Tuesday, 06 18th
Last updateTue, 19 Feb 2013 1am
Sixty thousand Palestinians live under harsh conditions in the Jordan Valley and the Dead Sea area - one of the most isolated and restricted areas in occupied Palestine. The UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) has summarized their humanitarian situation in its February 2012 fact sheet.
For approximately five months, the residents of Kufr Qaddoum have united to demonstrate against the illegal Israeli settlement of Kedumim and the Israeli military’s closure of their village’s main road. Kufr Qaddoum, a West Bank village so old that, according to legend, Abraham was circumcised there with an axe, has since 1976 been plagued by Kedumim, a 3,000-inhabitant Israeli settlement that now surrounds the village on five hilltops. Kufr Qaddoum’s main road, which passes through Kedumim to link the village to Nablus, was closed by the Israeli military in 2003.
Palestinian political prisoner Samer Issawi, who has been on full and partial hunger strike since his arrest at a Jerusalem checkpoint in July 2012, was sentenced to eight months today by a Jerusalem magistrate court. His sentence begins at the date of his arrest, meaning that he has one month of this sentence left to serve.
The Public Committee Against Torture in Israel (PCATI) today, July 13, called on Minister of Internal Security, Tzahi Hanegbi, and Prison Service Commissioner, Yakov Granot, to immediately investigate the violent behavior of the wardens during last week’s events at the Neve Tirza prison, to allow independent doctors to visit the prisoners who had been injured during these events and to absolutely prohibit the spraying of tear gas in prison cells.