The Israeli government has announced plans to build 800 new homes for Israeli settlers in and around occupied East Jerusalem, Israeli daily newspaper Haaretz reported Sunday night.
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ISRAEL confirmed yesterday that it has approved hundreds of new illegal settler homes in occupied East Jerusalem after rightwingers slammed new housing for Palestinians.
The decision was coupled with approval to build 600 housing units for Palestinians in Beit Safafa, a Palestinian neighborhood in East Jerusalem.
While the report criticized Israeli policy in the West Bank, it also idenitified Palestinian violence against civilians and – in a first for a major global forum – Palestinian incitement as major obstacles to peace.
Since October 1, the violence in the Palestinian territories, Israel and Jerusalem have killed 214 Palestinians, 34 Israelis, two Americans, an Eritrean and a Sudanese, according to an unofficial count by a local NGO.
This story has been corrected to show that in the December attack, one Israeli was stabbed and killed by the two Palestinians, the other Israeli was apparently mistakenly shot and killed by police.
The Palestinian Authority (PA) has made a decision to cut ties with the Middle East Quartet following the recent publication of the committee’s report on obstacles to Israeli-Palestinian peace, the London-based Arabic newspaper al-Hayat reported Tuesday.
Netanyahu’s government is however considered the most right-wing in Israel’s history, with key members of his cabinet strong supporters of settlement building and opponents of a Palestinian state. She was a relative of the Kiryat Arba attacker, and both were from Bani Naim, a village just outside Hebron.
Hebron has always been a flashpoint in the conflict, with hundreds of Jewish settlers living under heavy military guard in the heart of the city among some 200,000 Palestinians.
They included “growing Palestinian anger, the paralysis of the peace process, the almost a half-century of occupation”, Ban said.
Dozens of Palestinians were injured as clashes broke out between Palestinian protestors and Israeli security forces, as hundreds of Palestinians attempted to cross into Jerusalem to visit the Al-Aqsa Mosque, Islam’s third most holy site, on the last Friday of Ramadan.
It said the men, who held special permits allowing them to conduct business in Israel, were caught with thousands of euros hidden in their shoes destined for Hamas members in the West Bank.
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Saeb Erekat, secretary general of the Palestine Liberation Organization, took aim at the recent settlement announcement as well as the lockdown on the Hebron region of the West Bank. The last attempt, led by the U.S., collapsed in April 2014.
