Tell us about your trip.’ ‘Tell us about your holiday.’ Just some of the responses to my visit to Palestine in October 2019.
For a start, I never imagined that I was going on a holiday when I signed up to go with a Peaceful Presence group to help with the olive harvest.
I knew that it would be hard work and that I might witness things that would distress me. Since I came home, I’ve found it difficult to talk about the visit. Knowing intellectually about the situation didn’t…
In January, European activists were arrested as they attempted to break the illegal Israeli siege of Gaza by cutting the fence separating Gaza from Israel.
The campaigners were from ‘Gaza 2020 Breaking the Siege’, a new international movement whose aim is to challenge Israel’s ‘inhumane’ blockade of two million Gazans.
Previous attempts to break the siege have been by sea, including the Gaza Freedom Flotilla of May 2010, in which nine unarmed Turkish solidarity activists were…
One of New Profile’s central projects is our Counselling Network – a network of volunteers accompanying young Israelis through the process of avoiding or discontinuing their compulsory military service.
One foundation that bills itself as politically radical has informed us that they’d fund other work we’re doing in education, but never the Counselling Network, because, you see, it is not radical enough.
As context, consider that, while we have always supported, and…
On 1 July, three activists from Manchester Palestine Action began a three-day rooftop occupation of a Israeli-owned arms factory, the five-storey-high Elbit Ferranti building in Oldham.
The same day, activists entered Elbit-owned Instro Precision, in Sandwich, Kent, blockading both gates.
The protests marked the fifth anniversary of Israel's 'Protective Edge' assault on Gaza which killed around 1,500 Palestinian civilians.
Elbit supplies four out of five drones used by…
Thousands of Palestinians demonstrated at the border fence between Gaza and Israel on 12 July, with 33 reportedly shot with live ammunition by Israeli soldiers.
It was the 66th Friday protest in the Great March of Return.
313 Palestinians have been killed and 30,135 have been injured during the protests according to patient records verified by the UN world health organisation.
On 11 July, a Hamas security guard was shot dead by Israeli soldiers as he tried to prevent…
Two Palestinians were on indefinite hunger strikes in Israeli prisons at the time of going to press. Odeh Haroub (32) and Hasan Awawi (35) were among 470 or so Palestinian civilians being held in Israeli ‘administrative detention’ without charge or trial.
By 13 May, the pair had completed 41 days on hunger strike, according to the Palestine Prisoners’ Society (PPS).
At the beginning of May, 25 Palestinians and four Israelis died during days of violence in and around Gaza.…
On 6 March, an Israeli military court extended for another six months the detention without charge of a Palestinian human rights defender. As usual in such cases, the alleged evidence against Ayman Nasser has been kept secret.
Ayman is the co-ordinator of the legal unit of Palestinian NGO Addameer (Conscience), the prisoner support and human rights association. He was arrested in his home in the village of Safa, west of Ramallah on the West Bank, last September.
This is…
Below is the official summary of the UN human rights council’s independent international commission of inquiry into the weekly demonstrations in Gaza, named ‘the Great March of Return’, that began on 30 March, 2018. It is followed by an extract on the events of 14 May 2018.
Summary
The Commission found reasonable grounds…
On 7 March, four Palestine solidarity activists were arrested at JCB’s world logistics headquarters in Stoke-on-Trent while lying on the road outside the depot. They had locked-on at 6.30am, joining their arms together in reinforced concrete arm-tubes. (They protected themselves from the rain with waterproof covers.)
The blockade lasted several hours while the company was unable to get deliveries in and out of…
Palestinians are being forced from their homes throughout the Occupied Territories and in Israel itself.
Some 13 Palestinian families were ordered to abandon their homes in the village of Khirbet Ibzik, in the fertile Jordan Valley, on four occasions in one month. The Israeli army displaced the 70 residents (including 38 children) for 24 hours at a time, on 16, 23 and 26 December and then again on 13 January.
The reason? The army said it was carrying out manoeuvres in…
In December and January, two Israeli Jewish teenagers won exemption from military service in the Israeli army after serving over 100 days in prison each for their conscientious objection.
On 28 December, following seven periods of imprisonment, Hillel Garmi, 19, was granted exemption from service by the army’s ‘conscience committee’.
Garmi, who served 107 days in prison in total, was one of the initiators of the ‘High School Students’ Letter against Occupation’ in…
On 19 November, Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu said the Palestinian village of Khan al-Ahmar, which has become an international cause célèbre, ‘will be demolished very soon’. The removal of the village would enable the Israeli government to cut the occupied West Bank in two, making a Palestinian state impossible.
The Israeli security cabinet had delayed the demolition by ‘several weeks’ on 21 October to provide time for negotiations for an agreed-upon evacuation of the…
Since Palestinians began their largely nonviolent Great March of Return protests at the Gaza-Israel border fence in March, Israeli security forces have shot dead over 180 Palestinians, and injured 24,000, said the World Health Organisation on 16 November. 5,800 demonstrators have been injured by live gunfire.
According to a survey by Israeli human rights group B’Tselem of 406 Palestinians injured by live fire, most were over 30 feet from the fence when they were shot.
…
The Great March of Return demonstrations at the Gaza-Israel border fence have not only continued every Friday since March, they are escalating. Protests now happen on other days of the week as well, after ceasefire talks between the Hamas government in Gaza and the Israeli government broke down.
During these demos, Israeli forces have killed over 130 unarmed Palestinians, including 29 children and three medics. Around 20,000 Gazans have been injured, nearly 5,000 by live…
