Bahia Amawi worked for nine years as a speech pathologist for a Texas school district. But in September, when it came time to renew her contract for the coming year, she was asked — under the provisions of a recent state law — to affirm that she does not and would not boycott Israel.

That put her in a tough position. As an American of Palestinian descent, she does try to avoid buying products from Israel. So she declined to sign the contract. And she lost her job.

That is as ludicrous as it is un-American. Regardless of one’s position on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict or on the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement, it should be clear that a U.S. citizen like Amawi has a right to make choices for herself about what kind of hummus or olive oil she does or does not want to buy, and about what kind of political statements she wants to make through her purchases.

The Palestinian resistance forces could discover an advanced system mounted near the house of a senior Hamas commander in Gaza to spy on him.

The Arabic-language al-Akhbar newspaper quoted informed security sources affiliated to the Palestinian resistance as saying that the system was due to eavesdrop on Mrwan Issa, a senior commander of al-Qassam Brigades, but the resistance forces could find and dismantle it.

The sources said that the system received sound waves from Issa's house and sent it to the receivers inside the occupied territories, adding that it is considered as a new method used by the Israelis to spy on Palestinians.

According to the paper, the resistance forces also could find and arrest the "mercenary who had planted the system in the region.

The military wing of Hamas said earlier this month that the botched undercover Israeli operation in the Palestinian enclave in November was aimed to plant spying devices in their communications network.

Israeli forces stormed into Al Aqsa Mosque, on Monday morning, and began to photograph the mosque’s landmarks and take measurements without mentioning any reasons for it.

Later this morning, groups of Israeli settlers renewed the provocative incursions into Al-Aqsa Mosque through the Moroccan Gate, carried out tours inside the mosque, under high security reinforcement, until they left the mosque.

In the same context, Israeli occupation authorities decided, on Sunday, to temporarily expel five guards from Al-Aqsa Mosque for periods ranging from four to six months.

According to Al Ray, the six-month deportation decision included guards Fadi Alian, Louai Abu Saad, Ahmed Abu Alia and a member of the Jerusalem district Awad Salaymeh.

The occupation decided to expel Yahya Shehadeh and Salman Abu Miyaleh, for 4 months, from the mosque.

Israeli settlers storm the Islamic holy site on a daily basis, in an attempt to divide the mosque temporally and spatially.

Institute for National Security Studies says the volatile situation along the northern border as well as in the Gaza Strip could lead Israel to war against Iran, Hezbollah and the Palestinians at the same time.

Benny Gantz, the former Israeli army chief, is bragging about how much killing and destruction he committed in Gaza in a series of campaign videos for his new political party posted on YouTube and social media over the weekend.

Gantz hopes to replace Benjamin Netanyahu as Israel’s prime minister in elections scheduled for April.

One of the videos, above, shows drone footage of a devastated neighborhood in Gaza in August 2014, following Israel’s 51-day assault on the territory.

The video’s title includes the words “Parts of Gaza were returned to the stone ages.”

Against the swell of dramatic music, captions on screen announce, “6,231 targets destroyed,” and “1,364 terrorists killed.”

Israel is persecuting Palestinians – a crime against humanity – a Palestinian human rights group and an American law center state in a report submitted to UN investigators earlier this month.

“Israeli occupation policies and practices, including the now 11-year-closure of Gaza, that actively deny Palestinians the right to self-determination collectively amount to persecution, a crime against humanity under international law,” the submission to the UN commission of inquiry into Israel’s use of lethal force against Gaza protesters states.

The 57-page submission was authored by Defense for Children International Palestine and the Human Rights and Gender Justice Law Clinic at the City University of New York School of Law.

Everyone is talking about one thing this morning, the outstanding piece by Michelle Alexander in the New York Times, yes, the New York Times, titled, “Time to Break the Silence about Palestine,” in which she says she can’t be quiet about Palestine any longer. The author of “The New Jim Crow” is a regular columnist now, and she has changed the discourse about Palestine in one explosive swoop, stating that progressives have been silent about Palestine partly because of fear for their careers, but the time has come to end that silence.

In late January 1968, after the series of North Vietnamese and Viet Cong attacks known as the Tet Offensive, Walter Cronkite, the anchor of the CBS Evening News and the most trusted journalist in America, came back from a trip to Vietnam to report on what was going on over there. At the end of his February 27 report, Cronkite, who rarely ventured his opinions on the air, rendered his verdict:

“[I]t seems now more certain than ever that the bloody experience of Vietnam is to end in a stalemate .?.?. [I]t is increasingly clear to this reporter that the only rational way out then will be to negotiate, not as victors, but as an honorable people who lived up to their pledge to defend democracy, and did the best they could.”

The US discourse was rocked this weekend by the opinion piece in the New York Times by columnist and “New Jim Crow” author Michelle Alexander saying that it was time for her to break her silence on Palestine no matter the career cost, in the spirit of Martin Luther King coming out against the Vietnam War in 1967.

Advocates for Israel have responded accordingly. Perceiving the piece as a huge blow to Israel’s reputation among elites, and to the traditional alliance of blacks and Jews, Israel’s cheerleaders have leaped to denounce Alexander as vicious in her views, and dead-wrong on facts.

Michael Oren, the American-born scribe, former Israeli ambassador and now member of the parliament, sees the piece as an attempt to delegitimize Israel and a “strategic threat.”

In a blow to Israel, a British high court has ordered World-Check, a subsidiary of Reuters, to pay compensation and offer an apology to a pro-Palestine organisation listed as a terrorist group on its global online database.

A two-year legal battle concluded with World-Check offering a public apology in open court and a legal settlement of $13,000 plus legal costs to Majed Al-Zeer, the chairman of the Palestinian Return Centre (PRC), for classifying them as “terrorists”.

It was found that Israel’s designation of PRC and its chairman as terrorists was adopted by World-Check which supplies private information on potential clients for corporations, businesses and even governmental agencies, such as police and immigration.

A UK-based Palestinian advocacy group is to hold a conference on Israel’s “Nation-State Law” at the European Parliament in Brussels, Belgium, tomorrow.

Parliamentarians, jurists and activists are expected to attend EuroPal Forum’s event which will be hosted by Member of the European Parliament Keith Taylor.

Palestinian member of the Israeli Kneseet, Yousef Jabareen will attend the session to highlight the racist violations committed by the occupying state against Palestinian citizens and the attempts to legitimise their racism.

David Kronin, a journalist and writer who specialises in monitoring Israel’s human rights violations, will discuss the “Nation-State Law” and the effects it has on Palestinians in Israel who makes up 20 per cent of the population.

Two first-term congresswomen’s support for Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) is shaking up the House. Yesterday, Republicans issued statements condemning Reps. Rashida Tlaib and Ilhan Omar for their endorsement of the non-violent campaign for human rights in Palestine. Their statements sound a lot like the hysteria about BDS from Israel’s leadership.

A recent media study based on an analysis of 50 years of data found that major U.S. newspapers have provided consistently skewed, pro-Israel reporting on Israel-Palestine.

The study, conducted by 416Labs, a Toronto-based consulting and research firm, is the largest of its kind.

Using computer analysis, researchers evaluated the headlines of five influential U.S. newspapers: the Chicago Tribune, Los Angeles Times, New York Times, Washington Post, and Wall Street Journal from 1967 to 2017.

A Palestinian official on Saturday condemned the Israeli decision to close schools run by the UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine refugees (UNRWA) from early 2020.

"The Israeli decision was made to complete the U.S. government's measures of targeting the global agency and seeking to end its activities in Jerusalem," Adnan Husseini, Palestinian minister for Jerusalem affairs, told Xinhua.

Husseini, also a member of Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) executive committee, accused both Israel and the United States of trying to remove the two crucial issues of Jerusalem and the refugees from the negotiating table.

Benny Morris, the Israeli historian who has documented Israeli-Palestinian history so meticulously, is again bemoaning that a full ethnic cleansing was not completed in 1948.

In a long interview with Ofer Aderet in Haaretz (published in English today), Morris says:

If the War of Independence had ended with an absolute separation of populations – the Palestinian Arabs on the east side of the Jordan River and the Jews on the west side – the Middle East would be less volatile and both peoples would have suffered less over the past 70 years. They would have been satisfied with a state of their own, not exactly what they wanted, and we would have received the whole Land of Israel.

The Jordanian foreign ministry yesterday condemned Israel’s actions near Al-Buraq (the Western Wall), stressing it is an inalienable part of Al-Aqsa Mosque.

Israel had reportedly set up steel and wooden structures near Al-Buraq, in contravention of the status quo agreement with Jordan over the administration of Al-Aqsa compound.

Foreign ministry spokesman, Sufian Al-Qudat, said that only the Palestinian Authority (PA) is responsible for dealing with issues related to Al-Aqsa Mosque, as stipulated by international law. Al-Qudat also stressed that Israel, as an occupying power, has to respect this agreement, Jordanian news agency Petra reported.

Al-Qudat also emphasised that Jerusalem’s Awqaf Department (which administers Al-Aqsa) is the only party with the power to carry out maintenance and renovation works in Al-Aqsa Mosque and the surrounding compound, an area which consists of 144 dunams (35 acres) of land.

Russia has reiterated its readiness to host a reconciliation conference between rival Palestinian factions.

In a phone call with the Head of Hamas’ Political Bureau, Ismail Haniyeh, Russia’s special envoy to the Middle East and Africa Mikhail Bogdanov discussed the possibility of holding a comprehensive Palestinian reconciliation meeting in Russian capital Moscow.

The Russian Foreign Ministry said in a statement that Bogdanov had reiterated Russia’s “strong and firm intention to restore Palestinian national unity as soon as possible and find a solution to the Palestinian issue following international law”.

“Bogdanov stressed that Russia is ready to go on establishing intensive contacts with all the leading Palestinian political forces and organise a comprehensive Palestinian meeting in Moscow,” the statement added.

A Palestinian from Hebron has rejected a $100 million Israeli offer to buy his home.

An inhabitant of the West Bank city of Hebron, Abdul Raouf Al-Mohtaseb rejected an Israeli offer worth $100 million for his house and shop, located in the centre of the old neighbourhood of Al-Sahla, Hebron, Arabi 21 reported on Friday.

Al-Mohtaseb has rejected all previous Israeli offers made to him for his house and shop, which overlook Ibrahimi Mosque in the centre of the old city.

“I rejected $100 million,” Al-Mohtaseb said, adding: “I will reject all the money on earth. I will not betray my land or my people. Money is fine, but only when it is clean.”

For the residents of Issawiyeh, a Palestinian village of some 20,000, surveillance, military raids and building demolitions are a daily reality.

Nestled in the hills of East Jerusalem, the village is plagued by poor infrastructure, residents are constantly harassed by the Israeli Border Police and anyone, including children, run the risk of arbitrary arrest.

The village has seen its lands gradually disappear. Before Israel occupied the area in 1967, the village included some 12,500 dunams (1 dunam = 1,000 square meters) of land.

Since then, and due to a combination of Israeli settlements, illegal under international law, the nearby Hebrew University and, more recently, Israel’s West Bank wall, village land has been reduced to around 9,400 dunams, according to Muhammad Abu al-Hummus, a local council member.

White House officials have issued a statement on Friday rejecting Israeli Channel 13’s report on the Israeli peace deal, declaring the deal to be “inaccurate,” and saying that “very few people on the planet know what is in it.”

Channel 13’s report cited a “senior American official,” and presented a very broad-brush summary of the plan, including giving the Palestinians a state that included the majority of the occupied West Bank, and some of the Arab neighborhoods of East Jerusalem as their capital city.

Though this fairly unspecific report is in keeping with what most plans could be expected to contain, US special envoy Jason Greenblatt not only rejected the idea, but added that any speculation about what the US plan actually is “is not helpful.”

Palestinian protesters clash with Israeli troops on the Gaza-Israel border, east of Gaza City, on Jan. 18, 2019. At least 30 Palestinians were injured in clashes on Friday between hundreds of protesters and Israeli soldiers stationed at the borderline of eastern Gaza Strip, according to Gaza medics.

The United States Agency for International Development (USAID) will end all its projects in the occupied West Bank and the besieged Gaza Strip on January 31st following the US administration’s decision to cut funding to the Palestinians, Dave Harden, former USAID Mission Director and Managing Director of the Georgetown Strategy Group, confirmed on Thursday.

According to Hebrew-language news outlets, Harden expressed deep concern over the move to shut down USAID and said that the US administration "demonstrates again a lack of nuance, sophistication, and appreciation for the complexity of the situation.”

He stressed, “Who suffers when USAID leaves schools and water systems unfinished? Palestinians, of course, but also Israelis and Americans. The administration just gave Hamas more running room.”

The Palestinian Center For Human Right (PCHR): On Friday evening, 18 January 2019, Israeli forces wounded 119 Palestinian civilians, including 30 children, 5 women, 5 paramedics, and 2 journalists, in the peaceful demonstrations in the eastern Gaza Strip despite the decreasing intensity of the demonstrations there for the twelfth week consecutively and absence of most means usually used during the demonstrations since the beginning of the Return and Breaking the Siege March 10 months ago.

According to observations by PCHR’s fieldworkers, though the demonstrators were around tens of meters away from the border fence, the Israeli forces who stationed in prone positions and in military jeeps along the fence continued to use excessive force against the demonstrators by opening fire and firing teargas canisters at them.

The General Federation of Palestinian Trade Unions (PGFTU) warned yesterday that the poverty rate in the Gaza Strip has exceeded 80 per cent.

The federation warned that both poverty and unemployment rates have reached unprecedented levels in the Gaza Strip, with poverty exceeding 80 per cent. Meanwhile, unemployment rates have reached more than 54.9 per cent in the besieged enclave, both of which are serious indicators of the deteriorated economic situation in Gaza.

The number of unemployed persons has reached more than 295,000 during the year 2018, it explained.

Israel’s Security Minister Gilad Erdan has called for international observers to be expelled from Hebron.

Erdan yesterday sent a letter to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, demanding that he end the mandate of the Temporary International Presence in Hebron (TIPH), in the south of the occupied West Bank.

According to the Jerusalem Post, Erdan claimed that the mission is “hostile to Israel rather than a neutral force, and is harmful to both the Israeli soldiers stationed in Hebron and the [illegal] Jewish settlers that live there”. Erdan reportedly gave Netanyahu a secret police report “with data to back up his assertion”.

The Israeli-US war declared on the Palestinian boycott movement is coming to a head, culminating in a well-orchestrated effort aimed at suffocating any form of tangible protest of the ongoing Israeli colonization of Palestine.

But an Israeli ‘victory’, even with blind US government support, is still too elusive if at all guaranteed. Killing unarmed protesters at the fence separating besieged Gaza from Israel is often whitewashed as Israel ‘defending itself’. However, legislating unconstitutional laws against the rights of ordinary people to boycott a state that practices war crimes might not be an easy endeavor.

The fact that 26 US states have already passed legislation or some form of condemnation of the civil act of boycott, as championed in the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement (BDS) should, in fact, raise more awareness of the iniquitous Israeli influence on the United States, rather than actually thwarting BDS.

Israeli forces continued to use excessive force against peaceful protestors in the Gaza Strip. A woman and a child were killed during the 42nd week of the Return and Breaking the Siege March. 143 civilians, including 34 children, 3 women, 3 journalists, and 3 paramedics, were wounded; the injury of 3 of them were reported as serious.

In the Gaza Strip, the Israeli forces continued to use lethal force against the participants in the peaceful protests organized along the Gaza Strip borders, which witnessed the peaceful protests for the 42nd week along the eastern and northern border area of the Gaza Strip. In the Gaza Strip, the Israeli forces killed 2 Palestinian, including a child and woman, and wounded 143 civilians, including 34 children, 3 women, 3 journalists, and 3 paramedics. The injury of 3 of those wounded was reported serious. In the West Bank, the Israeli forces wounded 7 civilians, including 2 journalists and a paramedic in separate shooting incidents.

Dehumanising Palestinians used to be easier but decades of deep-rooted, civil society activism by Palestinian Americans and their allies is bearing fruit

An IDF soldier has been charged with assault for striking an Arab teen in the city of Hevron in Judea.

The footage of the incident was recorded by the far-left organization B’Tselem in November 2017.

They are “demolishing our Palestinian heritage.”

“The Palestinian identity of [Haifa] city is being reinvested and reshaped for the benefit of the hegemonic Zionist narrative.”

This is the tenth anniversary of “Cast Lead,” Israel’s three-week-long onslaught on Gaza that took nearly 1,400 lives, 318 of them children, and that as much as anything helped shift the American view of the conflict and caused progressives to side with Palestinians.

During those three weeks of horrifying images, President-elect Obama had nothing critical to say and Israel did him a favor in return: it ended the bombing/invasion two days before he was inaugurated.

Then in September 2009 the UN Human Rights Council issued a bombshell of its own, the Goldstone Report, which documented war crimes and possible crimes against humanity during the campaign, chiefly the Israeli pattern of deliberately striking civilian targets, including schools, mosques, homes, and a flour mill and a chicken farm.

When a delegation of pro-justice activists and community leaders met with Washington state governor Jay Inslee in 2017, to urge him not to endorse the “Governors United against BDS” letter (which, sadly, he signed onto, like every single US state governor, as well as the mayor of Washington, DC), he spoke of it as a foreign policy matter. I strategically “corrected” him, pointing out that the right to boycott was not a foreign policy issue, but one of American free speech. As a member of Washington Freedom to Boycott (which we have since renamed Washington Advocates for Palestinian Rights), I helped circulate the following call to action to thousands, asking them to tell Inslee that “whatever your views on Israel, Palestine, or the BDS movement, anti-BDS legislation is anti-freedom of speech…”

Israel’s military courts have imposed fines topping 60 million shekels ($16 million) on West Bank Palestinians from 2015 to 2017, “even though the great majority of the offenses don’t involve the harming of people or property”, reported Haaretz.

According to the report, “the money is deposited in the Israeli Civil Administration’s accounts in the West Bank and is managed by an officer also subordinate to Israel’s Finance Ministry”.

The report cites examples of fines, such as the December 2018 conviction of a Beit Ummar resident of throwing a stone at Israeli occupation forces “from an unknown distance”. Although “the stone did not hit anyone and caused no damage”, he was jailed for six months and fined 2,000 shekels.

A group of illegal Israeli colonialist settlers invaded, Tuesday, Palestinian farmlands in Khirbat Yanoun village, south of the northern West bank city of Nablus, and uprooted them.

Ghassan Daghlas, a Palestinian official who monitors Israel’s illegal colonialist activities in northern West Bank, said the colonists invaded the lands with their bulldozers, and uprooted nearly 30 Dunams.

Daghlas added that the colonists usually bulldoze and uproot the Palestinian lands before planting them, in order to take control of the properties.

He also said that the uprooted lands are privately-owned by the villages, who have been denied access to them since the year 2006.

On December 4, 2018 Christian Peacemaker Team, Palestine issued Palestinian School Report: Education Under Occupation, November 4-27, 2018.

Christian Peacemaker Team, Palestine documented the increase in violence by Israeli military against Palestinian schools and school children in the Qitoun and Salaymeh areas of H-2 area, al-Khahil/Hebron. During the three weeks reported, CPT Palestine observed 238 rounds of tear gas canisters and 51 rounds of sound grenades fired by Israeli military during the time Palestinian school children were leaving school.

In recent weeks Rachel Riley, a British TV celebrity, has tossed the Antisemitic slur in the direction of the Labour Party, Jeremy Corbyn, Noam Chomsky, Ken Loach, Aaron Bastani, yours truly and others. In her first extended Ch 4 interview it became clear that Riley isn't exactly an astute political philosopher. You can watch the entire Ch 4 interview here.

Lawyers working on Palestinian Jerusalemites’ attempts to acquire Israeli citizenship believe that the government is deliberating blocking such applications, reported Haaretz.

According to the paper, “while the number of applications for citizenship has grown, from 69 in 2003 to more than 1,000 in 2018, very few receive a positive response”.

Lawyers familiar with the cases “are convinced that this is not something initiated by officials in East Jerusalem but rather a deliberate Interior Ministry policy to prevent the city’s Palestinians from becoming citizens”, Haaretz reported.

“It’s clear that the Interior Ministry doesn’t want these applications. They don’t want to pollute the Population Registry with more Palestinians,” said Adi Lustigman, a lawyer specializing in the issue.

The United States government is being urged to rescind a 1978 opinion on the illegality of Israeli settlements in the occupied Palestinian territory (oPt), reported The Jerusalem Post.

According to the report, the Zionist Organisation of America (ZOA) has “embarked on a renewed campaign this week to pressure the Trump administration on the matter”, claiming that “termination of this opinion is long overdue”.

Jeff Daube, the ZOA’s Israel Director, is seeking to “solicit support among US Congress members for the Trump administration to formally rescind a 1978 opinion by former State Department legal adviser Herbert J. Hansell, who worked for the Carter administration”, said The Jerusalem Post.

Israeli forces have killed Palestinian children during protests in the occupied Gaza Strip in “conduct amounting to war crimes”, according to a report submitted to a United Nations inquiry by Defense for Children International-Palestine (DCIP) and the City University of New York (CUNY) School of Law.

The 57-page report was given to investigators working as part of the United Nations Commission of Inquiry on the 2018 protests in the Occupied Palestinian Territory (OPT), established during a special session of the UN Human Rights Council in May 2018.

According to a statement released Tuesday, the DCIP-CUNY report “provides background and context to mass protests in Gaza, highlights Israeli forces’ unlawful killing of Palestinian child protesters, and details serious violations of international law by Israeli forces”.

The game is afoot. Israel, believe it or not, is demanding that seven Arab countries and Iran should pay $250 billion as compensation for what it claims was the forceful expulsion of Jews from Arab countries during the late 1940s. The events that Israel cites allegedly occurred at a time when Zionist Jewish militias were actively uprooting nearly one million Palestinian Arabs and systematically destroying their homes, villages, and towns throughout Palestine.

The Palestinian Center for Human Rights (PCHR) is warning of the deteriorating situation of the Palestinian patients in the Gaza Strip, due to the ongoing crisis of fuel shortage. PCHR calls upon the Palestinian Authority (PA) and international organizations to urgently intervene to order to ensure the rapid flow of fuel needed, for the operation of generators, in the health facilities of the Gaza Strip.

According to PCHR’s follow-up, the UAE Crescent Hospital in Rafah, south of the Gaza Strip, announced on Sunday, 13 January, 2019, that its health services will stop within hours due to the fully running out of fuel needed to operate the generators.

Pressured by human rights activists and a Palestinian refugee, the Canada Revenue Agency has begun an investigation into the Jewish National Fund of Canada over its use of charitable donations to build projects for the Israeli military and illegal settlements.

Uses of charitable donations to fund foreign militaries contravenes Canadian law.

JNF Canada’s parent organization, the Jewish National Fund (JNF), predates the establishment of Israel and uses tree-planting as a cover to ethnically cleanse Palestinians from their land.

After Israel’s establishment in 1948, the JNF took control of most of the land which had been confiscated from Palestinian refugees. In the 1950s, the JNF became a quasi-state organization, with a policy to lease land only to Jews on an openly discriminatory basis.

Documents show that the JNF has repeatedly used JNF Canada as a conduit to collect funds for its illegal projects, activists say.

When CNN fired Black commentator Marc Lamont Hill in 2018 for a speech he gave at the United Nations’ International Day of Solidarity with the Palestinian People, it recalled for some the forced resignation in 1979 of Andrew Young, the US ambassador to the United Nations. The first African-American to hold that post, Young was fired simply for meeting with a representative of the Palestine Liberation Organization.

The Andrew Young Affair, as it came to be called, is in many ways the centerpiece of Michael R. Fischbach’s Black Power and Palestine, a meticulously researched history of the ties between the Black and Palestinian liberation struggles from the 1960s to the 1980s.

One of the most dangerous aspects about regimes of colonial oppression is that they strive to occupy the mind of the oppressed, not just their land.

Palestinians will be pushing the envelope in January as they apply for full membership in the United Nations. The body has shown sympathy and support for the Palestinian plight, but the US has, through its Security Council veto, thwarted every effort to do anything constructive for the people.

The World Food Programme (WFP) has suspended or reduced aid for some of its Palestinian beneficiaries in the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip due to funding shortages, an official has said.

Some 27,000 Palestinians are no longer receiving aid through the United Nations programme since January 1 in the occupied West Bank, said Stephen Kearney, the organisation's director for the Palestinian territories.

Another 165,000, including 110,000 in Gaza, are receiving 80 percent of the usual amount, he said on Sunday.

The cuts were decided upon after a gradual reduction in donations over the past nearly four years, with US cuts having the biggest effect.

The Palestinian Health Ministry has reported that a child died, on Monday at dawn, from serious wounds he suffered on Friday January 11th, 2019, after Israeli soldiers shot him with live fire, in northern Gaza.

The Health Ministry stated that the child, Abdul-Rauf Ismael Salha, 14, was shot with a live round in the head during the Great Return March procession, east of Jabalia, in the northern part of the besieged and impoverished Gaza Strip.

It added that the child was first rushed to the Indonesian Hospital, in Beit Lahia, and was later moved to the Shifa Medical Center, in Gaza city, due to the seriousness of his wounds.

The Israeli occupation authorities distributed dozens of demolition orders on Sunday in the Arab village of Um Namila in the Negev, Arab48.com has reported. The security forces which stormed the village told the residents to evacuate 15 acres of residential and agriculture land, which are scheduled to be recognised as part of the city of Rahat.

The Palestinian residents described this as “provocative” as they have been fighting for years to get official recognition of their village, a move which has infuriated the Israeli authorities, including the Ministry of Agriculture. That is why, they say, the Israeli authorities have resumed their witch hunt against the village along with others in the north of the Negev. They pointed out that Israeli occupation forces stormed the villages and attacked the residents several times last year.

Israeli minister Yoav Gallant declared Sunday his opposition to a Palestinian state and support for the annexation of the occupied West Bank, reported The Jerusalem Post.

The Aliya and Integration Minister was speaking during a visit to West Bank settlements Beit Aryeh, Neve Tzuf, Eli and Shiloh. All settlements are considered illegal under international law.

“I am clearly saying no, to a Palestinian state. It is not possible to have more than one state west of the Jordan River”, Gallant declared.

Some may be happy to learn that the US Senate didn’t pass the ‘anti BDS bill’ on Tuesday. But a look at the vote reveals that America’s politicians are fully removed from the American ethos of freedom. Fifty six mostly Republican Senators, just 4 shy of the 60 needed to pass the bill, voted to enact a law contrary to the Constitutional right to Freedom of Speech as granted by the 1st amendment. The defeated bill included a provision to allow states and local governments to punish Americans who boycott Israel. This was an astonishing and nearly successful attempt to legislate crude government interference with freedom of speech in its most protected form: political speech. The fact that such a bill made it to the floor of the Senate confirms that the American political establishment is an occupied zone committed to silencing opposition to Israel and its lobby.

Israeli forces clash with Palestinians during a raid in the West Bank city of Ramallah.

Palestinian resistance group Hamas has held Israel responsible for the ongoing escalation in the blockaded Gaza Strip.

“The Israeli occupation bears the consequences of continuing commit its ‘follies’ against peaceful protesters and deliberately killing them in cold blood as well as bombing sites of resistance,” spokesman Fawzi Barhoum said in a statement reported by Anadolu Agency.

The spokesman asserted that the escalation “will not secure the occupation or its people.”

Israeli warplanes struck three targets, including a Hamas military site, in the Gaza Strip late Saturday.

The Israeli military said the attacks followed rocket fire from the Palestinian territory.

No injuries were reported.

Hundreds of Palestinian Christians and their supporters gathered Friday in Haifa, in northern Israel, to protest an Israeli exhibit that featured Ronald McDonald taking the place of Jesus on the cross.

The so-called “McJesus” exhibit was created by Finnish artist Jani Leinon, and has been on display at a gallery in Haifa as part of a gallery exhibition called ‘Sacred Goods’.

It recently came to the attention of church authorities in Haifa, who called for the protest.

The Greek Patriarchate said “While we express freedom of expression, this should not include mocking and targeting our religion and religious figures”.

The Jewish state gives chutzpah new meaning. It seeks $250 billion from seven Arab states and Iran in connection to its theft of historic Palestine - one of history's great crimes.

It took 78% in 1948, the Palestinian Nakba, the remainder in June 1967, including the West Bank, Gaza, and Jerusalem, the UN-declared international city, illegally occupied by Israel, illegally declared its exclusive capital.

David Ben-Gurion, Israel's first prime minister, set the tone during the Nakba for what followed, saying "(e)very attack has to end with occupation, destruction and expulsion" - forcefully eliminating resistance, assuring Israeli control over historic Palestine.

According to Israeli Hadashot TV news, Israel demands Egypt, Iran, Iraq, Libya, Morocco, Syria Tunisia and Yemen correct what it calls a "historic injustice" - a colossal perversion of truth.

Israel opened a new road in the central occupied West Bank on Thursday with an eight-meter wall separating Palestinian and Israeli traffic, leading many to deem the route “Apartheid Road.”

Headlines matter. As studies have repeatedly shown, when it comes to reaching the general public, the words at the top of the page might be as important, if not more, than the text of articles themselves — to the chagrin of many writers. In the case of the Israel-Palestine conflict, inappropriate, misleading, and biased headlines like those that appeared in the New York Times during 2014 Gaza War have been all too common.

This is the conclusion of a new study titled “50 Years of Occupation” published by 416Labs, a research and data analytics firm based in Canada. The firm analyzed nearly 100,000 news headlines about the conflict in the American press over the past five decades and found that the Israeli point of view was featured much more prominently than the Palestinian one, and that references to Palestinians’ experiences of being “refugees” or living under “occupation” have steadily declined.

For Saied Abu Asker, 2018 will be remembered as the year he was shot with two explosive bullets.

He is among numerous Palestinians to have been injured while taking part in the Great March of Return. The protests – held on a regular basis since late March – have been called to demand that the rights of Palestine’s refugees be upheld.

Abu Asker has paid a heavy price for demanding his basic rights. The Israeli snipers who fired at him caused serious damage to the pelvis area of his body while protesting east of Jabaliya refugee camp in northern Gaza on 1 June.

A woman shot during protests in the occupied Gaza Strip on Friday is the first Palestinian fatality at the hands of Israeli occupation forces in 2019. A Palestinian man was shot and seriously wounded by Israeli forces in the West Bank the same day.

Amal al-Taramsi, 44, died after she was shot in the head by live fire during Great March of Return protests east of Gaza City. She was 200 meters away from the boundary fence at the time of her injury, according to the Gaza-based human rights group Al Mezan.

Al-Taramsi is the third female to be killed during the protest series that was launched on 30 March last year. The other two female fatalities were medic Razan al-Najjar and 14-year-old Wesal al-Sheikh Khalil.

Israel opened a new road in the central occupied West Bank on Thursday with an eight-meter wall separating Palestinian and Israeli traffic, leading many to deem the route “Apartheid Road.”

The road connects the illegal Geva Binyamin Settlement, southeast of Ramallah, to Route 1, a major highway that runs through the West Bank and into Israeli-occupied East Jerusalem.

The new 5-kilometer Route 4370, also known as the “Easter Ring Route” is a four lane route: two lanes for Israeli settlers travelling from the West Bank into Jerusalem, and two lanes circumventing around the borders of Jerusalem for Palestinians with West Bank IDs.

Police opened an investigation Tuesday into an apparent hate crime targeting a Palestinian village in the southern West Bank. Residents of Tuwani, in the south Hebron Hills just west of the Israeli outpost of Havat Maon, woke up Tuesday to find 15 olive trees chopped down. Nearby, two boulders were spray-painted with the Hebrew phrases “Death to Arabs” and “Revenge.” Another boulder was graffiti’d with a red Star of David … Last week, the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs released statistics ahead of the new year that showed a 69 percent increase in settler attacks on Palestinians in 2018 compared to 2017.

The Palestinian Authority (PA) said yesterday that Israel’s storming of Ramallah is an attempt to coerce it into accepting the “Deal of the Century”.

PA spokesman Yousef Al-Mahmoud said that “no power on the face of the earth can push the Palestinian people and their leadership to kneel down,” Safa news agency reported. Al-Mahmoud added: “The repeated invasions of Palestinian cities are attempts to undermine Palestinian sovereignty,” pointing to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s warnings that it could “ignite wars”.

Al-Mahmoud continued: “Our people, with our leadership, announced a continuous confrontation with anything aiming to undermine our cause and against all the conspiracies aiming to undermine our efforts to achieve our freedom, independence and dream of a sovereign Palestinian state.”

It might not look like it, but in many ways Israel is in a bind.

Of course, Israel is a fundamentally oppressive, racist, apartheid state which is increasingly in bed with some of the world’s worst regimes – including Saudi Arabia’s brutal absolutist monarchy, and the anti-Semitic, neo-Nazi-arming government in Ukraine

Yet in terms of Israel’s propaganda, in the long term it is really only sticking its finger in the dam, delaying the inevitable deluge.

Israel’s image among the general population is in terminal decline, and there is no going back. Behind closed doors, professional propagandists for Israel admit as much. In 2017, the Electronic Intifada obtained a leaked report co-authored by Israeli think tank the Reut Institute and the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), which desperately tried to suggest solutions to the problem.

Another 25 injured, including a journalist and paramedic, amid ongoing Friday demonstrations in the besieged strip

In the Gaza Strip, the Israeli forces continued to use lethal force against the participants in the peaceful protests organized along the Gaza Strip borders, which witnessed the peaceful protests for the 41th week along the eastern and northern border area of the Gaza Strip. Moreover, the Israeli forces use force against civilians who participate in demonstrations during the Israeli incursions in the West Bank. In the Gaza Strip, the Israeli forces wounded 56 civilians, including 10 children, 3 women, 5 journalists and 6 paramedics. The injury of 1 of those wounded was reported serious. In the West Bank, the Israeli forces wounded 10 civilians, including 4 children, a woman, a journalist, and a paramedic.

As part of using excessive force against the peaceful protesters along the Gaza Strip borders, during the reporting period, Israeli forces wounded 56 civilians, including 10 children, 3 women, 5 journalists, and 6 paramedics. The injury of 1 of those wounded was reported serious.

After a delay of years, Route 4370 in the Jerusalem area has opened. This road connects the settlement of Geva Binyamin to Route 1, the Jerusalem-Tel Aviv highway, between French Hill and the Naomi Shemer Tunnel, which leads to Mount Scopus. The highway, which has been called the “Apartheid Road,” is divided in the middle by an eight-meter high wall. Its western side serves Palestinians, who cannot enter Jerusalem, whereas the road’s eastern side serves settlers, who can now reach French Hill and Mount Scopus more easily from Anatot, Geva Binyamin and Route 60, north of the city.

The West Bank has many segregated roads, but none of them is divided along its entire length by a wall.

Maryland's ban on contracting with businesses that boycott Israel tramples on the First Amendment rights of a software engineer who advocates for Palestinians, a Muslim civil rights group claims in a lawsuit filed Wednesday.

The Council on American-Islamic Relations' federal lawsuit seeks to block the state from enforcing an executive order that Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan signed in October 2017.

The order requires contractors to certify in writing that they don't boycott Israel. The group's suit claims the order has an unconstitutional chilling effect on First Amendment-protected political advocacy supporting the Palestinians.

The Palestinian Ministry of Endowment documented 101 Israeli violations against Palestinian holy sites in the occupied Palestinian territories during December 2018, Quds Press reported yesterday.

In a statement, the ministry said that the Israeli occupation carried out more than 30 incursions in Al-Aqsa Mosque and prevented the call to prayer 51 times at the Ibrahimi Mosque in Hebron.

Other violations were committed, it added, included digging under the holy sites in Silwan, in Jerusalem’s Old City, incursions, provocative marches in Jerusalem’s Old City, arrests and deportation orders against Al-Aqsa’s guards and the immergence of racist graffiti.

On Monday, human rights groups Al Mezan Centre for Human Rights in Gaza, Gisha – Legal Centre for Freedom of Movement, and Adalah, wrote to senior officials “with an urgent demand to refrain from conducting further aerial spraying of herbicides inside and near the Gaza Strip, due to the severe damage to crops and the risk to the health of Gaza residents caused by the spraying.”

On 4 December, the Israeli military “sprayed herbicides from the air over areas inside the Gaza Strip and near the fence separating it from Israel”. A variety of crops grown in fields near the fence inside the Gaza Strip were “damaged as a result”.

In December 2015, the military “confirmed it uses planes to spray herbicides near the fence in order to clear terrain”, with farmers reporting spraying since 2014.

The government of Israel and its lobbyists around the world have mastered the infamous art of the “Big Lie”. Although they have claimed to be the victims of such tactics used by Nazi Germany before and during World War Two, pro-Israel activists — Jews and non-Jews alike — have taken the concept to even greater heights of mendacity.

Israel has always recognised that public perceptions and what people can be made to believe are more powerful and more important than reality. Hence, it has engaged in an ongoing campaign of spreading lies to create false perceptions which whitewash the state’s atrocities and portray it as the perpetual victim.

The proto-Zionists did this during the 1930s and 1940s when they engaged in creating an artificial presence in Palestine, and their ideological offspring have been doing it ever since. Using high powered public relations and communications strategies, they distort the truth and concoct believable lies.

Mick Napier, in an exclusive interview with FNA, said that by implementation of the nation state law “Israel has shot itself in the foot by labeling itself internationally as an apartheid state while gaining no particular advantage for its program of ethnic cleansing.”

According to the activist, the Great March of Return protests and Israel's brutal reaction have further diminished the “minimal support for Israel in world public opinion and have also made it more difficult for Israel supporters to defend and support Israel actions thus opening wider possibilities to build the BDS campaign.”

It didn’t take long for the vise on Gaza’s long-suffering population to be tightened in the new year.

The Palestinian Authority, headed by Mahmoud Abbas in the occupied West Bank, withdrew its personnel from the Rafah border crossing between Gaza and Egypt overnight Sunday.

The move amounts to the effective closure of the sole point of exit and entry for the vast majority of Gaza’s more than two million residents.

Hamas authorities have resumed control over the Gaza side of the crossing, after having handed it over to the Palestinian Authority last November, but it is unclear whether Egypt will reopen Rafah.

The Jewish state gives chutzpah new meaning. It seeks $250 billion from seven Arab states and Iran in connection to its theft of historic Palestine – one of history’s great crimes.

It took 78% in 1948, the Palestinian Nakba, the remainder in June 1967, including the West Bank, Gaza, and Jerusalem, the UN-declared international city, illegally occupied by Israel, illegally declared its exclusive capital.

David Ben-Gurion, Israel’s first prime minister, set the tone during the Nakba for what followed, saying “(e)very attack has to end with occupation, destruction and expulsion” – forcefully eliminating resistance, assuring Israeli control over historic Palestine.

According to Israeli Hadashot TV news, Israel demands Egypt, Iran, Iraq, Libya, Morocco, Syria Tunisia and Yemen correct what it calls a “historic injustice” – a colossal perversion of truth.

Dozens of Palestinians, said to have been recruited by Israel, have been arrested by Gaza’s Hamas leadership after a botched IDF covert mission in the territory in November, which led to heavy gunfire battles and a tense standoff.
“The security services were able to arrest 45 agents after the security incident east of Khan Yunis last November and they are under investigation,” Hamas’ interior ministry spokesman Iyad al-Bozum said in a statement, without specifying if those detained had any direct role to play in the Israeli incursion into the Southern Gaza strip on November 11.

The arrested alleged Israeli agents had reportedly been recruited by Israel over the phone and social media, often through the use of blackmail. While Hamas has managed to arrest "many spies" over the years, the Israelis continue to recruit Palestinian agents to “help them commit crimes against our people,” the Hamas spokesman said, appealing to those who are being coerced by the IDF to turn themselves in.

The Birmingham Civil Rights Institute has canceled its annual gala at which iconic Black scholar and activist Angela Davis was to receive a prestigious human rights award.

Randall Woodfin, the mayor of Birmingham, Alabama, expressed his “dismay” at the decision, which he said came “after protests from our local Jewish community and some of its allies.”

“The reactive decision of the BCRI did not create an opportunity for necessary consensus dialogue,” Woodfin added.

Davis is the latest prominent Black intellectual and outspoken supporter of Palestinian rights to be targeted by the Israel lobby.

Roy S. Johnson, a columnist for several Alabama newspapers, revealed Monday that those demanding the cancellation were “primarily – though not exclusively – from the city’s Jewish leadership, according to a source familiar with a decision that transpired quickly, and stunningly, in a span of just a few days.”

In late December, dozens of humanitarian organizations, businesses, educational institutions, and local municipalities across the West Bank and Gaza were faced with a harsh reality: they would only have a few weeks, one month maximum, to come up with thousands of dollars if they wanted to keep running their respective programs.

They had just learned that the grants they had been promised for 2019 from USAID, one of the largest and most important humanitarian agencies in the region, would not be coming.

“We were shocked, all of a sudden with no prior warning, we were told the money was gone,” Waleed Khatib, an official with the Beit Jala municipality told Mondoweiss, speaking on a USAID-funded project the municipality had been anxiously waiting on.

Republicans failed to advance a bill for Israel to a vote when most Democrats voted against the move to protest what they complained was Republicans’ inaction on bills to fund the government. The vote was 56-44 against “cloture,” moving a bill to a quick vote, which requires a three-fifths vote in favor of it.

The bill, S.1, would give Israel billions of dollars, work to undermine BDS, and take additional pro-Israel measures.

View a video of the Senate session and read the transcript here.

The latest news is that Democrats may try to prevent today’s action on the bill (over concerns over the government shutdown), so phoning & emailing could help block the bill!

This composite bill, the first Senate bill of 2019, would give Israel billions of dollars and would work, in its own words, to “combat BDS.” The fraudulent title is “Strengthening America’s Security in the Middle East Act of 2019.”

For more information on the bill and its four components see my recent article on S.1.

The first component of the bill gives Israel the largest military aid package in U.S. history – see our previous report on the $38 billion to Israel package, and how it goes far beyond the Obama MOU.

Go here for more information on how the bill’s “combatting BDS” component violates the First Amendment right to free speech.

The bill is scheduled to be taken up at 3 EST, at which time the proceedings can be viewed here.

The American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee (ADC) and American civil liberties organizations are leading a campaign to block a bill in the US Congress aimed at fighting boycott of Israel led by the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement.

Republican Senators Marco Rubio, James Risch, Cory Gardner, and Mitch McConnell proposed the Senate’s first 2019 bill, S.B.1, “Strengthening America’s Security in the Middle East Act of 2019.”

According to ADC, S.B.1 shields Israel for its ongoing human rights violations against the Palestinian people and calls to punish those that engage in boycotting Israel for violating international law and human rights.

S.B.1 adopts the unconstitutional language from Senator Rubio’s Combating BDS Act, said ADC. Specifically, it calls for the denial of government contracts to those that boycott Israel to protect Palestinian human rights.

The Moroccan Jewish scholar, Jacob Cohen, who is known for his anti-Zionist ideas, stated that “Israel is still employing the cause of the Holocaust to justify the occupation and gain the sympathy of global public opinion.”

Cohen’s statement came during a seminar entitled: “The Holocaust and the Zionist Agenda,” which was organised by the non-governmental National Working Group for Palestine in Rabat.

Cohen, who is a human rights activist and an author, added: “Israel has been trying to invest in this cause since the 1970s in order redeem its public image and distract the world from the violations committed against the Palestinian people.”

“Israelis are always trying to raise this issue to suggest that Israel is threatened,” he noted.

Cohen continued: “At the domestic level, all the Israeli governments are trying to root the Holocaust issue in the consciousness of the Israeli citizens to continue spreading fear and violence and create a state of permanent aptness for war.”

Pro-Israel lobby groups in Westminster have begun 2019 with fresh attacks on UK government funding for both the Palestinian Authority (PA) and Palestine refugee agency UNRWA.

MP Louise Ellman, vice-chair of Labour Friends of Israel (LFI), introduced her International Development Assistance (Values Promoted in Palestinian National Authority Schools) Bill to the Commons yesterday.

Ellman attacked British funding for PA schools, which she accused of promoting “incitement”.

“Ministers have been repeatedly asked to suspend all aid to the PA which directly or indirectly finances those teaching and implementing this curriculum until fundamental changes are made,” Ellman stated. “They have refused to do so. It is now time to require them to act.”

The Australian Jewish Association (AJA) has urged the Australian national football team to boycott their Asian Cup group match against Palestine scheduled for this Friday.

According to reports, the AJA believes “Palestine is not a country recognised by the international community and that soccer has been ‘blatantly politicised’ by the Asian Football Confederation admitting the Arab state as a member.”

On Friday, “Australia will take on Palestine in a crucial Group B clash in Dubai, needing to bounce back from their opening game loss to Jordan.” Palestine, meanwhile, picked up their first point in a major tournament on Sunday, “when they held Syria to a 0-0 draw in Sharjah”.

Palestine was admitted to FIFA in 1998 and qualified for their first Asian Cup in 2015 in Australia.

A delegation of Turkish doctors has arrived in Gaza to carry out operations on Palestinians injured during the “Great March of Return”, Felesteen.ps reported today.

The delegation, from Doctors Worldwide Turkey, an independent charity, arrived in Gaza on Monday, programmes coordinator Ahmed Tsefek said.

According to Tsefek, the delegation will remain in Gaza for four days and carry out operations at Al-Shifa Hospital, the largest hospital in the besieged Strip.

Tsefek said his organisation is currently thinking of opening an office in the occupied West Bank in order to offer its services to the Palestinian refugees in the refugee camps there.

A senior member of the Hamas Political Bureau said on Monday that “the worst is still to come” as far as the Gaza Strip is concerned. Mousa Abu Marzook’s remarks followed the announcement by the Palestinian Authority that it will withdraw its security officers from the Rafah Border Crossing, the only route between Gaza and the outside world through Egypt. He tweeted similar sentiments after the PA Minister of Civil Affairs Hussein Al-Sheikh pledged that more punitive measures to tighten the siege on the Palestinians in the coastal enclave are on the way.

Top Israel lobby figure Adam Milstein is one of the leading purveyors of racial hatred and Islamophobia targeting Rashida Tlaib, the Michigan Democrat who has just been sworn in as a member of Congress.

Milstein is chair of the Israeli-American Council and has been named as a principal funder of the anti-Palestinian intimidation site Canary Mission.

He has lately been joined by President Donald Trump who claimed Tlaib “dishonored her family” when she used an expletive calling for his impeachment. Since then the abuse directed at her has spiked.

Tlaib is the first Palestinian American woman elected to Congress and, along with Minnesota’s Ilhan Omar, one of the first two Muslim women elected to the body.

During her campaign, Tlaib accepted support from J Street, a liberal Israel lobby group that opposes the Palestinian right of return and the boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) movement for Palestinian rights.

Most Americans probably don’t give it much thought, but Jewish federations are tax exempt, nonprofit organizations. That means that it’s legal to donate money to them and then write it off on your taxes. In a lot of cases, money donated through these organizations end up supporting illegal Israeli settlements. Under US law, however, this is “legal.”

Think about what that means: you can donate money, legally, to support settlements deemed illegal under international law– settlements that have been built illegally on occupied land–and technically you haven’t violated any US laws. And not only that, you get to write it off on your taxes.

The Birmingham Civil Rights Institute has canceled its annual gala at which iconic Black scholar and activist Angela Davis was to receive a prestigious human rights award.

Randall Woodfin, the mayor of Birmingham, Alabama, expressed his “dismay” at the decision, which he said came “after protests from our local Jewish community and some of its allies.”

“The reactive decision of the BCRI did not create an opportunity for necessary consensus dialogue,” Woodfin added.

Davis is the latest prominent Black intellectual and outspoken supporter of Palestinian rights to be targeted by the Israel lobby.

This month marks the 10th anniversary of the first major military assault on the 2 million Palestinians of the Gaza Strip. After its unilateral withdrawal from Gaza in 2005, Israel turned the area into the biggest open-door prison on Earth. The two hallmarks of Israel’s treatment of Gaza since then have been mendacity and the utmost brutality towards civilians.

The Investigation by the NYT into the killing of 21-year-old paramedic Rouzan al-Najjar reveals: “. . . the shooting by (IDF-Sniper) appears to have been reckless at best, and possibly a war crime,.. for which no one has yet been punished.”

Gaza 4 Jan – Press Release — On Friday evening, 04 January 2019, Israeli forces wounded 46 Civilians, including 7 Children, 4 Journalists and 6 Paramedics, in an excessive use of force against the peaceful demonstrators in the eastern Gaza Strip though the demonstrations have scaled down for the tenth week consecutively and despite absence of most means usually used during the demonstrations since the beginning of the Return and Breaking the Siege March 9 months ago.

The husband of a Palestinian woman who was killed in a roadside stoning last year said on Sunday that while nothing would bring her back, he hoped his wife’s killers will go to prison, since only justice would deter future attacks.

Yakoub Rabi, 52, made the comments after the Shin Bet security service said it had arrested several Jewish minors over the past week on suspicion of involvement in the killing of his wife, Aisha.