Israel security forces stole thousands of shekels from Palestinians in Al-Zawiya in the Salfit district of the occupied West Bank last night.

According to the Palestinian news agency WAFA, around 50,000 shekels ($14,500) were seized during raids that were carried out overnight in the houses of Palestinian citizens and former prisoners.

The Israeli authorities often claim that money has been “confiscated” because the Palestinians “supported acts of terror” and received the money from unknown sources. As a result, soldiers are rarely charged with such thefts.

With 90% of the votes counted in Israel’s 3rd-election-in-a-year, the big surprise is Netanyahu’s Likud lead over centrist rival Gantz’s Blue White. The count is 36 for Likud and 32 for Blue White. For some months Likud was mostly lagging behind, and only in the past two weeks polls started showing a slight edge for Likud over Blue White. Absolutely no poll had predicted this level of victory before election day yesterday.

Still, the count appears to leave Likud’s right wing bloc short by 2 seats– at 59 mandates — of reaching a right-wing governing coalition without Blue White, and without Lieberman’s seven seats in the Yisrael Beitenu party. For Lieberman has long declared that a unity government without the religious parties, which won 17 seats and are a key part of Netanyahu’s bloc, is the only option.

Israel held its third election in a year yesterday and once again the right wing is on top. Netanyahu won a large plurality though he is indicted and about to go on trial on corruption charges. The new “left” bloc in politics of three parties including Labor and Meretz got all of seven seats.

There is now just one address for liberal and leftwing politics in Israel: the Joint List of Palestinian parties, the third largest vote getter with a whopping 15 seats, up from 10 last April. It is said that the Palestinian parties drew Jewish voters. Something they wanted: Joint List for a Joint future!

On Monday, 226 Israeli Settlers stormed the courtyards of Al-Aqsa Mosque while accompanied by a squadron of Israeli police. In 2016, protests erupted at the embattled area after Israeli sSettlers invaded the compound during the last 10 days of Islam’s holy month of Ramadan, in contravention of tradition.

The Islamic Endowments Department in Jerusalem reported that the intruders wandered brazenly in the courtyards of the mosque.

How is one to apply rational political analysis to what is inherently irrational? What kind of political theory must one consult to formulate and test hypotheses when the information at hand is so grizzly, sadistic, and reeking with unbearable contradictions?

Seeing the gaunt body of Mohammed al-Naem hanging from the blades of an Israeli military bulldozer near the fence, which separates besieged Gaza from Israel, left me speechless. There is nothing in the field of political science that can convincingly explain the logic of that heart-rending scene.

Come to think of it, killing a Palestinian then dragging his lifeless body using the blades of a bulldozer, thus denying his family the dignity of burying their beloved son or daughter, is unique to Israel; an act that manifests itself in numerous ways every single day in occupied Palestine.

Several Palestinians, on Monday, were injured, when Israeli soldiers opened fire at them as they peacefully defended a mountain in Beita town, south of Nablus, against a settler takeover, local sources reported.

Palestinians gathered on the Jabal al-Arma mountain to protect their land, located in the northern occupied West Bank, from Israeli colonial theft.

Ghassan Daghlas, local settlement monitor told WAFA Palestinian News Agency that the Israeli soldiers shot live-fire, rubber-coated metal bullets and tear-gas canisters in a show of excessive use of force.

What if the Coronavirus reaches the besieged Gaza Strip?

While the question carries great urgency for all Palestinians living under Israel’s military occupation, the Gaza situation is particularly complex and extremely worrying.

Nearly 50 countries have already reported cases of COVID-19 disease, one of several epidemics that are caused by the Coronavirus. If developed countries, such as Italy and South Korea, are struggling to contain the deadly virus, one can only imagine what occupied Palestinians would have to face should the virus strike.

While the coronavirus has prompted panic and emergency measures around the world, many Palestinians trapped in Gaza have responded with black humour on social media, joking that the blockaded enclave may now be the “safest place in the world”.

Commenting on a Facebook post about the disease spreading to Lebanon earlier this week, Monzer Rajab wrote: “God willing, it is hard [for the coronavirus to reach Gaza]. Gaza has been on quarantine lockdown for 14 years,” referring to the blockade imposed by Israel since 2006.

On Friday extremist Israeli settlers uprooted hundreds of olive trees and grapevines in the Al-Khader neighbourhood, south of the West Bank city of Bethlehem, Safa news agency reported.

Local sources reported that the Israeli settlers uprooted 300 trees in the farm of a Palestinian farmer, Naser Ismail Marzouq, in the area of Zakandah, which lies between the settlements of Daniel and Eliazar.

Meanwhile, the settlers uprooted 200 old olive trees and 80 grape vines in the farm of Marwan and Anas Salah, which is located near the settlement of Eliazar.

The politically-symbolic act of two young American athletes has been dubbed ‘antisemitic’ by Israel’s supporters on social media and among the various organizations that promote Israel’s interests in the United States.

The controversy started when two volleyball players from Brooklyn College decided to kneel down during Israel’s national anthem, ahead of a match against Yeshiva University.

The symbolic act by two athletes, Hunnan Butt and Omar Rezika, was meant as a political protest against the Israeli occupation and apartheid policies in Palestine.

Fifty former leaders from across Europe have condemned President Donald Trump’s recently released “peace plan” as akin to apartheid.

In a letter published by The Guardian on Thursday, they say the so-called Deal of the Century violates numerous UN resolutions and “the most fundamental principles of international law.”

“The map featured in the plan proposes Palestinian enclaves under permanent Israeli military control, which evoke chilling associations with South Africa’s bantustans,” the leaders add.

Bantustans were a series of impoverished reservations where South Africa’s white supremacist government tried to force millions of Black people to live.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu vowed on Tuesday to build 3,500 homes for Jewish settlers in the so-called E1 area, east of Jerusalem in the occupied West Bank.

It is the last large open space between Jerusalem, to the west, and Israel’s huge Maaleh Adumim colony, to the east, where almost 40,000 settlers live.

Successive Israeli governments have pledged to build in E1, but have faced international pressure not to do so.

If Israel does build settlements there it will isolate the northern and southern parts of the occupied West Bank from each other, foreclosing the possibility of a contiguous Palestinian state.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has pledged to build 3,500 new illegal settler homes in the strategically sensitive E1 region of the occupied West Bank.

The announcement on Tuesday came a week ahead of Israel's general election - the third in less than 12 months - and is the latest in a string of promises to expand illegal Jewish settlements as the right-wing prime minister also faces a corruption trial.

Israeli police shot an innocent Bedouin teacher and left him to bleed to death, holding back medical treatment that might have saved his life, evidence unearthed by Haaretz has revealed.

Yacoub Abu Al-Qiyan, aged 50, was killed in 2017 when police launched a pre-dawn raid on the Bedouin village of Umm Al-Hiran with the aim of demolishing several homes Israel claims were built without planning permission.

Authorities claimed the Bedouin teacher had driven his car into a police vehicle, with an officer reportedly shooting at Qiyan in an attempt to slow it.

After Qiyan was shot dead, police claimed he was a "terrorist from the Islamic Movement" and suggested he had links to the Islamic State group.

But locals cast doubt on those claims and protested against the killing.

Israeli authorities will establish a joint defence agency tasked with "supressing Palestinian resistance", if Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu goes ahead with plans to annex West Bank settlements, according to a Haaretz report.

Composed of state institutions - including the army and police - the new agency is drawing up contingency plans for a range of possible scenarios, including mass popular uprisings in cities across the West Bank.

A number of Palestinian citizens were injured by Israeli gunfire and tear gas bombs at dawn Wednesday during confrontations after hordes of Israeli settlers forced their way into Joseph's Tomb east of Nablus City.

Local sources reported that Israeli occupation forces escorted about 2000 Jewish settlers into the site, which sparked confrontations with Palestinian residents.

The Palestinians closed the roads in the area with car tires while Israeli forces attacked them with rubber-coated metal bullets, tear gas canisters and stun grenades.

Activists in New Zealand are celebrating victory after they blocked an effort to censor speech supportive of Palestinian rights.

The city council in the capital Wellington was due this week to consider adopting the International Holocaust Rememberance Alliance’s misleading definition of anti-Semitism.

But the motion was withdrawn after a campaign by supporters of Palestinian rights.

Israeli authorities will establish a joint defence agency tasked with "supressing Palestinian resistance", if Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu goes ahead with plans to annex West Bank settlements, according to a Haaretz report.

Composed of state institutions - including the army and police - the new agency is drawing up contingency plans for a range of possible scenarios, including mass popular uprisings in cities across the West Bank.

Intelligence assessments fear mass unrest among Palestinians in the event of Netanyahu's victory in next week's elections, which will likely pave the way for Israel to impose full sovereignty over settlements in the occupied West Bank.

The Knesset caretaker government's attempts to adopt the measure in December drew criticism from Israel's security establishment due to its timing.

Just one week before elections, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has announced his approval of 3,500 new illegal settler homes in the highly contested ‘E1’ area of the central occupied West Bank.

“I have given instructions to immediately publish for deposit the plan to build 3,500 housing units in E-1,” Netanyahu said in a speech on Tuesday, adding that the plans “had been delayed for six or seven years.”

Israel’s plans for the E1 corridor, which has been in the works since 1995, has been consistently delayed due to pressure from the international community, including the EU and former US administration.

The E1 plan seeks to create a settlement bloc connecting the mega settlement of Ma’ale Adumim with Jerusalem, effectively splitting the West Bank in two, cutting off the north from the south.

The Israeli public relations machine is once again making attempts to obfuscate and justify the actions of its army along the Gaza fence. The Gaza Strip, which holds two million Palestinians captive without access to clean water, food or medical supplies, is also subjected to ongoing military attacks by the Israeli army. Though it is impossible to judge which of the countless crimes the state of Israel has committed is the cruelest, some stand out more than others. One particularly horrific crime committed on the morning of Sunday, February 23, 2020, was caught on camera. It is an expression of unspeakable cruelty by the Israeli military, which shows total disdain towards the lives and dignity of the Palestinian people.

Almost two dozen Palestinians have lost one or both eyes as a result of Israeli forces’ repression of Great Return March protests in the Gaza Strip, according to Israeli human rights NGO B’Tselem.

Over the last two years, B’Tselem reported, 19 Palestinians have lost their vision in one eye, while at least two more have lost their vision in both eyes.

Overall, “more than 200 people have been killed, some 8,000 wounded by live fire, about 2,400 wounded by rubber-coated metal bullets, and almost 3,000 wounded by tear gas canisters.”

In line with the demographic goals of the Zionist occupation state, the recently announced Trump deal includes a clause to move the Triangle region in northern Palestine occupied since 1948, to be under the authority of the Palestinian Authority. This will break the concentration of Israeli-Arab citizens in this area and achieve the first step of the Zionist plans to expel the Arab minority from Israel — 20 per cent of the population — and disrupt the demography with the ultimate goal of achieving absolute Jewish dominance.

Triangle villages cover 86,487 acres in total, and the areas threatened with annexation to the PA cover around 42,000 acres, representing almost 49 per cent of the Triangle with a population of 300,000 Palestinian Arabs. The Triangle includes Arab communities in Kafr Qara, Ar’ara, Baqa al-Gharbiyye, Umm Al-Fahm, Qalansawe, Tayibe, Kafr Qasim, Kafr Bara, and Jaljulia. The area was annexed to the occupation state in 1949.

Israel will stop at nothing to ensure its security and may well launch a broad military campaign against Gaza if the local armed groups continue with missile strikes, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said.

Air raid sirens were heard across southern Israel for the second straight day on Monday. The IDF said that some 50 rockets were fired from Gaza at Israeli territory, with 90 percent of them intercepted.

The missile strikes were met with a harsh response, with the Israeli Defense Forces confirming on Twitter that multiple strikes against targets in Gaza have been carried out.

Iran has denounced the Israeli regime’s attacks on civilians and targets of the resistance front in Gaza and Syria, criticizing the international community’s inaction on Tel Aviv’s repeated atrocities in Palestine and its violation of the neighboring countries’ sovereignty.

Uncertainty reigns amid unconfirmed reports of a unilateral ceasefire declared by Palestinian fighters after two days of intense fire across the Gaza-Israel boundary, and Israeli strikes on Damascus.

Israel, due to hold elections next week, claimed that more than 90 rockets were launched from Gaza on Sunday and Monday. Schools in the south of the country were ordered closed on Tuesday for the second consecutive day.

The Israeli military targeted what it described as multiple Islamic Jihad sites across Gaza. Israel also closed Gaza’s fishing zone and its checkpoints along the boundary, halting the movement of people and goods in and out of the territory.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu decided, on Monday evening, to continue bombing the Gaza Strip.

Netanyahu made the announcement, via Twitter, following the security consultations he had with the Minister of Defence Naftali Bennett, Chief of Staff of the Army Aviv Kochavi, head of the Shin Bet security service, Nadav Argaman, and head of the National Security Council, Meir Ben Shabat.

In a related context, the Israeli army spokesman said, in a statement, that the Israeli forces launched new attacks, today, on sites belonging to the Islamic Jihad movement (PIJ) in the Gaza Strip, reported the Israeli Channel 13.

On 18 October 2019, settlers assaulted farmers from the ‘Eid family as they harvested olives on their land east of the village of Burin. The unauthorized settlement outpost of Givat Ronen is located nearby. The settlers threw stones at the Palestinians and stole a sack full of olives and plastic sheets used to catch olives shaken from the trees. Soldiers arrived and ordered the Palestinians to leave, while arresting none of the assailants.

Damascus once again was rocked by Israeli airstrikes Sunday night, with Syria saying its anti-air defenses were active in confronting a wave of "enemy rockets" from the direction of the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights.

In a rare acknowledgement of the attack, Israel confirmed in was behind it, and linked it to rocket fire from the Palestinian territory, Gaza. The Israeli army said in a statement that it targeted Islamic Jihad leaders living in Damascus.

"In the Adeliyah region, outside of Damascus, an Islamic Jihad compound was struck, used as a hub of Islamic Jihad's activity in Syria," the statement said. "Israeli military planes targeted Islamic Jihad targets in Gaza" it said further.

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is not the product of ancient ethnic hatreds. It is the tragic clash between two peoples with claims to the same land. It is a manufactured conflict, the outcome of a 100-year-old colonial occupation by Zionists and later Israel, backed by the British, the United States and other major imperial powers. This project is about the ongoing seizure of Palestinian land by the colonizers. It is about the rendering of the Palestinians as non-people, writing them out of the historical narrative as if they never existed and denying them basic human rights. Yet to state these incontrovertible facts of Jewish colonization — supported by innumerable official reports and public and private communiques and statements, along with historical records and events — sees Israel’s defenders level charges of anti-Semitism and racism.

Israeli settlers on Monday morning destroyed Palestinian wheat fields with poisonous chemicals near al-Sakout village in the northern Jordan Valley.

Human rights activist Aref Daraghmeh said that Israeli settlers sprayed about 12 dunums of wheat fields with poisonous pesticides destroying and burning crops.

Daraghmeh said that settler attacks on Palestinian farmlands in the Jordan Valley fall in line with a large-scale scheme by the Israeli authorities aimed at forcing the Palestinians out of the area.

The US has effectively denied entry to Eyal Weizman, founder of the research group Forensic Architecture.

Forensic Architecture, based in the UK, uses groundbreaking methodologies such as digital forensics and spatial analysis to expose human rights abuses. The group has published several investigations concerning Israeli violations against Palestinians.

Weizman, who holds Israeli and British passports, was due to travel to the US for Forensic Architecture’s first major survey in the country at Miami Dade College’s Museum of Art and Design. The exhibition, titled Forensic Architecture: True to Scale, opened on Thursday and runs through late September.

Israeli fighter jets launched air strikes on suspected Islamic Jihad positions in Syria, the Israeli military said on Monday, after the militant group and Israel exchanged rockets and air strikes around Gaza.

Israeli forces hang the body of a Palestinian man from a bulldozer

Israeli forces use a bulldozer to push blocks of cement at Palestinian protesters in the West Bank

Over the last week, pedestrians and drivers in Tel Aviv caught a glimpse of an especially disturbing billboard that had been posted across the city. The billboard, erected by the far-right group, Israeli Victory Project, showed Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas and Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh blindfolded and on their knees on a backdrop of destruction. The caption read: “Peace is only made with defeated enemies.”

SOURCE: MINT PRESS
TEL AVIV — Since the International Criminal Court (ICC) announced it would investigate war crimes committed by Israel in the Gaza Strip and occupied West Bank last December, Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has been attempting to rally Israel’s allies in a multilateral effort to stop the ICC’s probe.

Those efforts have now left Netanyahu “optimistic,” with the embattled Prime Minister reportedly telling members of his cabinet that Israel’s efforts to lobby other countries against the ICC case is paying off, according to a recent report published by Reuters. “We are struggling against this [proceeding] and, at our side, I must say, are many friends around the world [which] joined the U.S. in a steadfast stand alongside Israel,” Reuters quoted Netanyahu as saying.

The Grand Mufti of Yemen and head of Yemen Scholars Association says Saudi Arabia sees no obstacle to granting the entire Palestine to Jews, describing such an approach as the principled policy of the Riyadh regime.

“Saudi Arabia's fundamental position is that there is no obstacle to granting Palestine to the Jews," Sheikh Shams al-Din Sharaf al-Din said at a conference of Yemeni scholars entitled “Rejection of Trump’s deal and prohibition of normalization with the Zionist enemy” in the capital Sana’a on Thursday.

The pro-Israel lobby group AIPAC used to pride itself on doing its business in the dark. We work most effectively as a “night flower,” AIPAC operative Steve Rosen once explained to Jeffrey Goldberg.

Those days are now over, maybe forever. The rightwing group is controversial in ways that it never wanted to be.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told American Jews that he and the Trump administration are moving ahead with plans to remap the West Bank to give Israel sovereignty over large portions of occupied territory, and Palestinians are going to have to live with that plan “whether they accept it or not.”

Netanyahu’s discussion of Palestinian submission to the “radical” and “historic” terms of the Trump “peace plan” including annexation of all “Jewish communities” and military control of the West Bank sounded very much like surrender.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is confident he can block the International Criminal Court (ICC) from launching an investigation into alleged war crimes committed by his country against the Palestinians in the occupied territories.

While Israel is not a signatory to the ICC, it has sought to undermine the efforts of the international body by lobbying governments friendly to the Zionist state to support its campaign to disrupt the court’s investigation.

One prisoner was hospitalized for kidney failure and 11 broken ribs. Another had his genitals bitten by a security dog while a third man was left wheelchair-bound and unrecognizable.

Two Palestinian youths were injured with live fire during clashes with Israeli soldiers in al-Duheisha refugee camp in southern Bethlehem early Friday morning, as reports emerged of an Israeli army commander making repeated threats in recent weeks to make “all youth in the camp disabled.”

Local sources said that two youths were shot and injured in the legs during clashes that erupted after Israeli forces raided the camp in Friday’s predawn hours.

After lengthy delays, the United Nations finally published a database last week of businesses that have been profiting from Israel’s illegal annexation and settlement activity in the West Bank.

The UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Michelle Bachelet, announced that 112 major companies had been identified as operating in Israeli settlements in ways that violate human rights.

Aside from major Israeli banks, transport services, cafes, supermarkets, and energy, building and telecoms firms, prominent international businesses include Airbnb, booking.com, Motorola, Trip Advisor, JCB, Expedia and General Mills.

The Israeli Prison Services (IPS) has decided to reduce food amounts and many other services offered to Palestinian prisoners inside Israeli jails, Palestinian Prisoner Club (PPC) revealed on Monday.

In a statement, the PPC announced that this step is part of Gilad Erdan’s Committee, which decided in 2018 to cancel all the achievements that the prisoners gained throughout their struggle with the IPS.

The Head of the Popular Committee against the Siege in the Gaza Strip said on Monday that the Israeli siege of the Palestinian territory has pushed the youth unemployment rate up to 70 per cent.

Jamal Al-Khudari, MP, pointed out in a media statement that the ongoing Israeli siege has entered its fourteenth year and resulted in the closure of dozens of factories, companies and workshops.

An eight-year-old Palestinian boy lost his left eye on Tuesday, a few days after being shot by Israeli police with a rubber-coated steel bullet after he stepped out from a restaurant in occupied East Jerusalem.

According to the boy's family and eyewitnesses, Malek Issa was deliberately shot between the eyes on Saturday after he bought a sandwich in the East Jerusalem village of Issawiya.

Medics said the impact of the shooting was so severe that Issa may have suffered brain damage.

The U.S. mainstream media, with the New York Times in the lead, is covering up a shocking feature of the Netanyahu/Trump annexation plan that would strip 350,000 to 400,000 Palestinian citizens of Israel of their citizenship. The “denationalization” proposal is a crime against humanity, but the American press is ignoring it.

Thabet Abu Rass lives in the affected area, a predominately Palestinian part of northeast Israel known as “The Triangle,” where he heads an organization devoted to promoting peace between Israel’s Jewish and Arab citizens. Here’s how he translated the denationalization proposal:

US President Donald Trump's so-called deal of the century on the decades-old Israeli-Palestinian conflict is meant to liquidate the Palestinian cause, says the secretary general of Lebanon's resistance movement Hezbollah.

“It is not a deal. It is Trump’s proposal in order to eradicate the Palestinian cause. None of the Palestinian factions would approve the plan. This is fundamental to frustrating the US scheme,” Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah said in a televised speech broadcast live from the Lebanese capital city of Beirut as he addressed supporters on Sunday afternoon.

A UN agency published a report on Wednesday accusing Israel of imposing an “apartheid regime” of racial discrimination on the Palestinian people, and said it was the first time a UN body had clearly made the charge.

Israel’s foreign ministry spokesman likened the report, published by the UN Economic and Social Commission for Western Asia (ESCWA), to Der Stürmer – a Nazi propaganda publication that was strongly anti-Semitic.

The report concluded that “Israel has established an apartheid regime that dominates the Palestinian people as a whole”. The accusation – often directed at Israel by its critics – is fiercely rejected by Israel.

Israeli occupation authorities have started construction work on a new road that would link the illegal Jewish settlements of Eli and Shilo in the north of the occupied West Bank with the Jordan Valley.

Ghassan Daghlas, a Palestinian official in charge of the settlements file in the northern West Bank, told Wafa news agency yesterday that the settler-only road is about eight kilometres long, and passes through fertile agricultural lands in the Palestinian villages of Duma, Telfit, Qaryut and Al-Mughair, south of Nablus all the way to the village of Fasayil in the central Jordan Valley.

Israeli settlers set fire to a classroom last night in the occupied West Bank village of Einabus, in the latest apparent "price tag" attack on Palestinian communities, students and teachers told Middle East Eye.

Rateb Nassar, the deputy headmaster of the affected school, told MEE that Israeli settlers came from the nearby illegal settlement of Yitzhar, and threw burning materials inside one of the classrooms.

The assailants also spray-painted racist and anti-Arab slogans on the walls, threatening to kill Palestinians and burn their properties, he added.

“This is the most dangerous attack the school has witnessed, and it indicates that more settler attacks are to come," Nassar said.

The Trump administration has dealt another blow to the the flailing Palestinian Authority (PA) in the form of more budget cuts, this time to the PA’s security forces.

The State Department released its congressional budget request for 2021 on Monday; noticeably missing was funding for the Palestinian Security Services, which has received bipartisan support in congress for 27 years.

Last year, the US provided the Palestinians with an estimated $35 million for their security services.

Since President Trump took office, the US has been steadily cutting humanitarian and economic aid to the Palestinians, plunging the PA and other organizations like UNRWA into deep financial crises.

Had Edward Said been alive to witness the sordid spectacle of the Trump administration’s announcement of the so-called Deal of the Century, there is little doubt he would have been disgusted.

But he would not have been surprised.

After Palestine Liberation Organization leader Yasser Arafat signed the Oslo accords with Israel in 1993, Said saw, with his typical lucidity and foresight, the damning implications of this supposed peace treaty.

In the wake of the optimism that the deal engendered in some quarters, Said commented scathingly that the accords were “more flawed” and “more unfavorably weighted than many had first supposed.”

The US will not request Israel recognise the State of Palestine as part of its “peace deal” for the Middle East, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said in the cabinet meeting yesterday.

“We are already in the process of mapping the territory that according to the Trump plan will be part of the State of Israel,” the Times of Israel reported Netanyahu saying at a Likud campaign event in the illegal Ma’ale Adumim settlement on Saturday night.

“This will not take a lot of time and we will complete this,” he added, without giving more detail about how and when this will happen.

In January, US President Donald Trump unveiled his long-advertised Israeli-Palestinian peace plan at a press conference attended by American and Israeli officials. The deal de-facto recognises Tel Aviv’s claims to sovereignty over Israeli settlements in the West Bank, considered a violation of international law by the UN.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has said his country is in the process of mapping areas of the West Bank that would be subjected to an extension of Israeli sovereignty, following the publication of US President Donald Trump’s peace plan to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, The Times of Israel reported.

“We’re already in the process of mapping the territory that according to the Trump plan will be part of the State of Israel”, Netanyahu reportedly said during his party’s campaign event on Saturday. “This won’t take a lot of time and we’ll complete this”.

Iman Abu Tayem was six months pregnant when Israel attacked Gaza in November.

She became increasingly frightened on the second day of that attack. The sound of explosions near her home in the town of Bani Suhaila got louder.

One blast in the evening was so powerful that it made her fall to the floor.

Approximately 15 minutes later she lost consciousness. Muhammad, her husband, noticed that she was bleeding and called an ambulance.

She was brought to Abu Yousef al-Najjar hospital in the city of Rafah.

“I woke up in the hospital and my whole body was in pain,” Iman said. “The first question I asked my husband was if my baby was ok. My husband did not answer and I fainted again.”

By that time, Muhammad already knew that Iman had suffered a miscarriage. The hospital staff had told him the bad news about three hours after Iman was admitted during the early hours of 14 November.

The Festering Conflict

But dreams can only support a position so far, especially when a dream runs up against the full ugliness of formal subjugation of one nation by another nation. Palestinian nationalism will not go away. It will not be bought off with enticements in glossy brochures about economic development. Support for it will not be abandoned by other Arabs — as demonstrated by the firm position on the subject that Saudi King Salman has repeatedly expressed. Regardless of what is done in future years by whatever passes for Palestinian leadership, terrorists and other extremists will continue to exploit for their own purposes an unresolved Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

A week into the official unveiling of the Trump Administration’s “Deal of the Century,” there is no lack of analysis of how this “vision for peace to prosperity” legitimizes Israel’s numerous crimes, while fulfilling the country’s aspirations for acceptance into the region. And as we denounce this vision, it must be emphasized that it does not propose much that is novel, as much as it merely sets up an official, contractual framework for transgressions that are already “facts on the ground.”

President Donald Trump's national security adviser warned Palestinians on Wednesday that Israeli settlements will continue to expand because rising anti-Semitism around the world means more Jews will immigrate to Israel.

Israeli police injured 10 worshippers and detained three others after storming Jerusalem’s flashpoint Al-Aqsa Mosque Friday morning, an official said, Anadolu reports.

The Israeli police forced their way into the mosque and shot rubber-coated metal bullets at the worshipers, the official with Jerusalem Islamic Waqf, an organization responsible for overseeing the city’s Islamic and Christian sites, told Anadolu Agency.

This is the third Friday in a row that Israeli police stormed Al-Aqsa Mosque and attacked worshippers after morning prayer.

The US Department of Education has opened two separate investigations into the University of California at Los Angeles because of events that discussed advocacy for Palestinian rights.

The investigations have been prompted by complaints filed by Israel lobby groups, which allege that Palestine-related education or advocacy on campus is inherently anti-Semitic and discriminates against Jewish students.

They follow US President Donald Trump’s executive order, signed in December, which allows mere accusations of anti-Semitism against campus critics of Israel to result in lengthy inquisitions by the government.

Much of Donald Trump’s long-trailed “deal of the century” came as no surprise. Over the past 18 months, Israeli officials had leaked many of its details.

The so-called “Vision for Peace” unveiled on Tuesday simply confirmed that the US government has publicly adopted the long-running consensus in Israel: that it is entitled to keep permanently the swaths of territory it seized illegally over the past half-century that deny the Palestinians any hope of a state.

The White House has discarded the traditional US pose as an “honest broker” between Israel and the Palestinians. Palestinian leaders were not invited to the ceremony, and would not have come had they been. This was a deal designed in Tel Aviv more than in Washington – and its point was to ensure there would be no Palestinian partner.

Lots of hysteria about the border,

Here’s a story that’s not being told.

Israeli defense contractor turning US reservation into a total surveillance prison camp.

“Field proven” on Palestinians.

This reservation is first – and you’re next.

Damage caused by aerial herbicide spraying conducted by Israel on three consecutive days (January 14-16) along Gaza’s perimeter fence has become visible on crops in the Strip. Individuals working with London-based research agency Forensic Architecture collected samples from fields located east of Jabalya, in northern Gaza, at distances of 100, 200, 400 and 600 meters from the fence. The damage to the crops is clearly visible on the samples they collected. According to local farmers, dunams more of parsley, peas, wheat, barley, spinach and other produce were destroyed entirely. The effect of the spraying appears several days after the spraying is conducted.

White House senior adviser Jared Kushner said Washington wants Israel to wait until after its March 2 election before making any moves towards settlement annexation in the West Bank, following the announcement of a U.S. peace plan.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who has hailed the U.S. proposal, told reporters on Tuesday that he would ask his Cabinet next week to approve applying Israeli law to Jewish settlements in the West Bank.

On Tuesday, he called the plan “win-win,” though to whom the second win goes is hard to say.

The first is undoubtedly Israel’s, of whom the only thing that is being asked is a four-year settlement freeze while Palestinian statehood is negotiated.

Outside this exhausting demand to do less, Israel gets: all (or near enough) its settlements, all of Jerusalem, control over borders, uncontested military control over the whole area of historic Palestine, some one-third of the West Bank and the removal of any possibility that Palestinians who were expelled in 1948 could ever claim a right of return or even compensation for the lands and homes and years that were stolen from them.

It is little wonder that a beaming Benjamin Netanyahu, the incumbent Israeli prime minister who stood next to Trump as he presented the plan, looked more smug than ever.

It is true that Jared Kushner’s father had to give Harvard a $2.5 million bribe to get him admitted there, but the younger Kushner isn’t actually stupid. The internet is abuzz with comment about Kushner’s interview with CNN’s Christiane Amanpour, during which he disrespects Palestinians. As one commenter noted acidly on Twitter: “How to Negotiate A Peace Plan Step #1: Insult One of the Parties.”

Israeli soldiers patrolling a future Palestinian state should not be considered occupying powers, according to David Friedman.

The US ambassador to Israel, who is closely aligned to the Israeli settlement enterprise, suggested that US troops patrolling cities is various parts of the world were no different to Israeli troops walking the streets of Palestine.

“The United States has military presence all over the world. We have presence in Germany, Japan, South Korea, Philippines, I mean…none of those countries consider themselves occupied by the United States and certainly don’t consider ourselves to be occupiers,” said Friedman.

Yet again, the leader of a 'civilised' western democracy has told millions of Palestinians that we have no rights

A new wave of struggle has to start now for equal rights in one state on all of the land of historic Palestine

When Donald Trump announced his “peace plan” this afternoon, rightwing lobbyists for Israel crowded the room, including Sheldon and Miriam Adelson, John Hagee, Joe Lieberman, Malcolm Hoenlein, Alan Dershowitz, and Ron Lauder.

But if rightwing supporters love Trump’s plan to give Israel sovereignty over much of the West Bank, including Jerusalem, liberal and centrist American Zionists are horrified. They regard the plan as an existential threat to “the Jewish democracy.” These Israel supporters say the plan will move Israel toward annexing much of the West Bank, thereby ending any possibility of a two-state solution and leading to a binational state in which Palestinians will demand equal rights.

These Zionists are responding with alarm and rage to the plan and, joined by many leading Democrats, announcing plans to fight its implementation.

After much anticipation and with great ceremony, on Tuesday US President Donald Trump presented his plan for Middle East peace.

It’s “a great plan,” Trump had already said a few days ago, though he may just have been humoring his son-in-law Jared Kushner, its chief architect.

On Tuesday, he called the plan “win-win,” though to whom the second win goes is hard to say.

The first is undoubtedly Israel’s, of whom the only thing that is being asked is a four-year settlement freeze while Palestinian statehood is negotiated.