GAZA CITY (IRIN) -- On Sept. 16, the United Nations announced a new deal that is supposed to ease restrictions on the Gaza Strip. In his public statement on the day, Robert Serry, the UN envoy for the Middle East, gave few specific details about the deal but said it would "enable work at the scale required in the Strip, involving the private sector in Gaza and giving a lead role to the Palestinian Authority in the reconstruction effort." Why is the agreement necessary? Following the 50-day war between Israel and Hamas and other militant groups in Gaza, much of the enclave is in ruins. At least 18,000 homes were destroyed as Israel dropped thousands of bombs on the heavily populated area, while key infrastructure including power plants and water networks were also badly damaged. Rebuilding efforts are made even more challenging by a pre-existing blockade. Since 2007 Israel and Egypt have limited or banned many basic goods from entering the Strip. Among those that Israel...

Two Palestinians were killed and three were injured on Friday when an unexploded Israeli bomb blew up in the al-Shujaiyya neighborhood of eastern Gaza City. A Ma'an reporter in Gaza said that a huge explosion was heard in the al-Shujaiyya area and ambulances rushed to the area immediately. Spokesperson for the Palestinian Ministry of Health in Gaza Ashraf al-Qidra said that two Palestinians were killed in the explosion. Al-Qidra identified the two as Ayman Ziad Abu Jibba, 23, and Abdullah Jibril Abu Aser, 23, and said that their bodies were taken to al-Shifa hospital in Gaza City. In mid-August, six people were killed in a similar explosion, and watch groups have warned that the ordnance is a particular threat to children, who often think the bombs are toys. more

GAZA: Saudi Arabia has pledged $500 million to help rebuild Gaza, Palestinian Prime Minister Rami al-Hamdallah said Thursday, with the full cost of postwar reconstruction expected to be around $4 billion over three years. Saudi Arabia’s commitment comes ahead of a conference in Cairo on Oct. 12 when Palestinian leaders hope other donors, including Turkey, Qatar, the European Union and United States, will step forward with promises of support. “ Saudi Arabia has initiated donations by pledging $500 million,” Hamdallah told reporters in Gaza, speaking via video conference from the West Bank. He said he hoped further pledges would cover the full cost of reconstruction in time. An estimated 18,000 homes were destroyed during the seven-week war, while a further 40,000 were extensively damaged. more

GAZA CITY (Ma'an) -- Several Israeli bulldozers entered the southern Gaza Strip on Friday and leveled Palestinian land, locals said. Witnesses told Ma'an that bulldozers entered some 150 meters into the al-Qarara area near Khan Younis and razed local land. The incursion is considered a violation of the ceasefire agreement signed in August. Last week, four Israeli bulldozers entered the al-Qarara area and demolished private land. Since the signing of a ceasefire agreement that ended 50 days of fighting between Israeli forces and Palestinian militants in Gaza on Aug. 26, the Israeli navy has fired at Gaza fishermen multiple times under the pretext that they had surpassed fishing zone limits. more

This summary is not available. Please click here to view the post.

JENIN, (PIC)-- The mother of prisoner Majd Al-Saadi appealed to human rights groups to urgently intervene to save the life of her son who suffers from epilepsy and lumbago. For his part, director of the Palestinian prisoner society in Jenin Ragheb Abu Diyak said the health condition of prisoner Saadi, who has been in an Israeli jail since December 7, 2013, has become worse as a result of the harsh incarceration conditions and the absence of proper medical care. Abu Diyak added that most of the prisoner patients are medically neglected and do not receive adequate medical care, holding the Israeli government fully responsible for their lives. more

Israeli forces raided a number of Bedouin communities east of Jerusalem on Thursday days after handing them demolition and evacuation orders, a local activist said. Popular committee spokesman Hani Halabiya told Ma'an that dozens of Israeli soldiers entered the Bedouin communities escorted by a bulldozer while an Israeli military plane circled above. He added that the bulldozer demolished the walls surrounding homes and land in the Khillet al-Qamar area in Abu Dis without warning. Halabiya warned that the demolitions in Khillet al-Qamar were part of Israel's larger plan to "displace" the 14,000 Bedouins living in nearly two dozen communities across the West Bank. more

GAZA CITY (Ma'an) -- Israeli naval forces opened fire off the coast of northern Gaza late Wednesday, injuring a Palestinian fisherman on a beach, locals said. Yousef Zayif, 70, was hit by live fire while waiting for his sons on the shore near al-Sudaniya. Medics said he was moderately wounded. An Israeli army spokeswoman said she was looking into the incident. On Sunday, an Israeli warship opened fire at Palestinian fishermen off the coast of Gaza City's al-Shati refugee camp, the speaker of the Union of Gaza Fishermen said. more

From MEMO - The Palestinian foreign ministry said yesterday that the number of convoys entering the Gaza Strip has reduced sharply when compared to the period after the Israeli war in 2012. Alaa Al-Battah, the head of the governmental committee for receiving solidarity convoys, said in a statement: "Only 14 Arabic, foreign and Palestinian solidarity delegations arrived in Gaza through the Rafah Crossing since the beginning of the Israeli war on July 7." According to Al-Battah, the delegations include one each from Jordan, Turkey, Malaysia, Tunisia, Sudan and Palestinians in Europe in addition to five from the UAE. "Compared with the number of the delegations in the wake of the Israeli war on Gaza in 2012, the number has sharply reduced," he said. "In 2012, 60 solidarity delegations included 1,600 members arrived in Gaza." Al-Battah accused the Egyptian authorities of banning tens of medical and relief delegations under "false pretexts". more

Two dozen Palestinians captured during Israel’s invasion of Gaza this summmer remain in detention more than three weeks after the 51-day offensive ended. While the men have had limited contact with their families, the legal team representing most of them says several have been tortured. “They testified in front of our lawyer that they were subjected to torture by the Israeli interrogators,” Issam Younis, director of Gaza’s Al Mezan Center for Human Rights, told The Electronic Intifada on Monday. Al Mezan represents 22 of the 24 detainees still held by Israel. “At least eight that were visited by the lawyer were subjected to torture,” Younis added. “It doesn’t mean the others were not.” Their treatment has included beatings with the butts of M-16 rifles, sleep deprivation for at least three consecutive days and handcuffing in painful stress positions, according to Younis. Additionally, he said, “They were intimidated with threats that Israel would demolish their houses, kill their...

RAMALLAH (Ma'an) -- More than 70 Palestinians who were arrested in the last three months by Israeli authorities in violation of a 2011 deal that freed them on Wednesday threatened to take protest measures against their continued detention. The prisoners -- who were among the 1,027 freed from Israeli custody in exchange for captured Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit - -said in a letter published by the Palestinian Prisoners' Committee that detaining them after they were freed was an "illegal and abusive move" by the Israeli government. Detention, the letter added, was done merely for political reasons and had nothing to do with justice. "This is collective punishment against the Palestinian people ignoring all principles of humanity and law." The 70 ex-prisoners were all arrested in a massive detention campaign across the West Bank carried out by Israel in the wake of the disappearance and death of three Israeli teenagers from a Jewish settlement. more

The Middle East Quartet of peacemakers on Wednesday joined calls for a quick start to the rebuilding of war-ravaged Gaza before the current truce with Israel ends in renewed violence. "The precarious situation in Gaza and southern Israel, the danger that violence could flare up again at any point, are precisely the reason to move as quickly as possible on the short-term and long-term recovery efforts," Quartet envoy Tony Blair wrote in remarks published by his office ahead of a meeting on international aid to the Palestinians. Blair said that aid to the coastal strip should go beyond just repairing the devastation wrought by Israel's 50-day offensive. more

Head of the Popular Committee against the Siege Jamal Al-Khodari has described living conditions in the Gaza Strip as "disastrous" after the latest Israeli war. In a briefed press release, Al-Khodari said that more than 90 per cent of Palestinians in Gaza live under the poverty line because of the sharp increase of unemployment rates. "Displaced Gazans, who live in shelters, experience disastrous conditions," Al-Khodari said, "as they lost the basic needs of life after the collapse of almost all facilities of major services such as electricity, water and sanitation." He noted that the humanitarian crises had increased after the latest Israeli war on the coastal enclave. "Individual income became below $2 per day," he said. Al-Khodari said that around 95 per cent of Gaza's water is undrinkable and the sea water is polluted because 40 million litres of untreated sewage water is pouring into it every day. "This has catastrophic effect...

From Mondoweiss - Time – and the news – moves on. Quickly. So, with the war over, Gaza remains in the news but off the front pages. ISIS has now taken the lead. Still every now and then an interesting reminder of the Gaza war surfaces. In this case, by drowning. At first it seemed that the boat deliberately sunk off the Malta coast last week was another case of human trafficking gone from bad to worse. Horrible but unrelated to Israel/Palestine. Now reports have it that 250-300 of as many as 500 drowned were refugees from Gaza. They were attempting to escape what is left of the prison walls in Gaza. So says the EUobserver in a narrative that is a fitting continuation of Israel’s war on Gaza – without leaving out the world’s complicity in the war and its aftermath. As well, it is a story of corruption all around. Refugees trying to escape by sea can expect little else: The Palestinian survivors told the International Organisation for Migration they paid a “travel office” in Gaza $2...

From The Electronic Intifada - Eight activists were arrested after they disrupted a theater performance sponsored by the Israeli embassy in Amsterdam in protest of Israel’s recent assault on the Gaza Strip. A ninth activist was arrested outside the theater as dozens more protested there. As the video below shows, the protesters chanted “Free, free Palestine” and “Boycott, boycott Israel” before a one-woman show by Lia Koenig, the Polish-born “first lady of Israeli theater,” at the Theatre de Doelenzaal on 13 September. The protesters were assaulted by other members of the audience. As one protester shouted, “This is not art, this is an occupation,” he was violently shoved and battered. Koenig remained impassive throughout the protest, at one point sharing a laugh with Haim Divon, the Israeli ambassador to the Netherlands. Several members of the Dutch parliament were in the audience, according to the newspaper NRC Handelsblad. Once the protest was over, Koenig began her perfor...

GAZA CITY (Ma'an) -- Cleaning workers at hospitals in the Gaza Strip declared a 24-hour strike on Wednesday in protest of not being paid their salaries, a union official said. Sami al-Amsi, president of the Federation of Palestine trade union, told Ma'an that the cleaning workers had not been paid their meager monthly salaries of around $200 for the past five months. "Today we are staging a 24-hour strike, and we will give them the opportunity to meet our demands because we are not interested in aggravating the crisis in Gaza hospitals which already suffer from shortage in medicines and power supply," al-Amsi said. Some 750 cleaning workers are participating in the strike, he said. He said the union had contacted both Gaza's health ministry and the national consensus government to inquire about the salaries, but did not receive a response from either. more

Hundreds of Israeli Jews visited Joseph's Tomb in Nablus in the occupied West Bank overnight under the guard of Israeli soldiers, locals told Ma'an. Witnesses said more than 30 military vehicles escorted eight buses carrying Israelis. Palestinian protesters threw stones and Molotov cocktails at the military vehicles as they drove near Balata refugee camp and Askar camp, the sources said. Israeli troops responded with tear gas and rubber-coated bullets. Jewish groups frequently visit Joseph's Tomb under the protection of Israeli forces, who deploy heavily in the area and often get into clashes with youth from the neighboring Balata refugee camp during these visits. Despite lying in an area under Palestinian authority deep in the West Bank, Israeli forces maintain control at the site and prohibit Muslims from praying there. more

(Reuters) - The United Nations, Israel and the Palestinian Authority have reached a deal to allow reconstruction work to begin in the war-torn Gaza Strip with U.N. monitoring of the use of materials, U.N. Middle East envoy Robert Serry said on Tuesday. Serry told the U.N. Security Council that the United Nations had brokered the deal "to enable work at the scale required in the strip, involving the private sector in Gaza and giving a lead role to the Palestinian Authority in the reconstruction effort, while providing security assurances through U.N. monitoring that these materials will not be diverted from their entirely civilian purpose." Fifty days of conflict in Gaza between Hamas militants and Israel, which ended late last month, has left swathes of the Mediterranean enclave in ruins. The Palestinian Authority said in a study recently that the reconstruction work would cost $7.8 billion, two and a half times Gaza's gross domestic product, including $2.5 billion fo...

From Haaretz - A mortar shell fired from the Gaza Strip landed in Israeli territory on Tuesday, the first time since the end of the recent war between Israel and the Palestinian factions in Gaza, the Israel Defense Forces confirmed. There was no word of injuries or damages. Hamas said it had no knowledge of any mortar attack on Israel and that the Palestinians factions remained committed to the truce. The shell exploded in an open area near the Gaza border, opposite a town in the Eshkol Regional Council, Channel 2 reported. Earlier on Tuesday, Defense Minister Moshe Ya’alon estimated that fighting would not resume with the Gaza Strip at the end of this month, despite the difficulties in reaching a permanent Israel-Hamas cease-fire agreement. more

The Palestinian Center for Human rights said Tuesday that its lawyers confirmed that at least four Palestinians who were arrested during Israel's assault on Gaza were subjected to "torture" during their detention period. PCHR lawyers visited four detainees in Ashkelon prison, and said they had undergone beatings or had been shackled between two chairs for long hours in a method known as "Shabeh," a statement said. It said Israeli forces detained dozens of Palestinian civilians during the seven-week Gaza offensive, 31 of whom were transferred to Israeli prisons. Four of the imprisoned detainees were released while 26 remain in custody and are accused of being members of armed groups. One of them was charged with being an "illegitimate combatant." According to international law, members of armed resistance groups are considered prisoners of war, and bills of indictment cannot be presented against them, the statement added. more