DOZENS of Israeli settlers accompanied by Israeli forces early Friday began farming on lands confiscated from Palestinian farmers in a village south of Hebron, a popular committee coordinator said.
Ratib al-Jbour said that the settlers began planting saplings on land that was confiscated from the village of al-Hathaleen.
Approximately 150 dunams (37 acres) were confiscated months ago, he said.
Israeli forces detained several shepherds from the al-Hathaleen family, Al-Jbour said, without providing further details.
Early Thursday, Israeli forces detained three prominent Hamas leaders in Hebron, locals said.
Nidal al-Qawasmi, Sufyan Jamjoum and former Palestinian minister of local governance Issa Khayri al-Jaabari were detained following arrest raids on their homes, witnesses said.
An Israeli army spokeswoman said five people were detained in Hebron and two in Ramallah overnight, but could not comment on the political affiliation of the detainees.
Also on Thursday, Israeli forces arrested a Palestinian man in a village east of Qalqiliya.
Witnesses said that Hamid Zaki Hamid Badwan, 22, was detained at a checkpoint south of the village of Azzun.
Badwan, who works as a fire-truck driver, is the fourteenth person to have been arrested in the village in the last two days, locals said.
The internationally recognised Palestinian territories of which the West Bank and East Jerusalem form a part have been occupied by the Israeli military since 1967.
Meanwhile, doctors in public hospitals in the occupied West Bank on Friday started partial strike action against what they describe as ‘abusive practices’ by the Palestinian Authority Ministry of Health.
Head of the doctors’ union, Shawqi Sabha, said that outpatient services and scheduled surgeries will be suspended in all public hospitals until the ministry complies with the union’s demands.
The protests were sparked by a recent ministry decision to transfer several doctors to different work locations in order to implement a 2013 decision banning doctors from running private clinics, Sabha said.
He highlighted that doctors would in submit collective resignations as the ministry ‘continues with its abusive practices.’
The decision on private clinics, he added, was suspended until March 2014 for consultations between doctors and the ministry in an attempt to reach agreement on an appropriate system.
The Palestinian Authority Ministry of Health is suffering from shortages in medicines and medical equipment because the Ministry of Finance has not paid the suppliers.
Public hospital doctors and patients have recently been complaining about shortages in indispensable medicines and equipment such as arterial, electrocardiograph paper as well as medications for cardiac diseases, blood pressure and cancer among others.
Director of the ministry’s department of medical warehouses, Salah Thawabta, said that public hospitals are short of medicines and medical equipment because the Ministry of Finance has not paid companies who win tenders to supply the ministry with those medicines.
Thirty-five types of medicines are being supplied very slowly because the Ministry of Finance has not been paying the suppliers, he added.
Thawabta said the Ministry of Health could take legal procedures against companies who won the bids.
He also called upon hospital managers to buy the needed medicines using the monthly allowances their hospitals receive from the ministry, and then send receipts to the ministry for reimbursement.
Administrative manager of the Ministry of Health Abd al-Halim Hamadnah said that the ministry’s debts reached 700 million NIS ($200 million).
These debts, he said, have been accumulated in the past four years. Some 88 per cent of the debts, he said, are owed to medicine suppliers and private hospitals, and the rest is owed to suppliers of fuel and cleaning materials.
l A PLO Executive Committee member spoke out against visits by rightist Israeli Jewish groups to the Al-Aqsa compound on Thursday.
Ahmad Qurie warned of ‘catastrophic’ consequences if the Jewish groups continued to visit Al-Aqsa, saying the visits violated international law.
Qurie said Israeli police arrested Palestinian youths who were attempting to stop the groups from entering the compound. He criticised the police for making such arrests.
Earlier, the director of the Al-Aqsa Mosque told said that the visits were a ‘provocative and dangerous intrusion by extremists.’
Azzam al-Khatib said extremist lawyer Yehuda Glick, who chairs the Temple Mount Heritage Fund, entered the mosque compound through the Moroccan Gate and later ‘climbed to the roof of the Dome of the Rock and verbally assaulted the guards.’
Also last Saturday, Palestinian security spokesman Adnan al-Dumieri said that Israeli rightists ‘ascending to the roof of the Dome of the Rock’ was a provocative action that would have a negative impact on Israeli-Palestinian peace negotiations.
But Israeli police spokesman Rosenfeld said he was unfamiliar with the roof-climbing incident.
He confirmed that there were ‘normal visits’ to the Al-Aqsa compound, but said no arrests were made.
Due to the sensitive nature of the Al-Aqsa Mosque, Israel maintains a compromise with the Islamic trust that controls the compound to restrict the area for Muslim prayers.
Israeli forces, however, regularly escort Jewish visitors to the site, often leading to tension with Palestinians.
Al-Aqsa is located in East Jerusalem, a part of the internationally recognised Palestinian territories that have been occupied by the Israeli military since 1967.
Israeli authorities have agreed to deliver the remains of a Palestinian man, who was killed by Israeli forces in 2002, to his family in the northern West Bank, an Israeli organisation said Thursday.
The Supreme Court ruled that Israel would send the remains of Majdi Abd al-Jawad Khanfar to his family in the village of Silat al-Dhahir in the West Bank’s Jenin district, a spokesperson for the Centre for the Defence of the Individual said.
The decision came in response to the centre’s demands for the release of the remains of every Palestinian currently held in Israel, the spokesman said.
Khanfar’s remains will be delivered to his family on January 26, he said, adding that a DNA match had already been confirmed.
The spokesman said Israel announced that the remains of Palestinians currently held in Israel would be distributed to their families after DNA tests were completed.
Khanfar was killed on March 30, 2002 after he and another members of Fatah’s military wing attacked an Israeli checkpoint in the West Bank, killing an Israeli soldier.
