Bi-Weekly Brief for January 17, 2022
A one page digest of Israel’s ongoing dispossession of Palestinian land and livelihoods, and Palestinian resistance.
Amid the Occupation’s grinding daily brutality one death captures US attention
The week of January 6 – 12 was a typical one in Palestine. The Palestine Center for Human Rights documented 132 incursions into the West Bank by the Israeli army leading to 78 arrests, the violent suppression of protests, several settler attacks, at least 10 home demolitions and the near daily firing on Palestinian fishing boats and farmers in the Gaza Strip. On Jan. 10, members of an Israeli undercover unit disguised as Palestinians fired at students at Birzeit University, seizing 5 of them for interrogation about student union activity. One event got the attention of the US media, State Department and Congress: on the night of Jan. 12, 80-year-old Omar Abdalmajeed As’ad, a US passport holder who had lived in Milwaukee, was taken from his car by soldiers as he returned to his home in Jiljilya near Ramallah. He was handcuffed and blindfolded, and dragged to a nearby building that was under construction. He was later found dead in the rubble, reportedly of a heart attack, with plastic handcuffs still attached to one wrist. The army claimed As’ad had been “resisting a security inspection” after his car was stopped. The State Department has demanded an investigation. On Jan. 14, the new US Ambassador to Israel Thomas Nides said that “the Biden administration believes it must take care of the Palestinian people” and unlike his predecessor, he would not be visiting settlements.
Israel tries again to make the case that six Palestinian civil society groups are tied to ‘terrorism’
After Israel failed last year to convince European governments that Al Haq, Addameer, the Bisan Center, DCI-Palestine, the Union of Agricultural Work Committees and the Union of Palestinian Women’s Committees are terrorist groups aligned with the PFLP to which all funding should be cut, it is making another attempt to do so, according to +972 Magazine. The publication has received a copy of a secret document which has been sent to various governments. According to one western diplomat, “not a single piece of incriminating evidence has been presented.” However, the Netherlands has put an end to funding the UAWC. The time period during which the 6 organizations can appeal the ‘terrorist’ designation has been extended by Israel from Jan. 10 to Jan. 18.
JNF tree planting in the Naqab (Negev) sets off clashes that threaten Israel’s coalition government
There were 4 days of skirmishes and several injuries and arrests as Bedouin from the Naqab’s ‘unrecognized villages’ protested as a form of ‘soft expulsion’ the Jewish National Fund’s tree planting near the village of Hura, where residents currently grow wheat. Mansour Abbas, head of the United Arab List, which is part of the coalition government and got nearly half its votes from the Naqab’s Bedouin who are citizens of Israel, has threatened to stop voting with the government if the planting proceeds, depriving it of its majority. On Jan. 16, the Israeli Air Force and fighter planes of the US Middle East Central Command (CENTCOM) held a joint training session in the skies over the Naqab.
Water Fact
On January 9, Haaretz journalist Amira Hass reported that Israel had been delaying the entry of replacement parts that are urgently needed to fix and maintain the water and sewage infrastructure in the Gaza Strip which was severely damaged during the May 2021 offensive. Not only has Israel barred the entry of so-called ‘dual use’ items, but it has imposed new prohibitions and application requirements, with the result that some 500 facilities are now experiencing dire shortages, leading to the deterioration in the quality and quantity of drinking water produced by the 100 small municipal and private desalination plants, and the dumping of only partially treated wastewater into the sea. A ban instituted early last year barring the entry of steel pipes larger than 1.5 inches in diameter has meant that desalination and wastewater treatment plants damaged by bombing which require pipes of a diameter of two inches or more have gone un-repaired.
Compiled by The Alliance for Water Justice in Palestine
