At the beginning of April 2002, the Israeli army reoccupied a number of cities in the West Bank as part of a wide-scale military operation dubbed “Defensive Shield”. The goal of the operation, as stated by the Israeli government, was to “eliminate the infrastructure of Palestinian terrorism and to prevent suicide bombers from executing their operations in the heart of Israeli cities inside the Green Line.” At the time, no attention was given to an artillery force that snuck up the hills to a quarry - the largest in the West Bank, which is located in the cradle of a huge hill west of Nablus. “We were shocked when we saw that the quarry was being taken over,” says the director of the quarry, Ihab Abu Shusheh. Read more about West Bank wasteland 

The Palestinian Authority is likely to postpone elections, due on 17 July, in a move that Hamas says would be political meddling by its rival, the ruling Fatah party. Fatah Minister of Parliament Hatim Abd al-Qadir said the postponement was expected to be announced in a few days and that it had more to do with procedural matters than other considerations. The Palestinian cabinet is responsible for the postponement. The opposition parties reacted strongly to the possibility of a delay. Parliament is expected to vote on Sunday on a modified election law. Read more about Palestinian parliamentary elections may be delayed 

On April 1, Amin Abu Warda, 37, sat with his colleagues, tallying votes for the new board of directors at the Balata Refugee Camp Youth Center. Just before midnight, with the group exhausted from the long hours, 15 armed men broke into the room. “It was terrifying,” says Abu Warda. A video of the break-in shows one of the intruders busting up the blackboard scribbled with the number of tallied votes. Another kicked a ballot box, already emptied. A third man confronted an employee who was trying to hide a few remaining and unharmed ballots. At gunpoint, the man was forced to surrender the papers, another ripping them into pieces before firing a bullet at the ceiling and ordering everyone out of the room. Read more about The fugitives of Nablus 

Hamas, and its sister organisation, the Islamic Jihad, have decided in principle to join the Palestine Liberation Organisation, the PLO. The landmark decision, a result of prolonged internal deliberations, is expected to have far-reaching consequences for Palestinian politics and inter-faction relations, especially between the two largest political movements, the Islamist Hamas and nationalist Fatah. As such, the decision could strengthen Palestinian national unity vis-a-vis Israel, but is unlikely to significantly affect the peace process, especially in the short run. Read more about Why Hamas is ready to join the PLO 

This week Palestine Report Online interviews Orient House Mapping and survey director Khalil Tufakji on the expansion of Jewish settlements in the West Bank: “The expansion of Maaleh Adumim is part of this plan, which is to create facts on the ground, to annex the settlement blocs to Israel and finally to alter the demographic reality to Israel’s advantage in terms of Jerusalem and basically impose a twofold reality on the Palestinians: the first is the geographical aspect and the second, the demographic aspect.” Read more about Gaza disengagement means West Bank settlement expansion