Israeli military raids on Palestinian communities have continued to escalate in magnitude and violence during the first month of 2023, said Palestinians in different parts of the occupied West Bank.
Israeli far-right minister Itamar Ben Gvir has said he will ignore Jordan and continue storming the Al-Aqsa Mosque compound, the third-most important site in Islam.
Ben Gvir sparked a diplomatic storm between Israel and its Arab allies and neighbours when the extremist politician stormed the compound earlier in January.
In a brutal assault on the Jenin refugee camp Thursday morning, Israeli forces killed nine Palestinians and injured over a dozen others, making it the deadliest day for Palestinians in 2023, and one of the single deadliest raids in the West Bank in years.
According to the Palestinian Ministry of Health (MOH), among those killed was an “elderly” woman identified as Magda Obaid, 60. Two of the others killed were identified as Saeb Izreiqi, 24, and Izzidin Salahat, 26.
The use of the word apartheid to describe Israel’s treatment of Palestinians just keeps growing. David Rothkopf, the former editor of Foreign Policy, baldly states that Israel is an apartheid state in a piece published by Haaretz last weekend.
The film opens by showing the beauty of pre-Zionist rural Palestine. The film was shot in Jordan, where the landscape is very similar. We see Farha in her village, we meet her father and uncle, and it seems like what one would expect in a Palestinian village in pre-Zionist Palestine. And yet, I could not help feeling that something terrible was brewing. Maybe because I know all too well what had happened to Palestinians in 1947- 48, how the ethnic cleansing campaign had caught most Palestinians by surprise.
Israeli forces killed at least nine Palestinians, including a 60-year-old woman, and wounded several others during a raid in a flashpoint area of the occupied West Bank on Thursday, Palestinian health officials said, in the deadliest day in years in the territory.
Israel's National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir said on Tuesday that an armed conflict between Israel and Hamas in Gaza is "imminent," and called for reinforcing police forces and creating a national guard to operate within Israel's borders.
Human Rights Watch charged on Monday that new Israeli rules for foreigners entering the West Bank risked turning the occupied territory into "another Gaza," cutting residents off from the outside world.
Israeli forces detained 16 Palestinians from various parts of the occupied West Bank on Monday morning, the official news agency WAFA reported.
According to official Palestinian sources, the isreali occupation forces rounded up Palestinians and ransacked their family houses in several West Bank refugee camps, including Jazalone, Nur Shamas, and Dheisheh.
In the Aida refugee camp, north of Bethlehem, Isreali forces detained a 13-year-old Palestinian minor.
Other arrest campaigns were carried out in Hebron (Al-Khalil), Nablus, Janin, and the Jordan Valley.
