On the Agenda

Khaled al-Bahtini, a 37-year-old father of four daughters between the ages of 3 and 16 from a-Tufah neighborhood in Gaza City, has kidney failure. He has been on dialysis for 16 years and was referred to East Jerusalem for an artery transplant as his arteries can no longer be hooked up to the dialysis machine and a graft attempt at a-Shifaa Hospital in Gaza failed. Since December 2022 he has repeatedly applied for a permit, but Israel has denied all his requests on various grounds...

On Thursday, 19 January 2023, at around 2:30 A.M., Israeli troops entered Jenin Refugee Camp. Local youths threw stones at them as soon as they arrived, and the Israeli military claims explosives were thrown as well. Some soldiers made their way into the camp, while others climbed onto the roof of a building. Several entered an apartment on the fifth floor of the building, ordered its occupants to go to another apartment, and then engaged in an exchange of fire with armed Palestinians who were hiding in an alley in the camp...

Bilal al-Masharawi (8) from the a-Zeitun neighborhood in Gaza City has a respiratory disease and chronic pneumonia. The treatment he needs is not available in the Gaza Strip. All the adults who applied to escort him to East Jerusalem have been rejected...

On Tuesday, 7 February 2023, at around 2:30 A.M., soldiers, Border Police officers and ISA agents arrived at the neighborhood of al-Masaken a-Sha’biyeh in Nablus and arrested three residents. During the arrest operation, armed Palestinians fired live rounds at the forces and residents threw stones at them. On their way out, at around 3:30 A.M., the forces drove in armored jeeps through a traffic circle where eight local youths were gathered and threw stones at them...

On Sunday, 26 February 2023, at around midday, Palestinian militants shot and killed Israeli brothers Hillel and Yagel Yaniv, who live in the settlement of Har Bracha, while the two were waiting in a traffic jam on a road that runs through the town of Huwarah. That afternoon, hundreds of settlers, escorted by soldiers, invaded several neighborhoods in the town of Huwarah as well as the villages of Za’tara, Burin and ‘Asira al-Qibliyah, and carried out a pogrom. This was no loss of control. In fact, it is exactly what Israel’s control looks like: settlers launch an attack, soldiers guard them, and politicians back them up...

On Thursday, 19 January 2023, at around 5:30 P.M., about 10 Israel Police officers arrived in the neighborhood of Wadi Qadum in East Jerusalem and grabbed five Palestinian residents between the ages of 12 and 15. They crowded all five into a police car and held them there for about an hour. At around 6:30, the teens were taken to the police station on Salah a-Din Street. There, they were made to sit on chairs facing a wall in a very cold, air-conditioned room and forbidden to talk to each other. At around 7:00 P.M., a lawyer arrived and explained their rights to them, and only then did the police allow them to use the bathroom. Meanwhile, the parents of four of the boys arrived at the station, but the officers refused to let them in, and they had no choice but to wait for their sons outside for hours...

More than 1 million Palestinian women and children live in the Gaza Strip – under blockade, deprived of basic rights and denied the ability to leave. To mark International Women’s Day, our field researchers asked three women about their dreams and the harsh reality they live in.

On Thursday, 26 January 2023, at around 1:30 P.M., Palestinian youths gathered by the northern entrance to the town of a-Ram, north of Jerusalem, to protest the killing of nine Palestinians in Jenin Refugee Camp that morning (another died of his wounds on 29 January) and the wounding of 20 others by Israeli forces. The young men threw stones at a military camp nearby. Dozens of Border Police officers drove out of the camp in several jeeps, stopped at a roundabout about 50 meters away from the youths and fired tear gas canisters at them. At intervals, they also hurled stun grenades and fired rubber-coated metal bullets and live shots at the youths...

On 5 Aug. 2022, Israel launched another attack on Gaza, killing 33 Palestinians, including 9 minors and 3 women, in 3 days. B’Tselem’s investigation found that at least 17 of the people killed, including all the minors and women, were not participating in the hostilities. Another 15 Palestinians, 9 of them minors, were killed by Palestinian rockets or mortars that landed in Gaza. Despite the horrific outcomes of Israel’s airstrike policy, the policymakers, legal counsel or troops on the ground are unlikely to be held accountable, yet again.

On Monday, 23 January 2023, most of the Palestinian shops across from the Jewish settlement of Beit Romano closed up for the day at around 2:00 P.M., as they usually do, for fear of attacks and harassment by settlers that have long since become routine. Only twos stores remained open – an antique shop run by Bader a-Tamimi, and ‘Azzam Abu Khalaf’s toy shop. Roughly an hour later, at around 3:00 P.M., soldiers arrived and hurled two stun grenades at wares a-Tamimi was displaying outside the shop, shattering them. Immediately after that, the soldiers hurled five stun grenades into the store itself, shattering some of the wares inside. ...

This Thursday (23 February 2023) at 10:00 A.M., a hearing will be held at Ofer military court on an indictment filed by the military prosecution against B'Tselem field researcher Nasser Nawaj’ah, who is being charged with attacking a police officer in September 2021, when settlers entered his village of Khirbet Susiya in the South Hebron Hills. Nawaj’ah, one of the leading human rights activists in the southern West Bank, has been targeted for years by the state and by settler organizations, in an attempt to sabotage his work and prevent him from reporting on human rights abuses and the apartheid regime’s policies in the area. 

On Thursday, 12 January 2023, at around 2:30 P.M., dozens of soldiers and Border Police officers – both uniformed and undercover – and Israel Security Agency personnel raided the town of Qabatiyah in Jenin District and entered the yard of the Kmeil family home. Muhammad Kmeil (26) was working on the house he is building near the main family home, and was sitting in it at the time along with his friend Muhammad ‘Alawneh and his cousin Habiballah Kmeil (26)...