US President Donald Trump will finally unveil his ‘great’ plan for peace in the Middle East before Israeli leaders visit Washington next week. While the Palestinians may not like it, it will be good for them, Trump said.
Trump has long teased the existence of a plan that would resolve the long-running dispute between Israel and the Palestinians, reportedly developed by his son-in-law Jared Kushner. Its release, however, has been repeatedly delayed.

On the way to an event in Florida on Thursday, Trump told reporters on board Air Force One that he intends to make the plan public ahead of next week’s visit to Washington by Israel’s caretaker prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his chief rival Benny Gantz.

"It's a great plan," said Trump, "It's a plan that really would work."

Technology developed in the context of the occupation is used by Israel’s seemingly benign precision agriculture industry. This civilian application allows Israeli military companies to promote “a sanitized version of their repressive technologies” as tools to combat climate change and world hunger.

Israeli agritech companies “develop and market smart irrigation systems, crop protection solutions and specialty fertilizers to farmers across the world, raking in billions of dollars in annual sales, while enjoying a positive ‘green’ image,” Who Profits states.

This industry contributes to agriculture in West Bank and Golan settlements, as well as the de-development of the Palestinian economy.

The Jordan Valley, the main agricultural region in the West Bank, is under full Israeli military control.

Dmytro Kuleba, Ukraine’s Deputy Prime Minister for European and Euro-Atlantic Integration, has been in Washington lobbying for the additional military assistance. He has had considerable success, particularly as there is bipartisan support in Congress for aid to Kiev and also because the Trump Departments of Defense and State as well as the National Security Council are all on board in countering the “Russian threat” in the Black Sea. President Trump signed the NDAA last week, which completed the process.

Christians from around the world have arrived in the West Bank town of Bethlehem ahead of Christmas day, while hundreds of Palestinian Christians from Gaza have been blocked by Israel from undertaking the pilgrimage.

Over 3.5 million tourists visit the city during this time, queuing to visit the grotto inside Bethlehem's Church of the Nativity, believed to be the exact site where Jesus was born.

Palestinian tourism minister Rula Maaya told AFP it had been a good year, but fewer Christians from the Gaza Strip were in attendance than in previous years.

Wadie Abunassar, an advisor to and spokesman for church leaders in the Holy Land, said out of the 951 applications from Gazans so far, only 192 had been granted.

This comes after Israel announced on Sunday that it will allow Christians in the Gaza Strip to travel to Jerusalem and the West Bank for Christmas, reversing an April decision to ban them from leaving the besieged Palestinian enclave.

In November, Israel conducted a series of air strikes on the Gaza Strip after it assassinated a senior Islamic Jihad commander and his wife.

The Palestinian armed group retaliated to the assassination by launching a barrage of rockets into Israel, before the two parties agreed on a ceasefire following joint Egyptian and UN mediation.

‘All that’s left are their school uniforms’: Israeli air strike kills eight Palestinian relatives
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During the two days of air strikes, at least 34 Palestinians were reported killed and more than 100 wounded.

No Israelis were killed during the same time period.

The deadliest of these attacks was carried out on the home of the al-Sawarka family, killing eight members of the family, including children.

A week after the strike, a ninth member of the family, Mohammed al-Sawarka, died from injuries sustained in the bombing.

Palestinian survivors of the 2014 war welcome the International Criminal Court's investigation into Israel, but ask why it has taken so long.

They wouldn't bring back our children'
Ahed Bakr, a father, grandfather and uncle of four children who were killed on a Gaza beach in a deadly attack on 16 July 2014, says it is "promising that there are finally international steps taken to at least recognise Israel's crimes against Palestinians after all this silence".

"What have they been waiting for, for more than five years, to finally take action? Everything was already documented by cameras," he says.

Ahed Atef Bakr, 10, Zakariya Ahed Bakr, 10, Mohammad Ramiz Bakr, 11, and Ismail Mahmoud Bakr, aged nine, were killed when Israeli forces shelled a beachfront in the west of Gaza City, during Operation Protective Edge.

A full investigation into alleged war crimes in the Palestinian Territories is to be launched by the International Criminal Court’s chief prosecutor, prompting a fierce backlash from Israel.

Fatou Bensouda said the probe could result in charges against both Israelis and Palestinians.

“I am satisfied that ... war crimes have been or are being committed in the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, and the Gaza Strip,” she said in a statement on Friday.

Bensouda added that because the Palestinian Territories had requested the intervention of the court she did not need to request approval from judges to start an investigation.

However, she has asked the ICC’s pre-trial chamber to rule on what geographical location it can investigate. The probe will be launched pending a decision on geographical jurisdiction.

Citing transcripts of Israel Police interrogations, British newspaper The Telegraph says the group is operating out of Istanbul, where at least 11 senior Hamas members are now living, with the Turkish president only telling the group to stay away from his own country's institutions

The prime minister's statement came shortly after the International Criminal Court Prosecutor Fatou Bensouda said she would open a full investigation into "the situation in Palestine" as it had been determined that war crimes had been committed there.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has slammed the International Criminal Court's intention to probe the situation in Palestinian territories. According to Netanyahu, the ICC has no jurisdiction to conduct an investigation in Palestine.

"The court has no jurisdiction in this case. The ICC only has jurisdiction over petitions submitted by sovereign states. But there has never been a Palestinian state," Netanyahu said on Friday.

The court's prosecutor Fatou Bensouda earlier in the day said that she would not require the authorisation of the Pre-Trial Chamber to launch the investigation as Palestine had asked for a probe

The US Ambassador to the United Nations Security Council, Kelly Craft on Wednesday slammed United Nations Security Council Resolution 2334 issued in 2016, which demands Israel immediately halt settlement activity in the occupied Palestinian territories including East Jerusalem.

Speaking at the Security Council headquarters in New York, Craft described the resolution as “one-sided” and “unfairly critical of Israel”; reiterating the full support of the US administration for Israeli settlement expansion in the occupied Palestinian territories.

Since 1967, hundreds of Palestinian bodies have been held by Israel: some in freezers, and others believed to be in the notorious “cemeteries of numbers”. Families of the martyrs have been trying to bring them back home.

Yet, the first demand of Palestinians is not for Israel to return our bodies; it is to stop killing us in the first place. Stop taking land, displacing families, incarcerating entire generations, and enabling a foreign population to take over what little remains of Palestinian cities, only to punish anyone who says “enough”.

One of the first bills to be introduced by Britain’s new Conservative government will reportedly stop "local authorities from boycotting individual companies", a move described as targeting the Palestinian-led boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) movement.

The Conservative Party election manifesto did indeed pledge to “ban public bodies from imposing their own direct or indirect boycotts, disinvestment or sanctions campaigns against foreign countries”, on the grounds that such moves “undermine community cohesion”.

It often seems that Israel’s actions in the West Bank are spurred by little more than a desire to compensate for lost opportunities and settle old scores, and Hebron is no exception writes Miko Peled.

Palestinians have a right to claim restitution for their loss of natural resources due to the Israeli occupation, the United Nations General Assembly said on Wednesday.

It approved by 160-6, with 15 abstentions an annual resolution called “Permanent sovereignty of the Palestinian people in the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including east Jerusalem, and of the Arab population in the occupied Syrian Golan over their natural resources.”

Prince Charles is scheduled to visit the occupied Palestinian territories and Israel for the first time in January, Clarence House announced in a statement yesterday.

On behalf of the British government, the Prince of Wales will meet Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas in the West Bank, where the heir to the throne will “undertake engagements”.

His five-day trip will begin in Amman, the capital of Jordan, at the end of January and end in Jerusalem.

Canada voted in favour of a United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) resolution supporting the Palestinian right to self-determination yesterday, in a defeat for pro-Israel groups.

The General Assembly adopted the resolution by 167 votes to five, with 11 abstentions, with only Israel, the United States, in addition to US-dependent Pacific island states Marshall Islands, Micronesia and Nauru, voting against the text.

The resolution reaffirms “the right of the Palestinian people to self-determination, including to their independent State of Palestine”, urging states and UN agencies “to continue to support and assist Palestinians in the early realization of their right to self-determination”, stated the UN press release.

With the increase in the frequency of Israeli attacks on the Gaza Strip, there is Palestinian and Israeli increased Israeli and Palestinian talk of the resistance’s “target banks” against Israel. This is for the resistance to go beyond launching rockets at Israeli settlements in the Gaza envelope, which it has done in the past years, and targeting Israeli gas platforms off the shores of the Gaza Strip. This would cause Israel significant economic losses, as it earns $18 billion annually from the gas in the Mediterranean Sea.

The following lines identify the capabilities of the Palestinian resistance to attack Israeli oil installations in the Mediterranean, instead of attacking Israeli cities with rockets, although Hamas fired rockets towards these platforms in the 2014 war, how Israel will respond, what means Hamas will use to target the platforms: missiles, Drones, or sea mines, and whether Hamas aspires to get a share of the gas off the coast of Gaza?

I first met Ibrahim al-Dabous when he came to paint my home.

It was about a year ago. I was introduced to him by my cousin Muhammad Ashour, an interior decorator.

Ibrahim was reticent. It wasn’t until his second day working in my home that I heard him speak.

Despite how quiet he was, Ibrahim could be very funny. When he cracked a joke, everyone in the room would laugh.

It took Ibrahim and my cousin approximately a week to paint my home. During their last day doing that job, we had a conversation about Israel’s major offensive against Gaza in the summer of 2014.

I was taken aback when Ibrahim told me that Israel had destroyed his newly built home that summer.

The new Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, Boris Johnson, is allegedly preparing to pass a bill which will outlaw advocacy for the Boycott Divestment and Sanctions Movement (BDS) against Israel, which will make it illegal for public bodies to engage with any group which participates in boycotts of the Israeli regime.

The story, which first surfaced in INews, has now caught wind in the Israeli press and is seen as another win for Israel to have come from Britain’s recent election, with Labor’s pro-Palestinian Jeremy Corbyn losing to his Conservative Party rival.

US Congress has rejected an official request from the White House of $175 million, aimed to support President Donald Trump’s ‘deal of the century,’ Israeli newspaper Haaretz reported on Tuesday.

The requested money was part of the US 2020 budget, according to Haaretz, reported by a congressional source, disclosing that the rejection was not motivated by politics, but rather by budgetary considerations.

“One argument against it was, ‘No one thinks this peace plan is coming out any time soon, so why devote money to it?’” announced the source, whom Haaretz revealed was involved in the negotiations regarding the budget decision.

Israeli forces “wantonly” shot at Palestinian children in Al-Jalazun refugee camp, injuring two, according to an investigation by human rights group B’Tselem.

The incident occurred on the afternoon of 17 November, when Israeli occupation forces entered Al-Jalazun to chase Palestinian children who had been throwing stones at them at the camp entrance.

After reinforcements arrived in an Israeli military jeep, uniformed soldiers and “at least one armed person in civilian clothing” began “firing live rounds toward the fleeing children and teens”, as well as rubber-coated metal bullets and tear gas canisters.

Israel has a long record of camouflaging the truth where Palestine is concerned.

Integral to this, in recent years, has been the growing war against human rights groups documenting Israel’s abuses against Palestinians and other Arabs.

Israel’s hostility towards such groups is targeted, first and foremost, against Palestinians themselves.

The Palestine Prisoners Centre for Studies has called on international humanitarian and human rights institutions, foremost of which is the Red Cross, to exert pressure on Israeli Prison Services (IPS) to provide winter clothing and covers desperately needed during the severe cold season.

The spokesperson for the Centre, Riyad Al-Ashqar, explained that Palestinian detainees in all facilities suffer harsh conditions in the winter season, due to acute shortage of clothes, winter blankets, and heating devices, especially in prisons located in the desert areas — namely the Negev, Nafha, Beersheba, and Rimon. This is in addition to the fact that some sections in a number of prisons are composed of tents that do not protect from the cold, many of which are old and worn out, allowing rain water to enter.

Ireland plans to urge European Union countries to take steps to counter “any unacceptable and illegal” encroachment by Israel on the Jordan Valley, Ireland’s deputy prime minister and minister of foreign affairs said.

Simon Coveney told the Times that the EU’s Council of Foreign Affairs discussed last week the bloc’s approach towards the Middle East peace process in order to “promote and protect the capacity to negotiate and deliver a two-state solution that is fair to both Israelis and Palestinians”.

Likud hopeful Gideon Sa’ar said yesterday that the two-state solution is an “illusion” and stressed the boundaries of the state of Israel are “between the river [Jordan] and the [Mediterranean] Sea”.

Sa’ar, who seeks to take over leadership of the Likud party from Benjamin Netanyahu, said: “Throughout the world they say that a two-state solution remains the path to an agreement, but I have to say to you, this is not a position that helps anyone. Two-states is an illusion.”

For the second year in a row, Haneen Elias al-Jilda fears that Israeli authorities will deny her the right to perform religious rituals and participate in Christmas celebrations in the city of Bethlehem.

Last year she was prevented from obtaining a permit to travel from the besieged Gaza Strip to the occupied West Bank through the Erez crossing.

Such disappointment and frustration are prevalent among Gaza's Christians.

On Thursday, a spokesperson for the Israeli Military Liaison Office with the Palestinians said that Palestinian Christians residing in Gaza could obtain permission to travel abroad, but that none of them would be allowed to enter Israel and the West Bank, where many sites sacred to Christians are located.

Workers, mayors and civil society groups are banding together in the Basque Country to oppose the participation of the local firm CAF in a project to expand Israel’s settlement railway in occupied East Jerusalem.

The project contravenes international law since it solidifies Israel’s grip on occupied Palestinian land. By participating CAF is contributing to serious violations of Palestinian human rights.

In August, a consortium of CAF and the Israeli infrastructure company Saphir was chosen by Israel’s finance ministry to expand the settlement railway project, known as the Jerusalem Light Rail (JLR).

CAF and Saphir won the $2 billion contract to extend the railway to more illegal Israeli settlements, particularly in East Jerusalem, and to strengthen transportation links between those settlements and West Jerusalem.

Samer, 44, was arrested on suspicion of involvement in an IED explosion that took place on August 23 near the illegal Israeli settlement of Dolev, northwest of Ramallah. The bomb killed 17-year-old Israeli girl Rina Shnerb and wounded her father and brother.

Three days later, Samer's lawyer was informed his client had been transferred to a hospital the previous day - in critical condition, unconscious, and on artificial respiration. He was also suffering from kidney failure and had 11 broken ribs, the lawyer said.

The Israeli Security Agency (ISA), known as Shin Bet, accused Samer of leading the group that carried out the bombing and was given legal permission to employ "extraordinary measures" in its interrogation, Israeli media reported. Amnesty International said the move "effectively sanctioned the use of methods amounting to torture".

Christians in the Gaza Strip will not be allowed to visit holy cities such as Bethlehem and Jerusalem to celebrate Christmas this year, Israeli authorities said on Thursday.

Gazan Christians will be granted permits to travel abroad but none will be allowed to go to Israel and the occupied West Bank, home to many sites holy to Christians, a spokeswoman for Israel’s military liaison to the Palestinians said.

Israel tightly restricts movements out of the Gaza Strip, territory controlled by militant group Hamas.

The spokeswoman said that following “security orders,” Gazans would be allowed to travel abroad via Israel’s Allenby Bridge border crossing with Jordan but not to visit cities in Israel or the West Bank.

Gaza has only around 1,000 Christians - most of them Greek Orthodox - among a population of 2 million in the narrow coastal strip.

President Trump signed yesterday an Executive Order empowering the federal government to crack down on campus organizing for Palestinian rights under the guise of combating antisemitism.

“This is our message to universities: If you want to accept the tremendous amount of federal dollars that you get every year, you must reject antisemitism,” Trump stated during a White House Hanukkah reception which doubled as a signing ceremony.

But Trump’s Executive Order has nothing to do with combating the scourge of antisemitism, the revival of which he is greatly responsible for by stoking white supremacy. Instead, it is primarily designed to pressure universities to disallow students to boycott for Palestinian rights.

Christians in the Gaza Strip will not be allowed to visit holy cities such as Bethlehem and Jerusalem to celebrate Christmas this year, Israeli authorities said on Thursday, Reuters reports.

Gazan Christians will be granted permits to travel abroad but none will be allowed to go to Israel and the occupied West Bank, home to many sites holy to Christians, a spokeswoman for Israel’s military liaison to the Palestinians said.

Israel tightly restricts movements out of the Gaza Strip, territory controlled by Hamas, an Islamist group that it considers a terrorist organization.

A Palestinian art exhibition was stolen last week during the 18th session of the Assembly of the States Parties of the International Criminal Court (ICC) in The Hague.

Hosted by the State of Palestine and Palestinian Human Rights Organisation Al-Haq, the exhibition featured MEMO’s Palestinian cartoonist Mohammad Sabaaneh’s artwork as part of an initiative on the impact of the criminal policies and practices of the Israeli occupation on the victims in Palestine.

According to the International Middle East Media Centre, Sabaaneh’s graphic political masterpieces were removed without authorisation from the hallways of the World Forum, sparking widespread condemnation.

The State of Palestine has been a member of the ICC since 2015 and has brought several key cases before the court.

Al-Haq and its partners have also submitted a file on crimes committed in the West Bank, including Jerusalem.

US President Donald Trump signed an executive order adopting a controversial definition of antisemitism that free speech advocates say will stifle Palestinian rights activism on college campuses.

The executive order, signed by the president on Wednesday afternoon, extends current anti-discrimination civil rights laws at the Department of Education to cover Judaism.

It also orders the department to adopt the working definition of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) of antisemitism when considering claims of antisemitic abuse.

Palestinian rights advocates have long rejected IHRA's definition, saying that it could be employed to censor speech critical of Israel's political policies.

In November 2019, following a long legal battle, Israel revoked the work visa and deported Human Rights Watch (HRW) director Omar Shakir. According to HRW, Israel argued that the state, “revoked the work visa of Shakir, a United States citizen, in May 2018 on the assertion that his advocacy violated a 2017 law that bars entry to people who advocate a boycott of Israel or its settlements in the occupied West Bank.”

HRW claims that this is not true and that the organization does not call for the boycott of Israel. On their website, they do claim, however, that, “Human Rights Watch urges businesses to stop operating in illegal settlements as part of their global duty to avoid complicity in human rights abuses.”

Republicans voted overwhelmingly Friday for Israeli apartheid in the West Bank.

They did so by voting against House Resolution 326 which backs the two-state solution and rejects Israeli annexation of the West Bank.

While the so-called two-state solution may be defunct, Republicans’ silence on what would replace it suggests they’re fine with Israel entrenching the apartheid system it has been establishing in the West Bank over the last five decades.

They certainly aren’t bubbling with excitement about the prospect of one person, one vote.

Just days after US President Donald Trump spewed vicious anti-Semitic rhetoric, Israel lobby groups are celebrating his executive order taking aim at supporters of Palestinian rights.

Israel and its most extreme defenders are not bothered by the president’s anti-Jewish rhetoric as long as it comes wrapped in unquestioning support for Israel.

Trump’s order, which he signs today, is evidence of that support. It is also a dangerous escalation of the attack on basic free speech rights.

In the decade since Palestinians first petitioned the International Criminal Court, around 3,500 Palestinians have been killed by Israeli occupation forces in the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

Around 800 were children.

Israel has expanded its settlement colonies in the West Bank, encouraged by a Trump administration that has put Washington’s seal of approval on war crimes only tacitly endorsed by previous US governments.

That tacit support has been more than symbolic.

The fate of the Palestinians, always shoved to the end of the line, has not been an issue with any kind of national profile in the course of this wretched election campaign.

In part, this is simply because as voters in Britain, we naturally have our own pressing domestic concerns – especially the gradual sell-off of the National Health Service.

But in large part it is also down to a four-year long witch hunt over a non-existent “Labour anti-Semitism crisis.”

This has made many sympathetic Labour politicians fearful to even discuss Palestine. They know the Israel lobby will immediately jump down their throats.

Palestinian protesters clashed with Israeli forces over plans for a new Israeli settlement in the West Bank city of Hebron.

On December 9, 1987, the first intifada began in illegally occupied Palestine in response to the assassination of four Palestinians outside the Jabalya refugee camp in Gaza. This fight for freedom has been going on for decades and will not end until Palestine is free. The indignation of the young Palestinians about their hopeless situation has consequently dammed – even after they had long ago noticed that their political leaders did nothing for them, but only appeased and arranged with the occupiers, and more or less under the occupation left their country to their fate. Thus, the desperate Palestinians saw no other possibility than in the refugee camps, in the occupied West Bank and in the annexed East Jerusalem to stand up and fight back.

Proposed destruction of Hebron’s market to make way for a new settlement is Israeli government’s route to refashion its apartheid system as the rule of law

The embattled Prime Minister wants Washington to approve of Israel's further expansion into the Jordan Valley, just days after he urged Donald Trump not to miss a rare chance to back Tel Aviv's territorial.

Benjamin Netanyahu, who fiercely fights for re-election, believes that "the time has come to extend Israeli sovereignty over the Jordan Valley," a swath of land spanning between the occupied West Bank and neighboring Kingdom of Jordan. On their part, Israel's closest ally should give a final nod to the move.

"I want American recognition of our sovereignty in the Jordan Valley. This is important," he bluntly told an event set up on Sunday by Israel's Makor Rishon newspaper. As part of the proposed annexation, all Jewish settlements in the area would become part of Israel, he insisted.

Five Palestinian workers have been injured after Israeli soldiers opened fire on them in the early hours of this morning near the separation wall in the occupied northern West Bank city of Tulkarem.

Israeli soldiers manning the checkpoint shot tear gas into the large crowd who were attempting to get to work, causing dozens of others to suffocate from excessive tear gas inhalation.

According to the official Palestinian news agency Wafa, the five wounded victims were rushed to the Thabet Government Hospital in Tulkarem. Medics confirmed the casualties were shot towards their lower extremities and described their situation as “moderate.”

Meanwhile, Israeli soldiers situated near the gate through the Israeli Annexation Wall at Dahr Al-Abed, southwest of Jenin, shot and wounded a young man from the Palestinian village of Arabeh.

The Palestinian was identified as Saif Iyad Wajih Al-Ardah.

Israeli occupation has denied permission for British lawmaker, Philippa Whitford, who is a doctor, from entering Gaza to offer help for patients of breast cancer.

Over the past two and half years[1], I have been working with Medical Aid for Palestine (MAP) to improve the provision of services and treatment for breast cancer patients in Palestine.

Last year, I travelled out with the specific aim of setting up a project to enable experienced professionals in breast cancer care to provide teaching and training to local Palestinian clinicians working with breast cancer patients.

Since my last visit, I have managed to recruit a team of specialists from all over Scotland to join the project, which will help improve breast cancer care – prevention, diagnosis and treatment – for women in Gaza and the West Bank.

The resolution was intended both to contradict President Trump, whose recent positions have been pro-occupation and pro-annexation, as well as to potentially warn Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu against any hasty annexations, something he’s been advocating recently.

The bill was hardly perfect, which meant a lot of the voting on the margins defied conventional wisdom. Some traditional critics of Israel voted against the bill over language, and still others rejected the bill because it proscribed a US-imposed solution.

The “gang of four” stood as four Democrats opposing the resolution, and did so because the bill’s final version removed any mention of settlements, of Israel being an occupying power, and watered down language about the two-state solution at the behest of more centrist Democrats.

The US Campaign for Palestinian Rights (USCPR) is the target of a $90 million lawsuit that accuses the group of engaging in environmental terrorism.

The legal action was brought forward by the Keren Kayemeth LeIsrael-Jewish National Fund (KKL-JNF) and 12 Americans citizens who live in Israel last month. Although they’re identified as the KKL-JNF in Hebrew, the group is widely known as the Jewish National Fund. The complaint alleges that USCPR has funneled money to the Boycott National Committee (BNC) to be used for terrorist activities and that BNC is directly connected to HAMAS, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, the Popular Front-General Command and the Palestinian Liberation Front. The group’s press release on the action asserts that the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement itself is a “campaign of terror against Israel.”

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo is reported to be planning a run for Senate in Kansas next year and quietly recruiting funders for that race. And surprise– Pompeo has already reached out to Sheldon Adelson, the biggest Republican donor around, and to other pro-Israel donors– at the very time that he was announcing that the U.S. no longer considers Israeli settlements illegal.

The report by Michael Wilner of McClatchy and Bryan Lowry of the Kansas City Star is frank about the crazy timing here.

The timing of Pompeo’s exchange with Adelson coincided with the secretary’s on-camera announcement on November 18 that the Trump administration would revoke its longstanding legal determination on the legitimacy of Israeli settlements in the West Bank. Adelson supports the settler enterprise.

Last month, over 100 Democratic House members signed a letter that decried the Trump administration’s policy shift on West Bank settlements. The letter was initiated by Rep. Andy Levin (D-MI and was sent to Secretary of State Mike Pompeo. On November 18, Pompeo announced that the U.S. government was abandoning a 1978 State Department legal opinion which determined that settlement expansion in the occupied territories were in violation of international law. Just a day after Pompeo’s announcement, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu advanced a bill that would annex the Jordan Valley.

“If the U.S. unilaterally abandons international and human rights law, we can only expect a more chaotic and brutal twenty-first century for Americans and our allies, including the Israeli people,” reads Levin’s letter, “Given these serious implications, we strongly urge you to reverse this policy decision immediately.”

Israel is holding a prominent Palestinian scientist without charge or trial.

Ubai Aboudi, an American citizen, was due to travel to the United States in January for a conference on science and Palestinian rights.

Prominent scholars, including Nobel Prize winner George P. Smith and Noam Chomsky signed a petition demanding Aboudi’s release.

The petition calls on the European Union in particular to demand that Israel free Aboudi. The EU grants Israel huge amounts of money under the guise of research and science partnerships despite Israel’s constant violations of the human rights condition in its agreement with the EU.

European Union (EU) countries’ are taking steps towards boycotting the Israeli apartheid system, using its legal, legislative and parliamentary institutions to oppose the occupation, Palestine News Network reported.

The EU condemned the Trump administration’s positions and policies carried out in the Palestinian Territories, occupied by Israel since 1967, especially in Jerusalem regarding the Israeli settlements, and the two-state solution.

Within this context, the EU’s Supreme Court has approved labeling Israeli goods produced in settlements built in the Palestinian territories, and exported to the EU. It should also be noted that the EU always asserts that settlements are “illegal, and are an obstacle for achieving peace.”

What do Paul Wolfowitz, Dan Kurtzer, Aaron Miller, and Prince Andrew have in common?

These four privileged older white guys have all sought (and been granted) exposure in the corporate media recently. Paul Wolfowitz, one of the prime architects and advocates of the 2003 invasion of Iraq, was given this fine platform on the NYT’s opinion page in order to criticize Pres. Trump’s recent decision to withdraw (or later, reduce/redeploy) the U.S. troop presence in Syria. Dan Kurtzer and Aaron Miller, two of the leading “peace processors” guiding U.S. policy on Palestine and other Middle Eastern issues for 24 years, 1992-2016, were given this platform on the Washington Post, to comment on Trump’s policy on Israel’s illegal settlement. As for Prince Andrew, you may have heard he gave this disastrous interview to the BBC, discussing his ties to the late Jeffrey Epstein.

A new Israeli settlement will be built in the heart of the flashpoint city of Hebron, in the southern West Bank, joining a long list of notoriously violent settlements in the area.

Israeli Defense Minister Naftali Bennet, of the ultra nationalist “New Right” party, said on Sunday that a new settlement would be built on top of Hebron’s once bustling fruit and vegetable market, now referred to by locals as a “ghost town.”

According to Bennet, the existing buildings, which belong to the Hebron municipality, will be razed to the ground to make way for new shops and buildings for the settlers.

The new settlement will create a contiguous settlement bloc in the middle of Hebron’s Old City, extending from the Ibrahimi Mosque to the Avraham Avinu settlement, and according to Bennet, will double the Jewish population of the city.

Backed by the Democrats, the US House of Representatives is planning to vote on a resolution reaffirming the two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict tomorrow.

The resolution was introduced by Representatives Alan Lowenthal (D-Calif.), Gerry Connolly (D-Va.) and Karen Bass (D-Calif.).

Originally, this was introduced in April and referred to the House Foreign Affairs Committee advocates for a negotiated, long-term solution that ensures Israel’s security as a democratic, Jewish nation while also establishing a Palestinian state.

The Israeli government has increased discretionary spending on settlements in the occupied Palestinian territory by 50 per cent over the last two years, reported the Jerusalem Post.

According to data published by settlement watchdog Peace Now, so-called “discretionary spending” “is expenditure by various ministries outside the general budget, including from the Interior, Housing, Education, and Energy and Water ministries, as well as the National Roads Authority”.

These funds are directed towards the construction of settlement housing units, as well as for roads inside the settlements, “buildings for educational, social and religious purposes, commercial centres and industrial parks”, the report added.

France’s National Assembly on Tuesday passed a resolution conflating support for Palestinian equality with hatred of Jews – an initiative supported by the country’s Israel lobby.

But most lawmakers did not take part in the vote.

On 1 June 2018, 21-year-old Palestinian paramedic Razan al-Najjar was shot and killed by Israeli forces while tending to casualties during the Great March of Return - the unarmed protests that had begun two months earlier along the Gaza Strip’s border with Israel and that continue to this day.

In predictable fashion, Israeli officials have cast the protesters - from children to elderly women to disabled persons - as diabolical minions sent by Hamas to lay waste to Israel via “kite and balloon terrorism” and other Scary Stuff.

As with every other manifestation of the Palestinian demand for dignity, Israel has used the Great March of Return as an opportunity to engage in mass slaughter: on a single day in May 2018, some 59 protesters were killed, including children.

Having slipped through Israel's security fence, Emad Khalil Ibrahim Shahin and his friends sneaked into an abandoned barracks and lit a fire. Anxious they were about to be discovered, they fled the scene.

“We ran until we found a sand dune to hide behind on the other side of the fence, but then noticed Emad was not with us. He ran slower because he was on crutches,” one of his companions, who wished to remain anonymous, told Middle East Eye.

“We saw him on the ground and told him to crawl. But then a military vehicle raced up and a soldier fired at him, shooting him in the right leg. Soon a helicopter came and took him away.”

It would be 355 days until Shahin returned to Gaza. He arrived on 23 October in a body bag.

Israeli Minister of Defense, Naftali Bennett, on Tuesday, issued a written order imposing international economic sanctions on Palestinian militants abroad, The Palestinian News and Info Agency reported.

How does Chancellor Merkel intend to explain it during her first visit to Auschwitz on December 6, 2019, that she and her government – given the historical responsibility for the Holocaust and 74 years after the liberation of Auschwitz from the National Socialist concentration and extermination camp by the soldiers of the Red Army – miss any respect when it comes to the permanent break of international law in the “Jewish state”. Does not it respect the respect for international law, as a compelling doctrine from German history, to finally take back the raison d’etat for the security of the “Jewish state”? How can a German government ignore the constant violations of international law simply because they are committed by a Jewish regime, descendants of the victims of the Holocaust? The clear rules, which international law has, Merkel can not simply sweep her “Christian Zionism” under the table.

An advisory committee set up to monitor and recommend the investment policies of Brown University in Rhode Island has voted to divest from companies participating in the continued subjugation of Palestinians.

The successful passing of the resolution by the university’s Advisory Committee on Corporate Responsibility in Investment Policies (ACCRIP) on Monday paves the way for activists to pressure the university to withdraw support for companies "facilitating the [Israeli] occupation and its human rights abuses in the West Bank and Gaza".

In a statement released by Brown Divest, a coalition of undergraduate students that has been at the forefront of the call to divest from companies operating in the occupied territories, the group said they were "elated that the university committee responsible for divestment has finally joined the calls for divestment from human rights violations in Palestine".

New details have emerged about a botched Israeli intelligence operation in the Gaza Strip in November 2018 that sparked deadly Israeli air strikes and Palestinian rocket fire.

Eight undercover Israeli agents - who were disguised as Palestinians and had taken the aliases of a real family in Gaza - entered the coastal enclave on November 11 last year with the objective of planting listening devices on Hamas's private communications system, an investigation by Al Jazeera Arabic's Ma Khafia Aazam (Tip of the Iceberg) programme revealed.

However, the Israelis were stopped and questioned by a Hamas patrol unit in Khan Younis for 40 minutes and became suspicious of their answers. A firefight broke out and the Israeli operatives used guns with silencers, immediately killing Hamas commander Nour Baraka and one of his aides, Mohammed al-Qarra.

Forty-seven incidents of violence toward Palestinians and their property took place over the past tree months ? Israel Police closed most cases because perpetrators were not identified

Two weeks since the air force attack in Deir el-Balah that killed nine members of the Sawarkah family, who were living in a structure that the army had defined as an Islamic Jihad “terror infrastructure,” the Israel Defense Forces are still investigating why the green light to bomb the building wasn’t based on updated information.

But an inquiry conducted by Haaretz shows that this conduct isn’t unusual. According to sources in the defense establishment, the IDF often bombs terror targets in Gaza that were included in its target bank long before the strike without checking in real time whether there are civilians at the site or whether the site has been converted into residences.

Children being made to endure lengthy medical treatments alone is a particularly cruel feature of Israel’s permit regime imposed on Palestinians in the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip.

It is a shameful reality that COGAT, the Israeli military body that handles such permits, tries to obscure with liberal use of emojis on its social media pages.

I have previously written about how COGAT tries to present itself as a humanitarian body in its social media propaganda while it plays a central role in Israel’s complete and unjust system of control over Palestinian movement.

For example, COGAT describes its restrictions on the movement of millions of Palestinians, such as military checkpoints, as projects which “improve the quality of life of the region’s population.”

It even put out a video last week boasting of a “service revolution” following the launch of “an advanced call center” through which its Civil Administration “provides clear responses on all topics, to everyone”:

SOURCE: MIDDLE EAST MONITOR
The Israeli government is aiming to increase the volume of Israel’s defence exports, reported Globes, which has revealed the main points of the plan for the first time.

The project, being overseen by the Defence Ministry’s International Defence Cooperation Directorate (SIBAT) led by Brigadier General (Res.) Yair Kulas, will begin to be rolled out in early 2020.

According to Globes, the plan is based on “focused seminars for senior commanders in foreign armies”, Israeli military “assistance for promoting sales of Israeli weapons”, and “subsidising small and medium-sized defence companies seeking to sell arms around the world”.

Speaking this week, Kulas said that SIBAT favours a major expansion of agreements between countries, resulting in significant deals for the large defence companies, especially Elbit Systems, Israel Aerospace Industries (IAI) and Rafael Advanced Defence Systems.

The good thing about the Secretary of State’s declaration that the U.S. does not regard settlements as illegal is that it is a naked expression of the power of the Israel lobby in U.S. policy making. Even the Associated Press chalked the decision up to Trump’s biggest donor, Sheldon Adelson.

For 20 years Sheldon Adelson has been pouring money into Republican politics to prevent the establishment of a Palestinian state, and he has succeeded. Trump has proved to be Adelson’s “perfect little puppet” (to quote the president on Adelson’s former favorite in 2015), giving the casino mogul everything on his wish list, from recognition of Jerusalem as the capital to recognizing the Golan annexation to tearing up the Iran deal. “A huge check from Sheldon Adelson” and winning Jewish votes in Florida, is how Thomas Friedman explained Trump’s policy last summer. Adelson has more power than the secretary of State, writes Tim Egan of the Times.

Israeli warplanes carried out fresh air strikes in the Gaza Strip on Wednesday following a rocket fire, according to the military, reports Anadolu Agency.

The army said fighter jets struck a number of targets belonging to Palestinian groups Hamas, which rules the seaside territory.

No injuries were reported.

The air strikes came shortly after the Israeli army attacked a number of Hamas sites in the southern Gaza Strip after two rockets were fired from the enclave into southern Israel.

My short visit to Palestine in early November began around the time of the commemoration of Yitzhak Rabin’s assassination, went through the assassination by Israel of Islamic Jihad leader, Bahaa Abu Al-Atta and his wife in Gaza, and ended as Prime Minister Netanyahu, who should be indicted for his countless crimes against the Palestinian people, was indicted for low grade corruption (valued at about $200,000), pulling strings and lying. And as always, Palestinians continue to bury their dead as Israelis bury their heads in the sand.

It is only a matter of time before the next terrible massacre in Gaza or elsewhere in illegally occupied Palestine will take place. The Zionist regime needs wars both internally and externally to survive.

Sirens went off in Gaza Strip and Sderot, Israeli Defence Forces reported on their twitter page on Tuesday.

Following the sirens, two launches from Gaza Strip at Israeli territory were identified, according to the IDF. The military added the Iron Dome air defence system managed to intercept one projectile.

"2 rockets were just fired from #Gaza at Israeli civilians. 1 rocket was intercepted by the Iron Dome Aerial Defense System," the IDF wrote on its Twitter page.

Normalising Israel as a Jewish state absents “Palestinian experience, history and identity claims”. Yasmeen Abu Laban and Abigail Bakan, Palestinian and Jewish authors of “Israel, Palestine and the Politics of Race” have constructed a detailed analysis of race and power relations which has been sustained and adopted by the international community. By dispelling the conflations associated with race, the book delves into the political implications, showing how the exclusion of Palestinians on all levels – politics, land and environment – are all sites in which Israel is able to manipulate, thus constructing the apartheid state in full view of, and with no obstruction from, the international community.

A disgraced Israeli businessman who is said to have received billions of dollars in backing from Saudi investment funds, has admitted to working with President Donald Trump’s son-in-law and senior advisor, Jared Kushner, to draft the controversial “peace plan” commonly known as “the deal of the century”.

The surprise revelation was reported in a Vanity Fair article on the rise and catastrophic downfall of WeWork founder and former CEO Adam Neumann. The 40-year-old Israeli entrepreneur raised on a kibbutz in southern Israel, not far from the Gaza Strip, is said to have assigned one of the directors of WeWork to produce a slick video for Kushner that would showcase what an economically transformed West Bank and Gaza would look like. The video was shown by Kushner during his speech at the White House’s peace conference in Bahrain during the summer.