GAZA CITY, 6 June (IPS) - In the early hours of Friday morning, Israeli warplanes targeted a Hamas-run security post in the northern town of Beit Lahiya, injuring 29 Palestinian civilians, according to Gaza medical sources. In the eastern Gaza City neighborhood of al-Shuja’iya, a 27-year-old man was shot dead by Israeli special forces during another invasion. Read more about Palestinian leaders take step towards reducing rift 

On a massive and wide-ranging scale, every single aspect of life in Gaza is punctuated by the Israeli occupation and the blockade. There are 1.5 million people here, trapped and hermetically sealed, in this 22-mile by 6-mile strip of devastated open-air prison compound. Fuel is scarce and the streets are thick with the soupy smoke of cooking gas, falafel oil and benzene as Israel’s collective punishment policies force people to fill their cars with their families’ gas rations. Nora Barrows-Friedman writes from Gaza. Read more about Blue sky, toxic sea 

The West Bank is fragmented by checkpoints, settler-only roads, closed military zones and Israeli-declared “nature reserves.” The road barriers come in many forms — barbed wire, metal fences, cement blocks, dirt mounds, trenches and permanent border crossings or terminals like Qalandia around every Palestinian city. The one at Qalandia actually says “Welcome to Israel,” as though it was an international border. Cathy Sultan writes from the occupied West Bank. Read more about Hatred is too heavy a burden to carry 

Frankly, I’ve always been a little uneasy about explicitly Jewish actions around Palestine. Isn’t this a human rights issue in which all voices are equally needed and valued? What difference does one’s background make when one is speaking up for justice? I worry that people will listen more to what a group of Jews has to say than to Palestinians and other activists. I don’t believe in a a special “Jewish position” on Palestine. Deborah Agre writes from San Francisco. Read more about No time to celebrate 

Last week, the managing director of SNS Asset Management, a division of the Dutch SNS Bank, sent me a letter explaining the bank’s position on divesting from Veolia. Veiola is a European company contracted to build a tramway on illegally seized Palestinian land that connects Israeli settlements on the West Bank, constructed in open violation of international law, with neighborhoods in West Jerusalem. EI contributor Adri Nieuwhof reports. Read more about Dutch bank agrees: Jerusalem tramway is illegal 

“Can you imagine that when a child of mine asks me for one shekel [USD 0.30], I can’t afford to give it to him? That’s why I hide from my children from early in the morning until evening.” So explains an exasperated Naser al-Batran, a father of five children living in the central Gaza Strip. EI correspondent Rami Almeghari reports on how Israel’s siege on Gaza is affecting public health there. Read more about With economic siege comes malnutrition 

WASHINGTON, 2 June (IPS) - Israel and the US said Friday they would “revisit” a policy that prevents Palestinians from leaving the Gaza Strip to pursue their educational goals one day after a controversial US State Department decision to withdraw all Fulbright Scholarships from students living in the territory. Read more about Gaza Fulbrights, small yet symbolic 

Al-Khozendar Electronics in Gaza City has become a recent point of pilgrimage for many Palestinians. The visitors come to observe Gaza’s latest invention of necessity: an electric car. Gazan engineers Wasim al-Khozendar and Fayez Annas recently designed a car that runs entirely on electricity as a solution to the fuel scarcity caused by the nearly a year-long Israeli blockade that has included severe cuts in fuel imports. EI correspondent Rami Almeghari reports from Gaza. Read more about Forced to go green in Gaza 

From the veranda of his home up on the hillside, Hassan Abed Hassan Jermeh looks out over his village, fertile green fields, and all the way over to the mountains across the border in Jordan. Village elder since 1995, he is intimately familiar with the challenges facing Palestinians in the Jordan Valley. Ben White writes for EI about the continued ethnic cleansing happening in this crucial area of the Israeli-occupied West Bank. Read more about The Jordan Valley's forgotten Palestinians