Two Palestinians were killed by Israeli fire and another 60 injured at a protest along the Gaza border amid ongoing Egyptian efforts to broker a cease-fire, Gaza's Health Ministry said Friday.

The protesters threw rocks and firebombs from behind clouds of black smoke of burning tires at Israeli troops, who responded with tear gas and sometimes live fire.

Israel's military said some Palestinians also threw improvised explosives and firebombs at the fence and that several were spotted briefly crossing into Israeli territory. It said troops "fired live rounds selectively according to standard operating procedures."

Hamas officials have been meeting with Egyptian officials in Cairo for days, hammering out details of a possible truce with Israel.

A look at the map suggests the two-state solution could be achieved with a minimal evacuation of Jews from the West Bank

At the protest, we found the usual: tear gas canisters falling thickly, leaving us barely able to breathe or talk; ambulances and paramedics fanning out everywhere; and the sound of live bullets whizzing past.

The sound of a bullet elicits contradictory feelings. All of us know that it will hit someone. But if we hear it, we are safe, just like when we hear shelling it means it has exploded but not on us.

Then my phone began to ring. I saw my brother’s name on the screen. Before I had a chance to say anything, he urged me to come to the European Hospital, “Now! Ali was shot.”

In March 2008 Angela Merkel became the first German chancellor to address the Israeli parliament.

In a speech that never once mentioned the occupation and colonization of Palestinian lands, she described Israel’s security as “part of my country’s raison d’être” – Staatsräson – more precisely, “reason of state,” and asserted that “only if Germany accepts its enduring responsibility for the moral disaster in its history will we be able to build a humane future.”

However, Germany accepts no responsibility for the fact that its “reason of state” has led to a moral disaster perpetrated against the dispossessed Palestinians, violently deprived of a humane future by Israel, with which Merkel claimed Germany shares “the values of freedom, democracy and respect for human dignity.”

The Israel lobby group J Street has withdrawn its endorsement from Rashida Tlaib.

“After closely consulting with Rashida Tlaib’s campaign to clarify her most current views on various aspects of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, we have come to the unfortunate conclusion that a significant divergence in perspectives requires JStreetPAC to withdraw our endorsement of her candidacy,” J Street announced on Friday.

JStreetPAC is the political action committee of J Street. It endorses and channels contributions to political candidates.

“JStreetPAC was created to demonstrate the wellspring of political support that exists for candidates who take pro-Israel, pro-peace positions, including support for a two-state solution,” J Street said.

Israeli occupation forces killed two Palestinians amid protests in the Gaza Strip for the 21st consecutive Friday under the banner of the Great March of Return.

Meanwhile, a Palestinian citizen of Israel was shot dead by Israeli occupation forces in the Old City of Jerusalem.

Karim Ahmad Ali Fatayer, 28, was fatally shot in the head when Israeli soldiers opened fire on unarmed protesters near the boundary fence in Gaza’s central district, the human rights group Al Mezan reported.

Israeli forces also fatally shot in the head Saadi Akram Muhammad Abu Muammar, 27, near Rafah in southernmost Gaza.

More than 100 others were shot with live ammunition on Friday, according to Al Mezan.

Shir Hever discusses the Intercept report, revealing that the Israeli military used an armed drone to kill four children playing football and injure four others. The Israeli investigation of the killing is exposed as a sham

A Palestinian journalist has been arrested by Israeli authorities for filming soldiers operating in the West Bank city of Ramallah on Facebook Live. They claim he was inciting violence against Israel and the army.
Ali Dar Ali live-streamed two videos on Facebook on Tuesday morning, which showed Israel Defense Forces (IDF) soldiers operating in the Al-Amari refugee camp. They were drawing up a plan of a Palestinian home, a procedure typically done before demolishing a building, according to Gaza-based journalist Hind Khoudary.

A Parisian Mayor was threatened and warned that he will be "blown up" after he named a street in honour of Palestinians who were forced out of their homes by the creation of the state of Israel. The Mayor, Dominique Lesparre and his colleagues at Bezons town hall said that they had received "a multitude of threatening calls." Lesparre was called a "Nazi Communist" and was warned "we will kill you", and "we will blow up the mayor".

After the illegal UN sanctioned partition of Palestine in 1948, Israeli terrorist organisations like the Haganah, Irgun and Stern gang expelled nearly 800,000 Palestinians from their homes and their land. The street in Bezons, in the north west of Paris, is now called Nakba Alley.

Israeli bulldozers demolished a residential building in the Palestinian neighbourhood of Issawiya in occupied East Jerusalem.

Israel reopened Gaza’s sole commercial crossing on Wednesday, one month after shutting it down in an act of collective punishment inflicting millions of dollars of additional economic damage on the besieged territory’s long-suffering population.

Meanwhile a ceasefire between Hamas and Israel, mediated by Egypt and the United Nations, was approved by the Israeli government.

Hamas had been observing a unilateral ceasefire after Israel bombed more than 150 sites across Gaza last Wednesday and Thursday, killing a pregnant woman, her toddler daughter and a Palestinian fighter, as well as destroying a prominent cultural center.

Three Palestinians in Gaza were fatally wounded by Israel on Friday.

‘When Israeli forces destroyed the cultural centre, they thought they would also destroy our dreams’

Gaza’s fuel crisis remains unresolved a week after a United Nations humanitarian official warned that hospitals and water sanitation facilities would soon shut down as a result.

“Despite our continued engagement with the concerned bodies, we have not encountered any preparations to contain the fuel crisis that threatens health services and facilities in the Gaza Strip,” the health ministry in the territory stated on Monday.

Six human rights groups urgently petitioned Israel’s high court on Thursday to reverse all restrictions on the movement of goods through Gaza’s sole commercial crossing, which is controlled by Israel.

Israel tightened its blockade on Gaza a month ago, banning imports to and exports from the territory with the exception, at its discretion, of food and medicine.

Two Palestinians lost their lives on Friday as Israel used lethal force against Great March of Return protests along Gaza’s eastern perimeter.

One of those killed, Abdallah al-Qatati, 22, was a volunteer medic on duty at the time of his fatal injury in eastern Rafah, southern Gaza.

Thousands rally against the Nationality Law in Tel Aviv, demanding the legislation to be repealed; Despite a ban imposed by organizers on waving flags, many people were seen carrying Israeli and Palestinian flags; 'The law tries to delegitimize the Arab sector.'

An operative of Israel’s global censorship campaign has admitted to exaggerating claims of anti-Semitism in order to engineer crackdowns on supporters of Palestinian rights.

In the latest instance, Benjamin Weinthal has apparently succeeded in persuading PayPal to close down the account of the French online publication Agence Media Palestine.

This constitutes censorship as it denies journalists the means to raise money for their work and retaliates against them for ideas they express.

Agence Media Palestine says it is considering legal action.

Weinthal presents his efforts as reportage for The Jerusalem Post on the actions of companies like PayPal, but what he really does is instigate crackdowns by feeding information – by his own admission distorted – about those he is targeting.

Judicial Watch announced today that it filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit against the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS), the Department of State, and the U.S. Department of Defense for all records of communications regarding anti-Israel group Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions’ (BDS) efforts to lobby the Obama administration to adopt policies to harm companies doing business with Israel (Judicial Watch v. U.S. Department of Defense (No. 1:18-cv-01721)).

The suit was filed after all three agencies failed to respond to nearly identical April 23, 2018, FOIA requests seeking:

Israeli air forces pummel Gaza, killing pregnant Palestinian woman and her 18-month-old daughter

This is difficult to write. Gaza Children’s Cinema team is mourning the destruction of the Said Al-Mishal Cultural Center which was levelled to the ground yesterday after Israeli fighter jets struck the five-story building with 10 rockets. The second largest cultural centre in Gaza was a venue for theatre and music performance in the besieged and isolated Gaza Strip. This cultural centre was one of the main places where Gaza Children Cinema team organised movie screening for children. The Said Al-Mishal Cultural Center provided spaces of entertainment and joy for generations of children and young people in Gaza; it is in total ruins now.

An Israel aircraft on Saturday struck targets in the Gaza Strip in retaliation for incendiary aerial devices launched into southern Israel a day after three Palestinians were killed during violent protests along the border fence.

Earlier in the day an incendiary balloon was found near the dining room of a community in the Eshkol Regional Council.

It’s simple really: 750,000 people and their millions of descendants are actually under the misapprehension that they are refugees and therefore have rights that need to be addressed. Redefine their status, do away with the UN agency that caters to their needs, pay host countries to settle them and convince them that they are actually not Palestinians at all (another confusion of language) and, hey presto!

They may still be poor, disempowered, dispossessed and unwanted, but they are no longer an issue to be grappled with under the Ultimate Deal™. With the deftest of diplomatic sleights of hand, a thorny problem disappears.

Just like the issue of Jerusalem.

Palestinian medic dies after sustaining serious gunshot wound to the head, Gaza’s Health Ministry reports. Committee leading demonstrations began calling on Gazans to join in protests before cease-fire had been declared.

Two Palestinians, one of whom was a medic, were killed and 307 Palestinians were wounded in clashes near the Gaza-Israel border, Gaza’s Health Ministry reported Friday. 131 of the casualties were taken to local hospitals and 85 were said to be wounded from live fire. Five are currently in serious condition.

The Palestinian medic was identified as Abdullah Al-Qatati, while the second fatality was identified as a 55-year-old man.

Regev spoke with mayors of towns in the South, and commended them for their strength.

It has been ten years since I returned to Palestine after living in the US for nearly three decades. Those ten years in Palestine have been truly phenomenal and inspirational despite the pain and agony associated with them. For example, they are bracketed by an attack on Gaza in 2008 when we saw hundreds of Palestinian civilians murdered and by the attacks on Gaza and on the freedom flotilla trying to break the siege on Gaza in 2018. In between much pain that I relayed in my weekly email messages including losing 19 of my personal friends killed by the Israeli colonization army. But also in between we have much to be proud of in Palestinian community achievement with help of others. Personally I am proud of publishing over 50 articles, books, building a museum and an institute for biodiversity (palestinenature.org). I took time to update the lessons I learned from life especially from those ten years (but also from >40 years of human rights activism):

The BBC has once again come under sharp criticism over its coverage of violence perpetrated by Israel against the Palestinians. Critics called the BBC out over its bias after the broadcaster bowed to pressure from the Israeli Foreign Ministry and changed the headline of a news piece concerning Israeli air strikes on Gaza.

The BBC headline read: “Israeli air strikes ‘kill woman and baby’” for a news piece related to the killing of three Palestinians including a pregnant mother and toddler in Gaza on Wednesday night.

The headline attracted the attention of Israel’s Foreign Ministry and the Board of Deputies of British Jews, who is currently leading a bitter campaign against Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn over a definition of anti-Semitism that conflates criticism of Israel with racism against Jews.

A candidate for mayor in the central Israeli town of Rosh Ha’ayin was convicted of killing a Palestinian teenager during the First Intifada, reported Haaretz.

Raz Sagi, then serving as a company commander in the occupied West Bank, shot Zuhein Abu Hiya in the back as he fled, following confrontations between stone-throwing youth and soldiers in a Ramallah-area village in October 1989.

Chasing the boy, Sagi first shot a plastic bullet in the air, then shot him in the back.

A court subsequently determined “that the boy posed no danger to the soldiers” and sentenced Sagi to three months community service within the military, but he “was not demoted”.

Palestinians living in an Israeli army-designated “firing zone” in the eastern Nablus area are “at risk of forcible transfer”, according to a United Nations agency update.

The report, published this week by UN OCHA, highlights how “recent developments have exacerbated the vulnerability of Palestinians living in, or dependent on access to, an area in eastern Nablus governorate designated in the 1970s as closed for Israeli military training”.

According to UN OCHA, military exercises by Israeli occupation forces in so-called “Firing Zone 904A” have led to “temporary displacement, property damage, disruption to life and new access restrictions”, developments that have occurred in parallel to “increasing settlement activities, including violence and intimidation, alongside a reduced Palestinian presence”.

One of the UK’s “largest donors to Israeli charities”, Dame Vivien Duffield, has likened the new “Jewish nation state” legislation to South African apartheid, in an interview with Haaretz.

Over the decades, Dame Vivien’s foundations have donated several hundred million pounds to Israeli charities and infrastructure projects, as well as Jewish and non-Jewish British institutions.

“Every step Mr. Netanyahu takes is a catastrophe, and it is very difficult to defend Israel right now, to represent it in England,” she told the paper.

The radio was playing in the background and my dad would interrupt the conversation, and both sounded distracted. Something was wrong.

“Bombings are everywhere. May God protect us and have mercy upon us. If you were here, you would have thought it was the beginning of another full-scale attack,” my mom said.

“The sky lights up and then a massive bombardment is heard, and within seconds another one, and another one, shaking the ground underneath us. The walls feel like they’re falling down.”

Palestinians can still squeeze through this choke-hold separating the northern and southern West Bank, but once Israel fully commandeers E-1, the West Bank will be contiguous only for settlers. For Palestinians, it will be dissected into two. Politicians who can still enunciate “two state solution” with a straight face fret that E-1 may be the final nail in the two-state coffin; yet, as with everything that has happened over the past seven decades, they wring their hands in faux powerlessness to stop it.

Israel bombed and destroyed a building housing a cultural center in Gaza City before reportedly agreeing to a ceasefire with Hamas late Thursday.

Rockets unleashed by Israeli F16 aircrafts demolished the cultural centre of Saeed Al-meshal in the west of Gaza city on Thursday.

Drones targeted the building with two warning rockets before eight F16 rockets levelled the building, reducing it to rubbles.

In the third serious flare-up of violence in the last month, a major escalation began between Israel and Hamas militants in Gaza overnight, which involved approximately 180 projectiles fired towards Israeli territory, and more than 150 Israeli airstrikes on targets inside Gaza, according to statements by the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF).

Reports citing Israeli sources say of about 180 projectiles launched from Gaza overnight, the Iron Dome defense system intercepted over 30, while most hit open fields. However, official statements also noted strikes on playgrounds, houses, cars, and factories.

The BBC reports up to seven Israeli civilians wounded by the rocket and mortar fire, with Palestinian health officials confirming the death of a pregnant Palestinian woman and a toddler. The AFP identified the victims as 23-year old Enas Khammash and her 18-month-old daughter Bayan, killed in the Jafarawi area of central Gaza.

A Palestinian toddler and her pregnant mother were killed in an Israeli airstrike in Gaza early Thursday, officials in the strip said, as Israel hit a series of sites in retaliation for '180 rockets and mortar bombs' allegedly fired from the strip.

Enas Khammash, 23, and her 18-month-old daughter Bayan were killed in an airstrike in Jafarawi in central Gaza, the health ministry in the Hamas-controlled strip said, while her husband was injured.

Gaza militants halted rocket fire by mid-day, with a Palestinian official saying 'they consider this round of escalation over.'

However, the Israeli military appear to disagree, warning that 'a full-blown military confrontation in the Gaza Strip' is near and that its government could start evacuating citizens near the border.

The National Board for Planning and Building today recommended to the government construction of two new communities in the Negev: Daniel and Ir Ovot. Also recommended was Nitzanit, an expansion of the Nitzana youth village. The committee on principle planning matters approved the plans in recent months, but the National Board for Planning and Building's approval is needed before the plan can be brought to the cabinet. The plan will now be submitted for cabinet approval. The Ministry of Construction and Housing submitted the proposals.

Israel pummeled the occupied Gaza Strip in more than a dozen strikes Wednesday night amid warnings from a United Nations official that hospitals in Gaza were about to run out of emergency fuel.

Gaza’s health ministry stated that Inas Muhammad Khamash, a pregnant 23-year-old, was killed by bombing in central Gaza along with her daughter Bayan, one and a half years old. The woman’s husband, Muhammad Khamash, was moderately injured.

IN SEPTEMBER OF last year, we noted that Facebook representatives were meeting with the Israeli government to determine which Facebook accounts of Palestinians should be deleted on the ground that they constituted “incitement.” The meetings — called for and presided over by one of the most extremist and authoritarian Israeli officials, pro-settlement Justice Minister Ayelet Shaked — came after Israel threatened Facebook that its failure to voluntarily comply with Israeli deletion orders would result in the enactment of laws requiring Facebook to do so, upon pain of being severely fined or even blocked in the country.

In 2012 FAIR highlighted Alison Weir’s exposé on a NY Times’ report on Israel-Palestine that had reversed the chronology of an attack, & had reported that “several goats were killed in a petting zoo in an Israeli communal farm,” but failed to mention that Israeli forces had injured a one month old Palestinian infant, a two year old, a three year old, a 10 year old, and others….

Israeli soldiers continued, on Wednesday night, the bombardment of several parts of the Gaza Strip, killing one man in northern Gaza, and wounding at least eight others.

The first half of 2018 has been deadly for Palestinian children, with at least 35 children killed by Israeli forces in the occupied West Bank and besieged Gaza Strip, according to Defense for Children International — Palestine (DCIP).

In a report published on Monday, DCIP said that between January and July, the number of slain Palestinian children was three times higher than during the same time period in 2017.

According to the group, Israeli forces have killed more Palestinian children since January this year than in any previous year of the past decade, outside of large-scale Israeli military offensives.

On August 5th, the day before the report was published, 17-year-old Ahmad Jihad Ahmad al-Aydi from Gaza succumbed to wounds he had sustained on the first day of Great March of Return protests on March 30th.

On Monday, the now legendary Palestinian teenager Ahed Tamimi was interviewed on Democracy Now! by Amy Goodman and Nermeen Shaikh.

And what an interview. 34 minutes, and the 17-year-old Ahed, who just got out of jail after 8 months for slapping an Israeli soldier, is as sharp as a knife, mild, succinct, exact, focused, warm but never overly emotional. She has a seriousness and a maturity that can be hard to find in many adults. It is just so inspiring. Israel has good reason to fear her. Not for her slapping soldiers really – but for her clear mind, that cuts through so much of the nonsense that Israel, and indeed Zionism, have managed to inculcate in the world as Hasbara, to complicate things so that they would not be resolved.

Ahed had some things to say about Zionism, very clear things.

U.S. Ambassador to Israel David Friedman visited an Israeli settlement last week during a long weekend of visits to settlements by senior Republicans that was splashed across social media, including a shindig in Jerusalem where former Governor of Arkansas Mike Huckabee performed the Lynyrd Skynyrd song “Sweet Home Alabama.”

Israeli Transportation Minister Yisrael Katz said his government rejected an EU plan to link the Gaza Strip with the West Bank by train, the Anadolu Agency reported yesterday.

“I made it clear that Gaza will not be linked to Judea and Samaria [the West Bank],” Katz told Israel Broadcasting Corporation, according to Anadolu. “Their plan will remain on paper and it is completely rejected.”

Israeli media said the EU had prepared a plan for transport in the occupied West Bank which included “the establishment of an airport, a port and a railway to link the Gaza Strip with the West Bank”. The EU did not officially inform the Israeli government of the plan.

One of the UK’s largest donors to Israeli charities has said she considers the country as she knew it to be “dead” and that “every step” Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu takes “is a catastrophe.”

Dame Vivien Duffield, chair of the Clore Duffield foundation, talked of her “hate” at what has happened to the country in an interview with Israeli newspaper Ha’aretz, which appeared in the Hebrew language version of the paper.

She described the country’s new Nation State Law as “Apartheid. It is South Africa – one law for one group and another law for the other.”

On Sunday 29 July, Israeli commandos boarded a boat taking part in a Freedom Flotilla which was taking humanitarian aid to the besieged Gaza Strip. The boat — Al-Awda (The Return) — was captured by Israel while sailing in international waters. If anyone else had conducted the raid, it would have been condemned as an act of piracy on the high seas. Instead, Israel stopped the much-needed aid going to the 2 million Palestinians in what has been described as an open-air prison.

In less than three months, Jewish settlers have destroyed over 2,000 trees and grapevines in the occupied West Bank. Rights group B’Tselem has issued a detailed report on this destruction, including testimony from Palestinian farmers. Bales of hay and barley fields were also destroyed. The destruction wrought by Israel’s settler-colonists equates Palestinian agriculture to terrorism; slogans sprayed on Palestinian property following the destruction included “No to farmer terrorism”.

The personal testimonies show that Israel has once again refused to act in order to deter settler violence against Palestinians and their land. Ultimately, the aim is to displace Palestinians forcibly by terrorising those seeking access to their own land. “This process has erected invisible walls throughout the West Bank, which Palestinians know crossing will expose them to violence and even danger to their lives,” says B’Tselem.

In this article, Professor Rabab Ibrahim Abdulhadi, founding director and senior scholar of the Arab and Muslim Ethnicities and Diasporas Studies Program at San Francisco State University offers an update and critical analysis of the struggle for scholarship, pedagogy and advocacy on justice for/in Palestine as part and parcel of the indivisibility of justice.

Israeli settlers, escorting a bulldozer, on Monday, demolished two Palestinian homes at Beit al-Baraka church compound at the Hebron-Jerusalem road, despite the presence of a court order allowing the owners to stay in their homes, according to the owner of the two homes, Ahmad Samara.

He told WAFA that scores of settlers from several hardcore illegal settlements, including Kiryat Arba, north of Hebron, and protected by Israeli forces, escorted a bulldozer into Beit al-Baraka church compound and proceeded to demolished the two homes where he and his family had lived for over 40 years.

Samara said that when the family attempted to stop the demolition and to show the army the Israeli court order that allows it stay in the homes, the soldiers and settlers assaulted him and his family, threw them out of their homes and detained his daughter, Asmaa, 32.

Egypt has allowed “some 250 tonnes of domestic gas” to Gaza nearly a month after Israel shut down its only goods crossing and prevented the transfer of fuel into the strip, a Palestinian official told Anadolu news agency on Sunday.

The agency quoted Khalil Shakfa, the head of the General Authority of Petroleum, saying that “some 250 tonnes of domestic gas has been allowed into Gaza.”

Meanwhile, Sky News Arabia reported that “11 trucks of domestic gas on Monday entered Gaza through Salah al-Din Gate, located near Rafah crossing,” according to sources.

However, the Egyptian authorities have not confirmed or denied the reports yet.

Internal emails leaked to Foreign Policy have revealed that US presidential adviser Jared Kushner has been conspiring to pull the plug on the primary aid organization providing help to Palestinian refugees and to convince surrounding Arab nations to make the Palestinians citizens.

The UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) was established by the United Nations in 1949, with the help of the US, to provide relief for Palestinians displaced from their homes following the establishment of the State of Israel. However, 70 years later, most Palestinian people remain refugees, according to the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics, and the numbers have ballooned from around 700,000 to over 5 million people. Of the original refugees, only a few tens of thousands are still alive, Foreign Policy noted.

The Minnesota lawmaker Betty McCollum recently took to the floor of the US House of Representatives, urging her colleagues to sign an unprecedented bill that would prohibit Israel from using US military aid to imprison Palestinian children.

This development underscores what journalist and author Ben White describes in his latest book, Cracks in the Wall, as the beginning of the end of bipartisan support for the State of Israel.

Essential services “are on the verge of collapse” in Gaza after Israel once again banned the transfer of fuel into the occupied and blockaded territory, the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs stated on Monday.

Two hospitals – maybe more – will run out of fuel in less than two days, OCHA added.

Meanwhile 40 of Gaza’s 132 water and sanitation facilities only have enough fuel to last one or two days.

“1.2 million Palestinians are at imminent risk of possible sewage overflow around the 41 main pumping stations,” OCHA stated.

These are the threats posed by the latest deliberately designed and managed crisis imposed on Gaza by Israel to pacify the rebellion among its population of two million.

The Forward has now run two important stories (here and here) on successive days on the covert strategy of the Israeli Ministry of Strategic Affairs and its right-wing NGO allies both in Israel and the United States, most prominently Canary Mission, to silence, marginalize and ultimately destroy the job and earnings prospects of young Americans on campus who have the temerity to advocate for Palestinian rights.

David Rothkopf, Carnegie scholar and former editor of Foreign Policy, has expanded on his tweets saying that American Jews have “a duty to oppose Israel.” He penned a piece for Haaretz, calling for boycott of Israel’s government, and “all manner of pressure.”

But this government of Israel and what it stands for must be opposed in every way possible – including, given the absence of other effective options, boycotts.

To the extent that laws like the nation-state law remain the unaltered law of the land, Israel’s leaders must be challenged, communities of conscience everywhere and all manner of pressure mobilized against it on behalf of those denied their most basic human rights by the law.

Israel’s government chose this path. Its acts have not only undermined its legitimacy; it has parted ways with many of those who support was in decades past most essential to its survival….

Note the words “all manner of pressure” and the loss of legitimacy.

There have been recent media reports regarding projects to liquidate the Palestinian refugee issue by means of liquidating the legal basis for their right of return to their homeland. US lawmakers began taking action to enact a law that would liquidate the issue of Palestinian refugees by recognising only about 40,000 of them, representing about 1 per cent of the over 5 million refugees. Members of the US Senate are trying to pass this law and it is associated with the reconsideration of annual aid contributed to UNRWA, as a new number of refugees not considered under UNRWA will be determined, and accordingly financial aid will be granted, depending on the number of refugees recognised by the agency as Palestinian refugees. Moreover, the UN General Assembly resolution 194 of 1948, as well as relevant resolutions, will apply to them.

Egypt bears as much responsibility for the Gaza Strip as Israel does, an Israeli cabinet minister said on Monday, in remarks that could upset Cairo as it tries to avoid being drawn back into the Palestinian enclave while brokering truce talks there.

In parallel to UN mediation, Egypt has used its contacts with both Israel and the dominant Palestinian Islamist group Hamas to discuss ways of calming a more than the three-month-old surge in confrontations along the Gaza-Israel border.

But some Egyptian officials say they would resist any attempt by Israel, or its US ally, to shift to Cairo the onus for addressing Gaza’s long-term governance or economic problems.

Eyewitness onboard boat to Gaza says Israeli forces beat passengers and stole thousands of dollars, antibiotics during raid

Israel set out limited goals for Gaza truce talks on Sunday, saying the focus was on a proposal to ease its closure on the Islamist Hamas-controlled territory in return for the Palestinians calming their side of the frontier.

The Israeli statement came hours before Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was due to convene his security cabinet to discuss, and possibly approve, UN- and Egyptian-brokered ideas for preventing another threatened Gaza war.

The United Nations and Egypt have not publicly detailed their proposals. They have spoken generally of a need to improve humanitarian conditions in Gaza, stem cross-border hostilities and reconcile Hamas – which refuses formal peacemaking with Israel – to its Western-backed Palestinian rivals.

College campuses are being hit by militant, pro-Israel, often anonymous anti-boycott campaigns. Some of them are so rough, they’re even making pro-Israel Jews uncomfortable.

The list of Jewish groups that do anti-BDS work on campuses is bafflingly long. A partial tally includes StandWithUs, AEPi, CAMERA, the David Project, the David Horowitz Freedom Center, Jerusalem U, AIPAC, Sheldon Adelson’s Maccabee Task Force, and the Zionist Organization of America.

The total amount of American Jewish and Israeli government funds flooding the anti-BDS effort is easily in the tens of millions of dollars each year.

It is Jeremy Corbyn’s misfortune to be surrounded by witless blabbermouths whose unbridled remarks are a gift to Israel lobby propagandists. And while mainstream media in the UK were, as usual, whipping up an anti-Semitism ruckus orchestrated against the Labour Party leader, Israel was busy committing yet another outrage on the high seas against a humanitarian aid vessel peacefully carrying urgently-needed medical supplies for the desperate citizens of blockaded Gaza.

New Jersey Sen. Cory Booker is under fire for posing for a photo with anti-Israel activists – and his spokesman’s excuse isn’t helping.

A grinning Booker held up a sign critical of Israel’s security wall at the Netroots Nation Conference in New Orleans Friday, flanked by members of the U.S. Campaign for Palestinian Rights.

But it wasn’t Booker’s fault, spokesman Jeff Giertz insisted.

“He didn’t have time to read the sign,” Giertz told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. “From his cursory glance he thought it was talking about Mexico and didn’t realize it had anything to do with Israel.”

For the past 18 months, the president's senior adviser and son-in-law Jared Kushner, along with his cohorts, Ambassador to Israel David Friedman and Middle East Special Envoy Jason Greenblatt, have been preparing the grounds for a great bargain between Israel and "moderate" Arab regimes, notably Egypt and Saudi Arabia - one that would end the Palestinian problem, allow for normalisation of relations, and pave the way for a new strategic alignment against a surging Iran.

Judging by their smirks and statements, Kushner and Company have succeeded in tightening the noose around Palestine in complicity with Egyptian and Saudi leaders and are now waiting for the right time to unleash a diplomatic blitzkrieg.

The United Nations Special Rapporteur on Minority Issues, Fernand de Varennes, has started official proceedings to investigate a complaint against Israel, submitted by the High Follow-Up Committee for Arab Citizens of Israel regarding the recent ‘Nation-State’ law.

In May, de Varennes participated in the Second Human Capabilities Conference, organised by the Follow-Up Committee in the city of Tayibe. The conference discussed the threats posed by the of the ‘Nation-State’ bill to the Arab citizens of Israel, as an indigenous community. After the bill became law, the Committee submitted an official complaint against Israel which focused on the ‘Nation-State’ law’s discriminatory and exclusionary articles against the Palestinian people in general and especially against the Arab citizens of Israel.

Israel’s Ministry of Defence yesterday released the first images of its sea barrier designed to further blockade the besieged Gaza Strip. The barrier is located on Zikim beach, approximately three kilometres from Gaza’s northern frontier. The project is slated to be completed by the end of 2018 and is likely to cost an estimated 25 million shekels ($6.7 million).

When completed, the structure will stretch 200 metres out into the Mediterranean Sea, further cutting off the Gaza Strip from Israel. The barrier will consist of three layers: an underwater base level; a 50-metre-wide sea-level platform made of armoured stone, and a six-metre-high barbed wire fence. A further fence will also surround the barrier itself as “an additional security measure.”

The Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement has said that German sports brand Adidas is no longer a sponsor of the Israel Football Association (IFA), media reports revealed last week.

Quds Net News said that BDS activists wrote on its website that Adidas terminated its services to the IFA after a campaign asking the sports giant to stop its complicity in the oppression of Palestinian people.

In March, BDS said, over 130 Palestinian football clubs urged Adidas to end its sponsorship of the IFA over its inclusion of six teams based in Israeli settlements across occupied Palestinian territories in the West Bank.

BDS said that it handed over a petition with 16,000 signatures to Adidas’ headquarters in Amsterdam in June.

The discovery of a rare aerial photo of Jerusalem in the 1930s, taken by a Zeppelin, has provided the long-sought after proof that when Israel occupied the Old City in 1967 it secretly destroyed an important mosque that dated from the time of Saladin close to the al-Aqsa mosque.

The destruction of the Sheikh Eid mosque – in an area widely considered to be the most sensitive site in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict – revives questions about Israel’s continuing abuse of Islamic holy places under its control.

The issue has been in the spotlight recently because of a growing number of arson and vandalism attacks by Jewish extremists on mosques in Jerusalem and the West Bank, in what are termed “price-tag” attacks designed to dissuade the Israeli government from making diplomatic concessions to the Palestinians.

On 29 July, the Israeli Navy stormed the Freedom Flotilla boat al-Awda and diverted it from its intended course to Gaza to Israel. Here Dr Ang Swee Chai, medical doctor on board, recalls what happened that night

The Palestinians’ deteriorating conditions in the West Bank and Gaza Strip makes even long-term optimism difficult. Neither a one-liberal-state nor two-state resolution seems in the offing because (if for no other reason) either would seem to spell political suicide for any foreseeable Israeli government. The one-staters have a good argument against the two-staters and vice versa. Would it really be easier for an Israeli prime minister to evict 400,000 Israeli Jews from the West Bank (leaving aside the more than 200,000 in formally annexed East Jerusalem) than it would be to agree to one secular democratic state in which non-Jews would soon outnumber Jews if they don’t already? I don’t see it.

Israel's Defense Ministry released on Sunday first pictures of a new maritime barrier across the Gaza Strip coast.

The barrier is 200 meters long and 50 meters wide, and has a 6-meter-high fence. "This structure will require additional measures that will provide full coverage of the entire sea against infiltrations," the ministry said in a statement.

Israel's Border and Seam Planning Administration and the Engineering and Construction Department at the Defense Ministry started to construct the barrier about two months ago on the Zikim beach, near the Gaza border.

Israel decided to build the barrier after its 2014 military campaign in Gaza, during which Gaza militants attempted to cross into Israel through the sea.

Believing that the destruction of the UN Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) would both punish the Palestinians for rejecting President Trump’s declaration of Jerusalem as Israel’s capital, and lay the groundwork for the US peace effort, Jared Kushner is trying to see Palestinians stripped of their refugee status.

Kushner, the son-in-law of President Trump, has been pushing the matter with Jordanian officials, trying to get the Jordan government to strip all refugee status recognition from the over two million Palestinians living there.

The UNRWA has jurisdiction over in excess of five million Palestinian refugees across the region, with Jordan having the largest number. Refugee camps in Gaza and the West Bank hold another two million,and the rest are in Syria and Lebanon.

On Friday Israel attacked a Swedish yacht, in int’l waters exercising right of ‘innocent passage’ taking medical supplies to Gaza. All 12 people aboard kidnapped & illegally detained in Israel. Demand they be released to continue their journey.

Senator Cory Booker was photographed holding a sign bearing a pro-Palestinian movement slogan. The image appeared on the Twitter feed of the U.S. Campaign for Palestinian Rights, a self-described “coalition of 330+ groups” working “for a US policy toward Palestine/Israel based on freedom, justice, and equality.”

“From Palestine to Mexico, all the walls have got to go,” the sign read.

While celebrating Ahed release, we should also pause to remember Razan Al-Najjar, the heroic nurse tending the wounded at the Gaza Great March of Return fatally shot on June 1st by an IDF sniper in cold blood while apart from the demonstrators, away from the fence, dressed in easily identifiable white medical clothing, working in the vicinity of Khan Yunis.

We should also salute Dareen Tatour, fine Palestinian poet, author of the poem “Resist My People, Resist Them,” sentenced to prison just now for the sin of writing defiant poetry, having only recently been released from years of house arrest, denied access to the Internet, and even to her own village community.

At a time when Israeli high-tech companies are outsourcing their work to countries such as Ukraine and India, the Palestinian Authority, where about 3,000 students a year graduate from computer science and engineering programs, provides a workforce that can be hired for less than is generally paid in Israel. There are several Palestinian manpower firms operating in Palestinian West Bank cities such as Ramallah, Nablus, Hebron and the new planned community of Rawabi that provide high-tech placement services.

“For the price of one Israeli engineer, an [Israeli] company can hire three Palestinians in the West Bank, and they have very high motivation,” Slama said. Mellanox itself, which is based in Yokne’am, southeast of Haifa, employs more than 100 Palestinians, including 20 engineers who work in the Gaza Strip. The other 80 employees are based in Rawabi.

In the aftermath of the Holocaust, some Jewish intellectuals and humanists expressed the thought that ‘after Auschwitz Jews have to locate themselves at the forefront of the battle for humanity and against all forms of oppression.’

This is a principled and heroic ideal, but the reality on the ground has been somewhat different. Just three years after the liberation of Auschwitz, the Jewish state ethnically cleansed the vast majority of indigenous Palestinians. Two years later, in 1950, Israel’s Knesset passed the Law of Return, a racist law that distinguishes between Jews who have the right to ‘return’ to someone else’s land and the hundreds of thousands of Palestinian refugees that were expelled by force from their villages and cities.

After claiming success for Argentina’s cancellation of the friendly football match with Israel in June, the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) campaign has placed another controversial match under their crosshairs.

This time their target is the match between Israel and Northern Ireland, which is scheduled for 11 September in Belfast. The friendly has been condemned by Palestinian groups who have called on the Northern Irish Football Association (IFA) to rethink its decision to host the match.

Palestinian campaigners for the academic and cultural boycott of Israel say that Jewish state “uses international sporting events to prop up its failing image as it becomes increasingly isolated due to its flagrant contempt for Palestinian rights”.

Darin is one of the Palestinians who stayed to their homes when the Zionist movement occupied Palestine and decided to established a state and homeland on it. She, like one and half other million Palestinians living in Israel, are referred to merely as Arabs, by the authorities. She and the rest of her community were forced to hold the Israeli citizenship. She is denied the freedom to lament the destruction of her homeland and the tragedy of her people, and asked to celebrate it instead, under the name of “Israel Independence Day”.

On 2 June 2014 a group of young Israelis kidnapped a Palestinian boy, Mohammed Abu Khdeir, while he was walking to a nearby mosque to perform dawn prayers, put him in a car and took him to a forest where they beat him and forced him to sallow petrol, poured more on him and set him a blaze. His family immediately informed the local police of his disappearance. His charred body was found a few hours later.

Lieberman’s statement said that the ban was done because of incendiary balloons crossing the border, and continuing tension at the Gaza border fence. He said this would pressure Hamas into doing more to stop the balloons.

This came despite Israel having reopened the crossing only a week ago, citing the decreasing number of balloons and declining tensions at the border. Though some balloon fires have been reported in southern Israel in recent days, it is far fewer than before.

Lieberman now says that limits on goods entering Gaza will be intensified, and that Israel insists on total quiet in Gaza before they will ease the restrictions any further. At present, the crossing allows only limited food and medicine to enter.

Palestinian musicians perform on stage during the Palestine International Festival 2018, in Gaza City, on July 29, 2018.

The biggest bloc of developing countries at the United Nations has chosen the observer state of Palestine as its next leader, the Palestinian ambassador said Tuesday, a decision that could cause new tensions with Israel and the United States.

The ambassador, Riyad H. Mansour, said in a telephone interview that Palestine would take over leadership of the bloc, known as the Group of 77, from Egypt, starting in January.

Originally 77 countries when formed in 1964, the bloc’s membership has nearly doubled in size. The bloc often speaks as one voice in the General Assembly and represents more than 80 percent of the world’s population.

Israel’s recent killing of unarmed Palestinian protesters at the Gaza border, storming of the Al-Aqsa Mosque Compound, and other aggressive actions, plus the US administration’s irresponsible recognition of Jerusalem, have added up to a dangerous escalation. Dr. Ashrawi calls on the international community and organizations to hold Israel accountable and to protect the people and holy sites of Palestine.

More than 350 Israeli soldiers who took part in last summer’s military onslaught on the Gaza Strip have since received psychiatric counseling for post-traumatic stress, an Israeli report has revealed.

Children remain at the heart of the struggle in Israel-Palestine. But while settlers’ terrorism organised and sponsored by the regime in Tel Aviv, the Palestinian resistance is the product of individuals.

Last Thursday, Mohammad Tareq Yousef, from the Palestinian village of Kobar (northwest of Ramallah), entered a settlement called Adam (southeast of Ramallah and al-Bireh) and stabbed a group of settlers before being killed. Isreal responded immediately with a round of assaults and home demolitions in Kobar.

This same village produced a young man named Omar Al-Abed who carried out a stabbing last year in a settlement called Halamish.

Moreover Adam settlement also produced the group of settlers who kidnapped Mohammad Abu Khudair (16 years old) from Jerusalem and burned him alive, killing him in July four years ago.