Israeli forces say they bombed Hamas targets for a fifth consecutive night as clashes broke out along border
Israeli aircraft have bombed sites belonging to the militant Hamas group in Gaza for a fifth night in a row, the Israel defence force says.
The military said early on Sunday that the airstrikes were in response to arson balloons that Hamas-affiliated groups sent across the Gaza frontier into Israeli territory.
Continue reading...Rami Aman and others held for ‘establishing normalisation activities ... via the internet’
Hamas security forces in the Gaza Strip have arrested local peace campaigners for treason after they held a Zoom virtual conference with Israeli activists.
Eyad al-Bozom, a spokesperson from the Hamas-run interior ministry, said the prominent Palestinian figure Rami Aman and others had been detained on charges of “establishing normalisation activities with the Israeli occupation via the internet”.
Continue reading...If Europe, the US and China are struggling to contain it, what chance for millions of people in less developed countries?
It is a terrible thing to see a disaster in the making and be unable to prevent it. Yet this is the prospect confronting us if we dare to look beyond the walls and parapets of a Britain besieged by the coronavirus invader. Tens of millions of people in poorer, less developed countries across the world face a looming catastrophe that appears as unstoppable as it is potentially lethal.
The moment has not quite arrived. But an axe is poised to fall on untold numbers of largely defenceless heads, a massacre almost too appalling to contemplate. As the relatively wealthy countries of the northern hemisphere engage in a noisy struggle to repulse Covid-19, alarm bells are ringing from south Asia to the Middle East and Africa. Mostly they have not yet been heard.
Continue reading...Arrival of Covid-19 raises fears about how besieged territory’s health system will cope
The first two cases of Covid-19 in Gaza have been confirmed, raising fears about how the besieged territory’s overstretched health system will cope if the virus spreads through its population of 2 million.
In the West Bank, Mohammad Shtayyeh, the Palestinian prime minister ordered people to stay at home for two weeks from Sunday night in an effort to slow the spread of the virus, with exemptions for medical personnel, pharmacists, grocers and bakers. People will be allowed out to shop for food.
Continue reading...Netanyahu’s trip a welcome distraction from indictment while election opponent Gantz also visits White House
Donald Trump is set to disclose details of his much-delayed Middle East “peace plan” during meetings with Israeli leaders in Washington on Monday, amid a rising global chorus of doubt about its timing and substance.
The choreography between the US and Israel has been interpreted as a convenient distraction for both Trump, who faces an impeachment trial, and Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, who faces three criminal corruption indictments and an uncertain election campaign.
Continue reading...Israel's prime minister was bundled off the stage at an election rally on Wednesday after sirens rang out, warning of a rocket attack from the Gaza Strip. The incident happened in the southern town of Ashkelon, a few miles from Gaza. Israeli authorities said their Iron Dome missile defence system intercepted the rocket. Netanyahu was campaigning hours before an internal Likud party leadership ballot
Second attack in three months forces Israel’s prime minister to interrupt campaign rally
A rocket launched from the Gaza Strip at a southern Israeli city as it hosted a campaign rally prompted the prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, to take shelter briefly before resuming the event, Israeli TV stations have reported.
The Israeli military confirmed the launch on Wednesday against Ashkelon, which is 12km (7.5 miles) from the coastal Palestinian enclave, and said the rocket was shot down by an Iron Dome air defence interceptor.
Continue reading...Authorities sanction strict Islamic fatwa that forbids boys and girls playing together on stage – but face strong criticism from teachers
Two orchestral concerts by students and graduates of Gaza’s decade-old music conservatory have been cancelled after the Hamas authorities insisted for the first time that they could not go ahead with girls and boys playing together on stage.
The Gaza music school, part of the Palestinian-wide Edward Said National Conservatory of Music, rejected a new single-sex condition which the conductor told the Observer would be a disaster for the 45-member orchestra if sustained by the de facto government.
Continue reading...The suffering of people wounded in conflict zones is being compounded by what doctors say are ‘horrifying levels’ of antibiotic resistance
When Jihad Nasser arrived at al-Awda trauma clinic in Gaza, he was hoping doctors could finally stop his pain. A gunshot wound in his right leg had not been not healing properly. The news, however, was bad.
The complex bone fracture he had suffered was badly infected with MRSA. Doctors told him it would not respond to treatment and they would need to amputate.
Continue reading...Commander killed in Gaza and political leader targeted in Syria, in sudden surge of violence
Related: Israel-Hamas relations: a predictable but fatal dance
Israel has launched airstrikes against two senior figures from the militant group Islamic Jihad in Gaza and Syria, in rare targeted assassination attempts that immediately prompted rounds of retaliatory rocket fire from Gaza.
Continue reading...The Israeli army said the raids were in response to at least 10 rockets being fired at Israel from Gaza on Friday
A Palestinian was killed by Israeli air strikes on Saturday, the health ministry in the Hamas-run Gaza Strip said, in an attack launched in response to rocket fire.
Dozens of strikes hit the Palestinian enclave in the early hours, targeting bases of the strip’s Islamist rulers and allied groups, a security source in Gaza said.
Continue reading...Energy blackouts had been a feature of daily life for almost as long as Majd Mashharawi could remember. Then a visit to Japan changed everything
When Palestinian entrepreneur Majd Mashharawi left Gaza for the first time in 2017, she counted herself lucky to be among a small minority able to get away from a place described by its residents as the world’s largest open-air prison.
But during her visit to Japan, what most caught her eye were the lights in the streets. The Palestinian enclave she comes from is notorious for its power cuts. Mashharawi, 25, decided to do something about the problem on her return to Gaza.
Continue reading...Hamas declares state of emergency after suspected suicide bomb attacks
Explosions at two police checkpoints run by Hamas in Gaza have killed three officers and wounded several other Palestinians, in an apparent attack that has so far been unclaimed.
The Hamas-run interior ministry declared a state of emergency across the coastal enclave after the blasts, with authorities searching for perpetrators. Witnesses said the blasts appeared to have been suicide bombings, which are rare in Gaza and suggest an attack might have been carried out by a rival faction.
Continue reading...This sombre, angry documentary captures a sense of ordinary life in the strip bordered by Egypt, Israel and the sea
Garry Keane and Andrew McConnell’s heartfelt film about the unending misery of Gaza – now effectively a blockaded strip of land bounded by the Egyptian and Israeli borders and the Mediterranean Sea – has had a complex reception in some quarters since it premiered at Sundance earlier this year. Some have found it manipulative and politically reticent, in that it only fleetingly mentions Hamas, and includes footage of an Israeli bombardment but shows only stone-throwing as the response. There may be something in this. For instance, eyebrows have to be raised at the moment when an immobile child is shown with her eyes closed, we are encouraged to think she is dead but in a later scene she opens her eyes.
Yet the film has real value as a compassionate human document, in showing ordinary people who courageously have to keep going somehow, in the grimmest of conditions, in a world where, as someone puts it, there is a “wall between the people of Gaza and life itself”. A young woman practises the cello, a young man records rap tracks, a theatre director rehearses a performance piece, a fisherman broods over the oppression of his industry – they are not allowed to fish more than three miles out, and the amount of fish that can be caught so close to shore is pitifully meagre. The sea is what the people of Gaza face: the one boundary that does not seem so brutal, something that should conceivably be a source of comfort, but is almost as unforgiving as the land barriers. A sombre, angry film about a people under political siege.
Continue reading...Israeli military said man was Hamas member but ‘not sent on an attack mission’
Israeli forces killed a Palestinian Hamas member after he crossed the Gaza fence overnight and shot and wounded three soldiers, the Israeli military said.
In the last two years similar incidents along the frontier have often escalated into large-scale confrontations between Israel and Hamas, which rules Gaza. However, the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) appeared to play down the event, saying the man was acting alone and not on orders from the militant group.
Continue reading...Israel sprays buffer zone to deprive potential ‘terror elements’ of cover, but farmers in Gaza say crops and livelihoods are damaged
Israeli aircraft spraying herbicide beside the buffer zone along the Gaza strip is directly affecting the livelihoods of Palestinians in violation of international standards, a new report claims.
The study tracked the drift of the herbicides on to the Gazan side and concluded it was killing agricultural crops and causing “unpredictable and uncontrollable damage”, according to the report’s main researcher.
Continue reading...No Israelis or Palestinians present for launch of plan that shreds decades of diplomacy
The first phase of the Trump administration’s long-awaited peace plan for Israel and Palestine has been rolled out to scepticism, anger and outright derision.
A conference hall of regional officials – with no Israelis or Palestinians present – was the first to hear details of the US-brokered deal, an economic blueprint that shreds decades of diplomacy and which even its mooted financial backers seemed reluctant to embrace.
Continue reading...Thousands turn out to commemorate mass displacement of people in 1948
Israeli soldiers have shot 16 people at the Gaza frontier on a day of rallies commemorating the mass displacement of Palestinians during the war that led to Israel’s creation in 1948.
Each year, typically on 15 May, Palestinians mark the nakba, or catastrophe, when more than 700,000 people fled or were expelled from towns and villages seven decades ago.
Continue reading...Calling themselves the Gaza skate team, a group of young Palestinians get together to skate and rollerblade amid deprivation and high security
Continue reading...Air and tank strikes kill 19 Palestinians after Netanyahu orders ‘massive attacks’, while rockets kill four in Israel
Militants in Gaza and Israeli forces engaged in a bloody and spiralling clash over the weekend, with Palestinian factions launching hundreds of rockets towards towns and cities in Israel, which retaliated with more than 250 strikes.
In exchanges that marked some of the worst fighting in recent years, 19 Palestinians, including two pregnant women and a toddler, have been killed since hostilities began on Friday, the health ministry in Gaza said. The dead included at least eight militants and a Hamas commander killed in the first targeted assassination Israel has conducted in the strip for years.
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