A 24 year-old Palestinian was hit in the head from a live round of bullets Saturday in the village of Asira al-Qibliya. B'Tselem footage of the event shows the settlers shooting at the young man, and Israeli soldiers standing by them - doing nothing to prevent it. According to B'Tselem, the incident started at around 16:30 Saturday, when a group of settlers descended from the extremist settlement Itzhar towards the Palestinian village (as seen in the first video below). According to eye witnesses the settlers - some of them masked and some armed - started fires in the fields near the village and threw stones at Palestinians who moved towards them, who also started throwing stones at the settlers. 

A Palestinian grassroots activist who was declared a human rights defender by the EU has been cleared of the central charge of incitement, at the end of an 11-month military trial that focused on weekly protests by villagers against a nearby Israeli settlement. Bassem Tamimi was also cleared of perverting the course of justice, but convicted of taking part in illegal demonstrations and of soliciting protesters to throw stones. Sentencing will begin on Thursday. 

An Israeli human rights group released footage on Sunday of settlers firing on Nablus-village a day earlier, and called on Israel's military to investigate the assailants, as well as the army's role. Settlers entered Asira al-Qibliya on Saturday and threw rocks at properties in the village, which borders Yitzhar settlement, before the arrival of Israeli forces, a Ma'an correspondent said. 

"There will be no Palestinian state," said Khalil Tafakji, a geographer who advised Arafat but says the late PLO leader, in exile for much of his life, did not appreciate how far Israelis had gone by the early 1990s in permanently colonizing the West Bank and East Jerusalem, captured in war from Jordan in 1967. "Look at the facts on the ground," Tafakji told Reuters last week as he reviewed maps of Israeli towns and infrastructure, which the United Nations deems illegal on occupied land: "There is no geographic contiguity between Palestinian villages and cities," he said. "They have expanded settlements, built bridges and tunnels. We now have two states inside one state." Aside from its tightening grip on Arab East Jerusalem, Israel now directly controls about 58 per cent of the West Bank, while the rest is administered by Abbas's Palestinian Authority. 

South Africa plans to ban labeling products of Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank as made in Israel, a popular committee said Saturday. The directive by South Africa's Department of Trade and Industry says: "consumers in South Africa should not be misled into believing that products originating from the (occupied Palestinian territory) are products originating from Israel.  

According to the report by the Association for Civil Rights in Israel, extreme poverty and high unemployment rates in East Jerusalem are a direct result of decades of Israeli policies which have stifled the economy in Palestinian areas. Israeli authorities have also revoked the status of 14,084 Palestinian Jerusalemites since 1967, no longer permitting them to live in the city. 

I later learned from my grandparents...that my family's story was not uncommon. In April 1948, they boarded a bus to Amman, hoping to wait out the violence. Their exile was made permanent after Israeli troops "liberated" Ramleh in July of that year and expelled most of the town's majority Arab population. The one relative who had stayed behind to look after the family properties, which subsequently passed into Israeli government ownership, had to walk to Ramallah, from where he made his way to Amman. 

Denmark is set to introduce a labeling system to denote products made in Israeli settlements, Danish media said Friday. "This is a move that will clearly show consumers that this produce has been produced under conditions that not only the Danish government, but also the European governments have rejected," Danish Foreign Minister Villy Sovndal was quoted as saying by Danish online news-site Politken.