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
Adam Morrow and Khaled Moussa al-Omrani27 April 2009
CAIRO (IPS) - The recent onslaught against the Gaza Strip — and Israel’s failure to achieve its military objectives there — left Palestinian resistance group Hamas politically stronger than ever. Concurrently, it dealt a possible death blow to the faction within Fatah led by strongman Mohammed Dahlan, long known for its closeness to Israel. Read more about Dahlan comeback to Gaza fails
GAZACITY, occupied Gaza Strip (IRIN) - Rising poverty, unemployment and food insecurity in Gaza, compounded by the recent 23-day Israeli offensive, have increased the threat of child malnutrition, say UN agencies, health ministry officials and healthcare non-governmental organizations in Gaza. Read more about Signs of worsening malnutrition among children
GAZACITY, occupied Gaza Strip (IRIN) - Rafah crossing, Gaza’s only official border crossing into Egypt, opened to a limited number of Gazans on 18-21 April. Some 1,600 medical patients, students and business people crossed into Egypt. Some 400 were turned back by the Egyptian authorities, according to the Gaza interior ministry, and thousands remain stranded on both sides of the border. Read more about Some Gazans allowed to cross into Egypt
In the Sadiyya neighborhood inside the Muslim quarter of Jerusalem’s Old City is the Jaber family home. There, three members of the Jaber family, as well as the Karaki family, have lived with their parents, and later spouses and children, since the 1930s. Six years ago Israeli police came to the house and told Nasser Jaber that his house no longer belonged to his family. Marcy Newman writes from occupied Jerusalem. Read more about Ethnic cleansing, one home at a time
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"
“For this is what the Palestinian does: we wait. For an answer to be given, for a question to be asked … for exile to a better place and for return to the only place that knows us …” Laila El-Haddad writes about her deportation from Egypt while attempting to go home to Gaza. Read more about The quintessential Palestinian experience
RAMALLAH, occupied West Bank (IPS) - John Ging, head of the UN agency for Palestine refugees (UNRWA) in Gaza, has urged Israel to ease aid flow restrictions that are having a devastating effect on the 1.5 million inhabitants. Ging says the amount of aid being allowed into Gaza at present is “wholly and totally inadequate. It’s having a very devastating impact on the physical circumstances and also the mindset of people on the ground,” Ging told IPS. Read more about Gaza needs more aid