âIf I donât steal it, someone else will steal it,â Jacob answers. âSo why are you yelling at me?â An Israeli settler was captured on video in the garden of a Palestinian family's home in Sheikh Jarrah
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âSquatters with Brooklyn accentsâ
In recent months, the Sheikh Jarrah neighbourhood saw a series of sit-ins by Palestinians to protest against Israeli orders for them to vacate their homes, which they have described as a continuation of the ethnic cleansing that began with the Nakba in 1948.
On Monday night, dozens of Israeli forces stormed the neighbourhood and assaulted Palestinian families by beating and shooting tear gas and sound bombs at them. According to local Palestinian media, 20 people were injured, and at least four Palestinian men and one girl were arrested, with two being released on Tuesday.
Half of the al-Kurd family home was taken over by Israeli settlers in 2009. Al-Kurdâs twin brother Mohammed previously told Al Jazeera that sharing their home with âsquatters with Brooklyn accentsâ was âinsufferable, intolerable terribleâ.
âThey are just sitting in our home, tormenting us, harassing us, doing everything they can to not only force us to leave the second half of our home but also harassing our neighbours into leaving their homes as part of an effort to completely annihilate the presence of Palestinians from Jerusalem,â Mohammed said, who was 11 years old when the settlers forced their way in.
Last March, the Israeli district court in occupied East Jerusalem ratified orders for six Palestinian families â the al-Kurds included â in Sheikh Jarrah to vacate their homes in order to make way for the settlers. The same court also ruled that another seven families should leave their homes by August 1.
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On Sunday, Israelâs Supreme Court postponed its ruling regarding these families who threatened with displacement from their homes in favour of mostly private US-funded settler organisations. The court gave the families until Thursday to reach an âagreementâ with the settlers, which is based on paying the settlers rent and recognising them as the landlords of their own homes.
The courtâs terms of agreement have been condemned by the Palestinian families.
âThe inherently unjust system of Israelâs colonial courts is not considering questioning the illegal settlerâs ownership and has already decided on the familiesâ dispossession,â a statement from the families said.
The 28 Palestinian families arrived at the Karm al-Jaouni area of Sheikh Jarrah as refugees in 1956. Under an agreement with the Jordanian government and the UN refugee agency UNRWA, the homes were built in exchange for a revocation of their refugee status and the promise that these families would own the homes after three years.
The promise was never fulfilled, and in 1967 Jordan lost its mandate over the West Bank and East Jerusalem after the territories were occupied by Israel.
Israeli settlement groups said Palestinian families had built their homes on land owned by Jews before 1948 and that they must vacate these homes, but Palestinian cartographer Khalil Toufakji refuted those claims.
Toufakji said he found the land deed that negates any Jewish ownership of the area at the time after digging through the archives in Ankara 11 years ago.
âI presented it to the Israeli district court, which promptly rejected it,â Toufakji told Al Jazeera.
In the last years, Palestinians evacuated three homes in the neighbourhood, after Israeli court decisions. There are 38 Palestinian families currently under the threat of eviction.
If Palestinians want to make peace, they should say so, it would go a long way to getting there, it's what's missing.
That's a rather familiar argument (red herring). It usually doesn't end well for the indigenous, but it does for the settlers/colonists backed by overwhelming firepower.
At least 15 killed when Israeli soldiers open fire during mass demonstrations in Gaza
Today we recognize Yom-Al Ard or Land Day in Palestine. Land Day is celebrated every year on March 30th in Palestine in remembrance of the annexation of 2 thousand hectares of land by the Israeli government on that day in 1976. In honor of Land Day we want to share the gradual seizure of Palestinian land from Israel from 1917 to today.
The Israeli parliament has passed a law that allows the minister of interior to revoke the residency rights of any Palestinian in Jerusalem on grounds of a "breach of loyalty" to Israel.
The bill, ratified on Wednesday, will also apply in cases where residency status was obtained on the basis of false information, and in cases where "an individual committed a criminal act" in the view of the interior ministry.
Under the new measure, Israel's Interior Minister Aryeh Deri, leader of the ultra-Orthodox political party Shas, will be able to strip the residency documents of any Palestinian whom he deems a threat.
Hanan Ashrawi, a senior member of the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO), described the law as "an extremely racist piece of legislation.
"By unethically stripping the residency of Palestinians from Jerusalem and depriving the rights of those Palestinians to remain in their own city, the Israeli government is acting in defiance of international law and is violating international human rights and humanitarian laws," said Ashrawi, according to a statement published on Wafa, the official Palestinian news agency.
Despite Israel's claims that occupied East Jerusalem is part of its "eternal, undivided" capital, the Palestinians who are born and live there do not hold Israeli citizenship, unlike their Jewish counterparts.
Palestinians in the city are given "permanent residency" ID cards and temporary Jordanian passports that are only used for travel purposes. They are essentially stateless, stuck in legal limbo - they are not citizens of Israel, nor are they citizens of Jordan or Palestine. (...)
The shocking interview with Hassan Al-Laham, who holds the title “mufti of Gaza,” came during a weekly Palestinian Authority TV program on social issues. Explaining that divorce must be a last resort in Islam, Al-Laham laid out the four steps that should come first.
"Allah said: Warn them , and separate from them, and hit them, and bring an arbitrator from his family and an arbitrator from her family," he said.
Al-Laham, whose title makes him the top spiritual leader appointed by the Palestinian Authority, then went into detail about how a husband should hit a wife.
"Not hitting that will bring the police, and break her hand and cause bleeding, or hitting that makes the face ugly," he said.
The hitting should "be like a joke," even reinforcing "the love and friendship" between the couple, he said.
The segment was flagged by the nonprofit watchdog Palestinian Media Watch. Director Itamar Marcus noted that the Palestinian Authority, which appointed Al-Laham and is responsible for the television programming which is beamed by satellite throughout the Arab world, is viewed as more moderate than Hamas, the terrorist group that governs Gaza.
The only thing I find unusual about this article is the term shocking to describe it and the fact that it is actually against the law there to beat your wife. I am actually encouraged that they have to hide it. Believe it or not that is a societal evolution of sort, baby steps ya know.
A Likud lawmaker was met with derision in the Knesset plenum, after saying that that there was no such thing as a Palestinian people, since Arabic doesn't have the consonant "P."
"I want to go back to history, what is our place here, about Jerusalem, about Palestine, when like we said, Arabic doesn't even have 'P,' so this loan-word also merits scrutiny," MK Anat Berko said in a Knesset address on Wednesday.
In Arabic, the word for Palestine is pronounced "Falastin."
"What? Did everyone hear this? Are you an idiot?" Meretz MK Tamar Zandberg called out, to which Berko responded: "These are the facts. I'll send it to you, everything's alright."
MK Osama Sa'adi from the Joint Arab List left the plenum in protest after Berko's remarks.
The lawmaker's gaffe was made during a Knesset debate on the Labor's plan for separating from the Palestinians. In the debate, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Labor leader Isaac Herzog also traded barbs, with the prime minister mocking Labor for only now "waking up" to reality and recognizing that the two-state solution isn't viable.
In response, Herzog dared Netanyahu to annex the territories. "Let's see what happens then," he said.
