A CONCERNED Palestinian family has called on the Red Cross to obtain news of Hudhayfah Jarrar, 21, from Jenin, as Israeli occupation authorities have detained him for over a week and prohibited him from receiving visits by a lawyer.
The Jarrars have called on all human rights organisations to ensure that he is receiving the proper treatment for his foot for which he was scheduled to undergo surgery days after he was arrested.
Israeli occupation forces arrested Jarrar at the Za’tarah checkpoint while he was heading to Ramallah city to get treatment for his foot.
Jarrar studies journalism at Al-Quds University and is the son of Abdul-Jabbar Jarrar, who was held prisoner on several occasions in the Israeli prisons.
Meanwhile, armed Israeli settlers attacked Jalud village south of Nablus in the West Bank on Friday demanding that villagers leave their homes, a Palestinian official said.
Clashes broke out and Israeli police arrived on the scene, where they fired tear gas and stun grenades to disperse villagers, Ghassan Doughlas, the Fatah official charged with monitoring settlement activity in the northern West Bank, said.
The settlers, from a small outpost near Jalud called Ahiya, attacked homes and properties, Doughlas said.
Threatening villagers with weapons, they called on the Palestinians to evacuate the village, he added.
A spokeswoman from Israel’s Judea and Samaria (West Bank) Police said groups of Palestinians and Israeli settlers from Ahiya gathered ‘to protest about each other’.
‘One of the Israelis said they heard someone shoot in the air, so the police came, but they didn’t see any shooting’ and went on to disperse the group, she claimed.
Jalud, a community of about 600 Palestinians, faces high unemployment and migration from the village as land confiscation and violence from nearby outposts Ahiya and Kida, both about 50-persons-strong, pose a threat to the village, Jalud’s mayor says.
Outposts are communities built without official Israeli government permission in the West Bank, often expanding the larger and accredited settlements on Palestinian land, although many outposts are established with tacit state support.
The latest figures from the Israeli group Peace Now, which opposes the settlements, puts the number of Israeli settlement outposts at around 100.
Six outposts and two larger settlements, Shilo and Eli, surround the Jalud area.
Meanwhile, Israel’s Supreme Court on Thursday turned down for the second time a request for a retrial over the fate of a building owned by settlers in the flashpoint East Jerusalem neighborhood of Silwan.
It also reprimanded the Jewish settlers living there for failing to heed earlier court rulings demanding that they evacuate the building, which is located in the heart of a densely populated Palestinian neighbourhood.
In 2007, a local court ordered the settlers evicted from the building and its entrances sealed, after determining that the structure was built without the appropriate permits.
But the order has never been implemented.
In their petition, the settlers claimed the authorities were discriminating against them, claiming that demolition orders against hundreds of Palestinian homes in the same neighbourhood were not being enforced.
They used the same argument in 2010.
Israel’s Jerusalem Mayor Nir Barkat has baulked at carrying out the order against the illegally built structure while he is being pressed to freeze demolition orders on about 200 Palestinian homes built without permits in the same neighbourhood.
Last November, Israel’s attorney general told Jerusalem city council to implement the 2007 court order and seal the seven-story building which is home to eight families, or around 50 people.
In its decision, the court reprimanded the settlers for failing to adhere to the original ruling, stressing that even though the municipality had yet to seal the building, it did not exempt the residents from doing so themselves.
The Palestinians see East Jerusalem as the capital of their promised state.
They oppose any attempts to extend Israel’s control over the part of the city which was captured in the 1967 Six-Day War and illegally annexed shortly afterward.
A settler spokesman dismissed Thursday’s ruling, saying it would have no practical impact.
And a spokesman for the municipality gave no indication that the city council would act on the Supreme Court decision.
‘The case was one between the courts and private residents to which the municipality was not a party,’ Stephen Miller said.
He claimed: ‘The municipality continues to uphold the rule of law evenly throughout all parts of Jerusalem.’
• Israeli Occupation Forces (IOF) late last Wednesday night arrested the son of imprisoned Islamic Jihad leader Bassam al-Saadi in an ambush on the Ramallah-Nablus road in the occupied West Bank.
Suhaib, 20, from Jenin refugee camp was returning from Ramallah to Jenin when Israeli soldiers set up a mobile checkpoint and detained him and his vehicle, locals reported.
Separately, the IOF combed much of Jenin governorate last Thursday at dawn without a report of arrests. Ambushes were set up in open areas and in olive groves, local Palestinians reported.
Witnesses said dozens of soldiers were deployed in the region between the towns of Al-Yamoun and al-Irqa and incursions were made in al-Irqa until morning hours.
Jenin governorate has recently seen significant military movement and increased arrests at checkpoints.
• A PLO official said last Wednesday that the Palestinian leadership will continue its ‘political battle’ at the UN even if the upcoming September bid fails.
Speaking to Voice of Palestine radio, PLO executive committee member Saleh Rafat said that if the US vetoes Palestine’s UN bid for statehood in September, ‘We will go back again, and five times more,’ with initiatives for UN recognition.
Rafat insisted that threats from Israel could not frighten the Palestinian leadership and people out of their determination.
Israeli Infrastructure Minister Uzi Landau had warned on Wednesday that the UN bid would nullify Israel’s agreements with Palestinians and called for Israel to ‘impose our sovereignty on territories over which there is consensus – that is, in the Jordan Valley and the major settlement blocs, and even more’.
Israel has already undermined the Oslo Accords which formed the basis of limited self-rule for the Palestinian Authority, Rafat said.
‘We will continue our struggle against the occupation and our fight in all the international forums until the Israeli occupation ends and the establishment of an independent state,’ the PLO official vowed.
Rafat also called for a cross-factional meeting to encourage implementation of May’s reconciliation deal between former rivals Hamas and Fatah, which sought to end the four-year divide between their ruling governments in the West Bank and Gaza Strip.
Fatah and Hamas officials had announced in August that work towards implementing the deal would begin after the Eid al-Fitr holiday.
