News Highlights:
- June 14th – Israel starts to annex 150 km in the northern Western Bank for further construction of the apartheid wall, and plans a new settlement south of Jerusalem.
- Despite “promises” to the U.S., Israel is proceeding with the wall east of the large settlement of Ariel.
Israel is also considering building thousands more houses in West Bank settlements. - June 13th – two Palestinians wounded in Jenin, the city and refugee camp of Jenin have been constantly raided in the last week.
- Palestinian female political prisoners face inhumane conditions; 29 Palestinian women currently in Israel’s Telmond jail.
- A leading U.N. official warns Caterpillar it may be complicit in human rights violations in the West Bank and Gaza, due to its sales of armored bulldozers.
Feature:
Another in the series of Eyewitness Palestine reports on the apartheid wall, this one consisting of two reports, one a personal testimony of a Palestinian villager and the second a commentary by Israeli peace activist Uri Avnery. Abu Jihad from Deir Ballut spoke about how his home and 14 others are being completely isolated by checkpoints and the approaching apartheid wall. Uri Avnery, in an article entitled The Nightmare Comes True, explained how 55% of the West Bank will be Israeli and each Palestinian town will be isolated in its own tiny enclave.
Focus on Zionism:
Highlights of a report from Solidarity for Palestinian Human Rights – Concordia about how one of their student members had just been acquitted in a Montreal court of “uttering a death threat”. The unfounded charges had been brought forward by Hillel and Birthright Israel members, and supported by Concordia security personnel. The group concluded that the fact the student had ever been charged at all was one more example of the biased treatment of Palestinian and Arab students at Concordia.