B’Tselem

GAZA — Tens of thousands of residents in the besieged Gaza Strip plan on returning to the Israeli-controlled border Friday in defiance of menacing promises from Tel Aviv to use massive and disproportionate force. The event will occur exactly one week after the Israelis massacred 17 unarmed demonstrators with live ammunition on Palestinian Land Day.
The protest is the latest in a six-week-long set of nonviolent protests meant to commemorate the continuing dispossession of the Palestinian people and the absorption of ancestral Palestinian land by the country now known as Israel.

A new report by respected Israeli human rights NGO B’Tselem has demolished claims made by Israeli authorities that significant ‘reforms’ have been made to the system of military detention and prosecution experienced by Palestinian children.

Israeli forces have notified residents of the Bedouin village of Khan al-Ahmar that they are at risk of imminent forcible transfer from their lands, weeks after Israeli Israeli Defense Minister Avigdor Lieberman reportedly announced that plans were underway to expel Khan al-Ahmar’s residents within a few months.
Lieberman also said that plans for the full expulsion of the community of Susiya, located in the South Hebron Hills, were also underway.

An Israeli border policeman detains a protester during a weekly demonstration against Israel’s apartheid wall in the West Bank village of Bilin near Ramallah, Friday, Feb. 13, 2015.

German Foreign Minister, Sigmar Gabriel looks on during his meeting with Israel’s President, Reuven Rivlin at the President’s residence in Jerusalem, April 25, 2017. (AP/Sebastian Scheiner)
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Tuesday canceled a meeting with the visiting German foreign minister over the latter’s plans to sit down with Israeli rights groups, sparking a rare diplomatic feud with one of Israel’s closest and most important allies.

Israeli solider Sgt. Elor Azaria waits for the verdict inside the military court in Tel Aviv, Israel on Wednesday, Jan. 4, 2017. (AP/Heidi Levine).
(REPORT) — The Israeli soldier who executed a Palestinian man while he was lying on the ground bleeding and incapacitated was found guilty Wednesday of manslaughter after facing a military trial that outraged far-right sectors in Israel.

Israel has just emerged from its three-week high holidays, a period that in recent years has been marked by extremist religious Jews making provocative visits to Al Aqsa mosque compound in occupied East Jerusalem.
Many go to pray, in violation of Israel’s international obligations. Most of them belong to groups that seek to replace the mosque with a Jewish temple. They now enjoy increasing parliamentary support, some of it from within prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s party.

Israeli government funds have been secretly transferred to far-right organisations leading a smear campaign against groups opposed to the occupation, a series of investigations show.
The right wing groups have received tens of millions of dollars in state funding, either directly from the government or via Israeli local authorities representing the settlements in the West Bank.
In three known cases, publicly funded far-right organisations launched spying operations on human rights groups.

Image: Palestinians in front of a destroyed house after Israeli forces demolished the homes of two Palestinians behind attacks in Jabal Mukaber in East Jerusalem, on Oct.6, 2015 (AFP/Thomas Coex, File)
JERUSALEM (Ma’an) — Israeli authorities on Wednesday demolished a house in the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood of occupied East Jerusalem, displacing six Palestinians, locals said.
Local sources told Ma’an that the residence belonged to Palestinian Ibrahim Diab and his daughter Dina.

The truth about stone throwing as a form of resistance is that it is not an equal encounter between the thrower and the thrower’s quarry. Do not however minimize the power of stone throwing as stones can gravely injure or kill their intended targets. With that said in all of the almost thirty years that stone throwing has been officially utilized by Palestinians as an active form of resistance, fortunately to date very few Israelis have died from being hit with a stone (11 killed).