MIN MAQBUL, secretary of the Fatah Revolutionary Council, revealed Palestinian President Mahmud Abbas’s intention to visit the Gaza Strip this week in preparation for national and presidential elections and for the formation of a new national unity government.
In his statement on 28 April, Maqbul said: ‘Gaza Strip is an inseparable part of the Palestinian State.
‘President Abbas’s imminent visit is a must and will take place once the opportunity presents itself.’
Maqbul predicted that Abbas’s visit to Gaza will follow the issuance of two presidential decrees on the formation of a national government and on setting a date for the presidential and legislative elections.
The secretary of the Fatah Revolutionary Council noted that, ‘President Abbas will start consultations regarding the formation of his government with the factions and national forces after the conclusion of the PLO Central Council meeting.’
Maqbul anticipated that the consultations would be completed successfully in order to form a new government, achieve national unity, and end the division between the PLO and Hamas.
Meanwhile four more Palestinian prisoners in a Ramallah Israeli jail have begun a hunger strike in protest against their detention without trial. News of the hunger strikes followed reports that over 100 Palestinian prisoners began a mass, open-ended hunger strike in a number of Israeli jails last Thursday in protest against being held without charge or trial under a policy Israel calls ‘administrative detention’.
The Palestinian Prisoners Society received a letter on Sunday from one of the four newly-reported hunger strikers in which he confirmed that the group would not end the strike until they were set free.
In his letter prisoner Mahmud Hamdi Shabanah said: ‘We will fight this crime with our empty bowels which refuse to be filled at the expense of our freedom’.
Describing how the ‘tyrannical’ system of administrative detention works, he wrote in his letter that ‘prisoners are first forced to stand up before the judge, who with one swipe of a pencil decides that this Palestinian will be deprived of his freedom’.
The details, he added, are confidential and considered ‘top secret,’ meaning that the prisoner does not have the right to see the charges made against them.
It was unclear whether the four were in contact with the 100 other hunger strikers, who are located in Ofer, Megiddo, and Negev prisons and launched their strike after Israeli authorities broke a 2012 agreement made following an earlier mass hunger strike to limit the use of administrative detention to exceptional cases.
Palestinians held in administrative detention are often held without charge or trial for months and without access to the evidence leading to their detention, even though international law stipulates this tactic only be used in exceptional circumstances.
Over 800,000 Palestinians have been detained since 1967, with 5,224 currently being held in Israeli prisons, according to the PLO.
Under international law, it is illegal to transfer prisoners outside of the occupied territory in which they are detained, and the families of Palestinian prisoners face many obstacles in obtaining permits to see their imprisoned relatives.
• Israeli military forces clashed with local Palestinians in al-Eizariya late on Sunday. Locals said that Israeli forces attacked a peaceful rally organised by Fatah’s youth movement in support of the al-Aqsa mosque, firing tear gas canisters and rubber-coated steel bullets.
Palestinian youths hurled stones and empty bottles in response. Freelance photojournalist Rami Illariya was stopped by Israeli soldiers who ordered him to leave the area during the clashes because they didn’t want the incident to be documented.
Following these clashes Israeli soldiers on Monday shot at and injured two Palestinian workers near Beit Hanoon crossing in the northern Gaza Strip. Palestinian sources reported that Israeli soldiers opened fire at a group of Gazan workers who were collecting stones near the crossing.
‘Two men were injured and were taken to a nearby hospital for medical treatment’, the locals added.
Meanwhile ‘price tag’ vandalism attacks by right wing Israeli groups against Arabs are increasing in northern Israeli cities.
On Sunday, an Arab contractor in the city of Yoqne’am Ilit found that the tyres of his vehicle, which was parked near the municipality building, had been slashed. The vehicle was also defaced with two Stars of David and the words ‘price tag’.
Afula police have launched an investigation into the incident, but no arrests have been made.
In Akko on Sunday, an Arab school was vandalised, with the words ‘death to Arabs’ and graffiti against the school’s administration spray-painted on a wall. A flag pole was also set on fire.
Also on Sunday two young right-wing activists posted a notice at one of the entrances to the Temple Mount in Jerusalem that called on Muslims to leave the site. The notice called on Muslims to vacate the Temple Mount compound, to allow for construction of the Third Temple.
Jerusalem police feared the notice would inflame tensions on the Temple Mount. Two suspects were detained and later released, they claimed they were protesting over recent events in Yitzhar.
The week before, the tyres of a vehicle parked in Yoqne’am Ilit’s industrial zone were slashed and a Star of David was scrawled on its boot. The vehicle belonged to an Arab resident of Wadi Ara.
• US Secretary of State John Kerry was visibly shocked when US congressmen and Israel politicians called for his resignation after he suggested that Israel risks becoming an ‘apartheid state.’
Kerry has spent more than a year of ‘intensive shuttle diplomacy’, with the aim of brokering a deal between the Palestinians and Israel by April 29.
All that time Israel has been busy building thousands of illegal settler homes on Palestinian land. Kerry on Monday vehemently denied calling Israel an apartheid state, as a furore grew in Israel over comments the top US diplomat reportedly made during a private meeting.
‘I do not believe, nor have I ever stated, publicly or privately that Israel is an apartheid state or that it intends to become one,’ Kerry insisted in a statement issued after calls for him to resign or at least apologise for the alleged comments, which appeared on US online news site ‘The Daily Beast.’
But Kerry, who has seen his efforts to broker peace between Israel and the Palestinians collapse, did suggest that he had used a ‘poor choice of words’ during his speech last Friday to international political experts at the Trilateral Commission.
Kerry continued to insist that although the peace process was at a point of ‘confrontation and hiatus,’ it was not dead, yet. But both the Palestinians and the Israelis have drawn their own conclusions about the life expectancy of the US-led negotiations.
Last week, Palestinian leaders in the West Bank and the Hamas-run Gaza Strip announced a historic unity deal aimed at ending years of occasionally violent rivalry. Israel denounced the deal as a death blow to peace hopes and said it would not negotiate with any government backed by Hamas.
Washington called the deal ‘unhelpful.’ Under the agreement, the PLO and Hamas will work to establish a new unity government of political independents headed by president Mahmoud Abbas, whose Fatah party dominates the PLO.
Abbas has said the new government will recognise Israel, as well as renouncing violence and abiding by existing agreements, in line with key principles set out by the Mideast peacemaking Quartet. But Netanyahu has ruled out any negotiation with the new government unless Hamas gives up its vision of destroying Israel.
Kerry, speaking at a closed-door meeting of international experts, reportedly said that if Israel didn’t seize the opportunity to make peace soon, it risked becoming an ‘apartheid state’ with second-class citizens.
‘Apartheid’ refers to South Africa’s 1948-1994 oppressive and racially segregated social system. The Daily Beast website said it had been given a recording of Kerry’s speech, which led one Republican senator to call for his resignation.
Kerry has ‘repeatedly demonstrated a willingness to countenance a world in which Israel is made a pariah,’ said Senator Ted Cruz. Kerry should offer his resignation and President Barack Obama should accept it, Cruz added, ‘before any more harm is done to our national security interests and our critical alliance with the state of Israel.’
Israeli Transport Minister Israel Katz, a member of Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu’s rightwing Likud party, expressed outrage at Kerry’s reported comments. ‘Kerry, shame on you. There are some words you cannot use,’ he wrote on his Facebook page.
‘On this day of national commemoration of the Holocaust, we have the US secretary of state describing us as an apartheid state, us, the state which is subjected to threats of destruction.’
Meanwhile, in remarks in Gaza on Monday, Mousa Abu Marzouq, a Cairo-based top Hamas leader, reaffirmed that the unity government would ‘not be political.’
He said its mandate would be primarily to prepare for elections within six months, restructuring the security services, and overseeing the reconstruction of the battered Gaza Strip. Tzahi Hanegbi, an MP close to Netanyahu, told army radio that Israel should ‘wait to understand the meaning’ of the Palestinian unity deal.
‘Israel must act intelligently and with restraint, and not play into the Palestinians’ hands by helping them out of the trap into which they have fallen,’ he said. Israel and Washington are reportedly at odds over the proposed new Palestinian government, with US officials taking a wait and see approach.
• Israel approved plans for nearly 14,000 new settler homes during the nine months of peace talks with the Palestinians, an Israeli settlement watchdog said on Tuesday as the negotiation period formally ended.
Figures quoted by Peace Now showed that during the talks, Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu’s government approved at least 13,851 new housing units through the advancement of plans and the publication of tenders.
‘This is an unprecedented number representing an average of 50 housing units per day or 1,540 per month,’ it said.
‘Netanyahu broke construction records during the nine-month peace talks,’ Peace Now head Yariv Oppenheimer said. Israel’s ongoing settlement building has weighed heavily on the negotiation process, with the Palestinians infuriated by the relentless pace of new construction approvals on land they want for a future state.
They have demanded a complete settlement freeze as one of the key conditions for any return to the crisis-hit talks. But Israel has flatly refused, with Netanyahu rejecting the notion that settlement building ran counter to peace efforts, saying he never agreed to any ‘restraints on construction’ throughout the talks.
• Israeli bulldozers on Tuesday demolished a mosque and three houses in a Palestinian village south of Nablus, an official said.
Ghassan Daghlas, a Palestinian official who monitors settlement-related activities in the northern West Bank, said that over 20 Israeli military vehicles entered Khirbet al-Tawil near the town of Aqraba early on Tuesday morning.
Bulldozers immediately began demolishing a mosque and three houses belonging to Osama Anas, Anwar Sidqi Hani, and Muhammad Hani. The structures were demolished under the pretext that they were ‘built without permits’, Daghlas said.
Israel rarely grants Palestinians permits to build in the West Bank, including East Jerusalem. It has demolished at least 27,000 Palestinian homes and structures since occupying the West Bank in 1967, according to the Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions.
Israel destroyed more than 663 Palestinian properties in the West Bank and East Jerusalem in 2013, displacing 1,101 people, according to UNOCHA. Some 250 people have been displaced since the beginning of 2014.
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.
