At the end of nearly 1,000 yards of newly-grown spring grassy turf, a renewed barbed-wire border fence rises three meters up, in anticipation of a million person march next week between Gaza protesters and their well-known antagonist snipers.

A week before the first anniversary of the great March of Return, organizers have pledged larger than usual demonstrations. However, their preparations appeared powerless in yesterday’s renewed protests at Malaka, eastern Gaza City, when hails of Israeli live ammunition and gas canisters killed two Palestinian men and wounded 26 others taking part in weekly demonstrations along the fortified Israel-Gaza border.

The AIPAC policy conference in Washington began today on a defensive note, with the Israel lobby organization’s chief executive saying that Israel’s friends face a terrible new challenge, “the scurrilous charge of dual loyalty” and declaring, “The intense hatred of Israel is now creeping from the margins to the center of our politics.”

The day after several major Democratic candidates announced that they would not be attending the annual conference of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), which begins in Washington on Sunday, President Trump did what he always does, pouring accelerant on an already hot-burning fire of public debate.

“I don’t know what happened to them, but they are anti-Israel,” Trump told reporters on Friday morning on the South Lawn of the White House. “Frankly, I think they are anti-Jews.” Trump thinks himself very much pro-Jews. The day before, he broke through the tweets about Kamala Harris and Bernie Sanders staying away from AIPAC with a perfectly timed tweet of his own, one that announced the United States would finally recognize the Golan Heights as belonging to Israel. The contrast was drawn and masterfully so.

White House senior adviser Jared Kushner’s Middle East peace plan at one point included Jordan giving land to the Palestinian territories and in return getting land from Saudi Arabia, according to a new book on the Kushner family.

The book, Kushner, Inc.: Greed. Ambition. Corruption. The Extraordinary Story of Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump, was written by Vicky Ward and released by St. Martin’s Press on Tuesday. The book’s 300 pages detail Jared and Ivanka’s path to involvement in every aspect of White House affairs and their alleged designs to use their influence for personal gain.

Two Palestinians were killed and dozens of others injured, including an Anadolu Agency photojournalist, during a Friday rally along the Gaza-Israel buffer zone, according to Gaza’s Health Ministry, Anadolu reports.

In a statement, ministry spokesman Ashraf al-Qudra confirmed that two Palestinians — aged 18 and 29 — had been killed by Israeli army gunfire.

Ali Jadallah, an Anadolu Agency photojournalist, was also reportedly injured during Friday’s demonstration.

Hamas yesterday celebrated the 15th anniversary of the assassination of Sheikh Ahmad Yassin, the founder of the movement, vowing to continue the path of resistance until the liberation of Palestine.

In a statement issued yesterday, Hamas said: “We will continue the resistance path of Sheikh Ahmad Yassin. Resistance is a legitimate right guaranteed by all religious and international law, in the forefront of which is armed resistance, which is a strategic choice to protect and regain Palestinian rights.”

The statement also said that Yassin put the issue of prisoners on top of Hamas’ agenda and exerted much effort to liberate them.

“Hamas now bears this responsibility and will not let the Israeli occupation continue to inflict suffering on our prisoners,” the statement said, stressing that it would use all means necessary to liberate those prisoners held by Israel.

How is the camel’s back not broken yet?

Fifty years of occupation, twelve years of blockade, 600,000 Israeli settlers, 250 dead unarmed Gazan protesters, three one-sided “wars” in which 3,500 Palestinians in Gaza (and about 150 Israelis) have been killed–that’s not a big enough deal for us to utter a word of reprimand or turn off the financial spigot to Israel.

The US is shelling out $10 million a day, $7,000 a minute in aid–not humanitarian, but military aid, mind you–to a country that last summer passed the openly racist Nation-State Law, that last month saw its prime minister create a coalition including disciples of a Jewish supremacist, that last week disqualified pro-Palestinian parties from even appearing on the election ballot, while welcoming an anti-Palestinian candidate who is a member of a Jewish terror group.

These outrageous acts did not outrage our politicians; Israel’s leaders are emboldened.

More than 97% of the water pumped from the coastal aquifer, in the besieged Gaza Strip, does not meet the water quality standards of the World Health Organization (WHO), leading to the depletion of groundwater reserves, with the groundwater level in the coastal aquifer reaching 19 meters below sea level, the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics (PCBS) and the Palestinian Water Authority (PWA) said on Thursday, in a joint press release, on the occasion of World Water Day.

The joint statement said, “The amount of water extracted from the coastal aquifer for domestic use was 178.7 million cubic meters (MCM) in Gaza Strip in 2017; but this quantity is obtained via unsafe pumping that jeopardizes sustainability of the source knowing that the basin sustainable yield should not exceed 50-60 MCM a year.”

A Vienna museum, Volkskundemuseum, has cancelled an event on Palestinian rights where former minister in Nelson Mandela’s government Ronnie Kasrils was scheduled to speak (Video by Ronnie Kasrils). Kasrils is a renowned South African anti-apartheid activist of Jewish descent, and his address was scheduled for the March 29 event as part of the annual Israeli Apartheid Week (IAW). Human rights advocates immediately condemned the cancellation, and called for the event to be reinstated.

The museum caved to pressure from Austria’s Israel lobby. The cancellation comes amid Israel’s ongoing repression of the peaceful Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement for Palestinian rights. Two IAW events scheduled in France this week were also canceled.

Israeli forces killed two protesters in the occupied Gaza Strip on Friday as the UN Human Rights Council condemned the “apparent intentional use of unlawful lethal and other excessive force” against Great March of Return demonstrators.

The UN body also passed a resolution opposing Israel’s occupation of the Golan Heights, one day after President Donald Trump tweeted in support of US recognition of Israel’s claims to the Syrian territory.

Gaza’s health ministry identified the Palestinians slain on Friday as 29-year-old Nidal Abd al-Karim Ahmad Shatat, shot in the chest, and 24-year-old Jihad Munir Khalid Harara, shot in the head.

Every year since 1993, the UN has marked March 22 as World Water Day. This date gives us the opportunity to raise the profile of water both as a fundamental need to sustain life, and as a human right – which the UN General Assembly declared it was in July 2010.

This year’s World Water Day theme – “leave no one behind” – has an acutely jarring ring when applied to Israel.

Since 1967 when Israel issued several military orders asserting its control over all water sources in the newly occupied territories (Palestinians were denied the right to drill wells or repair existing ones and the orders decreed that any Palestinian water installation built without a permit would be destroyed), its policies have been aimed at depriving Palestinians access to the water they once enjoyed, and punishing them for further use.

The March of Return is a scream for life so that we may leave the walls of our prison. These are the words repeated by Ahmed Abu Artema in his many lectures and interviews. Abu Artema is the brain behind the most powerful expression of unarmed Palestinian resistance, The March of Return, which began on March 30, 2018, and has become a weekly occurrence in the Gaza Strip for close to a year.

Why would we die here in silence? We want our message to reach the world. We want to say to the world ‘here there is a people. A people searching for a life of dignity, human rights and freedom.'”

Israeli forces shot and killed four young Palestinian men over the course of 24 hours between Tuesday and Wednesday in the occupied West Bank.

On Tuesday evening, around 7:00 pm, Israeli forces raided the Ramallah-area Abwein village in the central West Bank, in search of 19-year-old Omar Abu Laila, who was believed to be responsible for an attack over the weekend that left one Israeli soldier and a settler dead.

After besieging the village and surrounding the house where Abu Laila had been hiding, Israeli forces engaged in a lengthy shootout, eventually shooting and killing the teenager.

Local media reported that several local youth from Abwein were injured with live ammunition in clashes with Israeli forces during their operation in the town.

As of Thursday, Abu Laila’s body had yet to be returned to his family.

For many years, US corporate media have consistently failed to adequately inform audiences about the Palestinian right of return.

Even though the refugees are a crucial reason that the issue of Israel/Palestine remains unresolved, only a small portion of the coverage addresses the right of return. I used the media aggregator Factiva to search the databases of three major US newspapers: the New York Times, Wall Street Journal and Washington Post. In a combined search of these three publications, Factiva returns results for 45,285 pieces that mention the Palestinian issue over the last ten years. Of these, only 624 contain the phrase “right of return.” In other words, since March 2009 these outlets have published 44,661 articles that bring up the Palestinian question while omitting a phrase that is absolutely integral to it, and one of the main reasons that it remains unresolved.

At least seven Palestinians were injured on Thursday night by Israeli artillery shelling on Rafah town in southern Gaza Strip, medics said.

Ashraf al-Qedra, spokesman of the Health Ministry in Gaza, told reporters that seven Palestinians were moderately injured by the shrapnel of the shells fired by Israeli troops stationed on the border between eastern Gaza Strip and Israel.

Palestinian security officials also said that the Israeli artillery shelling targeted a military lookout post east of the town, destroying the post and wounding seven Palestinians.

An Israeli army spokesman said in a press statement that the artillery shelling was a response to the releasing of arson balloons carrying explosives that exploded in southern Israel. No injuries were reported.

When Dr. Nadav Granat read the Instagram post of Israeli model Rotem Sela in which she reminded the country that “Arabs are also human beings,” he decided he wanted to take action, too. As a religious Jewish doctor who works alongside Arabs every day, he launched his own online campaign to show the inclusive face of Israel.

The campaign has gone viral. This week, the Hebrew news site Mako published a story about Granat, 37, an emergency medical doctor at Rabin Medical Center-Beilinson Campus in Petah Tikva. Granat called on the public to implement exactly what Sela called for when she asked, “When will anyone in this government tell the public that this is a country of all its citizens, and all people are born equal?”

Israel said on Thursday a U.N. report critical of its use of lethal force during Palestinian protests on the Gaza border was biased and should have included a demand that the enclave’s dominant Hamas group take action to stop anti-Israeli violence.

A U.N. Commission of Inquiry on the demonstrations, which began nearly a year ago, said this week that Israel should investigate the shootings of more than 6,000 people, far beyond the criminal inquiries it has announced into 11 killings.

Israeli occupation forces arrested a 22-year-old Palestinian woman at a military checkpoint in the occupied West Bank city of Hebron after she posted a comment on Facebook on Al-Aqsa Mosque.

Isra’a Hammad Abu Sneineh was detained at the Abu Al-Rish military checkpoint near the Ibrahimi Mosque in Hebron.

According to the Asra Media Office, Abu Sneineh was arrested at the military checkpoint located at the main entrance to the Old City, west of the Ibrahimi Mosque, as a result of a Facebook post she wrote about Al-Aqsa Mosque.

According to the Palestinian Prisoners’ Centre (PPC), Israel had arrested more than 500 Palestinians, including women and children, as a result of their social media posts by May last year.

The occupation state uses its “Cyber Unit” to monitor Palestinian social media posts, the centre added.

Britain’s first Member of Parliament of Palestinian descent is preparing for a historic debate on Friday to have the government give official recognition to the state of Palestine in what she says is probably the “most personal and poignant” piece of legislation she has submitted since arriving in Westminster.

Rising political star Layla Moran, a Liberal Democrat, sent shock waves through the ranks of the Conservative Party when she overturned a 10,000 majority at the 2017 General Election to take Oxford West and Abingdon which was previously regarded as a safe Tory seat. Now she’s making more waves with the second reading of her Private Members Bill this week to have Palestine recognised by Britain as a state.

An Israeli group which promotes “separation” from the Palestinians has been slammed for publishing a series of “racist” videos, warning against the annexation of the occupied West Bank.

Writing in Local Call, Meron Rapoport took to task a series of election-related clips released by The Commanders for Israel’s Security (CIS), a so-called non-partisan group of former army commanders and intelligence officials.

According to Rapoport, the videos “can be defined in no other way but racist”.

One video portrays Palestinians in occupied East Jerusalem “living in filth, among mountains of garbage”, and moving into Jewish settlements such as French Hill and Givat Ze’ev as a result. “To emphasise the danger,” Rapoport describes, “an anonymous Jewish interviewee tells us that on the opposite street, in Givat Ze’ev, ‘everyone there are Arabs’.”

Israeli occupation forces raided a French government-linked cultural centre in East Jerusalem to shut down a Mother’s Day event, reported AFP.

According to the report, “an order posted on the door of the building by Israeli authorities said that the centre…intended to host an event organised with a women’s association ‘sponsored or financed by the Palestinian Authority [PA]’ and ‘without authorisation’.”

“In a rare move”, Israeli forces actually entered the French foreign ministry-associated centre, a source “with the French consulate” told AFP.

Israel considers any PA activity in occupied East Jerusalem, or events supported by the PA, to be illegal and a challenge to its sovereignty claim in the illegally-annexed part of the city.

“The consulate could not confirm if the association was indeed financed by the PA, but Palestinians who were to participate in the event said the allegation was false,” AFP added.

An Israeli military analyst has urged the army to “adapt” to recent Palestinian resistance operations in the occupied West Bank, accusing forces of a “soft” response to recent events.

Amos Harel, writing in Haaretz, described the West Bank as in a state of “turmoil”, noting the killing of a soldier and settler last Sunday in a combined stabbing and shooting near the illegal Ariel settlement.

The suspected assailant was subsequently killed in a “shoot-out” two days later, the same night as “two Palestinians were killed by IDF fire near Nablus”. On Thursday, meanwhile, “another Palestinian was killed, the fourth one this week and 10th this month, by a soldier near Bethlehem.”

According to Harel, “this was a case of a mistaken shooting”.

On 14 March, scores of Palestinians in the starving Gaza Strip took to the streets in several cities carrying the slogan “We Want to Live”, calling for “equality, dignity, food and job opportunities.” That day passed quietly, but the interior ministry in Gaza warned the protesters not to take to the streets again because Hamas, the Palestinian movement which has been ruling Gaza since 2007, “has been doing its best to afford these just demands.” However, they took to the streets the next day in larger numbers, but they were violent as they burnt tyres and insulted and threw stones at policemen, prompting violent responses.

Boys and young men are seized in the dead of night, blindfolded and cuffed, abused and manipulated to confess to crimes they didn’t commit. Every year Israel arrests almost 1,000 Palestinian youngsters, some of them not yet 13.

Israeli warplanes launch dozens of airstrikes on the Gaza Strip for five hours. Two million Palestinians have become victims of collective punishment policy amid a tide of incitement at political and military echelons in Israel. Four Palestinian civilians, including 2 women and a child, were wounded, in addition to damaging a wedding hall, an office belonging to the Ministry of Detainees and Ex-Detainees Affairs. Moreover, several houses sustained material damage. Three Palestinian civilians were killed and 12 others were wounded in different incidents in the West Bank. Israeli forces continued to use excessive force against peaceful protestors in the Gaza Strip.

Three American women were violently assaulted by Israeli occupation forces as they attempted to help a disabled woman at Al-Aqsa Mosque on Tuesday, despite showing soldiers their passports.

Virginia nursing student Nour Hawash, who is in Jerusalem on vacation, was taking photos with her mother and sister after midday prayers when Israeli occupation soldiers stormed the compound and started to evacuate the Dome of the Rock.

“Suddenly we heard these shots being fired and people just started running all over the place. We saw the IDF [Israeli soldiers], guns pointed, running, trying to chase people. So we just ran with everyone else to the side,” Nour said.

Syria’s permanent representative to the UN in Geneva Hussam el-Din Ala warned on Wednesday against the Israeli malicious attempts to exploit the situation and the latest developments in Syria and the region to consolidate the occupation of Golan in a flagrant violation of UNSC resolutions, particularly resolution No.497 for 1981.

The Syrian permanent mission at the UN in Geneva, in cooperation with the Arab Lawyers Union, organized a symposium under the title “the occupied Syrian Golan… 52 years of Israeli occupation, on the sidelines of the 40th session of the Human rights Council.

Ambassador Ala stressed the importance of this symposium in uncovering the Israeli violations in Golan, synchronizing with the US pressures practiced on member states at the Human Rights Council to cancel the 7th item of the agenda dedicated for observing the Israeli violations in the occupied Arab lands.

A Palestinian peace activist was denied entry to the United States and deported, despite having a valid visa.

Osama Iliwat, 42, was questioned over the course of eight hours by officials from Customs and Border Protection at John F. Kennedy Airport in New York City on Feb. 24 before he was sent on a flight back home. He was embarking on a speaking tour for Combatants for Peace, a group of Israelis and Palestinians who, according to its website, “have taken an active part in the cycle of violence; Israelis as soldiers in the Israeli army and Palestinians as part of the violent struggle for Palestinian freedom,” but now advocate joint nonviolent activism.

The UK is set to oppose all resolutions brought to the UN Human Rights Council that condemn Israeli abuses in the occupied Palestinian territories.

UK Foreign Secretary Jeremy Hunt told the Jewish Chronicle that resolutions brought to the UNHRC had a "disproportionate and discriminatory" focus on Israel.

Where else can U see this TERRORISM?

Israel’s Foreign Ministry confirmed Thursday night that these four countries would vote “no” on all Agenda Item 7 resolutions to protest the UNHRC’s bias against Israel.

The United States will soon unveil the details of US President Donald Trump's "deal of the century" that aimed to solve the long-standing conflict between Palestine and Israel, US State Secretary Mike Pompeo said.

Pompeo told Al Arabiya broadcaster that Washington wanted a better life for the Palestinians without violence and soon "the whole world will see how America is thinking about this."

Anyone who’s been watching the recent round of pearl-clutching and political smears directed at Rep. Ilhan Omar might notice that the Congresswoman is under attack for saying things that it seems we all know. That lobbyists use money to influence politicians, that the U.S. has a uniquely intimate relationship with Israel, and that everyday folks are well within their rights to advocate for Palestinian human rights. And yet, she’s under attack from all sides. It’s a frustrating position to be in. At a time when real anti-Jewish rhetoric and violence is growing in the country, we all need to stand up, condemn it, and find ways to protect Jews and other threatened religious groups. There’s no questions of that. But disingenuous accusations of anti-Semitism that are hurled at Palestinians, or at human rights activists cause damage as well. I know this because I’ve been there.

Dozens of students in the occupied West Bank city of Ramallah clashed with Israeli forces as they protested the killing of three Palestinians.

Students from Birzeit University protested north of Ramallah near an Israeli checkpoint against the army killing of three young Palestinians near Ramallah and in Nablus the night before.

Israeli forces fired tear gas and rubber-coated metal bullets at the students, injuring three while suffocating others.

The AIPAC convention is a celebration of the most repressive elements of the Israeli state, featuring those most engaged in curtailing Palestine freedom. This year is no exception and the conference is struggling to mask it’s true nature. In 2016, Bernie Sanders skipped the AIPAC conference and in 2020, Elizabeth Warren has announced she would not attend AIPAC. The tide is turning as more and more progressives distance themselves from Israel’s brutal regime of occupation.

Not only has AIPAC’s headlining speaker Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu formed an alliance with an Israeli political party so extreme they are referred to as the Jewish KKK. Last month, he also confirmed the systemic racism that exists in Israel when he commented that, “Israel is not a state of all its citizens. It’s the nation-state of the Jewish people — and them alone.”

On March 19th, with no advance warning, Israel evacuated a Palestinian school in Shaufat, Occupied East Jerusalem, then demolished it. The school’s principal reports that no official reason has been given.

An illegal Israeli colonialist settler rammed, Thursday, a Palestinian man with his car, and fled the scene, before Palestinian medics rushed the wounded man to a hospital, in Hebron city, in the southern part of the occupied West Bank.

Aref Jaber, a nonviolent activist with the Human Rights Coalition in Hebron, said the colonist rammed a Palestinian, identified as Jom’a Qfeisha, before fleeing the scene.

Jaber added that the wounded man works for the Hebron Reconstruction Committee, and suffered a fracture in his arm, in addition to various cuts and bruises.

An Israeli military drone fired, on Wednesday at night, a missile at young Palestinian protesters in the Central District of the Gaza Strip.

Eyewitnesses said the drone fire a missile at the young men, east of the al-Boreij refugee camp, and added that the missile detonated close to the protesters but did not lead to casualties.

On its part, the Israeli army claimed its missile targeted Palestinians “flying flammable balloons” into nearby Israeli areas.

The UN Human Rights Council voted, on March 15, to conduct an investigation into the Israeli army’s killing of peaceful Palestinian protesters along the eastern parts of Gaza, near the Israeli separation fence.

The council voted 29 in favor and two against, while 14 countries abstained. Australia and the US were the two countries in opposition to the decision. The council condemned “the disproportionate and indiscriminate use of force by the Israeli occupying forces against Palestinian civilians.”

Tomorrow, Thursday, March 21, the UN High Commission for Human Rights will vote on the report of the UN investigation committee, which confirmed Israeli violations against the protesters in the besieged Gaza Strip.

Two Palestinians in the United States are suing Israeli settlers for profiting from property stolen from their families in the occupied West Bank, by listing them on the home rental website Airbnb.

The lawsuit is in the form of a counterclaim against the settlers, who themselves filed a lawsuit against Airbnb over its decision last year to remove listings of settlement properties.

The two Palestinians, Ziad Alwan and Randa Wahbe, are being joined in their lawsuit by two towns in the occupied West Bank, the municipality of Anata, east of Jerusalem, and the village council of Jalud, near Nablus.

They are being represented by the Center for Constitutional Rights, which filed the counterclaim in federal court in Delaware on Monday.

Israeli forces killed four Palestinians in the occupied West Bank overnight Tuesday and on Wednesday.

The slain men include a Palestinian suspected by Israel of fatally injuring a soldier and a settler, and two young men who Israel claims threw an explosive device at soldiers guarding hundreds of settlers who had raided Joseph’s Tomb in the northern West Bank city of Nablus.

Local eyewitnesses contradicted the Israeli account of the killings in Nablus and said the car in which the two young men were traveling was fired on and then pushed by a bulldozer with them inside.

A UN fact-finding mission says Israeli forces committed rights violations during their crackdown against Palestinian protesters in the Gaza Strip last year that may amount to “war crimes,” urging the regime’s military to prevent its snipers from using lethal force against the demonstrators.

The UN Independent Commission of Inquiry on the protests in the Occupied Palestinian Territory presented its full report on Monday, saying Israeli forces breached international human rights by using live ammunition against unarmed Palestinian protesters during the anti-Israel protests in Gaza.

The Israeli forces “committed violations of international human rights and humanitarian law,” said UN Commissioner Kaari Betty Murungi. “Some of those violations may constitute war crimes or crimes against humanity, and must be immediately investigated by Israel.”

The UN special rapporteur on Human Rights in the Palestinian territories says Israel deprives the Palestinians of clean water. In a report, Michael Lynk, has described as an act of pillage, Israel’s control over Palestinian water resources.

UN war crimes investigators yesterday called on Israel to stop its snipers using lethal force against protesters in the Gaza Strip, as the anniversary approached of the start of demonstrations there, Reuters reported.

The Commission of Inquiry said Israel should investigate the shooting of more than 6,000 people, far beyond the criminal inquiries it has announced into 11 killings.

“The most important thing for the government of Israel is to review the rules of engagement immediately and to ensure that the rules of engagement are according to accepted international law standards,” the commission’s chairman Santiago Canton told the Human Rights Council.

Israel says the UN council is biased, and it boycotted the day-long debate.

Canton said Israel’s Supreme Court should review the confidential rules governing lethal force after the panel found it had been “in the majority of cases authorised unlawfully”.

In a new report (Word file) issued Monday by the UN Human Rights Council, officials condemned a number of Israel’s ongoing policies in the occupied Palestinian territories, including Israel’s exploitation of Palestinian natural resources and its impacts on the environment, and the catastrophic effects the 12-year siege has had on the Gaza Strip.

The report states that as an occupying power, Israel has a responsibility to ensure that Palestinians enjoy “the full panoply of human rights enshrined in international law, in order to protect their sovereignty over their natural wealth.”

In what could amount to several human rights violations, Israel has overseen the degradation of the Palestinian water supply, the exploitation of Palestinian natural resources, and the defacing of their environment.

Bernie Sanders is officially running against Israeli apartheid! Yesterday Sanders posted an ad on his Facebook page featuring excerpts from activist Shaun King’s introduction of the Vermont senator at his Brooklyn College campaign launch March 2. King embraced the label that Donald Trump has given Sanders, of being crazy.

Listen, he has always rejected the status quo. He spoke out against apartheid in South Africa when crazily that was an unpopular thing to do. And even today he speaks out against apartheid-like conditions in Palestine even though it’s not popular. Listen, I don’t care if 45 calls him Crazy Bernie because he is a little crazy.

The ad uses the apartheid reference with the graphics above and below, including the statement, “Bernie smashes the Israel status quo.”

Israeli Minister of Construction and Housing Yoav Galant along with Mayor of Ariel Eli Shaviro yesterday laid the cornerstone of new a settlement project comprising 839 settlement units in the illegal settlement, Arab48 reported.

The new project is expected to attract hundreds of young settler families to the second largest Israeli settlement in the occupied West Bank.

According to Arab48, the project includes new malls, education facilities, parks and attraction sites serving the new illegal Jewish community.

Shapiro said that this settlement project came in response to the killing of an Israeli soldier and a settler near the illegal settlement, which is built on the occupied land of the Palestinian city of Salfit.

Last Thursday, Pitzer College’s governing council took a historic vote to suspend a program of study at the University of Haifa because of Israel’s discriminatory policies. And just three hours later that resolution was vetoed, emphatically, by the college president.

I am told that President Melvin Oliver’s veto is now roiling the small progressive college in Claremont, California. Pitzer presidents have never vetoed a College Council resolution before, per the press. Pitzer prides itself on democratic governance, giving students a voice in school policies. The vote to suspend the program was overwhelming, 67-28; and the voters comprised nearly 60 faculty, about 35 students, and some 10 staff too.

Many are reportedly angry about the veto, and students have circulated a petition condemning Oliver that has gotten several hundred signatures nationwide, some with real throw-weight.

Ahead of the UN Human Rights Council meeting Monday, 18 March 2019 on the findings of the UN commission of inquiry into the 2018 Gaza protests, B’Tselem issued a position paper explaining that Israel’s promise to “investigate” 11 incidents in which protesters were killed is mere propaganda. In a letter, B’Tselem’s director, Hagai El-Ad called upon the head of the commission, Santiago Canton, to reject the tapestry of lies Israel has woven while killing more unarmed protesters: “A real change in Israeli policy will only take place if the international community demands it clearly and unequivocally, and if it stops allowing Israel to do no more than offer hollow promises of ‘investigation’.”

In the position paper, B’Tselem explains why announcing investigations is a standard ploy that Israel employs to ease international pressure whenever its unlawful policy elicits criticism.

Israeli bulldozers, today, demolished an under-construction building belonging to a Palestinian school in the Shu’fat refugee camp of occupied East Jerusalem, on Tuesday.

Dozens of Israeli soldiers escorted bulldozers into the refugee camp, surrounded the al-Razi School and went up rooftops of nearby buildings as drones flew overhead; Israeli bulldozers then began to demolish the school’s building.

Israeli forces fired rubber-coated steel bullets towards locals in the refugee camp.

Israel on Tuesday asked 26 countries for support against a UN vote that singles out its violation of international human rights and humanitarian law in the occupied Gaza Strip, according to local media, Anadolu reports.

Foreign Minister Yisrael Katz wrote in a letter to the countries not to vote in favour of Israel’s alleged violations against Palestinian demonstrators that could be covered by war crimes and crimes against humanity at the UN Human Rights Council.

He said a UN report ignored Hamas’ rockets and lacked understanding of security concerns of Israel.

The UN Independent Commission of Inquiry on the Protests in the Occupied Palestinian Territory said Monday that Israeli Security Forces violated international human rights and humanitarian law in Palestine’s occupied Gaza Strip.

Imagine a situation in which an extremist British government introduces a law which determines that only British Christians have a right to self-determination in the country, and that settlements built only for Christians should be encouraged.

At a stroke, non-Christian Brits are explicitly turned into second-class citizens. Communities with majority Christian populations set up “admissions committees”, to which those wishing to move need to apply for admission, which can be refused. Sound bizarre? Read on.

'The land is theirs'

One morning, you wake up and look out your window, only to find that a group of strangers have forced their way into your back garden, cordoned part of it off and started digging. You challenge them, and they tell you that this is Christian Britain, and as Christian Brits, they can build anywhere because “the land is theirs”.

Israeli warplanes carried out an airstrike on Tuesday evening on a military facility, while several people were injured during clashes with Israeli soldiers in northern Gaza Strip, close to the border with Israel, medics and security sources said.

The security sources said that an Israeli warplane fired at least one missile at a training facility that belongs to Islamic Hamas movement in eastern Gaza; no injuries reported.

Meanwhile, medics said that 13 Palestinian demonstrators were injured on Tuesday night during clashes with Israeli soldiers stationed at the border between northern Gaza Strip and Israel.

The United Nations Human Rights Council’s fact-finding mission into last year’s protests at the Gaza border presented its full report on Monday, saying it had compiled a list of Israelis suspected of serious crimes that it will make available to the International Criminal Court and other bodies.

The database, which was not made public, contains information about “military and civilian structures in Israel” that are allegedly responsible for violations of international humanitarian law, as well as the institutions that fail to investigate them, according to the report.

The 10-year-old is one of many hundreds of Palestinian children whom Israel arrests every year: The estimates range between 800 and 1,000. Some are under the age of 15; some are even preteens. A mapping of the locales where these detentions take place reveals a certain pattern: The closer a Palestinian village is to a settlement, the more likely it is that the minors residing there will find themselves in Israeli custody. For example, in the town of Azzun, west of the Karnei Shomron settlement, there’s hardly a household that hasn’t experienced an arrest. Residents say that in the past five years, more than 150 pupils from the town’s only high school have been arrested.

Palestinian activist Rasmea Odeh was banned from speaking at a public meeting marking International Women’s Day in Berlin on Friday after German officials revoked her visa.

The event was titled “Palestinian Women in the Liberation Struggle.”

The Israeli government claimed credit for the action.

US Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Gen. Joe Dunford issued a statement Monday denying weekend media reports that the US plans to leave around 1,000 troops in Syria, saying the reports are “factually incorrect.”

Dunford presented the current planned “residual force” as 200, saying that this hadn’t changed since February. The US announced 200 would stay on February 21, but on February 22 officially increased that number to 400.

It’s not clear from Dunford’s statement where the “incorrect” aspect of the new report, which came out of a Wall Street Journal, exists. That report suggested that the 1,000 figure was not yet finalized, but was being discussed. Dunford’s comments didn’t include any details on what is actually being discussed, but just that nothing was finalized.

A UN inquiry finds Israel used live ammunition against unarmed protesters, killing at least 189 Palestinians last year.

Debra Kamin’s March 14, 2019 New York Times Travel section piece, “Jaffa Is Tel Aviv’s Unexpected Luxury Hotspot,” follows the familiar pattern of Zionist revisionist history that completely ignores Palestinian history. The article refers to Jaffa only as an “ancient neighborhood” of modern Tel Aviv, and focuses on the upscale Jewish real-estate boom in the old Palestinian city, complete with gorgeous photos to accompany the piece.

The article offers a sanitized Jaffa that avoids any mention of the Palestinian point of view, likening the relationship between Jaffa and Tel Aviv to the famous American comedy duo:

Jaffa, the age-old Abbott to youthful Tel Aviv’s Costello, is an ancient port in the midst of a luxury renaissance. This 3,000-year-old harbor is a labyrinth of white stone alleys, hushed mosques and markets brimming with antiques and spices.

Criticism of Israel was once confined to the margins of the Jewish-American community. But now activists say dissent is 'bigger and louder' than ever before

Israel is depriving millions of Palestinians of access to a regular supply of clean water while stripping their land of minerals "in an apparent act of pillage", a United Nations human rights investigator said on Monday.

Michael Lynk, U.N. special rapporteur on human rights in the Palestinian territories, said that Israel "continues full-steam with settlement expansion" in the West Bank, which the United Nations and many countries deem illegal. There are some 20-25,000 new settlers a year, he said.

U.N. war crimes investigators called on Israel on Monday to stop its snipers using lethal force against protesters on the border with Gaza, as the anniversary approached of the start of demonstrations there last year in which 189 Palestinians were killed.

Rasmea Odeh, who was convicted for her part in a 1969 bombing that killed two Israeli students, was scheduled to speak at the Berlin event

Germany announced Saturday it would revoke the visa of a Palestinian woman convicted on terrorism charges in Israel, preventing her participation in a cultural event in Berlin organized by a group that supports the boycott, divestment and sanctions movement.

The Israeli Embassy in Germany, in cooperation with the Strategic Affairs Ministry, has acted over the last few days to block Rasmea Odeh from taking part in a protest event in Berlin's Kreuzberg neighborhood. The event, titled "Palestinian Women in the Liberation Struggle," was scheduled for Saturday night.

Jordanian lawmakers on Monday sought to expel the Israeli ambassador from the kingdom in response to “ongoing Israeli aggression” at holy sites in Jerusalem.

Amman is the official custodian of Jerusalem’s holy Muslim sites. The parliamentary session followed an Israeli court ruling on the al-Aqsa mosque compound.

“The parliament recommended the government recall the Jordanian ambassador from Israel and expel the Israeli ambassador from Amman to confront the ongoing Israeli aggression at holy sites in occupied Jerusalem,” reported the official Petra news agency.

Lawmakers also called on the government to address the UN Security Council about “stopping Israeli violations and protecting the Palestinian people.”

Jordan is the only Arab country apart from Egypt to have a peace deal with Israel. But the treaty is overwhelmingly opposed by Jordanians, more than half of whom are of Palestinian origin.

Global Actions Follow Record Turnout at Palestinian National BDS Conference
The 15th annual Israeli Apartheid Week (IAW), the largest global boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) mobilization for Palestinian rights, opens today with more than 80 events in 40 cities across Europe, North America and Palestine, featuring protests, lectures, film screenings, and cultural events. IAW is expected to be held in more than 200 cities worldwide. IAW officially kicked off Saturday the 16th in the occupied Palestinian city of Al-Bireh, where the Palestinian BDS National Committee (BNC) convened the Sixth National BDS Conference – a grassroots, civil society gathering with over 900 participants.

The number of illegal Jewish settlers who live in the occupied West Bank reached 449,805 in January this year, Israeli TV Channel 7 reported yesterday.

According to the station, these Jewish settlers are distributed among 11 illegal settlement blocks across the occupied West Bank.

Settlements are illegal under international law, however, Israel continues with the policy with US backing.

Director of the International Labour Organisation (ILO) Mounir Kleibo said yesterday that unemployment and poverty rates in the Gaza Strip hit record highs in recent history, Felesteen.ps reported.

Kleibo made his remarks during a visit of the ILO’s fact-finding mission to Gaza which lasted two days and aimed to document the Israeli violations in the occupied lands.

The members of the mission met with representatives of the Palestine Workers’ Union, public and private sectors and the Social Welfare Fund. They listened to briefs about the situation of workers in Gaza from these representatives.

The Gaza Strip has been crippled by a 12-year Israeli imposed siege which has led the UN to warn the enclave will be “unlivable” by 2020.

Without making any apparent effort to check the facts about the disturbances in Gaza, Greenblatt took aim indiscriminately at the Palestinian factions in the besieged territory. The Israeli-led siege and occupation did not figure in his calculations, of course. Not only did he criticise Hamas, but he also targeted Islamic Jihad and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, even though both factions are themselves critical of the movement. This suggests very strongly that the “Special Envoy” — for which read “there to advance Israel’s interests only” — was not concerned about the Palestinians or the alleged “violence” inflicted upon them by Hamas; that his sole aim was to demonise the Palestinian resistance factions, including Hamas, because they oppose the Israeli occupation of Palestine.

Rami Dababish was trying to help the wounded when he found himself facing a thick cloud of tear gas. Feeling the suffocating effects of the gas, he stepped back and squatted on the ground. Then he noticed there was a teenage boy beside him.

Dababish, a field medic, told the boy not to venture any farther. But the instructions made no difference. A short while later, Dababish saw the boy fall over.

Running towards the boy, “I found blood flowing out of his neck,” Dababish said. “I tried to stop the bleeding by putting gauze on the injury and pressing on it. Then his face turned blue. It was only a few minutes before he died.”

This killing occurred on 8 February during the Great March of Return, weekly protests in Gaza demanding that Palestine refugees be allowed go home to the towns and villages from which Zionist forces expelled them in 1948. The victim’s name was Hamza Ishtaiwi. He was 17.

Last week, the German organization Jewish Voice for a Just peace in the Middle East received a peace prize from the city of Göttingen.

As the organization supports the Palestinian call for Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions against Israel, the announcement of its nomination became a battleground, wherein prominent Jewish leaders tarnished its members as anti-Semites, suggesting that they were the ‘wrong kind of Jews’. The mayor and the president of the Göttingen university withdrew their support and cancelled the booking of halls for receptions. Nonetheless the jury stuck to its decision, and crowdfunded a prize of 28,000 Euros, which the organization will donate to human rights organizations in Palestine as well as to the liberal Israeli +972 Magazine.

Palestinian workers say conditions at the notorious checkpoint in occupied West Bank have worsened over the last months — Frantic clamouring disrupts the usual noises at Israel’s Checkpoint 300 in Bethlehem, where thousands of Palestinian workers queue for hours, starting at 3 am, to make it on time for their jobs in Israel. Workers chat, bicker, joke, frustratingly shout, bang on the steel bars, and rattle the turnstiles that Israeli border police officials intermittently lock amid the heavy traffic. “He has fainted. Everyone move! Call an ambulance!” The crowd becomes louder as a young man is carried outside the checkpoint. Numerous workers surround the man’s limp body stretched out on the ground, and others attempt to resuscitate him – to no avail … An ambulance arrives, and the young man is lifted onto a gurney and rushed to the hospital. The workers continue on through the single cement lane, sipping on small paper cups of coffee to push past their exhaustion.

The Israeli occupation army proposed a plan to reoccupy the besieged Gaza Strip during any future offensive, Al-Khaleej Online reported yesterday.

The plan was approved 14 years after Israel’s unilateral disengagement from the costal enclave.

The Wallah news website, which is close to the Israeli intelligence, said the plan were prepared when Gadi Eisenkot was the chief of staff while his predecessor Aviv Kofach approved it.

The news website reported senior Israeli military officials saying: “Hamas might flareup the region and go for a major confrontation if the truce understandings failed.”

The Gaza Strip has suffered under a more than 12-year siege at the hands of Israel, with support from Egypt and the international community. Goods, food, aid, construction materials and other essentials have not been allowed into the Strip and people have been left unable to leave even to access medical care.

Under heavy security protection of occupation forces, scores of Jewish settlers of American origin yesterday stormed the Al-Aqsa Mosque courtyards, Arab48 reported.

The news site reported that 67 Jewish settlers and foreign tourists stormed Al-Aqsa Mosque, Islam’s third holiest site.

According to the website, the settlers performed religious rituals and provoked Muslim and Palestinian worshippers.

Meanwhile, occupation forces deployed all around the mosque from the early hours of the morning and tightened restrictions imposed on the entry of Palestinians.

Israeli settlers carry out raids in to Al-Aqsa on an almost daily basis. They are accompanied by heavily armed Israeli military police, which impose severe restrictions on Palestinian and Muslim worshippers, with many banned from entering the holy site for months at a time as a result of their rejection of Israeli settler desecration of the area.

An Israeli parliamentarian in Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s ruling coalition has urged authorities to end any hope of establishing a Palestinian state, reported Arutz Sheva.

Speaking yesterday, MK Motti Yogev, of the Jewish Home party, declared that “we must cut off any political hope for the establishment of a Palestinian state of murderers that has never existed and will never exist”.

Yogev added that “the direction should be to apply sovereignty everywhere in the land of Israel and to bring hundreds of thousands of Jews to the Galilee, the Negev and to Judea and Samaria [the occupied West Bank], continue to strengthen our grip and continue to fight terrorism.”

Israeli forces and the Israeli Civil Administration cut the water supply to 2,600 of Palestinians living in communities in Bardala village in the Jordan Valley, northern occupied West Bank, yesterday.

Mutaz Bisharat, an official who monitors settlement activity in Tubas/Jordan Valley, told Ma’an that Israeli forces cut off water supply for 60 per cent of residents of the Bardala village; amounting to 2,600 people.

Israeli forces also cut off water supplies for 1,800-2,000 dunams (445-494 acres) of Palestinian agricultural lands that must be continuously irrigated.

Bisharat added that Israel claims that water sources in the area are illegal, adding that this cannot be true because the water comes from wells in the village and inside Palestinian lands.

Israeli occupation forces demolished a water well in the Umm Al-Nir village in southern Hebron, in the southern occupied West Bank, today.

Locals said that an Israeli bulldozer, escorted by large numbers of Israeli soldiers, demolished a water well in the village.

Umm Al-Nir is located near Susiya village in the South Hebron Hills.

The South Hebron Hills, known locally as Masafer Yatta, lie almost entirely in Area C, the 62 per cent of the West Bank under full Israeli civil and security control since the 1993 Oslo Accords.

Masafer Yatta residents were expelled at the time of the establishment of a firing zone in the 1970s and were eventually allowed back following a long court battle, but are under the constant threat of being expelled or seeing their homes demolished.

Often dubbed an open-air prison on account of Israel's and Egypt's ongoing air, land and sea blockade of the coastal enclave, Gaza is, according to Amnesty International and several other rights groups, on the brink of a humanitarian disaster.

In February, Antonio Guterres, the United Nations secretary-general, highlighted the crisis, saying that the near two million Palestinians of the besieged strip "remain mired in increasing poverty and unemployment, with limited access to adequate health, education, water and electricity".

But the mainstream media does not always succeed in telling Palestine's contemporary story with accuracy and empathy.

On Thursday, in the Scottish city of Glasgow, experts discussed the media's role in covering one of the most pressing and divisive issues in international politics.

The corporate foundations of Verizon, Pfizer, Bank of America, Deutsche Bank, American Express and JPMorgan Chase have collectively given over $25,000 to U.S. nonprofits that send money to Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank, according to tax records from 2001 to 2016 reviewed by In These Times.

A large network of U.S. nonprofits raises millions of dollars annually to send to Israeli settlements, which are built on Palestinian land and are considered illegal under international law. Some Israeli settlers violently harass Palestinians and burn down their crops. Israeli settlers have also killed Palestinians.

Tax records reviewed by In These Times show that Israeli settlements have a surprising source of funds: the foundations of some of the most well-known U.S. corporations.

“There is no such a thing as Palestinian,” interrupted a gentleman in the audience at the Allen County Public Library during a presentation by Miko Peled titled “Beyond Zionism” in 2013.

Peled, a former Israeli soldier turned peace activist, was invited by the Indiana Center for Middle East Peace to offer his honest and powerful perspective on the atrocities of Israel’s occupation of Palestine. His story is especially poignant when one considers how deep his roots run in Israel.

The West Bank and Gaza are illegally occupied Palestinian territories. There’s nothing “disputed” about them.

Expanding Israeli settlements on stolen Palestinian land flagrantly violate Fourth Geneva’s Article 49, stating:

“Individual or mass forcible transfers, as well as deportations of protected persons from occupied territory to the territory of the Occupying Power or to that of any other country, occupied or not, are prohibited, regardless of their motive.”

“The Occupying Power shall not deport or transfer parts of its own civilian population into the territory it occupies.”

The International Committee of the Red Cross affirmed Fourth Geneva, saying “international humanitarian law prohibits the establishment of settlements, as these are a form of population transfer into occupied territory.”

An Israeli journalist who called Israeli army soldiers “animals” for beating a Palestinian father and son in custody is to face trial.

Oshrat Kotler, a journalist with Israel’s Channel 13, is to face trial on charges of incitement, incrimination of suspects, failure to grant a right of reply and more after she called several soldiers accused of beating two Palestinians in custody “human animals”, the Jerusalem Post reported.

Speaking on the channel’s news programme in February, Kotler said:

When you send your children to the [Israeli] army, they are kids. You send them to the [occupied Palestinian] territories, and they come back as human animals. This is the result of the occupation.

“They were not letting anyone near the Dome of the Rock, they had surrounded it from all its doors,” the 21 year-old student says. “And there was an old lady being wheeled out as she was leaving the prayer area and she fell out of her wheelchair and she was unable to get back in. And I saw that a couple of women were trying to help her, but they were being shoved so I tried to go in as well.”

However as Nour moved towards the elderly woman, she found herself shoved to the floor by an Israeli soldier, who cuffed one of her wrists and proceeded to sit on her to stop her from moving.

“That’s when like ten to 15 soldiers were holding me down with their feet, trying to get my other wrist in handcuffs. And I had pulled out my passport and I told her [the soldier] that I was an American citizen and she said ‘I don’t care about your ID’ and threw my passport to the side.”

The only pharmaceutical factory in the Gaza Strip is struggling to survive Israeli restrictions and the economic crises brought about by the 12-year siege imposed on the coastal enclave.

The factory has been subjected to Israeli military attacks since 2003, long before the siege was imposed on the Strip in 2007, which caused an economic crisis, halted the factory’s development and caused production to drop by 80 per cent.

General manager of Middle East Pharmaceutical and Cosmetics Laboratories – or Megapharm, to which the factory is affiliated – Marwan Al-Astal, explained that: “Israeli attacks on the factory started in 2003 when the occupation army stormed its headquarters in the town of Beit Hanoun and stayed there for three months. During this period, lots of equipment, machines and raw materials were destroyed.”

Hamas officials were meeting with Egyptian mediators at the time the two rockets were launched. The Egyptian delegation, which has been conducting indirect negotiations between Hamas and Israel for several months, was told to leave by Israel later that night before the bombardment of the Strip.

On Friday, the Israeli military told media that the rockets were likely launched by mistake during maintenance work.

Meanwhile the Great March of Return organizing committee announced that it would postpone demonstrations along Gaza’s eastern boundaries that day, the first cancelation of the weekly protests since their launch on 30 March last year.

The committee obliquely referenced the overnight escalation and called on Palestinians to prepare for a massive mobilization on the one-year anniversary of the protests.

A UN investigation into the 2018 Gaza protests has concluded that Israeli officers and their leaders may have committed war crimes or crimes against humanity. The human rights council’s commission of inquiry found that soldiers intentionally used live ammunition against civilians, who included children, women, journalists, health workers and people with disabilities.

The figures are telling: more than 6,000 people injured by Israeli bullets, with 183 killed. Renowned human rights organisations such as Human Rights Watch, B’Tselem and Al-Haq had already denounced this policy, with B’Tselem calling on Israeli soldiers not to follow orders to shoot civilians. The people of Palestine still wonder whether such findings will be used by the international community to implement policy aimed at ending the Israeli occupation, or whether it will be business as usual.

The Israeli military said early on Friday that it had launched strikes against "terror sites" in the Gaza Strip.

On Thursday night, rocket alarms went off in the Israeli capital of Tel Aviv for the first time since 2014. The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) said that it had registered "two launches from the Gaza Strip toward Israeli territory."

A high-ranking member of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) says a US decision to drop Israeli-occupied designation from the Golan Heights and Palestinian territories in its latest annual human rights report is meant to whitewash the Israeli occupation and human rights violations against the Palestinian nation.

“After the release of the so-called human rights report by the US State Department, it is now abundantly clear that [US President Donald] Trump’s administration is gearing all branches of the government to whitewash the Israeli occupation and its pervasive violations of human rights,” Hanan Ashrawi, a member of the Executive Committee of the PLO, said in a statement released on Thursday.

She added, “The report also de-contextualizes the reality by omitting the inescapable fact of Israeli occupation of Palestine, reflecting this administration’s infatuation with an alternative yet fallacious version of reality and legality.”

In its annual human rights report the US state department decided to label territories occupied by Israel as Israeli-controlled land.

Palestinians are infuriated at the move. Palestinians say the move intends to whitewash the Israeli occupation and excuse human rights violations against the Palestinians.

Following Israel’s expulsion of the TIPH observer group from Hebron last month, a group of Palestinian activists from the city formed their own team of observers to fill in the gaps. Issa Amro and his team of observers head out every morning to the Tel Rumeida neighborhood in Hebron’s Old City and stand watch as children make their way to school. The kids must pass through several checkpoints monitored by armed soldiers, and streets that are patrolled by notoriously violent settlers. In the month since they began their work, Amro’s team have been given more than 10 military orders to stop work, and have been attacked by settlers several times. Amro told Mondoweiss that since TIPH was expelled, the situation in Hebron has gotten a lot worse.

People are often confused by the difference between citizenship and nationality when it comes to Israel. This issue most recently came up in the spat between Israeli celebrity Rotem Sela who asked, “when will anyone in this government tell the public that this is a state of all its citizens,” to which Prime Minister Netanyahu replied it wasn’t, and said that it was a nation state of Jews alone.

This was then further confused when Netanyahu also claimed that all Israeli citizens have equal rights. What’s going on here? Is Israel a state of all of its citizens, and do citizens have equal rights?

In short, I would say that Netanyahu was right about the state not being a state of all its citizens, and wrong about all citizens having equal rights.

oday there was solemn news on the BBC. The prosecutor in Northern Ireland is going to charge a British soldier with murder for two of the 14 killings on Bloody Sunday in Londonderry.

Bloody Sunday was January 1972. Forty-seven years ago.

The families of the victims have never forgotten the fallen. They marched through the streets yesterday. The arc of history is long but sometimes it really does bend toward justice.

Palestinians have called off their weekly peaceful protests along the Gaza-Israel fence, the Higher National Commission for the March of Return and Breaking the Siege announced today.

“The national authority for the March of Return has called for the postponement of the marches on an exceptional basis today,” the agency said in a brief statement.

The commission said this was an effort to maintain calm in the Strip and prevent escalations after Israeli occupation forces bombed 100 sites in the besieged enclave overnight injuring four Palestinians.

Secretary-General of the PLO Executive Committee Saeb Erekat said the administration of US President Donald Trump has radically changed American policy towards the Palestinian-Israeli conflict.

Erekat said it stopped using the term “occupied” in reference to the West Bank, East Jerusalem, the Gaza Strip and the Syrian Golan Heights adding that it “is not just a change in terminology, but a change in policy”.

The recent change adds to the US’ unilateral recognition of Jerusalem as the “undivided” capital of Israel and moving its embassy from Tel Aviv to the holy city, closing the US consulate in Jerusalem and the PLO office in Washington, legitimising illegal Israeli settlements and dropping the two-state solution, as well as cutting aid to the Palestinians and the UN agency setup to support them, he continued.

One outcome is certain when it comes to the forthcoming Israeli elections – Gaza will remain a top target for the new government. Amid the sparring between contenders for the elections, former IDF chief Benny Gantz declared he would implement Israel’s policy of targeted assassinations against Hamas leaders if elected, and if necessary.

His comments sought to counter Education Minister Naftali Bennett’s remarks over “Operation Protective Edge” in 2014, in which the latter used derogatory language to criticise Gantz’s decisions which, according to Bennett, endangered the lives of Israeli soldiers. Bennett alleged that Gantz would be Hamas’ preferable leadership option. This claim is also being supported by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who has stated that Gantz’s party would make “significant concessions to the Palestinians.”

Weekly protests along the Gaza-Israel border were called off on Friday after Israeli jets pounded the enclave overnight, hours after rockets were launched at Tel Aviv.

"In keeping with the public interest, the commission has decided to exceptionally postpone its activities scheduled for this day," the body which organises the protests said in a statement.

Protests will resume in the coming weeks, with particular preparation for the one-year anniversary of their beginning on 30 March, it said.

An official from the organising committee, speaking on condition of anonymity, said the protests were delayed "to protect our people due to the escalation and the Israeli aggression".