Bi-Weekly Brief for December 14, 2020
Israel receives vaccines while Gaza runs short of testing kits and hospital beds
Cases in Palestine have soared to more than 110,000 with nearly 1,000 deaths, and Gaza’s virus positivity rate of over 30% was exceeded only by Bolivia’s in early December. With hospitals overwhelmed, Gaza ran out of testing material on Dec. 6. The WHO immediately sent enough kits to provide 28,000 tests. West Bank hotspots Nablus, Hebron, Bethlehem and Tulkarem were completely closed down on Dec. 10, with travel between major towns, weddings and funerals prohibited. Israel’s Covid cases reached 357,000 with some 3,000 deaths by Dec. 14. It received the first shipment of what will be a million doses of Pfizer vaccine on Dec. 9 and plans to start a vaccination drive within weeks. On Dec. 12, an official of the PA Health Ministry said it should be getting 4 million doses of the Russian vaccine over the next month.
Trump endorses Morocco’s occupation in effort to expand bumpy ‘normalization’ drive
On Dec. 10, Trump reversed US policy and approved Morocco’s occupation of the former Spanish colony of Western Sahara, where a liberation struggle for an independent Sahrawi nation had been ongoing since 1975. Morocco, which has carried out military and surveillance cooperation with Israel for 60 years, is being invited to purchase $1 billion in US arms. On Dec. 4, Bahrain agreed the products it imported from settlements could be labeled ‘made in Israel’ but later said it would not import settlement products. The UAE said it would as this would ‘help’ Palestinian workers. On Dec. 8, a member of the Abu Dhabi royal family bought 49% of an Israeli football club known as a hub of anti-Arab racism. Saudi Arabia seems unlikely to ‘normalize’ as long as King Salman is alive. The King’s position was voiced by Prince Turki al-Faisal at a Dec. 6 Bahrain security summit Israel attended. Israel is, the Prince said, a ‘Western colonizing power’ that incarcerates Palestinians in concentration camps.
Netanyahu and Abbas coordinating again while their governments face uncertain future
On Dec. 2 Israel transferred over $1 billion in tax revenues to the PA without making a deduction for payments to prisoners. The resumption of coordination has deepened divisions among Palestinian factions. Palestinian spokeswoman Hanan Ashrawi resigned from the PLO on Dec. 7, calling for Palestinian politics to be ‘reinvigorated.’Hoping an election would give him a majority big enough to pass an immunity law halting his corruption trial, Netanyahu has refused to sign the 2020 budget and seems poised to let the Knesset dissolve on Dec. 23.
Palestinians live and die under fire as they struggle to save their land
On Dec. 4 Ali Abu Alia became the 5th child killed by live ammunition this year. He was shot on his 15th birthday with an American-made sniper rifle while watching an anti-settlement protest in Al-Mughayyir near Ramallah. US Rep. Betty McCollum called it a ‘grotesque state-sponsored killing.’ Other Palestinians were seriously wounded in army raids on West Bank refugee camps and villages, and journalists were attacked as they covered protests against land seizures. Israel forces continued to abduct and mistreat children, to demolish homes, to fire into the Gaza Strip and attack fishing boats, while settlers burned fields of olive trees. In addition to constructing thousands of new settlement units, Israel laid out its intention to permanently colonize the West Bank in a Transportation Ministry master planwhich for the first time includes the West Bank in long-term planning.
Water Fact
On Dec. 11, a large military force violently dispersed residents of Beit Dajan, east of Nablus, while they were planting olive tree saplings on their land in hopes of preventing a nearby settler outpost from seizing more of it. The settlers had extended water pipelines and bulldozed a road across village land to their outpost. Meanwhile, Beit Dajan and adjacent Furush Beit Dajan have been deprived of water on which their citrus and date trees depended. The water pipeline that supplied Furush Beit Dajan was destroyed by Israeli forces in May 2019, and shallow village wells have been depleted by deep wells dug to enable the nearby settlements of Hamra and Mehora to irrigate hundreds of acres of date palms. Twenty years ago, Beit Dajan dug a new well two miles from the village, only to be blocked from accessing it by a settlement road.
Compiled by Alliance for Water Justice in Palestine
Design by Paul Normandia of Red Sun Press.