August 2022

Why Israel will attack Gaza again and again . .  Ali Abunimah  EI  08/08/22

EI’s Ali Abunimah tells Al Jazeera that Tel Aviv’s aim is to regularly terrorize Palestinians into submission.

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16-year-old Palestinian killed by Israeli settler fire   Mariam Barghouti Mondoweiss  01/08/2022

On Saturday, July 30th, the town of al-Mughayyir, bid farewell to one of their children, Amjad Nashaat Abu Alia, who was shot and killed one day prior, on Friday July 29th. Abu Alia, only sixteen years old, was killed as he tried to escape Israeli settlers and soldiers who were firing live ammunition and throwing stones at unarmed Palestinian protestors in the village, which lies in the Ramallah district of the occupied West Bank.

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18th  Palestinian teen killed Yumna Patel Mondoweiss  03/08/2022

According to Defense for Children International – Palestine, an Israeli sniper deployed on top of a residential building in the refugee camp shot 17 year old Dirar al-Kafrayni in the back from a distance of approximately 295 feet. He’s the 18th Palestinian child to be killed since the start of 2022.

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Israel tightens Gaza chokehold Maureen Clare Murphy 04/08/2022

The additional closure measures have disrupted healthcare for the daily average of 100-120 medical patients that cross Erez checkpoint in Gaza’s north.The continued prevention of travel for medical patients would amount to “premeditated murder,” according to the Palestinian Center for Human Rights.The capacity of Gaza’s health sector has been greatly compromised after decades of occupation, 15 years of blockade and multiple large-scale military assaults and many patients must leave the territory to access life-saving care. Even people whose permits were already approved by Israel are being prevented from traveling. Since 2007, nearly 850 patients in Gaza have died after their permits to access hospitals in the West Bank and Israel were denied or delayed.

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Children bear brunt of Israel’s savagery Tamara Nassar EI  07/08/2022

A ceasefire between Israel and the Islamic Jihad resistance group took effect before midnight Sunday, ending a deadly Israeli assault on Gaza. In the hours before the Egyptian-mediated truce took hold, Israel ramped up its killing and assassination spree for the third consecutive day. By late evening on Sunday, the Gaza health ministry said 44 Palestinians had been killed in the territory, including 15 children, since Israel started the bloodshed by assassinating a senior leader of Islamic Jihad on Friday afternoon. More than 300 Palestinians have been injured, almost a third of them children. No one was killed in Israel and there were no reports of serious injuries.

Al-Haq, a Palestinian human rights organization, said Sunday that Israel had “indiscriminately targeted civilians and non-military structures” and that the attack constituted “a grave breach of international humanitarian law and may amount to war crimes and crimes against humanity.”

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Attorneys threatened by Israel  Siham Rashid  Mondoweiss  08/08/2022

To the dismay and outrage of human rights defenders, the Israeli Ministry of Defense is threatening three prominent attorneys for representing and defending their clients.     Prior to an appeal hearing for Al-Haq and Defense for the Children International–Palestine (DCI-P), attorneys Michael Sfard and Avigdor Feldman received a letter insinuating that merely representing their clients and seeking due process constituted a violation of Israel’s 2016 Counter-Terrorism Law. DCI-P and Al-Haq make up two of the six human rights organizations that Israel designated as “terrorist” organizations in a flagrant disavowal of human rights.

The EU investigated the Israeli terror designation and found no evidence to substantiate these claims, further illustrating Israel’s political motivations behind the designation. The letter penned by the Israeli government threatening the defense attorneys came almost immediately after nine European Union member states decided on July 12 to resume the vitally needed funding of these organizations — funding that they had withdrawn for a period of nine months following the terror designation.

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More killings – in the West Bank  Ali Abunimah EI  09/08/2022

An early morning assault by occupation forces in the Old City of Nablus killed three Palestinians, including a child, and injured almost 70 with live ammunition. Hours later, occupation forces fatally shot another Palestinian child in Hebron. Among the dead in Nablus was Ibrahim Alaa al-Nabulsi, a resistance fighter who appears to have been the target of a pre-planned extrajudicial killing, along with a comrade, Islam Sabbouh.                                  According to an investigation by the Palestinian Center for Human Rights, early on Tuesday morning members of Israel’s special forces unit Yamam “sneaked into al-Habla neighborhood in Nablus’ Old City and cordoned off an abandoned house in the area.” Israeli forces closed off the surrounding neighborhood and then “heavily opened fire at the one-story house and launched several missiles at it.” . . . Sabbouh’s body was “badly burnt after the missiles directly hit him, rendering it difficult to identify him,” PCHR stated. Al-Nabulsi suffered gunshot wounds to the head and neck. He was taken to hospital where despite efforts to save him he was pronounced dead.

Read more: More killings – in the West Bank 

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Israeli court acquits soldier of the murder of 13-year-old girl in 2004 Tareq S. Hajjaj  Mondoweiss  10/08/2022

Eman Al-Homs was brutally killed in 2004 by Israeli forces in the Tel Al-Sultan refugee camp in Rafah, in the southern Gaza Strip. On that day, the hospital told the family that their daughter’s body had been riddled with over 23 bullets — fired into her body after her death. The Al-Homs family sued the Israeli army in 2004, citing the testimony of eyewitnesses as well as the testimony of the soldiers themselves, who were members of the brigade that carried out the murder and testified against the officer that, according to them, made the “confirming kill.” 18 years later, the Israeli court ruled to dismiss the case.Eman Al-Homs’ family petitioned the Israeli court, looking for justice, yet all they found out was that “the Israeli judiciary offers no justice at all,” Eman’s father, 68-year-old Sameer Al-Homs . . .

Read more: Israeli court acquits soldier of the murder of 13-year-old girl in 2004 

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Israel admits killing 5 children  Tamara Nassar EI  16/08/2022

The Israeli military admitted it killed five Palestinian children in Gaza earlier this month after initially claiming the atrocity was caused by an Islamic Jihad rocket that fell short.

The explosion took place around 7 pm on 7 August at the al-Fallujah cemetery west of the Jabaliya refugee camp in northern Gaza.

The children killed in the Israeli attack were Jamil Najmuddin Jamil Najim, 3, Jamil Ihab Jamil Najim, 13, Nathmi Fayez Abdulhadi Abu Karsh, 15, Hamed Haidar Hamed Najim, 16, and 16-year-old Muhammad Salah Hamed Najim, according to an investigation by Defense for Children International-Palestine. They were among the 17 children killed during Israel’s three-day military attack on Gaza that left almost 50 people in Gaza dead and more than 360 injured.

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Rona Sela EI  17/08/2022

The seizure of Palestinian cultural materials does not stop with the physical act of confiscation. Israel hides the materials in its archives, limiting access and preventing their exposure. Israel meanwhile classifies materials in an inaccurate and biased manner that suits the Zionist narrative. For example, the materials looted from Beirut are listed in Israel’s military archives as the “PLO archive” – a body that never existed.

My studies of the archive’s bureaucracy reveal the destructive colonial means by which Israel exerts control over Palestinian narrative and history.My goal has been to give this issue the exposure it deserves so that seized and looted cultural and archival materials are returned to their Palestinian owners and restored to the public sphere.

Read more: How Israel erases Palestinian cultural memory 

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7 Palestinian civil society organizations raided and shut down Yumna Patel Mondoweiss 18/08/2022

Six of the seven organizations were designated as “terrorist institutions” by the Israeli government in October 2021, and were subsequently outlawed by the Israeli military commander in the occupied West Bank.

The original six organizations are human rights group Al-Haq, prisoners rights group Addameer, Defense for Children International – Palestine, the Union of Agricultural Work Committees (UAWC), The Bisan Center for Research and Development, and the Union of Palestinian Women’s Committees. The seventh organization to be closed today along with the original six is the Union of Health Work Committees (UHWC).

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Supreme Court rejects appeal – schools to be demolished  Yumna Patel Mondoweiss 22/08/22

The petition was filed to protect two schools and 32 other structures, including a health clinic, from demolition in the villages of Khirbet al-Fakheet and Jinba, which lie in the heart of an Israeli military firing zone in the middle of Masafer Yatta. . . . Khirbet al-Fakheet and Jinba are two of eight villages that were named in a ruling by the Israeli Supreme Court in May, in which the court ruled that the Israeli army could demolish the eight villages and expel its residents so the land could be used as a firing zone.

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UK Updates

British government dismisses Israeli apartheid  Stuart Littlewood R I & A 08/22

There’s nothing quite so deplorable as trying to defend the indefensible. And the UK government has been caught out by a simple, sensible petition which calls for a review UK foreign policy in light of reports of Israeli apartheid. The petition says:: The government must review UK foreign policy towards Israel, taking into account the conclusions by Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and the UN Special Rapporteur for human rights in the occupied Palestinian territory, that Israel is implementing a system of apartheid against Palestinians.

The government has dismissed it with the usual inept excuses set out in a response from the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office that might as well have been penned by Tel Aviv.

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Children denied medical treatment  Fedaa al-Qedra  EI 30/08/2022

His health is deteriorating daily. Now, Saeed Jarghoon, 14, can’t walk. Saeed, from the city of Khan Younis in the southern Gaza Strip, has a cancerous tumor in his right leg.His condition is worsening because the Israeli occupation authorities are preventing him from traveling to Israel for treatment. He is not the only one. Physicians for Human Rights Israel recently announced that, according to its calculations, the number of children denied treatment outside Gaza had nearly doubled. This number includes children younger than one.

In September last year, Saeed underwent tests and PET and CT scans in an Egyptian hospital, after which doctors decided to transfer him to Israel. The tumor in his right leg, which was first diagnosed in 2016, requires advanced medical treatment that is not available in Palestinian hospitals.

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12 years in prison for Gazan aid worker  Jeff Wright  Mondoweiss 31/08/2022

During the past six years of his detention, Halabi has refuted all charges against him, several times passing on offers to plead guilty on lesser charges. As is often the case when Palestinians appear in Israeli courts, Halabi’s verdict and sentence were based on a secret file that his attorney was not allowed to see. World Vision described the ruling as “deeply disappointing and in sharp contrast to the evidence and facts of the case, “and affirmed its support for Halabi’s intent to appeal the verdict and call for a fair and transparent appeal process “based on the facts of the case.”

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