THE Arab Organisation for Human Rights (AOHR) on Wednesday called on Britain to stop arming the Israeli terror state after Israel resumed its attacks on the Gaza Strip in violation of the ceasefire.
Israeli warplanes bombed civilian targets on Tuesday evening in Gaza, which led to dozens of casualties including women and children, the AOHR statement said.
The UK government vowed last Wednesday, August 13th, to suspend 12 export licences for arms and other military equipment to Israel for being used during the current aggression launched on July 7, which killed more than 2,000 citizens and wounded 10,000 others, the organisation said.
‘Arming a state that practices terrorism, killings and massacres constitutes a flagrant breach to Britain’s commitments to international conventions, in particular the Geneva Conventions of 1949 and the Convention of Rome.’
AOHR called on Britain to abide by its pledges and international commitments and to cancel all its 400 licences for arms to Israel estimated at £8 billion.
Israeli warplanes bombed on Tuesday evening different targets in the Gaza Strip in a flagrant violation of the 24-hour truce mediated on Monday night by Cairo after Israeli military sources claimed that three rockets were fired from the Gaza Strip towards Beersheba.
For its part, the Hamas Movement held Israel responsible for the latest escalation in Gaza, saying that such attacks weaken any possibility of reaching a truce agreement.
As Israeli airstrikes killed more families in Gaza again, in the West Bank, Israeli forces demolished steel structures belonging to the Palestinian Bedouin community east of Ramallah on Wednesday, locals said.
Israeli forces destroyed four steel structures, usually used for housing, near the village of al-Taybeh and another three structures in Mikhmas village.
The structures belonged to Yousef Mousa Ahmad Kaabneh and Moussa Yousef Kaabneh. In Mikhmas, Israeli forces raided the community and evacuated residents before demolishing the structures.
Israeli soldiers prevented journalists from reaching the area during the demolition. The Bedouin community resettled to areas of what are now the southern and eastern occupied West Bank after being expelled from the Negev during the creation of the Israeli state.
Early on Wednesday, Israeli forces raided the house of a Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine lawmaker and delivered an order demanding that she leave Ramallah.
Khalida Jarrar said that dozens of soldiers raided her house in Ramallah early on Wednesday and delivered a deportation order ‘by an Israeli court’ to Jericho for an unspecified period of time.
Jarrar added that the place of residence in Jericho was specified in the order. She said the order was in Hebrew and that she refused to sign it when soldiers told her to. She was also provided with a map for her movement inside Jericho.
Jarrar added that the raid was a form of house arrest and that she was given 24 hours to move out of Ramallah to Jericho. She said she will take the paper to relevant parties to determine the response.
Israeli troops stormed Burin village near Nablus in the northern West Bank overnight on Tuesday and ransacked dozens of Palestinian homes to warn locals of any attacks on settler houses near the village.
Palestinian security sources said on Wednesday morning that dozens of soldiers and intelligence officers interrogated more than 30 young men in the open after taking them out of their homes at gunpoint. The soldiers warned that they would open fire directly at anyone who attacks settler homes.
• Meanwhile, renewed Israeli attacks on Gaza have killed 20 Palestinians since a temporary ceasefire collapsed on Tuesday, a health ministry spokesman said on Wednesday.
Ashraf al-Qidra said that Zaki Suleiman al-Rai, 54, died from wounds sustained early on Wednesday.
The bodies of Mustafa Rabah al-Dalou, 14 and Wafaa Hussein al-Dalou were also recovered from the wreckage of the al-Dalou family home in Gaza City.
Earlier, a two-year-old Palestinian girl was killed in Israeli shelling on the al-Zaytoun neighbourhood of Gaza City, al-Qidra said. She was identified as Nour Muhammad Abu Hasirah.
Before that, al-Qidra said an Israeli airstrike killed an unidentified man near the al-Maqusi residential buildings in western Gaza City. The man’s body was taken to Shifa hospital.
Al-Qidra added that civil defence rescue teams had recovered the bodies of a woman and a child from the rubble of the al-Dalou family home in Sheikh Radwan, which was hit by five Israeli missiles.
The wife and daughter of al-Qassam Brigades commander Muhammad Deif were killed in the attack, Hamas says, along with four-year-old Ahmad al-Dalou.
A 24-hour truce due to last until midnight collapsed late on Tuesday afternoon when Israel said rockets fired from the Strip hit Beersheba. Hamas denied firing the rockets.
An Israeli army statement said that 117 rockets had been fired at Israel from Gaza since the truce collapsed. One of them hit a home in Ashkelon without causing injuries, it said.
Earlier, the army said it had struck ‘some 60 terror sites’ in Gaza overnight, in addition to targeting ‘two terrorists … in the northern Gaza Strip’.
Over 2,000 Palestinians, the vast majority of them civilians, have been killed throughout Israel’s offensive on Gaza. Sixty-seven people have been killed on the Israeli side, 64 of them soldiers.
• In the West Bank on Monday, Israeli forces demolished a residential building in the al-Tur neighbourhood of Jerusalem on the pretext that it was built without a permit.
Members of the Ghazzawi family, who own the building, said that Israeli soldiers escorted bulldozers to the area and began tearing down the building. Family members were not given any time to remove their belongings.
Tawfiq Ghazzawi said the two-storey building was built in 1997 and contained two apartments, one for him and his mother and another for his brother, Ayid.
The family have already paid fines of over 200,000 shekels ($57,126) and have been refused a construction permit several times by Israel’s Jerusalem municipality.
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.
The internationally recognized Palestinian territories of which the West Bank and East Jerusalem form a part have been occupied by the Israeli military since 1967.
• Global union International Transport Federation (ITF), supported by the ITUC is to send an Executive Board Mission to Gaza, the West Bank and Israel.
The mission will be the start of a four-year programme to support the ITF’s affiliates and contribute to long-term peace and justice for Palestine.
ITF affiliates meeting in Sofia on 10-16 August 2014 expressed their horror at the toll of deaths in the conflict, the overwhelming majority of which have been civilians.
The ITF has been providing humanitarian support to Gaza. It has already sent two truckloads of humanitarian and medical supplies to Gaza, with more to follow.
ITF President Paddy Crumlin said ‘The scars of this current tragedy in Gaza will be felt for many generations. And recognising the trauma and risk to life faced by transport workers in Palestine and Israel, the ITF, with the support of the ITUC, should send an Executive Board Mission to Gaza, the West Bank and Israel.
‘Recognising the urgency, this mission should take place as quickly as possible and should also be used to reinforce the ITF project for humanitarian aid for Gaza.’
The mission follows a resolution passed at the ITF Congress held in Sofia which added the ITF’s voice to the calls by the International Trade Union Confederation (ITUC) for coordinated international union action to press for an end to the occupation of Palestine and for a two-states-for-two-peoples solution.
The ITF is committed to the ITUC’s Call for Action on Gaza and the resolution passed at the ITUC Congress in Berlin in 2014.
