News Highlights:
- Israeli raid into Rafah leaves hundreds of Palestinians homeless and eight dead, including two young children; entire rows of houses crushed under bulldozers.
- Palestinian Center for Human Rights reports that the Israeli army used a banned nerve gas, adamatite, during the attack on Rafah
Israel announces plans to deport 18 Palestinian administrative detainees from the West Bank to Gaza. - Israel’s apartheid wall is discussed at the U.N. Security Council; U.S. says it may veto the resolution.
- Badil, Resource Center for Palestinian Refugee Rights, expresses concerns over the new “Geneva Accord” and its clauses regarding the Palestinian right of return.
- U.S. soldiers in Iraq uproot ancient date palms and other fruit groves as a form of collective punishment.
Feature:
An interview with Maxine, a B.C. woman currently in the West Bank for over a month. She spoke about the incredible difficulties faced by Palestinians on a daily basis at checkpoints and roadblocks, and felt they had little to do with “security”. She also talked about the olive harvest, in which she had participated, and about a book she is working on for which she did interviews. She gave an insightful look at the process happening around the apartheid wall, and how the land in between the wall and the Green Line will end up being confiscated.
Focus on Zionism:
Highlights of a press release from Iowa about the speaking tour of Salim and Arabiya Shawamreh, a Palestinian couple, whose home in the West Bank has been demolished already four times and is now threatened with demolition again by the Israeli authorities. The home is now a peace center dedicated to Rachel Corrie and Nuha Sweidan.
(Salim spoke in Vancouver in Feb., 2001, with Jeff Halper of the Israeli Committee against Home Demolitions.)