Umm Raed’s sick husband hasn’t worked in more than 20 years. Her own family can’t, or won’t, help support her and her seven children. So her job in the Royalife factory in the Barkan industrial zone, built on illegally confiscated Palestinian land in the Salfit governorate in the Israeli-occupied West Bank, was the household’s main source of income. Sarah Irving reports for The Electronic Intifada. Read more about Palestinian women settlement workers' plight
As the pressure on companies to pull out from business facilitating Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip grows, it has been recently revealed that in Norway three private banks and the state pension fund invested in one such company. Adri Nieuwhof reports for The Electronic Intifada. Read more about Norway gov't, banks investing in settlement construction company
Calling the Israeli military’s self-exoneration “lacking in credibility,” the National Lawyers Guild on Thursday categorically rejected the Israeli military’s findings that its soldiers did not commit war crimes during “Operation Cast Lead” in the Gaza Strip. Read more about Legal group: Israel must allow UN investigation to proceed
BETHLEHEM, occupied West Bank (IPS) - As the wreckage from Israel’s recent siege on Gaza continues to smolder, international civil society organizations are assembling this week in Switzerland to address Israel’s crimes of military occupation and racism. But any discussion on Israel’s actions in Palestine will be excluded from the formal framework at the Durban Anti-Racism Review Conference in Geneva Monday. Read more about UN Protects Israel from racism charges
AL-ARISH, Egypt (IPS) - Hundreds of thousands of tons of aid intended for the Gaza Strip is piling up in cities across Egypt’s North Sinai region, despite recent calls from the United Nations to ease aid flow restrictions to the embattled territory in the wake of Israel’s 22-day assault. Read more about Aid rots outside Gaza
By the time we arrived in Sur Bahir, a Palestinian village near Bethlehem in the Israeli-occupied West Bank, on the afternoon of 7 April, it was calm. At 6am, some 2,000 Israeli border police and special forces and other personnel descended on the village to demolish a wing of a house that belonged to the family of a Palestinian construction worker who allegedly went on a rampage while operating a bulldozer last July. Marian Houk reports. Read more about Punitive house demolitions as "deterrence"
The Palestinian Centre for Human Rights calls upon the ministries of health in Ramallah and Gaza to take immediate steps, including the cancellation of all decisions that have led to halting the transfer of Gazan patients to hospitals outside the Gaza Strip, to ensure access of those patients to medical treatment. Read more about Palestinian governments responsible for lives of Gaza patients
KHANYOUNIS, occupied Gaza Strip (IPS) - “They’re always shooting at us. Every day they shoot at us,” says Alaa Samour, 19, pulling aside his shirt to show a scar on his shoulder. Samour said he was shot on 28 December last year by Israeli soldiers positioned along the border fence near New Abassan village, east of Khan Younis in the south of the Gaza Strip. Read more about In Gaza, farming under fire
A decision by Israel’s state-owned railway company to sack 150 Arab workers because they have not served in the army has been denounced as “unlawful” and “racist” this week by Arab legal and workers’ rights groups. Jonathan Cook reports. Read more about "Hebrew labor" lives on as Israel Railways fires Arab guards
As farmer Jamal al-Bassyuni plucked a stalk of ripening wheat, a posse of young men danced in his field. The dancers were flanked by a lively crowd, many of them women wearing the traditional Palestinian embroidered thob dress. Despite the nearby rubble of destroyed houses, and tracts of land laid to waste by bulldozers and tanks, the mood was defiantly sunny. Local farmers and their supporters were celebrating Palestinian Land Day. Read more about Gaza farmers commemorate Land Day
