My old family house in the Nuseirat refugee camp in Gaza was recently rebuilt by its new owner, into a beautiful three-story building with large windows adorned by red frames. In Israel’s most recent and deadliest war on Gaza, the house sustained significant damage.
A mix of US humanitarian air drops of food and water to the stranded displaced people on Mount Sinjar as well as US military air strikes against some of the positions of the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) has focused international attention on the area.
Source: The Nation
Israel’s war on Gaza has provoked both peaceful and armed resistance in the West Bank, a simmering situation over which the largely discredited PA is losing control.
Ramallah, West Bank—The bullet was still lodged in Ahmad Kittaneh’s right lung when he arrived at Ramallah Hospital late on a Thursday night. The 22-year-old went into cardiac arrest twice, but miraculously pulled through after having been shot by Israeli soldiers at the Qalandia checkpoint, which separates the West Bank from Jerusalem.
Source: The Indypendent
When Deborah Cipolla-Dennis moved to Dryden, New York, she and her wife built a house on the 32 acres of land they had purchased. They looked forward to putting down roots in a small, tight-knit rural community that shares the tolerant values of the nearby college town of Ithaca where she works.
However, Cipolla-Dennis soon started receiving visits and phone calls from a representative of the Colorado-based Anschutz Exploration Corporation who urged her to lease her land. He said nothing of fracking — the controversial drilling technique that requires injecting millions of gallons of chemical-laced water and sand deep into the earth to tap hard-to-reach deposits — but Cipolla-Dennis was wary and shooed him away.
Source: Truthout
Amid all the horrors unfolding in the latest Israeli offensive in Gaza, Israel’s goal is simple: quiet-for-quiet, a return to the norm.
For the West Bank, the norm is that Israel continues its illegal construction of settlements and infrastructure so that it can integrate into Israel whatever might be of value, meanwhile consigning Palestinians to unviable cantons and subjecting them to repression and violence.
For Gaza, the norm is a miserable existence under a cruel and destructive siege that Israel administers to permit bare survival but nothing more.
“Where is the Palestinian Gandhi? In Israeli prison, of course!,” was the title of a 2009 article. That was almost exactly one year after Israel’s concluded a major war against Gaza.
Copyright Toward Freedom 2019