It was announced on Tuesday that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has approved the removal of a freeze on the building and selling of 436 housing units in the Ramat Shlomo settlement in East Jerusalem.
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Salah was sentenced earlier this year to 11 months in prison for incitement to violence and racism over an inflammatory sermon he delivered in 2007 in Jerusalem.
On Tuesday, the Israeli government outlawed the northern branch of the Islamic Movement in Israel, and declared membership or association with the organization is a criminal offense.
The Jerusalem hilltop compound, sacred to both Jews and Muslims, houses the Al-Aqsa mosque and is the third holiest site in Islam.
“Al-Aqsa is a Palestinian national symbol”. They will also discuss Israel’s relations with the Palestinians, the situation in the Gaza Strip and West Bank and need for progress towards a two-state solution. Authorities also froze the group’s bank accounts and the government said activists could be subject to arrest if they violate the ban.
Over the past six weeks Palestinians have killed 15 Israelis in attacks, and Israeli forces and civilians have killed more than 110 Palestinians.
“The time has come for us to use all the tools at the country’s disposal in the war on terror and against the inciters who cause it”, Public Security Minister Gilad Erdan said in a statement. In 1996 the faction split in two-the Islamic Movement of Northern Israel and the Islamic Movement of Southern Israel. While it is not the swamp that leads people to acts of violence but irrational hatred and incitement – alienation, poverty and a lack of horizons can only make those ideologies more attractive.
The day before the ad appeared in The NY Times, a news story in the same paper detailed how “two dozen men wearing bulky jackets, woollen caps, hoodies and checkered kaffiyehs barged into a hospital in the West Bank city of Hebron before dawn … pushing what appeared to be a very pregnant woman in a wheelchair”.
A pair of stabbing and shooting attacks carried out by Palestinians killed three Israelis, a Palestinian and an American teenager on Thursday in one of the deadliest days in a recent outburst of Israeli-Palestinian violence.
Salah’s deputy, Kamal Khatib, said the group condemned the Paris attacks, and he charged Israel with exploiting the timing to “punish the Islamic Movement”. The rest were killed in clashes with security forces.
He also noted that “even the Shin Bet are opposed to the ban”, confirming reports in the Israeli media of the dispute between the influential internal security agency, which feared the move could increase tensions, and police, which supported the move. Last month he deployed reservists across Jerusalem and Israel, and erected 14 new checkpoints inside of Palestinian neighborhoods of East Jerusalem.
By denying the Northern Islamic Movement’s claims of Israeli encroachment at al-Aqsa, criminalizing the Northern Islamic Movement, and effectively double-criminalizing the Murabitat, Israel is backhandedly capitalising on the activities of the Temple movement’s provocations at al-Aqsa.
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The attackers have mainly been young Palestinians who appear to be acting on their own, frustrated with Israel’s occupation, a frozen peace process and the leadership of Palestinian president Mahmud Abbas, whose calls for peaceful resistance they have ignored.
