Israeli forces have shot dead four Palestinians, including a 15-year-old boy, as more than 10,000 gathered in a mass demonstration in the besieged Gaza Strip demanding the right of return for Palestinian refugees.

The Palestinian Ministry of Health said on Friday that at least 729 people protesting near the border with Israel were wounded by Israeli gunfire, needed treatment for tear gas inhalation or suffered other injuries.

Since 1 April, MSF [Medecins Sans Frontieres] teams in Gaza, Palestine, have provided post-operative care to more than 500 people injured by gunshots during the March of Return demonstrations. The number of patients treated in our clinics over the last three weeks is more than the number we treated throughout all of 2014, when Israel’s military Operation Protective Edge was launched over the Gaza strip. MSF medical staff report receiving patients with devastating injuries of an unusual severity, which are extremely complex to treat. The injuries sustained by patients will leave most with serious, long-term physical disabilities. Medical teams in Gaza’s hospitals prepare to face a possible new influx of wounded this Friday in the latest of the March of Return demonstrations. MSF surgeons in Gaza report devastating gunshot wounds among hundreds of people injured during the protests over recent weeks.

Why is the European Union pretending not to see how Israel is deliberately killing civilians in the occupied Gaza Strip?

On Friday, Israel killed four more unarmed protesters, including 14-year-old Muhammad Ayyoub, and injured hundreds more.

This brought to more than 30 the number of Palestinians killed by Israel in its violent suppression of the Great March of Return rallies that began on 30 March and are planned to continue until Nakba Day, the 15 May commemoration of the 1948 ethnic cleansing of Palestine.

The victims include four children and a journalist.

Thousands more have been injured, more than 1,600 by live ammunition that has caused devastating injuries likely to leave them with lifelong disabilities.

Two weeks ago, the International Criminal Court chief prosecutor warned Israeli leaders that they could end up on trial for this violence against civilians.

In Jihad Abu Jamous’ family, he was seen as the lucky one.

The 31-year-old, who gathered gravel to sell to workshops and construction workers for a few dollars a day, was from Khan Younis in the southern Gaza Strip. He escaped a hereditary condition that affects almost his whole family, leaving most of them blind or partially sighted. He also avoided the chronic ailments that his mother, the only other person in the family with good eyesight, suffers.

But Jihad could not evade Israel’s snipers.

On 30 March, Jihad went, along with thousands of Palestinians in Gaza, to protest for the Palestinian right of return near the boundary with Israel. He never made it back.

New it’s NOT ….. but here it is

Pretty pathetic I must say

Yaser Murtaja was shot and killed while filming the second Great Return March which he was documenting with colleagues at ??? ????? Ain Media. This documentary was in progress before he was killed. He dedicated his life to telling the stories of Palestinians in Gaza. What a huge loss for the world.

Our local psycho seems tired of singing praises to the likes of Netanyahu and Trump, so she is now on one of her delusional rants against reality …. This time the Jewish Voice for Peace.

I’m pretty sure that Natalie Portman will be the next one on her list …

Israel is crediting the boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) movement for Natalie Portman’s refusal to receive an award in Jerusalem.

On Thursday, the Genesis Prize Foundation announced it was canceling its 2018 award ceremony after the Oscar-winning actor had informed it that “recent events in Israel have been extremely distressing to her and she does not feel comfortable participating in any public events in Israel.”

Portman’s representative told the foundation that “she cannot in good conscience move forward with the ceremony.”

“After decades of egregious human rights violations against Palestinians, Israel’s recent massacre of peaceful protesters in Gaza has made its brand so toxic that even well-known Israeli-American cultural figures, like Natalie Portman, now refuse to blatantly whitewash, or art-wash, Israeli crimes and apartheid policies,” the Palestinian BDS National Committee (BNC) said in a statement welcoming the news.

The US State Department doesn’t know whether there are civilians in Gaza or not.

This is terrifying – a new low for a department that may soon be led by CIA director Mike Pompeo – a supporter of torture.

The State Department spokesperson Heather Nauert was questioned by Said Arikat of the Palestinian newspaper Al-Quds on 10 April: “Today, the Israeli minister of defense, [Avigdor] Lieberman, said – told The Jerusalem Post, an Israeli newspaper, that there are no civilians in Gaza. Do you have any comment on that?”

In one of the most disturbing responses given in recent memory by a State Department spokesperson, Nauert responded by saying, “I do not. I do not.”

Asked to look into whether there are civilians in Gaza, Nauert responded, “If I have an answer, I will give it to you, certainly.”

For the record, children comprise roughly half of Gaza’s population.

“Paramedics who evacuated the child killed today indicated that he was shot with live ammunition to the head, at around 50 meters from the fence, east of Jabaliya, with no evidence that he posed any threat to Israeli forces,” the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs stated on Friday.

The United Nations Middle East peace envoy Nickolay Mladenov broke with his usual cautious statements expressing “concern” and calling for “maximum restraint.”

Mladenov stated on Twitter that it was “OUTRAGEOUS to shoot at children!” and added that the “tragic incident must be investigated”:

The death toll in Gaza rises to 39 with over 4,000 injured as Israel continues to massacre civilians for 4th straight week. See the horrific reality mainstream media refuses to show, including footage by and about video journalist Yasser Murtaja, killed earlier by Israeli forces.

A group of extremist Israeli colonists uprooted, Friday, at least 100 olive trees from an Orchard in Burin village, south of the northern West Bank city of Nablus.

The assailants, who came from a nearby illegal colony, invaded an orchard owned by Mohammad Raja, and cut 100 trees; many of them were planted more than 60 years ago, in addition to cutting several almond trees.

The attacked land is the only source of livelihood to Mohammad and his family.

Last night the young renegade Jewish group IfNotNow demonstrated outside Senator Chuck Schumer’s office, saying that his silence on the killings of Palestinian protesters as a Jewish political leader was licensing Israel to kill more Palestinians.

“How many more Palestinians must die?” they challenged Schumer, before he makes a statement. “It is life and death, Senator Schumer,” one demonstrator said. Asked another: “Is Palestinian freedom less important than our freedom?”

Four days ago seven members of the group were arrested outside Schumer’s office, making the same demand. And in all there have been 37 arrests of IfNotNow demonstrators since they began protests of Israel’s killings of unarmed Palestinians nearly 3 weeks ago.

Israeli Minister of Transport, Road Safety and Intelligence Israel Katz warned of resuming targeted assassinations of Hamas leaders in the Gaza Strip, Al-Quds Al-Arabi reported on Friday.

On Twitter, Katz wrote: “Hamas has to know that any attack on Israeli army commanders on the borders of Gaza would renew the targeted killing of Hamas leaders.”

He added: “The warning of Islamic Jihad Movement in Palestine to open fire by snipers from Gaza at army commanders is a red line.”

Since March 30, which marks Palestine Land Day, the Palestinians have been peacefully staging protests along the eastern Gaza borders, calling for the implementation of the UN Resolution 194 which stipulates the return of Palestine refugees to their homes, as well as to lift the 11-year-old Israeli blockade in Gaza.

Polish Foreign Minister Jacek Czaputowicz has said that his country’s position towards Palestinian rights is “fixed” and “unchangeable,” Safa news agency reported on Friday.

Czaputowicz’s remarks came during a meeting with the ambassadors of Palestine, Morocco, Kuwait, Egypt, UAE, Algeria, Qatar, Libya, Tunis, Lebanon, Iran, Yemen and Mauritania, held in Warsaw on Thursday.

The meeting was held to discuss the mutual Polish relations with these Arab countries as Poland is currently a member of the UN Security Council.

Czaputowicz stressed that Poland is looking at the Arab world with interest and is seeking to develop relationships with Arab states.

The US administration is resolved to “destroy the peace process and the two-state option”, the Secretary-General of the Palestine Liberation Organisation’s (PLO) Executive Committee, Saeb Erekat, said yesterday.

Erekat’s remarks came during separate meetings with the head of the UN’s Middle East political department, Susanne Rose, and the Japanese Ambassador to Palestine, Takeshi Okubo.

US President Donald Trump’s insistence to violate international law and legitimacy in such a “flagrant manner” has become a “threat” to the security, peace and stability of the Middle East and the world, Erekat stressed.

The human cost of Israel’s crackdown on Palestinian protesters in the occupied Gaza Strip is “a crisis on top of a catastrophe”, a senior United Nations official has stated.

Jamie McGoldrick, humanitarian coordinator for the occupied Palestinian territory (oPt), released a statement yesterday calling for the protection of Palestinian demonstrators, and “urgent funding” to meet “critical humanitarian needs” generated by the “massive rise” in casualties since 30 March.

“The current surge in humanitarian needs is a crisis on top of a catastrophe,” said McGoldrick.

As we approach another Friday of demonstrations near the perimeter fence between Gaza and Israel, it is critical that the Israeli authorities exercise the utmost restraint in the use of force for law enforcement operations, in line with their obligations under international law.

This year, the Israel Prize for Literature was awarded to David Grossman, one of the heralded novelists of the Left, who has a long reputation for speaking out against the “occupation” of Palestinian land, against the “settlers’ and the “settlements”, and against the ideological decay and dying morality of the Israeli majority.

In the past, after the Gaza War, Grossman demanded an inquiry to investigate the IDF, Tzahal, which led to the infamous anti-Israel Goldstone Report. After the Flotilla Affair, he accused the IDF of acting like a “brigade of pirates.” When Tzahal was sent to clean out terrorist havens in Judea and Samaria, Grossman drove off to assist Palestinians with their olive harvest.

This is what a Joint Memorial Day Service turned into …. surely something we shall remember;

“Death to the Arabs, death to the Arabs!” were the screams of the far-right Israeli protesters.

Students at Barnard College, the elite women’s school in New York City, voted this week to ask the university administration to divest from eight companies that do business in Israel.

The referendum, which was written by students from Jewish Voice for Peace and Students for Justice in Palestine, listed ways that companies like Hyundai, Boeing and the Israeli national water carrier Mekorot allegedly violate international law, before asking whether the student government should encourage Barnard to divest from companies that “profit from or engage in the State of Israel’s treatment of Palestinians.”

The 64%-36% victory for the boycott, divestment and sanctions campaign came at what Hillel International describes as the most heavily Jewish school in the country that is not officially Jewish. There are approximately 850 Jewish students at Barnard out of a total undergraduate population of around 2,500. Some 1,153 participated in the vote.

Over two dozen olive trees destroyed, 'Death to Arabs' and 'Drive them out' spray painted on walls in West Bank's Urif

Israeli occupation forces are threatening and beating Palestinian detainees in an attempt to pressure them to end their boycott of Israeli military courts.

Some have been forced to attend court sessions, prisoners rights group Addameer said in a statement marking Palestinian Prisoners Day on Tuesday.

It notes that Israel has arrested approximately 800,000 Palestinians and issued over 52,000 administrative detention orders since 1967.

The boycott, which started on 15 February, also includes lawyers and human rights organizations, as prisoners have urged them to take similar action as a way to delegitimize the Israeli military court system.

Prisoners said the boycott will last until Israel ends its practice of administrative detention – the widespread imprisonment of Palestinians without charge or trial that can be renewed indefinitely.

Six United Nations human rights experts have condemned Israel’s use of lethal force against unarmed Palestinian protesters in Gaza.

”We express our outrage over these shootings that may have resulted in unlawful killings and the incomprehensibly high number of injuries sustained,” the experts stated on Tuesday.

Israeli forces have killed 36 Palestinians in Gaza since 30 March, when the Great March of Return rallies were launched. The six-week protest is set to culminate on 15 May, when Palestinians commemorate the ethnic cleansing of the lands on which the state of Israel was declared in 1948.

At least 28 of those killed, including three children and a journalist marked as a member of the press, were fatally wounded during protests, according to the UN experts.

Vandals spray-painted graffiti on walls and slashed tires in the villages of Aswiya and Luban a-Sharqiya, near the West Bank settlement of Eli on Tuesday evening.

The human rights group Yesh Din, an Israeli organization working to improve human rights in the West Bank, condemned the attack and asked the group Nahliel underground, whose members are suspected of the arson attack in the village of Duma in 2015, to come forward.

How accurate are Gallup polling results in general? Like many other mainstream pollsters, Gallup wrongly predicted a win for presidential candidate Hillary Clinton over Donald Trump right up to the day of the 2016 election. Gallup more famously predicted in 1948 that Thomas Dewey would beat Harry S. Truman and also incorrectly forecast a slim victory for Gerald Ford over Jimmy Carter in 1976. While Gallup correctly predicted the winner of the 2008 presidential election, it was ranked by a Fordham scholar at 17th out of 23 polling organizations in terms of precision. In 2012 Gallup wrongly predicted a Mitt Romney win, and received a drubbing by poll analyst Nate Silver as the least accurate among 23 major firms, with a 7.2 point gap from the final result. More gravely, Gallup was criminally charged and paid fines in 2012 over well-documented charges of falsifying data.

A group of around 30 demonstrators from the left-wing Jewish group “If Not Now” gathered Monday in front of the office of Senator Ben Cardin (D-MD) to protest Israel’s use of deadly force against thousands of Palestinian demonstrators on the Israel-Gaza border in recent weeks. The demonstrators called on Cardin, one of the most senior Democratic Senators on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, to denounce Israel’s response, specifically its use of live ammunition to keep Palestinian protesters away from the border fence between Israel and Gaza. The protesters blocked the entrance to Cardin’s office and asked: “How many more lives need to be lost until you will speak up about the violence in Gaza?” Cardin was slated to speak before the annual J Street conference in Washington later on Monday afternoon.

A press advocacy employee has been sacked following his condemnation of Israel's lethal force used against Palestinians.

Some Israeli soldiers who are posted to the Gaza border have reached out to Breaking the Silence, the dissident Israeli group that prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu has tried to ban because it publishes soldiers’ testimonies that are highly critical of the occupation.

Avner Gvaryahu, the head of Breaking the Silence, described the contacts during a panel at the J Street conference in Washington yesterday:

As long as there will be an occupation, soldiers will speak out. As long as we will continue to control Palestinians, there will be those people who say I have to take responsibility for what I did. And the numbers of soldiers who are coming are as high as they were ever, you know– even soldiers reaching out who are currently on the border with Gaza.

I later asked Gvaryahu if these soldiers are refusing to shoot, as B’Tselem, the human rights organization, has urged. “No, I said, some of them have reached out to us,” he responded.

Rabbi Ophir Wallas of the Bnei David Military Mechina was caught on video teaching young would-be soldiers that Israelis are, from the halachaic point of view, permitted to wipe out Palestinians, and that only fear of massive retaliation prevents that.

Rabbi Wallas’ words can be heard here. They are taken from a longer lecture he has given his students, which – for those who have too much time on their hands – can be seen here. Here is my translation, with essential footnotes:

On the eve of a divestment vote by George Washington University’s (GWU) student senate, multiple students witnessed two men who they say clearly did not attend the university, posting spurious flyers around campus, all with the clear aim of undermining the credibility of the divestment resolution SR-S18-21 or “The Protection of Palestinian Human Rights Act”.

Divest This Time, the student group responsible for the resolution, and supporters like Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) and Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP) were subjected to the attacks, as were Student Association Senators (SA).

The Great Return March has already made a difference. As thirty thousand non-violent marchers are all indiscriminately viewed as “legitimate targets” for asserting their inalienable human rights, the image of Israel as a liberal democracy, an image already severely tarnished by its brazen embrace of apartheid over the past few years, is now receiving additional blows that will be hard to recover from. US politicians are finally noticing, and expressing criticism of the country that was once untouchable. As Philip Weiss notes: “As protests at the Gaza border get underway this morning, several liberal Democratic politicians have finally objected to Israel’s shooting of unarmed Palestinians at the Gaza fence.” Weiss goes on to point out that the criticism of Israel is nevertheless tempered by the call on Palestinians “to exercise their rights nonviolently,” and describes Senator Elizabeth Warren’s criticism as “tepid.”

Amnesty International’s incoming secretary-general is calling the boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) movement for Palestinian rights a “historically tested peaceful tool of resistance.”

He is also urging Palestine solidarity campaigners to make more use of civil disobedience.

Kumi Naidoo, who will take up his post as chief executive of the global human rights organization in August, made the comments in an interview during Israeli Apartheid Week activities organized by BDS South Africa last month.

The interview, in which journalist Janet Smith also talks to BDS South Africa’s Kwara Kekana, can be seen in the video above.

In the video, Naidoo slams as hypocritical the opposition to the BDS movement that has come from many governments.

From Boston to San Francisco, young activists from IfNotNow demonstrate outside the offices of prominent Jewish institutions and senators, demanding they condemn Israel’s violence against Gaza protesters.

Celebrating 70 years of… oppression and apartheid?

Israeli soldiers fired, on Wednesday at dawn, at least two artillery shells into Palestinian lands, close to the border fence east of Khuza’a town, east of Khan Younis, in the southern part of the Gaza Strip, wounding five Palestinians, including one who suffered a serious injury.

Media sources said the soldiers, stationed across the border fence east of Khuza’a town, fired at least two shells at Palestinians who approached the border fence, wounding five; one seriously.

They added that the soldiers also fired several live rounds at Red Crescent ambulances and medics who rushed to the scene.

Israeli soldiers attacked, Tuesday, dozens of nonviolent protesters and journalists, during a protest held by families of political prisoners near the northern entrance of al-Biereh city, in central West Bank, wounding many of them.

The soldiers deliberately attacked journalists documenting the nonviolent procession and fired many gas bombs and concussion grenades at them.

The army also resorted to the excessive use of force against the nonviolent protesters, and fired gas bombs at them, causing many to suffer the effects of teargas inhalation, and wounding two who were directly shot with gas bombs, including one who was hit in the head.

The nonviolent procession was held by more than 200 mothers or wives of political prisoners, in addition to many residents, including political leaders, who marched carrying Palestinian flags and pictures of imprisoned loved ones.

Today, on the International Day of Solidarity with Palestinian Political Prisoners, more than 150 European trade unions, political parties, human rights organizations and faith groups from over 16 European countries have issued a call urging the EU to uphold its legal responsibilities and exclude Israeli military companies from EU Framework Programs.

This call – accompanied by a video briefing – comes at a time when at least 35 unarmed Palestinians have been shot dead by Israeli snipers during three weeks of protests at Gaza’s border with Israel.

Write down: I, Uri Avnery, soldier number 44410 of the Israel army, hereby dissociate myself from the army sharpshooters who murder unarmed demonstrators along the Gaza Strip, and from their commanders, who give them the orders, up to the commander in chief.

We don’t belong to the same army, or to the same state. We hardly belong to the same human race.

Is my government committing "war crimes" along the border of the Gaza Strip?

I don’t know. I am not a jurist.

It seems that officials of the International Criminal Court believe that the acts of our soldiers do constitute war crimes. They demand an international investigation.

To prevent that, our army command proposes an Israeli military investigation. That is manifestly ridiculous – an army investigating itself about acts committed on direct orders of the Chief of Staff.

A group of Israeli settlers, on Monday, stormed a historic archaeological site in the town of Sebastia, near Nablus, northern West Bank, under heavy protection by the Israeli army.

The mayor of Sebastia Mohammed Azem, told WAFA that a number of settlers, broke into the site amid the protection by the army, who closed the area for any other visitors.

He added that confrontations broke out in the area, following the visit, while Israeli soldiers fired teargas towards the protesters.

Azem pointed out that the town is constantly attacked by the occupation and settlers, especially with the approach of a national festival in the town that will be organized by the municipality next Friday, and will be held in the archaeological area.

In a separate incident, two Israeli settlers, in the early Monday morning hours, have reportedly damaged a grave in Bab Al-Rahma historic Islamic cemetery, adjacent to the eastern wall of the Al-Aqsa Mosque, defiling it.

The Palestinian Prisoners Society (PPS) issued a statement marking the “Palestinians Prisoners’ Day,” on April 17th, and said that Israel is holding captive 6500 detainees, including 1928 who were abducted since the beginning of this year.

In its report, the PPS said that Israel is holding captive 6500 Palestinians, including 350 children, 62 women, and six democratically-elected legislators. Among the imprisoned women are 21 mothers, and eight children.

It added that 48 of the Palestinians detainees have been held since more than 20 years, 25 since more than 25 years, and 12 since more than 30 years.

Israeli soldiers abducted, on Tuesday at dawn, thirteen Palestinians, including a senior political leader of the leftist Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), during extensive and violent searches of homes in several parts of the occupied West Bank.

The soldiers also distributed leaflets in the al-Am’ari refugee camp, in the central West Bank city of Ramallah, warning “further restrictions and ongoing invasions,” if the Palestinians continue their protests.

In addition, the army said some of its military jeeps were attacked with stones and Molotov Cocktails in the al-Khader town, south of Bethlehem, and claimed to locate a pistol during searches in the West Bank.

For Mahmoud Shuqair, life in the small village of al-Zawiyeh is a waiting game. Once the proud owner of dozens of acres of land, Shuqair has seen swathes of his family land confiscated by Israel over the years.

Now, with the resurfacing of previously shelved plans of a settler-only light rail connecting West Bank settlements with Israeli cities inside the Green Line, Shuqair says it’s only a matter of time before he sees nearly all of his land taken by the state of Israel.

Israel says it is sanctioning the owners of Gaza buses used to transport Hamas activists to border demonstrations.

The head of Cogat, the military body for Palestinian civilian affairs, wrote on Facebook that 14 companies ignored warnings and bused "violent" protesters. Maj. Gen. Yoav Mordechai said Monday that they and their families will be denied extra "privileges" and ties to Israel will be "canceled," without elaborating.

The past three weekends in Gaza, we have watched, stunned, as unarmed Palestinian protesters have been gunned down by Israeli snipers. The soldiers were given explicit orders to shoot anyone approaching the fence that separates Israel and Gaza, in violation of international law, and condemnation of Israel’s actions has been swift and widespread.

The International Criminal Court has warned Israel that it is watching how it is using lethal force against unarmed protesters for possible war crimes. And from the New York Times editorial board to international rights organizations, many have called for accountability for Israel’s actions.

Read more: https://forward.com/opinion/398897/the-two-state-solution-is-dead-supp...

Let us begin with a thought experiment: imagine dozens of unarmed, protesting Caucasian Christians or Jews – say, Israelis or Europeans – were shot dead by heavily armed brown folks, like, say Palestinian Muslims. What would we call this? That’s easy: terrorism. How would the media cover such an event? Simple: extensively and emotionally, probably for many days. The smiling faces of the victims would be splashed across the screens of television networks from Fox News to MSNBC.

Write down: I, Uri Avnery, soldier number 44410 of the Israel army, hereby dissociate myself from the army sharpshooters who murder unarmed demonstrators along the Gaza Strip, and from their commanders, who give them the orders, up to the commander in chief.

We don’t belong to the same army, or to the same state. We hardly belong to the same human race.

Is my government committing "war crimes" along the border of the Gaza Strip?

After a hopeful improvement, the New York Times coverage of the Gaza protests is unfortunately back to its normal one-sided reporting — and intense pressure from Hasbara Central is surely a major reason. Take a look at this tweet yesterday, as the paper’s main reporter, David Halbfinger, jumps to respond to a pro-Israel critic:

DEMO @ UNION SQ. IN SOLIDARITY WITH THE RIGHT OF RETURN MARCH

Jarah, a 22-year-old Palestine refugee cancer survivor and amputee, climbs Mount Everest Base Camp to save his UNRWA school in Jordan

The Israeli navy claimed that it shot at Ismail’s boat after the fishermen on board ignored warnings and crossed a shifting Israeli-imposed limit on Gaza’s territorial waters.

But eyewitnesses say the reality is different. There were three men on the boat that day; the other two were both injured and arrested. One said, after his release, that the boat was only three miles from Gaza’s shoreline – well within the six-mile limit – and was heading back toward Gaza, not toward Israel, as the military said.

Requested changes include:

Deletion of references to Israel "occupying" territories captured during the 1967 Six-Day War and substituting "controlled." International conventions clearly outline the responsibility of occupying powers and the illegality of collective punishment and population transfers.

Changes to maps to recognize Israel's declared "annexation" of East Jerusalem and the Golan Heights. The U.S. and most other countries do not officially recognize Israeli annexation of either territory.

Substitution of references to "occupied territories" to "captured areas."

Substitution of references to "Jewish settlers" and "settlements" with "building of homes and communities."

Deletion of a lesson reviewing a video documentary by Iranian-American religious studies scholar, author, producer and television host Reza Aslan.
Deletion of an activity based on reading the biography and work of Palestinian legislator Hanan Ashrawi.

Life before expulsion in Palestine: “We were there. We do exist.” Today, 7 million+ Palestinians are denied their right to return by Israel.

Four Palestinians were killed in a suspected Israeli artillery shelling in the Gaza Strip on Saturday, according to the Palestinian Health Ministry.

In a statement, ministry spokesman Ashraf al-Qidra said the four were killed east of Rafah city in the southern Gaza Strip.

“Medical teams are still searching the area,” he said.

Local Palestinian media said Israeli forces fired tank shells at a position of Palestinian group Hamas east of Rafah, killing four people.

The four were identified as Amjad Qartous, 18, Ayed Hamaydeh, 23, Hesham Kallab, 18, and Hesham Abdul-Al, 22. All four were from from the southern Gaza Strip city of Rafah.

After three weeks in which Israeli army snipers have killed dozens and wounded well over 1,200 protesters inside the Gaza Strip, four prominent human rights organizations petitioned Israel’s High Court of Justice on Sunday, demanding that the court order the state to revoke the rules of engagement that permit shooting demonstrators who pose no danger to human life.

The overwhelming majority of those who were killed and wounded by Israeli forces over the past three weeks were unarmed participants in the “Great Return March,” a 45-day series of festivals and protests set to culminate on Nakba Day in mid-May.

The rights groups asked the court for an urgent hearing — before this Friday’s protests.

Last week the new leader of the Israeli Labour Party, Avi Gabbay issued a letter cutting his links with Jeremy Corbyn. It is doubtful that this racist twerp had any links in the first place. His actions were designed to aid those seeking to overthrow Corbyn. The last person Jeremy Corbyn needs to take lessons from, when it comes to racism, is Avi Gabbay of the Israeli Labour Party, a party that openly supports segregation and Apartheid.

The Zionists International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance definition of ‘anti-Semitism’ says that ‘criticism of Israel similar to that levelled against any other country cannot be regarded as antisemitic’ with the clear implication that other criticism is anti-Semitic.

The problem is of course that Israel is not ‘any other country’. It is unlike all other countries being a settler colonial state. In what other liberal democracy, which is what Israel claims to be, would you have whole villages of an ethnic minority demolished in order that a racially exclusive town could be built on top of it? That is what is happening to Bedouin villages in Israel’s Negev.

Israeli soldiers abducted, on Monday at dawn, eight Palestinians, and injured four others, during military invasions of Nablus and Jenin, in the northern parts of the occupied West Bank.

Media sources in Jenin said the soldiers invaded and violently searched many homes in the city, and abducted Mohammad Emad Tazaz’a, Amjad Damouni, Mustafa Kamil Dib’ey and Ahmad Hakim Jamil.

They added that the soldiers also invaded many stores along Nazareth Road, north of Jenin, violently searched them and confiscated surveillance recordings.

The soldiers also invaded the Shuhada Junction, in the center of Nablus city, and shot five Palestinian protesters, after firing rubber-coated steel bullets and gas bombs at them.

George Washington University's Student Association will soon vote on a BDS resolution that calls on the school to divest from companies such as Boeing and Lockheed Martin.

The bill, which failed to pass last year, accuses Israel of being an apartheid state, while asserting that the university's mission statement compels it to support BDS.

This is a message of gratitude and appreciation for making this initiative real. Without your generous donations, we wouldn’t be able to reach many of children across the Gaza Strip, and offer them some moments of peace, dialogue, and entertainment. We are determined to continue in this track, this time with more commitment and enthusiasm. We always appreciate your input and feedback. If you wish to know more, please contact us on info@gazachildrencinema.org.

Israeli leaders have been making downright genocidal claims against Palestinians, and the rhetoric finally seems to be backfiring. The government’s line on “defending itself from terrorists” is not being swallowed by the world as easily as it used to be. Especially because those genocidal statements betray other than “defensive” intentions to the actions in Gaza. And the process is accelerating Israel’s delegitimization as a supposed liberal democracy.

Take for example Likud spokesman Eli Hazan’s claim that “all 30,000 [Gazan protesters] are legitimate targets.”

Or Defense Minister Lieberman’s claim that “there are no innocent people in Gaza”.

A decade has passed since Israel adopted the perception, based on security or diplomatic reasons, that it favors the Hamas rule in Gaza over any other alternative.

The forefather of this doctrine was Ehud Barak, who served as defense minister in the Olmert and Netanyahu governments from 2007 to 2013. During Operation Cast Lead, when we were a bowshot away from bringing the Hamas rule down, Barak firmly objected and forced his opinion on the cabinet and on Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, who was nearing the end of his term.

"A Palestinian journalist shot Friday during clashes between Palestinian protesters and Israeli forces at the Gaza-Israel border died of his wounds later Friday night. The journalist, Yaser Murtaja, can be seen in photos soon after he was shot, wearing a protective jacket labeled PRESS. Four other journalists were injured by live fire during the demonstrations, one of them critically."
– Israel’s Haaretz newspaper, April 7, 2018

"The killing and wounding of yet more unarmed Palestinian protesters yesterday by Israeli forces in Gaza is an outrage . . . Firing live ammunition into crowds of unarmed civilians is illegal and inhumane and cannot be tolerated."
– British Political leader Jeremy Corbyn, reported in very few UK newspapers, April 7, 2018

"There are no innocent people in the Gaza Strip. Everyone’s connected to Hamas, everyone gets a salary from Hamas, and all the activists trying to challenge us and breach the border are Hamas military wing activists."

Senator Bernie Sanders is circulating a letter among members of Congress urging the Trump administration to take steps to improve the humanitarian and economic conditions in Gaza in light of the recent violence on the Israel-Gaza border.

The letter, which could be sent to the U.S. State Department as early as next week, comes as a growing number of Democratic lawmakers in Washington, including Sanders, are criticizing Israel's response to the protests.

SENIOR ISRAELI OFFICIALS declined on Thursday to offer any proof to substantiate their coordinated attack on the reputation of Yaser Murtaja, a Palestinian photojournalist who was shot and killed by an Israeli sniper last week while documenting protests in Gaza.

Israel has struggled for days to explain the killing of Murtaja, who was wearing a flak jacket clearly marked with the word “PRESS” when he was shot on Friday.

After his funeral on Saturday, a spokesperson for the Israel Defense Forces had insisted that Israeli snipers had not targeted Murtaja, or the five other Palestinian journalists who were injured by live fire.

Later on Saturday though, Israel’s defense minister, Avigdor Lieberman, suggested that Murtaja might have been killed because he was flying a drone over Israeli forces during the protests. However, video recorded moments before the shooting showed that Murtaja had been using a handheld stabilizer device to record images of the protesters, not a drone.

Mal Hyman, a supporter of Palestinian rights, is again running for US Congress in the conservative state of South Carolina.

Tom Rice, a Republican, defeated Hyman, a professor at Coker College, in 2016. Hyman finished with just under 40 percent of the vote tally.

Undeterred, Hyman is running again. To stand against Rice in November, he will need to defeat three other Democratic contenders in the primary.

Hyman has not silenced himself on Palestinian rights in the past few weeks, but rather has been outspoken in voicing his alarm about Israel’s actions against Palestinians in Gaza.

On 3 April he tweeted that Israel’s military had carried out “a massacre” the previous Friday when it shot and killed Palestinian demonstrators in Gaza participating in the Great March of Return.

Activists on Thursday confronted Nikki Haley, the US ambassador to the United Nations, on her government’s blocking of any international investigation into Israel’s killings in Gaza.

As the video above shows, Haley had no answer as members of the antiwar group CODEPINK stated that “Israel deserves to be held accountable just like any other country” for the “killing of peaceful protesters.”

Meanwhile, five members of the US Congress are breaking the near-silence.

They are backing B’Tselem’s call on Israeli soldiers to defy illegal orders to open fire on unarmed Palestinians taking part in protests in the occupied Gaza Strip.

“We applaud Israeli human rights groups that are calling on Israeli soldiers to resist such illegal orders from their superiors, and are urging IDF forces to fully comply with international law and exercise utmost restraint in their use of deadly force,” the lawmakers said on the eve of the third Friday of Great March of Return rallies.

Israeli forces injured around 1,000 protesters, 15 of them critically, on Friday as it used lethal force to crack down on demonstrations in eastern Gaza for the third week in a row.

One Palestinian, 28-year-old Islam Mahmoud Rushdi Herzallah, was reported by the Gaza health ministry to have died after being shot in the back east of Gaza City.

Herzallah was unarmed and was posing no threat to soldiers at the time he was shot, according to the Gaza-based rights group Al Mezan.

A photo of Herzallah circulated on social media following the announcement of his death:

Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu yesterday responded to a video by former ‘Amona settler Avihai Boaron, who praised Netanyahu for building ‘Amona land thieves a new settlement, by thanking him and promising to visit.

Part and parcel of the job of the most settler-friendly PM ever, you would think. Particularly one who is unusually sensitive to the idea of losing face with the “base.”

But Boaron isn’t your garden-variety settler leader. He has made genocidal statements. In 2011 Boaron attacked so-called moderate rabbis, who had opposed a “rabbis’ letter.” That letter was a call, signed by 300 rabbis, demanding Jews refrain from selling or renting houses or apartments to non-Jews. Boaron published his attack in the 117th volume of the Sabbath newszine Ma’ayanei Ha’yeshua, in January 2011– unsigned, but he did not deny writing it later – and claimed the moderate rabbis

he general secretary of the International Federation of Journalists accused Israeli authorities of “fabricating lies to justify murder” in the case of a Palestinian journalist who was killed last Friday during protests in Gaza. Others have called into question Israel’s assertions on Wednesday that Yaser Murtaja was a Hamas member.

Murtaja, a 30-year-old photographer and cameraman, was killed near Khan Yunis during the second Friday of the Palestinian “Great March of Return” on the Gaza border. He was wearing a blue journalist-style flak jacket marked with the word “press.”

Defense Minister Avigdor Liberman said that Murtaja was flying a drone near the border. However, Palestinians present claimed that journalists were targeted by IDF snipers during the clashes and that he did not use his drone that day. MKs MKs Ksenia Svetlova and Zouheir Bahloul called for an investigation and the IDF said it was looking into the incident.

‘This area under Jewish control,’ reads a sign in Arabic posted by settlers on a critical artery linking villages, now blocked for thousands of Palestinians

Raed Jadallah belonged to an exclusive club — a small band of surfers who escaped the claustrophobia of blockaded Gaza by riding the waves of the Mediterranean. Now he's immobile, a metal fixation device clamped to his left leg after an Israeli bullet fractured his femur in two places.

The 25-year-old plasterer from a seaside refugee camp said he doesn't know when he'll be able to walk again, let alone surf.

"Sea and surfing are everything to me," he said on Wednesday, a day after being discharged from the hospital, his lower body covered by a blanket as he rested on a sofa at his home.

In the last 10 years, Israel has launched three massive genocidal wars of aggression on the occupied Gaza Strip, many of our civilians were massacred by its indiscriminate bombing, condemned by UN experts and leading human rights organizations as war crimes and “possible” crimes against humanity. These assaults left over 3,800 Palestinians dead, predominantly civilians, of whom hundreds were children. Another 15,000 Palestinians were injured. We, the 2 million Palestinians in the besieged Gaza Strip, the overwhelming majority of whom are refugees who were violently expelled and dispossessed from our homes by Zionist forces in 1948, were subjected to three weeks (2009), 2 weeks (2012) and 51 days (2014) of relentless Israeli state terror, whereby Israeli warplanes systematically targeted civilian areas, reduced whole neighborhoods and vital civilian infrastructure to rubble and destroyed scores of schools, including several run by UNRWA, where civilians were taking shelter.

At least 65 foreign invitees blocked from participating in meeting in Ramallah organised by the Palestinian Authority.

At least 34 Palestinians killed by Israeli forces since they began holding Land Day protests on March 30.

The Israeli ambassador in Ghana went into an abusive meltdown in a radio interview about Israel’s refusal to allow a prominent Ghanaian lawmaker to enter the occupied West Bank.

Ras Mubarak had been trying to travel to Ramallah from Jordan on Wednesday for a conference about Jerusalem organized by the Palestinian Authority.

Mubarak was elected to the West African nation’s parliament in 2016, the year his party, the National Democratic Congress, lost power and went into opposition.

He was among more than 60 participants from countries including India, Bosnia, Sri Lanka and Australia who were denied entry by Israeli occupation authorities.

The legs of two Palestinians were amputated on Wednesday after Israel refused to allow them to leave the blockaded Gaza Strip for treatment.

Human rights groups had appealed to the Israeli authorities to allow for the transfer of Yusif Karnaz, 20, and Muhammad al-Ajouri, 17, to a hospital in the occupied West Bank for surgery that would save their limbs.

The youths were shot during the launch of the Great March of Return protests along the Gaza-Israel boundary on 30 March.

But COGAT – the bureaucratic arm of Israel’s military occupation that postures as a humanitiarian body – denied their requests for permission to travel for specialized surgery unavailable in Gaza.

As FAIR has noted before (e.g., Extra!, 1/17; FAIR.org, 4/2/18), the term “clash” is almost always used to launder power asymmetry and give the reader the impression of two equal warring sides. It obscures power dynamics and the nature of the conflict itself, e.g., who instigated it and what weapons if any were used. “Clash” is a reporter’s best friend when they want to describe violence without offending anyone in power—in the words of George Orwell, “to name things without calling up mental pictures of them.”

It’s predictable, then, that in coverage of Israel’s recent mass shootings in Gaza—which have killed over 30 Palestinians and injured more than 1,100—the word “clashes” is used to euphemize snipers in fortified positions firing on unarmed protesters 100 meters away:

As plumes of tear gas drift across the Israeli no-go zone inside Gaza’s border fence, Palestinian protesters dart between them, relying on an array of home-made devices to keep out the fumes.

In a 2 April 2018 interview in the Atlantic, Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman publicly declared that the Israelis “have a right to live in their own land just like the Palestinians.” It is a problematic assumption, given that the Israelis’ “own land” is the land they took away from the Palestinians. This, and much else, has been either forgotten or ignored by the Saudi crown prince.

The ongoing popular mobilisation on the Gaza border is a reminder of previous historical events where the Palestinian people rose in unison to challenge oppression and demand freedom.

Palestinian popular resistance is neither a new phenomenon nor is it an alien one. General mass strikes and civil disobedience, challenging British imperialism and Zionist settlements in Palestine, started nearly a century ago, culminating in the six-month-long general strike of 1936.

Since then, popular resistance has been a staple in Palestinian history, and it was a prominent feature of the First Intifada, the popular uprising of 1987.

On Saturday, hundreds of mourners gathered in Gaza for the funeral of Palestinian journalist Yaser Murtaja, who was fatally shot by the Israeli army while covering a fresh round of deadly protests along the Israel-Gaza border. Photos show the 30-year-old journalist was wearing a flak jacket clearly marked ”PRESS” at the time of the shooting. He’s one of at least nine Palestinians who were killed by the Israeli army during its brutal crackdown against Friday’s protests. The Palestinian Health Ministry says Israeli forces have killed 31 people in total since Palestinians kicked off a 6-week-long nonviolent protest late last month, dubbed “The Great March of Return.” Both the International Criminal Court and the United Nations have rebuked Israel in recent days and warned its actions on the border could violate international human rights conventions.

We, the undersigned student groups, pledge to participate in the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement for Palestinian human rights by

Boycotting Israeli goods and goods manufactured in the Occupied Territories, except for those manufactured by Palestinians. For a list of what to boycott, visit https://bdsmovement.net/get-involved/what-to-boycott
Boycotting Israeli academic institutions and conferences sponsored by the State of Israel
Boycotting NYU’s pro-Israel clubs, Realize Israel and TorchPAC, by not co-sponsoring events with them, as well as boycotting off-campus pro-Israel groups such as Birthright-Taglit, StandWithUs, Christians United for Israel, the Maccabee Task Force, Mosaic United, Zionist Organization of America, American Israeli Political Action Committee, and the Anti-Defamation League
Endorsing the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement

Days after an Israeli human rights group urged soldiers to refuse orders to shoot at Palestinian protesters in the Gaza Strip along the fence that divides the occupied territory from Israel, Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu yesterday accused the group of “outrageous absurdity” and defended the military for their “holy work.”