News Highlights:
- Israeli border police severely beat a young Palestinian from Nilin and seal off the village that has been the focus of anti-apartheid wall protests.
- Two small boats successfully land in Gaza after sailing from Cyprus with international volunteers and challenging the Israeli blockade.
- Longest-held Palestinian prisoner, Said Al Atabeh, returns home to Nablus as part of limited prisoner release and calls for all detainees to be released from Israeli jails.
- Israeli Bar Association issues new report that states there are at least 7 Palestinian detainees held in solitary confinement for five years without any legal status or trial.
- Israeli group Peace Now says more than 2600 settler housing units are under construction in the occupied West Bank and that construction is encroaching on Palestinian cities like Ramallah and Bethlehem.
- Adalah, Arab Israeli human rights group, protests the closure of an Islamic charity in Umm al Fahm in the Galilee.
Feature:
A special Eyewitness Palestine, Eyewitness Gaza that highlighted two reports from participants in the two boats that broke the blockade on Gaza (www.freegaza.org). Palestinian American Huwaida Arraf wrote about her experiences on one of the boats, how Israel tried to block all their communications with the outside world and what it meant to the Palestinians to break the siege on Gaza. Osama Qashoo from Cyprus talked about how even his family in the West Bank were threatened because of his participation in the project and how he had received death threats.
Focus on Zionism:
Highlights of an August 28th, 2008 article from the Israeli newspaper Haaretz about the arrest of Jeff Halper, an Israeli activist and academic, who was also on one of the two boats that sailed into Gaza and was detained when he re-entered Israel.
Here is an audio file of this show: