News Highlights:
- Israel will release 199 Palestinian prisoners on August 25 as a “goodwill gesture” to Mahmoud Abbas, including two long-serving political detainees.
- Palestinian officials note, however, that just since the Annapolis conference last year, Israel has arrested over 4 times the number of prisoners it has released.
- Patients continue to die in Gaza due to the Israeli siege, as the latest Palestinian to die from lack of medical treatment brings the number to 237.
- Israeli judge releases on bail the father of the young girl who videotaped the shooting of a handcuffed Palestinian by an Israeli soldier; father’s attorney says the arrest was simply out of vengeance.
Feature:
The feature was a unique cultural presentation, entitled the University of Majd, and detailed the experiences of a young Palestinian political prisoner. Majd was arrested during the mass Israeli raids in April 2002 and sentenced to a 30 year term. The presentation, which is both spoken word and musical, tells the story of this one of 11,000 Palestinian political prisoners and is both moving and informative at the same time.
Focus on Zionism:
Focus was part of an August 18th, 2008 press release from the International Solidarity Movement about the two ships carrying over 40 human rights volunteers trying to break the siege on Gaza.
Here is an audio file of this show: