ISRAEL’S navy yesterday targeted Palestinian fishermen sailing offshore Rafah city in the southern besieged Gaza Strip and confiscated two boats, according to a WAFA correspondents.
They said that the fishermen were sailing within three nautical miles offshore the city when Israeli naval boats opened heavy gunfire and water hoses towards them, held a boat with four fishermen aboard and transferred them to the nearby Ashdod Port before ultimately releasing them and confiscating two boats.
Two million Palestinians live in the Gaza Strip, which has been subjected to a punishing and crippling Israeli blockade for 12 years and repeated onslaughts that have heavily damaged much of the enclave’s infrastructure.
Gaza’s 2-million population remains under ‘remote control’ occupation and a strict siege, which has destroyed the local economy, strangled Palestinian livelihoods, plunged them into unprecedented rates of unemployment and poverty, and cut them off from the rest of the occupied Palestinian territories and the wider world.
Gaza remains occupied territory, having no control over its borders, territorial waters or airspace. Meanwhile, Israel upholds very few of its responsibilities as the occupying power, failing to provide for the basic needs of Palestinian civilians living in the territory.
Every two in three Palestinians in Gaza are refugees from lands inside what is now Israel. That government forbids them from exercising their right to return as enshrined in international law because they are not Jews.
Also yesterday, Israeli forces targeted and injured at least five Palestinians in several areas of the occupied West Bank.
Witnesses said that a military force, that was accompanying a group of settlers, fired live bullets at two youths near the entrance of Turmus Ayya town, north of the city of Ramallah, injuring them. The youths were ultimately detained.
Meanwhile, Israeli forces shot and injured three youths with live rounds in the course of confrontations, west of the city of Talkarm.
The three casualties sustained injuries to the thigh and the back. They were rushed to a hospital for treatment.
Israel is stepping up its war on the Palestinian masses!
The Israel state’s use of administrative detention against Palestinians has been recently rising, with a total of 400 detention orders issued since the beginning of 2022, said the Palestinian Prisoner Society (PPS) in a statement yesterday.
PPS noted that 210 orders were issued against Palestinian detainees for the first time, while 190 detainees had their administrative detention renewed.
There are some 500 Palestinian detainees being held under administrative detention in Israeli jails, a controversial Israeli practice that allows the detention of Palestinians without charge or trial for up to six-month intervals that can be renewed indefinitely.
A senior official of the Palestinian Islamic Resistance Movement, Hamas, has vehemently denounced Israeli public security minister Omer Bar-Lev’s recent call for the detention and execution of Palestinians who carry out operations against Israeli settlers, saying that the remarks are indicative of the regime’s criminal nature.
‘Such statements reflect the occupying regime’s persistence on aggravating the status quo through shedding more Palestinian blood. Latest assassinations in the occupied West Bank cities of Jenin and Nablus are nothing but a practical application of the regime’s racist policies,’ Jasser al-Barghouti, head of Hamas’ national relations office in the West Bank, said in a statement.
The Hamas official noted that the remarks corroborate that resistance is the only way to deter the Israeli occupation and protect the Palestinian nation. Barghouthi also urged the Palestinian Authority to stop its security cooperation with Israel.
There are reportedly more than 7,000 Palestinians held at Israeli jails. Some prisoners have been held in administrative detention for up to 11 years.
However liberation is on the way. The Palestinian masses are determined to answer the Israeli ruling class blow for blow and to establish the Palestinian state with Jerusalem as its capital in the year ahead!