JENIN (Ma’an) — Israel began large-scale digging works on Saturday in preparation for the expansion of an illegal settlement in the northern West Bank district of Jenin.
Residents of the Ya’bad village, on which the Shaqed settlement is built, said bulldozers entered on Saturday and began razing village land to make way for several new housing units.
The expansion follows the expiration of a partial settlement moratorium in the West Bank last month, which the US and EU urged Israel to prolong in a bid to save flailing peace talks from collapse over settlement activity.
The Ya’bad village is surrounded by several Israeli settlements including Shaqed, Rehan, Hinnanit, Mevo Dotan and Hermesh.
On Friday, the US said it was disappointed by Israel’s announcement that several new homes in two illegal East Jerusalem settlements had been approved, describing the move as “contrary” to efforts to resume direct negotiations.
LONDON – October 15 – A ship loaded with vehicles and aid for Gaza is due to leave Syria for Egypt this Sunday, carrying members of Palestine Solidarity CampaignUK.
The ship will pass the exact place in international waters where Israel boarded the Mavi Marmara in May and killed nine Turkish humanitarians on board as they attempted to sail to Gaza to deliver aid.
Those on board the ship, including 40 survivors of the Mavi Marmara attack, will throw a wreath into the sea to commemorate those killed by Israeli troops.
They have come from more than 30 countries, in the first international aid convoy to attempt to reach Gaza since the attack on the Mavi Marmara nearly five months ago.
Amena Saleem, of the Palestine Solidarity Campaign UK (PSC), who will be sailing on the ship, said: ‘We will be sailing, completely unarmed, to Egypt from where we will drive 20 miles to Gaza to break the illegal siege imposed by Israel four years ago. We are all aware of the lethal force Israel used on the Mavi Marmara against international civilians on an aid mission, but we will not be deterred. We will never turn our backs on Gaza, despite all of Israel’s efforts to force us to do so.’
She added: ‘It is now time for the depth of our commitment to Palestine to be reflected by our governments – ordinary people are demanding an end to Israel’s illegal occupation of Gaza and the West Bank, and an end to the siege of Gaza. Governments, by applying international pressure, can make this happen and we call on them to listen to their people and do so immediately.’
16 October 2010 | International Solidarity Movement
Thursday illegal settlers of the Umm Haroun Compound of Sheikh Jarrah, Jerusalem gave a press conference about their plans for the upcoming year. The Settlers’ Organization stated that they plan to build two new blocks of settlements and a holy tourist park of biblical archeology on the Palestinian owned land of East Jerusalem. The organization’s website has a one-year-plan on how to remove the Palestinian people from Umm Haroun.
Later in the evening there was a violent clash between settlers and Palestinians. Police arrived and arrested three Palestinians and one Israeli activist.
Sheikh Jarrah is home to about 3,000 Palestinians in East Jerusalem, close to the 1967 border that separates East and West Jerusalem. The residents suffer from settler violence and several families have been unlawfully evicted from their homes, in the Israeli authorities’ effort to replace Palestinians with Israeli settlers and “Judaise” Jerusalem.
The Palestinian community organized a contra press conference to provide more information on the history of the area. Ownership of the land is disputed, according to the Israeli government, because Israeli laws recognize Jewish citizen’s assets from before 1948, but don’t allow claims to Palestinian assets prior to 1948.
In the late 1990s, Jewish settler groups began seizing buildings and settling compounds in the neighborhood. One of these compounds is a plot of 70 acres in which twenty-eight Palestinian refugee families whose homes were taken in 1948, came to live. These refugees were given houses by the Jordanian government and the UN during the 1950s in exchange for renouncing their refugee status and the rights and welfare that go with that status.
These Israeli laws, founded in racism, were used to forcefully evict three Palestinian families from their homes in 2009. In August and November a large number of Israeli police and border police blocked sections in East Jerusalem in order to evict the Palestinian families by force. These families still are unable to return home.
After the press conference, young Palestinian boys from the group “Batizado Caipoera” made a performance in Caipoera (martial arts) to symbolize their struggle for ownership of their land.
For more information about the problems in Sheikh Jarrah you can read on: http://www.en.justjlm.org/.
13 October 2010 | International Solidarity Movement
Al-Arakib, the Bedouin village in Negev, was demolished for a sixth time Wednesday morning. Haya Noah, leader of the Forum for co-existence in the Negev, was hit by police officers and arrested following her request to see a court warrant.
Israel Land Administration officials refer to the village as “unrecognized” and have claimed the demolitions are legal because residents “invaded” an area that wasn’t theirs. Villagers say they have owned the land since the Ottoman Empire, and the village graveyard confirms this with graves dating back to 1908.
Turkey will not send any delegation to a biannual tourism conference in Israel later this month, the country’s culture minister said Tuesday, marking the first boycott of Israel on a multilateral level since a deadly raid on a Turkish aid ship in May.
Culture and Tourism Minister Ertuğrul Günay told a group of reporters Tuesday that Turkey would not send any representative to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, or OECD, conference on Oct. 20-22 in Jerusalem. “Regrettable statements have been made. We want tourism to take place, not politics,” he said.
Diplomatic sources told the Hürriyet Daily News & Economic Review that the Turkish decision would mark the first boycott of Israel on a multilateral platform. Despite the May 31 flotilla incident, an Israeli Foreign Ministry diplomat attended a meeting of the Conference on Interaction and Confidence Building Measures in Asia, or CICA, last week in Ankara.
Initially, Turkey intended to send the ministry’s deputy undersecretary, Özgür Özaslan, to the tourism conference, but Ankara changed its decision after evaluating the situation.
Spain and Britain will also not attend the OECD conference.
Israeli press claimed Palestinians were pressuring European countries to shun the conference on sustainable tourism, which normally takes place in Paris, on the grounds that the event would take place in east Jerusalem, considered the capital of the future Palestinian state.
Diplomatic sources, however, told the Daily News that the conference would take place in west Jerusalem.
