Israel announces thousands of new settler units in West Bank

Press TV

Israel has reportedly approved plans for the construction of 6,000 new settler units in the occupied West Bank, in flagrant defiance of international outcry over the Tel Aviv regime’s settlement expansion policies in the Palestinian territories.

Israeli officials said on Wednesday Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s cabinet had approved permits for 6,000 new units for settlers in the so-called Area C of the West Bank.

The area is the largest division in the occupied territory as it comprises 60 percent of the land, and is under full Israeli military control.

The Palestinian leadership rejected the construction announcement, with the Palestinian Foreign Ministry calling it “evidence of the dark colonial mentality of the rules in Israel and which ignores all United Nations resolutions, international law and the signed agreements.” 

Read more

Israel face-recognition start-up ‘secretly tracking Palestinians’

MEMO| Middle Eastern Monitor

A start-up known as “Israel’s most high-profile biometric recognition firm” is playing a key role in monitoring Palestinians at checkpoints in the occupied West Bank, reported Haaretz.

According to the article, Anyvision Interactive Technologies “is taking part in two special projects in assisting the Israeli army in the West Bank”.

One project “involves a system that it has installed at army checkpoints that thousands of Palestinians pass through each day on their way to work from the West Bank.”

In a statement in February, the army said “27 biometric crossings” had been established in the West Bank, as part of a “wide-ranging” effort to “upgrade” the checkpoints in question.

The second project, however, “is much more confidential”, reported Haaretz, and “includes facial recognition technology elsewhere in the West Bank, not just at border crossings”, as “cameras deep inside the West Bank try to spot and monitor potential Palestinian assailants”.

Read more

The EU’s destructive “peace” partner

Maureen Clare Murphy
Electronic Intifada

While the defenseless population of Gaza was being pummeled by the Israeli military on Saturday, the European Union’s foreign policy chief condemned the firing of rockets from the territory in a nakedly one-sided statement.

“These attacks provoke unspeakable suffering to the Israelis and serve only the cause of endless violence and of an endless conflict,” Federica Mogherini admonished, making no mention of the Palestinian victims of massive Israeli bombing.

“Together with the international community, we will keep working to bring relief to all those suffering from this conflict and cooperating with those who serve the cause of peace,” she added.

Days earlier, Mogherini entertained a proposal from COGAT, the bureaucratic arm of Israel’s military occupation, that international donors give hundreds of millions of dollars for a sewage treatment plant in Gaza.

The plant is critically needed in Gaza, the type of civilian infrastructure that Israel as the occupying power is obliged by international humanitarian law to provide.

Cynical scheme

 

But Israel knows that it can destroy Palestinian infrastructure in Gaza, and third states will pay for its reconstruction, with no cost to Israel.

Israel in fact benefits economically from reconstruction in Gaza, as it controls the import of all raw materials to the Strip, privileging Israeli vendors such as cement companies and trucking and storage firms that profit from the inevitable delays to the delivery of goods.

It’s a cynical scheme resulting from a myopic and dogmatic commitment to a so-called peace process that has completely lost touch with the reality on the ground.

In the West Bank, Israel’s euphemistically named Civil Administration, a unit of COGAT, implements a policy that incrementally dispossesses Palestinians from their land.

That scheme, implemented in the “seam zone” between Israel’s wall and the Israel-West Bank boundary, sees the coercive division of land collectively maintained by Palestinian communities into smaller parcels owned by individuals.

If the parcel of land is smaller than 330 square meters, as the journalist Amira Hass points out, it is declared by the Civil Administration to have “no agricultural necessity” and so access permits are not issued to its Palestinian owners.

Read more

Israel government to fund hotels in illegal West Bank settlements

MEMO

The Israeli government will subsidise hotels in illegal settlements in the occupied West Bank, as part of a plan to attract more tourists to the area.

According to an article in Arutz Sheva, citing a report by Israel Hayom, Israel’s Tourism Ministry “will aid entrepreneurs who want to invest in building or expanding hotels in Judea and Samaria [the occupied West Bank]”.

The entrepreneurs can now apply for a grant of up to 20 per cent of their intended investment.

Israel Hayom reported that a meeting held earlier this year between senior settler officials and the managers of Israeli travel agencies in the occupied West Bank “showed that the number of guest units is insufficient, causing tourists to avoid staying in the area for more than a day”.

According to the report, the government grants “are intended to encourage investors to open additional guest units in [illegal settlements in] Judea, Samaria, and the Jordan Valley [the occupied West Bank]”.

Settler leader (Yesha Council chair) Hananel Dorani stated: “We thank [Tourism] Minister Yariv Levin (Likud) for his important work on the issue of tourism in Judea, Samaria, and the Jordan Valley.”

“Building hotels and guest houses in the area is an important step which shows the deepening of our roots in the ground and paves the way for Israeli sovereignty in Judea and Samaria,” he added.

“Giving grants for the creation of hotels is another supplemental step which will help solve the problem of where to sleep and will strengthen settlements and our hold on Judea and Samaria.”

Read more

Illegal Israeli squatters seize over half a square kilometer of Palestinian land in Jordan Valley

PressTV

A number of Israeli settlers escorted by troops have confiscated a large area of Palestinian land in northern Jordan Valley in the West Bank despite the international outcry against the Tel Aviv regime's land expropriation policies in the occupied territories.

Local Palestinian media reports said on Monday that the group placed barbed wire and electric fence around more than 600 dunams (0.6 square kilometers) of Palestinian-owned land in Khillet al-Oqda and al-Sweideh areas of the valley, which comprises a third of the occupied West Bank.
Israeli troops have also installed surveillance cameras on the seized land.

The illegal Israeli land grab in the occupied Jordan Valley is a regular occurrence by the extremist settlers and the Israeli military.

The Palestinian territories are seized by the Tel Aviv regime under the contested Absentee Property Law, which paves the way for Israel to take over the property of Palestinians who have been forced from their homeland following the 1948 war. 

Read more

UN ‘shocked’ at ‘terror’ waged by israeli (apartheid state) settlers

Uprooted Palestinian's blog

The United Nations has voiced “shock” at the “terror” carried out by Israeli settlers that killed a Palestinian father of four in the Israeli-occupied West Bank.

“Today’s violence in al-Mughayer is shocking and unacceptable!” UN Special Coordinator for the Middle East Peace Process Nickolay Mladenov tweeted on Sunday, referring to a Palestinian village that was violently stormed by Israeli settlers and where they killed one Palestinian.

“Israel must put an end to settler violence and bring those responsible to justice,” he said. “My thoughts and prayers go out to the family of the Palestinian man killed and those injured. All must condemn violence, stand up to terror,” the envoy added.

Thirty eight-year-old Hamdi Taleb Na’san was killed and 30 others were wounded after Israeli “settler volunteer security teams” and regime troops stormed al-Mughayer, located 27 kilometers northeast of the city of Ramallah in the occupied territories on Sunday.

Read more

Israeli forces assault residents of Khan al-Ahmar, prepare to demolish village

Ma'an News Agency

Israeli forces assaulted residents alongside activists and supporters of the Khan al-Ahmar Bedouin village east of Jerusalem in the central occupied West Bank on Wednesday.

Activists from the Wall and Settlement Resistance Committee and others have been stationed in the village for weeks, as a form of protest against the planned demolition of Khan al-Ahmar and the displacement of its people.

Israeli forces and military vehicles had surrounded Khan al-Ahmar in the early morning hours on Wednesday.

The land on which the Bedouin village is built is entirely owned by and registered at the Land Registration for the residents of the nearby village of Anata.

Israeli forces have been attempting to displace the residents of the Bedouin village, inhabited by 181 people, half of whom are children. Earlier this week, Israeli forces raided Khan al-Ahmar, in preparation to demolish the village which would displace more than 35 Palestinian families, as part of an Israeli plan to expand the nearby Kfar Adummim settlement.

Although international humanitarian law prohibits the demolition of the village and illegal confiscation of private property, Israeli forces continue their planned expansion by forcing evictions and violating basic human rights of the people.

Sources added that Israeli police deployed near the Bedouin village blocked the main road. Buses were also called by the Israeli authorities to transfer the residents to the village of al-Eizariya, east of Jerusalem.

The Palestinian Red Crescent reported that 35 people were injured and treated in the field, while 4 were sent to hospitals for treatment.

Israel has been constantly trying to uproot Bedouin communities from the east of Jerusalem area to allow settlement expansion in the area, which would later turn the entire eastern part of the West Bank into a settlement zone.

Read more + videos

Israel announces plans for 2,500 homes in occupied W. Bank days after Gaza bloodshed

RT

Israel says it plans to build 2,500 new settler homes in the West Bank in violation of a 2016 UNSC resolution. It comes just days after the IDF killed dozens of Palestinians protesting the Israeli occupation. 

Israel’s Defense Minister Avigdor Lieberman said on Thursday that he was finalizing plans for the construction of new homes in Jewish settlements in the occupied West Bank.

Writing on Twitter, Lieberman said he would seek approval for the project next week, expressing hope that the regional planning board – the High Planning Council in Judea and Samaria – would designate 1,400 of the housing units for immediate construction.

“We will promote building in all of Judea and Samaria, from the north to south, in small communities and in large ones,” Lieberman wrote, using the Biblical names for the West Bank. Some 500,000 Israelis already live in the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem.

Read more

US Human Rights Report whitewashes Israeli high crimes

Stephen Lendman
stephenlendman.org

Annual State Department Country Reports on Human Rights Practices omit US high crimes - the most egregious human rights abuser over a longer duration in world history from inception.

Each year, its horrendous abuses over the past 12 months are airbrushed from the State Department report.

It greatly downplays Israeli high crimes. In previous years, its report on the Jewish state headlined "Israel and the Occupied Territory."

Its current one is titled "Israel, Golan Heights, West Bank and Gaza."

Zionist zealot US ambassador to Israel David Friedman reportedly asked the State Department to stop calling the Occupied Territories occupied.

Last year he was quoted saying (illegal settlements on stolen Palestinian land) "are part of Israel."

The State Department's report falsely called Israel "a multiparty democracy." There's nothing democratic about a ruthless rogue state, the region's leading human rights abuser - at war with Palestinians for 70 years, attacking neighboring states at its discretion. 

Read more

Israeli Terrorism Against Palestinians Will Never End if Western Hypocrisy in Middle East Continues

Eva Bartlett
RT

The US is fine with "rebels" like Al-Qaeda "protesting" in Syria, but when genuinely unarmed Palestinians protest the occupiers who violently expelled them from their homes and land, they are "inciting violence."
During peaceful protests on March 30 in eastern Gaza, an unarmed Palestinian man walked on farmland towards the fence built by his occupiers. Within minutes, he was shot by one of the 100 Israeli special forces snipers deployed along the fence precisely to quash dissent-by any means necessary-under the old pretext of "self-defense."

On the same day, a Palestinian woman, armed solely with a flag, walked towards the fence which has imprisoned her for so many years. She, too, was targeted by one of the snipers.
Among the 17 killed that day was a 16-year-old girl and a 27-year-old farmer, the latter killed by Israeli tank fire.

Even the BBC, which is not generally known to report fairly on Palestine, noted: "The first to die was Omar Samour, 27 - a Palestinian farmer killed in Israeli shelling as he worked his land near Khan Younis early on Friday, before the protests began."
Yet, according to Israel, this farmer was a "terrorist infiltrator," the lexicon which Israel uses to whitewash its extrajudicial assassinations.

Sputnik reports that the Israeli Army spokesperson proudly tweeted they knew "where every bullet landed," but later deleted the tweet, likely because it was clear these bullets landed in the bodies of unarmed protesters.

In my three years living in Gaza, I frequently accompanied such demonstrations, and also did so in countless demonstrations when I stayed as an activist for eight months in the West Bank. Having experienced these first hand, I'm acutely aware that Israel has zero moral authority on conduct.
In the tens of demonstrations in the West Bank and Gaza which I accompanied, "violence" always began with the Israelis shooting live ammunition, lead bullets covered with a thin rubber layer, and suffocating tear gas at unarmed Palestinians. That Palestinian youths chose to respond with slingshot-spun rocks is entirely within their rights. But in my experiences, it was always Israel which began, shooting to maim and kill, kidnapping and imprisoning unarmed protesters.

Read more

The IDF vs The Teenage Girl: Palestinian Activist Ahed Tamimi Arrested For Slapping Soldiers Who Shot Boy

Andrés Perezalonso
Sott.net

Ahed Tamimi lives in the West Bank village of Nabi Saleh. She has literally been fighting tooth and nail against Israeli occupation soldiers since before she was a teenager. In the 2015 video above, we see her fighting off a soldier who was trying to take away her then 11 year-old brother Mohammed. Since the video, she became both a symbol of Palestinian resistance and an easily recognizable target for Israelis, both civilian and military.

She told Al Jazeera:

"Many Israelis threatened me on social media after the video was released, demanding that I be detained or even killed... The harassment handcuffed my life. I was scared to even go outside or visit my friends." [...]

The harassment began immediately following the video's release, as Israelis called her a "terrorist" on social media and threatened to kill her, the family says. Bassem, Ahed's father and a long-standing leader in the village, said that her 19-year-old brother, Waed, was detained after the release of the video. At the start of his 10-month stay in Israeli jail, Ahed's mother, Nariman, received permission to enter Israel to visit him, and Ahed tagged along.

"When we passed a checkpoint near Jerusalem, the Israeli soldiers got on the bus and immediately singled her out," Nariman told Al Jazeera. "While everyone else was permitted to pass, Ahed was pulled off the bus and told she wouldn't be allowed into Israel."

During the village's protests, Israeli forces would often scream Ahed's name and shout curses at her. "Look! It's Ahed Tamimi. Shoot her!" Bassem recalled one soldier as saying.

The family was often scared for their daughter, he added: "Whenever the soldiers recognise her, they do something to make her life difficult. Every time she left the house, we were scared something would happen to her." Ahed was even forced to stay at her cousin's home in Ramallah, where she attends school, to avoid the danger of passing through Israeli checkpoints on her way from Nabi Saleh.

She began attending protests at Nabi Saleh when she was nine. Here she is when she was young enough to be half the size of the armed soldiers she confronted: 

Read more

Israel's vision for Palestine's future is terrifying

Ramzy Baroud
Politics for the People

Empirical historical evidence combined with little common-sense are enough to tell us the type of future options that Israel has in store for the Palestinian people: perpetual apartheid or ethnic cleansing, or a mix of both.

The passing of the "Regularisation Bill" on 6 February is all we need to imagine the Israeli-envisaged future. The new law allows the Israeli government to retroactively recognise Jewish outposts built without official permission on privately-owned Palestinian land.

All settlements - officially recognised settlements and unauthorised outposts - are illegal under international law. The verdict has been passed numerous times by the United Nations and, more recently, pronounced with unmistakable clarity in UN Security Council Resolution 2334.

Israel's response was the announcement of the construction of over 6,000 new housing units to be built throughout the Occupied Palestinian territories, the construction of a brand new settlement (the first in 20 years), and the new law that paves the way for the annexation of large swathes of the occupied West Bank.

Undoubtedly, the law is the "last nail in the coffin of the two-state solution", but that is not important. It never mattered to Israel, anyway. The talk of a solution was mere smoke and mirrors as far as Israel was concerned. All the "peace talks" and the entirety of "peace process", even when it was in its zenith, rarely slowed down the Israeli bulldozers, the construction of more "Jewish homes" or ended the unceasing ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians

Read more