Day: 21 November 2022

RAMALLAH– The Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Expatriates today condemned the Israeli army killing of 18-year-old Mahmoud Saadi in Jenin and settlers beating and injuring the child Yazan Rajabi in Hebron, which it described as “a brutal attack by settler terrorists.”

“This heinous crime committed by the occupation forces is an integral part of the daily killing of our people under the cover and approval of the Israeli political leadership,” said the Foreign Ministry in a statement on the killing this morning of Saadi.

“The attack on the child Rajabi is part of the official Israeli policy of targeting the Palestinian generations, including children, through its various arms, aimed at killing Palestinian children and depriving them of the right to life, and to pursue and persecute them,” it said.

The Ministry held the Israeli government responsible for the army and settlers’ escalation against the Palestinian people in the occupied territories, calling on the international community and human rights organizations to provide protection for the Palestinian people and on the International Criminal Court to immediately open an investigation into the Israeli government and settler crimes.

SOURCE: PALESTINE NEWS AND INFORMATION AGENCY

GAZA– The Israeli navy Monday evening targeted fishermen offshore al-Waha and al-Sudaniya areas in the northern besieged Gaza Strip, according to WAFA correspondent.

He said that the Israeli navy intercepted and opened machine gunfire, tear gas and water hoses towards fishing boats sailing offshore the areas, forcing them for safety.

Two million Palestinians live the Gaza Strip, which has been subjected to a punishing and crippling Israeli blockade for 12 years and repeated onslaughts that have heavily damaged much of the enclave’s infrastructure.

Gaza’s 2-million population remains under “remote control” occupation and a strict siege, which has destroyed the local economy, strangled Palestinian livelihoods, plunged them into unprecedented rates of unemployment and poverty, and cut off from the rest of the occupied Palestinian territories and the wider world.

Gaza remains occupied territory, having no control over its borders, territorial waters or airspace. Meanwhile, Israel upholds very few of its responsibilities as the occupying power, failing to provide for the basic needs of Palestinian civilians living in the territory.

Every two in three Palestinians in Gaza is a refugee from lands inside what is now Israel. That government forbids them from exercising their right to return as enshrined in international law because they are not Jews.

SOURCE: PALESTINE NEWS AND INFORMATION AGENCY

BETHLEHEM– Dozens of Palestinians today suffocated as Israeli forces targeted a school complex in Tuqu‘ town, east of Bethlehem, according to a local source.

The town mayor Musa Sha‘er said that the gun-toting soldiers deployed in the vicinity of the schools complex at the northern entrance of the southern West Bank town provoked confrontations with the students and residents and showered them with volleys of tear gas canisters, causing scores to suffocate from excessive tear gas inhalation.

In late September, a seven-year-old Palestinian boy died after falling from a significant height while running away from Israeli soldiers in the town.

Rayyan Yaser Suleiman was coming home from school with other pupils in the town when troops gave chase, and he died on the spot from fear, his father Yasser said.

A medical official who inspected the boy’s body told Reuters that it bore no sign of physical trauma and that the death appeared consistent with heart failure.

Attacks on education by Israeli military forces and Israeli settlers in the Palestine constitute grave violations of children’s rights to education and development. These attacks are particularly prevalent in the most vulnerable areas of the West Bank – Area C, H2 and Jerusalem.

SOURCE: PALESTINE NEWS AND INFORMATION AGENCY