, and forcibly shut the premises for six months. The closure was widely condemned, including by Amnesty International, which highlighted the “catastrophic consequences for the health needs of Palestinians across the Occupied Palestinian Territories (OPT).”

However, and in defiance of the Israeli military decision to close HWC for six months despite its location in an area under full Palestinian control, Palestinian health officials, workers, and activists broke the Israeli seal and reopened the office on June 17.

Odeh’s daughter, Sireen Abu Fanouneh, who participated in the sit-in, said that her mother suffers from health problems and is denied medication, clothes, and a lawyer’s visit while in detention.

Odeh is transferred from Hasharon Prison to the Israeli notorious detention facility of Ofer, west of Ramallah, for interrogation on a daily basis, which further exacerbates her health condition, Abu Fanouneh added, while noting that her mother is detained for her role in HWC, one of the most important Palestinian non-profit health care providers to the most vulnerable communities in Area C of the occupied West Bank.

Meanwhile, the head of HWC board, Ali Hassouneh, slammed Odeh’s detention as purely politically motivated and part of an organized criminalization campaign against the Palestinian society in general, and the Palestinian civil society in particular.

Hassouneh was joined by a chorus of other people who values Odeh’s role as a well respected civil society leader at the forefront of the struggle for health and social justice both locally and internationally, particularly that she serves as the chairperson of the Palestinian NGO Network (PNGO) and a member of the Global Steering Council of the People’s Health Movement.

Source: Palestinian New & Info Agency

US philosopher and academic Dr. Cornel West has resigned from Harvard University’s Divinity School, citing the institution’s anti-Palestinian prejudices as one of his reasons for doing so.

In a resignation letter dated June 30 and published on Twitter late yesterday, West said he faced discrimination during the time he worked at the university, including being given a lower salary than when he was first given a tenured position at Harvard, and also being rejected for tenure.

West said that “to witness a faculty enthusiastically support a candidate for tenure then timidly defer to a rejection based on the Harvard administration’s hostility to the Palestinian cause was disgusting”.

“This kind of narcissistic academic professionalism, cowardly deference to the anti-Palestinian prejudices of the Harvard administration, and indifference to my mother’s death constitute an intellectual and spiritual bankruptcy of deep depths.”

West, 68, graduated from Harvard and earned a PhD in philosophy from Princeton University, and he has taught at Harvard, Princeton, Yale and Union Theological Seminary over the years.

This is his second departure from Harvard; in 2002 he left the school after a public dispute with Harvard’s then-President Lawrence Summers, but rejoined the faculty in 2017.

Source: Palestinian New & Info Agency

The Ambassador of the State of Palestine to Ireland, Dr Jilan Wahba-Abdalmajid, has welcomed the report of the Joint Committee on Foreign Affairs and Defence on Displacement and Demolitions in the occupied Palestinian territory.

A recommendation made by the Committee in the report include “that Ireland, following on from its recent recognition that de facto annexation has taken place in the occupied Palestinian territory, now takes steps towards realising its responsibility to not render aid or assistance to Israel which would facilitate the maintenance of an internationally wrongful act of annexation.”

Dr Wahba-Abdalmajid commended the committee on their work on the report, which included testimony from her and from experts and civil society groups working on the issues raised.

The report called for an end to further evictions, transfer of settlers, semolitions, land appropriations, and pillage of natural resources in the occupied Palestinian territory and was stark in its conclusion: “Israeli land policy is racially based. Israel aggressively seeks to maximise the amount of land under Jewish-Israeli control.

The report added, “Palestinian rights, whether private or collective to land are neither protected nor respected by Israel. Israeli land policy has and is deliberately the pursuing goal of driving Palestinians from their lands. Israel implements these policies and practices to attain the enduring political goals of the assertion of sovereignty over East Jerusalem, the West Bank settlements and the Jordan Valley.”

“Israel’s land policy is an integral and essential part of the Apartheid system it operates throughout the entirety of Israel and the OPT.”

Regarding the forced displacement of Palestinians from the Sheikh Jarrah neighbourhood of East Jerusalem, the report found “the pattern of evictions, demolition orders and displacements are not random but appear to be strategically focused on altering the demography of East Jerusalem by targeting areas such as Sheikh Jarrah.”

The report also recommended that in addition to issuing statements of condemnation on actions taken by the Israeli authorities, Ireland should “agree a graduated set of proposals and concrete measures domestically, including diplomatic and economic and in conjunction with international organisations and bodies, to apply where further violations and breaches of international law occur in respect of demolitions, evictions, displacements, settlement expansion and de facto annexation.”

Ambassador Wahba-Abdalmajid saidI, “reland’s public representatives have once again set the bar for upholding international law and have demonstrated their strong commitment to human rights. Ireland is a leader in championing the rights of Palestinians and has indicated that Palestine will be a priority for them in their work on the UN Security Council.

“The recommendations in the report are to be applauded. The only way to end the injustice being perpetrated against Palestinians is to uphold international law and activate the existing framework for accountability. The impunity for the occupier and the occupation must end so that Palestinians can live in peace.”

Source: Palestinian New & Info Agency

Israeli occupation forces ordered today the demolition of agricultural and residential structures in the village of Azun Atme in the occupied West Bank district of Qalqilia, according to local sources.

An Israeli military force broke into the village and handed a notification for the demolition of two agricultural shacks belonging to two Palestinian citizens.

The Israeli military also ordered a halt on the ongoing construction of a house in the village, which belongs to a local Palestinian citizen who was identified as Mohammad Ismail Younes.

Israel occupied the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, during the 1967 Six Day War. It justifies the demolition of Palestinian homes by saying that they lack building permits, despite the fact that Israel very rarely issues such permits to Palestinians.

Meantime, Israel approves the construction of thousands of residential units within illegal settlements built on occupied Palestinian land.

Source: Palestinian New & Info Agency