The United States has placed its main diplomatic mission to the Palestinians under the authority of the US embassy in Israel, a downgrade that has sparked uproar among the West Bank leadership.

US secretary of state Mike Pompeo said the consulate general, which is currently a separate office in Jerusalem, would be closed down and replaced by a new Palestinian Affairs Unit inside their embassy which the US controversially moved from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem earlier this year.

The move would effectively mean the Palestinians are forced to recognise the US’s decision to label Jerusalem as the capital of Israel. It would also make David Friedman, the US ambassador to Israel, who is hated by Palestinians over his support for Israeli settlements in the West Bank, the main interlocutor with the Palestinian leadership.

Some 130 Palestinian protesters, including 25 children, have been injured by Israeli fire during anti-occupation protests at the Gaza border, according to the Gaza Health Ministry, amid Amnesty International's condemnation of Israel's newly proclaimed "zero tolerance" towards protesters.

Palestinian historian and analyst Jafar Ramini says that powerful Zionist lobbies are very influential in American politics to the extent that any American politician has to seek approval from the lobby in order to have a chance of being elected.
Speaking in an exclusive interview with FNA, Jafar Ramini said he believes that the powerful Zionist lobby controls American politics and consequently the American support provides the Israeli regime with the feeling of impunity to continue with its crimes against the Palestinians.

Commenting on the Saudi crown prince’s controversial remarks on formal relations with Israel, the Palestinian historian said that Mohammad bin Salman’s hunger for power has made him betray the Palestinian cause and to side with Israel.

Jafar Ramini is a Palestinian historian, writer and analyst on Middle Eastern affairs living in London. He has also shared his expert comments on many international news outlets such as Press TV and Radio Sputnik.

Scores of Palestinian protesters have been injured by Israeli soldiers near the separation fence in the east of the Gaza Strip. Israeli forces opened fire on Palestinians who demonstrated in their thousands as part of the weekly Great Return March Rallies. Press TV correspondent Ashraf Shannon brings us more details in the following report.

An Israeli court in Jerusalem has ordered two New Zealand activists to pay more than $12,000 in damages because the pop singer Lorde canceled a concert in Tel Aviv last year.

The two activists have rejected the ruling, which legal experts say cannot be enforced anyway.

Nadia Abu-Shanab and Justine Sachs say they won’t pay and are instead using the publicity generated by the case to raise money to support mental healthcare in Gaza.

The lawsuit was filed earlier this year on behalf of three Israeli fans of Lorde, under Israel’s anti-boycott law.

Israel’s high court on Thursday overturned a government decision to bar entry to Lara Alqasem, a Palestinian American student enrolled to study at Hebrew University in violation of the Palestinian call for a boycott of Israeli institutions.

Alqasem had been in detention since 2 October, when she was denied entry at Ben Gurion airport.

Israel’s strategic affairs minister Gilad Erdan said the decision to invalidate Alqasem’s student visa was taken because she had been a member of the University of Florida chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine, a group that supports the boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) movement for Palestinian rights.

Chief Prosecutor Fatou Bensouda released a statement, warning Israel that it might invoke the Rome Statute on violations over war crimes.

With strikes still ongoing, Israeli aircraft hit Hamas military bases, rocket manufacturing sites, underground infrastructure including a terror tunnel and tunnel dig sites in retaliation for early morning rockets that landed on a home in Be'er Sheva and off the coast of central Israeli city; one Palestinian killed, 3 others wounded.

West Bank farmers seeking access to their farmland located behind Israel’s illegal Separation Wall are facing intimidation and further access restrictions by Israeli occupation forces.

“When you go to that gate, there is a group of Israeli soldiers and the settlement guards. They keep people’s ID cards when they enter and hand it back to them on their way out,” one eyewitness said of the treatment farmers get in Salfit.

Farmers are forced in the system of so-called “prior coordination” ahead of the olive harvest, meaning that they seek approval from the Israeli occupation authorities in order to access their farmland which is surrounded by illegal settlements or which is located behind the illegal Separation Wall.

Hundreds of olive trees and vines were found destroyed on Sunday on land belonging to five different villages in the West Bank, reported Haaretz, citing Palestinians and Israeli human rights groups.

According to the paper, “in at least four of these cases, the trees were in plots Palestinians can only harvest under army supervision due to the plots’ proximity to settlements or outposts from which Israelis have attacked Palestinian farmers”.

Some 100 uprooted trees were discovered in the village of Mreir, 25 trees were damaged in Deir Nidham, and 59 trees were destroyed in Tal. In addition, 60 trees were damaged on land belonging to Far’ata, while in Al-Khader, south of Bethlehem, 370 vines and 30 olive trees were uprooted.

Haaretz noted that “in the last two months, ahead of the olive harvest, there has been an increase in the number of trees deliberately damaged.”

The United States does not recognize Palestine as a state, its envoys said on Tuesday as they opposed United Nations General Assembly move to enhance the stature of the Palestinian Authority.

“The Palestinians are not a UN Member State or any state at all. The United States will continually point that out in our remarks at UN events led by the Palestinians,” US Ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley said.

Just days after fuel tankers began delivering much-needed diesel oil to the Gaza Strip on Oct. 9, Israeli Defense Minister Avigdor Liberman halted the shipments in retaliation for Gazans' protests on the border with Israel.

Liberman tweeted Oct. 13, "As long as the events continue on the border and fire balloons continue to be launched toward Israel, no fuel shall be transferred to Gaza.” The protests continued, however, and on Oct. 16, an Israel Defense Forces plane fired on Palestinians allegedly launching the balloons. No casualties were reported.

Liberman's action was widely rejected by Israeli Security Cabinet members, who voiced concern that it would only aggravate the security situation on the border.

Defense Minister Avigdor Liberman on Tuesday called on his fellow ministers to approve a large-scale military campaign against the Hamas terror group in Gaza in light of ongoing riots and violence along the Strip’s security fence.

“I’ve held a series of meetings with the head of the Southern Command, the head of the [Gaza] Division, the brigade commanders, the battalion commanders, also with soldiers. My impression is that they all have reached the understanding that the situation as it is today cannot continue,” Liberman said.

According to the defense minister’s assessment, a “serious blow” to Hamas would result in four to five years of calm along the Gaza border — akin to the quiet that persisted from the end of the 2014 Gaza war, known in Israel as Operation Protective Edge, until the start of the current round of clashes in late March, a few limited skirmishes notwithstanding.

Israel must launch another war on Gaza to enforce its blockade on the territory, defense minister Avigdor Lieberman told reporters on Tuesday.

Lieberman’s comments came the day before Israel launched a series of airstrikes in retaliation for a rocket fired from Gaza that badly damaged a house in the city of Beersheba.

Lieberman also ordered the closing of crossings between Gaza and Israel and reduced the permitted fishing zone off of Gaza’s coast to three nautical miles – decisions described by the human rights group Gisha as “deliberate punishment of the residents of Gaza for no fault of their own.”

The health ministry in Gaza said that one Palestinian was killed as a result of an airstrike in the north of the territory. Three others were reported injured in Israeli attacks in Gaza’s southern and central districts.

Supporters of the BDS – boycott, divestment and sanctions – movement in Germany have won a two-year court battle against a local authority that could set a legal precedent for BDS activism in the country.

On 27 September, the administrative court of the northwestern German city of Oldenburg ruled that the municipality’s decision to cancel a 2016 BDS event had been unlawful.

It determined that the city council had “undermined the fundamental right of the applicant’s freedom of assembly” as well as freedom of expression, which, it added, “was (and is) severely interfered with.”

“The fundamental right to freedom of expression is, as the most direct expression of the human personality in society, one of the most distinguished human rights of all.”

Beto O’Rourke has become Texas’ progressive golden boy in his fight to oust Senator Ted Cruz in the upcoming midterm elections. But when supporters of Palestine asked O’Rourke – a Democratic member of Congress – about his stance on the issue, he sent a response that could just have easily been issued by a Republican.

The email from O’Rourke’s campaign described him as “a proud advocate of Israel.”

Israeli television recently aired a video of two Israeli soldiers filming themselves in the act of shooting a Palestinian protester at the Gaza boundary while cheering. Filming one’s own crimes against humanity – shooting Palestinians for sport – suggests a sense of security in never being held accountable.

Even more evidence of this impunity is apparent in Rise and Kill First: The Secret History of Israel’s Targeted Assassinations by veteran Israeli journalist Ronen Bergman, staff writer for The New York Times Magazine.

Prosecutors at the International Criminal Court might want to consider this book Exhibit A if Israeli government and military officials are ever indicted for war crimes. It contains open admissions of guilt in plotting and executing extralegal assassinations in violation of international law.

Israeli fighter jets targeted three areas in the Gaza Strip Wednesday -- retaliation for an earlier rocket attack -- amid intense rioting along the border that may lead to more attacks on Hamas.

Officials said the airstrikes killed a 25-year-old man. Earlier Wednesday, a rocket launched from the Gaza Strip hit a home in Beersheba, Israel. No injuries were reported.

"At 4 a.m. Israelis in the city of Beersheba were running to bomb shelters after a rocket was launched from the Gaza Strip at Israel," The Israel Defense Force said on Twitter. "We will defend Israeli civilians."

There were actually two rockets fired from Gaza, one of which landed in the sea near Tel Aviv. The IDF identified the area where the rockets originated and blamed Hamas.

Israel needs to decide if it is headed toward war in Gaza, Avigdor Lieberman says, and a military blow 'is the only way to lower the level of violence to zero or close to zero'

Last month Phillip Weiss and Donald Johnson wrote in a post that a standard for anti-Palestinianism would be helpful to

“… get people to start to realize the sheer ugliness of how false charges of antisemitism are used to support a racist cause. But that’s not going to happen if people only play defense.”

This triggered me to think about a definition of anti-Palestinian racism and how it can be used by activists for Palestinian rights.

Jewish Home, an Israeli political party sitting in Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s ruling coalition, has launched a poster campaign warning of inter-marriage between Jews and Muslims.

According to the Times of Israel, the municipal election poster campaign in Ramle features a young woman in a hijab “against a background of two white candles and a wine cup, items traditionally used to mark the start of the Jewish Shabbat”.

“Hundreds of cases of assimilation in Ramle, and no one cares,” the posters declared. “Tomorrow it could be your daughter. Only a strong Jewish Home will maintain a Jewish Ramle.”

There were reports of “angry scenes” at Queen’s University in Belfast yesterday, as protesters “confronted” the Israeli Ambassador to the UK, Mark Regev.

According to the Belfast Telegraph, some 70 pro-Palestinian protesters gathered outside the university, as the Israeli envoy gave a guest lecture to postgraduate students.

Earlier in the day, “a number of protesters took part in a sit-down demonstration blocking a corridor inside the building”.

Indonesian Foreign Minister Retno Marsudi yesterday expressed his country’s concern over Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison’s remarks that the country may move its embassy from Tel Aviv to occupied Jerusalem.

Marsudi called on the Australian government to respect the peace process and UN Security Council resolutions issued in this regard.

“Indonesia reiterates that [the political status of] Jerusalem is one of six issues that have to be negotiated and decided as a sustainable solution,” she said.

“Indonesia asks Australia and other countries to continue supporting the Palestine-Israel peace process in accordance with the principles that have been agreed and to not take steps that may threaten the peace process and world stability.”

More than a quarter of illnesses in Gaza are caused by water pollution, a new study has said, noting that this is the main cause of mortality in the coastal enclave that has endured an Israeli siege since 2007.

The study, which the Israeli newspaper Haaretz published a copy of, was carried out by RAND Corporation, an American NGO. It said that it reached these findings four years ago and that “since that time these numbers have continued to grow”.

Based on the report, Haaretz said that the collapse of water infrastructure has led to a sharp rise in germs and viruses such as rotavirus, cholera and salmonella.

Israel must launch another war on Gaza to enforce its blockade on the territory, defense minister Avigdor Lieberman told reporters on Tuesday.

Lieberman’s comments came the day before Israel launched a series of airstrikes in retaliation for a rocket fired from Gaza that badly damaged a house in the city of Beersheba.

Lieberman also ordered the closing of crossings between Gaza and Israel and reduced the permitted fishing zone off of Gaza’s coast to three nautical miles – decisions described by the human rights group Gisha as “deliberate punishment of the residents of Gaza for no fault of their own.”

The health ministry in Gaza said that one Palestinian was killed as a result of an airstrike in the north of the territory. Three others were reported injured in Israeli attacks in Gaza’s southern and central districts.

At least nine Palestinians, including a journalist, were killed by Israeli forces on the Gaza border on Friday, as thousands of demonstrators burned tyres and sent towers of thick black smoke billowing over the isolated Mediterranean enclave.

The latest fatalities mean that 31 Palestinians have been killed by Israeli snipers since Gaza residents last week began “the Great March of Return”, a series of weekly border protests demanding the right to return to their ancestral homes in what is today Israel.

Israeli occupation authorities yesterday, issued a confiscation order against 8,242 dunums (2,036 acres) of Az-Zawiya village’s lands in the Salfit district of the West Bank for alleged military purposes, Alghad TV reported.

The land is located in the west part of the village where illegal Israeli settlements are built on Palestinian land, including outposts that are not unauthorised by the Israeli authorities.

On Wednesday, the Israeli-Arab-Muslim TV host Lucy Aharish (the first to host a Hebrew-speaking show) and Israeli-Jewish actor Tzahi Halevy (known from Netflix TV series Fauda), got married.

Their ceremony was what could only be considered unofficial in Israel, at the beach in Hadera. This is because Israeli law does not permit interfaith marriage. The option left to such couples is to conduct an unofficial ceremony in Israel, but do the actual official marriage in another country, where this then gets retroactively recognized by the state. Aharish and Halevy have held the relationship under the radar for some three years, to avoid the backlash – which surely came. Various politicians from the right condemned and bemoaned the marriage.

The 20-year-old policewoman was arrested yesterday and appeared before Jerusalem Magistrate’s Court in a bail hearing. The court heard that the policewoman allegedly shot an unarmed Palestinian in the back with a sponge-tipped bullet “without any operational reason”, leaving him seriously wounded. The court’s judge, Elad Persky, said the policewoman seemed to have shot the Palestinian “as a dubious form of entertainment”, before ordering that she be held for another three days.

The attack is believed to have occurred in May, while the policewoman was on duty near the Al-Za’im checkpoint, situated near the illegal Israeli settlement of Ma’ale Adumim in the occupied West Bank. However, Israel’s Justice Ministry only learned of the incident recently “while investigating another case in which members of the Border Police allegedly beat a Palestinian for no reason”, Haaretz reported.

The Palestinian Journalists’ Syndicate yesterday condemned Israel’s shooting of photojournalist Jaffar Ishtayeh with a gas canister in his head, Shehab.ps reported.

The group also condemned the Israeli shooting of five other journalists and photographers as they covering the Great March of Return protests in Gaza.

In 2015, Israel approved a law that stipulated a 20 year prison sentence for individuals caught throwing stones. The intention was to target Palestinians involved in resistance activities, despite the discrepancies between armed Jewish Israeli settlers and Palestinians in terms of weapons available for them to use. “Tolerance towards terrorists ends today,” commented Israeli Justice Minister Ayelet Shaked. “A stone thrower is a terrorist and only a fitting punishment can serve as a deterrent and just punishment.”

Yet despite claiming that Palestinians who throw stones during clashes “provoke” unwarranted violence, stone throwing by Jewish Israeli settler-colonists has many precedents and victims, and is usually overlooked. The latest Palestinian victim of Jewish stone-throwers was Aisha Al-Rabi who was killed last Friday while on her way home in the car. Settlers hurled stones at the family car, killing Aisha and injuring her husband Yacoub.

The Israelis military is killing kids in the Gaza Strip – like, on the regular. You wouldn’t know it though; not unless you watch the BBC or Al Jazeera, that is. The uncomfortable truth is this: most Americans, frankly, don’t care. Most of the populace and a bipartisan coalition of nearly all policymakers are so reflexively pro-Israel that any critique of Israeli militarism is immediately labeled as anti-Semitism.

Nevertheless, Americans should start paying attention. We in the U.S. are, after all, veritably obsessed with our national security. So much so, indeed, that Washington has waged a perpetual "war on terror" across the Greater Middle East and Africa, restricted some civil liberties, and garrisoned the globe with hundreds of foreign military bases. The problem is that none of this expeditionary military action has made the homeland safer or lessened the appeal of violent jihadi Islam.

Gaza's Health Ministry says 32 Palestinians have been wounded by Israeli fire during a mass protest along the beach near the Israeli frontier.

Protesters threw flaming tires over the fence Monday, while fishing boats hoisted Palestinian flags. Israeli forces responded with tear gas and live fire.

The ruling Hamas militant group has been staging border protests for the past six months in hopes of easing a crippling Israeli-Egyptian blockade.

Mayor of Bethlehem, advocate Anton Salman said, in response to Sunday’s statements by Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Bethlehem and the situation of Palestinian Christians, that such a statement “is another Israeli attempt at distorting the reality of the Israeli occupation and particularly the effects that Israeli policies have had on the Palestinian Christian community since 1948.”

A dozen years ago Alison Weir described how U.S. media ignored a Palestinian death… This pattern has persisted year after year after year… And another Palestinian mother has just been killed…

Almost no one bothered to report it. A search of the nation’s largest newspapers turned up nothing in USA Today, the Boston Globe, Boston Herald, Chicago Sun-Times, Atlanta Journal-Constitution, San Francisco Chronicle, Seattle Times, St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Houston Chronicle, Tampa Tribune, etc.

An American student of Palestinian descent detained in Israel’s airport for nearly a fortnight has become an unexpected cause celebre. Lara Alqasem was refused entry under legislation passed last year against boycott activists, and Israeli courts are now deciding whether allowing her to study human rights at an Israeli university threatens public order.

Usually those held at the border are swiftly deported, but Ms Alqasem appealed against the decision, becoming in the process an improbable “prisoner of conscience” for the boycott cause.

The Israeli government, led by strategic affairs minister Gilad Erdan, claims that the 22-year-old is a leader of the growing international boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) movement. Activists like Ms Alqasem, he argues, demonise Israel.

Local sources, requesting anonymity, told Arabic-language Ma’an news agency that the victims, identified as Oqab Raji Mahmoud Abed al-Hafith and Ameer Hayel Raji, were struck near the village of Kafr Laqif, located 22 kilometers southwest of Nablus, on Sunday afternoon.

The pair was transferred to a nearby hospital to receive medical treatment.

Sources said Hafith had suffered serious injuries in the head, while Raji has sustained moderate injuries to his head and shoulder.

There have been scores of “hit and run” incidents targeting Palestinians in different parts of the occupied West Bank, with most of them largely going uninvestigated by Israeli authorities. Some of such events have resulted in fatalities.

A 21-year-old Palestinian died late Friday from the wounds sustained from Israeli gunshots, bringing to seven the death toll of Palestinians killed during violent clashes near the Israel-Gaza borders.

Mohamed Abbas, who was shot in the head earlier Friday by Israeli gunfire in eastern Gaza city, later succumbed to his wounds, said Ashraf Al-Qedra, spokesman of the Health Ministry in the Gaza Strip, ruled by the Islamic Hamas movement.

At least 252 Palestinians were injured during Friday clashes, as some 15,000 Palestinians participated in the demonstrations in several places in eastern Gaza Strip near the border fence with Israel.

Chanting anti-Israeli slogans, the Palestinian protesters burned tries, released dozens of arson balloons into Israel, cut the barbed wire of the border fence, and clashed with Israeli soldiers, eyewitnesses said.

The Israeli soldiers stationed on the border fired tear gas and even opened live fire at the Palestinian protesters.

Israeli Defence Minister Avigdor Lieberman has ordered deliveries of fuel to the besieged Gaza Strip to be suspended after protests on Friday during which the Hamas-run health ministry said seven Palestinians were killed by Israeli troops.

The suspension comes just days after a United Nations-brokered deal to supply the territory with Qatari-bought fuel came into effect.

The Israeli army said five Palestinians were shot dead on Friday after breaking through the fence that separates the enclave from Israel and attacking an army post.

But the Gaza health ministry said seven Palestinians were killed as thousands of protesters approached the heavily-guarded Israeli border.

Two New Zealand pro-Palestinian activists have raised NZ$17,576 ($11,435) as of Sunday for a Palestinian charity after being fined by an Israeli court for their alleged role in persuading pop star Lorde to cancel a concert in Tel Aviv last year.

Justine Sachs and Nadia Abu-Shanab said last week they would not pay the fine of 45,000 shekels ($12,416) awarded to three Israeli teenagers, calling the court’s ruling a “stunt” intended to intimidate Israel’s critics.

Instead, they asked people to donate money through website givealittle.co.nz to the Gaza Mental Health Foundation, a volunteer group that raises funds for mental health and women’s empowerment groups in the Gaza Strip.

As of Sunday, they raised NZ$17,576, according to the website.

Peace with Israel is impossible as long as the terrorist Benjamin Netanyahu is prime minister. This was my opinion in the 1990s and I still believe this today.

A terrorist wing, led by Netanyahu, exists in Israel and settlers and strangers claim that Palestine is their historical homeland. Some of their supporters are in the American policy circle and they have made President Donald Trump the official spokesman on behalf of Israel and its supporters in and around the American governing circles.

The highest Israeli officer tried for Israel’s 1956 Kafr Qasem massacre admitted that his trial was staged to protect Israeli leaders. An Israeli historian thinks the massacre was part of a secret plan to expel Palestinians from Israel

Israel’s Ha’aretz newspaper reports that the highest Israeli officer tried for Israel’s 1956 Kafr Qasem massacre admitted before his death that his trial was staged to protect military and political elites.

Israeli historian Adam Raz believes that a secret plan to transfer Israel’s Arabs was behind the 1956 attack, in which Israeli soldiers shot dead 19 men, 6 women, and 23 children (some reports give the total killed as 51). They were allegedly killed because they had violated an Israeli imposed curfew, of which they were unaware.

Insight refers to the sudden ability to see something in a way that profoundly clarifies our understanding. It allows us to revise our views from a totally new perspective. Insightfulness is an innovative mode. It offers an alternative, out of the box, vision of the world around us. Insightfulness is a key factor in any dynamic and vibrant discourse.

Donald Trump once advertised an Israeli-Palestinian peace plan as his greatest achievement-in-the-making, but like many of the president’s negotiations, the Kushner-Greenblatt strategy is a one-sided bargain, writes Patrick Lawrence.

Canada has announced that it is contributing $50 million to the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA).

Some $40 million would be allocated over two years to assist the health and education efforts of the refugee agency, a statement said.

Another $10 million is aimed at helping 460,000 Palestinian refugees in Syria and Lebanon.

International Development Minister Marie-Claude Bibeau said Canada’s new contribution would improve lives and “protect the human dignity” of millions of Palestinian refugees.

“This new funding to UNRWA is urgently needed, and it will bring some predictability to the agency as the needs on the ground are increasing,” Bibeau added.

An Israeli soldier killed a Palestinian teen along Gaza’s boundary when the detained youth tried to escape, according to a reporter who witnessed the shooting.

The slain Palestinian, identified as Ahmad Abdallah Abu Naim, 17, was one of seven killed during mass protests along Gaza’s boundary with Israel on Friday.

Journalist Muhammad Mahawish said that Abu Naim was among a group that had crossed the fence along central Gaza’s eastern boundary with Israel.

Police launch investigation into incident in which Aisha al-Rawbi, 47, from the village of Biddya, was reportedly killed by Jewish settlers who hurled stones at a vehicle she and her husband were riding in near Tapuach junction.

The Jerusalem's Magistrate's Court issued a gag order on Saturday over the investigation into the death of Aisha al-Rawbi, 47, from the village of Biddya in the West Bank.

The Palestinians say al-Rawbi was killed after Jewish settlers hurled stones at a vehicle she, her husband and their nine-year-old daughter were riding in near the Tapuach junction on Friday.

The court, at the request of the police, barred the publication of any detail from the investigation.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Sunday threatened "very painful blows" against Gaza's Hamas rulers if they don't halt protests along the perimeter fence that have led to clashes with Israeli troops.

Netanyahu said Israel is very close to waging a "different kind of activity" against the Islamic militants. He said "if it has any sense, Hamas will cease its fire and violent outbursts — now."

Hamas has orchestrated near-weekly protests along the Israel-Gaza boundary since March, pressing for an end to a decade-long Israel-Egyptian blockade of the isolated territory.

Israeli human rights organisation B’Tselem has published a video that shows Israeli occupation forces detaining two young Palestinian children in the West Bank city of Hebron.

“The Israeli military relies on a network of international companies, supplying everything from sniper rifles to tear gas, to carry out its massacres of protesters in Gaza. These companies are knowingly supporting war crimes, and are complicit in state-orchestrated murder.” — Tom Anderson, researcher for Corporate Occupation

Insight refers to the sudden ability to see something in a way that profoundly clarifies our understanding. It allows us to revise our views from a totally new perspective. Insightfulness is an innovative mode. It offers an alternative, out of the box, vision of the world around us. Insightfulness is a key factor in any dynamic and vibrant discourse.

'Yiska' Shadmi, the highest IDF officer tried for the Kafr Qasem massacre, admitted before his death that his trial was staged to protect military and political elites. Historian Adam Raz believes that behind the horrific 1956 event was a secret plan to transfer Israel's Arabs

MainAll NewsDefense/SecurityDM: No fuel for Gaza until violence ends

DM: No fuel for Gaza until violence ends
Defense Minister Liberman says Israel won't provide fuel, gas, to Gaza until violence - including incendiary balloons - ends.

Israeli Defense Minister Avigdor Liberman (Yisrael Beytenu) on Saturday said that Israel will not provide fuel or gas to Gaza if conflicts continue.

Liberman halted the transfer of fuel to Gaza on Friday, after several Gaza terrorists who detonated a bomb on the Israel-Gaza border fence and attacked an IDF position inside Israel.

Earlier on Saturday, Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh said that conflict would continue until Hamas' demands are met.

"Woe betide you if you cease the March of Return before the siege is lifted," Haniyeh told Gazans. "Our marches are not for the sake of fuel and money. They are our nation's natural right."

The only promise that is new about the promised peace plan is the way it will be forced on the Palestinians: no one has promised that the plan itself will be new. With Saudi Arabia and Egypt—the outside—brought onside with the promise of continued military aid despite their crimes against humanity and violations of international law and the Palestinians weakened by being silenced, economically crushed and stripped of any friends to help them, the United States and Israel are now free to attempt to impose a peace plan on the Palestinians.

The truth is that far from being the poor victim it likes to portray itself as, Israel is in fact the most aggressive and belligerent nation in the region, having invaded pretty much everyone it shares a border with.

The following maps show just who is wiping who off of the map!

Sometimes described in the media as “clashes,” the protests in Gaza involve heavily-armed Israeli snipers firing into crowds of unarmed young Palestinians. Those killed by IDF fire include journalists, medics and children.

A recent report revealed that the number of applications made by Israelis to obtain permits to carry personal weapons increased during the past two months by 183 per cent compared to the same period of last year.

The increase in the number of requests for permits to carry weapons came following Public Security Minister Gilad Erdan’s decision to ease regular restrictions imposed on that sort of security authorisations, Haaretz newspaper reported Thursday.

In August, Erdan announced the ministry’s resolution to simplify the permits granting procedure for Israelis, particularly in areas close to the zones populated by Palestinians and to the border.

Since then, 2,800 Israeli citizens have applied for permits to carry weapons, which marked a 183 per cent increase compared to the same period of last year.

Israel’s Ambassador to the United Nations Danny Danon issued a statement condemning the decision of the Executive Council of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO) to protect the Palestinian heritage.

The statement said that “this is an additional proof for those who did not understand why the United States and Israel withdrew from UNESCO. This proves once again that UNESCO is a body based on lies, biases and deliberate action against us. Israel will not be a member of an organisation that is trying to rewrite history and accept to be exploited by our enemies.”

Free speech and Palestinian advocacy groups have denounced the University of Michigan for reprimanding a professor who refused to write a letter of recommendation for a student looking to study in Israel.

John Cheney-Lippold, an associate professor of American culture, had agreed to write the letter, but later declined after finding the student was planning to study in Tel Aviv. The professor is engaged in an academic boycott of Israel amid its human rights abuses against Palestinians.

"I am very sorry, but I only scanned your first email a couple weeks ago and missed out on a key detail," Cheney-Lippold wrote the student, Abigail Ingber, in an email last month.

"As you may know, many university departments have pledged an academic boycott against Israel in support of Palestinians living in Palestine. This boycott includes writing letters of recommendation for students planning to study there."

Perhaps the most vocal champion of Palestinian rights in the US House of Representatives is Betty McCollum, elected to Congress since 2000 from St. Paul, Minnesota. Since 2015, she has led efforts in Congress to address the rights of Palestinian children living under Israeli military occupation.

Nearly a year ago she introduced HR 4391, the first bill in Congress which seeks to certify that US tax dollars do not fund Israeli military detention and abuse of Palestinian children.

“As an American and as a mother, I don’t think it’s a particularly controversial or a statement of moral courage to condemn a government that systematically arrests and abuses children,” McCollum said recently at a conference for Palestinian rights held in Minnesota.

A site of immense value to global heritage can be found in central Gaza.

With parts of it reported to be 1,700 years old, it hosted both a mosque and a monastery. Featuring three domes and ancient Greek inscriptions, the site is named after Saint George.

Though best known as England’s patron saint, George is widely believed to have been born and raised in Palestine.

In more recent times, Saint George’s Monastery – as the 200-square-meter complex is called – started falling into disrepair.

Nawa, a cultural group in Deir al-Balah, the city where the monastery is located, resolved to preserve the site and ensure it is of benefit to the local community.

In 2014, Nawa assumed responsibility for a project aimed at developing a children’s library on the site. The project was undertaken in cooperation with the United Nations cultural body UNESCO, which has restored the monastery.

The remand hearing in the trial of Raja Eghbarieh, former secretary-general of Abnaa al-Balad movement, who is accused of “incitement to terrorism” following publications on Facebook, has become a fascinating legal battle that raises fundamental questions about the policy of the Israeli police and prosecution regarding the freedom of expression of Palestinian citizens of Israel.

The time had finally come: the residents of Turmusayya, a lush Palestinian village nestled in a valley between Ramallah and Nablus in the central occupied West Bank, had gotten permission from Israeli authorities to go harvest their olive trees.

This chance only came twice a year: two days in the spring to cultivate their land, and two days in the fall to harvest the olives.

Filled with excitement and a sense of urgency, the villagers made their way to their farmlands, which are surrounded by an Israeli settlement and outpost. When they arrived, they were devastated to find dozens of trees chopped down, uprooted, and rotting.

The 40 olive trees belonged to 78-year-old Palestinian Mahmoud al-Araj, who had been tending to the trees since he was a boy.

“Some of these trees are 40, 50, 60, and 70 years old,” al-Araj told Mondoweiss, as he sat under the shade of a large olive tree that had been slashed at its trunk.

American graduate student Lara Alqasem has been sitting in jail in Israel for a week now after she was accused of supporting the Boycott Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement upon arriving in the country.

Alqasem, 22, was thrown in jail despite having a valid student visa, as she was accepted into Hebrew University in Jerusalem to study human rights. Alqasem's grandparents are Palestinian.

The BDS movement calls for an international boycott of products from Israel and divestment from Israeli companies in a bid to pressure the country into compliance with international law, particularly as it pertains to illegal settlements and human rights abuses.

Young Palestinians often describe their upbringing in the Gaza Strip as serving a sentence in “the world’s largest open-air prison.” Many struggle to imagine conditions improving after experiencing more than a decade of blockade that began in 2007 as Hamas came to power.

Over recent years, movement in and out of Gaza has tapered off with the number of exit permits into Israel for healthcare and all travel through Rafah dropping to around half of the 2012 levels. Alongside this, frustration and despair became rampant after successive failures between Israeli and Palestinian leaders to reach a lasting peace agreement to end decades of conflict.

One Palestinian told Mondoweiss, he believes the decade long siege that restricts travel in and out of the Strip is “eternal.”

French authorities have reportedly suspended their insistence on special labeling for West Bank products following a lawsuit alleging that the practice is discriminatory. The France office of the NGO Amnesty International complained about the suspension in a statement Wednesday. “Instead of complying with the request to end imports [from the West Bank], the government has chosen to roll back and suspend the demand for labeling,” the human rights group wrote.

Israeli authorities have refused entry to the occupied Gaza Strip to two members of a US medical delegation because they are Jewish, reported Haaretz.

Initially, the refusal was extended to the entire group, from the Washington branch of Physicians for Social Responsibility, citing the organisation’s alleged involvement with the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement.

After Israeli human rights NGO Gisha petitioned the Supreme Court, Haaretz reported, “the state backtracked on those two reasons and said it would permit eight of the delegation’s 10 members to enter the Strip as planned, on October 21”.

However, in regard to two of the members — “a neurosurgeon and a social worker with considerable experience treating people with trauma disorders” — the state said they required “additional security checks”. The state’s final response is reportedly due tomorrow.

Israeli human rights organisation B’Tselem has published a video that shows Israeli occupation forces detaining two young Palestinian children in the West Bank city of Hebron.

According to the NGO, on 13 September at around 7:30am Israeli Border Police officers detained two Palestinian boys who live in the Old City of Hebron: 13-year-old Q.R. and eight-year-old ‘A.H..

The pair were seized “on their way to school on a-Sahla Street”. According to the Israeli officers, “they had thrown stones at the nearby Checkpoint 160”.

After roughly grabbing the two children, the occupation forces “took the two to the Pharmacy Checkpoint, some 50 metres from the school”.

“There,” B’Tselem continued, “they were made to sit and forbidden to talk to relatives who came to the checkpoint.” After roughly an hour and a half, they were taken to a police station.

“Two Palestinian boys aged 16 and 18 were assaulted in Jerusalem on Wednesday by Jews believed to belong to a sect of the Bratslav Hasids”, reported Haaretz. However, when police arrived at the scene, they “arrested a Palestinian who had called for help rather than any of the Jewish suspects”.

According to the article, “the youths who were hurt on Wednesday said that they had been walking down the street when a number of youths cursed at them and yelled at them to go away. When they tried to leave they were smacked and kicked.”

“A Haredi adult helped extricate the youths from the area,” Haaretz noted.

After the two boys phoned Kamal Jabarin, “a youth counsellor for the city and brother of one of the assaulted teens,” Jabarin “tried to help get them out of the area, but the assailants followed close behind, shouting curses at them.”

Israeli minister of Strategic Affairs Gilad Erdan, on Tuesday, said he would reconsider his official stance on denying entry to an American student over alleged links to the boycott, divestment and sanctions movement if she publicly condemned a boycott of Israel.

Last week, Lara Alqasem was barred from entering the country despite obtaining a student visa from the Israeli constulate in Miami, because Israeli authorities claim she supported and took part in campaigns boycotting Israel. Since then, according to the PNN, she has been detained at Ben-Gurion Airport, pending a final ruling on her case. Her first appeal was denied. The second appeal is expected to be heard in the coming days.

In her testimony to the appeals court last week, Alqasem said, “I don’t support BDS. If I supported it, I wouldn’t be able to come to Israel as a student.”

Thanks to Laura MacDonald for bringing to our attention the revealing thread that begins with Richard Silverstein lamenting over being suspended from Twitter and infringing on his freedom of speech. This phenomenon of thought police is unfortunate, and we see this happening all over social media. However, it doesn’t take long before we see Silverstein engages in this very same reprehensible practice, blocking anyone who challenges his opinion or who expresses a view point he doesn’t agree with.

For some, Lara Alqasem may be taking a noble stance by insisting that she ought to be allowed to study at Hebrew University in Jerusalem, despite the Israeli government’s effort to deport her.

It is intuitive and natural to stand by any Palestinian, especially when they are in Israeli detention, and to that extent she deserves solidarity.

But her actions merit a closer look from the perspective of their impact on efforts led by Palestinians to hold Israel accountable for catastrophic and ongoing violations of their rights.

A Palestinian state has always been a fiction for Zionists. Therefore, the notion of partition in any form of historical Palestine was only ever endorsed by Zionists as a political-diplomatic means towards overtaking more territory and dispossessing more Palestinians.

To demonstrate this, I shall first go back to an early partition plan – that of the British Royal Peel Commission of 1937, to gradually reach our present day.

Eleven Palestinian protesters were wounded by Israeli fire during a protest along Gaza's coast on Monday, according to the Gaza Health Ministry.

Protesters were marking the 12 years since Israel imposed a blocked on the Gaza Strip. Several boats joined the protest, as those on land burned tires and threw stones over the border with Israel. Israeli forces responded with teargas and live fire.

The Trump administration’s policies don’t represent a radical shift. The White House has simply abandoned the facade of neutrality and rubber-stamped the Israeli government’s agenda.

Chairman of Foreign Affairs and Defence Committee at the Israeli Knesset Avi Dichter was described on Monday as a “warmonger” and “war criminal” at the EU Parliament, international and Israeli news agencies reported.

Dichter was there, Israeli media said, to speak about the two Israeli Jewish settlers who were killed in the occupied West Bank last week. However, he encountered a “severe wave of criticism”, Israeli media said.

Portuguese MEP Ana Gomes said that the president had been “honoured” to invite Dichter to address the EU Parliament, but she was “disgusted”.

“As head of the Shin Bet [Israel Security Agency], he masterminded the policy of targeted killings, in which many died in extrajudicial killings. He also initiated the racist nation-state bill, which I think makes Palestinian citizens of Arab origin second class citizens,” Gomes said.

Scores of Jewish settlers vandalised a dozen private vehicles in the Palestinian village of Karyout in the Israeli-occupied West Bank today, according to a local official.

“Settlers stormed the village, located south of Nablus, and slashed the tyres of several cars parked in the area before painting racist slogans on them,” Ghassan Daghlas, a Palestinian official in charge of settlement affairs, told Anadolu Agency.

Jewish settlers, he added, had recently stepped up their attacks on Palestinian villages, since the region’s farmers are currently busy harvesting their olive crops.

Olive production – from an estimated 27 million olive trees – represents a primary source of income for over 100,000 Palestinian families in the West Bank.

The claims made by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as he stood at the UN podium regarding what he considered Iran’s violation of the nuclear agreement with the global super powers in 2015 are part of a series of claims that began after Netanyahu became prime minister in 2009. The claims have been ongoing and growing in frequency and fierceness, especially in light of the Iranian military concentration in Syria.

Every time Netanyahu comes to the United Nations General Assembly he carries an armful of documents, pictures and statements, to incite the international public opinion against Iran and its allies in the region. This time, Hezbollah was the focus of his evidence and claims, as he claimed there were precision rockets just a few kilometres from the Rafic Hariri International Airport, specifically under a stadium in the southern suburb of Beirut.

Since March 30, Palestinian refugees in the Gaza Strip — including families, women, and children — have gathered along the Israeli border to highlight their dispossession in 1948 and protest the growing humanitarian catastrophe.

Israeli forces have killed about 198 and injured 22,000 protesters, including women, children, disabled individuals, medics, and journalists, since the beginning of the Great Return March on Palestinian Land. Many have been shot in the back.

“Whatever a soldier believes when they begin their military service, there is no way to behave ethically in the occupied territories,” he says. “It’s a system in which Palestinians are always treated as inferior, always viewed as the enemy, whoever they are.

“Every day the job is to inflict collective punishment. We were told explicitly that we were waging psychological war, that we were there to intimidate them.

“In the middle of the night we raided families’ homes, chosen randomly, waking up frightened children. We violently broke up Palestinian protests. I arrested Palestinians every day to ‘dry them out’ – to teach them a lesson, to make them understand who is boss.”

The Israeli courts are keeping Arab political leader Raja Eghbaria in detention at least until 15 October; the prosecutor doesn’t deny existence of multiple errors in its translation of Eghbaria’s Arabic-language Facebook posts, but says ‘it doesn’t matter.’

An Israeli prosecutor revealed in court yesterday, 7 October 2018, that the state has only ever sought detention until the end of court proceedings for Arab suspects in online incitement to terror cases – but never for Jewish suspects.

A Palestinian was forced to demolish his own home, on Monday, in the Beit Hanina neighborhood of occupied East Jerusalem, after receiving demolition threats from the Jerusalem municipality.

Ayman Naim Kawasbeh told Ma’an News Agency that he removed furniture and other belongings, and proceeded to demolish the home in which he had lived, along with his wife and six children, for a decade. The youngest child is three years old, while the oldest is 17.

Still under detention in Israel after a failed attempt to visit, University of Florida student and US citizen Lara Alqasem’s tentative links to the BDS movement have made her a major target for Israel’s far-right government.

Strategic Affairs Minister Gilad Erdan suggested that Alqasem could be released, and that he might even “consider” allowing her to visit Israel, if by Wednesday morning she publicly renouncing BDS in general as illegitimate and apologizes for “what she did.”

Enrolled as a master’s student at Hebrew University of Jerusalem, what Alqasem did was be the president of a sparsely attended chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine, and one, according to Facebook, attend a rally of as many as 19 people calling to boycott an Israeli brand of hummus.

Gaza's Health Ministry says 11 Palestinians have been wounded by Israeli gunfire in a protest along the territory's land and sea boundary with Israel.

Monday's beach demonstration was part of a half-year-long protest campaign by Gaza's Hamas rulers.

Protesters on fishing boats fixed Palestinian flags on a fence that extends into the Mediterranean. On land, other protesters briefly breached the frontier under the cover of smoke from flaming tires.

Israeli soldiers responded with tear gas and live fire.

In a Monday interview with the Times of Israel, US special envoy Jason Greenblatt reported that the upcoming peace plan from President Trump will “be heavily focused on Israeli security needs,” but will try to be “fair” to the Palestinians.

He wasn’t very clear what this would entail, but said that “each side will find things in this plan that they don’t like.” That’s already largely the case, with neither Israeli nor Palestinian officials expecting much out of the talks, and Palestinian officials in particular believe the US is too biased to be taken seriously.

What the US is actually planning to propose is not at all clear, though a focus on Israeli needs likely means that Israeli demands that the Palestinians never have any control over their own borders will be a part of the proposal.

Israel arrested 500 Palestinians, including women, children and MPs, over their social media posts, the Palestine Center for Prisoners Studies reported.

The center’s spokesman Riyadh Al-Ashqar said that the Israeli authorities began arresting Palestinians for their social media posts since the start of the Jerusalem Intifada claiming such uploads incite terror against Israel.

Israel is using its recently formed “Cyber Unit” to monitor Palestinian social media posts, he said.

This unit, Al-Ashqar said, classifies any Facebook post that glorifies Palestinian martyrs, discloses Israeli crimes, and supports resistance as “incitement of terror”.

A Nobel Prize has been awarded to George P. Smith, a renowned scientist and longtime advocate for Palestinian rights who supports the BDS movement and has called for an end to US military aid to Israel. The BDS movement congratulates Professor Smith.

During the Israeli bombardment and shelling of the Gaza Strip last summer, an Israeli soldier approached a 74-year-old Palestinian woman Ghalya Abu-Rida to give her a sip of water. He gave her the water, took a photo with her and then he shot her in the head from a distance of one metre. He then watched as she bled to death, the Palestine Information Centre reported.

This is how Ahmad Qdeh, a journalist in Al-Aqsa TV, described the scene that he witnessed during the latest Israeli aggression. The spokesman of the Israeli army, Avichay Adraee, shared the photo of an Israeli soldier holding the water bottle and helping the old woman drink as an example of the “humanity” of the Israeli army towards the civilians in the Gaza Strip.

I never really understood the ‘numbers game‘ in the States, but the following one is pretty easy to understand