News Highlights:
- Food aid is over 2/3 of the humanitarian aid requested by the UN and NGOs to assist Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank.
- European Development Commissioner expresses concern over the deteriorating situation in Gaza and calls the Israeli closure of border crossings “collective punishment”.
- Israel may free 250 Palestinian prisoners, out of the 11,000 political prisoners currently in Israeli jails.
- The family of Palestinian female prisoner, Sana Salah, calls for her release so she can receive urgently needed medical treatment.
- Egyptian police attack a student protest calling for an end to the siege on Gaza.
Feature:
The feature was another in our series of Eyewitness Palestine reports, this time with two moving stories, one from Gaza and the other from the West Bank. The first was a report from the UN news agency IRIN, that detailed the suffering in Gaza due to the Israeli blockade, particularly in the hospitals. It began with the details of a two-week-old premature baby whose incubator cannot provide a reliable supply of oxygen due to the hospital’s inconsistent power supply. The second story was from Anna Baltzer, a Jewish American activist, and detailed her harrowing experience in trying to pass through the Einab junction, which has one of the new style Israeli terminal buildings complete with metal gates, turnstiles and iron bars.
Focus on Zionism:
Highlights of a Dec. 1st, 2008 Guardian article about how the multinational Unilever is selling its stake in a factory in a West Bank settlement, as pressure from a Dutch human rights group was increasing.
Here is an audio file of this show: